<P> The advent of the Mongol Empire, though destabilizing to the commercial centers of the Middle East and China, greatly facilitated travel along the Silk Road . This permitted travelers and missionaries such as Marco Polo to journey successfully (and profitably) from one end of Eurasia to the other . The Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth century had several other notable globalizing effects . It witnessed the creation of the first international postal service, as well as the rapid transmission of epidemic diseases such as bubonic plague across the newly unified regions of Central Asia . These pre-modern phases of global or hemispheric exchange are sometimes known as archaic globalization . Up to the sixteenth century, however, even the largest systems of international exchange were limited to the Old World . </P> <P> The next phase is known as proto - globalization . It was characterized by the rise of maritime European empires, in the 16th and 17th centuries, first the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, and later the Dutch and British Empires . In the 17th century, globalization became also a private business phenomenon when chartered companies like British East India Company (founded in 1600), often described as the first multinational corporation, as well as the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602) were established . </P> <P> The Age of Discovery brought a broad change in globalization, being the first period in which Eurasia and Africa engaged in substantial cultural, material and biologic exchange with the New World . It began in the late 15th century, when the two Kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula--Portugal and Castile--sent the first exploratory voyages around the Cape of Good Hope and to the Americas, "discovered" in 1492 by Christopher Columbus . Shortly before the turn of the 16th century, Portuguese started establishing trading posts (factories) from Africa to Asia and Brazil, to deal with the trade of local products like slaves, gold, spices and timber, introducing an international business center under a royal monopoly, the House of India . </P> <P> Global integration continued with the European colonization of the Americas initiating the Columbian Exchange, the enormous widespread exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and culture between the Eastern and Western hemispheres . It was one of the most significant global events concerning ecology, agriculture, and culture in history . New crops that had come from the Americas via the European seafarers in the 16th century significantly contributed to the world's population growth . </P>

When did the global economy begin to develop