|
|
|
Treating Globalization in History Surveys
Peter N. Stearns
George Mason University
|
GLOBALIZATION, as an explicit concept, has been with us now for about a decade. In fact, many historians have discussed aspects of globalization for at least twice that span. William McNeill asked, in the 1980s, if the late 20th century would prove to be the beginning of the end of separate civilizations, thanks to the new ease with which groups could interact across civilizational lines. Theodore von Laue wrote of worldwide westernization, with considerable concern, and while this is not exactly the same as globalization, the overlap is obvious.1 With this backdrop, and given the currency of the term and, many would argue, the process, the issues involved in teaching about globalization as part of a survey history course deserve serious discussion. |
1
|
|
Admittedly, there are also several good reasons to stay away from globalization. Treatment would inherently occur at the end of a survey course, and many teachers find simply reaching the late 20th century challenging enough without adding a new concept. The term is faddish and, in many renderings, partisan, often standing for a loud approval of the forces of contemporary capitalism and American foreign policy. Dealing with the concept seriously might require some rethinking of how 20th-century history is laid out and periodized and about reliance on civilization as an organizing principle. Rethinking does not in itself justify avoidance, but it can be a deterrent. |
2
|
|
Against this, there are two factors arguing for inclusion. First, the very currency of the concept makes it desirable to provide historical perspective, to help students see how globalization fits a wider historical pattern, and to discuss some of the problems with the term. This is debatable, of course, for it is the flip side of faddism. But I think it is better to use contemporary jargon to lead students to connect past and present than to leave the whole matter to extracurricular devices. Second, I have found that globalization can be used as something of a summary of earlier segments of a survey course, in my case a survey of world history. It encourages review of past periodization and of previous geographical categories—a review which really constitutes the essence of the historical perspective we so often invoke. |
3
|
|
By globalization, I mean the acceleration of interregional contacts in speed, in increased volume and in widening range. Speed is the most obvious, deriving from technological innovations, but range is in fact the most important. Globalization is worth discussing mainly to the extent that it refers to processes that are reshaping significant aspects of people's lives—their work settings, their cultural expressions, their political identities. Those who embrace the term globalization admittedly can press claims for its impact too far, especially at a time when only twenty-five percent of the world's population has any contact with the Internet. There is no reason to exaggerate, however, because the case for widening impact is strong, and this is where the heart of the concept resides.2 |
4
|
|
Globalization has been dubbed the most important social science theory of the 1990s. Historians have not had much hand in its formulation, though a group of "new global historians" have contributed a disciplinary argument during the past several years.3 Their efforts have extended to a number of thematic explorations combining history and globalization around topics such as urbanism. And they have ventured challenging periodization statements, often stipulating unusually dramatic claims for recent novelty. |
5
|
|
This interesting cluster aside, however, there are reasons for historians to be uncomfortable with the term in addition to the pragmatic issues mentioned above. First, the idea of theory may antagonize some pragmatists in an untheoretical discipline such as ours, particularly when the scars from the most recent theoretical excursion into post-structuralism are only beginning to heal.4 Additionally, globalization usually refers to highly contemporary developments, and historians often like a deeper past before they venture judgments. It inevitably challenges historians' common commitment to place-specificity. Even world history courses often unfold a series of place-specific, usually civilizational, stories, and globalization may require a different scope. Above all, most globalization statements, critical as well as supportive, suggest sweeping and dramatic change. Anthony Giddens, the leading social science theorist, talks directly of globalization's revolutionary qualities, of the extent to which the new world will differ from what went before. Even those who oppose globalization often match this rhetoric, referring to globalization as "irresistible and irreversible."5But most historians, by training, have knee-jerk reactions against claims of this sort. They know that rarely does such sweeping change occur, and they have a disciplinary self-interest—a salutary one, it can be argued—in wanting to point to the continued validity of a longer past. These reactions, of course, can be converted to good teaching use in dealing with globalization. But they unquestionably help explain why—new global historians aside—history teaching has not picked up on globalization as yet in any systematic way.6 |
6
|
|
But there are in fact several vantage points through which globalization can usefully be approached in historical thinking and teaching. These are: 1) sorting out the unevenness of globalization as a process; 2) discussing timing and precedent; and 3) assessing the diversity of reactions. These three areas overlap, but we can begin by discussing each of them separately. |
7
|
| 1. |
Unevenness. A striking aspect of globalization involves the disparities wrapped up in the process to date. Historical treatment can help sort these out, improving our grasp of globalization in the process. |
| |
|
Political globalization, for example, clearly lags behind both economic and cultural facets. At the same time, efforts at political globalization have a distinct history, beginning, in my judgment, with the discussions that led to the Red Cross (1863) and the Geneva Convention (1864), followed in the next decade by the International Postal Union. Admittedly, this initial political globalization was limited and it was essentially Western, applying to the rest of the world mainly through imperialism. But from this start, efforts to develop global political institutions that would have some contact with other aspects of globalization offer a fascinating window on the process. It is a process which to date has failed to develop political controls and opportunities for global political voices that keep pace with issues such as environmental degradation or global economic inequality. Looking at history here contributes to a sense of globalization's imbalances. |
8
|
|
The same applies to an even more obvious imbalance between the economic winners and losers in the globalization process. Great debate rages about this, with partisans confident that globalization is offering, or will soon offer, ever wider economic benefits. The debate can be quite specific, for example as it applies to the plusses and minuses of global economic sectors like the maquiladora industry in Mexico. Historians can reproduce elements of this debate as they teach globalization, though they are hardly likely to resolve it. What they can do, however, is to show how this aspect of globalization links to longer standing issues in the world economy. When one deals with recent data about the decline of real wages in the textile industry, in Mexico, or Pakistan, or Turkey, despite rising exports to the United States; or with reports about declining wages and new labor strife among Andean banana workers because of growing competition among the various producing regions, the connection with older—sometimes centuries-old—aspects of the world economy invite historical treatment. Aspects of globalization, at least to this point, reproduce qualities associated with core-periphery relationships in the world economy that began to take shape in the 16th century. Again, this kind of historical perspective does not resolve the contemporary debate, but it sharpens the questions involved and highlights the complexity of the conditions globalization creates or exacerbates.7 |
9
|
|
Down the line, historians also need to incorporate the social consequences of globalization in their teaching, though the materials may not yet be ready. There is growing interest in discussing historically globalization's impact on topics such as gender and childhood, and some interesting case studies are emerging. How social change compares with cultural or economic change offers still another component to the assessment of globalization's differentials.8 |
10
|
| 2. |
Timing and periodization. The most obvious connection between historical perspective and globalization involves the fundamental measurement of change and chronology. It is fruitful to present students with the need to decide between revolutionary and evolutionary models, and to help them line up the necessary data and analysis. |
| |
|
Along with the social scientists and journalists propounding globalization, many of the self-proclaimed "new global historians" talk of fundamental change. Wolf Schaefer, for example, divides world history into three segments: preglobal, which is not worth talking about much; protoglobal, from 1500 to 1950; and now global.9 This schema is intriguing, along with Schaefer's contention that globalization rivals fundamental evolutionary change in its significance for the planet. Much of the "globalization-as-revolution" argument depends on the twin pillars of technological determinism and the claim of fundamental technological transformation (with highpoints such as the Internet, devised in 1990), but while this aspect of the claim needs attention it is not necessarily wrong. |
11
|
|
Against this scenario, many historians would offer a more evolutionary approach, one that would emphasize recent innovation less starkly and would provide more way-stations than Schaefer's model. While acknowledging a danger of excessive teleology, a possible periodization could note the Arab AfroEurasian network as of 1000, followed by the inclusion of the Americas and accelerated trade from 1500 onward, followed by fundamental innovations resulting from 19th-century industrial technology, and all this leading into an appropriate consideration of 20th century additions. The main point, as with any periodization scheme that requires assessment of the magnitude and causation of change, is to open explicit discussion. |
12
|
|
This illustration offers one of the possible connecting points between teaching globalization and providing opportunities to review earlier themes in world history with a general emphasis on explicit evaluation and the use of world historical periodization. The need to avoid teleology is obvious. It would, for example be wrong to imply some inevitable globalization approach, say, for the Mongol imperial interlude. But the opportunity to articulate and review stages of change in global contacts, and their underlying causes, technological and other, is a rewarding summative challenge. |
13
|
|
What has just been discussed generally can be supplemented by a recent, more focused suggestion that has intriguing implications.10 Several historians are now arguing that contemporary globalization should be seen as unfolding in two phases, the first in the decades around 1900, and the second since the 1970s or so. In the first phase, new technologies such as the telegraph, underocean cables, and steamshipping, combined with other developments such as the Suez and then the Panama canals to accelerate global contacts in various ways. Legal restrictions on international travel and the movement of certain goods (including drugs) were actually less great then than they are now. It was at this earlier point also that key societies, such as Japan, made such sweeping adjustments to globalization, that more recent impacts have been relatively muted. Finally, it was also at this point that a first wave of cultural globalization began. European, particularly English, sports launched the process in a manner very similar to the more familiar recent globalization of restaurants, television and music. At the end of the period, by the 1920s, Hollywood had established itself as the international movie capital, providing from seventy-five to ninety-five percent of the films shown in a whole variety of societies.11 |
14
|
|
This "first globalization" model has two advantages in teaching. First, it allows a sharpening of the measurements of what is really new in the current globalization round. There are, for example, unquestionably important new elements such as the sheer volume of global trade. Today's multinational companies can be compared to the international corporations of 1900. The environmental depredations caused by the extensions of a global economy—for example, the rubber plantations in Brazil, or the spread of vegetable and palm oil production in West Africa12—can be compared with the more literally global impacts of rainforest reduction in the contemporary globalization round. Efforts to protest globalization deserve attention as well, with Leninist perspectives in round one compared to the more diffuse, but perhaps even more fully global, attempts and techniques today, including global terrorism. |
15
|
|
The second advantage to invoking the "first globalization" model is the failure involved, and the kinds of analysis this invites—a clear counter thrust to assumptions of inevitability. Much of the mid-20th century can be seen in terms of the collapse of the first globalization and the efforts of key societies to withdraw from it in whole or in part. The United States of course pulled back politically. The Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, and then Japan and later Maoist China, tried to set up regional alternatives to globalization. Even Nazism might be explored in part as a reaction to globalization. Globalization's failures, in world war and depression, resulted among other things from an imbalance between global outreach and Western domination. The factors involved invite assessment in a renewed look at some seemingly familiar aspects of 20th-century history; and they should be compared to factors at play today, even as the societies that once withdrew now seem eager to rejoin the process. |
16
|
| 3. |
Diverse reactions. Even the "new global historians" admit that regional reactions to globalization vary, and will continue to vary at least for awhile. There is a division between sender and receiver societies. The traditions of some civilizations—for example, the more secular ones—may be friendlier to globalization than others. Even in "sender" societies there are differences. Currently, Western Europe seems less open to the immigration implications of contemporary globalization than the United States is (though the subject now elicits divided American reactions as well, as the State Department invites while the Department of Justice discourages). Yet the United States has historically been and currently is far more wedded to strict constructions of national sovereignty than Western Europe recently has been. Identifying diversities of this sort, and tracing them historically, is a stimulating and challenging comparative exercise, and again it allows a reuse and reprise of earlier coverage in a world course. |
| |
|
This exercise should not be confined to inter-civilizational comparisons alone, though some teachers will find it interesting to juxtapose Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" model to the globalization approach in order to see how well either theory fits current facts and historical trends.13 Diversity within major societies also invites attention—for every society, and many individuals within them, are divided about globalization issues, depending in part on which aspects of globalization are being stressed. Globalization as an internal debate helps capture real tensions within societies such as the Middle East, or even the United States. Complaints about globalization's damage to precious regional values and identities need to be set against an understanding of the extent to which even trite aspects of globalization, such as consumer-ism, help certain groups—the young, sometimes the female—gain a new sense of freedom from traditional constraints and hierarchies.14 Tensions such as these are both fascinating and fundamental, and they emerge historically. Admittedly, some of these complexities relate to earlier debates about diversity in relation to earlier models of westernization and modernization. But they were valid debate organizers in their time, useful in teaching if carefully addressed, and globalization, which has some distinctive elements of its own, can provide similar service. |
17
|
|
In sum, globalization provides history teachers with an opportunity to link past to present in new ways and to test historical thinking. This is particularly true in world history surveys, but has relevance to Western civilization or United States history surveys as well. For globalization in turn, the historical perspective offers opportunities for more precise measurements of change and complexity and for comparative treatment of diversities in response. The historical perspective also facilitates discussion of the human agency involved. Too many globalization models see the process as advancing inexorably, with opponents treated as faceless traditionalists crouched under their dusty olive trees. In fact, globalization combines impersonal factors, such as technologies and corporate structures, with very human policies and reactions. The idea of a previous round of globalization that failed calls attention to the need to discuss globalization as a construction, shaped or distorted by policies that can be declared better or worse depending on the values and knowledge involved. However humbly, explicit historical treatment can contribute to a better globalization process, and this is where the extension of teaching opportunities comes in. |
18
|
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Advanced Placement readers' meeting, AP European and AP World, in Lincoln, Nebraska, June 4, 2002. I am grateful for the many useful comments received.
1. Theodore von Laue, World Revolution of Westernization (1989).
2. Challenging surveys include Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives (2000); Paul Kirkbridge, ed., Globalization: The External Pressures (2001); Walter Anderson, All Connected Now (2001); Jan A. Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (2000); Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory: Polemical Essays (2000); Malcolm Waters, Globalization (2001); M. Featherstone et al, eds., Global Modernities (1995); Thomas Friedman, Lexus and Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999); Roland Robertson, Globalization (1992); Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization (2001); D. Held et al, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (1999). A historian's contribution is Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the new Global Capitalism (1999).
3. Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity: Co-evolution and humans and machines (1993); A. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997).
4. Lynn Hunt, "Where Have the Theories Gone," American Historical Association Perspectives (Mar., 2002).
5. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991), p. 225; Scholte, Globalization, p1.
6. Robert J. McMahon, "Globalization and History," paper presented to the Organization of American Historians, 2002 annual meeting, Washington, D.C.
7. Immanuel Wallerstein, Modern World System, 2v (1974 and 1980); see also Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System 1945-2025 (1996); Maria Fernandez-Kelly For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (1994).
8. Paula Fass, "Globalization and the New World," forthcoming in the Journal of Social History (June, 2003).
9. Wolf Schafer, "Global History: Historiographical Feasibility and Environmental Reality," in B. Mazlish and R. Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (1999).
10. Thomas Zeiler, "Just Do It: Globalization for Diplomatic Historians," Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 529-51.
11. Eric Foner, "American Freedom in a Global Age," American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1-16.
12. Warren Dean, "Deforestation in Southern Brazil," in R.P. Tucker and J. F. Richards, eds., Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1993); Thomas Weiskel "Toward an Archaeology of Colonialism. Elements in the Ecological Transformation of the Ivory Coast." In Donald Worster, ed. The Ends of the Earth: Perspective on Modern Environmental History (1988).
13. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York, 1997).
14. Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History (2001); James Watson, Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia (1997).
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|