Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas

Globalization is one of the most contentious subjects of our time—but it has a history. In Outside the Box, Marc Levinson explains why the complex value chains that defined it starting in the 1980s were merely the third stage in a phenomenon that has evolved over two centuries. Subsidies and misjudgments of risk arguably led to excessive globalization in the early 21st century. By the 2010s, the world economy entered a fourth phase of globalization in which trading services will come to matter more than shipping goods. 

Marc Levinson is an independent historian living in Washington, DC. His previous books include The Box, an acclaimed history of how container shipping made globalization possible; The Great A&P, which tells the story of a struggle between small business and big business that tore America apart; and An Extraordinary Time, a history of the global economic slowdown of the 1970s and its political consequences. He holds a doctorate from City University of New York.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.