ABSTRACT
Human societies almost certainly developed more rapidly as a global system during the past three decades than in any other comparable time period. Most past great eras of globalization happened through imperial relationships. The massive intensification of trade at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially the years just preceding the First World War, drew on decades of dominating colonial relationships. Empires were formed by conquering or civilizing centers imposing control over different and distant societies through hierarchy rather than becoming integrated through developmental processes. The final casts for interpreting the twentieth century will include markers for the end of both empires as the primary means of enlarging human societies and the international system of states as a way of protecting societal and ethnic differences. Its final decades will be seen as the beginning of the dynamics of social and human development on a truly global scale in what may be known as a new era of globalization. Nonetheless, the imprints of empires and states remain. They have lost to the new globalizations, but persistent initiatives to move toward their restoration can be expected.
