Globalisation

I’m going to embarrass myself here by talking about things that other people will have thought about in a lot more detail, but it’s my blog so what are you going to do about it? This will probably be the last of my holiday recollections, and I can get back to the usual to-and-fros of my normal life. The Olden Days As we were driving through Tenerife I was telling my son about colonialism and why the Canary Islands are Spanish and we were looking at all the banana plantations and I was thinking about wealth and poverty. Much of what I saw of the islands looked poor, or at least poorer than rural North Yorkshire. I thought back to a time when there would have been local farmers providing food for the people, and woodcutters, and miners, and smiths, and… Essentially, it used to be that each settlement had a number of jobs that came with a settlement that allowed it to function. Any given number of people needs a smith, and a doctor, and a priest, and a tanner etc. There were multiple…