Signified by an increasingly close economic interconnection that has led to profound political and social change around the world, the process of globalization seems irreversible. In this book, however, Harold James provides a sobering historical perspective, exploring the circumstances in which the globally integrated world of an earlier era broke down under the pressure of unexpected events.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon, nor is it irreversible. In Gobalization and History, the authors present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914--the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years.The authors estimate the extent of globalization and its impact on the participating countries, and discuss the political reactions that it provoked.

As awareness of globalization grows, so too does our need to understand it historically. This volume is one of the few to consider globalization in the context of the history of international trade. Its eleven papers explore a synthesized variety of topics, including how the process of globalization can be measured by the long-term integration of markets, what trends and questions develop as markets converge and diverge, what roles technology and geography play, the effect of globalization on inequality and social justice, and the roles of political institutions in responding to such injustices. Ultimately this work provides a panoramic view of globalization, one that will offer much to readers interested in this crucial issue.

In this third edition of Globalization in World History, Peter Stearns explores the roots of contemporary globalization, examining shifts in the global flow of people, goods, and ideas as early as 1000 CE. Exploring how four moments in history have accelerated the process of globalization, Stearns's narrative details how factors such as economics, migration, disease transmission, culture, the environment, and politics have influenced the nature of globalization as we understand it today. This revised edition includes: Updates to the whole study with appropriate recent references; New brief transition sections that focus attention on the Mongol period, debates over the role of the eighteenth century, and the partial retreat from globalization after World War I; A new final chapter that deals with the rise in attacks on globalization during the most recent decade, from populist objections to the implications of growing authoritarianism, raising the question of whether a new transition is taking shape around us today. Through an interdisciplinary approach that links political, sociological, and historical perspectives, Stearns provides a comprehensive overview of globalization and the historical factors that have shaped it. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of world history, economic history, and political economy.

The fifth volume of the series, The Globalization of the World Economy, is comprised of a collection of scholarly essays examining historical foundations of globalization from the mid 19th century to 1945. The book explores the effects of the nineteenth century technologies of the railway, the telegraph and the steamship which promoted the globalization process by boosting trade across frontiers and triggering migration of labor and flows of capital to the temperate areas of agriculture. The colonial empires, in particular the British Empire, facilitated the process, as the integration of capital markets and monetary systems and methods of business organization followed trade and labour. The volume also covers the time between the wars, when impediments to trade, migration and currency movements increased and led to a period of deglobalization and divergence.

The author looks at the history of the global market up to the present-day global market, discussing early international commerce and trade, and its origins in 15th century Western Europe.