But that was one city in one part of the world. How do you go about establishing what temperatures were doing across the globe - which is what you need for a proper baseline? Go back into and long-term temperature records become very sparse. There is a very good one for Central England back to , and a couple on the continent Netherlands from ; and Central Europe from Dr Hawkins' group used these, together with their understanding of how factors such as greenhouse gases influence the climate, and some modelling, to try to gauge what global temperatures were doing during - to in essence see if conditions were warmer or cooler than for But the Reading scientist cautions that the uncertainties make it impossible to say precisely how much additional warming there has been if you take as a new starting point.
You could narrow the uncertainties somewhat - for example, by rescuing the millions of 18th-andth-century temperature observations that currently sit in books around the world but have yet to be collated and digitised.
Or you could simply abandon the notion of an reference altogether and just use a modern comparison. So instead of being, 'Can we keep to two degrees above pre-industrial? Follow Jonathan on Twitter. Image source, Getty Images. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Two specific forms of pre-industrial society are hunter-gatherer societies and feudal societies.
A hunter-gatherer society is one in which most or all food is obtained by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species.
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be very mobile, following their food sources. They tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures, often including a high degree of gender equality. Full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies.
Hunter-gatherer group membership is often based on kinship and band or tribe membership. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers in most parts of the world were displaced by farming or pastoral groups who staked out land and settled it, cultivating it or turning it into pasture for livestock. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement their foraging activity with farming or raising domesticated animals. In the United States, the deindustrialization of Midwestern and Northeastern cities has occurred in response to shifting patterns in the geography of production.
Just as many American companies have moved their manufacturing operations to developing nations, where they can hire workers for far lower wages, so too have manufacturers in the United States relocated from the heavily unionized Northeast and Midwest toward the Southeast and Southwest. In these areas, right-to-work states limit the power of unions to raise wages.
Additionally, the high supply of workers forces those workers who are employed to accept low wages. In order to save costs, manufacturers have done more than merely relocate. They have also eliminated jobs, as technological innovation has reduced the demand for manual labor.
Though total industrial employment has been relatively stable over the past forty years, the overall U. Manufacturing is thus less prominent in American life and the American economy now than it has been at any other point for hundreds of years. The Decline of the Manufacturing Industry : This graphic shows the decline of the manufacturing industry relative to other industries over the course of the past sixty years.
Detroit : This map depicts the economic ramifications of deindustrialization in the Detroit area. The Detroit neighborhoods closest to the city center who were the most dependent upon manufacturing jobs are the most blighted. Corporations have powerful legal rights, and some have revenues that exceed the revenues of sovereign nations.
The word corporation is widely used to describe incorporated entities, especially those that have a large number of shareholders. Despite not being natural persons, the law recognizes corporations as having rights and responsibilities like natural persons. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, they can be responsible for human rights violations, and they can even be convicted of criminal offenses, such as fraud and manslaughter.
Once incorporated, a corporation has artificial personhood everywhere it operates, until the corporation is dissolved. Often, a corporation is legally a citizen of the state or other jurisdiction in which it is incorporated.
A multinational corporation MNC is a corporation that either manages production or delivers services in more than one country. Multinational corporations can have a powerful influence on both local economies and the world economy. They play an important role in international relations and globalization. A transnational corporation TNC differs from a traditional MNC in that it does not identify itself with a single national home. While traditional MNCs are national companies with foreign subsidiaries, TNCs spread out their operations in many countries.
This allows them to sustain high levels of local responsiveness. The rapid rise of multinational corporations has been a topic of concern among intellectuals, activists and laymen, who perceive it as a threat to basic civil rights like privacy. Scholars have pointed out that multinationals have had a long history of interference in the policies of sovereign nation states. Anti-corporate advocates express the commonly held view that corporations answer only to shareholders, and give little consideration to human rights, environmental concerns, or other cultural issues.
Multinational corporations are important factors in the processes of globalization. National and local governments often compete against one another to attract MNC facilities, with the expectation of increased tax revenue, employment, and economic activity.
To compete, political entities may offer MNCs incentives such as tax breaks, governmental assistance, subsidies, or lax environmental and labor regulations. Because of their size, multinationals can have a significant impact on government policy, primarily through the threat of market withdrawal. Confrontations between corporations and governments have occurred when governments have tried to force MNCs to make their intellectual property public.
This is a state effort to transfer technology to local entrepreneurs. Recently, industry has become more information-intensive, which has led to higher productivity but also higher unemployment and inequality. Examine how the Information Age is leading to higher productivity but fewer jobs, which lead to polarization between incomes of the rich and poor. In general, industry is becoming more information-intensive, less labor-intensive, and less capital-intensive.
These trends have led observers to call the modern era the information age. The trend toward an information-based economy has important implications for the workforce.
While productivity stands to increase dramatically, unemployment is also rising, and jobs are increasingly polarized into the following two categories: high-skill, high-wage jobs, and low-skill, low-wage jobs. Additionally, for the first time, workers are being forced to compete in a global job market, in which jobs tend to be attracted by countries with lower wages. As technology advances, workers are becoming increasingly productive, but the value of labor, and the demand for labor, are both decreasing.
Workers who perform easily automated tasks are being replaced by technology that can do the work faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. As a result, automation and computerization have led to both higher productivity and a net job loss.
In the United States, from January, to August, , the number of people employed in manufacturing jobs fell from 17,, to 11,, In general, jobs that are traditionally associated with the middle class assembly line workers, data processors, foremen, and supervisors are beginning to disappear due to automation.
They are also disappearing because of outsourcing, which has become more common in an era of global free trade. Production and service workers in industrialized nations are unable to compete with workers in developing countries, who are willing to tolerate much lower wages.
As a result, in industrialized nations like the U. Individuals who lose their jobs can respond in several ways. They are able to compete successfully in the world market and command high wages. In the United States, income inequality began to rise in the s and has increased even more quickly during the 21 st century. After WWII, decolonization ended formal colonialism, but economic inequality has given rise to neocolonialism. Explain the concepts of colonialism, decolonization and neocolonialism in terms of society and economic impact.
When speaking of colonialism, most people imagine the European colonization of Africa. Historically, the period of colonization tends to refer to the era from the sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, during which ships from Europe were actively seeking out new territories, new peoples, and new markets to acquire.
However, colonialism has been practiced throughout history and all over the world. In general, colonialism occurs when people from one territory establish or acquire, maintain, and expand colonies in another territory. In colonialism, the metropole or colonizing power claims sovereignty over the colony. Often, colonization is driven by a desire for economic expansion. In the sixteenth century, European colonization of Africa contributed significantly to European economic development.
European colonization intensified because Europeans had just developed galleons or ships that could navigate more easily all the way to Africa. Easier access to foreign lands encouraged European nobles and merchants to seek out new territories in an effort to acquire raw materials and develop new markets. Extracting raw materials from foreign lands provided the fuel for the Industrial Revolution, and the practice of slavery provided Europeans with a new source of labor power.
At the same time that colonialism benefited European economies, it had devastating consequences for African economies. Colonized territories were forced to depend on colonizers for trade. Local institutions and political structures were dismantled and replaced with ones imposed by colonial powers.
After World War II, colonial systems were dismantled in a process referred to as decolonization. Decolonization refers to the undoing of colonialism, or the claim of a formerly colonized people for independence and self-determination. In part, decolonization was the result of independence movements in colonized territories. In part, it was also the result of an calculated economic decision made by colonial powers. The cost of maintaining colonial empires had begun to exceed their value for the European powers.
The State of Colonialism, : This map shows the metropoles and their colonies in Decolonization has had a significant impact on the economies of the newly formed states.
First and foremost, newly independent African states had to develop an economic system. Moreover, even though the former colonies were now formally independent, they were still rather dependent on the West for assistance in developing economic and political structures. Thus, Western corporations still had a significant amount of control over the new states.
Newly independent states borrowed money from the West in order to fund their own development, resulting in a new system of debt. For decades, this debt has been politically impossible for many countries to pay off and still exists. Although decolonization ended formal colonialism, unequal economic relationships between the developed West and newly independent states had set up a system referred to as neocolonialism. Neocolonialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country in lieu of direct military or political control.
External forces exert power in Africa in two ways. First, multinational corporations MNCs , or companies with operations in multiple countries, apply pressure for certain political behaviors to suit their own interests. For example, if an American company wants to farm in Ethiopia, the company can apply pressure on the Ethiopian government to grant them certain conditions in exchange for the investment in the land. This function operates because of the dependency principle.
In other words, many African countries are so desperate to bring in revenue to support their domestic agendas that it is in their interests to accept unsavory conditions from foreign companies. In this way, foreign companies exert significant influence over post-colonial states. The combination of the degree of the influence and the dependency principle creates a situation that in many ways mirrors colonialism.
Second, foreign countries can exert influence over post-colonial states by only offering loans under certain conditions. This, again, invokes the dependency principle and mirrors colonialism. Neocolonialism : Some argue that the financial institutions of the post-World War II world are themselves instruments of neocolonialism.
A trade bloc is an agreement where regional barriers to trade are reduced or eliminated among the participating states. A trade bloc is a type of intergovernmental agreement, often part of a regional intergovernmental organization, where regional barriers to trade are reduced or eliminated among the participating states. A single market is a type of trade bloc that is composed of a free trade area for goods, with common policies on product regulation, as well as freedom of movement on capital, labor, enterprise, and services.
According to the principles of capitalism, a single market has many benefits. With full freedom of movement for all the factors of production between the member countries, the factors of production become more efficiently allocated, further increasing productivity. However, entering a trade bloc also strengthens ties between member parties. Economist Jeffrey J. Scott argues that for a trade bloc to be successful, members must share four common traits: similar levels of per capita national income, geographic proximity, similar or compatible trading regimes, and a political commitment to regional organization.
For better or for worse, trade blocs are prevalent. A common market is a first stage towards a single market, and may be limited initially to a free trade area with relatively free movement of capital and of services, but not so advanced in reduction of the rest of the trade barriers.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. The Transformation of Economic Systems. Preindustrial Societies: The Birth of Inequality Pre-industrial typically have predominantly agricultural economies and limited production, division of labor, and class variation. Learning Objectives Discuss the different types of societies and economies that existed during the pre-Industrial age. Key Takeaways Key Points A hunter-gatherer society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to an agricultural society that relies mainly on domesticated species.
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, and, broadly defined, was a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor.
Manorialism, an essential element of feudal society, was the organizing principle of rural economy that originated in the villa system of the Late Roman Empire. Key Terms pre-industrial society : Pre-industrial society refers to specific social attributes and forms of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
It is followed by the industrial society. Defining characteristics of feudalism are direct ownership of resources, personal loyalty, and a hierarchical social structure reinforced by religion. Industrial Societies: The Birth of the Machine During the Industrial Revolution roughly to changes in technology had a profound effect on social and economic conditions.
Learning Objectives Analyze the shift from manual to machine based labor during the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. The introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal, wider utilization of water wheels, and powered machinery—mainly in textile manufacturing—underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity.
The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world, a process that continues as industrialization today.
0コメント