The internationalization of economic activity in Europe first took off in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the development of new shipping technology that led to Spanish colonization of Latin America. However, the Chinese had developed better and more sophisticated technology much earlier but did not choose to use it to promote economic expansion. Similarly, the nineteenth century proved to be an era of increased international commerce, triggered by the industrial revolution but, in the 1930s, this economic expansion was reversed as political turmoil created the Great Depression. The contemporary phase of globalization only started to return global economic activity to nineteenth-century levels in the late 1970s.
Technological development does not necessarily lead to global production because governments can control how technology is used. The classic instrument for restraining trade is to impose taxes on imported goods (called tariffs) so that foreign products are artificially expensive and can't compete with domestic goods. All countries have tariffs on goods, although some taxes are more protectionist than others. Similarly there exist restrictions on foreign investment or the movement of capital. In being able to choose how much liberalization to allow, governments are responding to a variety of factors and politics.
Liberals argue that governments should want to promote free trade to make everyone wealthier. Technological change makes the benefits especially large and therefore increases incentives to liberalize trade, particularly as companies will pressure for opening so they can profit from outsourcing production. However, governments are not interested only in the procurement of cheap goods for their citizens " from a security perspective, it may be more prudent to produce weapons, and perhaps food, domestically. From a political perspective, foreign competition can bankrupt domestic businesses (which may benefit consumers with better value, more efficient goods, but disadvantages domestic companies whose employees face redundancy).