What is globalization in simple words?
Globalization means the speedup of movements and exchanges (of human beings,
goods, and services, capital, technologies or cultural practices) all over the planet. One
of the effects of globalization is that it promotes and increases interactions between
different regions and populations around the globe.21 Jan 2019
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.