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Dec 6, 2023

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1- Globalization as a process (Why is it important to think of it as a process?) Why is globalization important? Globalization changes the way nations, businesses and people interact . Specifically, it changes the nature of economic activity among nations, expanding trade, opening global supply chains, and providing access to natural resources and labor markets. 2- Glocalization Glocalization is a combination of the words "globalization" and "localization ." The term is used to describe a product or service that is developed and distributed globally but is also adjusted to accommodate the user or consumer in a local market. 3- Transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. (How and why did this happen?) The Industrial Revolution brought about a rapid and significant change in the economy due to the introduction of power-driven machinery and other energy sources . Societies developed from agricultural to industrial rapidly. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals , improved roads, and railways. With the transition away from an agricultural-based economy and toward machine-based manufacturing came a great influx of population from the countryside and into the towns and cities, which swelled in population. 4- The Dominance of Asia in the global trade system in the premodern period. Despite the weakened political influence of China and the noticeable ecological decline of the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia) some 500 years later, European powers failed to penetrate the interior of Africa and Asia. 5- Emergence of Europe as a major economic power in the early modern period. The term ‘modernity’ has become associated with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment project of developing objective science, achieving a universal form of morality and law, and liberating rational modes of thought and social organization from the perceived irrationalities of myth, religion, and political tyranny. The label ‘early modern’, then, refers to the period between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. During these two centuries, Europe and its social practices served as the primary catalyst for globalization. Having contributed little to technology and other civilizational achievements before about 1000 CE, Europeans north-west of the Alps greatly benefited from the diffusion of technological innovations originating in Islamic and Chinese cultural spheres.

Of course, the rise of European metropolitan centers and their affiliated merchant classes represented another important factor responsible for strengthening globalization tendencies during the early modern period. Embodying the new values of individualism and unlimited material accumulation, European 28 Globalization, and history: is globalization a new phenomenon? economic entrepreneurs laid the foundation of what later scholars would call the ‘capitalist world system’. However, these fledgling capitalists could not have achieved the global expansion of their commercial enterprises without substantial support from their respective governments. The monarchs of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England all put significant resources into the exploration of new worlds and the construction of new interregional markets that benefited them much more than their exotic ‘trading partners’. By the early 1600s, national joint stock companies like the Dutch and British East India companies were founded for the express purpose of setting up profitable overseas trade posts. As these innovative corporations grew and stature, they acquired the power to regulate most intercontinental economic transactions, in the process implementing social institutions and cultural practices that enabled later colonial governments to place these foreign regions under direct political rule. 6- Modernity as a condition, consciousness, and a process. Modernism – as a discrete "term applied to the cultural condition in which the seemingly absolute necessity of innovation becomes a primary fact of life, work, and thought" . By a modern consciousness, I mean a worldview informed, but not determined , by those philosophically powerful ideas of the physical sciences that have entered our culture and affect the basic way that we picture and behave in our world. Process of modernity implies three other processes: urbanization, modernization, and capitalism . 7- Colonialism The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. 8- Global slave trade The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of various enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. 9- WWI and WWII and emergence of the USA and USSR as global economic powers The end of the Second World War saw the explosion of two powerful atomic bombs that killed nearly 200,000 Japanese, most of them civilians. Nothing did more to convince people around the world of the

linked fate of geographically and politically separated ‘nations. Indeed, the global imaginary found a horrifying expression in the Cold-War acronym ‘MAD’ (mutually assured destruction). A more positive result was the process of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s that slowly revived global flows and international exchanges. The new ‘international system’ of sovereign yet interdependent nation-states anchored in the charter of the United Nations raised the prospect of global democratic governance. However, such cosmopolitan hopes quickly faded as the Cold War divided the world for four long decades into two antagonistic spheres: a liberal-capitalist ‘First World’ dominated by the United States, and an authoritarian-socialist ‘Second World’ controlled by the Soviet Union. Both blocs sought to establish their political and ideological dominance in the ‘Third World’. Indeed, superpower confrontations like the Cuban Missile Crisis raised the specter 35 Globalization of a global conflict capable of destroying virtually all life on our planet. 10- The Cold War The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc, and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II. 11- Decolonization Decolonization or decolonization is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby a nation establishes and maintains its domination of foreign territories, often overseas territories. 12- How did this result in the current interdependent and integrated world market? One of the most important effects of decolonization is the instability of the post- colonial political systems , which entails another, far-reaching consequences. These include deep economic problems, inhibiting growth and widening disparities between the northern and southern part of the globe. 13- Global North vs Global South The concept of Global North and Global South is used to describe a grouping of countries along socio-economic and political characteristics. The Global South is a term often used to identify lower-income countries on one side of the so-called divide, the other side being the countries of the Global North. 14- Sparke's 3 myths (why is it important to debunk them?) His 3 myths are that Globalization is new, that Globalization is inevitable, and that Globalization is a leveler.

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In the case of each myth, we need to examine both what it ignores about globalization and what it accomplishes politically in the interests of advancing neoliberal policy reforms. How, in other words, do certain sorts of silences in depictions of a new, inevitable, and globally leveling Globalization serve to support the promotion of free market reforms? 15- Dissident Discourses on Globalization Globalization discourse is an arena for formation of new political and cultural actors in local, national, regional, and global scopes .

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