brief history of globalization

I’m loving every page of the new book by Alex MacGillivray A Brief History of Globalization, where he attempts to address one of the very few areas that has not been discussed enough when it comes to globalization: it’s origins. The wide scope of his project doesn’t deviates attention from the key milestones that have progressively made our planet smaller for all practical purposes, and the thoroughness of his research has uncovered some amazing gems, one of which I took from the introduction:

In fact, the earliest use of the adjective ‘global’ I have been able to find dates back to 1892, and appears in the pages of Harper’s Magazine. But it was not coined by an American.
The Harper’s article describes a Monsieur de Vog√º√©, a Frenchman who ‘loves to travel; he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas; his interests are as wide as the universe; his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be “global”‘

I found amusing the fact that a history of globalization would refer back to such a noble intent. Still in its infancy, the Global Culture project is likely a bit guilty of being as naive as Monsieur de Vog√º√©, who trying to be global got people thinking about the possibilities (I’m speculating, of course). In fact, according to Mr. MacGillivray intent is an important concept when establishing which processes are worthy of analyzing when talking about globalization.

Among chapters about the forces behind globalization, such as the appearance of the taste for luxury, massive migrations and the economic aspects of it, I was pleasantly surprised to find a section on “The emergence of global culture” where the hectic fact enumeration confirms how complex the problem and points only in a general direction: people’s traditions are being impacted by foreign influences. It left me with the conviction that blogs such as this one provide a space to explore all the dimensions of such a complex problem.