The Making of a Global World

Why This Matters

Look at the things around you. The phone in your pocket was probably made in China. The oil that runs the bus you take to school may have come from West Asia. The tea your family drinks in the morning grows in Assam, but the cup might be sold all over the world. Even the chillies in your food and the potato in your aloo sabzi did not always grow in India. They came from a faraway land thousands of years after humans first started farming.

We think of this connected world as something new. We call it “globalisation” and feel it is the story of the last 50 years. But it is not new at all. For thousands of years, people have travelled across the world — traders looking for profit, pilgrims looking for god, workers looking for jobs. They carried goods. They carried money. They carried ideas and skills. And, without knowing it, they also carried germs and diseases.

This chapter is the story of how our one connected world slowly came to be. It is full of surprises. You will see how a single crop, the humble potato, helped grow Europe’s population — and then caused a famine that killed a million people. You will see how the Spanish conquered a whole continent not with guns, but with an invisible weapon. You will see how a cattle disease in Africa pushed a whole people into slavery-like labour. And you will see why a money crash in one country, America, could ruin a poor farmer in faraway Bengal. By the end, you will understand the world you live in — not as a fixed thing, but as something that was made, step by step, over a very long time.

The Big Idea

The world we live in did not become connected overnight. It was made slowly, over thousands of years, as people moved across the earth carrying goods, money, ideas — and even germs. Three big movements, or flows, tied the world together: the flow of trade (goods moving between countries), the flow of labour (people moving to find work), and the flow of capital (money moving to be invested far away). This connecting brought great riches to some and great misery to others — it had a bright side and a dark side at the same time. Because the world became so tightly linked, a shock in one place could spread everywhere, as the Great Depression of 1929 showed. After the destruction of two World Wars, countries tried to rebuild a stable, connected world economy through the Bretton Woods system — the IMF and the World Bank. Understanding these phases helps us understand the connected world of today.

Let’s Break It Down

The pre-modern world — connected long ago

People often think the world was made up of separate, cut-off lands until modern times. That is not true. Even in very old times, far-apart societies were linked.

As early as 3000 BCE, there was busy trade along the coast between the Indus Valley civilisation and present-day West Asia. For over a thousand years, cowries (small sea-shells, called cowdi in Hindi) travelled from the Maldives all the way to China and East Africa. People used these shells as a kind of money. So even in ancient times, things were moving across huge distances.

The best example of this old, connected world is the Silk Routes.

The Silk Routes that linked the world

The Silk Routes were a web of roads and sea-paths that joined far-apart parts of the world. The name comes from Chinese silk, which was the most famous thing carried west along these routes. But silk was not the only cargo. Chinese pottery travelled too. So did textiles (cloth) and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return, gold and silver flowed from Europe to Asia.

The Silk Routes existed even before the time of Christ, and they were busy almost up to the fifteenth century. And they carried much more than goods. Trade and culture always travelled together. Christian preachers, and later Muslim preachers, used these routes to reach Asia. Long before them, Buddhism spread out of eastern India in many directions through points along the Silk Routes. So ideas and religions travelled the same paths as silk and spices.

Food travels — the surprising story of what’s on your plate

Food is one of the best ways to see this long-distance contact. Many foods that feel completely “ours” actually came from far away.

Take spaghetti (a kind of long, thin pasta). Many believe noodles travelled west from China and slowly became spaghetti in Italy. Others think Arab traders carried pasta to Sicily (an island near Italy) long ago. The exact truth is lost. But the very fact that similar foods turn up in China, Italy, India and Japan tells us that food ideas travelled across the world even in old times.

Here is the bigger surprise. Many common foods were completely unknown to our ancestors until about five hundred years ago. These include potatoes, maize (corn), tomatoes, chillies, groundnuts, soya and sweet potatoes. None of these grew in Asia or Europe. They all came from the Americas — North America, South America and the Caribbean.

How did they reach us? They came only after Christopher Columbus accidentally reached the Americas in 1492. (Columbus was a European sailor who was trying to find a sea-route to Asia. Instead, he bumped into a continent Europeans did not even know existed.) After that, foods, crops and minerals from the Americas began to change lives all over the world.

Figure 3.1 below sketches these two great waves of exchange on a rough world map — the old Silk Routes, and the new exchange that began after 1492. Notice it is a rough sketch, not a real map.

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Sometimes a new crop could be the difference between life and death. The potato is the best example. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer once they started growing potatoes. But the same crop later brought a terrible disaster — and that takes us to one of the big “why” questions of this chapter.

Why could one humble crop grow a population — and then starve it?

NCERT tells us that the potato helped Europe’s poor live longer, and that when the potato crop failed in Ireland, hundreds of thousands died. But it does not really explain why a single vegetable had such enormous power, for good and for bad. Let’s close that gap.

First, why did the potato help the population grow? Think about a small patch of land that a poor family owns. If they grow grain like wheat on it, they get a certain amount of food. But the same patch, planted with potatoes, gives far more food. The potato is also filling and nutritious — it has the energy and nutrients a body needs. So a poor family that switched to potatoes suddenly had more to eat from the same little plot. More food means fewer people die of hunger, children grow up healthier, and the population rises. In Ireland, the poorest peasants came to depend on the potato almost completely. It was nearly all they ate.

But here is the trap. Depending on a single crop is dangerous. When you rely on just one food, you have no backup. So in the mid-1840s, when a plant disease destroyed the potato crop across Ireland, the poor had nothing else. Suddenly their one food was gone. This caused the Great Irish Famine (1845 to 1849). About one million people starved to death, and double that number left Ireland to find work abroad. The very crop that had grown the population now could not feed it.

Figure 3.2 below puts these two sides — the gift and the danger — next to each other, so you can see how the same dependence that helped the people also destroyed them.

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Conquest, disease and trade — the invisible weapon

In the sixteenth century, the world “shrank”. European sailors found a sea-route to Asia and crossed the western ocean to the Americas. (When we say the world “shrank”, we mean it became easier to reach faraway places, so distant lands felt closer and more connected.) America had been cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years. Now its lands, crops, and minerals began to change trade everywhere. Huge amounts of silver, dug from mines in present-day Peru and Mexico, flowed to Europe and made it rich.

The Portuguese and Spanish began conquering America in the mid-1500s. Now here is the part that should make you stop and think. We usually imagine that Europeans won because they had better guns. That is not the real story. The most powerful weapon of the Spanish was not a weapon at all. It was the germs they carried in their bodies, especially the germs of smallpox (a deadly disease that causes fever and spreading sores).

Why did disease, not guns, conquer the Americas?

This is a “why” worth slowing down for. How can a disease conquer a continent? The answer is one word: immunity.

Immunity means the body’s built-in defence against a disease. When people live with a germ for many generations, their bodies slowly learn to fight it, and they become immune — the germ no longer kills them so easily. Europeans had lived with smallpox for centuries, so most of them were immune. The germ did not harm them much.

But the people of the Americas were different. Their land had been cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years. So they had never met these European germs before. Their bodies had no defence at all — no immunity. When the Europeans arrived carrying smallpox, the disease spread among the local people like fire. It killed huge numbers — sometimes whole communities. In fact, smallpox spread so fast that it raced ahead of the Europeans, killing people in places no European had even reached yet. With their populations collapsing and dying, the local people could not resist. The land lay open, and the Europeans simply took it.

And here is the cruel cleverness of it. A gun can be captured. You can grab the enemy’s gun and turn it against him. But you cannot capture a disease. The people of America had no way to fight an invisible killer they had no immunity to. That is why germs, not guns, were the true conquerors.

The cause-and-effect chain in Figure 3.3 below lays this out step by step, and contrasts guns (which could be fought) with germs (which could not).

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By the eighteenth century, China and India were still among the richest countries in the world. But from the fifteenth century China cut back its contact with the outside world. As China stepped back and the Americas rose, the centre of world trade slowly moved westward. Europe became the new centre of world trade.

The nineteenth century — the three flows

Now we jump to the nineteenth century (the years from 1815 to 1914). The world changed deeply in this period. To understand it, economists look at three flows — three kinds of movement that tied the world economy together. This idea is the key to the whole century, so learn it well:

These three flows were closely woven together. They worked at the same time and depended on one another. Figure 3.4 below shows the three side by side, and reminds you how tightly they were linked.

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How a world economy took shape — the Corn Laws

The story of how this world economy formed starts with food in Britain. Britain’s population was growing fast. As cities and industry grew, more and more people needed food. So the demand for food grain went up, and food prices rose.

Now, the rich landowners of Britain wanted high food prices, because they earned more that way. Under their pressure, the government stopped food (corn) from being imported cheaply from abroad. The laws that allowed the government to do this were called the Corn Laws. (“Corn” here means food grain in general.)

But high food prices hurt everyone else. So the industrialists and city people grew angry and forced the government to scrap the Corn Laws. After the Corn Laws were abolished (repealed), cheap food could now be brought into Britain from abroad. This one decision set off a chain of events:

• Food could now be imported more cheaply than it could be grown in Britain. So British farming could not compete. Many fields were left unfarmed, and thousands of farm workers lost their jobs. Many of them moved to cities, or migrated overseas.
• As food got cheaper, people in Britain ate more. And as British industry grew, incomes rose, so people could buy even more food. Britain began importing huge amounts of food.
• To feed this demand, lands far away — in Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia — were cleared to grow food.

But clearing land was not enough. You needed railways to carry the food from inland farms to the ports. You needed bigger harbours to load the ships. You needed people to settle the new farmlands and homes to house them. All this needed capital (money) and labour (workers). The money flowed in from financial centres like London. And the demand for workers in places like America and Australia pulled in millions of migrants. Around 50 million people left Europe for America and Australia in the nineteenth century. In all, about 150 million people around the world left their homes in search of a better life.

So you can see all three flows working together — trade (cheap food), capital (London’s money), and labour (migrants). By 1890 a global agricultural economy had taken shape. Your food no longer came from a nearby village. It came from thousands of miles away, grown by a migrant worker on a giant farm that had once been a forest, carried by railways and ships built for that very purpose.

A quick check to make sure the chain of cause and effect is clear in your mind:

The dark side — rinderpest in Africa

The expanding world trade made some people richer. But it had a dark side too. For many people, being pulled into the world economy meant losing their freedom and their way of life. Africa is a painful example.

In the late nineteenth century, the big European powers rushed to grab Africa. In 1885 they met in Berlin and carved up the continent between themselves, drawing borders with straight lines as if using a ruler. Europeans wanted Africa’s rich land and minerals. They came to set up mines and plantations to produce crops and minerals to send back to Europe.

But they hit a problem: they could not find workers. Why not? Because Africans did not need the wages. Africa had plenty of land and plenty of cattle. A family with its own land and animals had everything it needed. There was little to buy with wages anyway. So why would anyone work long hours in a European’s mine for low pay? They wouldn’t. This shortage of willing workers frustrated the European employers.

Then came a disease that changed everything: Rinderpest, a fast-spreading cattle plague (a disease that kills cattle).

Why did a cattle disease hand Africa to the Europeans?

This is one of the strangest “why” stories in history. How can a disease of cows help conquer a continent of people? Let’s trace it.

Rinderpest reached Africa in the late 1880s, carried on infected cattle brought from Asia (to feed Italian soldiers invading Eritrea). It spread across the continent “like a forest fire”, moving from the east coast to the Atlantic coast by 1892 and reaching the southern tip a few years later. Along the way, it killed about 90 per cent of the cattle.

Now think about what that meant for Africans. Their cattle were not just animals. Cattle were their wealth, their food, and their independence. With the cattle gone, African families suddenly had nothing to live on. Their whole way of life was destroyed.

And here is the cruel part. The European planters, mine owners and colonial governments grabbed control of the few cattle that survived. So now the only cattle left were in European hands. Desperate, starving Africans had no choice. To survive, they had to do the one thing they had always refused — work for wages in the European mines and plantations. The labour shortage was solved, not by force of arms, but by a disease. By killing the cattle and seizing what remained, the Europeans gained control over African land and labour.

Figure 3.5 below shows this chain from start to finish: kill the cattle, destroy livelihoods, force people into wage work.

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Indentured labour from India — a new system of slavery

The labour flow had another dark side, this time touching India directly. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Indians went abroad to work — on plantations, in mines, and building roads and railways. They went as indentured labourers.

Most Indian indentured workers came from eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, central India, and the dry parts of Tamil Nadu. Why these places? Because life there had become very hard. Cottage industries (small home crafts) were dying, land rents had gone up, and land was being cleared for mines and plantations. So poor people fell into debt and could not survive. They left to find work somewhere — anywhere.

The main places they were sent were the Caribbean islands (mainly Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), Mauritius and Fiji. Tamil migrants also went to Ceylon and Malaya. Some were recruited for the tea plantations of Assam.

Why was indentured labour called “a new system of slavery”?

NCERT uses this striking phrase but expects you to feel its weight. Let’s understand exactly why such a harsh name fits.

The labourers were tricked from the very start. Agents recruited them and were paid for each worker they signed up. So these agents lied. They gave false information about where the worker was going, how long the journey was, and what the work and living conditions would be like. Many workers were not even told they would have to cross a vast ocean. Some were even kidnapped by force.

When they arrived, the truth was brutal. The work was back-breaking. The living conditions were harsh. And the workers had almost no legal rights — so they could not complain or get justice. If a worker could not finish the heavy daily task he was given, his wages were cut, and he could even be put in jail. If he ran away and was caught, he was punished severely.

So look at what indentured labour really was: people were tricked or forced onto ships, carried far from home, made to do crushing work for little pay, trapped by a contract, and left with no rights and no escape. That is not free work. It is so close to slavery in everything but name that it earned the title “a new system of slavery”. Indian nationalist leaders began opposing it in the early 1900s, and it was finally abolished in 1921.

There is one more side to this story, though. Out of all that suffering grew something new and creative. Indentured workers mixed their old traditions with new ones in their new homes. In Trinidad, the Muharram procession became a lively carnival called “Hosay”. The protest religion of Rastafarianism (made famous by reggae star Bob Marley) is linked to these migrants. “Chutney music” in Trinidad and Guyana grew from them too. Even today, there are large communities of Indian descent in these countries. The Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul, and West Indies cricketers like Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan, are descended from these Indian indentured workers. This is how cultures blend to make something new — a real part of the making of a global world.

India, trade and the global system

India was tied tightly into this world economy — but as a colony, which meant the connection was shaped to benefit Britain, not India.

For centuries, India had exported fine cotton cloth to Europe. But after Britain’s own cotton industry grew, British manufacturers pushed their government to put tariffs (taxes) on Indian cloth coming into Britain.

Because of these tariffs, fine Indian cloth could no longer sell well in Britain. The share of cotton cloth in India’s exports collapsed — from about 30 per cent around 1800 to below 3 per cent by the 1870s. India stopped being a seller of finished cloth. Instead, India was turned into a supplier of raw materials — raw cotton, indigo (a dye), and opium. So a country that once made and sold fine cloth was reduced to sending out raw stuff for British factories. This is what colonial trade did: it broke India’s own industry and used India for Britain’s benefit.

The inter-war economy — war, mass production, and crash

We now reach the early twentieth century. Two World Wars and a giant economic crash threw the world into chaos for over three decades. This is called the inter-war period (the years between the two World Wars).

The First World War — the first modern industrial war

The First World War (1914 to 1918) was fought mostly in Europe, but its effects were felt worldwide. It was a war unlike any before. Why? Because it was the first modern industrial war.

What does that mean? It means the war used the full power of modern industry to kill on a massive scale. Machine guns, tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons — all these were products of large factories. Millions of soldiers were gathered from around the world and moved to the battlefronts on huge ships and trains. The result was death and destruction on a scale never seen before: about 9 million dead and 20 million injured. Most of those killed were young, working-age men. So after the war, Europe had far fewer able workers, and family incomes fell.

The war also reshaped society. As men went off to fight, women stepped in to do jobs that only men used to do. And it changed the world’s money. To pay for the war, Britain borrowed huge sums from the United States. So the war turned the US from a debtor into a creditor — meaning the US went from owing money to others, to being owed money by others. America had become the world’s leading lender.

Mass production and Henry Ford’s assembly line

After the war, recovery was hard for Britain and Europe. But in the United States it was faster. The big feature of the US economy in the 1920s was mass production — making goods in huge numbers, cheaply.

The most famous example is the car-maker Henry Ford. Ford had a clever idea. He visited a Chicago slaughterhouse where animal carcasses moved along a moving belt and each worker did one cutting job as it passed. Ford copied this for his car factory in Detroit. He set up an assembly line: the car-in-the-making moved slowly along a conveyor belt, and each worker stood in one spot doing one single task — fitting one part — over and over, at the speed of the belt.

Why was this so powerful? Because it forced the work to go fast and never stop. No worker could pause, slow down, or even chat, because the belt kept moving. This made each worker produce far more in a day. Ford’s cars rolled off the line at one every three minutes — much faster than before. The T-Model Ford became the world’s first mass-produced car.

At first, workers hated the stress of the never-resting belt, and many quit. So Ford doubled their daily wage to 5 dollars. The high wage kept workers, and Ford got it back by speeding up the line even more. Mass production then spread across the US and Europe. Because goods were now cheap, and wages were higher, ordinary workers could buy things like cars, refrigerators, washing machines and radios — often on credit (paying in small monthly instalments). This buying boom created the prosperity of the 1920s in America. But, as we will see, it did not last.

The Great Depression of 1929

Around 1929, the world crashed into the worst economic disaster it had ever seen — the Great Depression. It lasted into the mid-1930s. In this time, production, jobs, incomes and trade fell sharply across most of the world. Farmers were hit worst, because farm prices fell more and for longer than the prices of factory goods.

What caused it? Several things came together. Farmers were already producing too much, so farm prices were low. To earn the same money, farmers grew even more, which pushed prices down further — crops rotted because no one bought them. Meanwhile, in the 1920s, many countries had borrowed heavily from the US. When trouble began, US lenders panicked and called back their loans. Countries that depended on US money were suddenly in deep crisis.

Why did the Great Depression spread across the whole world?

This is the crucial “why”. A crash that started mainly in America somehow ruined people everywhere — even a jute farmer in Bengal. How? The answer is that the world had become tightly interlinked, so the trouble spread like a row of falling dominoes.

Here is the chain. American banks called back their loans from other countries. Those countries suddenly ran short of money, so their banks failed and their currencies collapsed. With less money everywhere, people bought less, so demand fell and prices crashed (farmers worst of all). Factories had no buyers, so they cut production and sacked workers, and unemployment soared. Jobless people could not repay their own loans, so even more banks went bankrupt — over 4,000 US banks closed by 1933. And then the whole thing fed back on itself, round and round, a vicious circle.

The key point is why it crossed borders. By 1929, trade, loans and prices linked all countries together. So a shock in one place was passed straight on to all the others. That is what it means to live in a connected world: the good times are shared, but so are the disasters.

Figure 3.6 below draws this as a downward chain of dominoes that loops back on itself, with a side note on why it spread worldwide.

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How the Great Depression hit India

India was now so tied into the world economy that the crash reached it fast. This shows just how connected the world had become.

India’s trade was hit at once. Both exports and imports nearly halved between 1928 and 1934. As world prices crashed, prices in India crashed too — wheat prices fell by 50 per cent. Peasants and farmers suffered far more than city people. Why? Because even though the prices farmers got for their crops collapsed, the colonial government refused to lower its revenue (tax) demands. So farmers earned far less but still had to pay the same tax. They fell deeper and deeper into debt.

Think of the jute growers of Bengal. They grew raw jute, which was made into gunny bags for export. When the export of gunny bags collapsed, the price of raw jute crashed by over 60 per cent. Farmers who had borrowed money, hoping for good times, were ruined. Across India, peasants used up their savings, mortgaged their land, and even sold their jewellery and gold to survive. So in these years, India became an exporter of gold. That gold helped Britain recover — but did little for the poor Indian peasant. This deep rural distress is part of why Mahatma Gandhi launched the Civil Disobedience Movement at the height of the Depression in 1931.

(For city people with fixed incomes — like salaried workers — the Depression was actually a bit easier, because everything cost less.)

Rebuilding a world economy after the war

The Second World War (1939 to 1945) broke out only about twenty years after the first one ended. It was even more terrible. At least 60 million people were killed — about 3 per cent of the world’s population at the time. This time, unlike before, more civilians (ordinary people) died than soldiers, because cities were bombed and destroyed from the air. Huge parts of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. Rebuilding would be long and hard.

The Bretton Woods system — the IMF and the World Bank

After the war, leaders and economists looked back at the misery of the inter-war years and learned two big lessons:

• Lesson one: A modern economy based on mass production needs mass consumption — that is, lots of people buying things. But people will only keep buying if they have stable incomes, which means steady, full employment (everyone who wants a job has one). And markets alone cannot guarantee that. So the government must step in to keep prices, output and jobs steady.
• Lesson two: To keep full employment at home, a government also needs the power to control the flows of goods, money and people with the outside world.

To put these lessons into action, the rich nations met in July 1944 at Bretton Woods, a place in the United States. There they designed a new system to keep the world economy stable. This is called the Bretton Woods system, and it created two famous institutions, often called the “Bretton Woods twins”:

Two more things to remember about the system. The decisions in the IMF and World Bank were controlled by the rich Western powers, above all the US (which even held a veto — the power to block decisions). And the system used fixed exchange rates: each country’s currency (like the Indian rupee) was tied to the US dollar at a fixed value, and the dollar itself was tied to gold.

Figure 3.7 below maps out the whole Bretton Woods system on one page — the 1944 conference, its two institutions, and the system’s key features.

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Growth, decolonisation and the developing world

The Bretton Woods system worked well for a while. It began an age of fast and steady growth for the Western industrial countries and Japan. Between 1950 and 1970, world trade grew by over 8 per cent a year, and incomes by nearly 5 per cent, with very low unemployment. Technology and businesses spread around the world.

Meanwhile, a huge change was happening. After the Second World War, most colonies in Asia and Africa finally became free, independent nations. This is called decolonisation (colonies becoming free). But freedom did not bring instant wealth. These new countries were poor, short of resources, and damaged by long years of colonial rule. Even after becoming free, the former colonial powers often still controlled their key resources, like minerals and land. And big foreign companies got the right to use their natural resources very cheaply.

So the developing countries did not share in the fast growth that the West enjoyed in the 1950s and 60s. They felt the world economy was rigged against them. So they joined together as a group — the Group of 77, or G-77 — to demand a fairer deal. They wanted a “new international economic order”: real control over their own natural resources, fairer prices for their raw materials, and better access for their goods in rich countries’ markets. In a sense, the G-77 was the poorer countries’ reaction against a system (the Bretton Woods twins) that had been built by, and mostly for, the rich Western powers.

Before the practice problems, sum up the post-war rebuilding in your own mind:

Common Mistakes

Before the practice, let’s clear up four ideas students very often get wrong.

Quick Check

Practice Problems

Easy

Medium

Challenge

Summary

You should now be able to explain:

• The connecting of the world has a long history. Even in ancient times, trade, ideas, religions and germs travelled across continents — for example along the Silk Routes.
• Many “ordinary” foods — the potato, maize, tomato, chillies — came from the Americas after Columbus reached them in 1492. The potato grew Europe’s population by giving more food from less land, but depending on a single crop caused the deadly Irish Famine when it failed.
• The Spanish conquered the Americas through disease, not guns. The local people had no immunity to smallpox, so it wiped out whole communities and opened the land to conquest.
• The nineteenth-century world economy ran on three flows — trade (goods), labour (people), and capital (money) — all woven together.
• This connecting had a dark side: the rinderpest plague killed African cattle and forced Africans into wage labour, and Indian indentured labour was so harsh it was called “a new system of slavery”.
• The First World War was the first modern industrial war, and it made the US a leading creditor. The US 1920s saw mass production, like Henry Ford’s assembly line.
• The Great Depression of 1929 spread worldwide because countries were so interlinked — a shock spread like dominoes. In India, exports and prices crashed and peasants were ruined.
• After the Second World War, the Bretton Woods system rebuilt the world economy with the IMF and the World Bank. As colonies became free, the poorer nations formed the G-77 to demand a fairer economic order.

What’s Next

You have seen how the world became one connected economy — and how, at the heart of it, lay industry: Britain’s factories needed raw cotton and markets, Henry Ford’s assembly line remade work, and modern industry even made war more deadly. The next chapter, The Age of Industrialisation, goes inside that story. You will learn how factory industry rose in Britain, what life was like for the workers who ran the machines, why India’s own famous cloth industry declined under colonial rule, and how a few Indian businessmen still managed to build industries of their own. It is the inside story of the very machines that helped make our global world.