The agony and ecstasy of globalisation

DEPENDING who you talk to, globalisation happened either in 1492, when Christopher Columbus discovered America in search of the Orient, or sometime in the middle of 19th century, when America decided to look outwards for global trade after its Civil War.

By 2000, when global trade, technology, finance and investments seemed unstoppable, Thomas Friedman celebrated globalisation and a borderless world as the driver of global success in his bestseller, The World is Flat (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005). Globalisation had lifted billions from poverty and the logic of free trade and capital flows was accepted from Beijing to Zanzibar. But in 2007, when the North Atlantic financial crisis revealed the flaws of excessive financialisation, doubts about globalisation began to creep in.