20th Century Globalization
20th Century Globalization refers to the rapid expansion of global interconnectedness and interdependence in the 20th century. It was driven by advancements in technology, transportation, and communication, leading to increased international trade, cultural exchange, and the spread of ideas. This period saw the emergence of multinational corporations, global supply chains, and the integration of economies on a worldwide scale.
8 Key excerpts on "20th Century Globalization"
eBook - ePub- Barry K. Gills, William Thompson(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...We recognize that specific eras involve unique circumstances and transformations that alter the rhythms of the global system. For example, new Asian exports in the eighteenth century (e.g. tea and opium) were added to traditional exports of preceding centuries (e.g. silks, porcelain and spices). Technological innovations continue to increase the speed of production and exchange, but our global system today is a consequence of historical forces that continue to evolve since sixteenth-century beginnings. Some may criticize us for overemphasizing economic aspects of globalization’s birth, because our story provides such a prominent role for the silver trade. But decades of study of the worldwide silver trade have forced us to acknowledge a crucial insight: recognition of interdisciplinary connections is unavoidable when trying to decipher multicentury cycles at a global level. Long-term global history forces the observer to abandon the confines of traditional academic disciplines. To understand what is distinctive about human history, we must have some idea of how a biologist or a geologist might approach the subject. We cannot become biologists or geologists, and our understanding of these fields will have its limits; but we do have to use as skilfully as we can the expertise of specialists in other fields. And we have much to learn from their different perspectives on the past. Excessive respect for disciplinary boundaries has hidden many possibilities for intellectual synergy between disciplines. (Christian 2004:9) 12 In terms of the birth of globalization, the relentless search for profit led inadvertently to the spread of deadly diseases, and subsequently to dissemination of unknown forms of flora/fauna throughout the globe. Manifold ecological, demographic and cultural reactions literally reshaped the world. Reshaped physical and cultural landscapes then reverberated back into the economic sphere, in a series of feedback loops with no end in sight...
eBook - ePubGlobalization
The Return of Borders to a Borderless World?
- Yale H. Ferguson, Richard W. Mansbach(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 2 Globalization in Historical Perspective In the longue durée historical perspective globalization has been growing ever since homo sapiens settled into sedentary cultures in river valleys. Connections that began as short forays for trading, exploration, evangelism, and imperial expansion have accelerated over the millennia. 1 [I]t certainly is plausible to suggest that, whatever the historical precedents or antecedents, at least the pace of change is accelerating, with important qualitative differences. 2 Debate about the precise definition or even most useful understanding of the term “globalization” makes the task of tracing the history of globalization all the more difficult. As Scholte remarks, “Different definitions generate different chronologies and periodizations.” 3 Consider again his list of alternative definitions. 4 If globalization is internationalization, then its history began with the emergence of sovereign nation-states in Europe; or, if “nation” is the key term embedded in “international,” much earlier, with what Armstrong described as “nations before nationalism.” 5 If globalization is liberalization of state-imposed restrictions, then its history may go no further back than the abolition of British Corn Laws affecting trade in the mid-nineteenth century; and in any event pre-sovereign state history is excluded unless one expands the notion of “state” (as archaeologists tend to do) to include early kingly or tribal polities. If globalization is universalization in the sense of a “planetary synthesis of cultures,” we may perhaps ignore regional patterns and conclude that any truly global synthesis is to date very modest at best. If globalization is Westernization or “modernization, especially in an ‘Americanized’ form,” we have additional muddles...
eBook - ePub- Peter N. Stearns(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...World War I is a break, then, but it paused rather than reversed the basic mechanisms of globalization. Indeed the interwar decades can be seen in new perspective if the larger trends of the late-nineteenth-century globalization are highlighted. Fortunately, the focus on globalization does not require a full consideration of all aspects of world history chronology. It suggests the possibility, however, of beginning to rethink conventional structures, to argue for a longer early modern period – 1450–1850 – based on the inclusion of the Americas, a new level of global exchange, and some shifts in global power relationships including a greater role for the West. The last century of this span, after 1750, with accelerated world trade, fuller inclusion of the Pacific regions, and some other changes expanded several key themes of the period in ways that would provide transitions to the sharper departures of the 1850s and ensuing decades. Then, with the 1850s, came the real advent of modern globalization, with an important but not permanent disruption following World War I, followed by a resumption with added acceleration from the later 1940s to the present. Again, this chapter does not depend on recasting world history so completely, but if globalization is the key change in modern world history (which is at least a defendable proposition) and if the modern form of globalization began in the 1850s, the new framework can certainly be suggested. New Technologies and Systems Transportation and communication formed the most obvious break between the protoglobal patterns of the previous period and the global thrusts by 1850. Capacities for speed and volume in transportation followed from the application of industrialization’s steam engine to both land and sea, with trains and steamships, respectively. Communication was revolutionized through the telegraph, particularly when undersea cables moved the telegraph from a regional to a global device...
eBook - ePubGlobalization
A Short History
- Jürgen Osterhammel, Niels P. Petersson, Dona Geyer(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...At the heart of this term is a dichotomy that proves time and again to be as trivial as it is true: the world is becoming noticeably “smaller” as distant lands are being linked ever more closely together. At the same time, the world is becoming “larger” because our horizons have never been so broad. 2 Therefore, whoever seeks to sum up “in a word” the zeitgeist of this most recent turn of the century finds little alternative but to resort to the constantly repeated assurance that we have entered the era of globalization. This is the point where historians feel the need to intervene in the debate. Some of what is being presented in sociological literature as new findings seems already very familiar to them. Long before the word “globalization” came into being, for example, economic historians had rather precisely described the process of emergence and continued integration of a global economy. In their work, historians strive for precision both in the factual account and the ascription of cause and effect. Although historians, when in doubt, have preferred to support well-founded evidence over flashy arguments, they are just as susceptible to grand generalizations as are their colleagues in other disciplines. For quite a while now, historiography has explained the changes that the world has experienced in the last two and a half centuries with the help of all-encompassing concepts of historical processes, which—like their cousins, the famous “isms” (liberalism, socialism, etc.)—could be described as the “izations”: rationalization, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, democratization, individualization, secularization, alphabetization, to name a few...
eBook - ePub- Bertelsmann Foundation (ed.)(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Bertelsmann Stiftung(Publisher)
...It is, above all else, a process that evolves. By “evolution” I mean directional change. Both the direction and rate of change of globalization are shaped by national and international institutions. Since globalization is an evolutionary process, its current state is a product of its history. My discussion thus begins by interweaving the past and the present. Though “globalization” can sometimes refer to trends in culture, politics, biodiversity and technology, in this paper, I have used the term to describe economic globalization, in particular. dp n="189" folio="196" ? The success of collective action dp n="190" folio="197" ? Globalization in History When did economic globalization begin? It is difficult to know for certain. Start with any date or event, and you are likely to see evidence of globalization before that point. The movement of peoples from one continent to another has occurred for thousands of years. Trade routes, such as the Silk Road, brought together traders from East and West. Trade was not considered “international” before the advent of the nation-state, but trade among distinct communities is an ancient practice. Though we may not be able to pinpoint a starting date, it is possible to identify milestones in globalization. The most important, in my view, was the emergence of a common standard of time, which allowed for coordination of trade across greater distances (Barrett 2007). Historically, time was a purely local construct measured by sunrise, sunset and the solar maximum. A clock in the bell tower offered everyone in the village the same measure of time. In Britain, development of the railroad in the early 19th century led to the use of a single definition of time throughout the country fixed to the Greenwich meridian. Other states adopted their own definitions corresponding to their own meridians (Paris, Stockholm, etc.). This arrangement worked well so long as people mainly traveled within a state and travel between states was slow...
eBook - ePubIntroduction to Sociological Theory
Theorists, Concepts, and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century
- Michele Dillon(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Though global trade is not a new phenomenon, “globalization” was first used in in an article in 1983 (Eckes and Zeiler 2003 : 1) to basically refer to the expansion of the world economy such that trade in consumer products increasingly extends beyond a particular country’s borders. This is precisely the process predicted by Karl Marx when he spoke of the ever‐increasing pressure on capitalists to expand profits by finding and conquering new world markets for their products (see chapter 1). And at the time he wrote in the late nineteenth century there was already plenty of movement of capital, trade, and people around the world, but it came to a halt with the outbreak of World War I (1914–1918) (e.g., King 2017). Economists have a different perspective than sociologists on how society works. They focus primarily on the economic mechanisms and consequences of globalized trade in commodity, labor, and capital markets, and they generally do so without regard to its social and cultural implications (e.g., Bordo et al. 2003). They tend to regard capitalism as effectively regulated by natural forces of demand and supply and to see globalization through this same lens. Thus the deputy editor of the influential news magazine The Economist states, “Globalization has a powerful economic momentum of its own. Technological progress, left to its own devices, promotes [economic] integration … [Economic] integration seems in many ways a natural economic process, which can only be reversed, if at all, when policies are deliberately framed to that end” (Cook 2003 : 549). Further, economists see global trends in intra national (within‐country) inequality as a result of “the fact that the opening to trade and foreign investment was incomplete,” concentrated in select cities and provinces at the expense of rural and other areas (Lindert and Williamson 2003 : 255)...
eBook - ePubThe Global Age
State and Society Beyond Modernity
- Martin Albrow(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...They may well be related to different aspects of globalization which even run counter to each other. We will have assumed the existence of a new entity dependent on the metaphorical use of the term ‘global’. Those different senses of globalization may relate to relatively independent processes such as technological development, concentration of capital, modernization and rationalization. The complexity of their linkages and the difficulty in determining the direction of causation between them are such that we have to be ultra-cautious before we interpret them as belonging to some underlying unidirectional process. Should we therefore, as some have suggested, discard all talk of globalization because of the danger of fabricating a myth, a new grand narrative making sense of history, serving ideological ends? Some would see it as a new version of the belief in progress of the unity of humanity serving the end of the expansion of capital. But this is an intellectual strategy equivalent to the one we have already criticized, namely ignoring accounts of changes of great substantive significance because they are associated with a misguided methodology. There is an alternative strategy for dealing with instances of globalization and their mutually determining and determined factors. We see them as part of a non-directional period of historical change, characterized by globality but with an open future. Globalization then is the term which becomes prevalent in a transitional period in history, not a single overall process of change. It characterizes the beginning of the Global Age simply because the weight of reference to globality displaces modernity from prior position in characterizing the configuration, but it has no inherent direction or necessary end-point. In this respect it is unlike modernity...
eBook - ePub- Luke Martell(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Under austerity, left-wing parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have attracted substantial support. In alternatives to neoliberal globalization and American power, there are socialist elements to the criticisms and options proposed. Problems of global inequality and poverty, ecological crisis and economic instability have been attributed to economic liberalism. Liberalism has become more popular in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but socialism still has a hold analytically and ideologically. Technology and the globalization of media and culture Economics, technology and history in global communications Several themes of this book apply to the globalization of culture. As we shall see, the globalization of culture is structured and stratified in a way that involves power, inequality and conflict. Modernity and the importance of economics are also evident. Technological change has been a key factor behind the globalization of culture and media. Many of the technologies of cultural globalization have been of the modern industrial era. I argued in chapter 2 that the clearest qualitative leap for globalization was in this period. Modern cultural and communication technologies, from the printing press to the television, may be qualitatively more significant than the IT developments of the ‘postmodern’ era, although this is not to say that the latter have not been very important. Economic incentives have been behind technological change, especially under capitalism where profits can be made out of developing communications technologies and the globalization of media and culture for sale. Economics is an important underlying factor, as I will argue throughout this book. Economic motivations are not the sole factors or impersonal and out of control, but are often primary...
