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Globalization
Globalization is a term used to describe the increasing connectedness and
interdependence of world cultures and economies.
GRADES
5-8
SUBJECTS
Anthropology, Sociology, Social Studies, Civics, Economics
IMAGE
Freight Trains
Freight trains waiting to be loaded with cargo to transport around the
United Kingdom. This cargo comes from around the world and contains all
kinds of goods and products.
P H OTO G R A P H BY B LO OM B E RG
A RT I C L E VO C A B U L A RY
Globalization is a term used to describe how trade and technology have
made the world into a more connected and interdependent place.
Globalization also captures in its scope the economic and social changes
that have come about as a result. It may be pictured as the threads of an
immense spider web formed over millennia, with the number and reach of
these threads increasing over time. People, money, material goods, ideas,
and even disease and devastation have traveled these silken strands, and
have done so in greater numbers and with greater speed than ever in the
present age.
When did globalization begin? The Silk Road, an ancient network of trade
routes across China, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean used between 50
B.C.E. and 250 C.E., is perhaps the most well-known early example of
exchanging ideas, products, and customs. As with future globalizing
booms, new technologies played a key role in the Silk Road trade. Advances
in metallurgy led to the creation of coins; advances in transportation led to
the building of roads connecting the major empires of the day; and
increased agricultural production meant more food could be trafficked
between locales. Along with Chinese silk, Roman glass, and Arabian spices,
ideas such as Buddhist beliefs and the secrets of paper-making also spread
via these tendrils of trade.
Unquestionably, these types of exchanges were accelerated in the Age of
Exploration, when European explorers seeking new sea routes to the spices
and silks of Asia bumped into the Americas instead. Again, technology
played an important role in the maritime trade routes that flourished
between old and newly discovered continents. New ship designs and the
creation of the magnetic compass were key to the explorers’ successes.
Trade and idea exchange now extended to a previously unconnected part
of the world, where ships carrying plants, animals, and Spanish silver
between the Old World and the New also carried Christian missionaries.
The web of globalization continued to spin out through the Age of
Revolution, when ideas about liberty, equality, and fraternity spread like
fire from America to France to Latin America and beyond. It rode the waves
of industrialization, colonization, and war through the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, powered by the invention of factories,
railways, steamboats, cars, and planes.
With the Information Age, globalization went into overdrive. Advances in
computer and communications technology launched a new global era and
redefined what it meant to be “connected.” Modern communications
satellites meant the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo could be watched in
the United States for the first time. The World Wide Web and the Internet
allowed someone in Germany to read about a breaking news story in Bolivia
in real time. Someone wishing to travel from Boston, Massachusetts, to
London, England, could do so in hours rather than the week or more it
would have taken a hundred years ago. This digital revolution massively
impacted economies across the world as well: they became more
information-based and more interdependent. In the modern era, economic
success or failure at one focal point of the global web can be felt in every
major world economy.
The benefits and disadvantages of globalization are the subject of ongoing
debate. The downside to globalization can be seen in the increased risk for
the transmission of diseases like ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS), or in the kind of environmental harm that scientist Paul R. Furumo
has studied in microcosm in palm oil plantations in the tropics. Globalization
has of course led to great good, too. Richer nations now can—and do—come
to the aid of poorer nations in crisis. Increasing diversity in many countries
has meant more opportunity to learn about and celebrate other cultures.
The sense that there is a global village, a worldwide “us,” has emerged.
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