tl;dr, I hate to give you a non answer; but it depends on who you ask.

There is a wide range of arguments for both the ancient origins of globalizing forces and the recent qualitative difference between the size and scale of what we call 'globalization' and ancient instances of contact and exchange. Perhaps two important poles in this debate are historians who claim to do "Global History" and those who claim to do "World History" though by no means in this an entirely black and white distinction.

Bruce Mazlish represents in my mind the paragon of Global History. Mazlish gives the follow description of this field; “The definition of global history into two parts. The first focuses on the history of globalization; that is, it takes existing processes, encapsulated in the 'factors of globalization,' and traces them as far back in the past as seems necessary and useful. The second signifies processes that are best studied on a global, rather than a local, a national, or a regional, level.” This description of what Global History is plays an important role in whether or not Global historians make claims about the ancient origins of globalization. Mazlish argues that globalization is a new phenomena and one that ushered in a new age in human history- a global age which properly begins fifty years ago maybe a bit before. Global historians might be interested in the antecedents to the dawn of the global age, what some call 'globalizing phenomena' but they do not treat them as being the same thing as globalization, which Mazlish asserts represents a novel and unprecedented collapsing of time and space.

So Global historians might look for past intensifications of contact and exchange, but would not necessarily describe them as globalization which is seen as a separate modern phenomena. This approach to the past has not always been viewed in a positive light, especially by those who identify as World Historians. Kenneth Pomeranz, for one, has critiqued the idea of global history, “Whatever the merits of such a chronologically foreshortened and unabashedly teleological approach might be, it has relatively little to say to the large majority of historians who study people, places, and period marked by very different conditions.”

World Historians, for whom I will employ Jerry Bentley as the chief protagonist, would argue that these ancient exchanges are part of the same phenomena as globalization and that the assigning of globalization as an entirely modern development obscures the longer history of connections and transfers. Bentely argued against such a privileging of 'modernocentrism,' he believed histories of large scale which took account of human interactions suggested that, "for the past several thousand years human beings have functioned as historical agents and engaged in many of the same activities, or at least readily comparable activities, whether or not they used writing and whether or not they led their lives during that privileged moment in time conventionally referred to as the modern era.” Further more, and I think Bentley was directing this at Mazlish (who also directed a number of broadsides at Bentley), he linked global history to an obsession with the modern (a somewhat common critique I have seen). This Modernocentrism, he argued presented itself as an enchantment with the modern world thereby blinding scholars and the general public to the continuities between the premodern and modern worlds. This enchantment manifested itself in, “a belief that the modern era is so radically different as to be wholly incomparable to earlier ages, but also a faith in the power of social theory generated on the basis of modern experience to guide scholarly analysis of past ages.”

My own sympathies may be apparent in this brief overview; but I would say yes, in part globalization is a recent expression of a similar phenomena as the ancient bronze age (or earlier/later) trade routes and exchanges; however, there are certain qualitative differences in scale and intensity- especially in the energy regimes that drive and allow for such rapid exchanges. I do think they represent similar processes.

Here are the articles/chapters I drew those quotes from. Each of them lays out pretty well the positions above.

• Mazlish, Bruce. "Comparing Global History to World History." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 3 (1998): 385-395.

• Pomeranz, Kenneth; Daniel A. Segal. "World History; Departures and Variations." In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop. New York: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012.

• Jerry Bentley, “Beyond Modernocentrism; Toward Fresh Visions of the Global Past” in Contract and Exchange in the Ancient World ed. Victor H. Mair, (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

The theoretical description given by /u/b1uepenguin is definitely valuable and I don't want to detract from it, but I do think I should offer a perspective from the ancient side of things. It's not uncommon for these broad, theoretical debates among modern historians to be generally between, well modern historians and don't really describe the way that ancient historians go about their topic (For example, of three historians mentioned, Pomeranz is the only one who doesn't study the modern West, and he studies modern China. Which isn't to say they are less valid, just driven by different concerns). So instead I will talk about the ways in which ancient trade is and is not familiar to a modern perspective.

The biggest difference concerns what was traded. In the modern world, virtually everything is in some capacity, and in virtually every house in the US you can find electronics made in China, garments made in Bangladesh, books bound in Britain, etc. In the ancient world however, trade and what we call "interconnectedness" was more or less limited to a handful of object categories. The amount of goods traded widely varied considerably and was dependent on a variety of different factors, but even in the highly interconnected world of the Roman Mediterranean the majority of consumption was of local resources. If you take pottery, for example, the majority of scholarly focus has been on well built samian ware, which was traded across all Europe and the Mediterranean, but even at very wealthy villas the amount of samian ware is dwarfed by local earthenware. In contrast, unless you go to fares it is fairly likely you don't have a single piece of pottery made within a hundred miles of your house. The fact that everyday, utilitarian items are a dominant part of long distance trade networks is a major categorical difference between modern and ancient trade.

The implications of this are who exactly was participating in the trade. Today, everybody is a part of long distant trade networks, and is in fact highly dependent on them. In the past, long distant trade was an upper class society that had more or less penetration into lower strata depending on the circumstance. The caveat, of course, is that this penetration can be quite deep an quite important. In the Early Dynastic period of Sumeria, for example, farmers were dependent on stone gotten from very far distance sources, because the alternative was using ceramic, which is not a good material for scythes. In the Roman Empire, even humble houses in remote Britain would have pottery from far distant sources. Lapita obsidian traveled literally hundreds of miles over water. But again, this only constituted a minority category, so even though virtually everyone would be affected by long distance trade, it was not nearly to the extent of modern examples.

That effect, however, is something that I think can often be missed, because even if there was no mass commodity trade ancient societies could be highly dependent on each other even at great distances. Trade with Rome, for example, fueled the rise of the Satavahana an Pandya in India. What this means is that even if we don't say there was globalization, we can say there were global processes. Most dramatically, in the third century across Eurasia the old cultural cores of Rome, northern India and the Chinese central plains experienced a dramatic decline in urbanization and disintegration of imperial systems. Along with this was the rise of new state cores--the Deccan and southern India, southeast Asia and Ethiopia are examples. Which is not to say one directly caused the other, but the second century brought new heights to interconnectedness, which drove the rise of certain problems such as disease and the power of the central Eurasian steppe.

So having a theoretical debate on globalization is certainly useful, but it is also useful to keep grounded, which I hope this is to an extent. I can;t really source anything in general because a lot of these concerns issues I am working out, but I am happy to sources individual aspects.

In general, ancient and middle age trade routes (silk route) aren't really seen as the same as globalization. The interconnection between various far apart countries in the ancient was higher than historians thought for a long time, but this is still fundamentally different from today.

There are 2 schools of thought, one that globalization starts with the "discovery" of the Americas or that it only really starts with the 19th century.

With the Americas there started truly global trade, that wasn't only between some parts of the world, but it started to become really worldwide, and constant. Also it got way more intense and important economically than during the ancient. All ancient cultures are all agrarian cultures, this is something that must not be forget when talking about them.

For the second school of thought globalization as we talk about it today only starts in the 19th century. This is because transportation costs went very far down and this is the first time where a real global market for various goods started. A world market, where a good has one price, across the whole globe. Also here we have anything that defines modern globalization. Division of labor, trade, world market, world wide stock exchanges, a huge intensification of actual commodity trade, etc.

I personally don't really have an opinion what is "right", as I'm not knowledgable enough. I think both have something to them and are worthwhile in different situations and contexts.