This essay was written by Garrick Bailey. It will be published in the upcoming Sixth Edition of Peoples and Bailey, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, (Wadsworth Publishing, Summer 2002).

Until the violent street protests at the meeting of the World Trade Organization at Seattle in late 1999 few Americans had given more than passing attention issues of globalization and free trade. To most globalization seemed to be part of the natural evolution of the world economic system, which had during the decade of the 1990's resulted in economic prosperity for the United States. We assumed that globalization was or eventually would bring prosperity to the rest of the peoples of the world as well. Since Seattle virtually every major international economic meeting or summit has brought increasing numbers of protesters into the streets. At the G-8 meetings in Genoa, Italy in the summer of 2001 between 100,000 and 150,000 demonstrators filled the streets. Why? What the problem? The protestors have been variously labeled as "anti-capitalists", "anarchists" , "environmentalists" and even "Ludites". No single label can readily be applied to these protesters since they range widely in their concerns about the effects of globalization and in their ideologies. Globalization is not simply an economic issue. Globalization has far reaching political, social and cultural implications for the world's peoples. In the proceeding chapters we have raised in boxes some of the more specific questions concerning globalization. In this chapter we are going to discuss the history of globalization together with some of its consequences.

It was not until the 1980's that the term globalization first came into common usage. Today, although we hear and use the term almost daily, most of us would find it difficult to define. Globalization is not a thing or a product, but rather a process. Globalization refers to the world wide changes, which are increasingly integrating and remolding the lives of the people of the world. Most commonly we speak of the global economy and think of globalization primarily in economic terms. While economic changes are certainly the driving force behind globalization, globalization is having, or potentially has, far more profound effects on our way of life than merely what we eat, what we ware and how we make our living. Globalization has had and is having profound effects on the political, social and cultural institutions of the peoples of the world as well. Globalization began 500 years ago, with the voyage of Columbus and has had two stages of development. The earliest stage, the period from about 1500 to the mid-twentieth century, saw the development of a global trade network, which eventually connected, either directly indirectly, virtually every group of people in the world. The second stage, which began to develop at the end of World War II, saw the development of global marketing of products and the emergence of a global economy.