232Conclusion
This book has brought together new research in the field of cultural history with long-standing debates about the economics of imperialism. By combining approaches from the humanities and social sciences we have explored the relationship between two key features of the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century world: empire and globalisation. On the face of it, the division of the world into rival empires and the processes of closer international integration would appear to be inherently in conflict. To the extent that rivalry between empires, and violence and oppression within them, have pitted cultures and peoples against each other, this is true. Yet preceding chapters have also shown how the British empire, or more precisely the British World, promoted greater economic and social integration – a force for globalisation, in fact. Such a finding may seem surprising, especially when viewed through the lens of contemporary experience and national sovereignty. We are accustomed to perceive most political phenomena, including globalisation itself, through the framework of the nation state. From that perspective, closer international integration is largely a product of the interplay of different national policies.1 The unspoken assumption is clear: a society’s freedom to make its own way in the global marketplace is contingent upon a prior ability to gain and exert its independence. If we accept this proposition, then such freedom of action cannot be attained within the structures of empire.
We should not, however, underestimate the historic role of geo-politics in providing momentum to the process of globalisation, however segmented and uneven the results may have been.2 Thus, in the nineteenth
1 For the independent nation state as ‘the paradigmatic form through which globaliza-
tion . . . proceeded’ in the later half of the twentieth century, see B. Axford, The Global
System: Economics, Politics and Culture (Oxford: Polity, 1995), p. 29.
2 For the dangers of globalisation silencing the past, see M.-R. Trouillot, ‘The Perspectives
of the World: Globalisation Then and Now’, in E. Mudimbe-Boyi (ed.), Beyond
Dichotomies: Histories, Cultures and the Challenge of Globalization (Albany: SUNY Press,
2002), esp. pp. 5–6. For the view, from a contemporary theorist of globalisation, that the
expansion of European power was central to connections of global production and finance,
and to the spread of communications technology and political systems of sovereign states,
232 Conclusion century, the British empire (at the time the world’s pre-eminent power) willingly utilised its military might and economic influence to advance its interests – interests that included the global expansion of free trade. In so doing, of course, it was not unique. Hegemonic relationships have always been used to push through broader agendas, irrespective of opposition and resistance. Indeed, in our own time there are those who attribute a similar driving role in the global economy to America and its ‘empire’.3 A priori, then, the proposition that an empire promoted globalisation is clearly within the realms of possibility.
233Nor should we succumb to the temptation to focus overwhelmingly on modern technologies and their role in initiating and accelerating the process of globalisation, whether they be high-speed transportation, the Internet or telecommunications. In this view, globalisation is depicted as belonging to the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and, moreover, as being largely a culturally blind, technology-driven phenomenon. This book reminds us that globalisation belongs to the past as well as to the present, and that it is as much about people as technology. In particular, it has shown how the culturally shaped networks built by migrants played crucial roles in forging the increasingly globalised world of the half-century prior to the First World War.
Central to the whole process of nineteenth-century globalisation was migration.4 By its very nature, migration is transformative. It changes the perceptions and outlook of individuals and communities, teaching them to look beyond the inhibiting parochialism of former generations. In the case of the British World, it also changed the way in which individuals – and the families whom they left behind – imagined their social and political spaces, thereby making their migration a defining aspect of their identity. By encouraging people to see themselves as part of a global chain of kith and kin, who shared common standards, forms of communication and expectations, the exodus of people from the British Isles during the ‘long’ nineteenth century turned national (and indeed regional) identities into trans-national ones.5
see N. Bisley, Rethinking Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 34.
For two key detailed historical studies of the relation between empires and globalisation,
and how earlier episodes of globalisation have been reworked and reproduced today, see
J. Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007); and
A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002).
3 N. Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2004).
4 For the neglect of migrant diasporas in globalising processes, see J. Nederveen Pieterse,
Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003),
pp. 4, 32.
5 See for example S. J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass
Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, JBS 46 (July 2007),
621–46 (pp. 621–2).
234The story of this British diaspora (or ‘ethnic group in dispersal’) with all its fateful implications, merits a more prominent place in global histories.6 Alongside this massive out-migration of people there emerged a more expansive, even cosmopolitan, sense of ‘Britishness’ that overlapped, and was able to co-exist, with a range of other forms of identity. This ‘imperial’ Britishness was not just a form of belonging, but a set of widely shared and strongly felt (albeit sometimes vigorously contested) values, attitudes and beliefs. These attributes in turn impacted on religious, social and, less obviously but no less importantly, economic life. As we have seen, whether with respect to remittance activity, consumer choice or investment decisions, culture and ethnicity could be key determinants of economic behaviour and performance.
This does not, of course, mean that Britishness was homogenised or static. For reasons of both class and gender, the proletarian forms of Britishness we have identified around peripatetic skilled labour (which tied working-class emigrants to their homeland) were different from the bourgeois forms of Britishness derived from middle-class values, saving and consumerism (from which much of Britishness’ trans-national economic power derived). Meanwhile rapid advances in communication – which had major repercussions for travel, correspondence and the media – meant that interactions between the different parts of the British World were more frequent and intense at the end of our period than they had been at its beginning. Moreover, it was also at the end of our period, around the time of the South African War (1899–1902), that an increasingly defensive language of ‘race nationalism’ came to the fore. Immigration policy, and the ambitions of rival European colonial powers, contributed to the growing appeal of ethnic nationalism in the settler colonies, while racial sensibilities were also sharpened by the fears surrounding an ‘awakening Asia’, and by the insecurities resulting from the redeployment of much of the Royal Navy from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.7
Thus, as well as showing how a developing sense of global Britishness aided, rather than thwarted, economic and social integration in the halfcentury before the First World War, this book also highlights how this
6 Robin Cohen notes how the original Greek word ‘signified expansion and settler colon-
isation’ and can thus ‘best be compared to the European (especially British, Portuguese,
and Spanish) settlements of the mercantile and colonial period’; see Cohen ‘Diasporas,
the Nation-State, and Globalization’ in W. Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migrations
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 117–44 (pp. 139–40).
7 For a perceptive commentary on the language and rhetoric of Britishness in the set-
tler colonies, see especially S. Ward, ‘Imperial Identities Abroad’, in S. Stockwell (ed.),
The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 226–34.
For the racialisation of immigration policy and practice, see A. Bashford, Medicine at
the Border: Disease, Globalisation and Security, 1850 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006).
235Conclusion process had its limits. The globalisation of the period on which we focus did not encompass all parts of the world and all races equally; it did not lend itself to the creation of the type of supra-national institutions that have helped to co-ordinate the modern global economy; it was not official policy; nor did it always receive the imprimatur of the great and mighty of its time. That said, this limited, culturally and regionally focused globalisation of the late nineteenth century did promote economic integration of a like hitherto not witnessed.8 Above all else, it was an informal, grass-roots phenomenon. There was no grand design here: almost by stealth, the workings of a multitude of trans-national networks by-passed national boundaries and unwittingly took large and historically important steps towards the emergence of a truly global market.9 While Britain was often the hub of these networks through which people, capital and goods moved, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were rapidly evolving and maturing societies and economies in their own right, remarkably open to the world beyond their shores, and each thus contributing distinctively to, as well as feeding off, the trans-national networks under consideration. The United States, too, fed into these networks, although its place in the British World of the long nineteenth century was markedly more ambiguous, and hence is far more difficult to isolate. Again, however, the fact that the USA played such a role at all was in large part due to a shared heritage and the bonds of language that arose from mass emigration. Together, these factors fostered ties to, as well as a much deeper awareness and knowledge of, America in British society than scholars have typically acknowledged.10 As previous chapters have detailed, the impact of these connections was most evident in activities where transatlantic ties were at their strongest: inter alia the workings of financial networks, the destination choices of prospective emigrants (and their inclination to send part of their wages back ‘home’) and the consumption habits of the middle classes.
While this book has squarely focused on the networks forged by British migrants across the British imperial world,11 it is important to
8 For the argument that much of contemporary globalisation is regional rather than truly
‘global’ in nature, see A. Rugman, The End of Globalization: Why Global Strategy Is a Myth
and How to Profit from the Realities of Regional Markets (New York: AMACOM, 2001), pp.
1–12; and U. Beck, What Is Globalization? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2000), pp. 119–20.
9 For an historical perspective on the trans-national networks forged by migrants, see S.
Vertovec, ‘Transnationalism and Identity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27
(2001), 573–82 (pp. 576–7).
10 For a recent overview, see K. Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America
(London: Little Brown, 2007).
11 For the significance of ‘micro level networks of information and assistance’ to transat
lantic migrations from Europe, see E. Morowska and W. Spohn, ‘Moving Europeans in the
Globalizing World’, in Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migrations, pp. 23–62 (pp. 46ff).
236remember that there were, of course, other co-ethnic entities contributing to nineteenth-century economic integration – most notably the French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Jewish diasporas, which partly or largely lay beyond the boundaries of the formal British empire, and the Chinese and Indian diasporas, which largely lay within it. The substantial emigration from India and China, which followed the abolition of slavery, and which was discussed in Chapter 3, was indispensable to the workings of global (and colonial) capitalism. It comprised approximately 14.5 million people in the century after the 1830s, was spread across Asia and the Pacific rim, and mostly took the form of colonially regulated indenture and associated forms of labour, recruited by family and group networks forged in the nineteenth century. Chinese and Indian migration is a salutary reminder that not all the processes of globalisation were rooted in Europe.12 This Asian migration included people who settled in other parts of the empire – the Caribbean, the Pacific and southern Africa – as well as those who moved to other parts of Asia, such as Ceylon, Malaya and Burma.13 While these flows may not always have been especially demographically significant for the ‘exporting’ societies, they were, as we have seen, of greater importance for the recipient countries, not least in terms of the increasingly hostile reactions from their burgeoning ‘home-grown’ labour movements to imported or indentured workers.14 Patterns of global migration were profoundly shaped by these Asian and European diasporas, and they would certainly benefit from being studied in a more explicitly comparative framework. Yet, given its economic, financial and imperial dominance in the nineteenth century, it was Britain’s diaspora that left the largest single impression. The economic globalism wrought by British migrants took early root in capital markets, but also became evident in the ‘real’ economy of commodities
12 A point well made with respect to migration by Adam McKeown in ‘Periodizing
Globalization’, HWJ 63 (2007), 218–30 (pp. 226–7); and further elaborated with
respect to consumer cultures by J. Prestholdt in ‘On the Global Repercussions of East
African Consumerism’, AHR 109 (2004), 755–83, and Domesticating the World: African
Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2008). For a succinct summary of the special place of Africa in the world history
of migration, see P. D. Curtin, ‘Africa and Global Patterns of Migration’, in Gungwu
(ed.), Global History and Migrations, pp. 63–94. For the impact of, and responses to,
the Indian and Chinese diasporas across the British empire and the United States, see
A. R. Zolberg, ‘Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925’,
in Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migrations, pp. 287–93.
13 See especially A. McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History 15
(2004), 155–89.
14 R. Findlay and K. H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the
Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 407–8.
237Conclusion and manufactured products. Yet, although driven by profit, the networks forged by these migrants retained throughout a persistent bias towards Anglophone societies, in which British exporters found ready and expanding markets precisely because British settlers tended to have tastes that were more similar to than different from those of people back home. Free migration, too, followed patterns that saw certain ‘British’ destinations preferred to others.15 Even in the City of London, the residual effects of a culturally created informational asymmetry were reflected in the choice of projects favoured by investors right up until the First World War. Thus, while the markets for many nineteenth-century Britons many have been increasingly global, their ‘Britishness’ remained both palpable and, no doubt, decidedly welcoming. How could a series of distinct co-ethnic networks possibly have fostered a process of broader globalisation? British World networks offered unique opportunities for enrichment and advancement. In the period covered by this book, they tended to be expansionary, and, to the extent that they flourished, they did so by actively building bridges – not only between the metropolitan elite of the United Kingdom and privileged parts of settler society in the colonies, but between an ever more dynamic ‘provincial’ Britain, and its various overseas contacts, communities and spheres of interest. Sometimes they also built bridges across class and religious divides, so that people who were not bourgeois, or Protestant, or born in the British Isles – the pervasive appeal of ethnic identification meant that they normally had to be ‘white’ – were to varying degrees accepted as part of this broader ‘British’ community. Put simply, the information, trust and reciprocity (or ‘social capital’) engendered by these networks created value,16 and the British migrants who enjoyed privileged access to them became adept at exploiting them for their own gain.17 It is said that membership has its rewards, and, in this case, it was often true. Participation brought benefits, not least in terms of one’s admission (even if only partially) to an economic club that was relentlessly expanding its global reach.
15 This was not just a feature of British emigration; see F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question:
Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 95.
16 The concept of trust as a ‘public good’ rather than a mere regulatory mechanism, and the
conditions under which such trust is created and can thrive, have become increasingly
prominent subjects in debates about modern society; see B. A. Misztal, Trust in Modern
Societies: The Search for the Bases of Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
17 See for example M. Boyd, ‘Family and Personal Networks in International Migration:
Recent Developments and New Agendas’, International Migration Review 23 (1989),
638–70.
238Looking back, the way in which British World networks readily took root and thrived in the Victorian and Edwardian era gives this process almost an aura of inevitability. Indeed, it could be argued that had the First World War not intervened, British ‘imperial globalisation’ might well have continued, and even deepened. Yet care is needed here. Extrapolation is a dangerous practice. Just as the sub-prime crisis has revealed the fatal errors of those who believe that housing prices only go up, the notion that co-ethnic networks always promote economic activity, simply because they did so for a while in the nineteenth century, is illusory. The harsher reality is that, when forcefully challenged in the inter-war period, the inclusiveness of nineteenth-century British World networks proved remarkably fragile, so much so that, under examination, their earlier inclusiveness looks less like an intrinsic quality or characteristic and more like a product of the relatively benign economic conditions of the period. After all, for many involved, their enthusiasm for closer economic integration was not ideological; instead their support was predicated on the ability of the process to generate continuing prosperity.18 In a sense, therein lay the weakness of ‘imperial globalisation’. Success encouraged openness and further expansion; failure saw the door slam shut. The problem was built-in. The raison d’être of networks, it should be recalled, is to promote the interest of insiders – at the expense of others, if need be. When economic opportunities dry up, as they did in the wake of the First World War, networks have a natural inclination to turn inwards, and to become shields for their members against the outside world. If, in the good times, networks can look to each other for synergies, in harder times they can come to regard each other as rivals. The results could be paradoxical. Networks that had formerly championed globalisation could, and did, when circumstances altered, become instruments of its rollback. Indeed, the common cultural identity and racial ideology that underpinned these networks now acted to facilitate this transition. More than that, culture and race provided a potent vehicle, by which ethnic, inter-racial and class tensions could be parleyed into protectionism, extreme nationalism and even xenophobia – with baleful domestic and international consequences.19
18 As Frieden has opined: ‘History showed that support for international economic inte-
gration depended on prosperity.’ See J. A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise
in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 172. See also David Singh
Grewal’s assessment that network power grows because of the increasing size of a net-
work, rather than because of any intrinsic value: Network Power: The Social Dynamics of
Globalisation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
19 L. Barrow, ‘White Solidarity in 1914’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and
Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols., Vol. I: History and Politics (London: Routledge,
1989), pp. 275–87; Bisley, Rethinking Globalization, pp. 32–4; H. James, The End of
239Conclusion The hostile geo-political considerations that determined the fate of globalisation during the inter-war period were responsible for breeding a form of what has been labelled ‘insular capitalism’.20 By the later Victorian and Edwardian era, however, the potential for such a turn was already evident.21 Witness, inter alia, the adverse reaction of British finan ciers to those wishing to invest in the German ‘war loan’ issue of July 1908,22 the mounting opposition to non-white immigration and calls for greater protectionism in settler colonies, or the deepening racial and ethnic exclusiveness of masonic and commercial, and various types of professional networks.23 In each case, the role of non-Anglophone groups in British imperial networks was to become more curtailed, even if one effect of this exclusionary tendency was to spur indigenous subjects to create and maintain counter-networks of their own, some of which fostered anti-colonial resistance, while others laid claim to inclusion in the colonial state.24 Racial exclusionism and protectionism were therefore a very common reflex of the imperial networks we have been examining. Even those networks that started out relatively open and outward looking often became more restrictive over time. This is because access to networks was ultimately a matter of power: not just the formal political power of the colonial state, but the informal cultural power conferred by membership of an imperial community that was becoming ever more skewed along ethnic and racial lines. The inward retreat of networks was in part the flipside of British, and indeed all ethnic (trans)-nationalism. While such a retreat cannot alone account for the dark days of the inter-war years, the growing culturally and racially based insularity of the period was nurtured,
Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), p. 13; D. Held and A. McGrew, ‘The Great Globalization Debate: An
Introduction’, in Held and McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction
to the Globalization Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–50 (p.
4); Zolberg, ‘Global Movements, Global Walls’.
20 M. Daunton, ‘Britain and Globalisation since 1850, II: The Rise of Insular Capitalism,
1914–1939’, TRHS 17 (2007), 1–30.
21 James, End of Globalization, pp. 200–1.
22 R. P. T. Davenport-Hines, ‘Lord Glendyne’, in R. T. Appleyard and C. B. Schedvin (eds.),
Australian Financiers: Biographical Essays (Melbourne: Macmillan Co. of Australia, 1988),
pp. 190–205 (p. 194).
23 For an informative study of networks among freemasonry, see J. L. Harland-Jacobs,
Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 10–13, 23, 216–22, 232.
24 C. A. Bayly, ‘Informing Empire and Nation: Publicity, Propaganda and the Press
1880–1920’, in H. Morgan (ed.), Information, Media and Power through the Ages
(Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001), pp. 179–98 (pp. 197–8); R. Holton, ‘The
Inclusion of the Non-European World in International Society, 1870s–1920s: Evidence
from Global Networks’, Global Networks 5 (2005), 239–59.
240and even amplified, by networks, and, along with the changing economic fundamentals of the New and Old Worlds, gave rise to the political movements that dealt a death blow to the first phase of modern globalisation initiated in the nineteenth century.25 We began this book with definitions. We set out the range and diversity of opinion about the true character of globalisation – its origins, nature, scope and impact. We noted how globalisation has become one of the single most important concepts in the social sciences (and arguably in the humanities too),26 and how it has both its champions and its critics. We also referred to the danger of globalisation becoming little more than a glib polysyllable – a word widely bandied around, and of which everyone assumes they know the meaning, yet which on closer inspection actually turns out to be rather ill-defined. In the pages that followed, we then sought to show how an historical perspective can help not only to shed light on the origins of globalisation in its more modern forms, but also on the way in which earlier episodes of globalisation have in turn left their mark on the global forces at work today. In particular, we have argued that it is in the relationships between Britain, the settler societies of its empire and the United States that the early stages of modern globalisation can most clearly be seen. This British World was among the first and most powerful sponsors of globalisation as we recognise it today. Indeed, several of the characteristics of the global economy and society talked about so frequently in the early twenty-first century – ‘semiglobalisation’,27 ‘regionalised globalisation’,28 the notions of ‘network
25 On the role of changing relative factor prices on the political economy of different regions
of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see K. O’Rourke and
J. G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic
Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 269–87.
26 M. Shrivastava, ‘Globalising “Global Studies”: Vehicle for Disciplinary and Regional
Bridges?’, New Global Studies 2 (2008), 1–20 (pp. 1–5).
27 The emphasis here tends to be either on the fact that globalisation has advanced more
rapidly in some sectors of the economy than others, or that even in those sectors where it
has rapidly advanced (e.g. financial markets) it is still more unstable than commentators
often assume. See Bisley, Rethinking Globalization; Darwin, After Tamerlane, pp. 502–3;
and M. Veseth, Selling Globalization: The Myth of the Global Economy (London: Lynne
Reinner, 1998).
28 As Patrick Manning asks, is what we are witnessing ‘a world-encompassing global
economy or a global economy made up of distinct regional systems?’; see P. Manning,
Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac
millan, 2003), p. 19. For the debate surrounding ‘regionalised globalisation’ – includ-
ing the argument that what we have witnessed is ‘economic internationalisation, not
globalisation’ – see Beck, What is Globalization?, pp. 119–21; F. Halliday, The World at
2000: Perils and Promises (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 60–1; Held and
McGrew, Global Transformations Reader, pp. 4, 20–5, 39; Rugman, End of Globalization,
pp. 1–15.
241Conclusion power’ and the ‘networked society’,29 and the centrality of international migration to the globalisation process – stem in part from the historical experience of the British imperial (and wider Anglophone) World. The reason why the above characteristics are so significant may be precisely because they are so deeply rooted. How far can a greater awareness of previous experiences or episodes of globalisation help governments to manage its consequences today? The British World economy that lay at the heart of the first great wave of modern globalisation from the 1850s to 1914 was an ethnically based trans-national rather than fully global phenomenon; the sense of trust that was so crucial to its working was partly a matter of ethnic self-recognition, and partly of the exercise of the real sinews of imperial power, including the naval-based Pax britannica. History shows how such trans-national forms of identity, based around cultural and ethnic groups – Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone – have formed much more readily than concepts of global citizenship, which, however desirable, have in reality been much slower to emerge. History also reveals the fragility of this first wave of modern globalisation, which came crashing down on the rocks of war in Europe in 1914 and the devastation that followed. The Great War not only stopped but actually reversed integration. Afterwards, the world gradually divided into regional economic blocs, ‘each aiming to shrink its trade with the others’.30
Two of the main contemporary challenges currently recognised in the literature on globalisation arguably have their roots in the half-century prior to 1914. The first challenge arises from the sheer scale of global mobility: the explosion of diasporic cultures (whereby many more people now imagine themselves as part of a nation beyond a homeland), and the resulting question of how to extend economic relations across cultural and ethnic boundaries. In short, how successfully can economic interdependence co-exist with cultural diversity? The second challenge arises from the contingent nature of globalisation: the varying nature of its openness over time, and its almost self-destructive capacity to produce the very circumstances – economic nationalism, trade protection and tight immigration controls – in which it is likely to break down.31 This set
29 M. Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols., Vol. I: The Rise
of the Network Society (Oxford; Malden, MA, Blackwells 2000); Cooper, Colonialism in
Question, pp. 107–10; Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems’; G. F. Thompson, ‘Is All
the World a Complex Network?’, Economy and Society 33 (2004), 411–24.
30 Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 503.
31 See, for example, Morowska’s and Spohn’s observations on the ‘discordant tendency’
of past and contemporary phases of globalisation to produce, as a reaction to swell-
ing migration, restrictive immigration policies by receiver countries ‘confronted with a
242of circumstances has been called the ‘globalization backlash’.32 Is such a backlash (and the de-globalisation that ensues) sooner or later inevitable, or can it be avoided? In view of these challenges, it is perhaps not surprising that the focus of recent writing has shifted away from the capacity of specific, high profile international organisations – the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, for example – to resolve the resentments against globalisation in favour of exploring more broadly the role of trans-national social networks, especially migrant networks, in reorganising spatial relations. How do such networks make connections across national borders? How is power distributed across them? What are the limits to the resulting linkages? Particular attention has been paid to the type of networks required to sustain a global economy and to prevent its component parts from turning inward and sealing themselves off from each other. Social scientists have highlighted the need to cultivate more open and inclusive forms of social capital that can better foster cross-cultural entrepreneurial activities.33 Such an aspiration entails a rather different mindset from that of the imperial past. In a postcolonial and multi-cultural world, integration, as one scholar has shrewdly observed, is predicated on a view of social relations ‘founded on a belief in equality’: indeed, the view of social relations ‘governed by a racial hierarchy’ is precisely the reason why ‘imperial systems are incompatible with the process of globalization’ as it unfolds today.34
Maintaining the degree of openness and interconnectedness (widely felt to be the sine qua non of positive globalisation) requires us to take
deluge of foreign residents’; ‘Moving Europeans in the Globalizing World’, p. 51. It is a
moot point as to how far we today may be witnessing an era of resurgent nationalism,
depending upon how one reads the complex and shifting political landscapes of Russia,
China, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America.
32 O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, pp. 286–7.
33 Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture, pp. 35–8. See also the conclusion to Paul
James’ thoughtful essay, ‘Globalisation and Empires of Mutual Accord’, Arena Magazine
85 (October–November 2006), 41–6.
34 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past & Present 200 (2008), 211–47 (p. 242). For
a similar line of reasoning, see also Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and
Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and N. Kirk, Comrades
and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia
from the 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin Press, 2003). Maier claims that ‘Territorial fron-
tiers are not the only boundaries that empires establish. Crucial, too, for the structure of
an empire is the stratification within each of its political units . . . Empires seek to defend
internal socio-political frontiers as well as external boundaries . . . extending their gradients
of privilege and participation outward through space and downward into society’ (p. 10).
Meanwhile, Kirk argues for the importance of a ‘strategy of [labour] inclusiveness under
the conditions of capitalist globalization’, in particular, as a counterpoint to growing social
inequalities and the divisive effects of globalisation in national and international labour
movements (p. 221).
243Conclusion account of its cultural as well as economic dynamic.35 As we move in the early twenty-first century into a period of fundamental economic change, with the effects of a world financial crisis ever more widely felt, globalisation looks decidedly less irreversible than it once did. It would, however, be a mistake to focus exclusively on the immediate manifest ations of that crisis – the complex financial instruments, such as creditfault swaps, hedge funds, sub-prime mortgages and the like – which have exposed virtually all of the major banks’ shareholders and customers to dizzying levels of risk, and which have been so corrosive of confidence precisely because they are so little understood. Globalisation is, after all, as much about people as it is about institutions or infrastructure, all the more so at a time when we are witnessing a worldwide increase in mobility for virtually all categories of migrants – legal and illegal, refugees and asylum-seekers, people in search of employment, temporary guest workers and permanent residents – and not only from the developing to the developed world, but from one developing country to another.36 To the extent that the Pax britannica of the past promoted a more ‘globalised’ world economic system, it was, to be sure, a vertical and hierarchical process that relied heavily upon the imposition of the British law necessary to open up trade routes, accelerate capital flows and encourage the mobility of people. Law and order, however, were insufficient in themselves. As we have seen, the growth and integration of markets relied equally on a plethora of dense, everyday social networks that straddled national borders, linked migrants in their places of settlement to their places of origin, generated trust and solidarity, improved the quality and quantity of information flows, and combined cultural and economic pursuits.37 What they did not – and perhaps never could – succeed in doing was to transcend the culture from which they had emerged. Inclusive networks, then as now, proved very difficult to construct, all the more so when questions of race and ethnicity came into play. At a time when we are grappling with our own ‘global migration crisis’, and emigrants are more likely to be regarded as a threat than an opportunity for receiving
35 See for example C. Hay and D. Marsh, ‘Introduction: Demystifying Globalization’, in
Hay and Marsh (eds.) Demystifying Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
1999), pp. 12–13; and S. D. Sharma, ‘The Many Faces of Today’s Globalization: A
Survey of Recent Literature’, New Global Studies 2 (2008), 1–27 (p. 20).
36 M. Weiner, ‘The Global Migration Crisis’, in Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migrations,
pp. 96, 98.
37 A. Portes, ‘Globalization from Below: The Rise of Transnational Communities’, in W.
P. Smith and R. P. Korczenwicz (eds.), Latin America in the World Economy (Westport:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), pp. 151–68.
244states,38 this is a lesson that the Pax americana – and those now calling for a worldwide community of English-speaking states (or ‘Anglosphere’) to provide international leadership in the twenty-first century39 – would do well to learn.
38 D. S. Massey, J. Arango, G. Hugo, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor
(eds.), Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 6–7.
39 For a leading example, see James C. Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-
Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century (Plymouth: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2007). For another call for English-speaking peoples to join together, see
Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century (London: John Murray, 1999).
For an encomium to the history of the English-speaking world, see Andrew Roberts’
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
2006).