Global English and Political Economy

John P. O'Regan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138811119
• eBook ISBN: 9781317608776
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this book, John O'Regan examines the role of political economy in the worldwide spread of English and traces the origins and development of the dominance of English to the endless accumulation of capital in a capitalist world-system.

O'Regan combines Marxist perspectives of capital accumulation with world-systems analysis, international political economy, and studies of imperialism and empire to present a historical account of the 'free riding' of English upon the global capital networks of the capitalist world-system. Relevant disciplinary perspectives on global English are examined in this light, including superdiversity, translanguaging, translingual practice, trans-spatiality, language commodification, World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca. Global English and Political Economy presents an original historical and interdisciplinary interpretation of the global ascent of English, while also raising important theoretical and practical questions for perspectives which suggest that the time of the traditional models of English is past.

Providing an introduction to key theoretical perspectives in political economy, this book is essential reading for advanced students and researchers in applied linguistics, World Englishes and related fields of study.

1 The political economy of English in a capitalist world-system

English and capital

On June 27, 1615, Richard Wickham, the English East India Company’s Factor at Firando [Hirado] in Japan, wrote to his fellow Company agent, Mr Eaton, in Macao. In his letter Wickham begs Eaton to send him ‘a pot of the best sort of chaw’ (Ukers, 1935: 71–72). Wickham was referring to tea, and the mention of it is thought to be the first written reference to tea in the English language. We do not know if Wickham received his tea, but in addition to the interest of tea being known to English persons some decades before it first arrived in England, the communication also serves as an indication of the formal presence of English, and resident speakers of that language, in East Asia in the early seventeenth century. It may not have been a particularly significant presence of the language, but a presence it was nevertheless. It is now four hundred years since Wickham wrote his letter, and in that time English has advanced its position to become the most sought after and dominant language in the world (Choi, 2002; Reksulak, Shughart & Tollison, 2004; Piller & Takahashi, 2006; Ives, 2006; Chowdhury & Phan, 2014; Ricento, 2015b; Phan, 2017; Lemberg, 2018). It is also the language which, in a global context, appears to arouse the most passion and controversy, particularly amongst scholars of language and linguistics whose interests are with English and Englishes in the world. Here are some indicative alignments [other more recent ones are referenced later]: first, those that take an openly anti-imperialist stance towards global English (e.g. Phillipson, 1992, 2008; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996; Canagarajah, 1999); second, those that take a postcolonialist and to varying degrees [or not] a poststructuralist stance (e.g. Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013; Pennycook, 1998, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2020; Mazrui, 2004, 2016; Thiong’o, 1987, 1991; Rajagopalan, 2004, 2012; Kumaravadivelu, 2008); third, those who take a more-or-less Marxist stance (e.g. Block, Gray & Holborow, 2012; Holborow, 1999, 2015a; O’Regan, 2014); and lastly, those who take an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), World Englishes (WE), translingual practice, translanguaging or superdiversity stance – although these are by no means identical perspectives (Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011; Jenkins, 2006, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2009, 2012a; Mauranen, 2015; Kachru, 1985, 1996; Bhatt, 1995, 2001; Brutt-Griffler, 2002; Bolton, 2013; Sadeghpour, 2019; Sridhar, 2019; Canagarajah, 2013; García & Li, 2014; Li, 2018a, 2018b; Blommaert & Rampton, 2012; Arnaut & Spotti, 2014).¹ It is perhaps no exaggeration to state that for at least some of these scholars English in its ‘ideologized’ standard inner-circle form (Kachru, 1985; Ives, 2010: 528; see also Bailey, 2017; Peters, 2017) is one which is deserving of little praise or welcome, and in some corners is even met with outright disdain, for English is seen to come with a considerable social [in]justice burden attached to its history as well as to its present use. This is due, as might be expected, to the indubitable historical association of English with British colonialism and US imperialism on the one hand (Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1998) and its routinely negative association in the literature with the dominance of ‘native-speakerism’ or ‘native-speakerist’ ideologies on the other (passim). As many reading these lines will know, this refers to the widespread and for the most part instinctive conception that the English(es) of the anglophone core – that is, of the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland etc. – and the standard grammatical systems and enunciations on which these are based – somehow represent the most correct models of English in the world and are the forms which ought to be followed in the teaching of English in a largely taken-for-granted globalized age (Kachru, 1990; Quirk, 1989/1990). This book assumes a reasonable familiarity with these arguments and the associated scholarly debates.

1 There are of course many who would not readily be accommodated to such groupings, but this is meant to be more illustrative than prescriptive.

While some of these perspectives will be referred to in the course of this book, and indeed are returned to specifically in Chapter 7 when I consider what has usefully been referred to as the ‘multi/plural turn’ in applied linguistics (Kubota, 2016), it is not my intention to rehearse these different positions here at the outset, or to engage in an in-depth critical overview of them through the book, as this has been more than adequately done elsewhere (Blommaert, 2010; Holborow, 1999, 2015; Jenkins, 2009; Kubota, 2015, 2016; Kirkpatrick, 2010a; Park & Wee, 2012; Pennycook, 1994, 2001; Saraceni, 2015; Saxena & Omoniyi, 2010; Seargeant, 2012; Sowden, 2012; Grin, 2018; Ricento, 2018). A positional account which takes on these perspectives is not the main purpose of this book. Rather, I think of this book as more of a ‘desk clearing’ exercise in which I attempt to fill in a number of the historical and economic lacunae which have existed for me in applied linguistic and sociolinguistic accounts of the spread of English as a global language, and which I hope may show this spread in a different and more historical political-economic light. It has been an unfortunate absence as Block (2017a), Ricento (2015b) and others have suggested, that many applied linguists do not consider the economic dimension of language. As Bruthiaux has said, ‘In the end, it undermines the credibility of applied linguists and makes it unlikely they will play a significant role in solving the social injustices they so rightly deplore’ (Bruthiaux, 2008: 20). But as the growing body of work on language and political economy shows, this is now changing (see McGill, 2013; Block, 2017a, 2017b; Simpson & O’Regan, 2018, for overviews). In the course of this book, and particularly in Chapter 7 when the discussion is opened up to include approaches such as superdiversity, translanguaging and language commodification (Arnaut & Spotti, 2014; Blommaert & Rampton, 2012; Budach & de Saint-Georges, 2017; García & Li, 2014; Li, 2018a, 2018b; Heller, 2010; Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Boutet, 2012; Kelly-Holmes, 2016), these and some of the other positions mentioned earlier will be contested or ‘stressed’ to an extent; and it may be that the reader of these pages will wish to read the last few chapters first before proceeding to the rest of the book, since these are concerned with the current era and address directly more recent debates and concepts as these affect conceptualizations of English in the world today.

To reiterate then, this is a book about the political economy of English in relation to capital and the development of the capitalist world-system. That is, as a political economy, it is concerned with ‘the interrelatedness of political and economic processes and phenomena’ (Block, 2017a: 35) as these are implicated in the global dominance of English. But political economy, while central to this book, is not the whole of the story. The main issue as I see it, and which I wish to foreground in this book, is with the political and economic historiography of the global spread of English, which lacks historical as well as political-economic depth and duration (Braudel, 1980 [1958], 2012 [1958]; Wallerstein, 2000 [1974], 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d; O’Regan, 2021), although in the critical sociolinguistic tradition, scholars such as Bolton (2003), Blommaert (2010), Pennycook (1994, 1998, 2007), Phillipson (1992, 2008), Holborow (1999, 2015), Fairclough (2006), Seargeant (2012), and more recently Ricento (2015a) and Saraceni (2015) have each made important contributions. Blommaert indirectly points to this issue in his Sociolinguistics of Globalization (2010), when he refers to the ‘stereotyping [in the literature] of contemporary globalization processes as fundamentally and shockingly new things’ (p. 16). Blommaert notes an over-preoccupation with the recent past, as though globalization only dates to the late 1970s and the birth of modern neoliberalism and the Internet (Blommaert, 2010: 16), or to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Gilpin, 2001: 8). Block (2012a: 63) refers to it as a presentist outlook on the world (see also O’Regan, 2014, 2016; Simpson & O’Regan, 2018). These events certainly represent new ‘moments’ in recent historical globalization processes (Harvey, 1996, 2010), but the time which has elapsed since they occurred is too short to be able to draw substantive conclusions about the kind of world that we now find ourselves in, or in the context of this book, about the seeming universalization of English as the world’s dominant language. It also quite possibly leads us down erroneous paths. For others, and that includes scholars of global English, historians and political economists alike, 1945 is also often – not unreasonably – cited as the watershed moment for modern-day globalization processes and for the indelible hyper-centralization of English amongst the languages of the world (e.g. Calvet, 1998; Castells, 2006; De Swann, 2001; Fukuyama, 1992; Ritzer, 1993; Giddens, 1990, 2002; Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton, 1999; Gilpin, 2001; Nederveen Pieterse, 2009; Fairclough, 2006; Saxena & Omoniyi, 2010),² although common use of the term only came much later. As Gilpin has recorded, ‘The term “globalization” came into popular usage in the second half of the 1980s in connection with the huge surge in foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational corporations (MNCs)’ (Gilpin, 2001: 7). Further to this, Gilpin identifies the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as providing ‘the necessary political condition for the creation of a truly global economy’ (ibid: 8). The popularization of the term ‘globalization’ in combination with the global communications revolution which also exploded at just about this time seem to have been responsible for locating much of the debate about global English [and Englishes] within the timeframe of the relatively recent past, and rarely earlier than 1945; that is, unless it is to give an account of the history of English in a particular place or region, such as India (Roy, 1993, 1994; Evans, 2002), China (Adamson, 2002, 2004; L. Pan, 2015; Z. Pan, 2015; Gao, 2018) or Iran (Borjian, 2013; Rahimi, 2017; Goodrich, 2020).

2 I also wish to acknowledge that for several of these authors globalization is certainly not a process which only begins after 1945.

It is my purpose in this book to show that a historiography of global English, whose principal focus is the post-1945 or, still more recent, post-Cold War era is not entirely satisfactory either. I believe that it is necessary to start much earlier, that is, with the rise of capitalism and of capital accumulation as an end in itself (Marx, 1976 [1867]; Luxemburg, 1951 [1913]; Sweezy, 1972; Wallerstein, 2000 [1974]; Fine, 1978; Arrighi, 2010; Nichols, 2015). As Blommaert (2010) has commented, ‘one has to be precise with respect to the historical framing of the phenomena one examines’ (p. 16). This book thus represents an attempt – from a mostly [but not only] Marxist perspective – to put in one place a historically framed account of the global spread of English as this is connected to the global spread of capital, and to do this in the context of the rise of a capitalist world-system which has been in existence since the sixteenth century, although some place it a century earlier than that (Sweezy, 1972; Wallerstein, 2004; Arrighi, 2010). Marx, on the other hand, goes a little later: ‘World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 247). It is from around 1600 that we begin to see the rise of England, and subsequent upon this the gradual unfolding of English as the lingua franca of global commerce and finance. The historical account shows that the feature peculiar to the world-system as this was managed by the British³ from the mid-1600s down to at least 1914 was the fact of the movement of British capital, commercial and financial capital in particular, and in association with this movement, that of Engl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The political economy of English in a capitalist world-system
• 2 English and the political economy of informal empire, 1688–1850
• 3 The political economy of global English, 1850–1914
• 4 The political economy of global English, 1918–1979
• 5 Capital-centric English and the modern world-system, 1979–2008
• 6 The decline of the US world-hegemony
• 7 Superdiverse translingualism, commodification and trans-spatial resistances
• 8 The demise of capitalism and the end of the hegemony of English
• References
• Index