FEATURE

Global Times and Spaces:

On Historicizing the Global
INTRODUCTION

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Geoff Eley’s essay on the politics of globalization, published in History
Workshop Journal 63, presents a powerful critique of current ‘globalization
talk’ amongst politicians, journalists, lobbyists and academics.1 In common
with many other critics, he argues for a more discriminating sense of
the complex historical geographies of economy, society and politics that
have characterized the long-term development of global capitalism, whose
unevenness tends to be flattened out in neo-liberal accounts of the process.
He also illuminates a veritable galaxy of ideas currently being debated
by theorists across the academy, as they grapple with some of the more
striking changes in the contemporary global political economy.
Globalization, as anthropologist James Ferguson puts it his account of
Africa’s place in the new world order, is a process ‘not of planetary
communion, but of disconnection, segmentation, and segregation – not a
seamless world without borders, but a patchwork of discontinuous
and hierarchically ranked spaces, whose edges are carefully delimited,
guarded and enforced’.2
In the face of what Geoff Eley describes as ‘the inescapable discursive
noise of globalization’, historians have begun to expose and explore the
historical depth and geographical differentiation of the world-economic
processes too often currently described as entirely new or entirely universal.
Seen in the light of his essay, however, this historicizing response is
necessary but not sufficient. The challenge posed by recent events on the
world stage – the end of the Cold War, the intensification of post-Fordism,
the consequences of 9/11, the reconfiguration of global power in the wake of
US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan – is to reconsider the terms on
which these global histories are understood, and their effects in the world
today. In this context, Eley draws attention to an array of recent work which
re-centres, in various ways, the condition of slavery and servitude in the
narratives of global capitalism, and which questions the analytical
precedence conventionally given to waged work in the framework of
Marxist political economy. This inevitably requires a corresponding effort to
de-centre, geographically and historically speaking, the experience of
Western Europe in the era of Fordism.
Given the significance and scope of the issues raised by Geoff Eley’s
essay, History Workshop Journal invited contributions to a roundtable
debate from four leading historians working on economic, political and

History Workshop Journal Issue 64 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm038

ß The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
322 History Workshop Journal

cultural aspects of what has come to be known as world history. Of course,

thinking in world-historical terms is nothing new for historians – indeed,
in its Enlightenment form (only one of its many guises, as several
contributors point out), this was once supposed to define the difference
between philosophical history and mere antiquarianism. Moreover, the
notion of a turn to ‘the global’ in writing history has become something of a
commonplace in recent years. The question raised here is how to think
globally while not effacing the local; or rather, how to conceive the processes

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through which the experience of world history have become intensely
differentiated under the sign of ‘globalization’. This requires, in part, a
willingness to rethink the geography of the world historical process - that
‘patchwork of discontinuous and hierarchically ranked spaces, whose edges
are carefully delimited, guarded and enforced’ which James Ferguson
describes. For this very reason, several of the contributors to this roundtable
respond to Geoff Eley’s challenge to ‘historicize the global’ by highlighting
what they regard as the blind-spots in his own map of global change.
The need to rethink the histories of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas
in the light of the host of uneven exchanges between them is today
more urgent than it has ever been. The eloquence and passion of the
responses which follow suggest grounds for hope that historians are up
to the challenge.
Felix Driver

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Geoff Eley, ‘Historicizing the global, politicizing capital: giving the present a name’,
History Workshop Journal, 63, pp. 154–88.
2 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham NC,
2006, p. 14.