A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  5.9 A small group of Ugandans take part in the 3rd Annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride celebration in Entebbe, Uganda, in August of 2014. This was the first public event after a Ugandan court invalidated a draconian anti-homosexual law.

  Religious fundamentalism and hostility to those of other faiths has been accompanied (and in part caused) by increasing religious diversity as migration brings those of different religious traditions together, missionaries gain converts, and individuals blend elements of different traditions in new ways. In Africa, indigenous religions remain widely practiced, including Vodun across much of coastal West Africa and the Yoruba religion in Nigeria, both of which center on spirits that govern the natural world and human society, including the spirits of the dead, which can be approached for assistance in life. Christianity and Islam have also expanded in Africa. In the immediate postcolonial period, Christianity was often rejected as a remnant of the colonial past, but this began to change in the late twentieth century, and Africa now has the world's fastest growing Christian churches, many of them nondenominational and fundamentalist rather than more traditional Catholic or Protestant. Christianity has expanded elsewhere as well; in 2000, nearly two-thirds of the world's Christians lived outside Europe and North America, with churches incorporating local cultural values on such issues as marriage and female clergy.

  Religious life in Latin America also became more diverse in the later twentieth century. Until then, most people were baptized as Catholics, and, as we saw in Chapter 4, practiced a creolized Catholicism centered on religious festivals, the veneration of the saints, and family altars in which indigenous and African traditions were blended with European ones. Catholicism has remained strong, but evangelical Protestantism, especially pentecostalism, in which worship involves speaking in tongues and faith healing, has grown rapidly as a result of extensive proselytization efforts, initially by missionaries from the United States and now largely by local missionaries. New religions, especially those created in the Caribbean, have also gained adherents. These include Vodou, a religion created by slaves in Haiti that blended elements from West African Vodun with Christianity, and involved rituals common to both, including offerings, personal altars, and elaborate ceremonies of music and dance. They also include Rastafari, a religion created by poor people in Jamaica in the 1930s whose adherents regard Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1892–1975), at that point the leader of the only unconquered, non-colonial state in Africa, as a messianic figure. Rastas called for a redistribution of wealth, and a return of black people to Africa, in spirit if not in body. Migration has taken both Rastafari and West African Vodun around the world, and transported other religions as well. Hmong shamans now conduct healing rituals in hospitals in Minneapolis, Sikh temples (known as gurdwaras) can be found in Montevideo, Montreal, and Mannheim, and new religions centered on more recent charismatic leaders and their ideas, such as Mormonism or Scientology, gain followers and build places of worship across the globe. In contrast to native language, skin color, or ethnic background, religious adherence is to some degree changeable and chosen, with converts often the most vocal advocates of their new faith. The contemporary religious picture is thus very complex, with variety and conflicts within groups and among them.

  Post-industry and poverty

  In the later twentieth century, many older industrial centers declined, transformed into “Rust Belts” of aging machines and aging workforces, as new giant factories were built in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and wherever else wages were low. As in the early Industrial Revolution, women and girls make up a large share of the workers in these factories. The postindustrial service economy expanded, often decentralized, for computer and communications technology allows many employees to work from their own homes or in small sweatshops rather than in large factories. Like the domestic production of earlier centuries, such work is often paid by the piece rather than the hour, which allows for greater flexibility but also greater exploitation as there is no limitation of the workday and benefits such as health care are often not included. A few of those who work at home are highly educated and highly paid “tele-commuters” in the burgeoning information industry, but most home or sweatshop labor involves routine data processing and other forms of computerized office work or more traditional jobs such as making clothing or shoes. Along with the computer and the cell phone, the sewing machine continues to be an effective tool of decentralization, and cotton clothing remains an important product. Work at home, whether using a sewing machine or a computer, is sometimes included in official statistics, but often it is not, and it shades into what economists term the informal or underground economy. Such work off the books is an important part of the economies of many countries, including highly industrialized ones; estimates from Italy judge that the unrecorded exchange of goods and services is probably equal to that of the official economy, and essential for survival. The increasingly global nature of business and dramatic cycles of boom and bust has led men's work in many areas to become feminized, that is, lower-waged and not bound by long-term contracts or providing much job security. Union membership has dropped significantly from mid twentieth-century highs, and threats to move jobs elsewhere have been successful in preventing unions from being formed or limiting their effectiveness.

  Gender and racial segmentation and ideas about the value of certain types of labor continued to keep wages low in teaching, nursing, institutional child care, and other jobs in which women made up a majority of the workforce, and also low in jobs in which non-white men predominated, such as lawn care and custodial work. The gender wage gap has decreased over the last several decades, but as of 2010 across industrialized countries men's median, full-time earnings were 17.6 percent higher than women's. The gender wage gap was highest in Japan and Korea—more than 30 percent in 2010—a situation that has caused many highly educated young Japanese women to leave Japan. Gender and race intersected to keep wages especially low in jobs in which non-white and immigrant women predominated, such as domestic service, in-home child care, cleaning offices and hotels, manicuring, and sex work. The opposite happened when tasks were redefined as male. Using a typewriter was gendered female, but working with computers has been gendered male and accompanied by an increase in pay and status. This regendering of work on a keyboard has been accomplished by associating computers with mathematics, machinery, and warfare, typically viewed as masculine. Thus it was called “data processing” instead of “typing,” and advertisements in computer magazines as the field was developing generally portrayed women at the keyboard only when they were emphasizing how easy a computer system was to use. Computer and online games of combat have played a significant role in this masculinization of computers, as warfare itself has become more technical, but such “militainment” has also provoked criticism by those concerned with the growing militarization of popular culture. Because East and South Asians are associated with high technology, the racialization of computer work is more complex in Western societies than a white/non-white dichotomy, but a similar masculinization of work on a keyboard occurred in Asia as well. Currently high-tech companies are far less diverse than other corporations, especially in upper management, despite rhetoric about meritocracy.

  By the end of the twentieth century, most of the world's industry, and even more of its postindustrial economy, was part of the connected network of global capitalism. Neoliberal policies triumphed. Open markets, free trade, privatization, and a reduction in government expenditures became a condition of joining the European Union (EU), the economic alliance and monetary union that some hoped might be a step toward political union, which many former members of the Soviet bloc also sought to join after the end of communist systems in eastern Europe. Deregulation and privatization led to economic expansion in some places. For example, several Indian cities became high-tech centers of global communications networks, and some educated middle-class Indians living in North America and Europe have r
eturned to India, moving into new suburbs similar to those built around American cities. This boom has not been experienced in the villages where three-quarters of the Indian population live, however. Globally, measures reducing social benefits to shrink government budgets have had a disproportionate impact on children, women, and the elderly, often resulting in what economists term a “feminization of poverty.”

  Increasing poverty has also been the result of a population explosion in Asia, Africa, and Latin America after 1950, largely because of medical advances such as vaccinations that lowered the death rate among children dramatically. (World population was 2.5 billion in 1950, and passed the 7 billion mark in 2012, with most of the increase in the world's poorer countries.) This growth threatened to outpace economic gains, putting pressure on every institution, from the family to the nation, and also led to a population skewed toward the young. Children were desired for their labor and as caregivers for their parents in later life, and contraceptives were not available, too expensive, or seen as socially unacceptable. Population growth has been reduced in some quite poor countries through strict government policies or subsidized contraception, but international aid programs have also been hampered in this by stringent limitations on the types of birth control they are allowed to provide that result from the moral and religious concerns of political pressure groups in wealthier countries. Aid agencies have also discovered that the most effective means of decreasing the birth rate is to increase the level of basic and technical education for girls and women, while providing small loans for sewing machines, farm flocks, or even cell phones so that women could gain some economic independence. In the 1980s, development programs did shift somewhat to smaller-scale projects directed at women, such as small irrigation systems, improvements in stock-raising techniques, credit associations, and micro-loan programs, but warfare, environmental crises, declines in funding, and cultural attitudes about women's proper role have limited such measures.

  The dramatic growth in population has occurred despite the emergence and spread of new diseases, some of which have had significant social and cultural as well as health consequences. In the 1980s, the emergence of a new sexually transmitted disease—Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)—shaped both sexual behavior and opinions about it around the world. AIDS is transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids, and is extremely contagious. Its initial victims in the West included many homosexuals and intravenous drug users, who were seen by some as meriting their fate. Extensive medical research led to antiretroviral drugs in the 1990s, and, for those who could afford these, HIV/AIDS became a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. In poorer parts of the world, AIDS spread first among prostitutes and their clients, and its rapid transmission around the world was related to an explosive rise in international sex tourism. Drugs were far too expensive and many men objected to using condoms, which would have slowed its spread. Eventually huge numbers of people were infected, particularly in southern Africa, where having multiple sexual partners concurrently was common, especially for men, and population displacements resulting from conflict and drought hastened the spread. AIDS lowered life expectancy in South Africa and neighboring countries by more than a decade in the 1990s, and, according to the World Health Organization, is currently the leading cause of death among women aged 15–44 worldwide.

  The world's villages had few prospects for the growing numbers of young people, and they went where they always have—to cities, which expanded at an astonishing rate, sometimes doubling or tripling in a single decade. As of 2000, Latin America was the world's most urbanized region, with 75 percent of the population in cities. Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria, grew from less than a million in 1965 to an estimated 20 million today, making it Africa's largest city. Here and in other megacities such as Nairobi, Dakar, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro, water and sewage systems, electric power, police and fire services, housing and even streets could not (and cannot) keep up with the explosive growth. Cities such as these have a small group of wealthy and middle-class people, who live in pleasant apartments or suburban mansions and work in offices in skyscrapers, but most people live in crowded apartments or make “self-help” housing on land they do not own out of cardboard cartons, plywood, packing crates, fabric, and other scavenged materials. Most people survive through the type of economy of makeshifts that has always been the situation for poor urban dwellers, selling commodities and labor services—including sex—on a very small scale. Cities bring people of different backgrounds and traditions together, creating new cultural mixtures but also fostering hostilities, both of which are enhanced by modern media technologies including the loudspeaker, the cell phone, and the internet.

  Moving takes young people away from their extended family, which weakens lineage ties and allows them to be more independent. Most urban households are much smaller than those in villages, with marriages decided upon by the individuals rather than arranged by the family. Moving also leaves people vulnerable because they do not have a lineage to support them economically or emotionally. Voluntary associations, youth groups, churches, and women's clubs established in urban neighborhoods have tried to help migrants adjust, but their employment prospects remain limited and they have only a small chance of escaping poverty.

  Into the third millennium

  At the beginning of the third millennium, the most common buzzword for the current situation of the world is “globalized,” in which the regions of the world are integrated into a single system. Some commentators, including many world historians, see globalization as a very long process, beginning with the Columbian Exchange, or with travel along the Silk Roads across Asia, or even with the initial migration of Homo sapiens around the world. More often, globalization is seen as a product of advances in transportation and telecommunications over the last several decades, which have allowed international business and financial institutions, along with international agencies and organizations, both governmental and nongovernmental, to become increasingly important. Large multinational corporations now know more and determine more about more people's lives than was imaginable earlier, including people who live in the very few nations where those corporations are not active, such as North Korea, where private corporations are prohibited, or Burundi, in 2014 the world's poorest and hungriest nation and thus not of much interest to international business. According to the Global Connectedness Index developed by DHL, the world's largest logistics company, in 2012 Burundi was the least globalized country in the world. The Netherlands was the most globalized, dozens of times more connected than Burundi in terms of the depth and breadth of the flows of trade, capital, information, and people that DHL chose to measure. It was also one of the world's wealthiest countries (seventeenth in per capita GDP, according to the UN), with a level of hunger so low it was not even measured in the Global Hunger Index prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

  2012 DHL Global Connectedness Index, Top 20 and Bottom 20 Countries

  CountryTotal Connectedness IndexCountryTotal Connectedness Index

  1 Netherlands 89 121 Bosnia and Herzegovina 28

  2 Singapore 83 122 Niger 26

  3 Luxembourg 82 123 Uzbekistan 25

  4 Ireland 81 124 Kyrgyz Republic 25

  5 Switzerland 80 125 Bolivia 24

  6 United Kingdom 78 126 Iran 24

  7 Belgium 76 127 Syria 23

  8 Sweden 75 128 Venezuela 23

  9 Denmark 74 129 El Salvador 23

  10 Germany 73 130 Benin 22

  11 Norway 71 131 Lao PDR 22

  12 Hong Kong 71 132 Tajikistan 22

  13 Malta 69 133 Nepal 21

  14 South Korea 69 134 Botswana 21

  15 Thailand 67 135 Paraguay 20

  16 Malaysia 66 136 Burkina Faso 18

  17 France 65 137 Myanmar 15

  18 Israel 65 138 Rwanda 14

  19 Austria 65 139 Central African Republic 12

  20 I
celand 64 140 Burundi 10

  Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven A. Altman, “DHL Global Connectedness Index 2012,” Deutsche Post DHL, November 2012

  Map 5.3 Global distribution of wealth, 2010

  Analysts of all political persuasions see these three statistics—global connections, wealth, and hunger—as causally related, with the lines of causation flowing in all directions. Burundi is poor and hungry because it lacks global connections, and it lacks global connections in part because it is poor. That poverty is itself in part a result of the two processes traced in this chapter, industrialization and imperialism, as is the wealth of the Netherlands. The movement of some of the world into a postindustrial economy and the waning of political imperialism have enhanced this inequality rather than lessening it. In general, in terms of standard of living, access to health care, child mortality, life expectancy, literacy rates, political stability, freedom from violence, and other measures of the quality of life, the regions of the world that were highest in 1950 are still highest today. Inequalities within nations have also continued. In Latin America, for example, although Mexico celebrates its mestizo heritage and Cuba, Brazil, and other nations proclaim themselves racially egalitarian, light-skinned people dominate the top income brackets and dark-skinned the bottom. Individuals classified as white on the 2007 Brazilian national census had an income twice that of those classified as black or mixed race.