What Nutmeg Can Tell Us About Nafta - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/clove-trees-the-color-of-ash.html
GOA, India — For many years the word “globalization” was used as shorthand for a promised utopia of free trade powered by the world’s great centers of technological and financial innovation. But the celebratory note has worn thin. The word is now increasingly invoked to explain a widespread recoiling from a cosmopolitan earth. People in many countries are looking nostalgically backward, toward less connected, supposedly more secure times.
But did such an era ever exist? Was there ever an unglobalized world?
The question struck me during the final hours of the American election, when I happened to be traveling by ferry in the Maluku archipelago of Indonesia. Once known as the Moluccas, this corner of the world is considered remote even within Indonesia. Two time zones removed from Jakarta, it straddles one of the most seismically volatile zones on earth; many of its islands are active volcanoes rising steeply out of the sea. In size they range from small to minuscule. Surely if ever there were a global periphery, it would be here.
