UGC 112: World Civilizations 1500-Present First Assignment

The Economic System and Globalization
Your Name
September 27, 2016
Your Institution of Affiliation
What is Globalization and how did it start?
For most historians and scholars, the start of globalization can be marked during the Treaty of Westphalia. This treaty brought an end to “the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch and the German phase of the Thirty Years' War” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2015). However, what is much more significant about this peace settlement between warring nations is that it sparked the idea of ‘co-existing, equal, and sovereign states’, one of the primary requirements needed for globalization to exist. However, as loose as how it is defined, globalization’s roots can even be argued to start (its ideological origins at least) during the time of Alexander the Great at around 300 B.C.E. As said by Liebert (2011), Globalization is not only the matter of rapid and successive economic and ideological expansions but also of “more inclusive identities acquired always, and necessarily, through the more particular identities that shape our pursuit of esteem”. Because of this very vague definition of where it started, the author would limit his definition in this article to the five-scapes which are utilized by Appadurai (2011) in his work “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Namely, these ‘scapes’ are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. According to him, these are the ‘global cultural flows’ which describes the phenomena of globalization. In terms of ‘fuel’, it could be said that the proliferation of globalization started due to the rise of capitalism especially in the advent of Protestantism. According to Weber in his book “The protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, the protestant movement (which started with Calvinism) provided the fuel for capitalist desires of individuals who would first try to expand in their own localities. Apparently, due to the man’s never ending desire, he decided to move ‘internationally’ and gain profits even from other parts of the world, thus starting the trend of globalization. From this, the author strongly believes that the primary fuel and the origins for the interconnectedness that we experience today came from a desire to maximize one’s financial needs. Then, through the invention of the “prime movers of globalization” - Diesel Engine and Gas turbines â&euro...