The great Indian-American trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati defines globalization as,
“[The] integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, foreign direct investment (by corporations and multinationals), short-term capital flows, international flows of workers and humanity generally, and flows of technology.”
— Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3.
Globalization is a highly controversial phenomenon. To it we ascribe falling prices. Thanks to globalization, we now trade more than ever with the rest of the world, including with the enormous populations of the developing world. However, to it we also ascribe job and income loss, the decline of manufacturing as the primary economic sector in the United States, and the over-dependence of national economies on international factors.
We tend to think of globalization as a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly, global economic and cultural integration has accelerated since the end of World War II. Our modern world is, in many ways, defined by the frictions that result from globalization, including cultural and legal integration, as well as shifts in economic opportunities. Many wonder whether globalization is worth it, whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
It helps to see globalization with a wider lens. The beginning of modern economic and cultural internationalization began much sooner than the post-war era. We find the roots of our modern economy in the colonization of the 16th through 20th centuries, driven by improved means of transportation that gave humanity direct access to any country in the world. The drive to expand markets, migrate, and integrate extends even longer in the past, all the way to the ancient world and the beginning of written human history.
This article is a tour of European history between the years 1,200 B.C. and 500 A.D. It shows the forces of globalization in what was then the known world, the civilizations between the Middle East and the western reaches of Spain. We explore the threads of economic and cultural internationalization, how these gave rise to Western civilization, and how they ultimately played into the downfall of the classical Greek and Roman world. The story begins in modern-day Syria and Lebanon, then the battleground of great states and the home of one of Europe’s first globalists, the Phoenicians.
A Short Note on Sources
Academic resources are linked to throughout this article — most are accessible through JSTOR.
For excellent introductions to the topics discussed here, I recommend the following three books:
- Richard Miles, Carthage Must be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (New York: Penguin Group, 2011).
- Kathryn Lomas, The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2018).
- Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
How Globalization Built Western Civilization
When the two opposing armies of Pharaoh Ramses II and Hittite King Muwatalli II met outside the city of Kadesh during the early 13th century B.C., the event represented a climax to a long history of struggle over the area of modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. These lands had long marked a contentious and disputed border between the spheres of influence of the two great superpowers of the late Bronze Age, the Egyptian and Hittite empires. The great battle ended in Egyptian victory, but one that was mostly cosmetic. Over the next eighty years, the cities around Kadesh fell under Hittite dominion.
Domination by a foreign power has long been in the cards for the area of the world known as Phoenicia, loosely corresponding to what is modern-day Lebanon on the eastern Mediterranean coast. It is a natural situation, given Phoenicia’s long history of shipbuilding, commerce, and wealth — traits that would make any city an attractive victim of a larger, more powerful state.
But, when the interconnected world of the Bronze Age came to an end with the mysterious arrival of the “Sea People” and the collapse or waning of long-standing powers like the Hittites, Egyptians, Mycenaeans, and Assyrians, the cities of Phoenicia earned a three-century-long freedom that would shape Western Civilization as we know it.
The Discovery of Western Europe
Much like the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, Western Europe was “discovered” by traders and conquerors seeking resources. And, much like the Americas, these lands were already long inhabited by other peoples, peoples who would have to grow accustomed to a new order.
At first, there was little Phoenician interest in the lands of western North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and southeastern Spain. When world order fell into chaos in the 12th and 11th centuries, the forces that collapsed empires proved to be a boon to the city-states along the Eastern Mediterranean. Trade thrived like it never had before, the great Phoenician cities turning into both mercantile powerhouses and centers of manufacturing. Luxury goods flowed to and from Syria, Africa, and India, and the wealth spread even to the non-mercantile classes, who benefited from the production of domestic utensils and iron agricultural tools.
However, the re-emergence of large, centralized powers, especially the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the 9th century B.C., soon imposed itself on Phoenician commercial liberty. By the turn of the 8th century, much of Syria was in Assyrian hands, including the deposits of precious metals like iron that the Phoenician cities had exploited to fuel their growth. Assyria soon turned its focus to Phoenicia itself, demanding large quantities of tribute, including in the form of precious metals.
Without access to Syrian deposits, the Phoenicians had to find the source of their tribute somewhere else. Sailing west in search of riches, they found these in Sardinia and Spain, which were rich in copper, lead, and silver. Although complex society and trade had existed in these parts of the world long before the arrival of eastern settlers, the Phoenicians soon established a string of colonies along the coastlines of the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, modern-day Tunisia, and as far away as southern Spain and western Morocco, fueling the evolution of the interconnectedness of the entire Mediterranean Sea.
The Ancient Globalization of Language
Source: Roger Ulrich.
The first known evidence of writing in Italy hails from an 8th century female cremation burial not far from the city of Rome, around the ancient town of Gabii. The script is either an early Greek or modified Phoenician alphabet, written on a pottery vessel. Manufactured locally, the find implies the presence of a literate Greek or Phoenician figure in the area, or someone who was trained by one. More significantly, the vessel predates the Etrurian adoption of writing in northern Italy and is concurrent with the initial development of Greek to the east.
Phoenician writing had been in the region for at least a hundred years already. The first known piece of Phoenician writing, known as the Nora Stone, was found in southwestern Sardinia and is dated to the late 9th or early 8th centuries. It speaks of the land of Tarshish, which is associated with the Kingdom of Tartessus in southern Spain, where the Phoenicians established colonies at Gades and elsewhere, from which they could export Spain’s mineral wealth east.
However, the principal exporter of Phoenician culture would not be the Phoenicians themselves, but the Greeks. The first known evidence of Greek writing is from the island of Euboea, dating to the 8th century and clearly an adaptation of the easy-to-learn Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks also borrowed from Phoenician literature, art, and technology, including concepts such as interest-bearing loans, maritime insurance, and deposit banking. As the Greeks established trading outposts of their own through the Meditarranean world and the Black Sea, they too became primary exporters of “Western” culture — a culture that it had imported from the Near East.
The Middle Eastern Origins of Western Europe
Source: Brown University.
The most popular modern-day alphabet remains the Latin alphabet, an accomplishment of not only the Romans, but of the post-Roman states that spread their own variations of it to most of the known world. This alphabet, however, would not exist had not the Greeks developed their own first and, as we’ve seen, the Greeks took theirs from the Phoenician.
This evolution of European language, beginning with the spread of Phoenician to Cyprus, Greece, and the Western Mediterranean, traces a story of growing seaborne commerce that went in two directions. As raw resources flowed east, culture was exported to the west, and we see in this phenomenon a growing globalization that was first seen in the Eastern Mediterranean and soon expanded to include the west. It was this nascent globalization that made way for the rise of the Roman Empire.
The Ancient Globalized World of the Punic Wars
When Polybius undertook his project to explain the rise of Roman dominance in the Mediterranean, naturally his focus turned to the momentous Punic Wars that were fought between 264 and 146 B.C. between Rome and the Phoenician colony [turned independent powerhouse] Carthage. By the end of these wars, the unification of the Mediterranean coasts under Roman rule was almost inevitably a matter of time. Indeed, by then most of Spain, Italy, Greece, and central North Africa were under the direct governorship of Rome. The rest would fall to the eternal city within the next century and a half.
Polybius’ history starts with the first war, but ours must begin earlier. The forces that would lead to the Punic War are found centuries before, when the leading powers in the Tyrrhenian Sea were the Carthaginians, Greeks, and Etruscans. In these days, Rome was little more than a burgeoning city whose sphere of influence extended to western central Italy.
Rome’s rise was not inevitable. Their success perhaps is ultimately attributable to being the top dog at the right time, when the great Hellenistic kingdoms of the east were in decline and the geopolitical order was ripe for domination by a sole-remaining superpower. But, Rome’s rise does follow a line of globalization and cultural homogenization that helps to explain how it even became possible to unite the whole Mediterranean world under the rule of a single state.
Ancient Urban Multiculturalism
The ancient city of Caere and its port at Pyrgi have fallen into relative obscurity, but for at least two centuries it formed a significant link in an evolving Western Mediterranean world. We have, amazingly, extant tablets found in the ruins of Pyrgi that detail an agreement between the Carthaginians and the local ruler, King Thefarie Velianas of Caere, with regards to the establishment of a sanctuary to the Punic goddess Astarte in the port. Dating from c. 500 B.C., the agreement was recorded in both Punic and Etruscan and is illustrative of the commercial interests Carthage had in central and northern Italy.
As a tribute to Caere’s wealth, a likely byproduct of its commercial relevance, is our knowledge of the treasury it built in Delphi, a sanctuary of the classical Greek world. And despite economic troubles and the accompanying decline of Etrurian influence in central Italy by the end of the 5th century B.C., the temples at Caere and Pyrgi remained affluent enough to attract the mischievous ambitions of Syracusan tyrant Dionysius I, who pillaged the temple of the Greek goddess Eileithyia at Pyrgi in 384 B.C. to raise revenues to fund his war against the Carthaginians. This event was recorded by Diodorus Siculus in Book XV of Library of History and by Strabo in Book V of Geography, and comes not long after the city had taken in numerous Roman refugees following the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 B.C., as recorded by Livy’s Book V.
At Caere we see the confluence of Latin, Etruscan, Carthaginian, and Greek cultures, and it is representative of a multiculturalism that existed in most, if not all, commercially important centers of the Mediterrenean. The Greek colony of Naples, for example, was occupied not just by Greeks, but by locals as well, and by the end of the 5th century was increasingly under Oscan (Samnite) influence. Most great cities of the ancient world hosted cults and peoples from all over the Mediterranean and beyond, including Rome and Carthage.
The Cult of Melqart-Herakles
Much like all other cultures of the time, Carthaginian culture represented a cosmopolitan milieu that was as much influenced by the Greeks, Egyptians, and others as the other way around. The Greek cults of Demeter and Core, for example, were present in Punic Sicily and Sardinia, as well as the great city of Carthage itself. Adopted by the Carthaginians, religious beliefs around Demeter and Core naturally took on indigenous and local characteristics, as cultural worlds unified. Of course, by the time of the Greek-Carthaginian conflicts in Sicily, Carthage had been interacting with the various peoples of the Mediteranean for centuries.
Herakles, known to the Romans as Hercules, is one of the quintessential Greek myths that legitimized its colonization and dominance over much of the Mediterranean, but it is also one of the best examples of cultural homogenization. The cult was widely adopted by non-Greek peoples, including the Romans, Carthaginians, and Etruscans.
The Baths of Antoninus in Carthage. The city was razed by the Romans in 146 B.C. and later refounded by Julius Caesar.
Vulca of Veii’s statue of Apollo, part of a scene with Hercules.
In a fragment of Stesichorus’ 6th century B.C. Geryoneis, Herakles arrived in the Spanish kingdom of Tartessus, where he was given a golden cup by the sun and promptly made his way to Erythia, a mythical island and the residence of Geryon. Killing the latter and taking his cattle, he returns the cup to the sun and from Tartessus drives these cattle to Italy, crossing both the Pyrenees and the Alps, until he finally brings them to Greece. Not before reaching Sicily, Stesichorus’ home island, of course. This route was soon known as the Heraklean Way.
The Romans developed a Heraklean, or Herculean, mythology of their own. They had adopted the cult of Hercules via the Etruscans, not the Greeks. The Latin name Hercules derives from the Etruscan Hercle. In fact, the statue of Hercules that was still standing in the days of Pliny the Elder — who cites the statue in book XXXV of his Natural History —, was made by the Etruscan Vulca of Veii. Most artists in early Rome were foreign, whether Etruscan or Greek, and the cult of Hercules was introduced during a period of Etruscan political domination over Rome.
In Punic religion, Hercules was associated with Melqart, a god whose origins can be traced back to the Phoenician city of Tyre — the mother city of Carthage. Like Hercules to the Greeks, Melqart symbolized Phoenician colonization abroad as the protector of Tyre and the Phoenician world. This relationship between Melqart and Hercules was broadly recognized. The temple to Hercules in the Sicilian Greek city of Akragas featured a twin staircase to the sanctuary’s attic, a characteristic originally proper to Phoenician-Punic religion. This architectural feature was quite common in temples throughout Magna Graecia.
It’s possible, and even likely, that the Melqart-Hercules association precedes the 6th century B.C. It was Greek historian Herodotus, in Book II of The Histories, who after visiting the temple of Melqart in Tyre suggested that the temple of Hercules on the island of Thasos — a Greek island originally occupied by Tyre — had originally been a sanctuary to his Phoenician counterpart.
Cultural Syncretism and the Rise of Rome
Before embarking on his ambitious invasion of Italy by crossing the Pyrenees and then the Alps, Hannibal visited the shrine to Melqart-Hercules in Gades to invoke him as his patron. The connection to Hercules’ travels from Gades to Italy using a similar route is as obvious as it was purposeful. Upon arriving in Italy, Hannibal made ready use of his connection to Hercules as a means of legitimizing his cause vis-a-vis Rome’s allies in Italy, especially the Greek city-states on the southern end of the peninsula.
The use of religious propaganda to legitimize one cause over another was a common tactic among the ancients, including the Romans, who are well-known for their widespread adoption of foreign deities and cults. It’s worth considering to what extent the concurrent processes of globalization and homogenization paved the road for the Romans.
These coins, likely issued by Hannibal’s father Hamilcar, feature Melqart-Herakles and an African war elephant.
The lands they conquered by the end of the Second Punic War were all Punic territories with a longstanding shared cultural history to Rome and the wider Mediterranean. By the end of the 2nd century, Macedon, Greece, and the western anatolian peninsula was conquered and much of the rest of the Hellenistic world was in decay. Syria and Phoenician were taken by Pompey the Great during the early 1st century, and Ptolemaic Egypt fell to Augustus by the end of his civil war against Mark Antony.
Much of the Roman Empire ultimately occupied a network of cities and states that had been interacting with each other for the last seven-to-nine centuries. They shared a common culture and identity that had multiple regional variations to the degree that they were influenced by other local and foreign traditions. That there was the necessary similarity was most likely a factor in Rome’s ability to connect its religious propaganda with that of the people it conquered, and too the ease of adoption of foreign cults in Rome itself and by its citizens. In other words, Rome followed on the coat-tails of an ideological globalization that had culturally unified the Mediterranean world between the 9th and and 1st century B.C.
But, if one is to talk about globalization and Rome, one cannot end the story without including the northern “barbarians.”
Cultural and Economic Globalization in “Barbarian” Europe
Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, a sizable piece of territory that lies between the English Channel and the Pyrenees, and between the Atlantic and the Rhine river, was the single-greatest military triumph of the ancient Roman world. He sparked it under the guise of a response to the aggression of the Germanic Suebi clans and their king, Ariovistus, against Roman allies. He defeated Ariovistus that same year, 58 B.C. In 57 B.C., he humbled the Belgic tribes of the northeast, occupying an area roughly corresponding to modern Belgium.
By the end of 56 B.C., Caesar and his army had marched west and defeated the tribes along the Atlantic coast, giving him enough breathing room to march soldiers back east to cross the Rhine river in a punitive expedition against the Suebi. He was the first Roman to command an army east of the Rhine.
Caesar remained in Germany for only 18 days before sailing across the English Channel to invade southern Britain, to which he returned the year after. Finally, in 53 B.C., following an uprising in Gaul that took place over the winter of 54–53, he crossed back over the Rhine and into Germany to raid and plunder the countryside. In 52 and 51 B.C. he consolidated his new conquests by pacifying a final, and significant, revolt of the Gallic tribes. His civil war against Pompey began two years later.
We know of Caesar’s exploits in Gaul perhaps almost entirely through Caesar himself, who published books detailing his campaigns most likely at the end of each year. Aside from being a military and political history of Gaul during the middle of the 1st century B.C., Caesar’s history also provides rare insights on the nature of “barbarian” society in pre-Roman Gaul and Germany.
In fact, it is largely to Caesar that we owe the traditional view of the status of the tribal world in Gaul and Germany during the 1st century. West of the Rhine, there were large oppidum, or major fortified, walled towns, from which the Romans could acquire food and other supplies. They were major seats of power for local elites and also important centers of production. According to Caesar, none existed east of the Rhine, where life was simpler and less complex.
As it turns out, Caesar’s view of history was a narrow one. While for some reason central European culture had suffered a temporary decline in the 1st century B.C. for reasons unknown, great oppida had existed east of the Rhine since at least the 3rd century.
The First Sack of Rome
When Alaric I of the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 A.D., it was the first time Rome had been violated since the year 390 B.C. Just as it was in 410 B.C. Rome’s capture and sack 800 years earlier was accomplished by a warband of “barbarians” who had come from north of the Alps. The defeat was not only utterly humiliating to the Romans, it also invited Rome’s subdued allies in Latium to rebel against Roman domination — conflicts which occupied Rome for the next five decades. More importantly, it created a fear and hatred of the Gallic “barbarians” that would persist until Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.
The Celts, as they were known by the Greeks, were a people of the La Tène culture that lived across Gaul and central Europe. They expanded into Spain, Britain, and Anatolia, as well as northern Italy. We know of them in most part due to their interactions with the Greeks and, later, the Romans, and they were long integrated into the larger Mediterranean world. The Celts not only migrated, invaded, and pillaged, they also served as mercenaries and traded with their more urbanized neighbors. The Greek colony of Massilia, for example, served as a trading post that connected the Mediterranean with Gaul.
Neither was Rome the only city to suffer from the ambitions of Celtic warbands. The famous ancient oracle of Delphi was nearly the victim of another Celtic leader named Brennus, who was turned back outside the city after having initially defeated a coalition of Greek armies at Thermopylae in 279 B.C. The Etruscans of northern Italy too had their run-ins with the Celts, the latter of which had been present in the area for a long time but otherwise coincided with a decline of Etruscan influence in the Po Valley.
Thus, the La Tène culture — which made up most of the peoples of central Europe in the ancient world — had long interacted with the greater Mediterranean world. Pillagers and mercenaries brought back wealth, including both luxuries and currency, as did traders. In areas most affected, we see in the archeological evidence the generation of hierarchies, often manifested through patterns in the amount of wealth displayed in recovered burials. It was this world that Caesar was introduced to during his conquest of Gaul, but he was wrong to believe that it was unique to society west of the Rhine.
The Greek trade colony of Massilia controlled a tin trade route known since the Bronze Age. Source: J.D. Muhly (1973).
Manching: The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
A model of one of Manching’s main gates.
The ancient city of Manching was destined to be buried beneath the asphalt and concrete of an American air base in Cold War West Germany, if it were not for a surprising archeological discovery that would redefine our understanding of pre-Roman society east of the Rhine. The site had been excavated in the mid-1930s, but never to the extent that it was in the 1950s. What they found was an oppidum of an unexpectedly large size, larger than what the surviving historical record suggests.
Whoever governed Manching also minted coins, a concept undoubtedly borrowed from the Greeks and Romans, as Celtic or Germanic barbarians returned home from mercenary service — or from pillaging. People owned iron and steel tools, and the city’s population was responsible for much of the manufacturing. What’s more, Manching and its belongings date to the third or second centuries B.C., hundreds of years prior to Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.
There was a decline in Manching’s population by the mid-1st century B.C., corresponding with Caesar’s warring in Gaul. It’s possible that the disruptions caused by Caesar caused the people of Manching to leave due to decreasing accessibility to food, of which a surplus is typically needed to support large urban populations which specialize in non-agricultural industries. Or, the disruption could have other causes and may have to do with King Ariovistus’ migration into Gaul, the event which set off Caesar’s wars. The historical record is ambiguous.
Nevertheless, for hundreds of years Manching’s people traded Greek and Roman goods, as well as wares from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It’s clear that there was extensive mercantile activity, as well as the return of loot and plunder taken while on mercenary service or in raids. This wealth was unequally distributed, creating hierarchies which are reflected in burial remains and even affecting separate communities differently.
Certainly, prior to the 1st century A.D., complex society certainly did not seem to extend into Europe’s far north. In the late first millennium B.C. there is evidence for increased interaction between the far northern people, such as in Denmark and Sweden, with central European peoples. If Mediterranean culture and wares spread into central Europe, La Tène culture spread north as well. Much of this was adopted locally, as jewelry typical of the La Tène people have been found to be locally produced in Denmark. Still, the far north was a society of small farmsteads and these may have increased in size, but we do not see the same oppida that we see to the south.
What’s clear is that the extent of societal complexity clearly relates to the distance of the society in question to the Mediterranean. Trade, military service, and raiding all played a role in bringing Mediterranean culture north, just as trade and plunder allowed the La Tène culture to move north (and vice versa). It speaks to an international spread of influence for different customs, especially from the Meditteranean — that is, globalization.
A horde of Celtic coins found at Manching.
If there was a decline in urban society east of the Rhine in the mid-1st century B.C., by the third and fourth centuries A.D. the Germanic world had changed drastically. Of course, so had the world west of the Rhine and south of the Danube. By 100 A.D., the Roman borders in Europe had been mostly solidified, excepting Trajan’s Dacian campaign in the first decade of the 2nd century A.D. They followed a trajectory marked by the courses of the Rhine and Danube rivers.
Germans still served with Roman armies, increasingly so in fact. After the Roman expansion, there was an increase in burials between the Rhine and the Elbe with Roman swords and weapons. Furthermore, Germans still raided, plundered and traded — about a third of 2nd century A.D. goods recovered east of the Rhine are Roman in origin. The result was an increasing societal complexity, with new hierarchies. Burials from the middle Danube area have been found outfitted with banqueting finery and other luxury goods, typically belonging to Roman client kings.
In The Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather argues (pp. 454–455) that as a result of this interaction and consequent establishment of political hierarchy, driven by inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the Germans had become more politically and militarily sophisticated by the 5th century A.D. Thus, when the Samartians migrated into eastern Europe in the 1st century A.D., Roman security was not threatened by the displacement of the tribes already living in those lands. However, when the Huns did the same in the 5th century, the greater threat posed by evolved German tribes and kingdoms caused the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
The Court of Theodoric II the Visigoth
Sometime between July 455 and October 456 A.D., Sidonius Apollinaris wrote to his brother-in-law Agricola, the son of then-Emperor Avitus. Like Sidonius, emperor Avitus was a Gallic-Roman aristocrat and he rose as a great hope for the leadership of the influential southern Gallic provinces. Avitus had a great relationship with the king of the Visigoths, Theodoric II. By this time, the Visigoths had settled into their own putatively-subordinate independent state in southwestern Gaul. While the Romans under Avitus may have considered the Visigoths to be their subordinates, the greater international world certainly considered Theodoric II to be a very important person in his own right.
In his letter to Agricola, Sidonius describes the court of Theodoric II, to which he attends. He describes the king to be a muscular and fit man, tall and showing no signs of his age. It is curious that the fact that Theodoric II had to have his nostril hair trimmed on a daily basis was interesting enough to Sidonius for it to have been included in the letter. Theodoric II may have been a “barbarian,” but he was kingly and well-educated. Indeed, he had received a Roman education, including by the personal hand of Avitus himself, well before he was emperor of course.
Sidonius provides us a brief glimpse into the court of this Roman-educated, German king,
“The administrative duties of his sovereignty claim the rest of the morning. Nobles in armor have places near his throne; a crowd of guards in their dress of skins is allowed in so as to be at hand, but excluded from the presence so as not to disturb; and so they keep up a hum of conversation by the door, outside the curtains but within the barriers. Meanwhile deputations from various peoples are introduced, and he listens to a great deal of talk, but replies shortly, postponing business which he intends to consider, speeding that which is to be promptly settled.”
— Sidonius, Poems and Letters 1–2 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1936), p. 339.
The Roman aristocrat, and Sidonius was indeed deeply Roman, often bemoaning the fate of his culture in barbarian-infested Gaul, describes the Visigothic court as busy and lively. Theodoric II expressed his power through his entourage, was significant enough to attract envoys from foreign lands, and powerful enough in southwestern Gaul to hold administrative sway.
By the early 460s, after the death of Emperor’s Avitus’ also short-lived successor, Emperor Majorian, Theodoric II conquered the Gallic province of Septimania and invaded Spain. Theodoric was eventually killed by his brother, Euric, but by Euric’s death in 484 A.D. the Visigoths were the most powerful successors to the Western Roman Empire. This is quite the achievement for a people who hundreds of years earlier had lived within the shadow of Rome.
The History of Western Europe as a History of Ancient Globalization
The story of Europe, from the Bronze Age to the end of the Roman Empire, is unified by the threads of trade and migration. If by the end of 1200 B.C. the extent of advanced civilization was limited to Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East, it was to Phoenician trade and colonization that we owe the writing and cultural systems that still dominate the European world today. Without the Phoenicians, the European trajectory may have been radically different — the Greek and Latin languages may have never existed. Neither mey we have seen the same extent of urbanization and trade in the Mediterranean.
Likewise, the development of the “barbarian” world is one that follows a similar pattern. Those closest to Mediterranean trade and population movements benefited the most, with societal complexity spread almost like a gradient over the northern European landscape. The farther away one lived from the Mediterranean world, the less likely they were to enjoy luxury items and goods, and the less complex the society they lived in.
Trade and migration brought frictions and issues of their own, but over the long-run the relationship between globalization and civilizational progress is undisputable. The ancient world affords us a long-run view of change that provides us with lessons on how to judge the process of globalization as it continues in its modern form.