Globalization in a shopping basket
Pick up a packet of biscuits in a supermarket and it may contain palm oil grown in another country, a crop followed in the lesson on sustainable ways of living of indigenous societies. The farmer who harvested the fruit, the company that shipped the oil and the shopper who paid for the biscuits are all linked, even though they will never meet.
The same kind of link appears almost everywhere you look. A McDonald's restaurant or an IKEA store in your town, a phone call to a relative in another country, tourists arriving at an airport, a news story from another continent on your screen. Each one ties your daily life to distant places.
These links are what historians, geographers and economists mean by globalization. The word is used constantly in politics, business and the news, often by people who mean quite different things by it. Knowing exactly what it means lets you judge claims about globalization instead of simply repeating them.
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