A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept

‘Globalization’ is an extraordinary concept. It is a complicated concept that burst upon the world relatively recently, but soon became a household concern. It is a concept that was rarely used until the 1990s, but processes of globalization had been happening for centuries. This article follows the genealogy of the concept from its unlikely beginnings in the 1930s–1950s to the heated scholarly debates across the end of the twentieth century to the present. Before it became a buzz word, the concept of ‘globalization’ began to be used in the most unlikely fields: in education to describe the global life of the mind; in international relations to describe the extension of the European Common Market; and in journalism to describe how the ‘American Negro and his problem are taking on a global significance’. The article begins to answer the question ‘Through what lineages and processes did the concept of globalization become so important?’ Drawing on textual research and interviews with key originating figures in the field of global studies, the article attempts to get past the usual anecdotes about the formation and etymology of the concept that center on alleged inventors of the term or references to first use of ‘globalization’ various dictionaries. The article tracks the careers of major scholars in relation to the career of the concept.