You hear people today saying we live in a "global economy." It seems like that statement might be true of people hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
Eh, that’s a false equivalency. Ancient economies had far less impact on each other, even if they did trade some things occasionally. Today, economies are far more global in an interconnected sense; if America, China or the EU have a recession, the rest of the world probably does too. The same scenario would not be true a couple thousand years ago.
Sure, but when the Roman Empire collapsed, it didn’t take the rest of the world with it. If the US went through a similar scenario, it would have a dramatic impact on pretty much everyone.
On the one hand, I'm always surprised by (say) how many thousands of gallons of beer could be produced by a victorian brewery but equally, we make a hell of a lot more now.
A large chunk of that is simply differences in population sizes. The current US population is likely larger than the global population in 1,000 CE. Further, children used to make up a larger chunk of the population exaggerating the differences.
So, it was often possible to scale up production even more, but there where not enough customers to justify it.
The vast majority of limited trade during pre-industrial times is due to the inefficiency of (i.e. cost) of long range transportation. A single modern cargo ship can carry more cargo in a single voyage than an entire years worth of the entire medieval world's cargo fleets. And at a price that is few orders of magnitude cheaper (per ton).
Not that it mattered since production of everything was, by today's standards, a few orders of magnitude less efficient.
It's often difficult to fully grasp how inefficient and slow everything was in pre-industrial times until you dig into the details.
Remember that the economies of scale were made possible by technology.
Budweiser, Miller, etc dominated the US market with an inferior product because they could build a distribution network and ship/store the product at massive scale at low cost. This was particularly important post-prohibition. Consistently mediocre, branded/marketed, cheap beer was more valuable than local stuff.
'economy of scale' is a spectrum and also related to input costs, of which technology is one of many such as labor cost, etc. Also, 'technology' means 'one producers relative advantage in technology' rather than 'the invention of X in the year Y'
It's certainly, unambiguously, true (the Silk Roads were roughly 200AD onwards, and the Roman Empire was trading for centuries before that for smaller values of 'global').
Look at how metals were traded in that time. "Bullhide ingots" are not uncommon and are widespread, Certainly people copied good ideas and used them locally, too; but I've always thought that evidence of some clever (and tough!) folks doing a lot of running all over the ancient world.
