Globalization

Description

Peter Taylor:

"Globalization comprises a bundle of processes that originated in the 1970s with: 1. the rise of multinational corporations culminating in “global reach” (a popular book of that name appeared in 1973) producing a new international division of labour; and 2. the collapse of Bretton Woods fixed currency arrangements in 1971 culminating in a new worldwide financial market (transcending national control); both based upon 3. computing/communication enabling technology that made such worldwide organization possible.

The concept of globalization has been applied to all spheres of social activity – global civil society, global governance, global culture, and global economy – but it has been the latter that has dominated the discourse. This is because globalization has been closely associated with the rise of neo-liberalism, the dismantling of state mechanisms of economic protection and redistribution built up throughout the twentieth century. With its privileging of market processes, proponents of globalization favour, indeed famously proclaim, a borderless world.

The discourse of globalization is largely a product of the 1990s. There were three key political challenges that globalization proponents were trying to overcome. This politics was about making all the world attractive to capital:

In the “second world” through the incorporation of the USSR and its sphere of influence with the end of the Cold War;

In the “third world” through structural adjustment programmes to reduce social expenditure in the new “unipolar world” (the “Washington consensus”);

In the “first world” through cutting back on the welfare state provisions (Reaganomics, Thatcherism, TINA – “there is no alternative).

Generally, this involved the privatization of state assets, and “opening” state economies to foreign investment and trade. The end-result was to move from “three worlds” to “one world” = GLOBALIZATION.

Globalization is truly a keyword of our times, overwhelming all other conceptions of macro-social change in the 1990s. Today it is a hugely contested concept both empirically and politically. My position is as follows:

Empirically, I accept the evidence for contemporary social change being truly distinctive, in part, because of the intensity of its global operations;

Politically, I reject the globalization mantra that “there is no alternative”; globalization does not have to be regressive."

(https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/12292)

History

Globalization in the Ancient World

By: Brian Spooner:

"Globalization began in the Middle East. It is the story of larger and larger numbers of people connecting and interacting with each other over greater expanses. But it would not have happened without climate change and population growth. Around 10,000 BCE, adaptation to climate change allowed some to settle. As the climate continued to change, people began to farm. Increasing aridity brought populations down to the major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, where they could irrigate their crops. Cities began to form in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) in the 4th millennium. Irrigation increased the production of food, which increased the rate of population growth, and accelerated the growth of cities; this also occurred on other rivers that flowed through the arid zone, from the Nile in North Africa to the Oxus and Jaxartes in Central Asia to the Yellow River and the Yangtse in China.

When it was no longer necessary for every family to produce its own food, some began to develop new skills and produce commodities. The cities reached out for trade and formed an inter-urban trade network from the Middle East westward to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and eastward to the Pacific and Japan. By the end of the 4th millennium, writing began to be adopted to record transactions, and in the following millennium it became a tool of administration. Cities became city-states. City-states became empires. And each empire grew bigger than the one before, from the Sumerians in the 4th millennium to the Persian empires (the Achaemenians, the Parthians, and the Sasanians) starting in the 6th century BCE, followed by the growth of ISlamic civilization in 7th century CE.

Islam spread along the trade routes east and west from the Middle East because it provided a legal system for the organization of society and trade. But since it did not provide a model for administration or government, each major city continued to function in the same way, with Persian, now written in the Arabic script, as the language of administration. By the 9th century Persian and the culture it carried was becoming the standard language of public affairs for the eastern half of the Islamic world. The process was intensified by the arrival of paper from China. The area from Baghdad to China and India became the largest culturally homogenized part of the world until the height of the colonial period in the 19th century.

Since the Middle East is at the center of the world’s largest landmass — Africa, Asia, and Europe — it be-came a global crossroads, the center of world trade and all globalizing developments through the ancient and medieval periods. Not only commodities but cultigens and cultural practices moved across Asia, between China, India, and the Middle East: walnuts, peaches, apricots, spinach, eggplant, and olives; tea and silk; paper, printing, paper money, gunpowder, and models of government; as well as more exotic products such as jasmine, henna, and indigo. This was long before similar exchange began between America and Europe.

Globalization is the evolutionary triumph of collaboration over competition."

(https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/globalization-and-the-ancient-world/)

For more, see the book: Globalizations and the Ancient World