Chapter 2 Flashcards
Capitalism
A form of economic and social organization characterized by the profit motive and the control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods by private ownership.
Climate change
Defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “a change in the state of the climate that can be identified,
like with using statistical tests, by changes in the mean and/or variability of its properties, and persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.
Colonization
The physical settlement in a new territory of people from a colonizing state.
Colonialism
The establishment and maintenance of political and legal domination by a state over a separate society.
Commodity chains
Networks of labour and production processes beginning with the extraction or production of raw materials and ending with the delivery of a finished commodity.
Digital divide
Inequality of access to telecommunications and information technology, particularly the internet.
Comparative advantage
The specialization of a country in an economic activity that does not duplicate or compete with the domestic suppliers within core countries.
Core regions
Regions that dominate trade, control the most advanced technologies, and have high levels of productivity within diversified economies.
Fast world
People, places, and regions directly involved, as producers and consumers, in transnational industry, modern telecommunications, materialistic consumption, and international news and entertainment.
Division of labour
The specialization of different people, regions, or countries in particular kinds of economic activities.
Environmental determinism
A doctrine holding that human activities are shaped and constructed by the environment.
Hearth areas
Geographic settings where new practices have developed and from which they have spread.
Ethnocentrism
The attitude that a person’s own race and culture are superior to those of others.
External areas
Regions of the world not yet absorbed into the modern world-system.
Globalization
The increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world through common processes of economic, environmental, political, and cultural change.
Hinterland
The sphere of economic influence of a town or city.
Hydraulic empire
A state in which despotic rulers organized labour intensive irrigation and drainage schemes that allowed for significant increases in agricultural productivity.
Hegemony
Domination over the world economy exercised by one national state in a particular historical epoch though a combination of economic, military, financial, and cultural means.
Law of diminishing returns
The tendency for productivity to decline with the continued application of capital and/or labour to a given resource base.
Imperialism
The deliberate exercise of military power and economic influence by powerful states in order to advance and secure their national interests.
Minisystem
A society with a single cultural base and a reciprocal social economy.
Import substitution
Copying and making goods preciously available only by trading.
Leadership cycles
Periods of international power established by individual states through economic, political, and military competition.
Pandemic
An epidemic that spreads rapidly around the world with high rates of illness and death.
