Appendix B - The Ages of Globalization

Summary

Millions of years ago a superior primate, the Homo sapiens-demens, emerged in Africa. Thousands of years later, humans started spreading around the world; first to Eurasia, then to the Americas, and lastly to Polynesia and Oceania. At the end of the later Palaeolithic age, about 40,000 years ago, human beings occupied the whole of the planet and amounted to one million people. They created civilizations and nation-states.

From 1492, however, we see a vast process of expansion from the West. In 1492, Columbus brought to the knowledge of the Europeans the fact that there are other lands inhabited by cultures that are totally different from the European. In 1521, Ferdinand Magellan proved that the Earth is round and that each place can be reached from anywhere in the world. The supreme powers of the 16th century, Spain and Portugal, designed, for the first time, the world-project. They expanded into Africa, America and Asia. They Westernized the world.

This process extended into the 19th century, when Western Imperialism forced all of the known world to submit to its cultural, religious and economic interests. All of these were forced upon the weaker nations with extreme violence. Arms and canons are more powerful than rationality and religion. The Europeans revealed themselves as the hyenas of the nations. We, in the Americas, were born globalized and we know the meaning of globalization since we have experienced it, we have felt and suffered it as a global colonization.