Globalization: A Short History

Book Description

"Globalization" has become a popular buzzword for explaining today's world. The expression achieved terminological stardom in the 1990s and was soon embraced by the general public and integrated into numerous languages.

But is this much-discussed phenomenon really an invention of modern times? In this work, Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson make the case that globalization is not so new, after all. Arguing that the world did not turn "global" overnight, the book traces the emergence of globalization over the past seven or eight centuries. In fact, the authors write, the phenomenon can be traced back to early modern large-scale trading, for example, the silk trade between China and the Mediterranean region, the shipping routes between the Arabian Peninsula and India, and the more frequently traveled caravan routes of the Near East and North Africa--all conduits for people, goods, coins, artwork, and ideas.

Osterhammel and Petersson argue that the period from 1750 to 1880--an era characterized by the development of free trade and the long-distance impact of the industrial revolution--represented an important phase in the globalization phenomenon. Moreover, they demonstrate how globalization in the mid-twentieth century opened up the prospect of global destruction though nuclear war and ecological catastrophe. In the end, the authors write, today's globalization is part of a long-running transformation and has not ushered in a "global age" radically different from anything that came before.

This book will appeal to historians, economists, and anyone in the social sciences who is interested in the historical emergence of globalization.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent history book for experts and laypeople.......2006-07-24

This excellent short book by German historians Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson provides a fascinating, accessible sketch of the development of globalization. The authors bridge the gap between academic historians and general readers. While they discuss, in summary, issues of terminology and research primarily of interest to the former, they do not lose the latter. Many will be surprised to learn that at least part of the foundation of globalization as we know it may have been laid as early as the thirteenth-century Mongolian empire. The authors divide the history of globalization into four major phases, and offer provocative insights into the forces at work in each phase. At a time when many people believe that the term "globalization" connotes an entirely new world condition, this book is an indispensable corrective. We recommend it to history buffs, journalists, and employees and executives at international companies.

Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World (Reaktion Books - Focus on Contemporary Issues)

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Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World (Reaktion Books - Focus on Contemporary Issues)
John Rennie Short
Manufacturer: Reaktion Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

International | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Education | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Globalization is one of today's most powerful and pervasive ideas – for some a welcome dream, for others a nightmare. The term is used in the popular press as a sort of shorthand for the notion that all parts of the world are becoming more alike. It is also used as a marketing concept to sell goods, commodities and services. "Going global" has become the mantra for a whole range of companies, business gurus and institutions. John Rennie Short disagrees with this interpretation, arguing that the world today actually thrives on local differences and that a global polity tends to reinforce – not repress – the power of individual nation-states. He insists that globalization is not so much replacing difference with sameness as providing opportunities for new interactions between spaces and locations, new connections between the global and the local, new social landscapes and more diversity rather than less.

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Global History: A Short Overview
Noel Cowen
Manufacturer: Polity Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Early Civilization | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0745628060

Book Description

This short book offers a clear and engaging introduction to the history of humankind, from the earliest movements of people to the contemporary epoch of globalization.Cowen traces this complex history in a manner which offers both a compelling narrative and an analytical and comparative treatment. Drawing on a new perspective on global history, he traces the intersection of change in economics, politics and human beliefs, examining the formation, enlargement and limits of human societies. Global History shows how much of human history encompasses three intersecting forces - trading networks, expanding political empires and crusading creeds.Abandoning the limits of a Eurocentric view of the world, the book offers a number of fresh insights. Its periodization embraces movement across continents and across the millennia. The indigenous American civilizations are included, for instance. The book also ranges over the early civilizations of China and Europe as well as the Russian and Islamic worlds. Modern American and Japanese civilizations are, in addition, a focus for attention. The author examines national and regional histories in relation to wider themes, sequences and global tendencies. In conclusion, he seeks to address the question of the extent to which a global society is beginning to crystallize.

The Novel and the Globalization of Culture

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The Novel and the Globalization of Culture
Michael Valdez Moses
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

British | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Bringing together canonical European authors with authors from the Third World, this book analyzes the emergence of the modern global novel, and the way it mirrors the underlying process of cultural globalization. Through detailed readings of Stendhal, Hardy, Conrad, Achebe, and Vargas Llosa, this study reveals how the spread of Western modernity--materially and culturally--has been shadowed by the destruction of traditional societies. These novels focus on the individual tragedies of those who represent pre-modern ways of life; in the process, offering a corrective to Hegel's abstruse philosophy of history. From rural Victorian England to the Malay Archipelago, and from the Igbo heartland in Africa to the backlands of Brazil, a global narrative unfolds, one where the forces of modernization clash with the defenders of traditional society. Moses contributes to the ongoing debate on Alexandre Kojeve and the "end of history", while, at the same time, moving beyond sterile oppositions--canonical versus non-canonical works, formal literary criticism versus political/historical critique. With its new conceptualization of modernity and globalization, this book will interest the literary scholar, cultural critic, social scientist, and political theorist.

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The Search for Meaning: A Short History
Dennis Ford
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Political | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Globalization | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0520253000

Book Description

In The Search for Meaning: A Short History, Dennis Ford explores eight approaches human beings have pursued over time to invest life with meaning and to infuse order into a seemingly chaotic universe. These include myth, philosophy, science, postmodernism, pragmatism, archetypal psychology, metaphysics, and naturalism. In engaging, companionable prose, Ford boils down these systems to their bare essentials, showing the difference between viewing the world from a religious point of view and that of a naturalist, and comparing a scientific worldview to a philosophical one. Ford investigates the contributions of the Greeks, Kant, and William James, and brings the discussion up to date with contemporary thinkers. He proffers the refreshing idea that in today's world, the answers provided by traditional religions to increasingly difficult questions have lost their currency for many and that the reductive or rationalist answers provided by science and postmodernism are themselves rife with unexamined assumptions.

Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (New Americanists)

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Please help me!
Transcendent -- This Book literally changed My Life
not what you expect
Powerful, bleak book
A Return of Peyser's Aphasia

Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (New Americanists)
Thomas Peyser , and Thomas Peyser
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

United States | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

British | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Incorporation of America [25th Anniversary Edition]: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

ASIN: 0822322307

Book Description

When did Americans first believe they were at the center of a truly global culture? How did they envision that culture and how much do recent attitudes toward globalization owe to their often utopian dreams? In Utopia and Cosmopolis Thomas Peyser asks these and other questions, offers a reevaluation of American literature and culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, and provides a new context for understanding contemporary debates about America’s relation to the rest of the world.
Applying current theoretical work on globalization to the writing of authors as diverse as Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, Peyser reveals the ways in which turn-of-the-century American writers struggled to understand the future in a newly emerging global community. Because the pressures of globalization at once fostered the formation of an American national culture and made national culture less viable as a source of identity, authors grappled to find a form of fiction that could accommodate the contradictions of their condition. Utopia and Cosmopolis unites utopian and realist narratives in subtle, startling ways through an examination of these writers’ aspirations and anxieties. Whether exploring the first vision of a world brought together by the power of consumer culture, or showing how different cultures could be managed when reconceived as specimens in a museum, this book steadily extends the horizons within which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture can be understood.
Ranging widely over history, politics, philosophy, and literature, Utopia and Cosmopolis is an important contribution to debates about utopian thought, globalization, and American literature.

Customer Reviews:

Please help me!.......2004-08-01

Please say this review is helpful to you. They told me that if I post another unhelpful review they're going to kill my ferret.

Transcendent -- This Book literally changed My Life.......2001-09-21

You know, this is not the sort of book I would normally read. But there it was, suddenly, on the coffee table one night. How it got there I have no idea. Just curious, I began to leaf through the pages, and the words began to resonate with me. Unable to sleep, I read it through in one sitting by candlelight. The next morning, I began to look at things around me differently. First, I removed several unessential appliances from the house in an effort to simplify my existence. Then it became time to de-clutter and I threw out several items I realized I had no more use for. Then, and this all seemed so logical in light of the things I'd read, I divorced the wife and sent her on her why. Sure, she cried a bit, but I knew I was doing the right thing. And I've never regretted it. This is, indeed, one of the best books I've read all year.

not what you expect.......2000-12-23

I don't usually tolerate so-called theory, but this was fun!

Don't let the title fool you--this is a down-to-earth, engaging work that deserves to be read by a much larger audience than the academic field it's probably relegated to.

Powerful, bleak book.......1999-08-12

This is a powerful, bleak book. None of the writers Peyser deals with is particularly optimistic. The possible exception is Howells but there is a dark undertow even to his work which Peyser makes sure we see. So a book about utopia is also a strangely, depressing read. 40 years or so after Brooke Farm, who would have thought things would have gotten so sad? Of course it was the turn the century and the best of the Western thinkers were thinking sad and pessimistic thoughts. And now here we are at the turn of another century and we have this powerful, bleak book. Have we come all that far after this century of bloodthirsty carnage? Is Utopia even further away than it was 100 years ago? Read Peyser's powerful, bleak book and see if you can answer some of these sad questions yourself. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A Return of Peyser's Aphasia.......1999-07-27

It was obvious to anyone who has known Peyser that something like this was bound to happen. I refer, of course, to Peyser's bout of aphasia during his freshman year at the College. Clearly this mysterious illness has returned in book-length, perhaps even a global, form. We may never really know what Peyser is up to in this book. Oh, for some Young and Champollion to decode this, the Rosetta Stone of post-modernism!

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Unabridged) [Modern Library Chronicles]

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The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Unabridged) [Modern Library Chronicles]
Wooldridge, John, Adrian Micklethwait
Manufacturer: audible.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Download

Stocks | Investing | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000AQQHJC

Globalization: A Short History.(Book review): An article from: The Historian

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Globalization: A Short History.(Book review): An article from: The Historian
Philip F. Riley
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000R2ZBRI
Release Date: 2007-05-21

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Historian, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2007. The length of the article is 550 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Globalization: A Short History.(Book review)
Author: Philip F. Riley
Publication: The Historian (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 69 Issue: 1 Page: 185(2)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Where is history heading?(What is History Now?)(The New History: Confessions and Conversations)(Historical Representation)(Book Review): An article from: Canadian Journal of History

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Where is history heading?(What is History Now?)(The New History: Confessions and Conversations)(Historical Representation)(Book Review): An article from: Canadian Journal of History
Ian K. Steele
Manufacturer: University of Saskatchewan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on December 1, 2004. The length of the article is 4119 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Where is history heading?(What is History Now?)(The New History: Confessions and Conversations)(Historical Representation)(Book Review)
Author: Ian K. Steele
Publication: Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2004
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: 39 Issue: 3 Page: 547(9)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

Strategic Skills for Team Leaders and Line Managers will help line managers and team leaders develop strategy at team or unit level.

Increasingly, mid-level managers are required to think and act strategically and contribute extensively to strategy formulation. This is in keeping with new and classic approaches to strategy. The US strategy guru, Michael Porter, believed the strategic plan should emerge from the teams and operating units required to implement it.

This book, therefore, focuses on the core, practical skills which can help mid-level managers define the future of their organization.

The New Skills Portfolio is a groundbreaking new series, published in association with the Industrial Society, which re-defines the core management skills managers and team leaders need to be competitive. Each title is action-focused blending 20th century management initiatives/trends with a new flexible skills portfolio for managers constantly experiencing and managing organizational and marketplace change.

The Industrial Society is one of the largest public training providers in the UK. It has over 10,000 corporate members. The New Skills Portfolio will be featured in the Industrial Society catalogue 1998.

Shows how to apply key strategic tools and skills at team level
Set in the context of new approaches to strategy in team-based, horizontally structured organizations
Empowering for middle managers

Other titles in this series:
Developing Resilient Teams (Charlton and Breger); Managing More with Less (Joanna Howard); Honing your Knowledge Skills (Funes and Johnson); Managing 'Live' Innovation (Syrett and Lammiman); Project Skills (Elbeik and Thomas); The New Skills Toolkit (Clegg).

Book Description

A move toward more flexible, sustainable agricultural practices is increasingly being seen as the way to address or avoid environmental and economic problems associated with existing, predominantly intensive, farming systems. Through case studies taken from around the world, this book examines the implications of adopting more ecologically sound agricultural practices, at both individual farmer and larger-scale agro-ecosystems levels. The emphasis of the book is on human and social aspects, rather than on agronomic or economic considerations. The authors focus on the learning processes necessary to initiate and to facilitate learning through participatory approaches and appropriate institutional support and policy structure.

Customer Reviews:

A much welcomed volume on sustainable agriculture.......1999-09-02

This much welcomed volume begins with the disquieting fact that high-energy, chemical-input and intensive farming continues as the dominant model for agricultural development, with all its increasingly unacceptable hazards to human health, ecosystems and the landscape. As an alternative, the book looks to the development of more sustainable, productive and less destructive forms of resource use. However, this depends not only on the redesigning of the agronomic and technical make-up of farming but also on the development of organisational and human capacities aimed at maintaining and enhancing the natural resource base. Essential to this task is building of improved institutional frameworks for facilitating learning about the potentialities and difficulties of sustainalbe agricultural and environmental practice, as well as new methodologies geared towards understanding and improving forms of collective action. The various chapters - some build upon case studies, other addressing policy intervention and outcomes, and yet others exploring underlying theoretical issues - tothether add up to a formidable collection that explores the many analytical and practical problems entailed. Although the authors differ somewhat in their treatment of the notion of 'sustainability' - a slippery concept in the best of writings - one finishes reading the book convinced that here we have a work that makes a valuable contribution to the general debates on sustainable resource use by its emphasis on the emergent properties of collective decision-making. Many of the contributors have longstanding experience of participatory types of interventions and research at the level of farming populations: they now turn their experience and expertise to deal with more complex issues associated with the roles of 'local' and 'external' actors in the management of larger scale agro-ecological systems. The book identifies social constructivism as the epistemological basis for addressing social learning processes and organisational practices central to managing sustainability, since actors often disagree over the definition of the problems for solution and the means to be used. In other words we are confronted by 'multiple realities' which militate against concerted action aimed at specific objectieves. The building of bridges between these differing social worlds rests then on an awareness of how social coalitions and common points of view are and can be constructed socially. While participatory approaches recognise the necessity of such 'social' work, it has only recently that the theoretical potential of social constructivism has been taken up systematically in applied fields such as agricultural extension. The present volume represents a clear affirmation of the usefulness of this approach. The chapters of the volume are grouped into five parts. Part I consists of an introductory chapter which provides a general theroretical and thematic overview of the book. This is followed by two other contributions - one which identifies and criticizes policy options for supporting sustainalbe agriculture, and the other which offers a stimulating elucidation of the underlying philosophical and theoretical foundations of a new social-learning approach that addresses the issues of 'facilitating learning through making things visible, helping people to reconstruct realities through experimentation, discourse, observation and meaningful experience' (Woodhill and Röling, p. 68), and it points to the importance of creating 'new platforms' of understanding between the various (potential conflicting) actors necessary for the successful management of ecosystems. Part II explores the dynamics of environmental policy implementation and farmer responses in three contrasting European cases: Switzerland, Greece and the Netherlands. The examples differ in the extent ot which farmers were involved or involved themselves in the development of these policy frameworks. Part III concentrates on issues relating to how farmers learn about and implement measures towards sustainalbe agriculture. Here the examples and issues are taken up range widely: from Europe (four Dutch experimental projects dealing with sustainable arable agriculture, and eco-farming in Germany), Asia (problems of integrated pest mananagement in Indonesia, and lessons learnt from Asian user-responsive, participatory agricultural research) and Australia (a government initiated participatory learning and research programme aimed at improved fallow management). Part IV moves the discussion to consider the processes involved in 'platform' building at rural and larger agro-ecological systems or water catchment levels. The chapters focus on the building of learning 'communities' concerned with sustainable agricultural practice. Contributing chapters are from the USA (methods and experiences of THe W.K. Kellogg Foundations's integrated farming systems programme), Australia (Landcare movement) and the Netherlands ('nature' policy). The concluding chapter (part V) offers a useful analytical overview of hte many interrelated arguments presented earlier. It underlines that the main contirbution of the book lies in its empahsis on 'what ecologically sound practice implies for the human actors involved'', - not only farmers but land users and other stakeholders interested in the countryside, and its analyses how conditions for generating favourable change might be created. Yet as the authors persuasively argue, the critical conditions are not, as economists are prone to suggest, primarily related to pricing and fiscal inducements; but rather they result from the complex social interplay of 'policy, institutional and behavioural change'. This book, then, deserves to be read and its arguments assessed not only by practising communication, participatory research and agro-ecological specialists, but also by all those interested in rural change and development. Scholars and students of sociology, anthropology and political economy would, I believe, particularly benefit from plunging somewhat more into the 'worlds of practice'.

Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture Participatory Learning and Adaptive Management in Times of Environmental Uncertainty

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Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture Participatory Learning and Adaptive Management in Times of Environmental Uncertainty
Niels G. Roling
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N7KMWQ

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Galileo to Jupiter. Probing the planet and mapping its moons
NA
Manufacturer: NASA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000IUKKFW

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Jupiter & Its Moons
Michael Carroll
Manufacturer: Avalon Travel Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Astronomy | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books
General | Ages 9-12 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books
Astronomy | Astronomy | Professional Science | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1562613529

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Jupiter and its moons: A book of activities for teachers and students
Janet K Wolfe
Manufacturer: Smithsonian Institution
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0006XOLME

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Observations of the fifth satellite of Jupiter in the years 1908 and 1909, with a new determination of its period: Miscellaneous observations of Jupiter and his belts and moons
Edward Emerson Barnard
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0008CAUIW

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