Historicizing the Global, or Labouring for Invention?

If there be nothing new, but that which isHath been before, how are our brains beguiled,Which, labouring for invention, bear amissThe second burthen of a former child!

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 59

Geoff Eley's extended and erudite essay, 'Historicizing the Global' is one of a number on that theme to have appeared in recent times. What seems to set Eley's effort apart from some of the others, to which I shall turn in greater detail presently, are two features (not including its unremittingly presentist mood). First, Eley is not principally concerned with the economic characteristics of 'globalization', unlike writers associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), or even some of their more prominent critics. Therefore, the main questions for him do not centre on the history of capital and monetary flows, and the nature and timing of price convergence in markets spread over the globe. To the extent that he is interested in economic questions, they appear to focus far more than is usually the case on labour markets and their evolution, but also on the nature of unfree labour in the long-term development of capitalist production. A second feature of Eley's presentation is its attention to 'globalization' as a discursive phenomenon, and the relation between the discourse and what underpins it in 'real' terms, but also what the discourse itself helps to shore up, propagate and justify. I am entirely sympathetic, let me state at the outset, to such efforts to look at globalization-as-ideology, even if I do not share certain of Eley's theoretical perspectives or presuppositions. However, in the space of this brief comment I would like to point to some aspects of the whole question that remain neglected in the main essay, and also to what I can only term a massive geographical blind spot in its view of the world. My brief comments will be in three parts. First, I will rapidly and critically review some recent literature that is of relevance. Second, I will question of the relative absence of Asia in Eley's analysis. Finally, I will look at the question of the emergence of the 'global' as an object of study for historians, here revisiting some of my own earlier work and that of the French historian Serge Gruzinski.

A good part of the debate on globalization treats it principally as an economic phenomenon, having to do with a move from a world made up of dispersed, fragmented and largely natural economies, to a system of integrated, interlinked and market-oriented economies. In this literature, where the principal protagonists are Jeffrey Williamson, Kevin O'Rourke and some of their co-authors (all writing under the carapace of the NBER), 'globalization' can – and to be meaningful should – be measured.¹ Such measurement should allow us to test propositions regarding the pace and timing of this largely unidirectional process, which is a reincarnation of sorts (in a post-national framework) of what was once dealt with in a national framework as 'modern economic growth' by the likes of Simon Kuznets and Walt Rostow. In turn, we can then also look to subsidiary phenomena that either facilitate or impede 'globalization' (which is here positively valorized, of course), and these would include both hidebound ideologies and sundry other state-related phenomena (including 'politics' in its various manifestations). The classic statement on the question by Williamson and O'Rourke takes issue with the view (associated in the cliché with Adam Smith) that the maritime discoveries of Columbus and Gama mark the beginning of the process of the 'opening of the world'.² Rather, they see the centuries between 1500 and 1800 as characterized by slow and uncertain progress in this direction, largely because of the work of mercantilist states, prohibitive tariffs, and anti-capitalist mindsets. Thus, it is only in the nineteenth century that globalization can be said to start in earnest, under the (probably benevolent?) aegis of the British empire. The process continues till the First World War and then suffers an interruption due to the collapse of the gold standard and the...