Periodizing Globalization

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilization. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Marx and Engels, 1848

The railway, the steamship, and the telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the peoples of the earth. The nations are coming out of their isolation, and distances which separated the different races are rapidly giving way before the extension of communication . . ..[G]reat cosmic forces have broken down the barriers which formerly separated the races and nationalities of the world, and forced them into new intimacies and new forms of competition, rivalry, and conflict.

Robert Park, 1917

It has become commonplace that we are in the midst of a great world revolution . . ... The rapidly accelerating spread of literacy, mass communications, and travel, which has only begun, will produce unsettling results over the coming years. This revolution is rapidly exposing previously apathetic peoples to the possibility of change. It is creating in them new aspirations for education, social improvement, and economic development. At the same time, it is breaking down traditional institutions and culture patterns which in the past held societies together. In short, the world community is becoming both more interdependent and more fluid than it has been at any other time in history.

M. F. Millikan and W. W. Rostow, 1957

The material foundations of society, space, and time are being transformed, organized around the space of flows and timeless time. It is the beginning of a new existence, and indeed the beginning of a new age, the Information Age, marked by the autonomy of culture vis-à-vis the material bases of our existence.

Manuel Castells, 2000

How can we periodize a process that is continually obsessed with its own newness? How can the insistence on an epochal break with the past be used as a basis of temporal generalization, indeed of any historical awareness at all? How can we evaluate the claims of globalization seriously when the only consistent fate of each transformative new age is to be regarded as a period of stasis and isolation by the next new age?

The question suggests its own answer. The era of globalization is precisely that period in which a sense of living in the midst of unprecedented change has dominated social and personal sensibilities. The belief in a new global era, pervasive since at least the early nineteenth century, is an ideal candidate to mark the beginning of modern globalization. Perceptions of change certainly existed before the nineteenth century. But they were generally assertions of an impending change, often invested with religious and apocalyptic overtones. Even secularized visions of newness were formulated as transformation yet to come, a utopia unrealized and dependent on the possibility of rational human behaviour. Over the nineteenth century, however, the cult of newness slowly replaced millenarian visions and enlightenment dreams, entrenching itself as a description of a secular present. This is not to say that the prophets of newness are deluded. Many have been acute observers of the changes taking place around them and active participants in the generation of more transformation. Indeed, the compulsion to forget the past and insist on the transformative power of the present is an important condition for Marx's constant revolutionizing. Similarly, Manuel Castells suggests that 'timeless time' is a key feature of globalization, 'the result of the negation of time, past and future, in the network of the space of flow'.¹ What better way to produce timeless time than by endlessly asserting that connections and communication have renovated the world anew . . . over and over again?

But a long-term periodization of globalization as something other than a process beginning in the present also compels us to be sceptical of histories proposed by the prophets of...