Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 167
CONTENTS
Оглавление1 Early societies and civilizations
4 The transformation of societies
5 Modernity and industrial technology
6 Classifying the world’s societies
10 Structuring the globalization debate
11 Consequences of globalization
This image of Europe and North Africa at night, taken from space, is one illustration of the global extent of human settlement.
Human beings have existed on Earth for less than half a million years. If we think of this entire span of human existence as a 24-hour day, agriculture came into existence at 11.56 p.m. – four minutes to midnight – and civilizations at 11.57 p.m. The development of industrial societies began only at 11.59 and 30 seconds, and yet, in those last 30 seconds of the human day, there has been more rapid population growth and socio-environmental change than in all the ages leading to it.
As we will see throughout this chapter, the period sociologists call modernity brought large-scale societies into closer contact with each other in a variety of ways, from systematic trade and long-range economic exchange, international political agreements and global tourism to electronic communications and large-scale migration. In all these ways, people have become more interconnected, interdependent and geographically mobile than ever before (Sheller and Urry 2004; Urry 2007).
Migration and the research agenda on ‘mobilities’ in sociology is discussed in chapter 8, ‘Race, Ethnicity and Migration’.
The sheer pace of change in the modern era is evident in rates of human population growth. Livi Bacci (2012) studies the global population and its long-term growth. From an estimated 6 million people in 10,000 BCE, the global population rose to more than 6 billion by 2000 and reached 7.7 billion by 2019. However, the pace of population growth has been uneven, accelerating from around 1750, the start of the industrial period. The most striking demographic aspect here is the shrinking ‘doubling time’ of the global population. In 1750, it took 1,000 years for the population to double in size. By 1950 this was down to 118 years, and in 2000 it was a mere forty years. Livi Bacci (2017: 26) calculates that, at this rate, the world’s population will reach 11 billion by the end of the century, which, the UN (UN DESA 2019c: 5–6) estimates, may be the peak human population, as the pace of growth has begun to slow.
If 11 billion people seems unsustainable, remember that, in the nineteenth century, the idea that 7 billion people could survive on Earth was quite literally unthinkable, and yet it has already been reached and surpassed. Whether such unprecedented levels can be sustained depends not simply on the carrying capacity of the natural environment but also on economic and technological developments, social organization and political decisions.
Chapter 5, ‘The Environment’, looks more closely at the environmental impact of rapid human expansion.
In the rest of this chapter we look at the spread of key aspects of modernity before examining the various meanings attached to the concept of globalization. As a basic working definition, we can say that globalization is characterized both by a set of processes that bind the societies and people of the world into tighter interdependence and by a growing global consciousness that influences how people act. The speed at which the Covid-19 virus spread around the world in 2019–20 demonstrates the very high levels of geographical mobility of people and goods in our globalizing age. Many social scientists see the contemporary phase as the most significant development that will shape humanity’s future.
Chapter 6, ‘Global Inequality’, looks in more detail at some of the key evidence and theories from the discipline of demography.
Later in the chapter we will explore debates on whether globalization is highly significant or somewhat exaggerated and what its consequences might be. Before that we will set the current globalization debate into a much longer time frame, and there follows a sketch of human development over the very long term. This is necessary in order to understand better how the development of modern industrial-capitalist societies set the human world on its present global trajectory.
Globalization is one of our four central themes. A guide listing where to find the main sections and discussions can be found in the book’s Introduction.
