Who Coined 'Globalization'?

According to my friend at St Hilda's, who enterprisingly turned to the OED during my rant, the first use of the word 'globalization' was way back in 1930, by W Boyd and M M Mackenzie, and not by Theodore Levitt in 1983. However, a lot of American commentators (it seems a stretch to call them researchers under the circumstances) still claim that Levitt was the first one to use the term — this despite the fact that shortly after his death in 2006, the New York Times appended a correction to his obituary which denied this claim.

In this age of the Internet, I was able to find uses of the actual word 'globalization' at least as far back as 1959, with claims dating back to 1944, within ten minutes of beginning my search. When a key commentator in my field, such as Joel Spring, gets it wrong, it makes me wonder how on earth I am ever going to bulletproof my research. (In his defence, he cited this from another colleague, who cited the OECD. Ho ho.)

It is A G Hopkins's 2002 book, Globalization in World History (Pimlico/Random House), that I have found most useful so far. It divides the phenomenon into historical phases — archaic, proto-, modern, and post-colonial — tracing its origins back to the pre-industrial Chinese diaspora which first created a global economy and shook the foundations of the world.

Of course, the difference between Spring and Hopkins is that the former is an educationist and the latter is an historian. Educationists, unfortunately, are often so focused on the idea of education that they have been known to ignore the facts. Historians, on the other hand, have been known to obsess about facts so much that some have ignored education.

I do think, however, that all educators should be historians, even if not all historians educate. It is hard to think about educating anybody without knowing something about history — especially in this age of the globalization of knowledge-based disciplines.