JUNE 8 — If we listen closely, we can hear the camel bells. Not from some distant century, but from yesterday’s shipping container, today’s data cable, tomorrow’s drone delivery. Globalisation did not begin in the 1990s with the World Wide Web. It did not begin with the Dutch East India Company. It began when a merchant in Chang’an packed silk, a trader in Samarkand offered glass, and a buyer in Rome wanted both — badly enough to risk bandits, deserts, and the long, lonely road.
The Silk Route was the first face of globalisation. Slow, fragile, breathtaking. It carried not just goods but religions, plagues, paper, gunpowder. It taught humanity a dangerous lesson: connection creates wealth, but also vulnerability. The Black Death travelled those same paths. Today, we call that lesson “supply chain risk.” Same phenomenon. Better shoes.
They were many faces of one beast. The first face was spice and silk—ancient, pre-modern globalisation driven by imperial curiosity and royal appetite. Then came the colonial face: sugar, cotton, slaves, and steel. A violent globalisation, where one hemisphere’s gain was another’s genocide. Then the industrial face: steamships, telegraphs, the Gold Standard. For the first time, a crisis in one market crashed another within weeks. The fourth face—the one my generation grew up in—was the neoliberal face: fall of the Berlin Wall, rise of the WTO, hyperglobalisation. Suddenly, your shirt was sewn in Bangladesh, designed in California, sold in London, and financed by a pension fund in Tokyo. The world became a factory without walls.
And then came the fifth face. The one we live in now. The fragile face. The walls that grew back. Challenges? Where to begin? The Asian Financial Crisis (1997) taught us that capital flows faster than wisdom. The 2008 crash taught us that interdependence without regulation is a suicide pact. Then Covid-19 — a virus that did what no terrorist could: stop global trade in three weeks. Then the Ukraine war, weaponising wheat and gas. Then Gaza, rupturing Red Sea shipping. Each crisis resurrected an old question: Is globalisation worth it?
Nationalists say no. Build walls. Hoard vaccines. Subsidise local farms. Their argument is honest but short-sighted. Autarky has never fed a nation well, except for the very largest. The rest of us trade because we must. But the globalists who promised endless peace and prosperity have also failed. They forgot that globalisation without resilience is just fragility spread thinly across borders.
The future: not less global, but smarter. So where do we go? The sixth face of globalisation will not look like the fifth. It will not be about maximising efficiency at all costs. It will be a regionalised globalisation: friendshoring, near-shoring, supply chains that are redundant rather than lean. Not de-globalisation, but re-globalisation.
We will see three parallel systems: a Western bloc, an Asian bloc (China-centric), and a Global South network. They will trade with each other, but warily, with buffer stocks and strategic reserves.
Technology will be both the problem and the solution. Digital services — software, streaming, AI models — will globalise faster than ever because they have no customs. But physical goods will move slower, through more diversified routes. The new Silk Road (China’s Belt and Road) is already a blueprint: not one road, but many.
And the greatest challenge? Climate change. It is the ultimate globalisation test: emissions anywhere hurt everywhere. No wall stops rising seas. If humanity can solve climate together, it will have proven that globalisation can transcend its selfish origins. If it cannot, then all the silk and spices in history will mean nothing. So far, our climate actions have made some progress, but slow. We need more urgency.
The camel and the cable. We think about the Silk Route often. Those merchants had no GPS, no insurance, no international tribunals. They trusted a network of relationships across languages and gods. They lost fortunes to bandits and sandstorms. But they kept moving. We are better equipped but not wiser. We have forgotten that trade has always been a gamble. The question is not whether to globalise — that ship sailed 2,000 years ago — but how to globalise with eyes open.
The future will not be a retreat into villages. It will be a messy, contested, often frustrating web of cables, ships, pipelines, and yes, camel bells. But if we build resilience alongside efficiency, equity alongside profit, and peace alongside prosperity, then the next face of globalisation might finally be its best one. Or we might repeat the old mistakes. After all, even the Silk Route had its dark ages. The choice, as always, is ours. And the road is still open.
* Professor Datuk Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at [email protected]
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
