1. A nontrivial question on which this section is based was first systematically analyzed in Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?,” European Review of Economic History 6 (2002): 23–50.
2. Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).
3. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 52.
4. Jerry Bentley, “Asia in World History,” Education about Asia 4 (1999): 7.
5. For example, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); or Nigel Cliff, Holy War: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).