Consider the following comments on globalisation.
Globalisation made the world smaller for goods and larger for the people left behind.
The world is becoming a single market and a thousand resentments at once.
A shipping container did more to reshape the century than most armies.
We were promised one connected village and given one shared vulnerability instead.
Trade binds nations together, then dares them to remember they once made things themselves.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Argue that globalisation has been neither the engine of universal prosperity its champions promised nor the simple theft its critics describe, but a vast redistribution whose winners and losers rarely sit at the same table. Begin by conceding the real gains, that integrated markets have lifted hundreds of millions from poverty and spread medicine, technology and ideas at unprecedented speed. Then press the complication: those gains were unevenly captured, hollowing out some communities while enriching others, so a true statement about the average hides a brutal story about the variance. A useful third move examines the new fragility, where a fault in one country's supply chain or banking system becomes everyone's crisis. Caution: avoid both the technocratic faith that more openness is always progress and the nostalgic fantasy that a nation can simply wall itself back into the past.