Globalization and its characteristics

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a new trend figured in the world economy: globalization. Europe became one of the main participants in this transfiguration. Several historians maintain that there is nothing new in globalization – consider an ancient form of globalization, the Christian Church (Hopkins, 2002). According to others, early modern times, and even more so the nineteenth century, marked the beginnings of globalization. In this view, globalization was successively advanced by the colonial empires, the railroads, the laissez-faire system, and the international gold standard. From late medieval times long-distance trade and cashless payment networks began internationalizing the European economy. Worldwide trade networks emerged during the early modern centuries. All these, however, were only the beginning of a long historical trend that led to globalization.