The brief historical time line in the previous notes suggests a possible story about the processes of human and social evolution - the underpinnings of globalisation (whatever we mean by the term):

• -200,000 yrs -> -10,000yrs. - our human ancestors multiplied and migrated from their origins in Africa to populate the global land mass, as hunter-gatherers
• -10,000 yrs -> - 5,000 yrs - humans cultivated their natural environment and became farmers - and village/town dwellers - in the Neolithic revolution following the last ice age.(1st Agricultural revolution)
• -3000 yrs - trade and exchange already well established in the Near East , centering on raw materials and artifacts: world population reaches 1 million. 
• 'religion' and self/social-belief systems well established.
•  Empires emerge, grow, fight and dissipate - the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Samarra, and Uruk
  
• 0 yrs. (1AD):  Global Population reaches 150 million (about twice the present UK population);  
• Trade routes span the known world. 
• Major Cities emerge. By 100 AD, two cities of >400,000 people, 2 of 250,000 and 4 of 100,000+
• 15th C: Printing press and 'discovery' of the 'New World, world popn. 300m
  
• 18th C: Industrial revolution  (and 2nd. Agricultural revolution)-  coal, steam, iron and machines (textiles and transport) + sanitation, clean water and vaccination: world popn. grows from 600m to 900m. (2nd Ag. Revolution - labour exodus, expansion of farm size & commercialisation of agriculture (including application of science, augmented by expansion of territory to 'new world')
  
• 1880-1914: European Empires and patterns of world trade. world popn. exceeds 1 bn to reach 1.6bn by 1900.
• 20thC World War I, Great depression, World War II, Cold War, massive development, growth & innovation, including '3rd' agricultural revolution  (green): mechanical & chemical & hybridisation and -> (?)
  
• 21st C GLOBALISATION: world popn reaches 7 bn., threatening to grow to 9bn. by 2050. Global mobile phone accounts (2010) 4.6bn, (Economist). 4th. Ag. Rev needed (double green)?  GM/GE + precision agriculture?  Information & Communication revolution
  

        Four authoritative and short assessments of the recent dramatic changes in world relations: 
Economist: "Rethinking the “third world”:  Seeing the world differently", June 10th, 2010. "Since 2008, says the World Bank, they (developing countries) have contributed almost all of what economic growth there has been. In the 1980s they accounted for 33.7% of global income, at purchasing-power parities. This year, the share will be 43.4%.  ... (Nevertheless) The world remains binary. Over 1 billion people live on $1.25 or less a day, more than did when the term third world was coined. Many live in countries, like Brazil and India, that seem to have escaped from the third world. And 60 or so small poor countries retain third-world characteristics: aid dependency, corruption, violence."
Pscal Lamy, WTO Director General, “The Doha Round marks a transition from the old governance of the old trade order to the new governance of a new trade order”, speach on the occasion of the WTO's 10th birthday (Oct. 1st, 2010) "Developing countries' share of world trade has grown from a third to over half in just fifteen years — and China has just passed Japan as the world's second biggest national economy, and Germany as the world's top exporter. ...We still think in terms of Adam Smith's world of trade between nations, but in reality most trade now takes place within globe-spanning multinational companies and their suppliers.  It is not competition between China and the US that is relevant, so much as competition between Nokia's and Samsung's value chains.  Instead of “Made in China” on the back of an iPhone, the label should read “Made in the World”, reflecting Japanese microchips, US design, Korean flat-screens and Chinese assembly. (which means that our traditional trade stats., by country, are now, perhaps, almost meaningless). This is an important speach from the boss of the WTO.
Who Runs the 21stC. World? - a brief commentary on the major Global Institutions (Economist, July 3rd. 2008), including a table indicating their relative size.
Special Report: The World Economy (Economist), 13.10.2012 - 12 articles in all.
An alternative answer is provided by Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel. (see, also, PBS pages) - that geographical and biological advantage favoured the european land mass (temperate, well connected and polulated with domesticable plants (wheat, barley, flax, legumes) and animals (horse, cow, sheep, goats) -> cultivation, civilisation and growth (specialisation and trade), which provided both a base and a need for the development of military force for both defence and expansion (guns); and also for steel (machines and power); and also generated disease in dense populations and disease resistance (germs), which, when transmitted to more sparsely populated regions (the Americas) proved decisive. -an evolutionary accident generating positive feedback loops which proved self-reinforcing.

A further answer is provided by Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009), which relies more on economics: "In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a European-wide market emerged. England took a commanding position in this new order as her wool textile industry out competed the established producers in Italy and the Low Countries. England extended her lead in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by creating an intercontinental trading network including the Americas and India. Intercontinental trade expansion depended on the acquisition of colonies, mercantilist trade promotion, and naval power." [Though the Dutch and others also managed similar expansion at this time].
In England, rapid urbanisation and growth -> increased demand for fuel (wood replaced by easily and cheaply available coal). ["Energy was more expensive on the European continent and particularly expensive in China (Figure 2)."
Rapid growth also -> higher wages and incomes - rising cost of labour & increased demand for manufactured and imported goods
-> Commercialisation and revolution of agriculture (to feed the rich and growing urban population)
"Success in international trade created Britain’s high wage, cheap energy economy, and it was the spring board for the Industrial Revolution. High wages and cheap energy created a demand for technology that substituted capital and energy for labour.... The technologies that were used (in England vs, China) reflected the relative prices of capital, labour, and energy. Since it was costly to invent technology, invention also responded to the same incentives."  "These technologies (steam driven) eventually revolutionised the world, but at the outset they were barely profitable in Britain, and their commercial success depended on increasing the use of inputs that were relatively cheap in Britain. In other countries, where wages were lower and energy more expensive, it did not pay to use technology that reduced employment and increased the consumption of fuel. .. Since the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were only profitable to adopt in Britain, that was also the only country where it paid to invent them."  In addition, the demand for R&D, education and training to develop the industrial muscle and sophistication also generated a supply repsonse (private education, apprenticeships, and respect for science and research), and the development of venture capitalists (the early banks) willing to finance R&D.
Once started, however, the drive for progress in harness with the expansion of the British Empire, led rapidly to increasing efficiency of steam power: "The consumption of coal in steam engines, for instance, was cut from 45 pounds per horse power-hour in the early eighteenth to only 2 pounds in the mid-nineteenth. The genius of British engineering undermined the country’s technological lead by creating ‘appropriate technology’ for the world at large. By the middle of the nineteenth century, advanced technology could be profitably used in countries like France with expensive energy and India with cheap labour. Once that happened, the Industrial Revolution went world wide."
In short, expensive labour and cheap energy spawned the industrial revolution. And trade helps enormously. The Black Death raised the price of labour and boosted trade. English sheep grew longer fleeces as they grazed fields newly left fallow, and local cloth improved. As Britain traded more, extending its reach to the Americas and Asia, London, then other cities, expanded. Agriculture became more productive. Between 1500 and 1800 England shifted people out of farming faster than any other big European country. The coal that Britain was lucky enough to have was mined in growing quantities to fuel city dwellings. By 1800 Britain was producing “the vast preponderance” of the world’s coal, and it was cheap.
Thanks to trade, wages stayed high although the population grew. Education improved (though the Dutch still had a higher literacy rate in 1800). So did diet, permitting people to work longer and harder. And trade gave them a reason to, bringing in exotic products that well-paid workers could aspire to. This “industrious revolution” made possible the industrial revolution. Steam engines were originally designed to pump water out of the pits and railways to move coal around them. The watchmakers of southern Lancashire proved an unequalled source of high-quality, low-cost gears."

DRH Note - the major migrations to and colonisations of the 'new world' also provided valuable 'safety valves' for European (and especially British) industrialisation - by providing an escape route for the disaffected and displaced (Scots from the Highland clearances, Irish from the Potato famines); and also by providing both the means of and demands for transport (ships and railways) and the food and raw material supplies for the home population. Not only this, but the revolution was also based (at least partly) on the slave trade. Could the industrial revolution have happened without these safety-valves?  Would it have been different and had a different development path without them?

See, also, Angus Maddison: Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD : Essays in Macro-Economic History, Oxford, 2007 (e-book). "Written by a pioneer in the quantitative and macroeconomic analysis of economic history, this book combines qualitative histories with quantitative data. It also seeks a new understanding of the forces of economic growth and development by taking the ultimate long view - the whole of the last millennium - and looking to the future. This book seeks to identify the forces which explain how and why some parts of the world have grown rich and others have lagged behind. Encompassing 2000 years of history, part 1 begins with the Roman Empire and explores the key factors that have influenced economic development in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. Part 2 covers the development of macroeconomic tools of analysis from the 17th century to the present. Part 3 looks to the future and considers what the shape of the world economy might be in 2030. Combining both the close quantitative analysis for which Professor Maddison is famous with a more qualitative approach that takes into account the complexity of the forces at work, this book provides students and all interested readers with a totally fascinatingoverview of world economic history. Professor Maddison has the unique ability to synthesise vast amounts of information into a clear narrative flow that entertains as well as informs, making this text an invaluable resource for all students and scholars, and anyone interested in trying to understand why some parts of the World are so much richer than others" [Angus Maddison passed away on 24 April 2010]
Maddison's original website contains a number of 'seminal' papers on economic growth and development - see, especially, "New Estimates of Chinese Growth Performance and Potential 1952-2030", which shows how difficult it is to measure economic growth; and "Economic Epochs and their Interpretation", and "European Capitalism: an historic and comparative perspective" - an excellent account of the last 200 years of economic development in the West.

For more on the genesis of the industrial revolution, see: The story began in Bedlington, Northumberland: "The coming of the iron industry with the opening of the Bedlington Ironworks Company in 1736 changed the town from an isolated rural village to an industrial town."

Why didn't it happen in China?

Interesting question (aka The Needham Puzzle).   Diamond's (Guns) argument is that Western success was a coincidence driven by accidental good fortune - being in the right place at the right time - a view which is quintessentially postmodern.  Ian Morris: "Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History", History Today, 20. Oct, 2010, argues a similar thesis.  Diamond's more recent book -  ''Collapse'' posits that the Western way of life is flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi and the Mayans to vanish. .“...“ The big problem with this view (Guns)  is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change, at least after the Ming dynasty (1368 -1664) - [as does Menger (op cit)]. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a political/cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was rapidly developing the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds. Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a factory manufacturing jet engines." (Gregg Easterbrook, NYTimes) - Socio-economic development is a political/cultural phenomenon, then, as argued by Landes (above).

See, also: Daniel Venn, Warwick University, "Why Did The Industrial Revolution Take Place In Europe And Not Asia?" (2005), who surveys the arguments, without coming to a major conclusion - other than that the industrial revolution might well have happened in China.  Stenger (op.cit, intro) suggests that China turned inwards rather than outwards at the time when industrialisation was possible and made sense, and (by implication) only reversed this position in the last 30 years, and is now experiencing its own industrial revolution - the implication being that China's failure to 'capitalise' on her early technological and knowledge base was largely political.
See, also:  John Darwin "After Tamerlane: the global history of Empire since 1405", excerpted in this blog.
Or, Justin Yifu Lin, "The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China", Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jan., 1995), pp. 269-292, who suggests that China, while demonstrating major technical advance based on experience (and practitioner trial & error), did not manage to make the transition to the science/experimental methods developed in Europe in the 17th C., and develops an argument based on the conditions necessary for significant advance by experiential trial and error versus by scientific expermentation. He concludes that the cultural legacy of well organised bureaucracy (and associated service to the 'state') in China, in contrast to the more individually hierarchical social 'systems' in Europe, is at least a part of the explanation.  Dr. Patrick Leung, Economic History of China: "Why industrial revolution did not occur in China?" argues along similar lines.
Or, for a sociological perspective,  Mark Elvin, "Why China failed to create an endogenous industrial capitalism",  Theory and Society, Volume 13, Number 3, 379-391, DOI: 10.1007/BF00213231 for a critique of the Weberian explanation, and arguing that an economic and ecological explanation is simpler, more internally consistent, and more capable of empirical examination than Weber's cultural and ideological explanation (though possibly less entertaining and intuitively appealing?)
And Naill Ferguson:  "The 6 killer apps of prosperity" (neither geography nor national character/culture can explain the differences in prosperity) - as presented in his recent book and TV series: Civilisation.

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What should we learn? Is collapse inevitable?

Diamond (Collapse, above) suggests that collapse is inevitable until and unless we take much better care of our environments.  Those subscribing to the cultural explanation necessarily require that our cultures have to change if we are to be sustainable, which seems to suggest that collapse is inevitable short of a second coming.  Joseph Tainter (author of the classic - The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988) - library catalogue) argues that complexity of problem solving is the major difficulty, requiring ever increasing effort and resource which ultimately undermines the capacity of the society to survive.  See Tainter: Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies, for a synopsis - though this argument does not indicate any clear directions to avoid collapse. Others might reasonably complain that our politics are too cumbersome, incomplete, divisive, corrupt, etc. etc. to offer much prospect for future sustainable development. On the other hand, surely our command of technology can be harnessed ensure a more sustainable future?  Not, might come the response, unless our economics is very substantially revised.  So, do we need a new, revised, different IDEOLOGY?

The short answer to the issue of what we might learn from history is that it all depends on the 'story' about why what has happened has happened - and thus what we might expect to happen in the future (or at least to identify either the major and fundamental problems, and/or outline the major alternative options).  However, there is NO SINGLE, COHERENT AND CONSISTENT THEORY about the development of people and nations, other than some form of Socio-Economic, and therefore political and cultural Evolution, which necesarily happens in interaction with our natural and physical environments, and is not necessarly continually progressive.  A major problem with this evolutionary foundation is that it is fundamentally a-scientific - there are no (or very few) testable (refutable) propositions from the theory of evolution, which raises (even generates) some interesting philosophical issues.

Since understanding Globalisation Patterns and Processes necessarily involves consideration of what the nature of patterns and processes might be - we need to consider the philosophy of what we think we know - the philosoph(ies) of social science.  What (Metaphysical) stories do social scientists subscribe to?  What sort of ideological alternatives are available - ideology: "a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy", or "the set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual". In short -  What do we need from Social Science?
This might seem a large jump - from ideology to the philosophy of social science - but what else could possibly underlie any "scientific study of human society and social relationships"  i.e social science, other than a system of ideas and ideals forming the basis of economic, political or social theory?  Is the apparent fact that modern (economist) use of the term 'globalisation' arose following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the USSR and the effective demise of Communism (with a capital C) as a credible alternative to liberal, democratic capitalism a clear signal that ideology is a fundamental part of the phenomenon?  Is the apparent dominance of the liberal, democratic capitalist system (and assocated ideology) the 'climax' state of socio-economic and political evolution - as approximately argued by Fukuyama - really the "The End of History" (1992)?  More importantly, will we only know when it is too late?  [A little more on social science foundations and philiosophy, if you are interested, while the paper underlying 'what do we need from social science' is here.]