An outline, era by era

Globalization; rise of smartphones and social media

21st Century · 2000 – present

Globalization is the growth of trade, travel, finance, migration and communication links between countries. It has a long history, but it sped up sharply from the late twentieth century, helped by lower tariffs, container shipping, cheaper flights and the spread of the internet. China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 brought a very large workforce into world markets, and supply chains came to stretch across many countries.

From the mid-2000s, smartphones and social media changed how people connect. Apple's iPhone appeared in 2007, and Android phones followed in 2008. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and later platforms such as Instagram and TikTok let people share text, images and video across borders at almost no cost. By the 2020s a majority of the world's people were online, most of them through phones.

The period has brought rising incomes and cheaper goods in many places, along with job losses in some industries, dependence on distant suppliers, and debates over privacy, misinformation and the power of large technology companies.

Things happened, and the rest is history

  1. Container shipping transforms trade

    Event

    What happened

    In April 1956 Malcom McLean sends the first container ship, the Ideal X, from Newark to Houston. Over the following decades ports, ships, trains and lorries are rebuilt around standard steel boxes. International standards for container sizes are agreed in the 1960s.

    The rest is history

    Containers sharply cut the cost and time of loading goods and made long supply chains practical. Historians such as Marc Levinson argue that their effect on trade grew gradually, as ports and railways adapted, and that they were one of several forces behind globalization. By the early 2000s most manufactured goods in world trade travelled in containers.

    Sources

    1. BookLevinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

  2. The World Wide Web is released

    Event

    What happened

    In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, proposes a system of linked documents. In December 1990 he has a working web server and browser, and in August 1991 the system is announced publicly. In April 1993 CERN places the web software in the public domain.

    The rest is history

    The web made the internet usable for ordinary people and ran on networks that had existed since the 1970s and 1980s. Graphical browsers such as Mosaic in 1993 helped it spread quickly. It supplied the basis for later online commerce, search engines and social media.

    Sources

    1. BookBerners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
    2. BookAbbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

  3. The World Trade Organization is founded

    Event

    What happened

    The Uruguay Round of trade talks, begun in 1986, ends with the Marrakesh Agreement of April 1994. The World Trade Organization starts work on 1 January 1995 in Geneva, replacing the looser GATT system. It adds rules on services, intellectual property and a formal process for settling disputes.

    The rest is history

    The WTO gave world trade a common rulebook and a body to settle disputes among its members. Tariffs on many goods had already fallen over the previous decades. Membership grew to well over 150 countries, and later rounds of talks, such as the Doha Round begun in 2001, made much less progress than the Uruguay Round.

    Sources

    1. PrimaryMarrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization. Treaty signed 15 April 1994, in force 1 January 1995.
    2. BookIrwin, Douglas A. Free Trade under Fire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

  4. China joins the WTO

    Event

    What happened

    After about fifteen years of negotiation, China is admitted to the World Trade Organization on 11 December 2001. It had already begun market reforms under Deng Xiaoping from 1978 and had opened special economic zones such as Shenzhen. Foreign firms increasingly build factories there and export goods around the world.

    The rest is history

    China's share of world goods exports rose from a few percent around 2000 to well over ten percent within two decades. Many consumers gained from cheaper goods, and hundreds of millions of people in China moved out of extreme poverty. Economists have also documented job losses in manufacturing regions of the United States and Europe, a result often called the China shock.

    Sources

    1. ArticleAutor, David H., David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. "The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States." American Economic Review 103, no. 6 (2013): 2121-2168.
    2. BookNaughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

  5. Mobile phones spread worldwide

    Event

    What happened

    The first handheld mobile phone call is made by Martin Cooper of Motorola in April 1973, and commercial networks open in the 1980s. The GSM digital standard launches in Europe in 1991. By the early 2000s mobile subscriptions are growing fast in Africa, Asia and Latin America, often where fixed lines were scarce.

    The rest is history

    Mobile subscriptions passed one billion around 2002 and exceeded the world's population by the late 2010s, counting multiple subscriptions per person. Phones allowed banking, such as M-Pesa in Kenya from 2007, and access to information in places with little other infrastructure. They also set the stage for the smartphone.

    Sources

    1. BookAgar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003.

  6. The iPhone and Android launch

    Event

    What happened

    On 9 January 2007 Steve Jobs presents the first iPhone, which combines a phone, an internet device and a touchscreen, and it goes on sale in June. In 2008 Apple opens its App Store, and the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, is released. Other makers soon follow.

    The rest is history

    Smartphones put a networked computer, camera and map in billions of pockets. App stores created new industries, from ride-hailing to mobile games. By the 2020s billions of people used smartphones, and in many countries the phone became the main way of reaching the internet.

    Sources

    1. BookIsaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

  7. Social media platforms go global

    Event

    What happened

    Facebook is founded at Harvard in 2004 and opens to the general public in 2006. YouTube starts in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Facebook reaches one billion monthly users in 2012, and Instagram is bought by Facebook that year.

    The rest is history

    These platforms let people share news, images and opinions across borders. They helped organize protests, such as those of the Arab Spring from 2010 and 2011, though scholars disagree about how large a role they played. They also raised concerns about privacy, harassment and the spread of false information, leading to regulation such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, in force from 2018.

    Sources

    1. BookKirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
    2. BookTufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

  8. Cloud computing and global digital platforms

    Event

    What happened

    Amazon launches Amazon Web Services in 2006, renting computing power and storage over the internet. Other firms, including Microsoft and Google, build similar services. Companies and governments move data and software to large data centres.

    The rest is history

    Cloud services let small firms reach global markets without owning their own servers, and they became the base for streaming, online shopping and later machine learning. Computing power became concentrated in a few large companies. Critics raise concerns about market dominance and where data is stored, and these remain active policy debates.

    Sources

    1. BookSrnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.

  9. The world is flat

    Popular belief

    The legend

    A common claim is that globalization has levelled the world, so that a worker anywhere can compete equally with a worker anywhere else. The phrase comes from the title of a 2005 book by Thomas Friedman, after a conversation with an Indian technology executive. It is often repeated as if borders no longer matter.

    The rest is history

    Friedman's book argued that technology was leveling competition, but economists find that distance, language, law and local costs still matter greatly. Trade between neighbouring countries remains much larger than between distant ones of similar size, a pattern known as the gravity model. Scholars such as Pankaj Ghemawat have argued that the world is only partly connected, a view he set out in World 3.0 (2011).

    Sources

    1. BookFriedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
    2. BookGhemawat, Pankaj. World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.

  10. Smartphones are said to make us stupid or unhappy

    Popular belief

    The legend

    A widely repeated belief holds that smartphones and social media have damaged attention, mental health and young people's wellbeing. Books and news stories often describe a generation harmed by screens. Others claim the opposite, that the technology has had no measurable effect.

    The rest is history

    The evidence is mixed. Some studies link heavy use to anxiety and poor sleep in some teenagers, while large reviews find the average effects small and hard to separate from other causes. Researchers such as Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski analysed large datasets in 2019 and found only a very small association with wellbeing. The question is still actively researched and debated.

    Sources

    1. ArticleOrben, Amy, and Andrew K. Przybylski. "The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use." Nature Human Behaviour 3 (2019): 173-182.

  11. The internet was built to survive a nuclear war

    Popular belief

    The legend

    It is often said that the internet was designed so that communications would survive a nuclear attack. The story says military planners built a network with no centre that could not be destroyed. It is repeated in many popular accounts.

    The rest is history

    The story mixes two projects. Paul Baran at RAND did study survivable communications networks in the early 1960s, and his ideas on packet switching influenced later work. ARPANET, which began in 1969, was built by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency mainly to let researchers share computing resources. Its first link joined UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in October 1969.

    Sources

    1. BookAbbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

  12. Globalization is entirely new

    Popular belief

    The legend

    Many people think that global trade and instant communication began only with the internet, and that earlier ages were isolated. The 2000s are described as the first time the whole world was linked.

    The rest is history

    Long-distance links are very old. The Silk Roads, Indian Ocean trade and the Atlantic trade connected distant regions for centuries. A first great wave of modern globalization ran from about 1870 to 1914, with steamships, the telegraph and large migrations, before it was broken by the First World War. Historians such as Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson have shown that in some respects, such as migration, that earlier period was more open than the present.

    Sources

    1. BookO'Rourke, Kevin H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Globalization and History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

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