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Abstract
In the past, historians tended to perceive the global as a set of encompassing processes that made the world smaller and generated an upward trajectory of economic development in the industrialized countries, as we saw in the nineteenth and the better part of the twentieth centuries. At the core of the processes were the technological innovations, the rise of humanism, and the emergence of democratic systems, all of which were closely associated with western European culture. Only recently, have we begun to comprehend not only the multiplexity of the global, but also the deterritorialized, dispersed, and regionalized nature of global change. In this article, I suggest that the global is only the reification of the local. Instead of studying the global, we should focus on the changes in the local societies.
Notes
1 This article is based on my readings when I was working on my book, The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023). I wish to thank the following scholars who helped me construe this article: William Kirby, Elizabeth Perry, Prasenjit Duara, Kenneth Pomeranz, Stephen Halsey, Megan Greene, and Henrietta Harrison.
2 Jean-François Lyotard uses the term to describe all the theories (narratives) that are intended to provide a totalizing or comprehensive explanation of human history; Lyotard believes that any such narrative is only used as a tool for legitimizing power, social norms, and authority; See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 8.
3 For detailed discussion of each thinker’s view, see Daly, Historians Debate the Rise of the West, 2-8.
4 See detailed discussion in ibid.
5 Hall, Powers and Liberties.
6 Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.
7 McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity.
8 Rosenberg and Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich.
9 North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World.
10 Pipes, Property and Freedom.
11 Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.
12 Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism.
13 White, Medieval Technology and Social Change; Medieval Religion and Technology.
14 Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena.
15 Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700.
16 Roberts, "The Military Revolution, 1560-1660", 195-225; Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800.
17 McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000.
18 Although we usually believe that modern social sciences emerged in the eighteenth century with the development of modern science and by borrowing many methods of inquiry from the latter, modern social sciences actually have its roots in the human interest in natural science, which can be dated as early as the fifth century BCE, during the time of Athenian philosopher Thucydides. However, social sciences became a field in the early nineteenth century because many saw the need to explain what they saw as the drastic changes in the world in that century. See discussion in McDonald, The Early Origins of the Social Sciences, 3.
19 See similar discussion in Michael E. Latham, "Introduction: Modernization, International History, and the Cold War World",
20 Lipset and Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society; Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy".
21 Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change, and Modernity; Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism, Studies in Comparative Modernization Series; Revolution and the Transformation of Societies.
22 Parsons, "Evolutionary Universals in Society".
23 See discussion in Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 203-40.
24 Hobson, Imperialism.
25 Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
26 Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes.
27 Quoted from Chilcote, Imperialism, 271-72.
28 See Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination.
29 El-Ojeili and Hayden, Critical Theories of Globalization, 43-44.
30 United Nations. Economic Commission for Latin America, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems, United Nations Document (Lake Success: United Nations Dept. of Economic Affairs, 1950); Singer, "The Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries"; "The Terms of Trade Controversy and the Evolution of Soft Financing".
31 Frank, "The Development of Underdevelopment".
32 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System.
33 See summary of the thesis in Weiss and Thakur, Global Governance and the Un, 165.
34 See discussion in Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance, 30.
35 For discussion on how the earlier postmodernists (1946-mid 1960s) continued to associate their ideas with modernity, see Breisach, Historiography, 420-23.
36 In one of his publications such as this, see Habermas, "Modernity Versus Postmodernity".
37 See discussion in Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 425-27.
38 See discussion in Cook, Glickman, and O'Malley, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History, 3-58.
39 See Ibid. 425-27.
40 Said, Orientalism, 3.
41 See Ibid.
42 Quoted from Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, 39.
43 For discussion of the globalization phenomenon, see Robinson, "Theories of Globalization", 125.
44 Mazlish and Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History.
45 For instance, Wai studies globalization from post-colonial perspective; see Wai, "Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization".
46 Quoted from Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, 60.
47 See discussion by Hunt in ibid., 40.
48 Ibid., 9-10, 40.
49 See Lynn Hunt’s discussion in ibid., 9-10, 62.
50 See discussion in ibid., 58.
51 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity.
52 Meyer, et al., "World Society and the Nation-State"
53 For a brief discussion of neo-modernization theory, see William and Larry, Social Theory and Postcommunism, 106-07.
54 Cartier, Globalizing South China; Wu and Cheung, The Globalization of Chinese Food; Xu, China: A New Cultural History; Jansen, et al., Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China; Francesca Bray, et al., Rice: Global Networks and New Histories; Wu, Empires of Coal.
55 Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony; The World System in the Thirteenth Century.
56 See Goody, The East in the West, 47; See also discussion in Daly, Historians Debate the Rise of the West, 102-07.
57 Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.
58 Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, 2-3.
59 Darwin, After Tamerlane, 117.
60 The quoted words are Hodgson’s; see Hodgson and Burke, Rethinking World History, 68; Also see discussion about Hodgson’s view in Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800, 9.
61 Temple, The Genius of China.
62 Therefore, Matossian believes that the period should be called “Chinese Millennium” instead of “Medieval Millennium”; see Matossian, Shaping World History, 3.
63 Adshead, T'ang China.
64 Marks, The Origins of the Modern World, 43-57.
65 Yang, Performing China.
66 See Wong, China Transformed.
67 See Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.
68 For Iriye’s term, see Iriye, "The Transnational Turn"; See similar discussion in Bayly, "Ahr Conversation"; For discussion on transnationalism used to avoid teleology in globalization theory, see Saunier, "Going Transnational?", 130-31.
69 Bayly, "Ahr Conversation", 1441-64.
70 Quotation from Patrick Manning comes from Manning, Navigating World History, 169.
71 See discussion by Akira Iriye in Iriye, Global and Transnational History, 11-12; See also discussion in Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, 9-10.
72 Quoted from Basch, et al., Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States.
73 See discussion in Clavin, "Defining Transnationalism", 422; Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33-36.
74 Castells, The Informational City; The Rise of the Network Society.
75 See discussion of this aspect of transnationalism in Robinson, "Theories of Globalization," 136.
76 See discussion in Robertson, "Europeanization as Glocalization", 24.
77 See discussion in Herod, Geographies of Globalization, 100-01.
78 Dirlik, "Place-Based Imagination", 30.
79 See discussion in Robinson, "Theories of Globalization," 135.
80 See discussion in ibid.
81 Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home; Pieke, Transnational Chinese; Carroll, Edge of Empires; Xu, China and the Great War; Woodside, Lost Modernities; Blussé, Visible Cities; Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China; Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, 171. Bays and Widmer, China's Christian Colleges; Zhan, Other-Worldly; Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism; Liang and Furth, Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia; Zachmann, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period; Zhou, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece; Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England; Chang, Britain's Chinese Eye; Ling, Chinese Chicago; Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds; Harrison, The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village.
82 Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, & Friars. Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands; Goodman and Goodman, Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China; Wu, Chinese Christianity. Jansen, Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China.
83 Duara, The Global and Regional in China's Nation-Formation; The Crisis of Global Modernity; Since the appearance of Duara’s works, many scholars have placed their research on China in a transnational context, giving much attention to the global linkages in the Chinese diaspora. Such publications include Soon, Global Medicine in China; Miles, Chinese Diasporas.
84 See translation by Iwabuchi in Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 93; For who has used the term, see discussion in Robertson, "Europeanization as Glocalization," 16.
85 Quoted from Ritze and Atalay, Readings in Globalization, 319.
86 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 64. Here the term “modern imperialism” refers to the activities of the early industrialized nations aimed at gaining control of the rest of the world outside their home countries, as we have seen during most of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries.
87 Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Jones, The European Miracle; North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders.
88 Hodgson, "In the Center of the Map: Nations See Themselves as the Hub of History"; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914; Darwin, After Tamerlane. John The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation.
89 Gabardi, Negotiating Postmodernism, 33-34.
90 Gibson-Graham, "Beyond Global Vs. Local".
91 Ritzer, The Mcdonaldization of Society; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
92 Scholars associated mostly with the neo-Marxist literature tend to perceive the global and local on opposite sides of a binary, i.e. global capitalism, corporation, and hegemony vs. local resistance, solidary, and protest; See discussion in Guy, "What Is Global and What Is Local?".
93 See summary of the concept by William Robinson in Robinson, "Theories of Globalization," 135.
94 Kumaravadivelu, Cultural Globalization and Language Education, 45; See discussion about their views in Rani Rubdy and Lubna, "The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization", 4.
95 Quoted from Robertson, "Europeanization as Glocalization," 21; See discussion of Robertson’s view in Christopher Kollmeyer, "Glocalization and the Simultaneous Rise Fna D Fall of Democracy at Teh Century's End," ibid., 174-75.
96 Rubdy and Lubna, "The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization: Problemitizing Hybridity," 5.
97 Quoted from Waters, Globalization, 5. Held et al. see globalization as “a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions.” Quoted from Held, et al., Global Transformations, 16.
98 To Giddens, “one of the fundamental consequences of modernity … is globalization,” even though globalization is “more than a diffusion of Western institutions across the world, in which other culture are crushed.” See Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 64, 175.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Xin Zhang
Xin Zhang is a Professor of History at Indiana University Indianapolis. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and is the author of two books: Social Transformation in Modern China: The State and Local Elites in Henan, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). His expertise is in Chinese urban and rural history, specializing in theoretical interpretation of local changes due to globalization and social transformation in the modern period. Correspondence to: Xin Zhang. Email: [email protected]
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