Globalization and the end of geography
We live in a world that many of our grandparents could never have
dreamed of, and that it is an increasingly ‘small world’ is commonly
heard in conversation. Much of this is tied up with the twentieth-century
revolution in transport and communications technology that has captured
the popular imagination. It is possible, for example, to journey around
the world in just over a day on commercial airlines. Less than fifty years
ago, the journey from England to Australia took about a week. In 1870,
it would take seventy days for surface mail to travel from London to
New Zealand. With the advent of the telephone, faxes, and more recently
e-mail and video conferencing, such communication has become almost
instant. We live, if the hyperbole is to be believed, in a ‘global village’
and the term that is most commonly used to refer to this apparent
shrinking is ‘globalization’ (see Figure 1.1).
Increasingly used to rationalize a wide range of economic and political
policies, and to explain a plethora of cultural, social and economic
processes and outcomes, the concept of ‘globalization’ has assumed
enormous power. Despite this, it is not always well defined or critically
appraised in either popular or even academic usage. A common image
of globalization is one of a process that unfolds like a blanket across the
globe, homogenizing the world’s economies, societies and cultures as
it falls. Everywhere becomes the same, boundaries don’t matter and
distance disappears.