Abstract
Globalization is more than just the success of a few multinational companies and the wealth of a minority of rich people. Those who are the most implicated in globalization remain discreet, if not completely invisible. For the last thirty years, transnational exchange routes have been profoundly transformed. They now connect the world’s workshop, China, with “the market of the poor” made up of four billion consumers in places like Algeria, Nigeria, or the Ivory Coast. To understand these new “Silk Roads”, we must let go of an overly western perspective and look toward more marginalized spaces, where the global practices are being invented that are overturning the global economy. In doing so, we discover an “alter- globalization”, from the bottom up, from the viewpoint of those who are creating it.