ap world history

ap world history

The Impact of Globalization on World History: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Globalization and its Historical Context

Globalization is not a new concept within the world. Yet, in the arena of historical study, the topic is relatively young, spanning only from the post-World War II period to the present. It is argued that in our current age of high-paced technological and scientific growth, as well as a continuing market-driven and technological revolution, such a revolution has historical roots. These are created and initiated in the many societies and civilizations that have preceded our own. What may well be new is the present capacity to globalize, or make the world a single place. While never previously an issue for historical examination (except for those covering the subject of modern imperial systems), historical peoples have always had an awareness of others living over large geographical spaces. These people actively intermingled and even formed connections between a collection of world areas that we term the world system. By examining how scholars documented historical encounters between the diverse peoples of the earth, we obtain a more clearly focused historical context with which to assess such contemporary concerns as global consciousness, information highways, increasing economic interdependence, and the consequences of alternative futures created by contemporary globalization.

2. The Spread of Ideas, Technologies, and Cultures Across Continents

Globalization has never been stronger than it is today. Even in the face of Indiana sand dunes isolated by distance and temperature from global ecumene cultural and technological diffusion or and its modern cybernetic counterparts illustrated and described distinct ways in which it had started to occur. But, it is only around the beginning of the current millennium that the popular press and a spectrum of global interest began to reflect serious concerns that unilaterally and multilaterally advantageous developments may be accompanied by a fundamental harm. Stimulated by the global white supremacy racism proclamations, the 9/11 terrorist atrocities, and other US war and political acts, the negative impacts of this comprehensive communication revolution are what primarily animate concerns over contemporary globalization.

Globalization is characterized by an acceleration of the expansion of logistical systems connecting people, states, or institutions in ways that lead to more frequent and more intense one-to-one or one-to-many intercultural exchanges. This is essentially no different than simply expanding trade, migration, or pilot-to-pilot radio communication across greater portions of the earth’s surface. But with the currently observed experience of greater numbers of people from more diverse places experiencing pressure to think and act in similar fashions, it is clear that the qualitative uniqueness and potential harms of the outcomes are why global interest, concern, and debate exist over modern forms of globalization.

3. Economic Exchange and Trade Networks in World History

The act of giving money or valuables to the gods was seen as the main approach to communicating with the supernatural world. The social, economic, or financial institution that organizes a path for payment to a greater authority facilitates exchange. The first industry was the approach to or payment of (debits to) the gods. Everywhere people naturally ventured to the greatest heights of mystique and power—volcanoes, the sun, fire, and the supernatural rulers of the universe—to offer gifts or make payments. Because desiring more was innate in human nature, the objects of economic exchange expanded from the desire for the fundamental requirements of life to include an infinite variety of commercial goods. Horses, pigs, fishhooks, and hides were bartered, and wealth began to be accumulated. Commercial capitalism began as a system founded on exchange, exchange that generated profits. The magic of the enterprise transformed bosses and under bosses into capitalist entrepreneurs. The propensity to barter and its relative benefit fueled commerce among chiefdoms to change their distributional networks into reciprocities. Handicraft, commercial, and export, import, and finance organizations were all developed from a rubric focused on profit.

Connections have proliferated in the modern world, generating a high volume of transactions. Such exchanges are also not modern inventions; connections have long sustained human societies. The need for exchange unites diverse peoples in economic activity. That need shapes history by fostering ever-expanding webs of exchange. The original economic exchange was the act of gift-giving. The provision of gifts or hospitality in premodern societies was the initial form of commercial exchange. Gift-giving ensured social interactions were nonviolent and marked status relationships between superior and subordinate. Gift-giving was subsequently turned into systems of obligations called graft or tribute.

4. Political and Social Transformations in a Globalized World

The rapid expansion of demand on the part of the affluent consumers of the core coincided with generally depressed agricultural prices in these societies to produce a range of political responses. For some areas, the demographic and social dislocations of the new “world economy” meant a retrenchment, the dislocation of families and communities combined with the development of a new sense of regional or national identity and sharply defined perceptions of the proper role of foreigners. For most of the “losers,” the social and, above all, political transformations were much more profound as the poverty-stricken, the dislocated, and the desolated had to re-order themselves internally and further north, abroad, halfway between isolation and integration, or, sometimes, as outcasts in the entrepôt port cities of Lübeck, Venice, or London.

The expansion of an increasingly integrated economy had equally important implications for Europe’s regional and global politics and society. All of the metropolitan states entered the race to create political institutions and economic infrastructures that would guarantee that they could control trade and economic development at home while also strengthening military forces to extract from others the subsistence-level wealth the Europeans believed was the only positive contribution inferior societies were capable of making.

5. Conclusion: Reflecting on the Past and Looking Towards the Future

Today, many of the border disputes of earlier periods have become internationalized with many states accorded a role in international decision-making processes. It is apparent that the multi-dimensional meanings of the past resulted from changes and ongoing transformations in the structure and organization of political states over time. In the past, the sovereign state system enforced by the high walls of physical geography confined conflict within the boundaries of states, and thereby allowed kings, emperors, and potentates to fashion their own battlefields.

In the foreseeable future, international relations among governments at the top levels of policy decision making will still be characterized more by the use of military capabilities as points of departure for policy decision-making. In the post-Cold War era, the meaning of sovereignty has changed to provide broader approaches to conflict in terms of culture, ethnicity, economics, and ideology, minimizing the use of military forces as points of departure for policy decisions. In the past, sovereignty of the state was discussed in terms of autonomy and the ability to act on its own behalf independently of external influence. The problem of the post-Cold War sovereign state was discussed in terms of its actual ability to have any influence, much less any type of autonomous decision making. The major conflicts of the early post-Cold War era were regional conflicts based on the ethnonational fragmentation of larger empires such as those of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and the Soviet Union.