In my experience, whilst commentators who declare an opposition to globalization may be true believers from old school Nazi or hardline Communist stock, mostly they are as reliable at recognizing the subject as those who advocate commercial-scale organic farming are on agricultural science.
In the Modern Era, globalization undoubtedly began as a means to bring from colonial possessions highly expensive goods such as gold and silk and spices and sugar and tea and coffee which barely touched the lives of the masses, or human cargo which modern and not a few contemporary values recoil from.
The changing of gears during the Industrial Revolution introduced the possibility of quick moving cargo ships started to bring prices down. Then came the opening-up of entire continents to grain production, followed by refrigerated ships in the 1880s which allowed meat to be transported across oceans.
And large populations in Europe which only a few decades previously had faced routine famine conditions were able to rely on a cheap and plentiful food supply; which had the added benefit of reducing the landed gentry’s hold on the stomachs of the population.
For its 150 anniversary, The Grocer has compared prices from a typical food basket in 2012 to the same products in 1862.
Tropical fruit such as pineapples – which even I, hardly long-in-the-tooth, remember as hideously expensive – are estimated to have cost £150 in today’s money; although, to be honest, these still should be considered treat items. Yet, factoring even those out, leaves an unremarkable shop of items such as milk and sugar and tea and eggs and bread and common vegetables and a few pieces of meat eating into the household income by three of four times as much as the 8% or so required now.
Average wages have increased many times over since 1862 and the drop in equivalent price of eggs can be attributed to the introduction of the Masui Hashimoto method of sexing newly hatched chicks in the 1930s, but I cannot see how anyone other than a fool or inhumane ideologue is able to express a blanket objection to globalization.
