the.com/globalization
the reason your phone, your dinner, and your cold all came from somewhere else
means The process by which economies, cultures, and people around the world become increasingly interconnected through trade, technology, and the movement of goods, ideas, and labor across borders.
from Built from "global" — itself from the Latin globus, "round mass, ball," the same word that gave us the spherical "globe" of the Earth — plus the busy machinery of "-ization," the suffix English bolts onto things to mean "the act of making it so." "Global" stretched from meaning literally "ball-shaped" to "worldwide" by the 19th century, and "globalization" itself is a much younger word, surfacing in the mid-20th century and exploding into everyday speech in the late 1900s as the world's economies knotted themselves together.
- silk road
- trade routes globalized goods over 2000 years ago
- shipping container
- a metal box, not the internet, shrank the world
- big mac index
- economists compare currencies using burger prices
- word origin
- the term entered dictionaries only in the 1960s
- pandemic spread
- global connection moves viruses as fast as cargo
apple iphone supply chain — designed in california, manufactured in china, components from 43 countries, assembled in taiwan
netflix — streaming service operating in 190 countries with localized content in 30+ languages as of 2024
fast fashion zara — spanish retailer with 6,500+ stores across 95 countries, producing 450 million items annually
world trade organization — 164 member countries negotiating tariffs and trade rules since 1995