Portugal was the first globalizatior of the world!
My
good friend John Barbosa of
Bristol
,
Rhode Island
,
U. S. A.
sent me a copy of the section of
the book “Three Billion New Capitalists”
written by
Clyde
Prestowitz in which this Author
pays homage to the Portuguese leaders who in the XV and XVI centuries
created indeed the first globalization. The
Portuguese language and culture were known all over the world. Nowadays
people talk about the world being a small village, or
talking of having a town
meeting.
For
more than 50 years I have been writing that especially in
U. S. A.
the leaders do not pay enough attention to what the Portuguese navigators and
explorers accomplished five centuries ago. I will never forget when I was
a student at
New York
University
from 1948 to 1952, in the class of
World History, our
professor omitted the chapter of the world discoveries. At that time I
thought the professor was a jerk and I still have the same impression of him
today.
One
of the reasons why the
U. S. A.
continues to make so many mistakes in the international affairs is
because they do not pay attention to the nations that went thru similar
experiences before. The Portuguese
History can teach a lot to the Americans. Too bad the American leaders do not
pay attention and disregard the
Portuguese experience.
Here
is the quotation from the book of
Clyde
Prestowitz “Three Billion New
Capitalists” with my homage and sincere
thanks. My thanks also to Mr. John
Barbosa for alerting me to this book.
The First Wave, 1415-1914
“The
present system of Americanized globalization is the crest of a Western
swell that began to rise in
Portugal
nearly six hundred years ago. In 1415
China
and the area we now call
India
produced about 75 percent of the global GDP.
America
was still undiscovered, and the countries
of
Europe
were insignificant and backward. They were aware
of the wealth of the East only because Arabs who controlled the overland trade
routes deigned from time to time to let a few scraps fall from
the table to the Western "infidel" dogs. In
Lisbon
, King John I's third son, Henry,
wondered if it might be possible to get around the Arabs
and go directly to the source of the wealth by sea. At Sagres (now
Cape St. Vincent, the southwestern tip of
Europe
) he established history's first
national base for exploration and globalization. Think of it as an early version of
Florida
's
Cape Canaveral
and Henry's project as a kind of
Apollo mission. Except that the prince was aiming not for the
moon but to get around
Africa
. To do so, his shipwrights developed the
caravel, a fast, maneuverable ship without which none of the great expeditions,
including that of Columbus, would have been possible 3 The
caravel was not large because it was meant to carry a compact but highly
valuable cargo—information.
The
caravels were the information technology of the day, and Henry sent
them as probes along
Africa
's west coast, charging his captains to "boldly go where no man
has gone before." They did, finding ivory, gold,
and slaves from which come the names
Ivory Coast
, Gold Coast' and Slave Coast for parts of
Africa
. But the real prize wasn't the
Africa
.
trade, it was the news that Bartolomeu Dias brought back in 1488
After
rounding the southern tip of Africa into the
Indian Ocean
. That information led to two seminal expeditions.
Columbus had hoped that Portugal would fund his
scheme of getting to the Indies by going west When
he realized the Portuguese could get there on their own by going around
Africa, he turned to Spain for help, with historic consequences Just
as historic was the 1498 expedition of Vasco da Gama, who took a Portuguese
flotilla to Calicut on India's west coast.
The sailing, navigational, and naval warfare
technology of the Portuguese was superior to
anything in
Asia
. By 1511
Portugal
controlled the Straits of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, had made Goa the capital
of its
possessions in
India
, and had taken control of Malacca. It dominated the
Indian Ocean and opened sea trade with
Siam
, the Moluccas or Spice Islands, and
China
. Spices, drugs, gems, and silks-which for centuries had passed
from China and the Indies across the Arabian Sea to
the Middle East and then through Venice and Genoa to Europe-were
now carried west around Africa on Portuguese ships. The effect was
immediate and dramatic. The Egyptian sultans, for example had kept
the price of pepper high by limiting shipments to 210 tons per year.4
With the Portuguese in the game, pepper prices in
Lisbon
fell to a fifth of those in
Venice
. Overnight, Egyptian-Venetian trade was destroyed, shifting the power of
Venice
to
Portugal
without a shot being fired. That was the first
demonstration of the power of globalization.
This demonstration was not lost on the
Spanish, Dutch, English and French, who quickly adopted and adapted the new
Portuguese technology for expeditions of their own. Over
the next four hundred years, these five countries (later to be joined by the
fledgling United States and Japan) on the
periphery of Europe, comprising less than 2 percent
of the earth's surface and less than 20 percent of its population,
exploited these advantages to create world-girdling empires that gave
the West both economic and geopolitical dominance. The Industrial
Revolution cemented this dominance, opening an enormous gap of
productivity and wealth between the industrializing countries of the West
and the rest. For example, as late as 1830, Latin America, Asia, and
Africa
accounted for 61 percent of the world's manufactured goods; by 1913 that share was down to 8 percent.
The
industrial revolution also tied the world together tighter than ever
before. Capital markets became internationalized as the gold standard
established a common international medium of exchange that
facilitated enormous capital flows. At its peak, for example,
Britain
's net overseas investment was running at 9
percent of GDP.5 This was
also a period of great movements of people, with annual immigration
into places like the
United States
and
Argentina
running at rates up to 26 percent of
the existing population. Many contemporary observers
felt the world economy was becoming so integrated as to make
its fracturing and war impossible. Tragically, however, this view proved
wrong; World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II put
an end to globalization for nearly forty years.
In
1947, with the consequences of aborted globalization vividly in mind,
Western leaders prepared for a second round. But it wasn't globalization
of the whole world, as
Asia
accounted for only 8 percent of global output, and half the world's
population was in the communist or socialist camp and wasn't playing.”
Globalization:
The Second Wave, 1947-2000
“This second wave of globalization was orchestrated by
America
, and its purposes, philosophy, and actors were very different from those of the
previous wave. Instead of expansion, the objective was to rebuild areas devastated by the war and regain living
standards and opportunities
for a new generation. There was also the need to construct economies and a trading system that would avoid the pitfalls of the intervening
forty-five years as I have met a number of world leaders and have asked myself what exactly is leadership. It
is good to have intelligent leaders, but intelligence is not leadership. Leaders may be in a
position of high office, but all those who obtain these positions are not leaders.
Just think of the high officials of 1914, blindly plunging the young men of Europe into the blood bath of World War
I. Eloquence is a wonderful gift for a leader, but those who eloquently mouth the conventional
wisdom are not leaders.
Essentially, a true leader
strives to discover the facts, connect the dots, follow where they
lead, and determine how best to face the problem they present, and
then shape events and persuade people to embrace the results.
Six centuries ago,
Portugal
's Prince Henry (the Navigator) was bold enough
to connect certain dots, to think outside the box and so lead our forebears to the Far
East and the
New World
. We too must think outside the box. The fact
that we are now riding a new wave of globalization with 3 billion new surfers
presents a unique opportunity for a still powerful
America
to turn from illusions of empire and exercise the ingenious entrepreneurial
leadership that has long characterized it. To do so, we must be mindful of
Shakespeare's lines in Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of
men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of
their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat,
and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. “
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