TY - BOOK AU - O'Rourke,Kevin H. AU - Williamson,Jeffrey G. ED - National Bureau of Economic Research. TI - When Did Globalization Begin? T2 - NBER working paper series PY - 2000/// CY - Cambridge, Mass. PB - National Bureau of Economic Research N1 - April 2000; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers N2 - Some world historians attach globalization big bang' significance to 1492 (Christopher Colombus stumbles on the Americas in search of spices) and 1498 (Vasco da Gama makes an end run around Africa and snatches monopoly rents away from the Arab and Venetian spice traders). Such scholars are on the side of Adam Smith who believed that these were the two most important events in recorded history. Other world historians insist that globalization stretches back even earlier. There is a third view which argues that the world economy was fragmented and completely de-globalized before the 19th century. None of these three competing views has explicitly shown the difference between trade expansion driven by booming demand and supply within the trading economies (e.g., the underlying fundamental, population growth), and trade expansion driven by the integration of markets between trading economies (e.g., the central manifestation of globalization, commodity price convergence). This paper makes that distinction, and then offers two novel empirical tests which allow us to discriminate between these three competing views. Both tests show: there is no evidence supporting the view that the world economy was globally integrated prior to 1492 and/or 1498; there is also no evidence supporting the view that these two dates had the economic impact on the global economy that world historians assign to them; but there is abundant evidence supporting the view that the 19th century contained a very big globalization bang. These tests involve a close look at the connections between factor prices, commodity prices and endowments world wide UR - https://www.nber.org/papers/w7632 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w7632 ER -