學習院大學文學部で出題された問題文です。7題中2題が長文讀解問題で、本題は2番目になります。「次の英文はノーベル經濟學賞(1998年)を受けたインドの經濟學者アマルティア・センによつて書かれたもの」といふ紹介が日本語で記されてゐます。
What exactly is globalization? Different global relations are included under this broad heading, varying from the expansion of cultural influences across borders to the enlargement of economic and business relations throughout the world. It is often argued that globalization is a new folly. Is that true? I would argue that globalization, in its basic form, is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly. It is through global movements of ideas, people, goods and technology that different regions of the world have tended to benefit from progress and development occurring in other regions. The direction of inter-regional movements of ideas has varied over history, and these variations in direction are important to recognize, since the global movement of ideas is sometimes seen just as ideological imperialism* of the West – as a one-sided movement that simply reflects an imbalance of power which needs to be resisted.
It may, in fact, teach us much if we think about the nature of the world not at the end of the second millennium, but at the end of the previous millennium. At the end of the first millennium, around 1000 CE*, globalization of science, technology, and mathematics was changing the nature of the old world, even though, as it happens, the main flow of change then was typically in the opposite direction to what we see today.
For example, the high technology in the world of 1000 included paper and printing, gunpowder, the clock and the magnetic compass. Every one of these ‘high-tech’ fields of knowledge in the world a millennium ago was well established in China, and at the same time was practically unknown elsewhere. It was globalization that spread them across the world, including Europe. We can similarly consider the impact of Eastern influence on Western mathematics. The decimal system* emerged and became well developed in India between the second and the sixth centuries, and was also used extensively soon after by Arab mathematicians. These procedures reached Europe mainly in the last quarter of the tenth century, and their huge effects were felt in the early years of the last millennium.
Globalization in mathematics as well as in science and engineering played a major part in the revolution of thought and social organization that helped to transform Europe into its modern shape. Europe would have been much poorer had it resisted the globalization of mathematics, science and technology at that time, and to a great extent the same – working in the opposite direction – is true today. To identify the phenomenon of the global spread of ideas with a form of ideological imperialism would be a serious error, somewhat similar to the way any European resistance to Eastern influence would have been at the beginning of the last millennium.
Notes: ideological imperialism イデオロギー上の帝國主義 1000 CE 西暦1000年 decimal system 十進法
[約455語]
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