Industrialization of War, 1840–84^261never before. World markets reached across all existing political
boundaries, though tariffs in the United States and Russia, as well as
natural obstacles to transport in the continental interiors of Africa and
Asia, blunted the globalization of economic relationships.
All the same, the transcontinental integration of human effort at
tained by the 1870s constituted a landmark of world history compara
ble to the commercial integration of Sung China that had occurred
some nine hundred years before. As argued in chapter 2, the Chinese
achievement of the eleventh century probably played a key role in
launching an ecumenical upsurge of market relationships of which the
nineteenth-century global trade patterns were the apogee. The com
mercialization of diverse landscapes within China under the Sung had
permitted more people to survive and productivity to increase far
above earlier ceilings. So, too, the global integration of market-
regulated human effort in the nineteenth century allowed the earth to
accommodate a rapidly rising population by increasing human pro
ductivity enormously. More than a century later we remain the heirs
of this achievement, in spite of all the obstacles to the free flow of
goods and services that the twin considerations of welfare and warfare
have since introduced into the world market system.