Globalization: c. 1900 - Present

Globalization and Technology

  • Globalization: Increasing economic, political, and social interconnectedness of the world.
  • Examples of increasing globalization in the AP Curriculum:
    • Trade routes in Unit 2 (Silk Road, Indian Ocean Routes, Sahara Routes)
    • The age of imperialism
    • The world wars
    • The Age of Exploration and the founding of Manila by the Spanish in 1571

Communications Technology and Globalization

  • Examples of how communications technology increased globalization:
    • 1930s in the U.S.: Radios were found in about 12 million homes and had news programs and entertainment.
    • 1960s: Televisions replaced the radio for the developed world.
    • News broadcasts of the war in Vietnam or the Cuban Missile Crisis let people see and feel connected to places across the world.
    • Telephones were invented in the 19th century. Cellular technology (cell phones) were invented in the 1980s, allowing people to speak to each other across the globe.
    • The internet became widely available in the 1990s with the rise of personal computers and the World Wide Web. This further connected people through access to email and YouTube Videos.
  • New forms of communication reduced the problem of geographic distance and changed the world.

Shipping Technology and Globalization

  • Increasing use of air travel after War II for work and pleasure gave people access to the world.
  • The adoption of shipping containers made the most significant contribution to a globalized economy.
    • They are standardized metal boxes that can be stacked for shipping cargo without having to be unpacked while being transferred from trains or trucks or boats.
    • Almost all consumer goods are transported across the world in shipping containers.
  • New forms/modes of transportation reduced the problem of geographic distance and changed the world.

Energy Technologies and Globalization

  • Fossil fuels, like petroleum are more energy efficient and became the main power source of industrial manufacturing, increasing production in order to meet the demand for consumer goods across the world.
  • Nuclear power was harnessed for civilian use. It is a clear energy source, but due to several disasters at nuclear plants, it is less widely embraced.
  • New energy technologies raised productivity and increased the production of material goods, changing the world.

Medical Technology and Women's Control

  • Medical birth control methods like the birth control pill gave women more reliable control over their fertility.
    • This mostly affected women in wealthier countries and led to declining fertility rates.
    • In places like Japan and several European countries, it caused a demographic crisis.
    • In the developing world like in Sub-Saharan Africa, populations are growing rapidly due lack of access to birth control.
  • More effective forms of birth control gave women greater control over fertility, transformed reproductive practices, and contributed to declining rates of fertility in much of the world.

Medical Technologies and Prolonging Life

  • Vaccines and antibiotics that fight off illnesses have increased lifespans for those who have access.
  • Medical innovations increased the ability of humans to survive and live longer.

Agricultural Technology and Globalization

  • Commercial agriculture has become the dominant model for growing food in a way that increases production and maximizes profits. This has led to a significant increase in the world’s food supply.
  • The Green Revolution and commercial agriculture increased productivity and sustained the earth’s growing population as it spread chemically and genetically modified forms of agriculture.

Globalization and Disease

  • The Green Revolution started in the 1950s and 60s.
    • During it, scientists used genetic modification to created new strains of high-yielding grain crops that produced 3-4 times the normal yield.
    • They helped places in the developing world like Mexico, India, and Indonesia with high populations and not enough food.
  • The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 was global.
    • Near the end of World War I this disease began to spread along travel and trade routes ultimately killing around 50 million people in two years.
    • It mostly affected working age people.
    • More died from the pandemic than on the battlefields of WWI.
  • Environmental factors affected human populations over time, like emergent epidemic diseases.
  • Malaria is a disease spread by infected mosquitos in warmer, tropical regions.
    • Due to lack of access to effective medical interventions and practical measures like mosquito nets, there are hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, mostly in the poor regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Heart disease and Alzheimer’s mainly affect wealthier older people who have increased lifespans due to the new medical technologies they have access to.
    • This has also led to new medical advances to treat these diseases like bypass surgery on the heart.
  • Environmental factors affected human populations over time, like diseases associated with poverty, as did medical and scientific developments.
  • Environmental factors affected human populations over time, like diseases that have a higher incidence merely because they are associated with increased longevity.
  • New diseases spurred technological and medical advances.

Globalization and the Environment

  • Deforestation, the large-scale clearing of trees in a geographical area is due to increasing urbanization and the creation of suburbs.
    • Additionally, forests are being cleared to create more farmland to keep everyone fed.
    • This has led to an increasing number of animal species going extinct and more pollution due to erosion and contaminated water runoff.
    • Also, air quality is declining due to increased dependence on fossil fuels, especially in cities.
  • Desertification which occurs when farmland becomes infertile due to over cultivation encouraged by commercial farming practices becoming useless.
  • Only about 3% of Earth’s water is drinkable. With growing populations comes competition, and commercial farming outfits use a large percentage of that freshwater to water their crops. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2025, half the world’s population will lack clean drinking water.
  • Climate change, the warming of the planet due to the release of greenhouse gasses has led to fierce debates about what has caused it and who is responsible for fixing the problem.
    • Most scientists blame the amount of greenhouse gasses humans have released into the environment starting with the Industrial Revolution.
    • Therefore, those nations that industrialized bear most of the responsibility and are the wealthiest nations in the world.
    • Many agree that greenhouse gasses should be limited, but developing nations can only become economically competitive if they industrialize, so it seems unfair to limit them.
  • The release of greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere contributed to debates about the nature and causes of climate change.

Globalized Economics

  • By the 1980s free market economics and economic liberalization became popular.
    • States began to emphasize free market policies like the lowering of trade barriers such as tariffs, deregulation of industry, and the transfer of public sector industries to private parties.
    • This trend is all about the government getting its hands off the economy.
  • The governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.
    • Both reduced taxes on the wealthy, deregulated business, and decreased spending on social welfare programs.
    • The economic health and power of both nations grew, but the power of labor unions was undermined and the gap between the wealthy and the poor increased significantly.
  • Deng Xiaoping of China, who opened China to some free market trade after the death of Mao Zedong. It was this change that led to China’s prosperity in the present.
  • Work in wealthier countries became characterized by knowledge workers whose work was not done by their bodies, but their minds.
    • Example: Finland was an agrarian economy prior to World War II, but toward the end of the 20th century the government invested heavily in their technology sector. This led to tremendous economic growth as they beame important in cell phone technology and software development, which is knowledge work.
  • Manufacturing became located in developing countries where workers earned lower wages than was legal in the manufacturer’s own countries.
    • Industrial production is now located mostly in Asia, in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh, and Latin America, in places like Mexico and Honduras.
  • The European Union: European states who have merged to become a single economic unit by reducing trade barriers between them. 27 countries are members (as of 2024).
  • The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international economic organization that helps facilitate economic interactions.
    • It was created to regulate trade on a global scale.
    • It assists in negotiating trade deals, acts as a moderator for trade disputes, and creates initiatives to assist developing countries.
  • Multinational corporations are businesses that are incorporated in one country but manufacture and sell goods in other countries globally.
    • Example: Nestle is headquartered in Switzerland, purchases and manufactures their chocolate with low-wage workers in West Africa, and then sells their chocolate on the world market.

Globalized Culture

  • New communication and transportation technologies made it so that people from all over the world were exposed to other cultures. This has created globalized culture.
  • Reggae originated in Jamaica, but the popularity of Bob Marley led the music to spread globally.
  • K-Pop originated in South Korea, and is now everywhere.
  • Hollywood is based in the United States, and Bollywood (or the Hindi film industry) is based in India.
    • Both make films that reflect their local culture and values, but both also produce films that make a lot of money on the international market.
    • For example, Lagaan is a Hindi film that became such a global phenomenon that it was nominated for an Oscar in 2002, and is enjoyed by AP World History students across the globe.
  • Global consumer culture means that people are defined by what they buy, not what they make.
    • The United States had an oversized influence on the global culture and the economy after World War II which led many countries to be consumers of American brands like Coca-Cola, which can be found all over the world.
    • Toyota, a Japanese car manufacturer, is a multinational corporation which sells cars in 170 countries throughout the world.
  • The Olympics and the World Cup. Billions of people across the world watch these events every four years. They are platforms for the expression of nationalism as athletes from various countries compete for the ultimate prize.
  • Giant online retailers like Alibaba in China, or Amazon and eBay in the United States have hundreds of millions of users from around the globe. Shipping containers move the goods.
  • In 2009, China created their own social media site called Weibo so that they could control what their citizens read online, like criticisms of the treatment of the minority Uighur popluation in China. They thought social media caused an uprising in the Uighur community. They banned western media sites like Facebook and Twitter for creating unrest among their people.

Globalized Institutions

  • The United Nations (successor to the League of Nations) was created after World War II. It was created to accomplish two purposes: to prevent war and facilitate cooperation among the world’s nations.
  • The General Assembly of the UN includes representatives from all member nations and is responsible for discussing and making policies for all member nations.
    • Example: The General Assembly created UNICEF (the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) in 1946 to provide social welfare services to children throughout the world. It has created global initiatives for child immunizations, education, and emergency relief for children and mothers in the aftermath of disasters.
  • The Security Council of the UN is responsible for global peace keeping. It has five permanent members— the U.S., China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom—and ten seats that rotate to representatives of member nations. The permanent members have veto power, which they often use to protect their own interests. The Security Council works toward their goal by sending military peacekeepers to stabilize violent situations, and they can impose economic sanctions on states creating violence and war or violating human rights.
  • The UN created global economic institutions like the World Bank which was created to provide financial assistance to Europe after World War II. Late in the 20th century it started providing loans and technical assistance to developing countries to help them reduce poverty, promote economic development, and achieve sustainable growth.
  • The International Monetary Fund was created to help member states. Both want to promote free trade and keep global currency values stable and flowing.

Globalization Encouraged Reform

  • It created movements for rights-based discourse that challenged old assumptions about race, class, gender, and religion.
    • Example: In 1948 the United Nations created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which included basic human rights, condemned racism, imperialism, and championed social and economic equality for all the world’s citizens. Member nations are expected to uphold those rights, but some are more aspirational than real world realities.
  • The global feminist movement worked to secure women’s right to vote across the world ( the United Nations promoted this too).
  • Black liberation campaigns like the Negritude Movement worked to eliminate racial discrimination. It was mostly a literary and ideological movement that promoted blackness and black culture as worthy of celebration and dignity.
  • The Civil Rights Movement in the United States led the Supreme Court to abolish racial segregation in schools, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 ending legal discrimination and segregation based on race.
  • In India, the caste reservation system holds a percentage of seats in educational institutions, government jobs, and elected positions for members of historically marginalized caste groups.
  • Liberation theology in Latin America emphasized Christ’s concern for the poor and marginalized and called for change in oppressive power structures. Globally, it led the Catholic Church to work for social justice and emphasize solidarity with the poor.

Resistance to Globalization

  • Environmentalism is a response to the negative environmental effects of globalization. This became a global concern due to worries over climate change.
  • The World Fair Trade Organization represents one movement that seeks to reform exploitative practices like low wages, long hours, unsafe working conditions, and lack of job security in less developed nations that are used for industrial production.
  • Greenpeace is a global environmental protection organization that uses various nonviolent tactics to raise awareness and advocate for the protection of the environment.
  • The Battle for Seattle in 1999 happened when the World Trade Organization (WTO) met in Seattle in and a massive protest formed outside with over 40,000 people from a large diversity of backgrounds. The protest was met with violence as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to try to disperse the crowd. This started a much larger anti-globalization movement that represents the interests of those who have been marginalized by globalized economic policies.