Introduction: Globalization and the Environment

In: Journal of world-systems research, S. 195-203

Abstract

Human societies have long experienced the increasingly rapid expansion of the modern world-economy; an economy that has existed since at least the middle 1400s, meeting crisis after crisis in accumulation (e.g.Abu-Lughod 1989; Arrighi 1994; Chase-Dunn 1998; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Chew 2001; Frank 1978, 1998; Frank and Gills 1993; Kentor 2000; Moore 2003; Pomeranz 2000; Wallerstein 1974, 1979). Rapid technological growth has been part and parcel of this expansion that has tightened the global division of labor and importance of distant events for all humans. This division of labor permits further expansion in rationalized production, and it reaches everywhere to expand markets and offer up cheap labor and material resources to increase surplus value ( e.g. Marx 1906; see also Foster 1999, 2002; Harvey 1999).