8 - Wronging rights and righting wrongs: some lessons on community viability from the colonial era in the Pacific

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The term “globalization” is used to describe an increase to a worldwide scale of the interconnectedness of cultural, environmental, and social phenomena. The term has been applied to commercial, ecological, economic, financial, organizational, religious, spiritual, and trade activities, among a great many other processes and structures. Although identified with various trends that developed largely during the last half-century, it can be argued that the substance of globalization does not connote anything particularly new. In contrast, the speed with which it is now occurring is new, and results from the intensity of modern communications. It is this awesome speed of contemporary communication combined with the portability, increasingly low cost, standardization, and integration of the required hardware and software that now enables the process of globalization to penetrate into the remotest corners of the world, and to tie hitherto isolated fishing communities, for example, into the mainstream of the world fish trade.

But it was not always thus. Although some would argue that the characteristics of globalization can be identified at other times in history, their assertions founder on the issue of communication speed. What can now be achieved with a PDA in every pocket certainly would not have been feasible in the days of sail-borne commerce. Whereas one might agree that the outline of Western commercial, military, and imperial globalization could be traced to the beginnings of the European rampage overseas in the fifteenth century, without lightning-fast communication this outline could not have evolved into globalization as we now understand it.