The creation of the global economy sped up in the 1990s with the development of the Internet and the accompanying economic boom. As triumphal narratives of a global West emerged, a counternarrative of exploitation of the developing world for the comfort of the world’s wealthiest nations emerged as well. Since 2001, every gathering of the G8 (the leaders of the eight largest economies in the world: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Russia) has been met with organized, sometimes violent, protests. The marchers decry the consumerism and materialism of the West, and the use of poorly paid labor in Africa and Asia to sustain Western economies, as suggested by this Greenpeace protester at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy.

Reuters/Stefano Rellandini, July 17, 2001. © Reuters/Corbis.