George Ritzer - Globalization

1 Eurasian Phase (starting 3000 bce). Agricultural and urban revolutions, migrations, increased trade, and ancient empires grew out of Eurasia.

2 Afro-Eurasian Phase (starting 1000 bce). Commercial revolutions commenced in the Greco-Roman world, West Asia, and East Africa.

3 Oriental Phase I (starting 500 ce). The world economy emerged alongside the caravan trade in the Middle East.

4 Oriental Phase II (starting 1100). Improvements in productivity and technology emerged throughout East and South Asia, with increased urbanization and development of the Silk Routes.

5 Multicentric Phase (starting 1500). Trade expanded across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Americas.

6 Euro-Atlantic Phase (starting 1800). The Euro-Atlantic economy developed through industrialization and the colonial division of labor.

7 20C Phase (starting 1950). MNCs and global value chains emerged throughout the US, Europe, and Japan, and the Cold War ended.

8 21C Phase (starting 2000). A new geography of trade encompasses East Asia and emerging economies, with a global rebalancing of power and economic flows.

From this, Nederveen Pieterse concludes that globalization is not unique to today’s world. However, his historical or phase-based view also rejects the cyclical view of globalization. Past epochs are not returning, at least in their earlier form, at some point in the future. Instead, globalization functions as growing connectivity, which develops and accelerates around various centers across time.

Robertson (1990) offers a very different, and far more recent, set of epochs (or phases). He traces the beginnings of globalization to the early fifteenth century, but he does not see it really taking off until the late 1800s:

1 Germinal Phase in Europe (early fifteenth to mid-eighteenth century). Important developments during this period were the sun-centered view of the universe, the beginnings of modern geography, and the spread of the Gregorian calendar.

2 Incipient Phase mainly in Europe (mid-1700s to the 1870s). Among the key developments in this period were the “crystallization of conceptions of formalized international relations,” a “more concrete conception of humankind,” and “[s]harp increases in conventions and agencies concerned with international and transnational regulation and communication” (1990: 26).

3 Take-Off Phase (1870s to the mid-1920s). Among the key developments in this period were the “[v]ery sharp increase in number and speed of global forms of communication. Rise of ecumenical movement. Development of global competitions – e.g. Olympics, Nobel Prizes. Implementation of World Time and near-global adoption of Gregorian calendar. First World war. League of Nations” (1990: 27).

4 Struggle-for-hegemony phase (1920s to the mid-1960s). This period was characterized by war (WW II) and disputes (Cold War) over the still fragile globalization process. The UN was formed during this period.

5 Uncertainty Phase (1960s to the early 1990s 4). Many global developments occurred during this period including inclusion of the Third World in the global system, end of the Cold War (and bipolarity), spread of nuclear weapons, world civil society, world citizenship, and global media system consolidation. Robertson saw “crisis tendencies” in the global system in the early 1990s, and COVID-19 has more recently exacerbated such tendencies.

Were Robertson to address this issue again, he might find that yet another epoch began at the turn of the twenty-first century. These epochal views tend to contrast with the focus here on the current global age since they do not see it as particularly unique.

A fourth view is that instead of cycles or great epochs, one can point to much more specific events that can be seen as the origin of globalization. In fact, there are many such possible points of origin of globalization, some of which are:

the Romans and their far-ranging conquests in the centuries before Christ (Gibbon 1998);

the rise and spread of Christianity in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire;

the spread of Islam in the seventh century and beyond;

the travels of the Vikings from Europe to Iceland, Greenland, and briefly to North America in the ninth through the eleventh centuries as examples of, and landmarks, in globalization;

trade in the Middle Ages throughout the Mediterranean;

the activities of the banks of the twelfth-century Italian city-states;

the rampage of the armies of Ghengis Khan into Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century;

European traders like Marco Polo and his travels later in the thirteenth century along the Silk Road to China. (Interestingly, there is now discussion of the development of an “iron silk road” involving a linked railroad network through a variety of Asian countries that at least evokes the image of the lure of Marco Polo’s Silk Road.);

the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Other important voyages of discovery during this time involved Vasco Da Gama rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and the circumnavigation of the globe completed in 1522 by one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships (Joel Rosenthal 2007);

European colonialism, especially in the nineteenth century;

the early twentieth-century global Spanish flu pandemic;

the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century.

It is also possible to get even more specific about the origin of globalization, especially in recent years. A few rather eclectic recent examples include:

1956 – the first transatlantic telephone cable;

1958 – while it was possible to fly across the Atlantic in the 1930s on seaplanes that made several stops along the way, the big revolution in this area was the arrival of transatlantic passenger jet travel with the first being Pan Am’s flight from New York to London (with a stopover for refueling required in Newfoundland);

1962 – the launch of the satellite Telstar and soon thereafter the first transatlantic television broadcasts;

1966 – the transmission from a satellite of the picture of the earth as single location leading not only to a greater sense of the world as one place (increased global consciousness [Robertson and Inglis 2004]), but also of great importance to the development of the global environmental movement;

1970 – the creation of Clearing House Interbank Payment System (CHIPS) making possible global electronic (wire) transfers of funds (now $1.5 trillion a day in 2012) among financial institutions;

1977 – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) came into being making possible more global transfers of funds by individuals;

1988 – the founding of the modern Internet based on Arpanet (which was created in 1969). While it took the Internet several years to take off, this was a turning point in global interconnection for billions of people;

2001 – the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, as well as later terrorist attacks on trains in Madrid (March 11, 2004) and London (July 7, 2005), among others. The following is a specific example insupport of the idea that 9/11 can be taken as a point of origin for globalization (at least of higher education): “Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, internationalization has moved high on the agenda at most universities, to prepare students for a globalized world, and to help faculty members stay up-to-date in their disciplines” (Lewin 2008: 8).

2009 – due to the highly interconnected global economy, the Great Recession sent shockwaves throughout the world. Some of its many effects included changes to global migration patterns, declines in global remittances, and explosions in unemployment and debt, and it led to many battles over austerity measures – effects that are likely to continue shaping globalization.