7 - ‘Horizontal’ Connections and Interactions in Global Development

Summary

In order to consider fully the challenges and possibilities of world-making, it is necessary to understand the socioeconomic space that already exists across national boundaries and how it has been politically constituted and reconstituted over time. Nelson Goodman's observation, already cited by the editors in the Introduction to this volume, makes the point precisely: ‘Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already at hand; the making is a re-making’ (1978: 6).

Discussions of the global era and how to navigate or shape it often fail to give sufficient consideration to the global socioeconomic order that pre-existed, and continuously worked to shape, the era of nation states. The era of nation states was forged within a global constellation which worked to unite dominant groups around the world, at the same time separating the masses that populated their local jurisdictions into culturally and politically bounded national collectivities. An understanding of the socioeconomic and political bonds that have long existed among dominant groups around the globe, and of the connections and interactions that constitute and reproduce these bonds, is necessary to any consideration of how to remake the world.

With this aim in mind, this chapter endeavours to bring into clearer focus the structure of global socioeconomic relations from the point of view of predominantly ‘horizontal’ bonds rather than ‘vertical’ ones contained by state institutions. More specifically, it explores the trans-local/cross-regional interactions and connections that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, brought about the synchronic and interdependent development of dynamic focal points of growth throughout the world.