Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:36:17.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is Globalisation Yesterday’s News?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

A. G. Hopkins
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Globalisation is now a fashionable topic of historical research. Books and articles routinely use the term, though often in a loose manner that has yet to realise the full potential of the subject. The question arises as to whether globalisation, as currently applied by historians, is sufficiently robust to resist inevitable changes in historiographical fashion. The fact that globalisation is a process and not a single theory opens the way, not only to over-general applications of the term, but also to rich research possibilities derived in particular from other social sciences. One such prospect, which ought to be at the centre of all historians’ interests, is how to categorise the evolution of the process. This question, which has yet to stimulate the lively debate it needs, is explored here by identifying three successive phases or sequences between the eighteenth century and the present, and joining them to the history of the empires that were their principal agents. These phases, termed proto-globalisation, modern globalisation, and postcolonial globalisation provide the context for reviewing the history of the West, including the United States, and in principle of the wider world too.

Keywords

globalisationglobal historyempirehistoriographypostcolonial
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 41 , Special Issue 1: Knowledge Brokers and Knowledge Production in Colonial Orders , April 2017 , pp. 109 - 128
Copyright
© 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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.)

Footnotes

*

This is an expanded and revised version of a keynote lecture delivered at the University of Western Sydney on 20 October 2013. The approach is given extended treatment in the author’s book, American Empire. Partly for this reason, citations are kept here to a minimum.

References

Adolphus, John. The History of England from the Accession of George III to the Conclusion of the Peace in the Year 1783, vol. 1. London: 1801.Google Scholar
Bayly, Christopher. “History and World History.” In A Concise Companion to History, edited by Ulinka Rublack, chap. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Benvenuti, Andrea. Anglo-Australian Relations and the “Turn to Europe,” 1961–1972. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2008.Google Scholar
Berg, Manfred. “Black Rights and Liberal Anti-Communism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War.” Journal of American History 94 (2007): 75–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broers, Michael R. Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815. London: I.B. Tauris, 1996.Google Scholar
Broers, Michael, Hicks, Peter and Guimerá, Agustín, eds. The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buckner, Philip, ed. Canada and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G.. British Imperialism, 1688–2015. 3rd edition. London: Routledge, 2016.Google Scholar
Crowder, Michael. “The Second World War: Prelude to Decolonisation in Africa.” The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 8 , From c. 1940 to c. 1975, edited by Michael Crowder, 8–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2010.Google Scholar
Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Etemad, Bouda. Possessing the World: Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the 18th to the 20th Century. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Fraser, Cary. “Decolonization and the Cold War.” Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, edited by Richard Immerman and Petra Goedde, chap. 27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Grafe, Regina and Irigoin, Maria Alejandra. “A Stakeholder Empire: The Political Economy of Spanish Imperial Rule in America.” Economic History Review 65 (2012): 609–651.Google Scholar
Hartley, David. The Budget: Inscribed to the Man Who Thinks Himself a Minister. London: 1764.Google Scholar
Held, David, McGrew, Antony, Globlatt, David and Perraton, Jonathan. Globalisation: Key Concepts. London, 1999.Google Scholar
Held, David. McGrew, Antony Globlatt, David and Perraton, Jonathan Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Hopkins, A. G. American Empire: A Global View of an Insular History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Hopkins, A. G., ed. Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, A. G., ed. Globalisation in World History. London: Pimlico, 2002.Google Scholar
Hopkins, A. G.. “Rethinking Decolonisation.” Past & Present 200 (2008): 211–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kramer, Paul. “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World.” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 1348–1391.Google Scholar
Kwas, Michael. Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Lang, Michael. “Globalization and its History.” Journal of Modern History 78 (2006): 899–931.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The Vietnam War: A Concise International History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Leonard, Spencer A. “‘A Theatre of Disputes’: The East India Company Election of 1764 as the Founding of British India.” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 42 (2014): 593–624.Google Scholar
Marichal, Carlos. Bankruptcy of Empire; Mexican Silver and the Wars between Spain, Britain and France, 1760–1810. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahon, Robert J. Colonialism and the Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–1949. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Marshall, P. J. “British Society in India under the East India Company.” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 89–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The FBI’s War against the American Indian Movement (New York, 1983; 1992).Google Scholar
Mitter, Rana. “China and the Cold War.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, edited by Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, chap. 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of the Laws, edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel. Cambridge, 1989.Google Scholar
Pérez, Louis A. Jr. “We are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International.” Journal of American History 89 (2010): 558–566.Google Scholar
Phillips, A. A. A. A. Phillips on the Cultural Cringe. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Rotter, Andrew J. The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Sánchez, José Jurado. “Military Expenditure, Spending Capacity and Budget Constraints in Eighteenth-Century Spain and Britain.” Revista de Historia Económica 27 (2009): 141–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunier, Pierre-Yves. Transnational History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Senescher, Michael. Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Sexton, Jay. “The Global View of the United States.” Historical Journal 48 (2005): 261–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Stuart. Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne. “The Cold War and International History in the Twentieth Century.” Cambridge History of the Cold War . Vol. 1 , Origins, edited by in Melvyn Leffler and Odd Westad, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying—An Observation.” In Intentions. London, 1891.Google Scholar