The worldwide globalization of the past half-century has produced more intense cross-cultural contact than has occurred at any other time in history. In earlier periods, as today, much culture change has been an accidental by-product of contact between people with a different way of life, much of it unconscious. But culture change by intent, sometimes called conversion, has also been important. This includes religious conversion, but it is not limited to religion, and it can take place on the initiative of the cultural borrowers as well as that of cultural transmitters. It is a two-sided process in any event. Missionaries, including secular missionaries, have set out to persuade others to change their way of life, but they have usually succeeded only in part, and only when their audience wanted to hear what they had to say.

Culture change on the initiative of the borrowers is far more common. In recent centuries much of the initiative has come from non-Western modernizers, who had before them the threat of Western power and the lure of Western technological prowess. They were not, however, so much interested in imitating Western culture as they were anxious to participate in the benefits of high productivity and high consumption, which were the most visible aspects of the West of the early industrial age.

It is a common observation about culture change over recent centuries that Western Europe has been, along with Japan, among the most avid imitator of techniques from abroad.