Transcription
Hello, welcome back to Antisocial Studies. I'm Emily Glankler, and this is part two in my short series on Unit Nine. Uh, in lieu of, I don't know, like, you having to cover it in class at all. That's how I feel at this point in the school year. So, we've been talking about Unit 9, Globalization. Our guiding question for part one, which if you haven't checked that out yet, you should go check it out at some point. They're not particularly in any order, so you can watch this one first and then go back and look at it later. But the guiding question we've been working on is, "Explain the extent to which science and technology brought change from 1900 to the present." And like, the answer is just an enormous extent. It brought like, almost infinite change, just tons of change.
In part one, we talked about how it unified people and created a lot of like, societal and economic and kind of cultural advancement. Today, we're going to talk more about the economy, how it accelerates economic growth by extending the economy from states to this global network of exchange. And so, really, this is the culmination of the course in terms of the theme of economics. So, at the very beginning of the course, we started talking about these, what now seem like little baby trade routes, like the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean, the Trans-Saharan trade routes. And really, every era, we have just expanded the length and the breadth of those trade routes by some amount. And so, what's happening now in the 20th century is that those established global trade routes are now just becoming insanely more efficient and advanced because of science and technology. And really, what is happening in this era is it's almost like we, we sort of shouldn't be looking at like, states. We really just have a global economy. And what that also means is we sort of end up with a global economic hierarchy. And that really kind of divides states between the developed and the developing.
Clearly, emerging technology led to rapid economic expansion throughout the 20th century. And we see that especially with new energy technology, oil. Hello, right? What steam did for the Industrial Revolution, oil is going to do for globalization. What else is happening is that we're having massive advancements in agriculture to support our growing population. Something called the Green Revolution is hugely influential. And now, I want to be really clear. There's this guy, Norman Borlaug, who is an American scientist who's known as the father of the Green Revolution. He did most of his work in Mexico. And so, Mexico was kind of seen as the birthplace of the Green Revolution, thanks to support from the Mexican government and investment from them. And then, really, the Green Revolution develops and becomes a kind of global resource in India. So, even though I have a picture of this American scientist up here, it would be really clear that actually the states you should associate with the beginning of the Green Revolution are more Mexico and India. The Green Revolution is essentially just using technology to grow crops more abundantly and more efficiently. And so, a lot of that is centered around, um, genetically modified crops and just kind of making things that are, for example, insect-resistant or drought-resistant. So, you can see in these charts, like wheat yields in the least developed countries are going up dramatically. And you have countries that typically lose crops to insects or pestilence or whatever, and now we're able to use our science and technology to prevent that from happening as much. So, those are kind of the causes, at least to some extent. Those are examples of the technology like directly impacting the growing economy and the growing population in this labor force.
What I'm really interested in is how that the globalization and the growth of this new global economy has created now a worldwide hierarchy of states. And I want to be really clear, this is sort of like my approach. The AP World History curriculum approaches this just a little bit differently. They just talk about different types of economies. But the way I like to think of it is that whereas in previous eras, we would look at each state separately and say, "Okay, within that, what's their social and economic hierarchy?" And now, I want to be really clear that still exists, right? So, we still have the elites and the poor in the United States. We still have the elites and the poor in Uganda, wherever. But what is really interesting that's occurring is that also because our economy has become so global, and really our political system with the development of things like the UN, which again, we'll talk about more in part three, we also within that are seeing a really complex hierarchy of states. That was beginning, obviously, in the Age of Imperialism, that was getting established there where the industrialized states often tended to be the ones that developed empires. So, that's the context. That's where it starts. But we really see it reaching its probably peak in the 20th century.
So, within that global hierarchy, really at the top is going to be what are known now as knowledge economies. Essentially, the states that industrialized first, mostly, although China is a huge exception and we'll talk about that in a second. But the states that tended to industrialize first, which is going to be the United States, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Japan, they then are kind of further along in that development model. And so now, by the mid to late 20th century, they have moved into like a new phase of economic development where their main economic activities are not producing things at all. It's the service industry, it's technology, it's like research and development, inventing new things, that sort of thing. And so, that is a huge change that's occurring from 1900 to today. Is that at the beginning of the century, the vast majority of people on Earth were employed as farmers in every country, in the United States, for example. But by the end, now we've really totally shifted to a new model.
I will say that those economies then tend to throughout the 20th century start pushing what's known as free trade or economic liberalization. And when you hear "liberal," if you're an American, don't think like "liberal" in our political sense. We mean "liberal" in terms of like freedom and kind of free trade and openness. And so, what economic liberalization means is that if you kind of imagine a map of the world and you imagine that all, there's all these different economic barriers. So, there are tariffs, there's quotas, there's different things that make it more difficult to get like a good that's produced in one country to then be sold in another country. Imagine those as just like big economic walls. What a free trade advocate would want is for those walls to be as low as possible, ideally non-existent. So, this is essentially trying to apply laissez-faire capitalism to the entire globe. And it tends to be pushed by Western capitalist countries that are further along in the development model. So, if you're in the United States, for example, or you're Western Europe, for example, you would want the barriers to trade to be as low as possible so that you can get your products and you can put factories and these other things in in all the countries that you want, especially in places where maybe their labor is cheaper or their tax structure means you'd have to pay less in taxes, right? So, it really benefits these most developed states, a lot of times at the expense of those states that are maybe newly independent, that have just gone through decolonization, that are trying to catch up economically and go through that industrialization that those kind of Western states got, I don't know, around 200 years to do really quickly to catch up.
We see this with the development of like free trade agreements. NAFTA is a good example of one. Just the, the development of the EU in general. There's like an Asian, um, free trade agreement as well. Essentially, it's saying instead of thinking about trade within one state, like one country, let's think about trade within a whole region. And so, the EU is really the best and maybe the earliest example in the 20th century of creating a kind of a free trade zone. But then other regions want to catch up because it's like, "Well, shoot, now if we're one state competing against the whole region of Europe, right? We need to maybe get with our neighbors and figure out how we can do things more efficiently." So, maybe the U.S. companies are going to still be headquartered in the United States, but maybe their factories will be in Mexico, for example.
We see this with research and development. This map right here is showing, like, you can see the big pyramids are the headquarters for research and development, and then you see all the other kind of campuses and offshoots and stuff around the world. So, the heart of the knowledge economies are still in those traditionally kind of previously industrialized powerful states. But that technology is slowly spreading through globalization as well, right? So, it's not like that technology lives only in the technologically advanced states. Kind of by definition, as our technology gets better and our decree, our barriers to communication, like we talked about last time, get lower, then that technology can also spread and can allow some of those less developed countries to catch up more quickly.
Um, we also see, literally, a global market by the end of the 20th century. This is something that, I know, now just seems very obvious and straightforward, but like, again, as a '90s kid, I cannot emphasize how weird, like eBay was. The idea of eBay. So, just the idea, if you think about where we started in 1200 and we were talking about like the Silk Road and the caravan sarai, to think about that 800 years later, we have a literal global market where I can go on Amazon right now and buy something from another country that I don't even maybe know what country it is, and it might arrive on my doorstep in three days, is pure insanity. Also, I put eBay on here because, just a little side note, in the AP World History curriculum, when they're talking about like global market kind of technology, they include eBay and not Amazon. And I don't know if the College Board has like beef with Jeff Bezos or what, but I thought that was delightful and hilarious. And so, I'm also going to continue to promote eBay as the best example of an online digital marketplace. Sorry, Jeff.
So, we have that sort of elite with those knowledge economies. And again, I want to be really clear, I'm not implying that like within a knowledge economy, you don't have poverty or whatever. And then also within a less developed economy, you don't have incredibly intelligent and technologically savvy and wealthy people. Obviously, I'm making these huge over-generalizations. But you also have sort of what I think of as like a global middle class rising. And these are going to be the states like I mentioned with NAFTA, like Mexico to the United States. These are going to be the states that maybe have relationships with those knowledge economies and are willing to kind of prioritize the production of goods for the global market. You have states like, thanks to that Green Revolution, you have states that are able to invest and apply, um, better technology for agriculture to increase their output of crops and sell crops around the world. So, that knowledge economies maybe can spend less time and money growing crops. This goes all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution, right? We didn't talk about it in this class, but in my Unit Zero video, like the Neolithic Revolution is that, like, the development of farming and agriculture, then allows for the diversification of jobs and hierarchy. That's all that's happening here in the 20th century. As we get more and more and more efficient at growing crops and we don't need like the vast majority of our global population involved in farming, we can get way more creative. And that's why the last 50 or 60 years, we've seen just this explosion of technology and creativity and new jobs and new ideas that arguably we haven't seen since like the rise of civilization.
We also see this with thinking about these multinational corporations. So, Nike is a great example, but there's obviously like a million at this point. Where typically they are founded and headquartered in places that are like the elite states, but then they're using like the whole globe as their supply chain. So, they might be getting raw materials from one state, then sending it to a factory in another state. Essentially, what's happening in the late 20th century is what was like a European empire, like the British Empire, right? Would get raw materials from South Africa, and then they would use, uh, textiles from India, then they would take them back to their factories. Well, now we're seeing that, but instead of with states, we're seeing them with corporations. And so, unfortunately, this does lead to massive global inequality, right? So, as you have the economy rapidly advancing and technology making it really like difficult to keep up, right? It's like, once one state or once one subset of the economy has finally figured out one technology, they're onto something new. It's sort of how I feel about Instagram and TikTok. Like, I just figured out Instagram, and now I'm forced to be on TikTok, and it's just, I, I just want to catch up. And so, a lot of times this inequality and conflict are driven by the scarcity of natural resources. And so, the fact that we are becoming so reliant on our resources, right? At the very beginning of our course and, and really just human history, the environment was dictating how we acted. But we have now really gained supremacy over the environment to where we are dictating like what the environment will do and how it will support us for now, right? More on climate change in part three. But that's also leaving us really vulnerable. So, if our economy as a globe is so dependent on oil, what happens when there's an oil shortage, for example?
We also are seeing this massive inequality by region. Where when you look at world regions by total wealth, there are some regions that have a huge piece of the pie. For example, here, it's like North America has the biggest chunk of the pie, and that really is mostly the United States and Canada. And then you have other regions like India, Africa, Latin America that are tiny. Think about this in the context of world history. Think about that little sliver that is India, and how insane that is in the context of world history, right? Because for most of our class, we've been talking about like the big guys, and that was the Middle East, it was India, it was China. And now, if we're looking here, like all of Asia, which includes the Middle East, is less than Europe, is less than North America. If you had gone to people 500 years ago and showed them this, they would have laughed at you, right? And also been super confused, but whatever. Um, and obviously, we're going to see, and we have been seeing in the last century, the rise of conflicts based solely on resources, right? For the mo, for most of world history, we've seen conflict based on land, but it's not land as a resource, it's land as like power or, um, religious significance, right? But now what we're seeing is war based on like survival, right? Which might be access to water, it might be access to oil, which is seen as necessary for the survival, a lot of these modern economies. Um, and so that's only going to get more prevalent in the 21st century.
Okay, so those are all the reasons how science and technology are going to accelerate economic growth throughout the 20th century. And so, again, just the general idea is that take all these themes and these trends that we've been talking about throughout all of the world history class. Think about, um, technology increasing trade routes. That could be like the compass and the astrolabe, and then those trade routes help to diffuse cultures. That's all we're talking about here, right? We're talking about this new science and technology that is allowing for a global network of trade that by the end of the century is like instantaneous, thanks to eBay. And no one else. But then, like we talked about in part one, those expanded trade routes and that new technology is also helping us spread culture and become more interconnected in other ways that beyond just trade.
So, uh, next on part three, we're going to end on a downer, which is this modern set of problems that we've created for ourselves. Because something that is drastically changing and has changed in the 20th and now 21st century is what problems we're experiencing as a human species and how we're going to solve them. Spoiler alert, like, it's gonna take global cooperation. So, I hope this was helpful. Hope you're having fun with Unit 9, if you're talking about it at all in your class. Subscribe to my channel. I'm going to be doing a ton of AP review stuff on here throughout the next few months, and you'll want to make sure that you're subscribed. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Go join my Patreon. Thanks. Bye.