Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization

Introduction

This book provides the reader with a 30-year span of debates over globalization and its history. As one of our key thinkers, Jan Aart Scholte, has observed, the word ‘globalization’ is a relatively late addition not only to the English language but to other languages as well. The term itself was only coined in the second half of the twentieth century. The word ‘globe’ as a denotation of a spherical representation of the Earth dates to the fifteenth century. The word ‘global’ entered the scene in the late seventeenth century but came to mean ‘planetary-wide scale’ only in the late nineteenth century. The words ‘globalize’ and ‘globalism’ emerged during the 1940s (see Scholte 2005: 50–51), while‘globalization’ entered academic analysis ...