As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle’s chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards. Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism. Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.
In this book, the authors set forth a new model of globalization that lays claims to supersede existing models, and then use this model to assess the way the processes of globalization have operated in different historic periods in respect to political organization, military globalization, trade, finance, corporate productivity, migration, culture, and the environment. Each of these topics is covered in a chapter which contrasts the contemporary nature of globalization with that of earlier epochs. In mapping the shape and political consequences of globalization, the authors concentrate on six states in advanced capitalist societies (SIACS): the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, and Japan. For comparative purposes, other statesparticularly those with developing economicsare referred to and discussed where relevant. The book concludes by systematically describing and assessing contemporary globalization, and appraising the implications of globalization for the sovereignty and autonomy of SIACS. It also confronts directly the political fatalism that surrounds much discussion of globalization with a normative agenda that elaborates the possibilities for democratizing and civilizing the unfolding global transformation.
Provides a new legal-sociological theory of democracy, reflecting the impact of global law on national political institutions. This title is also available as Open Access.
Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the Twenty-first-century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study.
A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.
This book is about the global resurgence of culture and religion in international relations, and how these social changes are transforming our understanding of International Relation theory, and the key policy-related issue areas in world politics. It is evident in the on-going debates over the 'root causes' of 9/11 that there are many scholars, journalists and members of the public who still believe culture and religion can be explained away by appeals to more 'basic' economic, social or political forces in society. Therefore The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations presents an argument for taking culture - and particularly religion - as social forces that are important for understanding world politics in the post-Westphalian era.
For some, recycling is a big business; for others a moralised way of engaging with the world. But, for many, this is a dangerous way of earning a living. With scrap now being the largest export category from the US to China, the sheer scale of this global trade has not yet been clearly identified or analysed. Combining fine-grained ethnographic analysis with overviews of international material flows, Economies of Recycling radically changes the way we understand global and local economies as well as the new social relations and identities created by recycling processes. Following global material chains, this groundbreaking book reveals astonishing connections between persons, households, cities and global regions as objects are reworked, taken to pieces and traded. With case studies from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, China, the former Soviet Union, North America and Europe, this timely collection debunks common linear understandings of production, exchange and consumption and argues for a complete re-evaluation of North-South economic relationships.
Anyone reading the business section of a newspaper lately knows that the financial exchanges--stock, bonds, FX, commodities, and so forth--are undergoing tremendous transformations. Fund managers, market makers, traders, exchange professionals, marekt data providers and analyzers, investors--anyone involved with the financial exchanges needs to understand the major forces pushing this transformation in order to position themselves and their institutions to the best advantage. In this book, veteran exchange expert Michael Gorham joins his twenty-five years of experience with CME and CBOT to the technical expertise of Nidhi Singh of Goldman Sachs to write a book that tells the story of this dramatic transformation. They chronicle the shift: --from floors to screens --from private clubs to public companies, and --from local and national to global competition. They analyze each of these shifts, identify the drivers behind them and look forward to the implications arising out of them for exchange business in the future. They also explore several key trends: --an increase in product innovation --the integration of markets from all over the world onto a single screen, --the rise of the modular exchange --the outsourcing of various exchange functions, and --the difficulty of transcending geography for regulatory purposes. So join Gorham and Singh in learning the story of this fundamental transformation. As old ways of working are being destroyed, entirely new types of jobs are being created, and new ways of working with exchanges. This book will help you chart the way forward to financial success. Gorham is an exchange expert and Singh is an electronic trading expert, they combine their expertise to reveal the inner workings of the exchanges and where they will go in the future Only book to point to new skills needed and new ways of making money for users of exchange services
The break up of countries, the end of the current planetary economic model, the regionalization of economies, the birth of global supra national projects. Change of the cosmic energy of Atlanticism (NATO, USA, North Atlantic) to the Eastern and Pacific zone (Silk Road, China, Eurasia) with Latin America as its second node. The book explains what the new economic model will need to constructed and agreed on after the global collapse of our world in 2 or 3 years.