The Global Imperative: An Interpretive History of the Spread of Humankind (review)

Forming a part of the Global History Series, The Global Imperative: An Interpretive History of the Spread of Humankind is different from the others in both its singularity of authorship and its thematic focus: the world historical role of entropy in the "spread of humankind." Its title is very apposite for three main reasons. First, the author, Robert P. Clark, insists that an imperative of sorts can indeed be identified in our historical evolution toward social (system) complexity—an imperative that no particular historical actor (either individual or collective) was necessarily cognizant of during the process that Clark, fol-lowing Roland Robertson [Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Newburg Park, Ca., 1992)], refers to as globalization. Second, as the subtitle suggests, humankind in the long-term view has spread across different geographic (and social) spaces to eventually find the globe as its place of habitat. In fact, both of these observations are intertwined in Clark's sevenfold episodic history of contemporary "globalism"—not to be confused with "one-worldism," the author warns. Third, and perhaps most problematic of all, we are presented with an account of the history of globalism that claims to explain a historico-spatial imperative toward expansion and more complex forms of life in largely interpretive terms. Here the centrality of the concept of entropy, imported from the physical science of thermodynamics, is inescapable. It not only pervades Clark's interpretation of the "seventh episode" of globalization (the three phases of the Information Age), but is even retrojected back to before the Age of Discovery (episode four) when humans came "out of Africa"—the originary moment of globalism.

Hence comes the central diffusionist thesis of the book. "Today's globalization process differs from that of earlier times in four ways: the distances covered are longer; the volume of materials moved is larger; the speeds with which they are moved are faster; and the diversity of materials (matter, energy, information) moved is greater" (p. 16). Clark traces the "global imperative" back not simply to pre-industrial society, but rather to pre-agricultural homo erectus. This somewhat grandiose claim regarding the genesis of contemporary globalism stems from an otherwise valid observation Robertson makes in relation to problems with reducing the process of globalization to an outgrowth of modernity or, as many social scientists prefer to see it, the process of modernization. Clark correctly aims to inject into the present analysis of globalism a long-term perspective that is not devoid of interpretive parameters; the object is certainly worthy, but its execution remains in the final analysis unconvincing. Aside from the overly conjectural nature of the claims made regarding its historical genesis, there is the worrying tendency to look for (and then seemingly to locate) signs or "evidence" of expansive outward thrusts everywhere in history, usually from the center to the periphery in a decidedly non-Marxist, empirical, systems-analysis fashion. Once the supposition is made that a global imperative underlies what one famous German called the "riddle of history," we naturally seek out episodic instances in which the "dissipative structures" of human institutions and systems have of necessity led to an extension of human activity and systems integration.

At the start the author briefly sounds a cautionary note concerning the limits of the inquiry: "To write a comprehensive history of globalization from the beginning to the present would be a daunting task, one far beyond the scope of the project." Yet insufficient attention to delimiting the paradigmatic parameters of the work leaves the reader with the strong impression that the "scope of this project" is both too broad and, in other respects, too narrow. Too broad, because although the concept of globalization essentially is a spatial term, this book's over-riding narrative logic is a temporal one, involving episodic moments or leaps in global-ization...