riseagainstrocks

yes, a school work thread, but I don't want you to do school work for me, so please read.

I'm writing about Globalism and I'm arguing that it isn't a current trend, but one that has been going on since the Roman Empire. I'm not having trouble finding supporting sources (although the more the merrier!) it's finding credible opposing viewpoints that I'm having trouble with.

Any help in this would be greatly appreciated! I'll give out what.cd invites (once they open them again) as payment if you'd like.

I'll also upload what I have written so far (it's only a draft, but my basic ideas are there) and any critiques about how you think it should flow, be organized, etc. are welcome. Again, it's not near done, but I'm up against the wall with this essay, so any help would be awesome.

link to paper
hxxp://www.sendspace.com/file/9x4y9i

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One note timeless, came out of nowhere...

DontRunMeOver

Well, I don't have time at the moment to look anything up but I can spout some ideas off the top of my head.

1. Although the spread of ideas and trade across many countries has been going on for thousands of years, it's arguable whether any of the pre-columbus empires count as 'globalisation' because europe, asia and africa were completely seperate from the americas. And the definition of 'globalisation' could be tenuous if half of the globe doesn't even know about the other half of the globe.

2. If they thought the world was flat would it be globalisation? (ok, that's not such a serious answer)

3. Ancient empires generally had a pretty solid form, with a couple of boundaries on a map being enough to define the extent of the empires. There may be exceptions that I'm unaware of but generally even if ancient europe-based empires stretched into the middle-east and north africa they didn't stretch that far beyond one continent and didn't have little outposts in far-flung countries. The same is true of empires based in asia and africa, however big they became they had boundaries and beyond these boundaries I'm not aware of their influences being very strong.

4. It's harder to argue against colonialism (as done by British and Spanish et al a few hundred years back) not being a lot like globalisation, as the British empire was properly global. But if you include in the definition of globalisation the factors of rapid tranfer of people, culture and trade across the world then the technology necessary for that type of globalisation has only been available recently.

So until five hundreds years or so ago culture and trade did not quite operate across a global market and since then global exchange has increased. Part of the argument might be based on at what point it stops being international trade and becomes globalisation, and also at what point it stops being slow-moving colonilisation and becomes globalisation.

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DontRunMeOver

Hu Jintao is the president of China and has been for 4 years. Do you mean 'former president' or 'then president' (with a date of the quote)?

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DontRunMeOver

The Roman Empire was big, but you could argue that it didn'tstretch much into Africa or Asia, it kind of hugged their outskirts instead.

And to quote wiki (because I don't have any globalization books to hand)

Within empires and between colonies you always see these types of convergence, yes it's faster with modern technology but it has occurred in every empire HOWEVER modern globalisation is such that significant convergence is seen between a large number of independent nations. The internet can rapidly transfer ideas with much less regard for boundaries than any old silk trading route ever did.

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