The New Global History

Bruce Mazlish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134131426
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From a distinguished author in the field, The New Global History is a critical inquiry into the historical process of globalization, which is seen as a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon with its roots in the age of expansion of the early modern world.

Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, The New Global History offers a fresh, overarching view of the process of globalization that is always empirically based and discusses the most important themes, such as policy, trade, cultural imperialism and warfare. Bruce Mazlish argues that globalization is not something that the West has imposed upon the rest of the world, but the result of the interplay of many factors across continents.

Students of history, politics and international studies, will all find this a valuable resource in the pursuit of their studies.

Part I

Nature of New Global History

Chapter 1

Globalization without end

A framing

Let us start with two ways of looking at globalization. The first assumes that globalization is a thread running through all of humanity’s past, starting with generations of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, over millennia, gradually migrating across the world. In this sense, there is no set beginning, as well as no foreseeable end. The second involves the fact that globalization in its present-day incarnation is a subject of endless debate as to what it is and where it is going. Taken together, these two ways add up to a kind of “globalization without end,” both as discourse and possible reality.

In the Introduction, I essayed a brief definition of globalization. It is well to go a bit further now with this problem. Many who brush up against this definitional problem are aghast at the lack of agreement on what the term means, and often throw up their hands and mutter under their breath “globaloney.” This understandable frustration is misguided. Any concept used in regard to large-scale social processes is bound to be vague and contested, for it seeks to aid us in grasping powerful and protean forces, twisting and turning over time, and not easily encompassed by words. So the first thing to recognize, as one scholar tells us, is that “the meaning of some concepts derive [sic] from controversy rather than from any consensus about their meaning.”¹

It is essential to recognize that globalization’s meaning or meanings lies in the very arguments brought to bear on the concept. In its simplest form, I will argue, it is a theory about social relations, emphasizing that those relations, whatever their specific form, are becoming more widespread, with the parties to them more and more interconnected and interdependent in various ways. There is always a geographical dimension to this development as greater expansion into the world takes place. Without all parts of the world becoming more and more known, there can only be a limited increase in social relations. In speaking of geography, I should add that today’s virtual space is as much a dimension of interconnectivity as was the sixteenthcentury circumnavigation of the globe or any number of other, similar transformations of geocultural space.

To give a bit more support to this kind of definition, I will cite the historian C. A. Bayly’s view that globalization is “a progressive increase in the scale of social processes from a local or regional to a world level.”² For him the concept is a heuristic device, one that draws attention to dynamics, while abjuring a description of progressive linear social change. Thus, his definition has the merit of suggesting to us a difference between global, or new global, history and what is called world history; the latter tends to deny or neglect directionality. In contrast, accepting the idea of direction in historical development, the sociologist Sylvia Walby speaks affirmatively of globalization as “a process of increased density and frequency of international or global interactions relative to local or national ones.”³ With these additional definitions, we are on our way to a focused concern with present-day globalization as studied by new global historians.

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Though my emphasis will be on the new globalization, we must constantly bear in mind its antecedents and earlier forms, even at the risk of reciting well-known facts (although they are placed in a new light). Central to the globalization of the past few centuries has been the state, or rather the nation-state. Indeed, as has been frequently noted, the transcending of nation-state boundaries is at the core of one variation on the definition of globalization. Consequently, the coming into being of the modern state is an essential feature as we try to understand globalization past and present.

After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, a governmental structure that emphasizes sovereignty becomes more and more important.⁴ A brief description suggests that such sovereignty is both political and economic, for the modern state functions increasingly as a single market. Additionally, in theory, such a state is to respect the inviolable sovereignty of other states, but in practice resort is often had to war. Such wars require ever more efficient tax systems, military technologies, improved communications, and a host of similar devices, and thus the further strengthening of the state.⁵

All of these developments can also be found in empires. What was new in the modern states that arose in Europe was their acceptance in principle of other sovereignties, whereas empires, at least according to Martin Van Creveld, cannot accept equals. As he puts it, empires “looking beyond their borders . . . saw not other political communities with a right to an independent existence, but barbarians.”⁶ With nation-states, moreover, we have the possibility of an international system, made up of equal sovereignties along with laws and conventions by which they adjust their relations to each other, and settle differences peacefully. Before the nation as such we cannot really have an international system.

There is a vast literature on the nation-state. I have drawn on it here to make the point that without its emergence what we call globalization today, especially as it plays out in regard to internationalism, would have no meaning. So, too, the European state has been the prime agency in the exploration of the globe, and in its subsequent exploitation. It is the state that introduced the era of global warfare, with the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) anticipating the world wars of the twentieth century. It is the nation-state that has been cloned globally (even with only partial success), with over 190 of them now represented in the United Nations. In short, an early phase of globalization was carried out by the very form, the nation-state, which is now under subversion by present-day globalizing forces.

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That is one part of the earlier globalizing story. Another piece is the rise of merchant empires. Their primary aim was to pursue profit, though this might entail the use of violence. In this they differed from the nation-states that stood behind them, which had territorial gain as a direct goal and assumed violence as the necessary means of such acquisition. The two, state and merchant empire, go together, however, for it was the relatively small and rivalrous states, for example, Portugal, Spain, the Italian city states, the Netherlands, England, and France, whence the merchants and their ships came and went, West and East.

It was, as we know, primarily as a result of the new states and the merchant empires that a quantum jump took place in the fifteenth century, and the whole globe swam into view. We need not rehearse the discovery of the “New World,” the subsequent circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan in 1517–20 and the later voyages of discovery in the Far East, but merely signal their role in this early phase of globalization. A nice symbolic touch is afforded by the present of a magnificent golden globe whose oceans were made from green enamel by Francis Drake to his Queen, Elizabeth, after being knighted for his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580—the first by an Englishman—and his plundering of the Spanish fleet.

Central to the whole story is the sea. Covering about seven-eighths of the earth’s surface, it stood outside the usual empires of history, an uncharted and unconquered realm. When the small nations of the West built fleets that could sail upwind, they could open a new chapter in history and reach all parts of the globe, with the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans linked through the Straits of Magellan. No wonder that “stout Cortez” (actually, Balboa) stood in awe, as Keats tells us, at the sight of the Pacific glimpsed from a peak in Darien!

Numerous advances in astronomy, mapping, surveying and navigating were required for the European vessels to find their way across the largely uncharted seas. As it turned out, navies were expensive, and most empires had neither the will nor the means to harness their resources in this direction. Those states that did profited greatly, though paying a terrible price in lives lost to the watery depths. In any case, the future lay with the European control of the oceans. Spurred on by a religion claiming global dominion— the papal demarcation of most of the known globe between Spain and Portugal was a palpable demonstration though in the event unsuccessful— and by a market-driven economy that knew no geographical limits, the European powers gradually and painfully established a global hegemony. These European nations, becoming imperial, merged the national and the global in one sweeping movement.

The effect of the merchant empires was both material and cultural. As one scholar puts it, “Silks and cottons, coffee and tea, tobacco and opium, tomatoes and potatoes, rice and maize, porcelain and lacquerware—the impact … on European material culture proved profound and permanent. No less striking were the mental changes, beginning with wonder at strange plants, beasts, and men, and culminating in the fruitful cultural relativism that spouted from European encounters with Americans, Africans and Asians.”⁷ It is not too much to claim that the merchant empires, along with developments in science and philosophy, helped create the conditions in the seventeenth century that led to the early Enlightenment and all that follows from that, including the sense of cosmopolitanism.

Such is the European perspective. In the eye of global history we must also see the impact of the merchant empires not only on their home countries, but also on those whose shores they reached. Japan can serve as one example. In the sixteenth century, Japan and, in this case, Portugal were initially ignorant of one another, as if existing on separate planets. When a vessel carrying a small band of Portuguese merchants was blown off course and three of its men landed in the southwest of Japan, each side was significantly affected by the encounter. The Europeans encountered a culture more civilized than their own, while the Japanese were made aware that “there is another world greater than ours.”⁸ Such effects were confirmed by the English who arrived in Japan almost 60 years later. Though the Westerners had superior astronomy and knowledge of navigation, they were struck by the sharp swords of the samurai and the cultivated aesthetics of their Japanese hosts. On the Japanese side, muskets and cannon were briefly incorporated by the Shogun into his army, helping him to establish the Tokugawa power that was to persist until the second opening of Japan, with Perry’s arrival in 1853, when the Tokugawa was succeeded by the Meiji regime.

These are global effects. They are part of the connections being made by the expansionist powers of Europe through their mastery of the seas. They also mark the beginnings of the gulf of superior development that was to open up between the West and the rest of the world, a development which is conceived of as going forward under the banner of modernity. In this effort, the state and its merchant empires were joined at the hip. The resultant globalization was part of nation-building, in which emerging nations were achieving supremacy over existing empires, or rather substituting ocean-based merchant empires for more traditional land-based ones.

From the beginning, it was trade that played the major role in the great change in awareness that underlay this phase of globalization. It was economic exchange, carried out by the merchant empires, that dramatically affected the conceptualization of space, which, along with time, stands at the heart of one decisive definition of globalization. Of course, there were other causes underlying the great expansion and, paradoxically, contraction of space/time. But the merchant empires are the prime carriers of that change in coordinates. Subsequent history can be told as the story of that ever-increasing contraction and expansion.

It is in this light that we should think of America. America, of course, was supposed to be China when Columbus set sail for the fabled East. Once the new awareness that it was a separate continent took hold, America became the scene of national/imperial expansion in the Southern part, with Spanish conquistadors as agents of the state. In the North we find our familiar merchant empire, embodied in such groups as the Hudson Bay Company and later the Massachusetts Bay Company. Thus, America, as it became known, accidentally being named after Amerigo Vespucci, and with the North subsequently arrogating to itself that name as if South and Central America did not exist, was global in its inspiration, with its discovery affirming the fact that a globe existed, to be circumnavigated shortly thereafter.

Collapsing a long story, I want simply to underline the fact that America became part of an empire, the British one, intimately tied to the merchant empires that traded in slaves, and thus of the entire plantation base of the early modern economy. Henceforth, race would haunt the history of the future USA, a “local” effect of a global movement. So, too, Africa was dragged into the globalization that characterizes this phase of development, though subsequently falling behind Europe and Asia in terms of both nation-building and modernity. In short, as American historians are coming gradually to realize, we cannot understand the USA any more than other sections of the world without placing it from the beginning in the context of globalization.

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I want momentarily to expand our panorama before narrowing our attention to the present and its new globalization. Humanity has sought to give meaning to its existence in time and space through many means, myths and religions being prime examples. With the coming of a form of knowledge known as “history,” arising in “scientific” form, i.e., as promulgated by Herodotus and Thucydides in fifth-century Greece, universal or world histories arose. Such visions took the form not only of universal history, but more recently of philosophies of history, world-system analysis, world history, Big History, Global, and now New Global History.⁹

Clearly, there is much debate as to the nature of globalization, its origins, its nodes of existence, how it might be studied, and so forth. One important contribution is the book Globalization in World History, edited by A. G. Hopkins, which deals with some of the early stages of global history. A collection of essays, it attacks the illusion that globalization is simply a Western creation, and argues that it is a state of affairs jointly created by all parts of the world. The essays give details about Asia, Islam and other areas and cultures, and their participation in the construction of globalization, though the focus is much on the eighteenth century and the role of the West. In addition, Hopkins sets up a schema in terms of archaic, proto, modern, and postcolonial globalization, best viewed, however, as a “series of overlapping and interacting sequences rather than as a succession of neat stages.”¹⁰ Hopkins’ collection and its ideas serve as a useful transition to the New Global History as well as to the discussion of present-day globalization that I am undertaking in this book.

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In undertaking this task, I want to emphasize anew the holistic nature of our enterprise. To do so is to stress that, as one author commented about colonialism, an early factor in modern globalization, it is simultaneously a “process in political economy and culture … indissoluble aspects of the same reality.”¹¹ Or rather, I would argue, globalization is a matter of politics, economics, cultures, and many other factors—reflecting the synthesis and synergy mentioned earlier—a whole that we break into parts because of our inability immediately to grasp it entirely, as well as for disciplinary reasons. That is why, to deal with this problem, New Global History is so insistently interdisciplinary. This is why the sort of analysis involved in the work, say, of Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, who claim the period 1870–1914 was marked by greater globalization than the present, is so narrow, limited to economics, and resolutely ignoring the larger context in which this one part of globalization exists.¹² It is for this reason that we need a new perspective, embodied in what I am calling New Global History, building as it does on the World and Global histories that have come before it.

In the simplest terms, then, New Global History is dedicated to the study of the new globalization that has emerged some time in the period after WW II. Revealing is the entry of the word “globalization” into the human vocabulary. Some argue that it was coined in the 1960s in the USA or in Latin America, others that it is a neologism introduced in the 1970s by the Japanese. Whichever is correct—and more research is needed on this topic— it represents a profound shift in human consciousness, symbolic recognition and thus self-awareness of what has been taking place in real life. The term speaks of an historically unprecedented development, as part of which the national, regional, and international are supplanted or supplemented by global forces. These are not under the control of any government, and are best spoken of in terms of flows and processes. They present problems that can no longer be dealt with adequately on the local level, but require global efforts.

Not surprisingly, present-day globalization is not only new and emergent, but incomplete and unequal in its effects, good and bad. For scholars it gives rise to what Arjun Appadurai has called “anxiety” about globalization studies. Where, they may ask, are the archives from which to write its story? How can it avoid the pitfalls of self-proclaimed contemporary history (although it is now more than 50 years old) where we are too close to events to understand them? One way to deal with such anxiety is to dismiss the phenomenon completely: it’s nothing new, only old wine in new bottles. Another way is to pour scorn on the subject by calling it a mere fashion, soon to pass away. A more dramatic way is to embrace anti-globalization and try to reverse the process itself, whether by protests (such as against the World Trade Organization and World Bank), boycotts (e.g., against Nike), or other demonstrations of hostility.

Closely connected to such scholarly anxiety is the notion of risk. Thus it is the thesis of Ulrich Beck and others that today we are faced with “global, often irreparable damage that can no longer be limited.”¹³ This can take the form of global warming, ozone holes, disease spread by air travel or acts of human destruction for which no insurance can compensate. Unlike natural disasters, these risks result from “decisions that focus on techno-economic advantages and opportunities and accept hazards as simply the dark side of progress.” In a global epoch, of course, these consequences may be both irreversible and catastrophically affect the entire world.

Add to anxiety and risk a host of misperceptions and one can see readily why globaliza...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Nature of New Global History
• Part II: Factors of New Global History
• Part III: Policy and Morality
• Notes