What Is Globalization?

Mission Brief #1

The phone in your pocket, the rice on your plate and the songs in your headphones all carry stories of journeys across the world.

🎯 Your mission

Find the connection between here and somewhere far away.

⚡ The twist

The news only shows you one slice of the world at a time.

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Globalization describes the growing web of connections that link distant people, so that events, ideas and goods in one place shape lives far away. Sociologist Anthony Giddens defined it in 1990 as the intensification of worldwide social relations linking distant localities, and Roland Robertson added that it also means people becoming conscious of the world as a single place.

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This course treats globalization as a social and cultural story, not only an economic one: it is about migration, religion, food, music, disease, media and shared problems. Historians disagree about when it began; some point to 1492, others to the Silk Roads, and others to the jet and internet age. They also debate whether it makes cultures more alike or produces new mixtures. Learning to ask who gains, who loses and who adapts helps us judge globalization rather than simply celebrate or condemn it.

Key facts · 1 of 2

Remember these

1Anthony Giddens, in The Consequences of Modernity (1990), defined globalization as the intensification of worldwide social relations linking distant localities.
2Roland Robertson (1992) described globalization as the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.
3Scholars distinguish economic, political, cultural, social and environmental dimensions of globalization.

Key facts · 2 of 2

4The word became widely used in English only in the 1980s and 1990s, although the processes it describes are much older.

Timeline

When it happened

c. 130 BCE
Han China's missions westward help open the overland routes later called the Silk Roads.
1492
Columbus's first voyage begins lasting contact between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia.
1990
Anthony Giddens publishes his influential definition of globalization.
1992
Roland Robertson stresses global consciousness as part of globalization.

Then & Now

Every time a news story, a song or a virus crosses borders within days, it shows how dense the connections first traced by these definitions have become.

Mind = blown

Before 'globalization' caught on, writers in the 19th century already used phrases like the 'annihilation of space and time' to describe how railways and telegraphs shrank the world.

Question 1 of 3

Which definition best matches how this course uses the term globalization?

How sure?😐 maybe

Question 2 of 3

Why do historians disagree about when globalization began?

How sure?😐 maybe

Question 3 of 3

A student says globalization only means the spread of American products. Which evidence best challenges this claim?

How sure?😐 maybe

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You got 0 of 3 right.

Next: Waves of Connection: How Historians Periodize Globalization All lessons

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🌍 Why this still matters: Pick any product in your home. Trace where it came from. Be amazed.

🏆 Try this week: Pick a country in the news. Find out one good thing happening there too.

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