As part of its “Global Faces of the Yale Library” season of events, a special talk on Globalization will be held to mark the opening of a new Library exhibit and the launch of a new book by Nayan Chanda.

Nayan Chanda is director of publications for the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and Editor of YaleGlobal Online. He is former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly.

His talk, entitled "A World Connected: How Traders, Preachers, Warriors and Adventurers Shaped Globalization", will start at 2pm in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall on Friday May 4th. It will outline how the incessant crossing of borders by different groups of humans seeking profit and adventure to live a more fulfilling life and achieve political ambition, have helped to create the interconnected and interdependent world we live in today. Much of the material will be drawn from his new book, “Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization” in which he traces how traders, preachers, warriors, and adventurers have reshaped the world and reconnected us throughout history, while also offering a provocative discussion of what globalization means for the future.

The talk will also mark the opening of a new Library exhibit “The History of Globalization: Artifacts and Documentation from Yale's Collections” and will refer to items in the exhibit as evidence of the process of globalization. Since it first came on the scene in the 1960s, the word “globalization” has engendered impassioned debate. Sometimes lost in the controversy is the fact that globalization is actually describing a process that has ancient origins. In this exhibit, items from Yale’s extensive collections are used to illustrate aspects of the historical process of globalization. Drawing on Nayan Chanda’s book, the exhibit highlights four categories of agents who have, throughout history, promoted interconnectedness: traders, preachers, adventurers and warriors. How did the human community, whose African ancestors spread all over the world, reconnect? What motivated the interactions between ancient peoples, and what do those motivations have to do with globalization as we understand it today? Only by examining the historical process of the world’s growing interconnectedness can we begin to understand how millennia-old filaments of connections have bound the human community together so tightly. Some of the items that will be displayed in the exhibit include, Chinese porcelain, whaling ship logs, images of the Black Death, Babylonian clay tablets, a cast of a bird fossil, a letter from Charles Darwin, and much more. The exhibit is curated by members of the Library’s Special Collections Collaborative, led by Martha Smalley, Special Collections Librarian and Curator of the Day Missions Collection at the Yale Divinity Library.

The talk will last one hour and be followed by a reception in the adjacent Memorabilia Room. Attendees will have the chance to purchase signed copies of Nayan's book (offered by the Yale bookstore) and view the new Library exhibit. All are welcome.

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