Explain globalization and the precapitalist social structure in terms of the economic concept of demand

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Globalization is a process through which the sale of goods and services spreads across national borders, expanding across the world. But for this to happen, there has to be an expansion of the market for those goods and services—people have to want to buy them. But even in the nineteenth century, most people in the world mostly consumed what they produced for themselves on their farms and in their locality. This meant that they only went to markets periodically for those things they couldn't produce at home. And this, in turn, meant that the demand for goods and services in the market always remained limited. The only group that was a reliable source of demand for consumption goods was people living in cities because they didn't have their own land like peasants did. But cities in the nineteenth century only accounted for a small proportion of the global population. Most of humanity was still located in the countryside, and this part of the population was geared toward self-subsistence, or living off the land. The economic system in most areas was still precapitalistin that the place for market-produced goods was still very limited. This is why globalization remained limited well into the nineteenth century. As long as most of the world economy was still precapitalist, consisting of peasants who toiled on their own plots of land, producing for themselves much of what they consumed, the market for goods and services remained very small. For globalization to take off, the scope of markets would have to expand, so people would want to buy the goods coming from distant parts of the world. The demand for market-produced goods would have to increase.