Author: Tom Tuten

The series of lectures we had this week emphasized the degree to which the pattern of industrialization and globalization played out in similar ways across the world. Jaffa, the Rhineland, and Bombay all grew semi-organically out of their location – in the case of Bombay and the Rhineland, the needs of empire and local industrial capabilities, and in the case of Jaffa, transportation convenience. One can also arguably see how the global economy is developing into a market in which shifts in supply and demand can change individual communities substantially – and in which imperialism is used to further the economic goals of empires by trying to control the market.

For instance, the cotton market in Bombay is created by the absence of American coffee from the market due to the American Civil War, and made possible by the construction of the Suez Canal. Jaffa becomes a transportation hub because of its proximity of the Holy Land and Zionism, and because of the orange trade. The Rhineland was near both coal and iron in a time in which the German Empire needed industry (especially war industry). By these conditions, the lives of the people who lived in these locations had the circumstances of their lives utterly and completely changed in a relatively short period of time.

This change was not completely positive in any of the examples. The upper class in the new world market economy drives exploitation that harms the workers in every example. In Jaffa, title transfers lead to rural workers losing control of their property and essentially becoming serfs. In conquered India, in addition to lacking sovereignty, a similar process makes many rural laborers serfs or moves them to the cities. And finally, though they are European laborers in a safe and prosperous country, German Rhenish workers are subjected to awful conditions in the mines. T

Though the geography of the places we have discussed is different, their similarities betray the themes of the age of the turn of the century.

For countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that were threatened by the expansion of European Imperial powers, how they could protect their self determination and territorial integrity as peoples became an existential question. In Latin America, native populations such as that in Brazil were successfully ethnically cleansed, in many cases, in order to make room for development. Likewise, many African and Asian countries were conquered or had the influence of Europeans powers imposed upon them by the early 20th century. The elites of the remaining free non-imperial states then had to reckon with the question of protecting themselves urgently.

In Africa, the Ethiopians attempted to play various powers – the British, French, and Italians against each other, but repeatedly found themselves to trade. The end result was that they were able to protect their own independence by fighting back against invading powers by having their soldiers armed with European arms and a leader in king Menelek II who was able to organize a proper defense. The Japanese, in a somewhat similar fashion, decided that for the sake of self preservation, their government needed to be reformed into a European-style nation state that would be respected by Imperial powers. Fukuzawa Yukichi explains this mentality as “We should leave [the ranks of East Asian countries] to join the camp of the civilized countries of the West.” In the first half of the 20th Century, Japan was arguably the most successful non-Western nation in adopting Western Imperial Bureaucracy and statecraft.

The examples of Ethiopia and Japan show an similar decision being made by the ruling classes of the countries – to sacrifice some amount of traditional practice and shifting away from traditional methods of state organization in order to protect self determination and cultural practices from Imperialism in the long run. In Ethiopia and especially Japan, however, the adoption of some imperial systems resulted in both of the countries being conquering powers – Ethiopia conquered surrounding territories under Menelek II and Japan becoming a brutal Imperial power in its own right between 1900 and 1945.

The idea raised by the authors that globalization is not a quantified thing that increases or decreases, but more or less a static condition that was established in the second half of the 19th century is interesting, if somewhat questionable. The authors contend that strategies for dealing with the reality changed, but not the nature of globalization itself. A close examination of the history seems to yield conflicting results: the idea of changing strategies in a globalized world seems like a much better interpretation than the extremely linear approach of insisting that strategies “evolve” and that the Europeans always come up with the next one fist, with the rest of the world trying to catch up. However, technological innovation and population growth have increased individual interconnections, in the sense that it is now possible and even easy for some people to travel between continents in the space of 24 hours and for people thousands of miles apart to communicate effectively with only seconds of delay. In this sense, globalization has ‘increased’ – individual connections are closer globally. One could argue, however, as a counterpoint, that structural interconnections remain the same as always, its just that they are more visible. The working people in industrial Britain who moved to the city as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws probably didn’t understand the cause of their frustration quite as well as modern American farmers understand, or at least know about, that the tariffs placed on China by the US are what makes their Soybeans unprofitable internationally. However, despite happening more than 100 years apart, they are in more than less the same situation otherwise.

Additionally interesting is the sort of ‘post-national’ argument made by the authors when describing the current situation. I agree with it to some extent – the idea of empire as it existed up until the mid 20th century has become wholly irrelevant today. I think that the primary organizing force of international politics is in fact global capital (to be a bit leftist for a moment) which, as the authors discussed, moves slums and factories around the world in a continuous process of increasing profit efficiency. I think it is worth mentioning that the locations of slums, factories, and other creations of economy are moved from country to country (sweatshops are in Indonesia, consumers are in the US). This is the extent of how far I am willing to except the idea of a post-national world, as otherwise the emotional force of nationalism as an organizational method is clearly extensively popular and growing in popularity worldwide, whereas the much less outwardly defined principle of global capitalism is not. Overall, the authors do raise interesting reinterpretations of conventional wisdom on globalization that I agree with for the most part.