My goal is to explain how technical factors—above all, new prime movers (engines, turbines, motors) and new means of communication and information (storage, transmission, and retrieval)—made successive waves of globalization possible, and then to point out how these technical advances have been contingent on the prevailing political and social conditions. As a result, there is nothing inevitable about the continuation and further intensification of the process, and the significant, decades-long, post-1913 retreat from globalization, as well as recent reversals and concerns about the security
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