ABSTRACT
Questions and deliberations concerning globalization are more than a hot topic of extended cross-disciplinary focus in academia; they also are central to long-simmering debates regarding policies and their implications that today often enter the public arena. For example, a quick perusal of broadly accessible media outlets from late 2013 and early 2014 reects a suite of still unresolved but vibrant civic ponderings: ‘When did globalization start?’ (The Economist 2013), ‘The dark side of globalization: why Seattle’s 1999 protesters were right’ (Smith 2014), and ‘Have we reached the end of globalization?’ (CNN 2014). Yet can such issues really be evaluated judiciously without dening the critical elements of globalization, and then dissecting and assessing its historical scope? Given the broad temporal and spatial elements implied by the concept ‘globalization’, is it not most likely that the outcomes and eects of this multifaceted process would be highly variable across time and space? But through a diachronic and comparative examination of human connections over time, might we see some commonalities and learn relevant lessons?
