Globalisation

The 1968 ‘revolution’ does not appear as profound now as it did then, perhaps, but it certainly encouraged the global approach to the problems facing humankind. This approach was stimulated by a previous event occurring in 1967, the detonation of a Chinese H-Bomb, which signalled the end of Western domination of the world begun in the eighteenth century if not before. Was China on the way to becoming a third superpower? Then, the global view received a boost in 1969 from the moon landing, which reinforced the impact of photographs taken from space showing Planet Earth and its thin coat of atmosphere in all their fragility.

Before human history began, Earth's continents had drifted apart, or so the story goes. Pangea, the original motherland, had broken up, ‘first into two large land masses […] which in turn fragmented and drifted to form the pattern of land that we see on the surface of the Earth today’.

In any case, so-called primitive peoples were great travellers, and moved freely around and between Eurasia, the Americas, Africa and Europe before the arrival of the early civilisations. In a sense, therefore, the converse process to continental drift of globalisation, which brought the continents together again, began early. The classical and medieval periods saw significant connections, too. The Greeks and the Romans penetrated Central Asia, for example, while Vikings crossed the Atlantic Ocean, Arabs reached China by sea, and the Chinese sailed to Africa. From the point of view of European discovery and colonisation in particular, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked an acceleration in awareness of the world as one. The realisation developed further with the expansion of empire from the eighteenth century onwards, the United States and Japan joining in at the end of the nineteenth century.

The two world wars of the twentieth century both began in Europe but then exerted a powerful globalising influence, the first leading to the confrontation of Leninism and Wilsonism, the second promoting the emergence of the superpowers. Thereafter, the twin process of the Cold War and Decolonisation was all-pervasive. Nuclear weapons proliferated, while a Third Industrial Revolution, superimposing new technologies on the old, and necessitating further adaptations to concepts of society as well as of economy, affected all the earth's regions as the Great Acceleration gathered momentum.