For sixty years, globalization sat in obscurity before becoming the word of the 1990s.
The English word globalization appeared as early as the 1930s, but only in reference to education, and it failed to gain traction.1 For several decades, the term surfaced occasionally without a consistent definition. The French economist François Perroux used the related term mondialisation in essays during the early 1960s.
Merriam-Webster included globalization in a general dictionary for the first time in 1961.2
In 1983, Theodore Levitt, a professor at Harvard Business School, published "The Globalization of Markets" in the Harvard Business Review.3 When Levitt died in 2006, the New York Times credited him with coining the term. Days later, the paper ran a correction: the word had been in use at least as early as 1944.4
Researchers Manfred Steger and Paul James traced the genealogy of the concept, finding that no single person coined it. The beginnings involved several intellectual currents, most of which did not endure.5
Some scholars date the phenomenon to the 1820s. Others place the first modern wave between 1870 and 1914. A second wave is dated to roughly 1944 through 1971, organized around the Bretton Woods monetary system.6