Customer Rating: Summary: Tales of Earlier Globalization Comment: Links between Asia, Latin America, and Europe are the norm today and we toss around words like "globalization" as if it had come in with MTV, the Internet, and MBAs. But no, actually global movements of goods, capital, and people have been around for a long time. This magnificent, but forgotten book, which I first read back in 1963, presents the story of how the Spaniards gathered rare and desireable goods---mostly silk and spices, but including a great variety of other luxuries---from China, Japan, and Southeast Asia and shipped them in yearly galleons from Manila to Acapulco, on the west coast of Mexico. These yearly voyages occurred over a period of 250 years, from 1565 to 1815, an amazing span of time, but are now almost totally forgotten. The goods were either used in Latin America or transshipped to Spain from there. In return, the galleons took great shipments of silver back to Asia, where Spanish coins became the preferred currency of trade. Schurz, writing in 1939, was one of the very first Americans to write in a scholarly way about Southeast Asia, albeit with the aim of discussing Spanish history. He describes the organization of trade, the rivalries and alternatives proposed to such trade within the Spanish Empire, the city of Manila and the peoples involved in one way or another in the gathering of goods---the Chinese, Japanese, and the Portuguese. [He neglects the Filipino peoples and other Southeast Asians, perhaps because in his day, information in European languages was scarce.] We read in detail about the ships, the routes, the conditions of the voyages, how Spain long controlled the entire Pacific, how England and the Netherlands tried to interrupt and plunder the fleets. There is so much information, interestingly presented, that only a reading of the book itself can do it justice. One of the sections which fascinated me was about Spanish intrusions into mainland Southeast Asia---Siam, Laos, Cambodia, Cochin-China, and Annam---where we glimpse a wild world of constant turmoil and battle, changing fortunes and crazy European mercenaries battling all comers. While Schurz dwells on "romantic" aspects of the whole galleon history a little too much to be considered "correct" in modern history courses, the work is still basically an economic history which paints an extremely vivid picture of another era of globalization. Though it comes from long ago, it is well worth reading today for students of Latin America, of Spain, Southeast Asia, China, or of economic history.
