READ: Unit 9 Introduction

Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.

Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

In December of 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up into fifteen different countries, most of which quickly embraced some form of a capitalist economic system, the Cold War came to an end. Decolonization didn’t end quite as neatly, but it probably can be said to have ended somewhere in the 1990s, perhaps in 1997, when the British handed the colony of Hong Kong back to China. So that’s that, right?

Well, no. If you’ve paid attention to this course, you know that historical narratives hardly ever really end. History has a legacy. The past continues to affect the present. For example, there are still communist states in the world, such as Cuba and (in some ways) China. Many people in the world still believe that socialism is a good idea, despite the Cold War victory of the United States over the Soviet Union. Colonialism has left an even longer legacy. Among other things, this legacy continues to shape ideas and opinions about whose culture is superior or inferior. In global economic structures, the ghosts of colonialism have left many former colonies impoverished while the richest companies in the world are based in former imperialist nations.

This unit is about globalization. Okay, the whole course is kind of about globalization, but this is where we’ll follow various types of worldwide connections and networks through time and place, armed with the knowledge and ideas of the earlier units. Like the Cold War and decolonization, historians argue about the dates of this thing we call globalization. We don’t argue about when it ended, but rather when it began. Did globalization begin around 1750, when the ideas that would give birth to the Industrial Revolution and liberal political revolutions crisscrossed the Atlantic? Or perhaps 1880, when industrial states rushed to build vast global empires? Or did it begin in 1914, with the first truly global war? Wait a minute—shouldn’t we really go back to 1492 when ship routes connected Afro-Eurasia and the Americas? Or did it only truly take off after the Second World War with mass media and passenger air travel? Depending on who you ask, globalization is as old as sailboats or as new as the Internet.

In this unit, while acknowledging that global connections go way back, we focus on globalization as a story beginning around 1900, and especially in the last half century or so. This era overlaps with the last three units—on empire, conflict, and the Cold War and decolonization. But it extends forward all the way to the early twenty-first century—within your own lifetime—as well. We call this era, from about 1945 to the present, an age of intense globalization. This means that globalization was deeper and wider than ever before. Now we try to understand this intense degree of globalization not just as one big trend, but also in terms of human experiences around the world. We interpret evidence to answer some fundamental questions about globalization: How alike, and how different were people living during this era, and to what degree? And what explains the similarities and differences among them, among us?

Our study of the era of intense globalization starts with a look at issues familiar to anyone who has studied the past eight centuries—so lucky you! In this course, it began with our comparison of the structure of states and communities in different regions of the world beginning in the thirteenth century (Unit 1) and also the connections and exchange networks that spanned them (Unit 2). We then looked at the interacting empires of Afro-Eurasia (Unit 3) and the Columbian Exchange that connected this landmass to the Americas (Unit 4). It takes into account the revolutionary technologies of industrialization that brought our economic systems and communications closer together in the long nineteenth century (Unit 5), and the vast oceanic empires that created unequal trans-continental connections in the same period (Unit 6). Globalization made the two great wars of the first half of the twentieth century into “World Wars” (Unit 7), and also helped spread decolonization in the context of the global struggle that was the Cold War (Unit 8).

Over this long story, we have seen how the Industrial Revolution gave us the ability to produce more goods, foods, and services, and to distribute them faster. As the Industrial Revolution remade our world over the past 250 or so years, our changing environment has introduced another issue. Industrialization, a booming human population, and the need to feed our growing population have together caused massive changes to the environment. These changes include increased pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the extinction of species, and—increasingly—climate change. We sometimes call this era in which humans have been the biggest influence on the environment, the Anthropocene. This environmental change has affected some people more than others. The demand for natural resources has started wars in some regions. Pollution is making people sicker, but again that depends on where you live. Other people have lost their farms or jobs or homes because of climate change. This is the lesson where we can finally study how the many changes brought on by globalization are affecting different parts of the world.

In the last fifty years, the trends of industrialization only intensified, increasing global economic integration. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism almost everywhere meant the global economy was now dominated by capitalism. Even the last great communist state, China, became a major player in the global capitalist system. Almost everyone is now a participant in the global economy. Money, raw materials, and finished products fly across the world at great speed. But what has this global economy done to each of us? How has it affected people in different regions? In different kinds of jobs? In one lesson in this unit, we try to provide evidence to answer these questions, in particular by looking at the most dramatic example: the re-emergence of China as a global economic superpower.

Many political revolutions in this narrative of the last 800 years promised national sovereignty and truly egalitarian states. In reality, such rights have been extended only to some people. Whether because of race, gender, empire, or other restrictions, many people have not benefited from these changes. In another part of this unit, we look at people’s identities and globalized culture. Who do people identify with, and who do they feel they are? For better or worse, our recent human history has given us the option of feeling like members of a nation. But the twentieth century also gave us international identities. And we all feel like we belong to smaller communities—whether it’s our towns, or our families, or something else. How has globalization changed the groups we identify with? How is that different in different places? How have these experiences driven some people to embrace some parts of globalization, and to resist others!

This final unit brings our course up to date, but you’ve probably already guessed that it doesn’t end the narrative. By now, you should be able to see how the patterns of the past are impacting our own world. Maybe you are interested in the ways that the regions of the world have been drawn more closely together since 1200. Possibly you are more compelled by the ongoing results of the Columbian Exchange on different regions of the world. Or maybe you are interested in the ways in which political rights have expanded in some respect—and narrowed in others—since the liberal revolutions of the long nineteenth century. You could be more concerned about the ways that our global economy has grown, but not equally for everyone, since the Industrial Revolution.

In many ways, globalization is only the most recent step in all of these processes. Asking how these trends impact us today makes the past not just useful, but usable—and a usable past can help you to orient yourself to the present, and perhaps prepare for the future as the global story continues.

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.