ABSTRACT
The term ‘globalization’ was invented in the 1980s, and, as the Oxford English dictionary makes clear, it is usually thought of as a characteristic of a world economy that has only recently come into existence (Feinman this volume; Jennings this volume), in which the exigencies of freemarket capitalism demand (and achieve) the free movement of goods and capital across national and cultural boundaries, in which sense it conveys a particular modern ideology. Small wonder, then, that archaeologists and economic historians have hesitated to introduce the term into their characterizations of the ancient world, fearful of the political blow-back and of the kind of reaction which greeted the adoption and adaptation (for much earlier periods) of some of the concepts and terminology of Immanuel Wallerstein’s closely related Early Modern ‘world-system’ (Wallerstein 1974; see Feinman this volume) from the late 1970s onwards. Yet, if one ignores the modern politics (Robertson this volume), then Anthony Giddens’ (1990: 64) denition of globalization as ‘the intensication of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ seems to describe, at least in outline, the results of the kinds of processes one can trace unfolding in the Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages. This is the increasing linkingup and integration of wider and wider areas of the Old World, including the Mediterranean, primarily in an economic sense (or at least for the most part, once it got going, driven by economic motors), but, as a direct consequence of this, in a cultural sense, through the widespread adoption of closely related values and ideas over an increasing number of regions. This is what I aim to describe briey in this chapter.
