Globalization gets a cogent and well-document defense in Eric L. Jones’s Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture (2006). Those who fear that contact with Western civilization will corrupt the “pristine” non-European cultures of remote shores often overlook the positive role that foreign trade and adaptation to external influences have played in shaping both a culture’s net exporters and its net importers.

Paul A. Cantor is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English and Director of the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Virginia.
Defense and Foreign PolicyInternational Economics and DevelopmentTrade
Other Independent Review articles by Paul A. Cantor
Summer 2001 This Is Not Your Father’s FBI: The X-Files and the Delegitimation of the Nation State