This collection of essays was conceived at a conference in Cambridge in April 2016. Since then, the editors, authors and publisher have worked on the book from a distance. We, the editors, coordinated it from our computers in Mexico City, Berlin and Barcelona. We used WhatsApp to discuss the most urgent questions and Dropbox to organise the workflow. The authors, representing ten different nationalities, wrote from cities across Asia, Europe and the Americas . The publishing house editor was in London. We attended conferences in Chicago, Florence and Madrid to discuss chapters and commissioned new contributors at workshops in Lisbon, Xalapa and Saint Petersburg. Authors, working on topics spanning four continents, sent their abstracts, drafts and eventually their final corrected chapters via email. They kept moving, for personal as well as professional reasons. They communicated from Havana, Shanghai, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires and Taipei. We hope readers and libraries from Delhi to Paris, from Buenos Aires to Luanda will be requesting copies of this book.
The book itself is proof of the globalised world we live in. Transnational lives and international connectivity are, however, only globalisation’s most visible faces. Today’s world is more than a virtual multicultural cosmopolis or an immaterial information society. It is a planet wired by transoceanic fibre-optic cables, digital storage facilities and satellites. It is a world made of global commodity networks, continental infrastructures and transnational migrant workers. It is not, however, a borderless world of unconstrained and uninterrupted flows and free movements. The technology and materials that support globalisation have paradoxical consequences. The same knowledge and technologies that promote globalisation often create new barriers, gaps or borders. Moreover, the complex technological scaffolding that supports modern globalisation and de-globalisation are built, designed and installed in specific parts of the planet. And what of the social actors who put technologies in place? This book aims to locate them and bring them back into the history of the making of the global economy.
Globalisation(s) and the World Economy
Historian Jeremy Adelman pointed out in a 2017 article that the rising wave of anti-globalisation and nationalist politics might be threatening global history.1 This field, which has made it possible to overcome the excessive provincialisation of national histories and has brought historians back to the centre of current debates, was itself restored by the practices and ideologies of late twentieth-century globalisation. It might be too easily concluded that the current challenges posed to globalisation by protectionism, economic crisis, inequality and climate change will bring that young field to a premature dismissal. We believe instead that it is more rewarding to recognise that while the current contestation of globalisation exposes the contradictions of the global history paradigm, it also represents an opportunity to develop more nuanced, complex and plural world histories. The global view does not imply looking at the entire planet as an homogeneous historical entity, but instead rewrites local and regional histories with an emphasis on global connections. It accepts that globalising processes are neither homogeneous nor incompatible with state and imperial interests. This approach allows us to talk about globalisations in the plural and to explore the role of individual actors in various globalising enterprises.2
The distinctive feature of the new global approach to history has been the study of connections between societies, particularly the transnational movements of people, ideas, capital and things. This perspective has brought to light the areas of encounter and conflict among societies, showing the interplay between the local and the global. Less emphasis has been placed on how capitalism functions at local and global levels. In this respect, the intersection between two fields, global history and the history of capitalism, is of particular interest for this volume. We would like to suggest that the history of the capitalist world economy can provide a context to local, national and regional narratives. Perhaps the most critical task facing the social sciences is to identify the underlying local and global conditions that have determined the metamorphosis of the capitalist world economy over the past five centuries.
While the global turn is a relatively recent trend, globalisation itself is not new. As Jerry Bentley observes, long-distance cross-cultural interactions, such as maritime trade, were already commonplace in ancient civilisations throughout Eurasia and northern Africa.3 It is precisely this conception of globalisation as a process independent of the rise of the West that leads Hopkins to speak of an ‘archaic-globalisation’ (until 1600) and a ‘proto-globalisation’ (1600–1800), predating ‘modern-globalisation’ (1800–1950) and ‘post-colonial globalisation’ (1950s onwards).4 The integration of the Atlantic world economy from the sixteenth century onwards extended material interactions to an ever-increasing planetary scale.5 This volume, however, focuses on the last two centuries. The industrial era transformed the scale and scope of international flows of money, artefacts and people. From that moment, local and national histories were increasingly affected by supranational dynamics. National industrialisation processes facilitated specific technological and economic globalising structures.6 Not only national histories, but also the histories of empires transformed from the nineteenth century onwards.7
The acceleration of globalisation during the last third of the nineteenth century was again strongly linked to the technological transformations of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, as well as to the expansion of multinational corporations, which were the cornerstones of a progressive globalism . We would not want to incur the technological determinism locked in the phrase ‘the annihilation of space and time’, with which Karl Marx and others characterised global industrial modernity.8 But the role of technology in modern globalisation should not be underestimated. Through the mobilisation of experts and the production of capital-intensive technologies for mass production, the new industrial paradigm of the age of ‘machinofacture’ took global capitalism to hitherto unimaginable extremes.9
Speaking about globalisation and capitalism in the plural does not make this volume immune to the problems that face much of global history from its restoration. A global approach has frequently meant the study of European and North American roles in world history, neglecting national histories, tales of resistance and alternative types of connections in vast parts of the world. Post-independence Latin America, for example, is barely incorporated into the global histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and when it does appear it is often in a marginal and peripheral position.10 Moreover, academics from universities in Europe or the United States remain the dominant narrators of global history, with some remarkable exceptions.11 Our volume certainly aims to incorporate these and other often neglected views, but its focus on networks of technical experts and professionals, which were considered essentially modern and Western, makes it difficult to escape from the narrative of the economic success and industrial leadership of some nations since the nineteenth century. Many of the chapters, however, explore failed plans and unintended consequences, while others give voice to opposing views, appropriations and confrontations. The volume covers Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia, in an effort to go beyond Europe and the United States.
Global history has faced other related problems, some shared with comparative history and historical sociology. Studying broad areas, with disparate cultures and languages, creates new difficulties. The global shift has made it necessary for historians to rethink some of their theoretical perspectives and to introduce new analytical categories, such as networks, borders and cosmopolitanism, to name just a few. This expansion of topics, in turn, has led to an expansion of sources, requiring contact with specialists from various disciplines in the excessively compartmentalised realm of academia. One major challenge has to do with scale: combining case-specific detailed studies with broad or long-term approaches and global analysis with local histories. The need for a balance between abstraction and particularism seems clear, and it frequently involves the conciliation of macro-historical narratives with postmodern and post-colonial critiques.12 Creating a local history of the global has also been one of the main problems of epistemology. We believe that cross-fertilisation of methods between economic history and the history of science and technol...