We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Westerners on both the left and right overwhelmingly conflate globalisation with Westernisation and presume that the global economy is a pure Western-creation. Taking on the traditional Eurocentric Big Bang theory, or the 'expansion of the West' narrative, this book reveals the multicultural origins of globalisation and the global economy, not so as to marginalise the West but to show how it has long been embedded in complex interconnections and co-constitutive interactions with non-Western actors/agents and processes. The central empirical theme is the role of Indian structural power that was derived from Indian cotton textile exports. Indian structural power organised the first (historical-capitalist) global economy between 1500 and c.1850 and performed a vital, albeit indirect, role in the making of Western empire, industrialisation and the second (modern-capitalist) global economy. These textiles underpinned the complex inter-relations between Africa, West/Central/East/Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe that collectively drove global economic development forward.
Chapter 1 introduces the key conceptual themes/problems that underpin this book. It begins by arguing that current accounts of globalization and the global economy are Eurocentric in that they view these phenomena as the sole product of Western power and agency. It then feeds into the analysis of Benjamin Cohen's call for the return to ‘big picture’ visions and accounts of IPE given my belief that British- and US-School IPE have produced ahistorical/presentist and narrow conceptions of the global economy. To counter this I advance a global historical sociological approach that reveals the origins of both the global economy and capitalism in the last half-millennium. In problematising the dominant, naturalised Western conception I seek to replace it with an alternative non-Eurocentric approach that foregrounds the interconnections between Western and non-Western agency. I then sketch a picture of what ‘Eurocentrism I’ comprises before providing a critique of ‘Eurocentrism II’ that is advanced by fundamentalist critical postcolonialism, with the latter reproducing Western-centrism (i.e., ‘Eurofetishism’). Finally, having provided a sympathetic critique of the California School of global history on the grounds of its fetishization of non-Western agency I conclude by defining capitalism and providing a sketch-map of the journey ahead.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.