'Globalization' first appeared in English describing education, not trade
The word turned up in the 1930s, but only in discussions of education, and it went nowhere. It took French economist François Perroux's writing on mondialisation in the early 1960s, and then the post-Cold War 1990s, for globalization to become the catch-all term for a world knitted together by trade, capital and communication.
Theodore Levitt is sometimes credited with coining the modern term, but that attribution is inaccurate. For decades the word floated around loosely: academics applied it to the global life of the mind, international relations writers to the spread of the European Common Market, and journalists to the worldwide significance of American racial politics. French still distinguishes mondialisation from globalisation, treating the second as a later stage in which national identities and borders dissolve inside a single economic network.
The process itself is much older than the word. Historians describe an archaic globalisation running from the first civilisations to around 1600, when contacts stayed mostly regional across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Europe, and ideas flowed from East to West. Large-scale globalisation began in the 1820s, powered by the transport and communications advances of the Industrial Revolution. In 1848 Karl Marx observed that capitalism was dissolving national self-sufficiency and binding nations into universal interdependence. Between 1990 and 2010 the pace quickened sharply as cheap communications, freer trade and the shift of manufacturing to emerging economies, especially China, took hold.
Definitions multiply. Anthony Giddens describes worldwide social ties so intense that local events are shaped by distant ones and vice versa. David Held and his co-authors framed it as a transformation in the spatial organisation of social relations, measured by reach, intensity, speed and impact, which a 2014 DHL connectedness index called probably the most widely cited definition. Manfred Steger lists economic, political, cultural and ecological dimensions, plus an ideological one running through them all, and Thomas Friedman popularised the image of a flat world reshaped by outsourcing and supply chains.
Supporters point to economic growth and social development; opponents cite environmental damage, ethnocentrism and harm to wellbeing. The fear of globalisation even has a name, globophobia, which can also mean a fear of balloons.
Source: Globalization
