Making Connections; Nayan Chanda draws on examples from his own life to demonstrate how inextricably the world is linked.(Book review)

Byline: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Wasserstrom teaches history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of "China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times," published next month by Indiana University Press.)

Rarely has there been as neat a fit between a book's subject and its author's biography as in "Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization" by Nayan Chanda (372 pages. Yale University Press ). It's easy to see why the subject fascinates Chanda; he's a self-proclaimed Francophile of South Asian origin, who studied French in Calcutta, then took courses on China in Paris, wrote a noteworthy book about Southeast Asia, ran a magazine in Hong Kong and ended up launching an online journal devoted to globalization at a venerable Ivy League institution. And in this engaging analysis, he answers such intriguing questions as "How did the coffee bean, first grown only in Ethiopia, end up in our coffee cups after a journey through Java and Colombia?"

In examining these specific questions--and larger ones about how the world is interconnected--Chanda does not emphasize his own experiences. But when appropriate, he effectively uses small, personal details to cut very big social, economic, cultural and sometimes biological processes down to size. For instance, he uses an account of having his own DNA analyzed to illustrate just how long migration has been central to the human experience. He also shows how close scrutiny of the iPod he gave his son as a birthday present can reveal much about the multinational origins of such objects. It was officially touted as "designed" by an American company and "assembled in China"; he found that it actually contained component parts and software with ties to India, Japan, South Korea and Scotland. And he marvels at the speed with which it traveled from Shanghai to New Haven via Alaska and Indiana, as well as at his ability to track its progress thanks to bar codes.

The debate over globalization has grown so polarized that many readers are probably itching to know whether Chanda belongs in the "pro" or "anti" camp. One theme of "Bound Together" is that thinking in these terms doesn't make sense. Those who gather at what are somewhat misleadingly called "anti-globalization" rallies, after all, don't oppose all the ways the world is shrinking, just some (they're content ...