Globalization & Technology

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 1 of 7 — Core Concepts

Key idea: Globalization after 1945 was not the first global integration (the Silk Roads, the Atlantic system, and the 1870–1914 wave came before it), but it was the deepest. It rested on three pillars: U.S.-led economic institutions, ever-cheaper transportation and communications, and multinational corporations operating across borders. The exam's short-answer and document-based questions cover developments through 2001, so this lesson runs to 2001.

Defining Globalization

The Bretton Woods Order (1944)

In July 1944, before World War II had ended, delegates from 44 Allied nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to design the postwar economic order. The conference created both the IMF and the World Bank, which began operating in 1945–46.

• Key rule of the original system: Currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce. This held until 1971, when President Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility (the "Nixon Shock").

Concept Check — Bretton Woods

The Information Revolution

KC-6.1.I.A: "New modes of communication—including radio communication, cellular communication, and the internet—as well as transportation, including air travel and shipping containers, reduced the problem of geographic distance."

Term Sprint — Globalization institutions and tools

Why Technological Change Accelerated After 1945

Energy in brief: Oil replaced coal as the leading fuel for transport and much of industry after World War II, and the first nuclear power stations opened in the 1950s. The 1973 oil embargo showed how dependent industrial economies had become on imported petroleum.

• Key takeaway: When a prompt asks why globalization accelerated after 1945, give a two-part answer: an institutional framework (Bretton Woods, GATT) plus technologies that made distance cheaper (containers, jets, satellites, computing).

Applied AP Practice — Why globalization accelerated

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 2 of 7 — Key Processes

Key idea: After 1971 the world economy reorganized around floating exchange rates, multinational corporations and globally distributed supply chains. Production was unbundled: design in one country, components in several others, assembly in another, and sales everywhere. KC-6.3.I.E describes the result: knowledge economies grew in some regions "while industrial production and manufacturing were increasingly situated in Asia and Latin America."

Multinational Corporations (MNCs)

CED Topic 9.4 names Nestlé (Switzerland), Nissan (Japan) and Mahindra and Mahindra (India) as examples of multinationals; the list is a reminder that MNCs were not only American.

Major Free Trade Agreements

Concept Check — MNCs and trade blocs

Floating Currencies and Financial Globalization After 1971

Foreign Direct Investment and Offshoring

Who gained and who lost: Consumers gained cheaper goods; workers in Mexico, China and Southeast Asia gained factory jobs, often at low wages; workers in older industrial regions of the United States and Europe lost jobs; shareholders gained higher returns. AP rewards answers that separate these groups.

Match each development to the decade it belongs to.

Putting the Processes Together

The three processes reinforced each other. Floating currencies and open capital markets let money move quickly to wherever production was cheapest; trade agreements lowered the tariffs on goods crossing borders; and multinationals used both to build supply chains that ran through Mexico, China and Southeast Asia. The same openness made economies vulnerable: when foreign lenders pulled money out of Mexico in 1994 or East Asia in 1997, crises spread from one country to its neighbors.

• Key takeaway: Post-1971 globalization rested on three linked processes: multinational supply chains, regional and global trade rules, and a dollar-based financial system with mobile capital.

Applied AP Practice — Effects of integration

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 3 of 7 — Patterns & Examples

Key idea: AP prompts on globalization reward specific cases. Learn three: the Asian Tigers (state-led export growth), China after 1978 (Deng Xiaoping's reforms through WTO entry in 2001), and the Green Revolution (technology that fed a growing population at an environmental cost). All three show state policy, technology and world markets combining to produce uneven outcomes.

The Asian Tigers (1960s–1990s)

China After 1978

• Result: Hundreds of millions of people in China left extreme poverty in the two decades after 1980, the largest such reduction in history, while coastal provinces grew far richer than the interior.

Concept Check — Tigers and China

The Green Revolution and Its Critics

KC-6.1.I.B: "The Green Revolution and commercial agriculture increased productivity and sustained the earth's growing population as it spread chemically and genetically modified forms of agriculture."

Term Sprint — Globalization cases

Cultural Globalization

KC-6.3.IV.ii–iii: arts, entertainment and popular culture "increasingly reflected the influence of a globalized society," and consumer culture "became globalized and transcended national borders." The CED's examples include reggae, Bollywood, the BBC, World Cup soccer, the Olympics, Toyota and Coca-Cola.

• Key takeaway: Cultural flows ran in more than one direction. Hollywood and Coca-Cola spread outward from the United States, but Bollywood and reggae show global culture coming from non-Western centers too. An answer that treats cultural globalization as purely "Americanization" misses half the evidence.

Applied AP Practice — Uneven outcomes

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 4 of 7 — Connections & Interactions

Key idea: Globalization moved people, diseases, ideas and protests across borders, not just goods and money. AP prompts often ask how migration and disease reshaped societies, and how movements organized across borders to challenge the globalization model itself.

Mass Migration After 1945

Why migrants followed old ties: Many migrants moved to the former colonial power, whose language they spoke and where they had legal rights to enter. The CED notes that migrants often kept "cultural and economic ties between the colony and the metropole even after the dissolution of empires."

Concept Check — Migration

Diasporas and Remittances

• A diaspora is a community living outside its homeland. Migrants sent remittances, money sent home to families, which by the late 1990s were a major source of income for countries such as India, Mexico and the Philippines.
• Remittances paid for food, schooling and housing, and in some countries they brought in more foreign currency than exports of any single product.

Resistance to Globalization (Topic 9.7)

KC-6.3.IV.iv: "Responses to rising cultural and economic globalization took a variety of forms." The CED names anti-IMF and anti-World Bank activism as examples.

Match each migration flow to its main destination.

Disease in a Connected World

• The paradox: The air travel, shipping and migration that integrated the world economy were the same networks that turned regional outbreaks into worldwide epidemics.

• Key takeaway: Connections prompts reward specific cases (the Windrush generation, the Battle of Seattle, HIV/AIDS) rather than general statements about "global integration."

Applied AP Practice — Connections

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 5 of 7 — Change Over Time

Key idea: Continuity-and-change prompts on globalization are won by students who divide the period into clear phases and name what stayed the same across them. This scheme ends in 2001, the end point of the exam's short-answer and document-based questions.

Phase 1 (1945–1971): "Embedded Liberalism"

Phase 2 (1971–1991): The Free-Market Turn

KC-6.3.I.D: "In a trend accelerated by the end of the Cold War, many governments encouraged free-market economic policies and promoted economic liberalization in the late 20th century." The CED's examples are Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping and Pinochet.

Concept Check — The first two phases

Phase 3 (1991–2001): Integration After the Cold War

Match each group of events to its phase.

Continuities Across All Three Phases

Major Changes Across Phases

• Key takeaway: Each phase had its own monetary regime, trade pattern and leading economic ideas, while the dollar, Western-led institutions and growing trade connected them.

Applied AP Practice — CCOT writing

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 6 of 7 — Problem-Solving Workshop

Key idea: Globalization documents come from a clear position: technocratic designers of the system, people resisting it, or critics who once worked inside it. Sourcing the author's position is the highest-value AP move on these prompts.

HIPP for Globalization Documents

Document Bank

1. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, preamble (1947) "...entering into reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements directed to the substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade and to the elimination of discriminatory treatment in international commerce."

• HIPP: Signed by 23 countries two years after World War II, when leaders blamed the high tariffs of the 1930s for deepening the Depression; intended audience is the signatory governments; purpose is to lower tariffs step by step through negotiation; point of view is that of mostly Western governments, led by the United States, rebuilding the world economy.

2. Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, preamble (1994) "Resolved, therefore, to develop an integrated, more viable and durable multilateral trading system..."

• HIPP: Concluded by the 123 governments of the Uruguay Round, about two years after the Soviet collapse; intended audience is the international trade-policy community; purpose is to replace GATT with a permanent organization that has binding dispute settlement; point of view is technocratic, multilateral and rules-based.

Concept Check — Sourcing the founding documents

3. Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (January 1, 1994) "Today we say enough is enough!"

• HIPP: Issued as indigenous rebels seized towns in Chiapas, Mexico, on the day NAFTA took effect (the declaration itself focuses on land, poverty and the Mexican government rather than on NAFTA by name); intended audience is the Mexican public and, through the press, the world; purpose is to win support for indigenous rights and against the government's free-market policies; point of view is that of poor indigenous farmers in southern Mexico.

4. Joseph Stiglitz, "Globalization and Its Discontents" (2002), a later account of the 1990s "Decisions were made on the basis of what seemed a curious blend of ideology and bad economics..."

• HIPP: Written by a Nobel Prize–winning economist who had been the World Bank's chief economist (1997–2000) during the Asian financial crisis; intended audience is policymakers and the informed public; purpose is to criticize IMF conditions imposed on developing countries in the 1990s; point of view is that of an insider critic of the institutions he had served. Published just after the course's 2001 endpoint, it is a secondary account: use it as an interpretation of 1990s events, the way you would use a historian's argument, not as evidence of anything that happened after 2001.

AP SAQ Structure (3 parts)

• A. Identify one specific feature of post-1945 globalization
• B. Explain how it contributed to an outcome (growth, inequality, integration, or backlash)
• C. Explain a contrast with another phase, or a contrasting interpretation

Common AP Traps

Match each fact to the HIPP element it most directly supports.

Model SAQ Response

Prompt: Identify ONE feature of post-1945 globalization, and explain how it contributed to economic integration.

Response: Containerization, introduced in 1956, standardized cargo so that steel boxes moved straight from ships to trains and trucks. By cutting port handling costs and theft, it made it cheap to ship parts and finished goods across oceans, which allowed firms to build supply chains that ran through Asia and Latin America after 1980.

• Why it scores: It names a specific feature with a date, explains the mechanism (lower handling costs), and ties it to the outcome the prompt asks about (integration through supply chains).

Applied AP Practice — Sourcing and argument

Globalization & Technology After 1900

Part 7 of 7 — AP Review

Key idea: Use this part as your night-before-the-exam reference for globalization and technology through 2001. Drill the dates, the comparisons and the AP skills.

High-Yield Dates

Comparing the Phases

Concept Check — High-yield recall

Defenders and Critics

Sprint Terms

• Bretton Woods — 1944 conference that created the IMF and World Bank
• GATT / WTO — tariff-reduction agreement (1947) and its 1995 successor
• Nixon Shock — 1971 end of dollar-gold convertibility
• Containerization — standardized cargo boxes (from 1956) that cut shipping costs
• Multinational corporation — a firm operating in many countries (Nestlé, Nissan, Mahindra and Mahindra)
• Maquiladora — a Mexican export-assembly plant near the U.S. border, first created under the 1965 Border Industrialization Program and expanded after NAFTA
• Reform and Opening — Deng Xiaoping's 1978 program of market reforms
• Asian Tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore
• Structural adjustment — IMF and World Bank loan conditions requiring spending cuts and market reforms
• Remittances — money sent home by migrant workers
• Battle of Seattle — 1999 protests against the WTO
• Zapatistas — indigenous rebels in Chiapas who rose up as NAFTA took effect in 1994

Final Term Sprint — High-yield recall

Putting It Together

Post-1945 globalization was built on deliberate institutional design (Bretton Woods, GATT, the WTO) and on technologies that made distance cheap (containers, jets, satellites, computing). It produced dramatic gains, above all in East Asia, and real losses in older industrial regions and in debt-burdened developing countries, and it provoked resistance from Chiapas to Seattle.

• Key takeaway: For any evaluation prompt, name a cause from institutions, a cause from technology, a group that gained, and a group that lost.

Applied AP Practice — Final drill