Au prisme des mots

Abstract

It is usually accepted that the French word “mondialisation” was coined in the early 1960s and that its use became common since the 1980s, although we also recognize that globalization, as a progressive integration of different parts of the world, began before. Today, the increasing digitization of publications allows us to refine the researches on past use of words and their invention. Thus, it appears that the French word “mondialisation” undoubtedly goes back to the period of the First World War and since then it has been regularly used, but without finding the success it has experienced since the 1990s. The historical study of the lexical field of globalization in different European languages, put towards the process of globalization since the end of the XVth century, allows following the various stages of the elaboration of a speech on the unification of the world until today.

Keywords

• globalization/globalisation
• geohistory
• representation
• metahistory
• cartography