The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
Abstract
This text offers insight into one of the classic questions of history: why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As the author shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, he demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. The author argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths, paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
... La búsqueda de un enfoque propio para el estudio de las RI en China está inmersa en un dilema más amplio. Durante siglos, se ha sostenido la creencia de que el éxito de las naciones occidentales se debe a su rápida modernización y al progreso tecnológico, ambos fundamentados en la ciencia y filosofía desarrolladas en Occidente (Pomeranz, 2000). Este paradigma influyó profundamente en el desarrollo de los estudios de RI en China, que ha seguido un camino de modernización con bases en modelos occidentales, como el marxismo y la ideología comunista, ambos de origen extranjero. ...
El trabajo tiene como objetivo explorar y analizar los enfoques no occidentales en las relaciones internacionales, destacando la importancia de las perspectivas alternativas en un campo tradicionalmente dominado por paradigmas occidentales. Se examinan las teorías y prácticas que emergen de contextos geopolíticos, históricos y culturales distintos al Occidente, subrayando cómo estos enfoques desafían y complementan el entendimiento global de las relaciones internacionales. A través de un análisis crítico, el estudio busca desmitificar la percepción de que las teorías occidentales son universalmente aplicables, proponiendo en su lugar una visión más inclusiva y pluralista del orden mundial. El trabajo también discute las implicaciones de estas perspectivas en la formulación de políticas internacionales y la importancia de integrar estas voces en los debates académicos para lograr una comprensión más equilibrada y representativa de la dinámica global actual
This paper examines the “nature” and significance of BRICS within the geopolitical and historical-spatial transition of the world system, focusing on its enlargement since September 2023. The main argument is that BRICS represent the rise and political'insubordination'of semi-periphery countries—often referred to as developing nations—driven by middle and regional powers of continental scale operating within a global scenario. This dynamic is expressing a profound transformation of the world system and reflecting the emergence of new social forces that articulate a new ‘historical bloc’. Also, the expansion of BRICS into BRICS+ extends this process to other regions of the Global South, with significant political and geopolitical implications. Some of these implications include: (1) a rebalancing of power in key geopolitical regions such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia; (2) a questioning and crisis of the traditional center-periphery dynamic (Global North–Global South) within the capitalist world system centered in the West; and (3) the consolidation of large-scale cooperative partnerships across Eurasia. By democratizing the world order and encouraging the emergence of alternative structures, BRICS is increasingly positioning itself as a constructive force for promoting world economic growth and improving global governance. This study has the purpose to contribute to the ongoing debates on power transition and emerging powers, the crisis of global order, the increasing relevance of BRICS+ within the Global South, and the internal challenges and external risks facing this multilateral space in an emerging world.
We evaluate the role of taxes on overseas trade in the development of imperial Britain’s fiscal-military state. Influential work, for example, Brewer’s Sinews of Power , attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating excise revenues from traded and domestic goods. We find substantial growth in revenue from traded goods, accounting for over half of indirect taxation around 1800. This challenges conventional wisdom, attributing the development of the British state to domestic factors. International factors mattered, too.
This Introduction and Special Forum highlight the importance of localization for the study of world politics, both as a theoretical concept in international relations research on norms and as a set of practices and policies. The article tackles four questions: (1) Why has localization become a focus of scholarly and policy attention? (2) What are the historical precursors of localization? (3) What is being “localized” and who/what is “local”? And (4) how can localization be studied (i.e., using which methods and approaches)? After unpacking common functionalist, normative, and strategic arguments in favor of localization and situating the concept historically, we develop a novel relational conception of localization as both a process and an outcome. Our central objective is to bridge the diverse meanings and uses of the term that exist across theory and practice. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives and empirical examples from forced migration, humanitarianism, the protection of civilians, transitional justice, and Women, Peace and Security, we consider key dilemmas and challenges facing both the academic study and practice of localization and identify several methods and approaches that can be used to analyze this important topic in world politics.
This chapter provides a historiographical review of the literatures on banks and economic growth, non-bank credit markets in Western economies, and non-bank credit markets in non-Western economies. It argues that moving beyond established terminologies such as (in)formal and alternative makes it possible to focus on how credit markets actually functioned. It proposes that the study of bank and non-bank credit markets should be guided by how the demand for and supply of loanable funds meet, whose funds change hands, what form loans are recorded in, and what mechanisms secure and enforce repayment. Lastly, the contributions to this edited volume are introduced.
The Global International Relations (hereafter GIR) project aims to provide the conditions for various modes of knowledge production, referencing experience and the creation of theoretical concepts that have their origins outside the modern West. Project advocates reject the notion that only the West can provide legitimate foundations and empirical material for theorizing world politics and seek to integrate or incorporate ‘local’ sites of knowledge production into disciplinary debates. Advocates of GIR reject the claim that Western history is the sole provider of IR empirics upon which theories of international relations are developed and tested. Numerous authors and project advocates argue that the West is not synonymous with either the international or the global. In November 2024, Krakow was the venue of the 2nd Congress of the Polish Society for International Studies titled “Global International Relations: Challenges and Development”, that addressed the origins, contemporary dimension, directions of development, and critique of the GIR concept. This article aims to analyze the current discourse in the discipline and to present the GIR project by discussing its origins and indicating its pioneers (parts 1 and 2), presenting the research (part 3) and indicating potential development directions and the doubts and risks related to them (part 4).
The collections of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardi-no Rivadavia” (MACN) not only reflect biodiversity but also the historical impact of scientific institutions on the evolution of knowledge. Through them, one can observe the transformation of research, conservation, and outreach practices, shaped by the political and social contexts of each era. A representative example of this legacy is the collection of fish gathered during the 1938 and 1939 expeditions to Saint Helena and Ascension Islands in the South Atlantic, carried out by the Argentine Merchant Navy. The ship Sentinel II, originally intended for the installa-tion of underwater cables, played a key role in these expeditions. After being acquired by the Compañía Argentina de Navegación y ComercioÁfrica – Río de la Plata, it was dedicated to lobster and exotic fish fishing, while simultaneously collecting scientifically valuable samples for the Museum. Between 1938 and 1939, the fish collection of the MACN’s Ichthyology Division received 33 lots of fish related to these voyages. This article highlights how the study of these fish, traditionally approached from a biological perspective, offers a unique opportunity to explore a little-known event in the history of the Museum and the Argentine Merchant Navy.
This chapter synthesizes the challenges and opportunities presented by technological advancements and environmental crises, emphasizing humanity’s pivotal moment in history. It examines the potential of transformative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, nuclear fusion, robotics, and biotechnology to address global challenges, including climate change, resource scarcity, and societal inequities. However, it warns of the existential risks these innovations pose, such as deepening inequalities, environmental degradation, and the militarization of technology. The chapter critiques capitalism and tribalism as outdated frameworks that perpetuate conflict and inequality, advocating for a shift toward collectivist policies that prioritize sustainability, equity, and global cooperation. It explores historical lessons, technological dualities, and the limitations of international institutions in addressing global crises. By proposing governance models rooted in inclusivity and sustainability, the chapter envisions a future where humanity harnesses technology for collective progress, balancing innovation with ethical and environmental stewardship to ensure a thriving civilization.
How has China grown so rapidly through private initiatives despite weak institutions enforcing contracts and protecting against expropriation? Why has private investment, after overcoming so many obstacles, stagnated over the last decade? This chapter explores the changing roles of the state and private sectors during China’s history and since the death of Mao in 1979. It analyzes the formal and informal institutions that have enforced contracts and protected against expropriation in China. It concludes with a consideration of the adverse effects of recent changes on China’s private sector and the future trajectory of China’s growth.
The development of market-based exchange relies on the support of two institutional pillars that are, in turn, shaped by the development of markets: (1) “Contract-enforcement institutions” determine the range of transactions in which individuals can commit to keep their contractual obligations. (2) “Coercion-constraining” institutions constrain those with coercive power from abusing others’ property rights and influence whether individuals will bring their goods to the market in the first place. Markets and political institutions co-evolve, reflecting the dynamic interplay between coercion-constraining and contract-enforcement institutions. This chapter reviews the literature on contract-enforcement institutions and defines and elaborates on coercion-constraining institutions. It provides a tentative theory of the dynamics of market-supporting and political institutions and draws on history to illustrate the merits of this conjecture.
In this essay, we outline some reasons why one should be cautious about grounding a theory of growth on institutions. We emphasize how very different institutional structures have often been found to be reasonable substitutes for each other, both in dissimilar, as well as similar, contexts. The historical record, therefore, does not seem to support the notion that any particular institution, narrowly defined, is indispensable for growth. Moreover, we discuss how the evidence that there are systematic patterns to the ways institutions evolve undercuts the idea that exogenous change in institutions is what powers growth. Institutions matter, but our thinking about how they matter should recognize that they are profoundly influenced by the political and economic environment, and that if any aspect of institutions is crucial for growth, it is that institutions change over time as circumstances change.
There has been an understanding related to the Green Revolution that wheat became a popular crop post-1960s. The paper aims to study the scientific research and resources dedicated to wheat cultivation by the British Raj and whether its significance could be matched with other cash crops like tobacco, indigo, sugarcane, etc. This paper will show that from the late nineteenth century onwards, wheat became Bihar’s most important food crop due to its export to European countries. This microcosmic study of Bihar will demonstrate that the significant rise in the production of wheat was a joint effort propelled by the British Raj, which was well received by the peasants of Bihar, even though wheat was not a staple crop of the Biharis.
Globalizing Europe explores modern Europe's myriad entanglements with the wider world, considering the continent not only as an engine but also as a product of global transformations. It looks at the ways in which the global movements of peoples and ideas, goods and raw materials, flora and fauna have impacted life on the continent over the centuries. Bringing together a group of leading historians, the book shows how the history of Europe can be integrated into global history. Taken together, its chapters will help reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of modern European history.
Globalizing Europe explores modern Europe's myriad entanglements with the wider world, considering the continent not only as an engine but also as a product of global transformations. It looks at the ways in which the global movements of peoples and ideas, goods and raw materials, flora and fauna have impacted life on the continent over the centuries. Bringing together a group of leading historians, the book shows how the history of Europe can be integrated into global history. Taken together, its chapters will help reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of modern European history.
Globalizing Europe explores modern Europe's myriad entanglements with the wider world, considering the continent not only as an engine but also as a product of global transformations. It looks at the ways in which the global movements of peoples and ideas, goods and raw materials, flora and fauna have impacted life on the continent over the centuries. Bringing together a group of leading historians, the book shows how the history of Europe can be integrated into global history. Taken together, its chapters will help reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of modern European history.
In 2022 and 2023, Duke University Press published three major works as part of its Sinotheory series. Ban Wang's book explored the political ethos of tianxia underlying the advent of the new rise of China. Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau's volume of essays presented critical views of the latter in East Asia from the context of literary postcolonial theory, while Carlos Rojas and Lisa Rofel's volume surveyed the interdisciplinary landscape of China's globalist political economy, perhaps in light of recent history. Despite the mutual thematic overlap, each work interprets “China in the world” from inherently different perspectives. While they may resonate with wider discussions of nation-state, postcoloniality, and globalization elsewhere, this review essay argues that each work has its own problems of internal compatibility, especially when cast in its specific relevance or applicability to China. Instead of a sinotheory, the review essay argues that geopolitics can integrate cultural sociology as critical ethos.
The Great Divergence debate, resulting from Kenneth Pomeranz’s work comparing pre-industrial levels of development in Europe and China, stimulated significant new research into the techniques for measuring and comparing standards of living over time and space. These techniques were derived from work on England and tended to assume that household incomes largely depended on the market wage of a male ‘breadwinner’. However, more recent work by feminist economic historians has begun to show that women in fact performed a wide range of productive labour, paid and unpaid, in pre-industrial and industrialising European economies. Moreover, recognition of the continuing contribution of women’s work, unpaid labour and subsistence production to household income can be shown to have a significant impact on the assessment of living standards and their comparison across time and space.
After rising for almost two centuries, global income inequality declined substantially after 2000. While past scholarship on global inequality has explored several causes for this recent decline in inequality, these studies take for granted the official GDP figures released by national governments. A parallel social science literature has documented the manipulation of official data to exaggerate economic performance in autocratic countries, but this work has stopped short of examining the broader implications of this phenomenon. In this study, I explore the overstatement of GDP growth figures in autocracies as another contributor to the recent decline in estimates of global inequality based on officially reported GDP figures. Drawing on satellite-based night-time lights data and an empirical strategy from recent research, I compute model-based estimates of GDP overstatement in autocracies. I then combine this information with data on within-country income inequality to arrive at adjusted estimates of global income inequality in a sample of 109 countries constituting 92 percent of the world’s population. I find that between 1995 and 2014, ~20 percent of the decline in global inequality can be explained by the overstatement of GDP growth in less democratic countries. I conclude by discussing the broader implications of these findings for our understanding of global inequality and its political economy.
Wealth, more than income, has a skewed distribution. The wealthiest people control an extraordinary share of global fortunes, a share that has grown in recent decades. Seventy‐six percent of the world's wealth is controlled by the richest 10 percent. Furthermore, these family fortunes endure over many generations.
Over the past decades, archaeological exploration of southern China has shattered the image of primitive indigenous people and their pristine environments. It is known, for example, that East Asia's largest settlements and hydraulic infrastructures in the third millennium BCE were located in the Yangzi valley, as were some of the most sophisticated metallurgical centers of the following millennium. If southern East Asia was not a backward periphery of the Central Plains, then what created the power asymmetry that made possible 'China's march toward the Tropics'? What did becoming 'Chinese' practically mean for the local populations south of the Yangzi? Why did some of them decide to do so, and what were the alternatives? This Element focuses on the specific ways people in southern East Asia mastered their environment through two forms of cooperation: centralized and intensive, ultimately represented by the states, and decentralized and extensive, exemplified by interaction networks.
Global Environmental Governance (GEG) has been a growing phenomenon since the middle of the 20th century, although the concept itself and its acronym are more recent and were in fact rarely used before 2000. The early interest in GEG was much preoccupied with environmental diplomacy and international legal agreements from the Stockholm UN conference 1972 onwards. The addition of the ‘global’ reflected the general rise in awareness of the significance of globalization since the 1980s. The further growth, and the transformation of GEG, in earnest since the Millennium has been increasingly marked by yet another category, ‘the planetary’, mirroring the increasing influence of Earth System Science on environmental and climate discourse. This has affected both GEG and ‘the environment’ itself. The conceptual shifts, including the rising interest in the Anthropocene, reflected profound changes in the human-Earth relationship. To analyze these shifts, which is the aim of this paper, I will use the ‘Planetary Boundaries’-concept, launched in a highly cited paper in the journal Nature in 2009 and further developed in later publications, seminally in 2015 and 2023. I will consider the PB-concept, and versions of the often shown diagram that accompanied it, as both a case of ‘planetary modelling’ and, at the same time an ‘environing technology’ that is performative and shapes what the environment ‘is’ while modelling it. I also emphasize that the PB-model has led a ‘social life’, which has defined its continued evolution as a key agency in the formation of an Anthropocene Weltanschauung, with normative properties. I posit that the model helped shape the shift towards the epistemic and temporal ‘environment’ that has become mainstreamed in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and other goal setting projects.
During the 1690s, both the English and Ottoman states developed new institutions for longer-term borrowing and reformed their imperial monetary systems. These synchronous but divergent developments present a puzzle that has not been answered by rigidly separate English and Ottoman historiographies. “Empires of Obligation” follows merchants trading between England and the Ottoman Empire to understand how both states responded differently to the challenges of global trade and fiscal crisis. At this time, English merchants were the most powerful European traders in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire represented England’s greatest single market for its woolen textiles, its largest industry. As Levant Company merchants swapped woolens for silk, they also blended international private credit with domestic public finance. They were the largest merchant investors relative to the size of their trade in the Bank of England and helped facilitate Ottoman longer-term public borrowing through the mālikāne system. From within England’s bureaucracy, they also worked to ease global trade through an “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins represented a government commitment to provide a fixed amount of precious metal. At the same time, the Ottoman state sought to redefine money as an instrument of the state, not a tool of trade. Following merchants who themselves bridged two empires that are rarely compared shows interconnected but divergent responses to the challenges of making money work both within and between states at the end of the seventeenth century.
The article explores the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy, framing it within the colonial heritage and ongoing economic dominance of Western countries. It traces the rise of the idea of human rights and free trade, linking it with the practices of slavery and exploitation of conquered territories. The author examines Enlightenment philosophers' views on slavery and colonialism and outlines the economic consequences of these historical phenomena to analyze how they contributed to the democratization and economic development of European countries. The text proceeds to examine current international economic relations to show how the imbalance of power between rich and developing countries leads to exploitation of the latter. The article argues that both colonial roots and contemporary unequal trade relations underpin the current rise of populism and xenophobia in Western countries faced. The main guiding theme of the work is Mbembe's proposed idea of the solar and nocturnal body of democracy: the constant intertwining of internal economic and cultural flourishing with the rise of inequality, populism and undemocratic practices.
Inequalities have existed for as long as anyone can remember. They mostly had its ups, but sometimes also downs. The twenty-first century is the century in which societies should be organized so that inequalities are at a low level. They also have a positive side, because if there is formal equality, then it affects productivity, innovation, commitment, education, and the like. Inequality is most often looked at from the standpoint of income, although other forms are also very significant. The aim of this paper is to show that inequalities have always existed and that they will exist in the future, but at the same time to show that inequalities should be reduced to an acceptable level. When it comes to economic inequality, the balance of labor and capital must be taken into account. This paper aims to present inequalities in Serbia throughout its history. During the preparation of the paper, the methods of analysis, synthesis, description and deduction were used.
Dialogism focuses solely on demonstrating the indispensability of knowledge transmissions from non-European civilizations to Europe in the making of modern science, but it does not engage in any analysis of the phenomenon of intellectual development itself. In order to transcend dialogism, a specially designed theoretical-methodological framework for analysing intellectual development is developed. This framework draws upon theories, concepts, and insights from a variety of disciplines including historical sociology, philosophy of science, physics, evolutionary theory, organizational sociology, institutionalist economics, and so on, which, together with our own views, are synthesized into a particular approach, comprising of a number of variables. In the literature, some of these variables are regarded, by both Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric scholars alike, as necessarily essentialist. This is a huge misunderstanding, which is one major cause of dialogism’s limitations as a perspective.
This article surveys the emergence of theories of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) and outlines the implications of an EUE perspective for a materialist conceptualization of trade and technological development. It briefly traces the progression of new perspectives and methodologies for identifying EUE from the early 1970s, reviewing the genealogy of concerns with asymmetric global transfers of embodied energy, materials, land, and labor that are obscured by the fictive reciprocity of market prices. Trade that is perceived by mainstream economists as balanced in monetary terms may be highly asymmetric in terms of transfers of biophysical resources. Contrary to the mainstream view, EUE theory holds that the material substance of traded commodities may have significant implications for the capacity of different geographical areas to accumulate technological infrastructure, achieve economic growth, and displace environmental pressures to other regions or countries. The article argues that such non-monetary transfers should be understood in terms of biophysical metrics rather than economic values, shifting the perspective from monetary valuation to the material properties of traded commodities. Net transfers of embodied resources through trade do not just represent economic cost-shifting but are physically constitutive of productive infrastructures. This focus on social metabolism signifies an ontological shift from neoclassical to ecological economics. The EUE perspective illuminates how modern technologies are no less fetishized than other commodities in the sense that they obscure social relations of exchange. It indicates that local technological progress, such as the Industrial Revolution in Britain, may reflect asymmetric global resource flows.
Historians have predominantly examined the phenomenon of time through a qualitative lens. Historians typically regard the measurement of time utilisation and scarcity as more suited for analysing contemporary issues, where statistical data from surveys are readily available. It is widely assumed that the measurement of time is not a viable field of inquiry within social history and historical sociology due to the scarcity of sources. In this article, we challenge this assumption by adapting the methodology commonly employed by economic historians in studying absolute poverty to investigate time poverty indirectly. We introduce a novel indicator, the Temporal Deficit Ratio of Households, which focuses on household units rather than individual perspectives. We contend that this proposed methodology can be developed utilising information derived from traditional employment surveys, encompassing household composition, age, education, and causes of unemployment. Numerous underdeveloped and developing countries, particularly in Latin America and Asia, conducted such surveys during the latter half of the twentieth century. In the final stage of our research, we apply the proposed methodology to the case of Chile, which lacked time-use surveys during the twentieth century but possesses regular employment surveys dating back to 1957. Our analysis concludes that, between 1960 and 1995, despite rapid economic growth and a decrease in absolute income poverty, the availability of time for families to engage in personal care for working-age members and provide external care for dependents remained consistent.
Chronic coin shortages plagued Ireland and Britain's American colonies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite complaints, every proposal to mint money in early modern Britain's overseas Atlantic empire failed, whether in Ireland, the Caribbean, or North America. This article explains why. Although the rulers in the court and Parliament were sometimes enthusiastic about colonial mints, the Officers of the Royal Mint exercised enduring influence and managed to obstruct each of these projects. The evolution of the Mint officers’ advice into a maxim of monetary uniformity allowed the doctrine of “one certain standard” to survive the ensuing decades of upheaval as it shed its visible politics. While their advice grew out of the particular politics of the early Restoration, it gained special power and durability when it took on the character of technocratic expertise. Still, an investigation of the same actors’ treatment of a parallel issue—the rates of the foreign coins that circulated in colonies—reveals that an authoritarian style had an enduring hold on imperial monetary policy. This article offers an explanation for the British Empire's peculiar monetary geography, and also demonstrates the way that seemingly apolitical technical knowledge can disguise a potent politics.
This chapter deals with the existential significance of the Anthropocene for the future of humanity. We have only been living in the Anthropocene for the length of a human life. If geologists, with their extremely long-term perspective, are already proclaiming a new phase of the Earth’s history, then we should be alarmed. A meaningful scientific approach that also leads to realistic solutions combines natural sciences and a whole range of human sciences. Of central importance are a significantly time-extended cultural anthropology and an anthropologically informed geology. In short: We need geoanthropology!
This chapter asks about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea of the Anthropocene. While the geological-stratigraphic criticisms were discussed in the first chapter, this chapter deals with criticisms relating to the social, ethical and political relevance of the hypothesis. A clear benefit is that the natural sciences are now actually working together with the humanities and cultural studies on a very concrete topic. A problem with the term Anthropocene is its increasing diffusiveness. Important criticisms suggest that the idea of the Anthropocene overestimates the power of humans and is anthropocentric. More fundamental criticisms see the idea as Eurocentric and criticize its blindness to the diversity of the perpetrators and also the inequality of the victims. Critics object to its depoliticizing tendency or simply consider the Anthropocene to be a distraction from the capitalist causes of the world crisis. Accordingly, a multitude of alternative terms are being discussed. If we look at the scientific landscape, we have now arrived in the “Neologismocene.” My own criticism is that many contributions wrongly reduce the Anthropocene to anthropogenic climate change or misuse the word for the rhetorical enhancement of known concepts or other topics.
This chapter brings together what the culturalization of the planet and the geologization of culture mean for societies and for us as individuals. In view of the diverse debates, only building blocks can be provided here, which will not be enough to produce a conceptually inhabitable building. Hence, the controversial discussion about scales is combined with concepts of world citizenship in the Anthropocene. I have then formulated the guiding question as a cosmopolitan-informed question of world ecology: How can intensively networked cultures peacefully coexist on a planet that is heavily influenced by humans but limited in size, without all having to become indistinguishable? Using Southeast Asia as an example, I finally show what a “provincialization” and a localization of the Anthropocene could look like on site.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Every society is intrinsically driven to optimize its productivity and operational efficiency. Such endeavors not only elevate a society’s prominence in global markets but also bolster its economic prosperity. Historically, the venture to amplify wealth and ensure its conservation has remained paramount. Groups, or at times entire societies, merged their intellectual prowess and workforce to enhance productivity, transforming their inherent advantages, be it knowledge or natural resources, into marketable goods or services (Smith, 2002). Herein lies the essence of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, at its core, symbolizes this collective ambition. It’s not just about wealth generation for individuals or shareholders; it encompasses a broader societal aspiration. Furthermore, the transformative role of leadership in this narrative is undeniable (Bass & Stogdill, 1990). Leaders, often being visionaries, are instrumental in fostering a conducive environment for entrepreneurial endeavors, driving innovation, and shaping market dynamics.
The article analyzes deep changes in international relations that are taking place in the context of the increasing role of digital actors and platforms in shaping the global agenda. The emergence of the Internet was a turning point in the development of the entire system of global communications. The Internet changed the way information is spread and public opinion is shaped, while digital platforms became a new factor of globalization. At the same time, as the authors demonstrate, the original nature of the Internet, which was viewed by the United States and the West as an integral part and technology of the liberal order, in the end started to reflect the increasing confrontation between states, and became a space for the spread of political conflicts, stereotypes and information wars. In addition, new digital oligopolies began to shape the digital space based on their corporate interests, prioritizing their market share rather than the quality of online discussions and the strengthening of the civic democratic culture. The weaponization and securitization of the Internet is a logical continuation of the crisis of the global liberal order. The complex interdependence, which was strengthened by digital actors and digital platforms, is increasingly being replaced by the idea of digital sovereignty. States aim to decouple from a single communicative space and to create norms protecting them and their citizens from the excessive influence of the Big Tech. The authors conclude that we are experiencing the sunset of the era of information openness. Depoliticization of the Internet is impossible without reducing international tension and reviving the spirit of rationalism in world politics. Only through getting back to reason can we return to the Internet the role of a creative, rather than destructive technology.
This article examines the patriarchal nature of inheritance law in late medieval and early modern England, the existence of an aristocratic offensive in the field of law against women’s inheritance rights between the 14th and the 18th century, and the relation between this offensive and the rise of agrarian capitalism. It then investigates the favorable effects of this legal legacy on the accumulation and concentration of the means of agrarian, coal and industrial commodity production in the hands of a minority of male aristocrats and bourgeois who played a significant role in the making of the Industrial Revolution.
Introducción: La Revolución 4.0 puede incrementar las divergencias económicas si sus beneficios no se distribuyen de manera equitativa. Este estudio analiza el impacto de la brecha digital en la desigualdad y el crecimiento económico. Metodología: Se utilizó una metodología mixta que incluye una revisión bibliográfica sobre el impacto de las tecnologías en el crecimiento económico y un análisis de datos sobre el acceso a la tecnología en diferentes países. Resultados: Los resultados muestran que las tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones impactan de manera desigual en el crecimiento económico según el país. Mientras que las tecnologías básicas han mostrado convergencia, las avanzadas, que impulsan el crecimiento económico, presentan mayores disparidades. Discusión: El estudio subraya que el acceso a tecnologías avanzadas en los países menos desarrollados puede contribuir significativamente a su crecimiento económico, ayudando a reducir las desigualdades globales. Conclusiones: Promover el acceso a la tecnología en países en desarrollo puede favorecer su crecimiento económico y reducir las desigualdades mediante transformaciones en el mercado laboral, la inclusión financiera y mejoras en salud y educación.
This chapter delves into the concept of social well-being in Asia by examining it from historical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives. It traces the evolution of well-being from Aristotle’s notion of “eudaimonia” to the present, emphasizing the necessity of adopting a comprehensive approach to human flourishing that extends beyond mere economic growth. The authors critique the reliance on GDP as the sole indicator of progress, drawing attention to arguments made by economists such as Pigou, who advocate for welfare economics as a means of assessing societal conditions. This chapter also discusses the impact of European colonization and modern global economic shifts on Asia’s social fabric, noting the region’s unique community-centric values influenced by the climate and natural features of tropical and subtropical monsoons. Additionally, this chapter introduces the work of the International Consortium for Social Well-Being Studies, which conducted the Social Well-Being Survey in Asia (SoWSA) across seven societies. The SoWSA findings challenge the correlation between economic prosperity and subjective well-being and reveal disparities between East and Southeast Asian societies. This research emphasizes the complexity of social well-being and advocates a multidimensional approach that incorporates cultural, social, and economic factors.
This paper examines the global cleavages that structure world politics from the mid-19th century to the present. It develops the concept of cleavage applied at the global level and measures empirically how territorial divisions give way to the politicization of various types of inequality along functional lines cutting across world regions. Covering over 300,000 articles from The Economist between 1843 and 2020, the analysis applies semi-supervised computational text analysis based on word embeddings to capture the territoriality−functionality continuum in global discourse. This method allows testing the theoretical expectation that the territoriality in the politicization of global divisions has diminished historically. Results reveal a trend toward the de-territorialization since World War II, primarily for cleavages about social and economic inequality. Although spikes of territoriality re-appear during interstate wars throughout the entire period, surges of territoriality are temporary and do not reverse the historical trend towards prevailing cross-territorial divisions.
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