Globalization and Health: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

The historical timescale of when globalization began (and potentially ends), the pace at which it has evolved and spread, and the balance between forces of continuity and change, are among its most contested features. Undoubtedly, dating globalization is largely dependent on one’s definition of the process. Scholte (1998: 17–18), for example, writes that globalization is ‘a relatively recent event in world history’, one that ‘did not figure continually, comprehensively, intensely, and with rapidly increasing frequency in the lives of a large proportion of humanity until around the 1960s’. In contrast, Robertson (1992) dates globalization from the beginning of the fifteenth century from which it emerges in five distinct phases. Giddens (1990: 64) similarly describes the globalizing of modernity as a process of ‘intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’. These processes are occurring over many centuries, embracing the establishment of the states system, rise of industrialism, and worldwide spread of capitalism. Still others take an even longer historical perspective, locating globalization with the migration of the Homo genus out of Africa some 1.6 million years ago.KeywordsWest Nile VirusHuman SocietyHistorical PerspectiveIndustrial RevolutionSixteenth CenturyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.