Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History

Geoff Eley's call for more rigorous histories of the global joins a burgeoning literature preoccupied with the relationship between contemporary planetary interdependence and what Hegel called die Weltgeschichte – which Ranajit Guha has translated as 'World-history'.¹ Seeking a break from the sociological literature on globalization as well as from the apparently endless terminological debate about when the word emerged or what it means, Eley offers a two-pronged approach, one which privileges two heretofore distinct historiographies: studies of slavery, post-emancipation and the Black Atlantic, and work on transnational labour markets and migration. By insisting on drawing each of these (back) into the history of global capital on either side of the long nineteenth century, Eley envisions histories of globalization that make the domain of the social – a longstanding concern of his – more legible than it has been among either self-styled world historians or students of geopolitics in a variety of disciplines.² He also aspires to rematerialize the political effects, in real and imaginary terms, of the convergence of historically specific forms of global transformation with, among other things, 'new patterns of transnational migration', both 'free' and coerced. Above all, Eley is interested in more rigorously historicized genealogies of the global present: genealogies that are, if not predictive, then at least forward-looking in terms of democratic practice for an emergent 'global left'.

There is much to get behind in response to a manifesto of this kind. In many respects, Eley's priorities are a breath of fresh air in the context of much recent work on globalization. For one thing, he challenges the econometric approaches on offer in the work of students of the phenomenon like Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, for whom the exceptionalism of the present has been a central concern.³ Eley also takes seriously recent studies of transnational slavery and the racialized dimensions of global capital it instantiated at the heart of the pre and post-Enlightenment geopolitical order, in ways that have scarcely been recognized by the world-history establishment seeking grand narratives of civilizational power (save as a kind of ghettoized terrain of inquiry). Not least, he addresses the 'silence' at the heart of recent invocations of a common Europe around its 'actually existing diversity of contemporary populations', its 'borderlands' citizens, its Turkish/Muslim subjects. Although he doesn't make this connection, Eley's determination to expose what Jozsef Borocz calls 'the topos of west European moral superiority' links the question of Europe's twentieth-century global positioning with what Borocz, again, calls 'the never-colonial, yet always imperial, histories of various, clearly recognizable localities within Europe' and – more provocatively – with the project of provincializing Europe itself.⁴

It's this connection (or lack thereof) between Europe and the colonial/ postcolonial in Eley's essay that interests me most. He opens powerfully with a rationale for historicizing the global that is deeply rooted in a long narrative of anglo-american imperium, followed by a chilling assessment via Robert Cooper of the European Union as a 'co-operative empire' akin to Rome (utterly whitewashed of course: citizens, Cooper says, get 'some of its laws, some coins and the occasional road').⁵ But the pressure of histories of modern imperial ambitions or, alternatively, accounts of their role in shaping the very structural conditions that he sets at the heart of a new set of global histories are oddly absent, except allusively. When those allusions are limited to the usual suspects, they run the risk of occluding recent work on Soviet Russia and Japan – imperial histories that would add a more fully global dimension to Eley's vision.⁶ I worry too that it is a presumptively Europe-centred global left that ends up being destination of Eley's critique. He clearly recognizes the transnational, extra-European character of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization movements, though there is no sustained attention paid to work from those actors who operate outside the World Bank and NGO systems, save through references to Arundhati Roy (whose success in the progressive global marketplace is more predictable than remarkable, given the purchase...