Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T19:52:25.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Excavating the Long History of Globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2019

Manfred B. Steger
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Paul James
Affiliation:
Western Sydney University
Get access

Summary

How long is the history of globalization? Most scholars would now agree that the sense of living in a world-space—a space conceived of as global—existed centuries before modern science projected a planet moving around the sun in the relative blackness of space. Different senses of the global go back much further than most casual commentators would allow. Certainly, they go back before the common myth that it was Copernicus who first argued that an erstwhile flat Earth should be understood as a planet. Hence, as we have begun to outline in earlier chapters, the processes of globalization through which the world-as-known became global need to be defined in terms of the historically variable ways in which they have been practiced and socially lived. This chapter questions earlier forms of periodization of globalization and sets out to map the dominant forms of globalization across world history from its earliest embodied beginnings as human settlement stretched across the planet to the relativizing upheaval of the present when globalization is now associated with a Great Unsettling.

Type
Chapter
Information
Globalization Matters
Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times
, pp. 137 - 163
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×