ABSTRACT
In C.A. Bayly's terms, only in the transition from 'archaic' to 'proto-capitalist' globalization, for instance, 'the capture of slaves, once a strategy in the building of the archaic great household in Africa and the Ottoman world, became a brutal proto-capitalist industry'. Bayly claims that European colonization and European dominance were driven as much by ideological transformations, or 'new types of sociability', or 'the intellectual buoyancy of the European idea of the advance of knowledge', or by "the density of civil institutions' as by commercial and technological advances. It is true that the migrations back and forth that characterized the frenetic eighteenth-century world created polyphonic nationalities and racializations. Today's globalization is not free of human conditions similar to those of colonialism and slavery. There are still slaves, some of them children, in the world today. Perhaps more than denationalization and colonization, the narrative of economic and social displacement and disempowerment should be recognized as the key theme of eighteenth-century transnational consciousness.
