ABSTRACT
When the term globalization rst achieved wide currency in the 1990s, temperate northern Europe loomed large in early accounts of globalization’s history. The rise of a new global society built upon the foundations of Western civilization was routinely perceived as possible only through the technological innovations of the European Industrial Revolution, hand-in-hand with the European colonization of the ‘New World’ from c.1500 ce, which enabled the rst interconnected world-economy with, literally, global reach. This, however, is a view that is increasingly at odds with perspectives that stress the need to de-centre Europe in accounts of both the origins of modern globalization (e.g. Frank 1998; Nederveen Pieterse 2009) and the deep-history of pre-modern globalizations (e.g. Jennings 2011). The chapters in this section of the volume fall in line with such thinking. Rather than merely rallying to an alternative position, its contributions make abundantly clear the myopia and ‘presentism’ of those who would limit our understanding of globalization to the last century or 500 years. This is not a simple matter of pushing back the start date for globalization, or discussing historical globalizing processes that would eventually lead to something resembling modernity. Instead, the varied perspectives oered in this section highlight both the distinctive character and uneven punctuations of past globalizations that entangled temperate Europe.
