ABSTRACT
Globalization is one of the premier buzzwords of the early twenty-first century. In its most general usage it refers to the idea of a world increasingly stretched, shrunk, connected, interwoven, integrated, interdependent, or less territorially divided economically and culturally among national states. It is most frequently seen as an economic-technological process of time-space compression (Harvey 1989), a social modernization previously national in character scaled up to the world as a whole (Robertson 1992), or as shorthand for the practices of economic liberalism spontaneously adopted by governments the world over (Overbeek 1993; Desai 2002). Rather than questioning any of these perspectives, I prefer to put geopolitical globalization in its historical context and argue that the world economy has only recently become more globalized under largely American auspices (Agnew 2005).
