Globalization seems quintessentially modern. Up until very recently, the images that sprang to my mind when I heard the word were a jumble of post–World War II vignettes – someone sharing files over the Internet with a friend across the ocean, a woman hunkered down at her sewing machine in a vast third-world sweatshop, the flags flapping outside of the United Nations. These mental snapshots evoked a feeling that I lived in a rapidly shrinking, ever-changing, and perhaps out-of-control world. I no longer see just these images. These recent pictures are now joined by images from antiquity when I think of globalization. A thousand-year-old megalith in Mexico is as vivid as an MTV broadcast in India; a luxury hotel in Dubai is juxtaposed to a colony of the Indus Valley civilization (Figure 1.1).

For most readers, these new pairings may seem silly. You might understandably argue that globalization is a modern phenomenon that is categorically different from anything in the past. After all, ancient civilizations did not have a truly “global” impact, and enormous leaps in technology, transformed socioeconomic systems, and new ways of thinking all separate us from the deep past. In short, you could argue that globalization is a new process, and you could find dozens of well-regarded books in the library to bolster your argument. Nonetheless, I will try to show that globalization has occurred many times in history and that these earlier globalizations can help us better understand the future of the world that we live in today.