Name: Globalization I - The Upside: Crash Course World History #41
Uploaded: 2013-05-02T09:21:04.000Z
Duration: 11 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And today is the penultimate episode of Crash Course.

This was going to be the last episode, but I just can’t quit you, World Historians.

So, today we’re going to talk about globalization,

and in doing so, we’re going to talk about why we study history at all.

We study history to get a good grade to go to a good college to get a good job--

--so you can make more money than you would otherwise make and be a slightly larger cog

among the seven billion gears that turn the planet’s economic engine. Right?

And that’s fine, but if that’s why you really study history,

then you need to understand all the ways that the t-shirt you’re wearing is

both the cause and result of your ambition.

This t-shirt contains the global economy:

Its efficiency; its massive surplus; its hyperconnectedness;

This t-shirt tells one story of globalization.

So, globalization is a cultural phenomenon.

and population migration and linguistic changes,

but we’re going to focus, as we so often have during Crash Course, on trade.

So the world today, as symbolized by our international felt melange,

experiences widespread global economic interdependence.

and the accompanying cultural borrowing are nothing new, you’ll remember that

we found trade documents from the Indus Valley civilization

all the way in Mesopotamia. [home of the Mesopotamians]

But for a few reasons, the scale of this trade has increased dramatically.

1. Multinational corporations have global reach and increasing power.

2. Travel and shipping are cheap and safe.

It took about two months to cross the Atlantic in 1800.

Today it takes about five hours by plane,

[nothing beats a TARDIS, however. TARDISes (TARDI?) are cool.]

3. Governments have decreased tariffs and regulations on international trade,

leading to what is sometimes called euphemistically ”free trade.”

To which I say, if this trade is so free,

how come BBC America is in the premium tier of my cable package?

To understand the role that governments play in international trade,

let’s look again at this t-shirt. [which is exceptional, you'll agree]

This t-shirt, like most t-shirts made in the world, contains 100% American cotton.

And that’s not because the U.S. makes the best cotton or the most efficient cotton,

it’s because the U.S. government subsidizes cotton production.

And that’s what makes this cotton cheaper than cotton of similar quality

But in the last 30 years, the US’s share of

India, and Africa’s cotton exports go up.

as the US moves away from its expensive cotton subsidies.

In fact, these days it’s already possible to find t-shirts

with Brazilian, Indian, or Ugandan cotton,

or a mixture of cottons from all around the world.

But because the American government doesn’t subsidize industry in

the actual spinning and weaving of the cotton takes place in lower wage countries:

Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, China, India, China, China, sometimes even China.

And then the finished shirts, called blanks,

are usually sent to Europe or the United States for screenprinting, and then sold.

of this process is the part where we ship this across the Pacific Ocean,

turn it into this, and then ship it back across the Pacific Ocean,

Wholesale t-shirt blanks can cost as little as $3; the expense is in the printing,

and paying the designer at Thought Bubble who was tasked with the difficult job

of creating a Mongol who is at once cute and terrifying.

So contemporary global trade is pretty anarchic and unregulated,

at least by international institutions and national governments.

Much of this has to do with academic economists, mostly in the U.S. and Europe

that governmental regulation diminishes prosperity by limiting growth.

in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa--

haven’t been particularly keen to pursue free trade

but they’ve been bullied into it by larger economies

with whom they desperately need to trade.

we’ve seen all these emerging markets lowering their tariffs,

getting rid of regulation, and privatizing formerly state run businesses.

And they often do that to appease the International Monetary Fund,

which offers low interest loans to developing world economies

whether these decreased regulations have been a net positive

for these developing world economies is a subject of much debate,

we we will wade into it. But not until next week.

First, we need to understand more about the nature of this trade.

So you’ll remember from the Industrial Revolution episode

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Globalization I - The Upside: Crash Course World History #41

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