Globalization, Coverage of

History and Development

Integral to both of these globalization phenomena is continuing improvement of technologies of transport, distribution, and communications. Globalization is a longer running trend than many perceive—it began with the industrial revolution in the mid-nineteenth century and continues into the early twenty-first century. Many antecedents of contemporary globalization can be found, including such early trade routes as the Silk Road in Eurasia and the Incense Route in Africa and Arabia, and the religious institutions which spread with empires, most notably the Roman Catholic Church and the Islamic Caliphates. These global religions created and continue the process of [Page 672]globalization through complex ecclesiastical hierarchies, traveling missionaries, and pilgrimages. By the late Middle Ages, trade and craft guilds had established systems for traveling journeymen and craft masters which increased the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Through these proto-globalizing trends, information was collected by travelers and conglomerated into central locations for use by ruling elites, merchants, and religious officials. As such, journalism and news gathering evolved together with travel and nascent globalism.

The rise of nationalism worked against global-ism for a number of centuries as newly formed nations established national or ethnic identities by defining what they excluded. However, the rise of the nation-state was partially due to the rise of the printing presses and the cultural consciousness of nationhood brought about by growing distribution of printed material. Establishment of an educated merchant class, usually in coastal city-states, required information to facilitate trade. City-states evolved into larger nation-states. Due to the cultural nature of globalization and its foundation in multilingual communication, it has been inextricably linked to forms of cultural information exchange, including journalism.

The character of globalization changed drastically with the beginning of the industrial revolution. Some technologies, for example steamships, allowed for faster travel and as a result more rapid global interconnections. However, it was the development of telegraphy in the 1840s that most radically encouraged globalization. Telegraphs were first used by Great Britain and the United States. The development of undersea telegraph cables in the 1860s, and wireless telegraphy at the turn of the twentieth century, dramatically speeded up cross-border communication. Although early telegraphy allowed for faster news gathering and the development of international news (or “wire”) services, it was the application of wireless technology for radio broadcasting by the 1920s, which allowed for large groups of geographically and culturally diverse populations to be seen as one single audience. Point-to-point and broadcast radio expanded alongside each other and were used to form the first broadcast networks. These involved (by the late 1930s) a central news collection organization linked to dozens of affiliate stations. While the network itself used point-to-point wired communications to link affiliates, the stations used broadcast technology to reach their audiences.

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