  We discuss gravitational effects of global scalar fields and, especially, of
global topological defects. We first give an introduction to the dynamics of
global fields and the formation of defects. Next we investigate the induced
gravitational fields, first in a flat background and then in the expanding
universe. In flat space, we explicitly calculate the gravitational fields of
exact global monopole and global texture solutions and discuss the motion of
photons and massive particles in these geometries. We also show that slowly
moving particles and the energy of photons are not affected in static scalar
field configurations with vanishing potential energy. In expanding space, we
explore the possibility that global topological defects from a phase transition
in the very early universe may have seeded inhomogeneities in the energy
distribution which yielded the observed large scale structure in the Universe,
the sheets of galaxies, clusters, voids ... . We outline numerical simulations
which have been performed to tackle this problem and briefly discuss their
results.
