How slow the internet makes the world feel. Half a century ago, I was present when enterprising Cypriots made news by flying their table grapes to British markets at Christmas time for a premium price. This was a new wrinkle in the risky trade in high value goods over long distances (Nicosia to London is 1989 miles), that was just beginning to benefit from the jet cargo plane in the early 1960s. But it was just an extension of new technology to the existing movement of highly perishable fruit, including bananas and oranges, by transport just fast enough to make the surviving amount commercially valuable. 

 The taste for foreign fresh fruits begins in the eighteenth century with pineapples. Because they were contained in their own can-like skin, they could make a multi-month trip from the Pacific to American and European ports. At first they were gifts from the seamen to their families and friends. Eventually, a trade developed at a profit which is the goal of all commerce.

 Globalization’s operation is thus much more than seeking low-cost labor. The movement of fruit demonstrates how international trade generates its own support in ways that are hard for globalization’s opponents to overcome. Often, simple tastes such as for these fruits, are the drivers of the international movement of goods that have become so expected that they are difficult to interrupt. Let me be clear: I’m not a political “globalist” supporting the diminution of the power of customs duties at borders to control commerce. My opinion, and that of many others, is beside the point; internationalization of agriculture and food processing, labor migration, manufacturing and business services along with a myriad of connected activities are facts of life. I simply recognize that the globe has been an expanding one-world society since at least 1959, and very little can be done to change that, as unsettling as it may be. The carriage of the Jaffa orange from its origin in the British-ruled Mandate of Palestine (now Israel) begins in the nineteenth century. The citrus and banana trades are coincident with, and dependent on, the development of mobile refrigeration during the second half of the century. Ice as a refrigerant was first noted at sea in 1869. The efficiency of mechanical refrigeration led to its use as early as 1881. But, fruit wasn’t the primary reason for the growth of refrigerated cargo ships. Meat was the driver of this trade, allowing the movement of beef and mutton from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and America to the British Isles and elsewhere. The only real change in at-sea food preservation since then was the appearance of refrigerated containers in the early 1950s. Containers quickly dominated international trade in goods but there are still standard cargo-hold shipping routes to the smaller ports of the world. 

 I picked the subject of fruit to introduce my approach to globalization because it is a minuscule portion of world trade and thus illustrates why opposition to world trade is so difficult. The benefits of continuing the banana, citrus, grape and pineapple trade are so distributed among consumers, and without local sources there is no local cost in jobs and community disruption to persuade them to oppose trade at the expense of these goods. 

 Even when local products are involved, opponents to overseas trade have scant hope of convincing millions of consumers in national markets that they should support the higher prices that would keep Americans who are dependent on these products employed. By the time the argument gets to higher volume goods, the trade-off between local and foreign production is so muddled that most people follow their own interest and support whichever costs them the least in the market; that the low-cost usually turns out to be foreign we will explore in the future. The real job reducer is automation, which story involves the old imperial system, differentials between corporate and government power and the economic drivers of innovation and resource availability