Globalization in World History

by A.G. Hopkins

Globalization has become an issue of the greatest urgency in the first decade of the new century.
Recent world events, especially the terrorist attacks on the United States and the evolving conflicts in the Middle East, have sparked wider concern for global issues in general.  There is now a flood of literature on the economics, politics, and sociology of globalization and regular commentary in the serious daily and weekly press.

Virtually all of this discussion makes assumptions, and frequently explicit claims, about the novelty of globalization.  According to one view, globalization is a new phenomenon that can be dated from the 1980s.  A second view holds that globalization has a long history that can be traced to the nineteenth century, if not earlier.  These are important claims, but until now they had not attracted significant critical attention from historians.  This volume is the first by a team of historians to address these issues.

Globalization in World History has two distinctive features.  First, it traces the history of globalization across nearly three centuries.  Second, it emphasizes a feature that the current debate greatly underestimates: the fact that globalization has non-Western as well as Western origins.  Globalization is much more than a new way to tell the all-too-familiar "rise of the West" story.  The contributors bring their expertise to bear on themes that give prominence to China, South Asia, Africa, and the world of Islam, as well as to Europe and the United States; these themes span the last three centuries while also showing an awareness of more distant antecedents.  The result is a coherent and thought-provoking collection of essays.  Globalization will become a major theme of historical research during the next decade; this book will help set the new agenda.

Genres: History, World History, Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Academic, The World

337 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2002

About the author

A. G. Hopkins is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge and former Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

For years there has been debate whether globalization, the increasingly unified world, is a recent phenomenon. The term was apparently not coined until the late 1990s, referring to the global entanglement of economics and communication since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Since then, a whole library has been written about the intensity of globalization, its advantages and disadvantages, and also about its real starting point. It is striking that until recently mainly non-historians contributed to the debate. This bundle aims to rectify this. A dozen historians from the University of Cambridge, England, have contributed to this. As it goes, the quality of the articles is quite good, but the focus is very diverging. Personally I found the contributions of A.G. Hopkins and C.A. Bayly really excellent.
More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Sense of History]

This book quite boldly claims to be the first to look at globalization from a historical perspective. I don't know if that's right. This book was published in 2002, some 10 years after globalization as a phenomenon became commonplace in the public discourse. So apparently it took historians that long to formulate an answer to questions like: is this really the first globalization? Is this a purely Western-hegemonic phenomenon as claimed by anti-colonialist? And were the effects the same everywhere?

As could be expected the answer the historians give, is not really simple. The central message by editor A.G. Hopkins makes that clear: “the present study, the first on the subject to be written entirely by historians, aims at being sufficiently comprehensive to mark the arrival of globalization as a theme deserving serious historical analysis. The detailed contributions that follow provide abundant evidence of the historical diversity of globalizing forces and the unevenness of the process of globalization. But they also draw out two general themes that bring coherence to the book as a whole: one emphasizes the non-Western dimensions of globalization; the other explores its historical forms and sequences.”

As Hopkins points out, globalization is indeed not a new phenomenon. But it really makes no sense to speak of a real globalization for the early modern period: in the period 1600-1800 a global interweaving of economic systems can be seen, especially in the form of intense interregional trade. It was only in the course of the 19th century that one could speak of a quantitative and qualitative leap in intercontinental trade and transaction, the macabre peak being the slave trade and western colonialism.

The various contributions in this volume however indicate excellently that globalization was not just a one-way street, imposed by the West on the rest of the world. In many places in the non-Western world there was considerable resistance and to a limited extent there is even talk of a 'reverse' globalization. The effects of globalization can also vary quite a bit, depending on the region. This book is a good start for a re-evaluation of the globalization phenomenon, but given its early publication date (2002), and given the fact that only British historians participated, more recent works may be more appropriate. To name just one: Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World, and the one I'm reading at the moment: Globalization in World History.

[Brian Baraza · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was very detailed and requires one to have some background in history studies to understand and appreciate the authors ideas. It was a good read nonetheless.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I found many of the essays in this book on different periods of globalization and its effects quite good, my students fucking loathed it.