Introduction

Geoff Eley's essay on the politics of globalization, published in History Workshop Journal 63, presents a powerful critique of current 'globalization talk' amongst politicians, journalists, lobbyists and academics.¹ In common with many other critics, he argues for a more discriminating sense of the complex historical geographies of economy, society and politics that have characterized the long-term development of global capitalism, whose unevenness tends to be flattened out in neo-liberal accounts of the process. He also illuminates a veritable galaxy of ideas currently being debated by theorists across the academy, as they grapple with some of the more striking changes in the contemporary global political economy. Globalization, as anthropologist James Ferguson puts it his account of Africa's place in the new world order, is a process 'not of planetary communion, but of disconnection, segmentation, and segregation – not a seamless world without borders, but a patchwork of discontinuous and hierarchically ranked spaces, whose edges are carefully delimited, guarded and enforced'.²

In the face of what Geoff Eley describes as 'the inescapable discursive noise of globalization', historians have begun to expose and explore the historical depth and geographical differentiation of the world-economic processes too often currently described as entirely new or entirely universal. Seen in the light of his essay, however, this historicizing response is necessary but not sufficient. The challenge posed by recent events on the world stage – the end of the Cold War, the intensification of post-Fordism, the consequences of 9/11, the reconfiguration of global power in the wake of US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan – is to reconsider the terms on which these global histories are understood, and their effects in the world today. In this context, Eley draws attention to an array of recent work which re-centres, in various ways, the condition of slavery and servitude in the narratives of global capitalism, and which questions the analytical precedence conventionally given to waged work in the framework of Marxist political economy. This inevitably requires a corresponding effort to de-centre, geographically and historically speaking, the experience of Western Europe in the era of Fordism.

Given the significance and scope of the issues raised by Geoff Eley's essay, History Workshop Journal invited contributions to a roundtable debate from four leading historians working on economic, political and cultural aspects of what has come to be known as world history. Of course, thinking in world-historical terms is nothing new for historians – indeed, in its Enlightenment form (only one of its many guises, as several contributors point out), this was once supposed to define the difference between philosophical history and mere antiquarianism. Moreover, the notion of a turn to 'the global' in writing history has become something of a commonplace in recent years. The question raised here is how to think globally while not effacing the local; or rather, how to conceive the processes through which the experience of world history have become intensely differentiated under the sign of 'globalization'. This requires, in part, a willingness to rethink the geography of the world historical process - that 'patchwork of discontinuous and hierarchically ranked spaces, whose edges are carefully delimited, guarded and enforced' which James Ferguson describes. For this very reason, several of the contributors to this roundtable respond to Geoff Eley's challenge to 'historicize the global' by highlighting what they regard as the blind-spots in his own map of global change. The need to rethink the histories of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas in the light of the host of uneven exchanges between them is today more urgent than it has ever been. The eloquence and passion of the responses which follow suggest grounds for hope that historians are up to the challenge.