HS 201 Long-Term History of Globalization

Contemporary discussions of globalization often suffer from a certain short-sightedness. It is all-too-frequently treated as a recent creation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century world economies and information networks. Both its advocates and its critics too often assume that the history of globalization has been the history of the 'westernization' of economic and cultural practices. This course provides a deeper and longer term introduction to the complex forces and far-from-one-sided cross-cultural interactions that have been ?globalizing? our planet since the development of settled agriculture. Among the aspects of globalization's history that are covered are the development of market conventions, the spread of religious and cultural traditions, ecological exchanges, transport technologies and networks, migration, the role of violence, and industrialization and deindustrialization.