Processes: the Diffusion of Technology

Abstract

‘Globalization’ has become part of modern discourse but still admits no precise definition. Like ‘Progress’ or ‘Development’, it is one of those catchall expressions that means both everything and nothing. Broadly it denotes increasing mutual interdependence in an apparently shrinking world. In fact, as historians and geographers both recognize, technological change has been shrinking the world for the past two centuries (Allen and Hamnett 1995).