ABSTRACT
Living in a world of immediate gratification, instant communication, ephemeral fads, overnight pop heroes, and advertisements that trumpet that image is everything, students of today's world can be swept away by short-term apparent trends and controversies. Moreover, increased engagement with the world economy has both strengthened and weakened states, even in recent times. Indeed, intra-Asian trade has been growing faster than world trade as a whole for almost the entire period since the 1870s. Yet the cumulative effects of 500-plus years of "globalization" have certainly made the world a very different place than it was in 1492. Increasingly the world is, rather than a garden or a field, a massive marketplace. The 2003 Cancun round of global trade talks of the World Trade Organization collapsed when a group of less developed countries turned the tables on the leaders of the world's richest economies. The winners and losers from the growth of world trade are not restricted to humans, of course.
