The Global Condition, 1850–2010
CHARLES BRIGHT AND MICHAEL GEYER
Globalization: Ever since it came into common use during the 1980s, the word itself has been both the problem to explain and its own explanation – a puzzle and a prediction. Wonderment or dismay, even horror, ran through the burgeoning literature, conveying a vertiginous sense of looking over the edge of a precipice into we know not what. That sticky little suffix “-ization” calls to attention something very much in process – not yet history and, possibly, beyond history. Implicit here is the notion of a destination – where historical processes were headed – or, alternatively, the triumphant assertion of a posthistorical age, in which movement is everything but nothing ever changes (Fukuyama 1992). Global-ization became a condition that is always becoming and also forever not yet. As prophecy it bore a distancing relationship to the past, carried along by a shallow language of “er” words – faster, denser, deeper – that cascaded through the present toward a future of both imminent fulfillment and unlimited transformation.
Among historians, marveling over the new and untoward met with resistance and has subsided somewhat under the weight of scholarly analysis and the application of tried and true terminologies that stress continuities and recurrence. But what is lost in the more sober inquiries into globalization is that sense of disorientation that arises from our direct and often chaotic experience of the global condition in the present. What a global history must seek to explain is the shocking reality of what is – how we got to where we are, and how we deal with a condition in which who we are and what we might become are irreversibly linked, for good and bad, with everybody else. First, there is the acceleration of world-crossing interaction with its attendant mobility of people, things and ideas that is transforming economies, societies and cultures in untoward ways and with incredible speed. Second, there is the engagement of all with all that has stripped away buffering layers of protection and security, once safeguarded by distances of space and time. Third, there is the exploration and exploitation of nature to the farthest extent of the globe, so that we have come to live in a habitat overwhelmingly defined by the human-made imprint. Finally, there are the ways we make meaning of this condition of wholesale transformation in time, space, and nature; for globalization is ultimately what people make of it – not in emoting a global consciousness, but in the most immediate sense of working with and being in a global world (Mazlish 2006). We need a conceptual hold on the experience of a world that is defined by its globality.
What a History of the Present Can Do
In taking up the problem of globalization in the present, historians have turned to the deep past of world history, developing a running start on the present by highlighting long-term continuities and recurring patterns. Some have championed a deep history of multiple civilizations (see McKeown, this volume), while others have stressed the ingrained nature of human communication and exchange and the interconnectivities these sustain (Bentley 1993; 2002; Curtin 1984; McNeill 1991). Its subject is the “human community” (McNeill 1997). While “new” global history may stretch back to the global “event” of Mongol expansion (Abu-Lughod 1989), its preferred site has been centered on the early modern period (see chapters by Levi and by Fernández-Armesto, this volume). This scholarship presents us with a complicated world full of linkages and patterns of exchange, movements of goods and ideas, flows of people, often over vast distances and in broad diasporas, and the migration of biomoral products (bodily ointments, remedies, and adornments) appropriated by elites in disparate and distant places. Work on what Chris Bayly has called “archaic” or “proto-” globalization has effectively accomplished two things (Bayly 2002; 2005). It has displaced the older stand-by narratives in world history that were concerned with the “rise of the west,” decisively disconnecting world history from European history and re-placing – and resituating – Europe in a larger, multicentered story in which Asia was once the center of a global economy (and may soon be so again) and Islam was the nexus of a cultural universe and a wide-reaching system of faith, knowledge, and exchange long before anything like Wallerstein’s “modern” (and Western) world-system may be said to exist (Wallerstein 1974–1989; Wolf 1982).
Comparative historians like Pomeranz and Wong, with their pivot in East Asia, have effectively done what Chakrabarty calls the provincialization of Europe, contextualizing it and reducing its specialness (Chakrabarty 2000; Pomeranz 2000a; Wong 1997). They have shown that the world as a whole remained bounded by the limits of the biological old regime of agrarian life and natural cycles well into the nineteenth century, and that efforts to transcend these biological limits of human existence can be found everywhere in “industrious revolutions” throughout the world (Wong 2002). The European breakout along an industrializing path based on fossil fuels that transformed nature and the human relationship to it came suddenly and relatively late – only during the course of the nineteenth century (Burke and Pomeranz 2009).
It is telling, however, that the best works in this genre stop well short of the present (Bayly 2004; Osterhammel 2003; 2009). The assumption seems to be that, having congealed in the ever deepening interconnectivity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, the subsequent “modern world” is familiar history. The “great divergence” of the West from the rest is now much later and more contingently understood and the rise of the “modern” world (with its stately and gradualist overtones) has been replaced with a birth (with its implied suddenness, even a scream), but the history of connections ends with European empires girdling the Earth and binding all into a single world. As global histories move into the twentieth century, rupture talk loses out to more-of-the-same, as global connections become denser, faster, fuller, more sustained and continuous, and an ever greater accretion of interconnectivity shapes the terrain of globalization (and even defines it), bringing us to the present on an accumulating wave of ever more of what has long been.
This history may be “globalizing,” but does it tell us “when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape?” (Barraclough 1967: 9). As the deep history of connections among the world’s regions gets swept up in the onward march of twentieth-century globalization, it loses an analytic and narrative grasp on the distinct features of the entangled history of a world that has become global. The problem with the predominant mode of writing is that it looks at global history from the vantage point of its beginnings moving forward, as if the forward movement were a mere extension of these origins. It is unable to capture the transformations unleashed by globalization itself and even the most daring and complete of these histories peter out in the 1910s and 1920s (Osterhammel 2009; Pomeranz 1993; 2000b).
The resulting (short) twentieth century (Hobsbawm 1996) becomes a strangely “lost” period of disconnection in a longer history of globalization. The world economic crisis gets treated as an interruption in the forward movement of globalization, a turn away from nineteenth-century integration and free trade, and global conflict becomes a form of backsliding from the putative cosmopolitanism of the nineteenth century (James 2001). To capture late twentieth-century upheavals, the forward narration is salvaged by adding another phase to the globalizing sequence, as Hopkins (2002) does by amending Bayly’s trilogy (archaic, proto-, and modern globalization) with a fourth, “postcolonial globalization” since 1945, to go along with the postmodern, postindustrial, post–Cold War language that telegraphs above all an inability to connect the present to the recent past except in terms of what it is not any longer. The new global history rewrites the prehistory of the present, but the road still runs out short of it and, like the proverbial road-runner, we zoom off beyond the precipice at the end of history.
How then to narrate the transformations unleashed by globalization? We might start with the simple observation that what we see and what we experience today is not connectivity in the making, but connectivity as a done deal. The world does not need to be discovered; distance no longer shelters the unknown; wherever we go, we are already there. Rather than a world being explored and connected, we live in an interior space of manifold and inescapable entanglements, thoroughly interconnected. What we want to know is when this condition of the world as a connected or entangled space became a palpable reality and what this condition entailed for those living in it.
Two things matter here. First, globalization was happening – and happening with striking simultaneity around the world – long before a global condition of enmeshment could set in. As analogy, we speak of industrialization as a series of disparate local processes reaching back into the eighteenth century, and we debate at length its occurrences, comparing localities around the world and drawing distinctions between industrious and industrial revolutions. But an “industrial condition” can only be said to be reached with the mutual entanglement and reciprocal reinforcement of these local processes. The same is the case with globalization. What matters is the requisite threshold of cumulative critical interaction needed to set in motion a self-reinforcing process of transformation that sucks in the entire world. Rather than a series of “takeoffs,” with some regions leading others who must wait awhile or get bumped, the more adequate image is one of an explosive chain reaction, a moment when continuities of long duration kick over into a rupture of cascading effects. Hence, in the spirit of Barraclough, the more productive historicization of the present goes back in time, not to find the origins of globalization, but in search of the threshold when globalization processes working themselves out over time began generating a chain reaction of consequences and effects that had a (new) life of their own.
In short, we suggest resituating in time the process of globalization. The most crucial and, indeed, breathtaking insight we take away from the path-breaking work of Bayly and Osterhammel is that the extended period of multicentric, imperial and commercial expansion and interconnectivity across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that enabled disparate power centers, buffered in time and space, to reproduce themselves while in continuous connection with one another – all of which gets bracketed in this literature with the prefix “proto-” – was in fact the real thing: an age of globalization. Tracing globalization back in time obscures the import of this history at the other end: globalization as a process of becoming was a done deal by the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
Second, the outcome of this process was a condition of entanglement on a global scale. This “global condition” was initially quite thin and it got thicker only in spurts. It was also limited in space; it never covered everything and everybody in the world. But there is a critical moment when this condition took hold and, once this threshold was crossed, the effects reverberated throughout the world. At this point, a history of connections linking disparate parts of the world must give way to a connected history of the world.1 This is emphatically not a call for a history of the whole (world, humanity, Earth) or a new world-systems theory (see Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume), but for a history of the effects of connectedness as a global condition. The latter can always entail more connections, of course, but it will focus on the partial, yet entangled histories of already connected people, places, things, ideas and images. These connections were always uneven and unequal; many are left out (un- or disconnected, though still actors in a connected history). A global history must also capture the sheer violence, the grim tensions and utter disorientation that come with this age of globality. Above all, we need to understand the explosive dynamism and often catastrophic instabilities – the “turbulences” (Rosenau 1990; 2008) – of this condition; how people have organized their lives and their polities within this condition or gone crazy trying (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001); and how and with what effect the natural world is transformed and eaten up by it (Kinkela and Maher 2010).
The Time of the Global
If we treat a broad swathe of time, across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the age of globalization, its end-game came quite rapidly in the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was a time of upheaval and revolution, and not just in the transatlantic world. Its outcome was a global entanglement of the world. By the 1870s/1880s, we are no longer in an age of multicentered globalization or “proto-globalization,” but in an age of global entanglement. What happened in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was both transitional and transformative.
Global historians tell the story of the beginning of the modern world as the history of a “great divergence,” which they date from the late eighteenth century extending across the first half of the nineteenth (Pomeranz 2000a). This is the moment when the West – or narrow pieces of it – broke through the limits of the old regime and rapidly gained significant comparative advantages vis-à-vis all other regions of the world. While the new global history has pushed this story deep into the nineteenth century, once the familiar features of the modern world have congealed and been let loose upon the world, it seems content to ride along. In so doing, these global historians allow Western initiatives to take over global history, following the trajectory of the great divergence. (See chapters by Adas and by Zhang, this volume.) While there is no gainsaying the explosive acceleration of Western powers of production and destruction, which, when coupled with the improved technologies of transportation and communications, the new sources of energy in fossil fuel and steam, and medical and scientific advances, provided a very few societies with enormous new capabilities for global projections of power into and over the rest of the world, it is a misstep to make this the crux of the story. For the “great divergence” of capabilities generated an equally powerful convergence – indeed a massive collision, forcing deep, mind-wrenching entanglements – that pushed beyond and challenged imperial superiority.
A far better starting point is the general crisis of “old rule” that ran like parallel wild-fires from one end of the world to the other (Bayly 2004; Osterhammel 2009). These convulsions and regime crises were accumulating from the late eighteenth century across the first half of the nineteenth, but timing matters here. Among the great land-based empires of Eurasia – all expanding through the eighteenth century – it was during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century (1830s–1870s) that accumulating premonitions of all kinds (in the biological limits of the old regime, the recurrent rebellion of peasants, the breakaway of provincial subordinates, the weakening of central administrations, and the disintegration of tax structures and military capacities) kicked over, in one place after another, into a full-blown crisis of confidence in political coherence and legitimacy – even of civilization itself: in China with military defeat, the Taiping rebellion of the 1850s and the long civil war that followed; in the Ottoman Empire with the Egyptian breakaway and the overhaul of administrative and military bureaucracies in the Tanzimat reforms; in India with the great “Mutiny” of 1857 and the collapse of the East India Company, followed by the reinvigoration of British rule and, from the 1860s, the rapid expansion of commodity exports; in Russia after the Crimean defeat in the 1850s, with the overhaul of the tsarist administration and the emancipation of serfs. And it was in the third quarter of the nineteenth century that political renovation and constitutional crises in regimes of the Atlantic world were also played out – most often in conjunction with struggles over slavery. The civil war in north America that remade the (re)United States into an industrial power, the realignment of the settler societies of the southern hemisphere toward export-led growth as primary producers in a British-centered world economy, and the forced reconfiguration of the slave-trading conquest states of West Africa are just the most vivid examples.2
Both the simultaneity of these crises, and the fact that they ran in parallel and were largely coeval with the “great divergence” of industrial Europe and the dramatic tilting of the regional balance of power in the world in favor of European-based empire, meant that aggressive assertions of Western power – themselves products of the great upheavals in Europe after 1848 – everywhere encountered not settled societies coolly aloof and indifferent or passively waiting around to be dominated, but a world in upheaval, fully in motion and scrambling to overcome local and regional crises of social order and authority. Unsettlement – the mobilization of people, things, and knowledge on a global scale – became the signature of the age. Everyone was running faster – scrambling to shore up and conserve or salvage and renew themselves through measures of self-strengthening. Whether the scrambles for self-renewal succeeded, or collapsed under (or into) new overlays of Western power, they began as proactive responses to specific regional crises – they developed in a competitive synchronicity that lifted regional interactions to a new plane of global entanglement – and they continued within and under the constraints and the unequal conditions of the imperial domination that was rapidly consolidated in the last third of the nineteenth century.3
Crucially, what came to an end in the course of these middle decades of the nineteenth century was that world of autonomous regions and arms’-length appropriations of distant goods and knowledge that had enabled disparate power centers and cultures to draw from exchange with each other the means necessary to carry on in their own, distinct ways. Distance, and the time it took to traverse distance, had remained crucial and foundational throughout the long “age of globalization.” The hallmark of that era had been the continuing capacity of disparate regions to produce autonomous histories – that is, to shape the articulations of power, production and social reproduction as well as ecology within their own terms, largely from their own resources, and in the adaptation of “other” techniques, goods and knowledges only inasmuch as local conditions facilitated or warranted assimilation (Cooper 1980). These buffers of space, time, and nature collapsed in the course of the nineteenth century, and most especially in its middle decades.
This mid nineteenth-century passage was born of the moment when the effects of globalizing processes began to shape destinies on all sides; when the cushions of distance, time and environment no longer protected; when “all” were forced, with a new immediacy, to secure and maintain control over their futures by means of a greater, more sustained engagement with all others; and when, in deepening engagement, the capacity for the production of discrete or autonomous histories, on all sides, imploded. It was in this passage that the global condition took shape as a multisided, if unequal engagement in a distinctively interior space of sustained enmeshment that was, in principle, and increasingly in fact, conducted in real time and that was, in principle and increasingly in practice, an engagement of all with all. It was in this moment that we enter a condition in which globality proved the tangible context of action, of political decisions and social practice, for all.
Contemporaries experienced this condition as a crisis of survival, which is not far-fetched if we think of the human-made catastrophes of the global age (Moses 2008). But it is more useful to think of globality as a series of choices about how to change in order to keep pace with, hold out against, or adapt to a world of continuous and inescapable interactivity and to appropriate from it those “tools of continuation” necessary for survival. Here the challenge was how to position oneself in a many-sided scramble so as to continue being oneself – how (as the Chinese said in the 1850s) to learn from the barbarian in order to defeat the barbarian (Harootunian 2000a).
The bottom line was this: to position oneself anywhere in this world of entanglements, one could only remain the same by transforming oneself. This chain reaction – and we would advocate thinking of it as an imperative for self-transformation – profoundly shaped the development of the global condition from the mid-nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. Much of the energy that drove self-transformation across this epoch derived from the dream of recapturing the autonomy of a previous age that, in fact, proved irretrievable (Sahlins 1992). In consequence, over the course of the long twentieth century, the struggle became less and less a matter of whether or not to be a part of a global history and more and more a contestation over the terms of that engagement and over one’s placement in it. It is this global condition rather than globalization that should be the object of a connected history of the twentieth century.
Global Actors and Spaces of Action
What then defines the “after-history” of a world already globalized? Who makes this history and where does it take place? We need to specify the spaces of engagement available and the actors who, on all sides, devised strategies to grapple with a condition that they both found and helped generate (Sewell 1996). This is a history as much of (re)settlement as it is a history of unsettlement and the (im)balances between them. If the quintessential history of settlement is one of empire, the quintessential history of unsettlement is the formation of cross-border or transnational spaces cutting across imperial regimes and epistemologies. Neither suffices on its own to capture the global condition in the long twentieth century. In collision with each other, settlement and unsettlement propelled actors and actions across the long twentieth century.
A world of enmeshment put the question of settlement onto an entirely new plane. Most simply, the question was how to organize the putative engagement of all with all? Who had the power and who had the authority to exercise control? What regimes of order might congeal? In whose interests? Within what ideological conventions? With what effects and with what exclusions?
For Europeans in their moment of ascendency, empire was a logical first response. Visions of hierarchical power, organizing capacious systems of exchange, controlling human and territorial resources in imperial divisions of labor, and deploying rules and mandates of behavior flowed easily from a long history of overseas expansion. Centered projections of top-down control, stabbing at the means for ordering the whole – with Britain and the United States being perhaps the most successful, if only briefly – generated tremendous global power and extraordinary wealth, but never established stable authority or sustainable control.4 The problem with empires in the global age was both their strength (which attracted imitators and rivals) and their limited capacity for exercising authority (which required legitimacy as opposed to dominion) (Bright and Geyer 2005). Historians have tended to attribute this problem to generic features of empire such as imperial overstretch or the absence of a social contract of consent (Kennedy 1987; Lundestad 1998; Westad 2005). However, the global condition, while enabling extraordinary accumulations of wealth and power, also made it extraordinarily difficult for anyone or any combination to organize a regime of global order. There would be no universal empire.
This was certainly not due to a lack of trying. But all efforts to establish dominance dissipated in the multiplying spaces of action and were overwhelmed by the multitude of actors crowding into them. Four of these arenas bear close scrutiny: the proliferation of national formations that sought to encompass and organize people on the basis of territoriality; the formation of territories of industrial production, which expanded within national states, but were also interlocked in inter- and transnational exchanges; the social and cultural lifeworlds that sought to organize meaning in and responses to the fragmented ways global enmeshment was picked up locally; and the expansion, the peopling, and the institutionalization of transnational spaces in between and across nations and empires that sought to shape and influence the very process of enmeshment that affected all.
The intensity of competition among imperial powers promoted what Charles Maier has called the growing territorialization of state power – the congealing of the territorial nation in deliberate, high-stakes efforts to mobilize the resources and manpower of the nation (and of colonial preserves or dependent Cold War satellites) as a vehicle for survival in a global competition that often appeared to contemporaries as a zero-sum game within a closed geopolitical arena (Maier 2000; 2006). The territorializing impulse led to a wholesale restructuring of “old empires,” as the Ottomans, Persians, Russians, and Chinese turned themselves into nations or sought to manipulate the national idiom to fend off global pressures or to engage in competition, setting off, in the process, the major revolutions of the twentieth century. But the real heat of territorialization came from so-called young nations – the United States, Germany, Italy, and Japan, which scrambled for place in a world in which competition for territory had shifted from violent annexation to systematic organization. This model for securing competitive place through self-mobilization (even self-exploitation), in turn, spilled back into colonial competition with the twentieth-century projects of imperial development, and these, in another turn, were picked up by anticolonial and nationalizing movements that struggled to recapture independence by pursuing national projects of self-determination and economic development through import substitution and state-led industrialization (Hamashita 2008; Rothermund 2000; Woo-Cumings 1999). In all, nation-making – the organization and self-mobilization of territorial entities – became the dominant political vector of the twentieth century, and the principal means by which political actors around the world sought to engage the global condition and to challenge empire (Paine 2010).
Territorialization also proved a crucial motor in the relentless and uneven industrialization of the world in the long twentieth century. The narrative of the “great divergence” was premised on the industrialization of a few corners of the globe and the accumulating advantages these new productive powers accorded the few over the rest, as global agriculture and primary production were attached to the engines of industrialization at the “core.” To be industrial was a mark of superiority, of white skin and a capitalist ethos, open to only a few (Adas 1989). For others to industrialize was, it was thought, a difficult and destabilizing project, one that had to be driven by modernizing elites and posed awesome challenges of coordination and control – the Soviet “catch-up” being treated, almost necessarily, in terms of heroic struggle and staggering cruelty. In all, industrialization was a national project and what mattered were national capacities to organize, mobilize, and suppress (Adas 2006; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Engerman 2003). Yet even the most single-minded and state-centered drives to industrialize were planned and sustained in a transnational infrastructure of exchange – whether of people or goods, of technologies or knowledge, or, not least, of social models for and comparisons of the possible ways of industrialized life. And the territories of industrial production within territorial nation-states were linked and interconnected with one another. Like nations, industrialization was a product of, and a response to, a global condition, and in its development, it deepened and intensified global entanglements. And because both nationalizing and transnationalizing forces were built into the process of industrialization, its progress proved extremely volatile.
Yet, while this history might well be written as a contest between “territorialists” and “globalists” (Maier 1997), the ultimate arena of struggle in industrialization was not between nations, or between nationalism and globalism, but in a worldwide division of labor between city and countryside. The subordination of the countryside was pivotal in the process of industrialization around the world (Rothermund 1992; 1996). All efforts at industrialization in the long twentieth century put pressure on the countryside and on ecology. In some of the more febrile and force-fed efforts at industrial transformation, as in the Soviet Union, this pressure turned into an all-out war on the peasantry and on nature. Even in less dramatic cases, and despite periodic upswings in prices or improvements in the terms of trade, the ever more efficient transfer of surpluses from agriculture to industry fostered a systemic impoverishment of the countryside and a spoilage of environments. Agrarian crisis was an abiding characteristic of the global condition, from the periodic panics, price depressions, and famines of the late nineteenth century, to the evacuation of rural communities with mechanization and consolidated farming in the mid-twentieth, to the late twentieth-century flight from an impoverished and ecologically depleted countryside into megacities of the global South (Davis 2004). The deepening squeeze on livelihoods and, as often, the grim struggle for survival imposed by these processes concentrated poverty in rural areas and associated it with absolute want. This subordination of agriculture and the fundamental divide it imposed between the priorities of the city and the needs of the countryside were a hallmark of the global condition in the long twentieth century – amounting, we would argue, to a kind of global civil war in the peak struggles of the 1930s to the 1950s, and framing the agendas of revolution and development in the postcolonial world of the 1960s.
These struggles framed a problematic epistemology. The notion of “catching up” or modernization, which informed the language of empire and nation-making, of industrialization and development, with such profligacy, is not a meaningful way to describe the accelerated state of self-transformation that overtook everyone, everywhere, as a global condition shaped options and strategies. Simply to “catch up” was a recipe for self-dissolution. The key to success for local actors was always survival and this meant engaging ascendant power on their own terms. In point of fact, people imitated and adapted all the time, and they learned very fast, taking up ideas, beliefs, images, and practices from wherever they found them, if and as these seemed to work to their own advantage (Beckert 2005). None of this ever made them uniform. If indeed what matters are strategies of self-preservation and self-improvement across the long twentieth century, then what needs to be explained are the multiple and competing tools of mimicking, adapting, rejecting, appropriating, and developing ways of life – vernacular modernities (Hansen 1999) – and the redifferentiation of social and cultural spaces that were generated in the contentious engagements of the global condition. If the real story of the last century and a half is one of self-transformation in which continuous change proved necessary in order for all to persevere as distinct selves, then we should remember that homogeneity makes people disappear, whereas difference – or, in fact, the reproduction of difference – enables them to persist.
The struggle over lifeworlds is best captured if we take the contraction of time and space seriously and explore the synchronicity of the challenge of the modern everywhere (Harootunian 2000b; Mitchell 2000). (See Northrop, last chapter in this volume.) How (and whether) to dress “modern” was a matter of grave concern in Shanghai and Mexico City, every bit as much as it was in Berlin and Paris. How to use the new means of an emergent leisure society, such as cinema or photography, posed problems around the world and virtually simultaneously. How to organize labor for mass-scale production was not a problem faced and solved in the industrial centers of the West and then applied to or adapted by the rest, but one that was framed and addressed in many places, from Lancashire to Mumbai to Osaka and São Paulo, at once. In short, we cannot presume the universalizing conceit of the West spilling over into the rest of the world. Rather, in the vortex of the global transformation, all societies – the West and the rest – were thrown into nerve-wracking processes of radical self-transformation that remade them, from the inside out, by recombining themselves and their ways with adaptations and imports from all sides.
Without the possibility of autonomous histories, all actors formulated their present in reference to and in contestation with all others (Aydin 2007). Finding place in these new conditions was a global problem, a source of endless fascination, but also of deep uncertainty, recurring panics, and outbursts of extreme violence. The synchronicity of grappling with the modern and the simultaneity of these labors of self-transformation are measures of a global condition confronting everyone – including, one should emphasize, the Western world, catching up with itself: for the challenges to tradition and old ways were as ubiquitous and contentious in Germany, Japan, and the United States as anywhere else and the deep strains – the uneasy and politically dangerous processes of “Westernization” in the West – were everywhere apparent in the industrial core and a source of tremendous cultural stress and internal violence for these societies. The destabilization of lifeworlds was general. Simultaneity and synchronicity – rather than the time lapses of catch-up and falter – help us see the long twentieth century as a connected, global history.
Nations could be torn apart by industrial and cultural transformations, and this fact animated imperial imaginings and the presumption that empires could control the spaces in between the territories of nations, industries, and lifeworlds – entangled spaces, as well as the people, money, things, knowledge, and images that populated them. And so it might have appeared. Empire in its new guise of imperialism seemed to swallow up the proliferating spaces in-between and organize the transfers among them. (See Sinha, this volume.) Imperialism thrived on making transnational spaces accessible, regulating them, and reaping handsome rewards from maintaining them. It fostered a club of civilized nations and a privileged civil society of transnational experts (Geyer and Paulmann 2001; Gong 1984). And yet transnational spaces proliferated and they were crowded by nonstate actors with minds of their own;5 multilateral arrangements and transnational institutions (International Labour Organization, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) slipped beyond imperial control (Maul 2007); the establishment of transnational, rules-based governance (United Nations) advanced the struggle for equality on a global scale quite contrary to the intent of its initiators (Mazower 2006). Moreover, the deployment of imperial regimes of control created links and vectors for ever more robust counterimaginings that proposed alternative ways of composing human relations in this era: transnational leagues, federations, and movements calling for peace and disarmament, international law and human rights, socialist solidarity across national and class divisions, racial, religious, and women’s equality and the overthrow of colonial empire – all finding restatements and inflections in local contexts that spoke back to imperial pretensions and limited them (Evangelista 1999). In all, competition, cooptation, and contestation in this transnational arena crimped and contained imperial bids to order the whole.
Reframing the Global Condition
How well do the narrative tropes and epistemological framings that might organize a history of the global condition since the mid-nineteenth century hold up when viewed from the vantage point of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century (Wallerstein 1991)? Looking back at this history, not in order to plot a future trajectory of globalization, but to specify the shifting terms of global entanglement, it would seem that the shifts, even ruptures, of recent decades mark, not the “emergence” of the global or a sudden acceleration of a directional globalization, but a dramatic realignment in the terms of engagement – really a redivision of globality and a reordering of this interior space.
The “great divergence” – tracing the weakening of the “rest” next to the ascending “West” – does not project well to the end of the century, when China and India have ceased to be abject before, or objects of, Western organizing power, and trajectories that began in relative weakness now push toward a new division of power. Also narratives of a “great convergence” – the intense struggles for self-transformation and modernity within a global condition – have been losing cogency and descriptive power, at least since the 1970s, as it becomes increasingly presumptuous, if not impossible, to specify the sources and the trajectories of modernity in the old binary terms of the rest catching up with and copying the West. A century of self-transformation has made modernity – whatever it may have meant in the global history of the long twentieth century – a “fact of life” at its end, one that generates, not sudden globalization, but a deeper and more effective (because no longer weak) engagement of all with all that is, at the same time, rapidly reorganizing – even reordering – the terms under which this engagement may develop.
The same may be said for industrialization. Viewed from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it is evident that the industrialization of the world is largely a done deed. The once seemingly impenetrable boundaries of the industrial world have been giving way with surprising speed since the 1970s, including in places like China or India, long paragons of arrested development. The “great divergence” which, from the mid-nineteenth century, had made the development of “the rest” in the shadow of “the West” appear hugely challenging, if not impossible, has run its course and lost its utility as a historian’s trope. The old imagery of “catch-up” as a model for global industrialization has also been strikingly twisted by the parallel fact that the industrialization of the world has proceeded in tandem with a broad deindustrialization of the very regions that were once the seemingly permanent core spaces of industrial development, as movements offshore have disaggregated production into streams of supply and assembly under transnational coordination.
Inequalities of wealth and power have not declined, and abject poverty, powerlessness, and social injustice remain widespread and even spreading. But these can no longer be mapped so easily onto an imperial division of labor with its core clusters of (industrial) nations and wide swatches of primary-exporters, or between the West and the rest, white and colored, advanced and backward (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Indeed the very meaning of development has been transformed, from an emphasis on the parallel (and presumably convergent) trajectories of national self-improvement to highly competitive and deeply fragmenting scrambles to find sustainable niches in global markets on a transnational plane of competition. In the process, the threefold division of the world into first, second, and third worlds that the Cold War authorized have vanished. Gone too are the spatially defined, geographic terms of “core” and “periphery” as meaningful devices for analyzing the arcs of poverty and affluence, development and marginalization, that now girdle the globe. Everywhere there is underway a redivision of impoverishment that relocates the centers of poverty from the countryside to the slums of megacities – revamping survival strategies and in the process literally overwhelming the old division of urban and rural, backward and advanced that once ordered the scales of human want.
Finally, nation-making – the consolidation and self-mobilization of territorial states – has taken a surprising turn. The stunning rise of the nation-state as a worldwide device for societies and peoples to organize themselves for survival reached a high point (accompanied by extraordinary hopes and expectations) in the chronological middle of the twentieth century. Yet seen from the millennial vantage point, it is apparent that territorially based nations, pursuing national strategies of economic development under the guidance of modernizing elites linked, politically, with broad segments of domestic populations and producing subjectivities bounded geographically by national borders, have given way, in many places and to varying degrees over the last quarter-century, to new configurations of an expanded space for production and accumulation separate from territoriality and transcending national frames. If the political organization of the world remains national, as economic, social and cultural practices become more transnational the principal role of politics has become one of absorbing the changes and adjusting domestic alignments to the requirements of global capital. States do not vanish, but they must figure out how to act transnationally, and their principal tasks become accordingly different, having less to do with the integration of national populations than with the segmentation of their own peoples. The pressure on societies to remake themselves in a global image, with exogenous elements and resources, has proven immense and immensely destabilizing.
In all these – and other – dimensions it seems apparent that the basic contours that framed a connected history of the global condition in the long twentieth century are now undergoing fundamental reorganization. The historical opportunities of one epoch have been played out. On the one hand, the projects of self-reliance that aimed at achieving self-renewal or self-mobilization in the name of successfully engaging the global condition are no longer relevant responses to that condition. On the other hand, centered, hegemonic projects of top-down ordering, cohering around a single imperial power and hierarchically imposed rules, have not been viable means of addressing the questions of global order. Transnational spaces have dramatically grown and proven to be beyond the control of any single actor, yet are ever more critical to assuring their capacity to act. The possibilities opened up in the mid nineteenth-century passage have been played out, and modes of explanation authorized by that passage no longer explain what is happening.
In retrospect from this vantage point, several things become clear. First, we can describe a discrete historical era of globality – the first in world history. The chronology of a long twentieth century is reasonably established: a global condition, congealing in the middle passage of the nineteenth century, experienced two periods of extraordinarily intense acceleration in the movement of goods, people, information, and knowledge (the 1880s to the 1910s and the 1980s to the 2010s), during which, arguably, production and exchange outweighed restriction and control. These periods were punctuated by a long middle period (1920s through the 1970s) of contestation among rival empires, protracted civil and international war, and economic instability during which, arguably, great – at times utopian – faith was reposed in state power and nationalized production. We mark in this, not a forward march (with inevitable backsliding and retreat) of globalization, but protracted, open-ended struggles over the terms of an enmeshment in which various strategies and essays of engagement were tried, tested, consolidated and reproduced or, alternatively, defeated and cast aside.
Secondly, while it may seem that the initial responses to this condition were competitive, even defensive ones – preclusive nationalism, protected industry, the reproduction of cultural difference – they were all, in fact, inherently transnational expressions – made by people in awareness of others, drawing on the examples of others, and pursuing separate survival through a deeper engagement with all others. Throughout the entire period, at every level, state strengthening, protected industrialization, and cultural renovation went hand in hand with, and depended upon constant transnationalization – understood not simply as “flows” and exchanges, but as a vital facilitating force (technology transfer), a mediating and enabling energy (capital), a regulating power (standards setting), an enabling imaginary (comparisons and roadmaps), and even a utopian dreamworld (the desire for consumption and the modeling of identities). And the habits, institutions, rules and practices that congealed from these struggles – from conflict, competition, and cultural warfare – only deepened the entanglement that first required and then shaped strategies of engagement. At the end of this era of global history, looking back, it is clear that global enmeshment remains, even as initial strategies and responses exhaust themselves, and that global entanglement is the principal subject of a connected history of the global condition.
Finally, without reverting to prophecy or assuming that we can anticipate the future by extrapolations from the past, we may begin to discern the new contours of globality that will shape the history of the next century. Most strikingly, human beings have taken over the entire Earth – not just in numbers that may exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, a concern of 30 years ago, but also in the sense that the world we inhabit is now entirely man-made, a human device. It is not just that human activity transforms nature; there is really no natural world left, save in man-made preserves. Nor is it simply a question of finite natural resources and when they will run out, another concern of 30 years ago. The gradual amplification of an environmental awareness has made plain the scale of the planetary human footprint which is permanently compromising ecosystems and the atmosphere. (See Simmons, this volume.) These are principal effects of the competitive struggles and the sociopolitical solutions of the last century and a half. Similarly, grappling with modernity in an effort to cope with and make meaningful the vertiginous movement of global forces has, in recent times, moved into new realms of spirituality – fundamentalist faiths being prominent – turning away from the materiality of the global condition in the absence of earthly answers toward less secular, and often less worldly, solutions to the human and now totally global condition. (See Vélez, Prange, and Clossey, this volume.) These changing parameters of debate and contestation become new arenas of engagement that cut through the familiar ligatures of globalization as it is imagined: the transformation of production and finance, the speedy networks of communication and information retrieval, the circuitry of consumption (inclusion) and desperation (exclusion), and the new patterns of sub- and transnational violence that shape conflicts over self-provisioning or ultimate ends. The condition of globality which congealed in the nineteenth century has irreversibly changed human history in the last 150 years, and the contours of that condition are now being transformed. There is openness in this moment, of a specific kind: will this man-made world turn into a wasteland or be made a habitable place by human effort? It is a global question, in which the conditions of entanglement and the question of global order remain on the table.
Notes
1 See our early efforts in this direction (Geyer and Bright 1987; 1995).
2 We have attempted a synoptic analysis of this mid-century cataract in Geyer and Bright (1996).
3 Burma and Argentina are good examples for subordinate integration into empire; German East Africa for the persistence of resistance. The uneasy entanglement of global and local actors is best seen in the development of maritime logistics in the Indian Ocean. “Break-ins” to the charmed circle of imperial nation-states were rare, Japan being the obvious example.
4 We leave aside the distinction between imperial (hard power) as opposed to hegemonic (soft power) bids, because neither of them was capable of commanding or ordering global interaction for long.
5 International lawyers are among these experts; see Koskenniemi (2002) and so are engineers (Mitchell 2002). Recent treatment sees them as exponents or instruments of an imperialism of rules; see Goodale (2005).
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