historicizing the global

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Historicizing the Global, orLabouring for Invention?

by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

If there be nothing new, but that which isHath been before, how are our brains beguiled,Which, labouring for invention, bear amissThe second burthen of a former child!

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 59

Geoff Eley’s extended and erudite essay, ‘Historicizing the Global’ is one of a number on that theme to have appeared in recent times. What seems to setEley’s effort apart from some of the others, to which I shall turn in greaterdetail presently, are two features (not including its unremittingly presentistmood). First, Eley is not principally concerned with the economiccharacteristics of ‘globalization’, unlike writers associated with theNational Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), or even some of theirmore prominent critics. Therefore, the main questions for him do not centreon the history of capital and monetary flows, and the nature and timing of price convergence in markets spread over the globe. To the extent that he isinterested in economic questions, they appear to focus far more than isusually the case on labour markets and their evolution, but also on thenature of unfree labour in the long-term development of capitalistproduction. A second feature of Eley’s presentation is its attention to‘globalization’ as a discursive phenomenon, and the relation between thediscourse and what underpins it in ‘real’ terms, but also what the discourseitself helps to shore up, propagate and justify. I am entirely sympathetic, letme state at the outset, to such efforts to look at globalization-as-ideology,even if I do not share certain of Eley’s theoretical perspectives orpresuppositions. However, in the space of this brief comment I would liketo point to some aspects of the whole question that remain neglected in themain essay, and also to what I can only term a massive geographical blindspot in its view of the world. My brief comments will be in three parts. First,I will rapidly and critically review some recent literature that is of relevance.Second, I will question of the relative absence of Asia in Eley’s analysis.Finally, I will look at the question of the emergence of the ‘global’ as anobject of study for historians, here revisiting some of my own earlier work

and that of the French historian Serge Gruzinski.A good part of the debate on globalization treats it principally as an

economic phenomenon, having to do with a move from a world made up of dispersed, fragmented and largely natural economies, to a system of

History Workshop Journal Issue 64 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm040 The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.


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lead to significant market integration in some areas, and for somecommodities at least (notably for pepper and spices between eastern andcentral Europe, and western Europe). 5

While the two naturally differ in myriad other ways, one significant

feature of the NBER worldview is curiously shared by Eley in his essay. Thisis the almost total focus on the Atlantic world, as if the ‘global’ could simplybe reduced to the ‘Atlantic’, and especially the North Atlantic. In part, wemay usefully return here to the Flynn-Gira ĺdez critique of the NBERviewpoint, for a good part of their critical emphasis lies on developing theimportance of both the Pacific and the Indian Ocean as basins of interactionin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As they and before them Richardvon Glahn have pointed out, the Chinese (and Japanese) economy must befactored in for any meaningful understanding of world silver and other

commodity flows in the early modern period, or indeed to understand thecareers of even the most successful and profitable European corporateentities of the time such as the Dutch United East India Company (orVOC). 6 Neither China nor even India appears to play any real role in Eley’sown conception of matters, except briefly in the context of the indenturesystem of the nineteenth century. Yet bringing these areas into the equationwill change matters in a non-trivial way and produce a quite different way of ‘historicizing the global’. 7

Given the prevalent ‘India and China are the future of the world’ mantraof today no current management guru will need to be told why, but historiansmay need to be reminded of the issues at hand. There is to begin with theweight, demographic, agricultural – and before 1850 – also in manufacturingterms, of these zones. Further, even after 1800 and British dominance overAsian seas, Indian and Chinese financiers continued to play an enormousrole not only in ‘national’ terms but as overseas entrepreneurs, underwritingeven a part of the British empire in Asia and Africa. 8 Indian labour wascrucial both for production (as noted in passing by Eley), and for policing theempire, and fighting its wars. A history of the ‘global’ which neglects theIndians and Africans who fought both in the European (and Middle Eastern)theatre of both the World Wars is, to put it mildly, a rather narrow one, andsemi-apocrypha tell us that Henry Kissinger for one has stated that in theabsence of such a pool of military labour, there could never be an Americanempire to succeed the defunct British one (‘If only we had two brigades of Gurkhas to send to Baghdad !’). I do not write this out of some simple-minded patriotism, or to rehash the now hackneyed call to ‘provincializeEurope’ (and perhaps universalize Bengal), but because one is constantly atrisk of reproducing that old and familiar history of the ‘global’, where it allbegins in the Mediterranean, passes to the Atlantic, and eventually expands

by means of concentric circles to the rest of the world. This was precisely therooted, and eventually successful, objection that historians of Asia raised tothe Wallersteinian perspective: that it was very old Eurocentric wine in ashiny new plastic bottle labelled ‘world-systems theory’. 9

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Finally, a point somewhat distinct from those discussed above. Eleyextensively and approvingly cites the work of Frederick Cooper, who hasraised vigorous objections to the use of the concept of ‘globalization’ itself. 10

It is certainly true that some theorists, and some ideologues, of globalization

wish to see in it a novelty that is (by them) vastly exaggerated. However,Cooper himself does not seem adequately to take into account the historicalroots of the concept, even if not of the precise usage. The question thenis: from when do we find systematic and self-conscious attempts to ‘thinkglobally’, particularly among historians? The French scholar SergeGruzinski has argued in his work Les quatre parties du monde that we cantrace this back to the later sixteenth century, when the joint rule of theHabsburgs over the Spanish and Portuguese empires created a globalimperial imagination, and a historiography, geography and literature to

accompany it.11

The central trope here was of a single monarchy that heldsome significant degree of control over the ‘four parts’ (meaning Europe,Asia, Africa and America) of the world, now that ‘Thule, the last of thelands’ (in Seneca’s prophetic words) had been found. 12 He further suggeststhat this ‘Iberian globalization’ is visible not merely in political andeconomic terms, but through a complex set of cultural productions: ivoriescombining Christian and Krishnaite themes in Goa, Japanese nambanscreen-paintings, chronicles written in Nahuatl in the valley of Mexico butdealing with Henri IV of France, histories of the Ottoman empire writtenin New Spain by German exiles, and so on.

I would argue that while Gruzinski is broadly correct on the timing of the emergence of ‘global histories’ (as opposed to the earlier ‘universalhistories’), wherein sixteenth-century Portuguese authors such as Anto ńioGalva õ speak of the object of their study as a redondeza (a version of theglobe), the move was far more widely shared than has been supposed. Wecan find examples of it in the Ottoman empire, in the court of the Mughalemperor Akbar, and in various other places. 13 Nor was this globalimagination always an imperial or imperialistic imagination, for wecannot understand authors such as the sixteenth-century Polish historianMarcin Bielski (1495–1575) in this fashion. So, if one is to ask Cooper’squestion again (what the concept of globalization is good for), one answer inthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that it was good to thinkglobally in order to redefine the possible objects of historical study. If, inmany instances, such a new history was one of imperial hubris andmessianic zeal (as with Philip II), it could also lead other European authorsof the same period to relativize their own achievements, and even to claim(in one instance), that the ‘discoveries’ of the Chinese had far exceeded theirown. It is, alas, a lesson that many historians of Europe seem reluctant

to learn even today.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Doshi Chair of Indian History and Director of the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA. He has taught in Delhi,

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Paris and Oxford. He is the author most recently of Explorations inConnected History , 2 Vols, (Oxford UP, 2005), and (with Muzaffar Alam)Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1700 (CambridgeUP, 2007).

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘After Columbus: Explaining Europe’sOverseas Trade Boom, 1500–1800’, Journal of Economic History 62, 2002, pp. 417–56; alsoO’Rourke and Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’, European Review of EconomicHistory 6, 2002, pp. 23–50.

2 In point of fact, Smith remained deeply ambivalent concerning what had happenedbetween the 1490s and his day, seeing it at times as a case of a lost opportunity.

3 For a critique of O’Rourke and Williamson’s historical naı v̈ete ,́ see G. Balachandran

and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘On the History of Globalization and India: Concepts, Measuresand Debates,’ in Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below , Jackie Assayag and C. J. Fuller,London, 2005, pp. 17–46.

4 Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Gira ĺdez, ‘Path Dependence, Time Lags and theBirth of Globalisation: a Critique of O’Rourke and Williamson’, European Review of Economic History 8, 2004, pp. 81–108; and the response by O’Rourke and Williamson,‘Once More: When Did Globalisation Begin?’, European Review of Economic History 8, 2004,pp. 109–17.

5 Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Did Vasco da Gama Matter forEuropean Markets?: Testing Frederick ( sic) Lane’s Hypotheses Fifty Years Later’, NBERWorking Paper 11884, December 2005.

6 Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China,

1000–1700 , Berkeley, 1996; the implications of such work have unfortunately been caricaturedand misread in such problematic works as Andre ́Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy inthe Asian Age , Berkeley, 1998.

7 This point was made forcefully in a number of essays by Frank Perlin, gathered togetherlater in two volumes: see Perlin, ‘The Invisible City’: Monetary, Administrative and PopularInfrastructures in Asia and Europe 1500–1900 , Aldershot, 1993; and Unbroken Landscape:Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity; Their Production as Myth and Knowledge from 1500 ,Aldershot, 1994.

8 At a monographic level, the path-breaking work is by Claude Markovits, TheGlobal World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama ,Cambridge, 2000. Also see the more recent and general accounts by Sugata Bose,A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire , Cambridge, Mass., 2006,pp. 72–121, and Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena,1860–1920 , Berkeley, 2007.

9 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘World-Economies’ and South Asia, 1600–1750: a SkepticalNote’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton, NY) 12: 1, 1989, pp. 141–8; DavidWashbrook, ‘South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism’, Journal of Asian Studies49: 3, 1990, pp. 479–508. The embarrassing section of Wallerstein’s work on eighteenth-centuryAsia has thankfully sunk without a trace; cf. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-SystemIII: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s ,San Diego, 1989.

10 Frederick Cooper, ‘What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An AfricanHistorian’s Perspective’, African Affairs 100, 2001, pp. 189–213. Though ostensibly writingfrom ‘an African historian’s perspective’, Cooper is in fact perfectly sensitive to materials fromnot only the Atlantic, but also Asia (in particular Central Asia and China).

11 Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation , Paris, 2004;also see the earlier reflection in Gruzinski, Virando se ´ culos 1480–1520: A passagem do se ´ culo; A s̀origens da globalizaç a ˜ o, Sa õ Paulo, 1999.

12 Diskin Clay, ‘‘Columbus’ Senecan Prophecy’, The American Journal of Philology 113:4,1992, pp. 617–20.

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