ABSTRACT
Because so much of how we read the past is conditioned by ideas and descriptions that grew out of that past, globalization thinking potentially provides us with fresh opportunities to re-examine history through new lenses and discover detail and trends previously obscured. However, globalization has itself succumbed to similar tendencies. Indeed, part of the diculty in understanding globalization lies in the way the term has been captured by vested interests (for example free marketers and anti-capitalists) with their own take on globalization as a form of economic practice that promises or threatens world integration. Additionally, the term is used as shorthand for dening features of contemporary society, such as the speeding up of spatial and temporal processes of change, the onset of cultural homogenization, interdependency, or the withering of the nation-state. Notions of archaic, proto and modern globalization are also confusing, with the former being both precursors of modernity and indicators of globalization’s universality. Together, they suggest continuity. Yet for others, ownership is something that can neither be traced back in time nor shared. Globalization is simply Westernization and it brought to the world the shock of modernity (see Latouche 1996; Bauman 1998; Scholte 2005; Hopkins 2002).
