After reading your comment below Gramatik's answer, you seem to be asking if the outcomes of globalization aren't effectively the same as those of imperialism. I think this is a more difficult question because imperialism often increased trade, a hallmark of globalisation. The real question is what kind of trade.
The first forms of globalisation are linked in part to the great
empires that, by politically unifying very vast and disparate territories, enhanced the movement of goods and people across continents.
From the 6th to the 4th century BC, merchants crisscrossed the vast
Persian Empire, which spread from the Mediterranean to the River
Ganges and covered a mosaic of peoples and civilisations. Its successor, Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire, also linked the East
and the West, pushing the borders even farther apart. This period of
cultural integration of disparate peoples (demonstrated by the Great
Library of Alexandria) also spread trading techniques, like the use of
currency. The city-states of the post-Macedonian Hellenistic civilisation took advantage of the expanded borders and continued to engage
heavily in (essentially maritime) trade. [...]
Trade grew considerably worldwide thanks to metropolises and
their colonies, but the major powers jealously defended their trading areas by applying protectionist measures, according to the then
dominant political economy theory – mercantilism. This doctrine
assumed that a nation-state’s power depended on its reserves of precious metals. To grow richer, the state – at the heart of the
economy – had to develop international trade and increase its
exports by exploiting the resources of colonial territories. But the
tariff schedule forced certain colonies to trade solely with their ruling kingdom and so the international trading posts on different continents stayed attached to their respective crowns (Spain, Portugal,
Netherlands, France, Great Britain, etc.). In the 18th century, Britain
was Jamaica’s only authorised trading partner. Guadeloupe, a
French possession, could only trade with French intermediaries.
I think it's obvious that given the backlash against globalization in some developed countries today that they are no longer in a position to exercise this kind of exploitative trade that characterised colonialism. (I can elaborate more on this if you want me to, but it seems obvious enough to me.)
Of course, some argue that there are less overt forms of imperialism today, but I think the point is clear that the most obvious form of imperialism (=colonialism) did not have the same trade characteristics as the globalisation of today. So real difficulty with your question is defining imperialism, e.g. contrast
In a recent polemic with Slavoj Žižek, Iranian scholar, Hamid Dabashi reflected a wider intellectual current that neo-globalisation has led us to an impasse in the idea of imperialism. Before the effects of neo-globalisation, imperialism was all so simple. The classic theorisations of imperialism had predominately seen neo-Marxists theoretically expand John Hobson’s thesis that maldistribution of income in Europe was key to understanding colonial expansion beyond Europe. Writers such as Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin examined how factors, such as the rise of monopoly capitalism and the internationalisation of capital and labour exploitation, were directly linked to the expansion of Western imperial empire and inter-imperial conflict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At the mid-point of the twentieth century, in the midst of the rise of US geo-political hegemony and the onset of decolonisation, dependency theory would advance this idea of a Western-centred imperial world order. Imperialism now not only characterised the territorial expanse of formal Western empires, but also the West’s informal economic and military oppression of newly independent countries. This idea of imperialism centred on a geo-political division between the ‘Centre and Periphery’, where the metropolitan centre, its elites, states, multi-national corporations and geo-political institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank), systematically underdeveloped the periphery (Global South) for profit. This created a neo-imperial order where newly independent Third World countries were perpetually placed on the outer-limits of the global economy, providing raw materials, natural resources and inflows of capital to industrialised countries in the West and unable to develop their own industries and infrastructure free of Western interference. The only solution to this problematic was thus an anti-imperial politics of ‘de-linking’ from the Western controlled global economy.
So if you simply want to call the [neo-]globalisation of today [neo-]imperialism, as some do, then there's no difference indeed. But I think doing this relies on a shell game of unclear concepts.
N.B. dependency theory has apparently given way to "digital colonialism"
This paper proposes a theoretical and conceptual framework explaining how the United States is reinventing colonialism in the Global South through the domination of digital technology. Drawing on South Africa as a case example, it argues that US multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware, and network connectivity. This gives rise to five related forms of domination. First, the monopoly power of multinational corporations is used for resource extraction through rent and surveillance, constituting a new form of economic domination. Second, by controlling the digital ecosystem, Big Tech corporations control computer-mediated experiences, giving them direct power over political, economic, and cultural domains of life – a new form of imperial control. Third, the centerpiece of surveillance capitalism, Big Data, violates the sanctity of privacy and concentrates economic power into the hands of US corporations – a system of global surveillance capitalism. Fourth, as a feature of surveillance capitalism, Global North intelligence agencies partner with their own corporations to conduct mass and targeted surveillance in the Global South. This intensifies imperial state surveillance. And fifth, US elites have persuaded most people that society must proceed according to its own ruling class conceptions of the digital world, setting the foundation for tech hegemony.
I for one could not read that without a WTF continuously popping in my head, but as you can see some people see globalization this way. (And that was actually published in a peer reviewed journal.)
