Who’s responsible for globalization? Probably a woman called Ug. Ug recognised that the woman in the next cave made better mammoth-skin shoes than she did. She also knew that Mr. Ug threw a pretty hot spear, which meant she had more mammoth skin to work with. So the first trade was made…

No, really. In the 5th century BCE, tin from England went into the bronze armour that helped 300 Spartans hold off the whole Persian army at Thermopylae. Gold from mediaeval Timbuktu was traded for salt across the Sahara. When they finally reached the Great Zimbabwe in the heart of Africa, European ‘explorers’ found Ming dynasty porcelain from China. There’s nothing new about trade, and trade has been global for many centuries.

And so has its effects. When iron superseded bronze, Cornish miners turned to fishing. An over-supply of African gold set off inflation in mediaeval Cairo. And today? Today, strange financial products that not even their inventors understood fuelled a boom, then a bust in the American housing market. The result is that a girl in Indonesia has had to leave school and find work. Her mother worked in a factory that made the sneakers that shod the kids that lived in the house that was mortgaged to a bank that sold the mortgage in slices that made the products that fuelled the boom and then the bust. The American mother lost her job and then her house, and she couldn’t afford new sneakers for the kids. The Indonesian girl’s mother lost her job when the sneaker factory closed, and she and her daughter sell sweetmeats in the street. They didn’t have a house to lose, but they had hopes.

Neither mother had anything to do with boom or bust. They worked hard and tried to do the right thing for their families – and they are still doing that, in very difficult times. They didn’t want to be wealthy, but they did want to be secure. They were both lifted up – briefly – by the free-market economists’ ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’, beached by the recession, then swamped by the tsunami that followed. The cheerleaders for globalization don’t discuss that side of it; but that’s how poor people experience globalization. And two-thirds of the world’s poorest people are female.

The rule seems to be, the poorer you are, the less you gain on the upswing, and the more you lose when things go bad. Not absolutely, of course, because you don’t have so much to lose, but what you have is the difference between poverty and destitution. School or selling on the street; contraception or take your chances; housing or a homeless shelter. For many of the world’s women, globalization is a mirage, a vision of security that they will never reach. They are constantly chasing rising prices and unaffordable services. Every little advance is followed by defeat. And they have no choice.

Globalization is a fact of life. The question that its critics have to answer is: When did the poorest ever have a choice? In subsistence economies, unconnected to a wider world, you reap what you sow, no more and no less – and in bad years you beg, or starve.

The question that globalization’s cheerleaders have to answer is: in a world of wealth unimaginable even half a century ago, why do a billion people subsist on the thin edge of destitution? And why are so many of them women – always at the end of the line when the benefits are handed down, and at the head of it when hard times come again?

The opinions expressed in this text are those of the author.