Global history Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Global history - Essay Example Additionally, the end of the Cold War has had important implications for the already precarious states of Africa and has coincided with the emergence of Asian economic â€Å"Tigers†: a global economic shift towards emerging East Asian powerhouses. Our current wave of globalization will be traced back to the late 1960s, beginning with the â€Å"social revolution† of that decade, and will end with today’s international state of affairs. The social revolution of the 1960s was also a cultural revolution. In fact, the â€Å"rise of a specific, and extraordinarily powerful youth culture indicated a profound change in the relation between generations† (Hobsbawm 324). Leading this cultural revolution were the young: teenagers started wearing jeans – prior to that only farmers wore them – and rock music became the voice of a generation (Hobsbawm 324). In fact, industries saw the potential of this young and increasingly powerful generation and catered to it through the â€Å"flourishing industries of cosmetics, hair-care and personal hygiene† (Hobsbawm 326). Hobsbawm asserts that the social revolution of the 1960s was as much a capitalist venture as a social and cultural revolution. The result of this â€Å"concentrated mass of purchasing power† (Hobsbawm 326) was the development of a sort of cultural hegemony, with blue jeans and rock music the identifiers of modern youth. Cultural symbo ls of identity thus perpetuated an Anglo-American global cultural hegemony. Additionally, "the cultural revolution of the latest twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures" (Hobsbawm 324-330). Planned capitalism, expressed through governmental economic intervention and the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944, exploded during the 1970s. Bretton Woods, which established