Introduction,
Abstracts, and Bios:
Introduction
Organized by the American Historical Association, the World
History Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the
African Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association,
the Conference on Latin American History, the Association for
Asian Studies, the Community College Humanities Association,
and the Library of Congress, this conference aims to go beyond
traditional area studies and to cross the usual national, geographical,
and cultural boundary lines of scholarship by taking explicitly
comparative, crosscultural, systematic, global, or other appropriate
approaches. A major purpose is to explore contemporary
globalization in historical context and the historical processes
that drive globalization, as well as the way in which the current
dialectic of globalization and fragmentation affects the definition
of areas and regions.
Each of the three conference days will focus on a particular
rubric. Day One: movement of peoples, ideas, and goods;
material interactions and their sites. Day Two: Networks
and connections beyond the nation-state. Day Three: Reconfigurations
of "area" and "state," their implications
and interactions.
Abstracts and Bios
The Role of Central Asians in the Spread of World Religions,
ca. 200 BCE-1000 CE
Richard Foltz, Columbia University
For over
a thousand years the prime actors in the transmission of the
worlds major religions from the Mediterranean to China were
the people of Transoxiana (roughly modern Uzbekistan).
Situated halfway between the Near Eastern and Far Eastern centers
of civilization, the natives of this region, Iranian-speakers
known as Sogdians, were ideally situated to be middlemen.
Sogdian merchants were for centuries among the most successful
in Asia, and their trading activities formed the major link
connecting East and West. The Sogdians were purveyors
not only of goods, but of culture in general, borrowing ideas
and traditions from one civilization and transmitting them to
another. In the centuries before the common era Buddhism
took hold amongst the Bactrians, another Iranian people living
to the northwest of India. Sogdians living or trading
in Bactria adopted Buddhism and carried its teachings throughout
their trading colonies all along the Silk Route as far as China.
Later Sogdians became enthusiastic converts to Manichaeism or
Nestorian Christianity, and became the representatives of these
faiths within their string of communities across the Asian interior.
With their international connections Sogdians knew foreign languages,
and many were literate. They were often engaged as interpreters
and translators. It was Sogdian scribes who translated
most of the religious texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity
into the various languages of the Silk Route, from Prakrit,
Aramaic, or Parthian into Bactrian, Tokharian, Khotanese, Turkish
or Chinese, either via Sogdian or directly. As Central
Asia became Islamicized beginning in the eighth century, the
Sogdians gradually adopted the Persian language and Iranian
Islam. Within two centuries Transoxiana indeed became
the center of the Persian cultural world under the Samanid dynasty;
Rudaki, Farabi, Khwarazmi, and Avicenna are just a few of the
Central Asians who stand out in medieval Islam.
This paper will discuss how and why the Iranian peoples of Central
Asia played such a major role in the transmission of religions
from the Near East to the Far East throughout the first millennium
of the Common Era.
Richard
C. Foltz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion,
University of Florida, and has held visiting positions at Columbia
University, Brown University, and Gettysburg College. He holds
a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.
He is the author of Religions of the Silk Road (St. Martins
Press, 1999) and Mughal India and Central Asia (Oxford
University Press, 1998). He is presently working on a book about
the environmental movement in contemporary Iran.
Freemasonry, Colonialism and Indigenous Elites: Fraternalism
in Asia and the Pacific During the Nineteenth Century
Frank Karpiel, Ramapo College, New Jersey
During the nineteenth century, Freemasonry spread across the
globe as Britain and the European powers expanded their colonial
empires and American vessels visited far-flung Pacific and Asian
ports. Naval officers along with civilian traders were
enthusiastic proponents of the Masonic order and its ritual,
fellowship, and useful international connections. The
first focus of this paper is the cultural and political context
into which Freemasonry was introduced to Australia, Indonesia,
Hawai¥i, Tahiti, the Philippines, India, China, and Japan during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Masonic lodges created
zones of social interaction which transcended many of the tensions
that divided Americans, Britons and Europeans in these colonial
outposts and international trading centers. At the same time
the fraternity also allowed competing factions within those
national groups to find a sociable middle ground.
The second half of this paper highlights the participation of
Asian and Pacific elites who joined the Masonic order.
While reflecting the power relationships and a range of social
values within the foreign community, Masonic lodges also offered
a unique environment for indigenous leaders. In Indonesia,
Hawai¥i, the Philippines and throughout Asia, local elites often
petitioned for membership and were welcomed as members (and
sometimes masters) of lodges. Far from being passive receptors
of this Western tradition, these leaders actively appropriated
the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry for their own purposes.
Yet appropriation was a two way street, with fraternal groups
dominated by Caucasians drawing upon indigenous traditions in
formulating new ceremonies. The øborrowingÓ of cultural
practices such as tattooing, sacred dance and blood sacrifice
thus illuminates the cross-cultural contests over history, culture
and power that occurred in the Pacific and Asia within the fraternal
context.
Frank Karpiel
is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Ramapo College
of New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. from the University of
Hawai¥i in 1998 and has taught world history since 1993.
Fields of interest include world history, American cultural
history, ethnohistory, Hawaiian and Pacific history. His
major research projects have focused on the crosscultural dimensions
of fraternalism in Hawai¥i and the development of Buddhism in
America. His publications include øMystic Ties of Brotherhood-Freemasonry,
Ritual and Hawaiian Royalty,Ó Pacific Historical Review
and articles in The Hawaiian Journal of History.
Migration and Family Structure: Theses on the Global History
of Families
Patrick Manning, Northeastern University
This paper aims to encourage a closer association of family
history and world history. It emphasizes the role of migration
in family history by applying a typology correlating family
structures with distinctions among three types of regions: regions
with few migrants, regions dominated by migrants, and regions
with significant minorities of migrants.
The paper argues that families changed substantially depending
on the regional proportion of migrants. In regions
with few migrants (early modern Japan and France), senior levels
of multigenerational families controlled land and access to
marriage. In regions dominated by migrants (the Caribbean and
maritime Southeast Asia), young people could start families
without the approval of eldersthough this might introduce new
sorts of oppression, such as enslavement of women. Populated
regions with significant numbers of migrants (the coasts of
India, Africa, and Europe) also had distinctive family patterns:
prestigious migrants (generally male) could marry into established
families, while subordinate migrants (commonly female) were
recruited into established families.
The paper concludes by generalizing these patterns as a set
of theses on the world history of family structure. (1)
migration usually causes families to become smaller; (2) migrant-dominated
zones of interaction developed family structures in which young
people created their own families; (3) regions with sizeable
minorities of migrants developed new structures for linking
multigenerational families to unaffiliated individuals; (4)
development of these new systems laid the groundwork for the
marital and non-marital forms of families in more recent times,
in which young people have increasingly migrated away from parental
homes and have started families by their own choice.
Patrick
Manning is Director of the World History Center and Professor
of History, African-American Studies, and Education at Northeastern
University. His books include studies of economic history
in West Africa, the demographic impact of slave trade on Africa
and the diaspora, and a survey of francophone sub-Saharan Africa.
He led the team producing the Migration in Modern World History
CD-ROM.
Governing globalization: Labour economic paradigms at the
International Labour Organization, 1919-1998
Oliver Liang, International Labour Office
This paper analyses four phases in the discussion of the notion
of globalization at the International Labour Organization (ILO)
and highlights the overarching labour economic paradigms which
emerged among the participating actors. In a first triumphalist
phase after its founding in 1919, the ILO was principally shaped
by Western governments, workers, and employers who promoted
free trade and sought to ensure a level playing field by securing
minimum labour standards. After 1929, the ILO moved into a second
phase, dominated by corporatism and nationalist Keynesian schemes
for employment. After 1945, the discussion of globalization
was conducted by a growing array of participants, including
Western governments, employers, and workers, and a growing number
of developing countries backed by the Soviet block. During
this phase, which lasted into the 1970s, the developing world
was able to shape the discussion of world labour economics to
transpose a rights-based discussion which initially sought to
facilitate international trade into one which stressed the right
to development. This consensus began to crumble in the 1980s,
leading to a present phase in which many developing countries
have sought a relaxation of global labour standards to encourage
global investment. Rights are no longer a condition for investment,
rather, global trade has become a condition for rights. The
international dialogue on governing globalization has thus shifted
from one dominated initially by Western governments against
the developing world into a discussion between neo-liberal governments,
both in the industrialized and developing world, against a growing
network of international workers.
Oliver
Liang was born in 1966 in Poughkeepsie, New York and received
a B.A. from Vassar College in 1988. He received his M.A.
and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. His doctoral
dissertation, entitled øCriminal-biological theory, discourse
and practice in Germany, 1918-1945,Ó explored the impact of
criminological theory on German criminal law. Since January
2000, he has been an official in the International Labour Standards
and Human Rights Department of the International Labour Office.
A øTrade DiasporaÓ Redefined: State Building, National Interest
and Colonial Settlement in Early Modern Trading Groups
Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Tufts University
The term øtrade diasporaÓ was coined to refer to øa nation of
socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities.Ó
The way the term has been used has created a distortion of reality.
It is applied to many groups in the early modern period: for
example, Iranians in India, or the Indians on the African continent,
the Armenians in Iran. It could equally apply, however, to the
East India Company factors, such as the English in India and
the Dutch in Southeast Asia, but it is never used this way.
Two problems emerge: how should these global merchant
networks be studied, and why are the settlement by European
company factors in Asia and the Americas viewed differently
by scholarship? They are studied with the framework of
the nation-state. It demands the comparative study of several
trading groups, and a reexamination of their participation in
state-building in societies other than their own. The central
examples comes from my work on the Armenians in the silk
trade: the New Julfa Armenians formed trading settlements
that spanned the globe from Narva to Shanghai. They had an Armenian
trading company, which I will compare and contrast to the European
East India Companies during the seventeenth century. K. N. Chaudhuri
postulated that the trade settlements of a nation in diaspora,
necessarily have a different outlook from merchants belonging
to a nation, the assumption being that only the latter serve
national interests and participate in state-building and in
colonization. This begs a closer examination and a comparison
between groups.
Ina Baghdiantz
McCabe is Darakjian Jafarian Chair in Armenian History at Tufts
University. She has previously taught European history
and Western civilization at Bennington College and at Columbia
University. She has taught Armenian history at the University
of Michigan and at the University of Chicago. Her research interests
are the silk trade, early modern Eurasian trade, trade diaspora,
and orientalism. She is the author of several articles
and of a book entitled: The Shahs Silk for Europes Silver:
The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and
India (1530-1750).
State Formation in Ancient Northeast Africa and the Indian
Ocean Trade
Stanley S. Burstein, California State University at Los
Angeles
The publication in 1974 of Immanuel Wallersteins The Modern
World System was a milestone in the historiography of world
history. With its by now familiar categories of core, semi-periphery,
and periphery, Wallersteins scheme provided an integrated analysis
of the socio-ecomomic history of the world since the sixteenth
century CE, which correlated the development of various
regions with their function in the world system.
Wallerstein specifically denied the applicability of world system
analysis before this period, arguing that interregional trade
in these periods was characterized by luxury trade and operated
within a framework provided by world empires. Janet Abu-Lughod
and others demonstrated that this chronological divide was unjustified
and that, while there may have been no previous world system,
interregional trading systems with similar characteristics did
exist in antiquity and the middle ages. One such system was
that focused on the Indian Ocean in the first three centuries
CE.
During these three centuries the Indian Ocean served as the
focus of a trading system that ultimately extended from the
Mediterranean basin to south China. Kenneth Hall and other scholars
have demonstrated the close connection between the development
of the Indian Ocean trade and state formation in the Indian
subcontinent. This paper will argue that the same was true in
northeast Africa and that the differing historical trajectories
of the kingdoms of Kush and Axum in this period also reflect
the influence of the Indian Ocean trade.
Stanley
M. Burstein is Professor of Ancient History at California State
University at Los Angeles. He was educated at the University
of California at Los Angeles, receiving his Ph.D. in 1972. The
focus of his research is Greek history with particular emphasis
on the history of Greek relations with the peoples of the Black
Sea and Northeast Africa. His publications include Outpost
of Hellenism: The Emergence of Heraclea on the Black Sea (1976),
Agatharchides of Cnidus: On the Erythraean Sea (1989),
Graeco-Africana: Studies in the History of Greek Relations
with Egypt and Nubia (1995), and Ancient African Civilizations:
Kush and Axum (1998).
Regions and Interaction Networks: A World-Systems Perspective
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Andrew Jorgenson, University
of California at Riverside
This paper discusses methodological and conceptual issues in
bounding human social systems and their interactions with the
natural environment. We contend that interaction networks are
far superior to cultural area and regional approaches for bounding
human social systems. And we review several new approaches for
studying the interactions between human systems and the natural
environment.
Christopher
Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University
of California at Riverside. His recent research focuses on the
causes of empire expansion and urban growth (and decline) in
the Afroeurasian world-system over the last 3000 years. His
study of structural globalization in the modern world-system
since 1800 is supported by the National Science Foundation.
An Economic Middle Ground?: Anglo/African Interaction, Cooperation,
and Competition at Cape Coast Castle in the Late Eighteenth
Century Atlantic World
Ty M. Reese, University of North Dakota
In eighteenth century West Africa, as the slave trade and Atlantic
World concurrently expanded, European companies, slavers, and
individuals operated and existed through the auspice of the
coastal African peoples. During a time when the slave
trade helped to integrate various regional economies, West Africa
presents a unique opportunity to research the consequences of
European expansion where the local peoples maintained sovereignty.
This examination of Cape Coast Castle works to expand our understanding
of cultural interaction and economic integration as African
and European contact in West Africa illustrates how both benefited
from this contact: an economic middle ground. By focusing
on one specific area of Anglo/African interaction, this study
provides a better understanding of how diverse groups establish
and utilize cross-cultural trade. The paper will deal
with this in two ways. First, it will examine the opportunities
that England's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa presented
to the local caboceers and penyins, as well as
their ability to control and manipulate this relationship.
The association that the African elite created with the English
allowed them to strengthen their economic and political power
over the local community. The paper will then examine
the opportunities gained by the coastal free and unfree laborers.
The company's inability to staff its administrative center with
European laborers made it dependent upon local African labor,
while the wages they received changed their position within
society.
Ty Reese
is currently an assistant professor of Atlantic world history
at the University of North Dakota. His dissertation, completed
in August 1999, comparatively examined laborers and labor systems,
within the context of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, in three
Atlantic portsCape Coast Castle, London, and Philadelphia.
He is currently engaged in research on Cape Coast during a period
of established, and mutual, economic activity at England's coastal
administrative center. This Gold Coast micro-history will
explore the social, economic, political, and cultural consequences
of the slave trade and African/European interaction on the Cape
Coast peoples.
Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism and Nutritional Crises
Rachel Laudan, Independent Scholar
By about 1600, a single power cuisine (a style of cooking and
eating for elites) was globally dominant. Variants were found
in Persia, China, Japan, the Ottoman and Mughal empires, Spain,
Portugal, their colonies, and northern Europe. Based on raw
materials, techniques, and dietetics that had, over three thousand
years, been extended worldwide, this power cuisine gave primacy
to breads, pasta, and pilaus of wheat and rice; to spiced stews
of lamb, poultry and game; and to sugar confections. Common
people subsisted on largely vegetarian diets dominated by gruels
of lesser grains.
Around 1650, the French, British and Dutch broke with traditional
dietetics and (with their settlement colonies) created an alternative
power cuisineËAtlantic cuisineËthat emphasized bread, beef,
sugar, and sauces and confections based on flour and animal
fats. By 1900, these powers had policies (not unconnected with
empire) to ensure that all citizens ate Atlantic power cuisine.
Consumers of traditional cuisines and of Atlantic power cuisine
were united, however, in the belief that diet was largely responsible
for both physique and character. When consumers of traditional
cuisines found themselves ruled by or threatened by consumers
of Atlantic cuisine, crises about diet and nutrition naturally
surfaced. I shall sketch how the handling of these crises in
countries such as Thailand, India, Japan, Mexico, Italy and
the United States in the first half of the twentieth century
related to the globalization of food.
Trained
as a historian of science, Rachel Laudan has taught at Carnegie-Mellon,
Pittsburgh, and Virginia Tech; held fellowships at the Dibner
Institute, MIT, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Davis
Center, and Princeton University; and grants from NEH, NSF,
and Fulbright. While at the University of Hawaii, she
became fascinated by the global forces shaping Hawaiis food,
leading to the 1977 Julia Child Prize for The Food of Paradise:
Exploring Hawaiis Culinary Heritage (University of Hawaii
Press,1996). Now freelance in Mexico, she is working on a book
on global culinary history, which will be published by the University
of Chicago Press.
Great Qing and Its Southern Neighbors, 1760-1820: Secular
Trends and Recovery from Crisis
John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California
Between 1760 and 1820, Chinas two great mainland neighbors,
Siam (now Thailand) and Annam (now Vietnam) passed through major
phases of political breakdown, revolt, and civil war. Vietnams,
encompassing almost thirty years of the rise and rule of the
Tayson rebels and their overthrow by the Nguyen, who went on
to found a new and stronger united kingdom, was apparently deeper
and longer-lasting than Siams experience of Burmese invasion,
successful resistance, and the founding of the Bangkok Dynasty
that still reigns in 2001. Both upheavals can be usefully viewed,
I suggest, as consequences of an eighteenth century of commercial
and demographic growth, producing a larger number of regional
centers of power, many of them complexly entwined with the activities
of ¹migr¹ Chinese. The ¹migr¹ Chinese also contributed in basic
ways to the new regimes that emerged from the chaos.
The Qing Dynasty kept track from a distance of these changes
in two important tributary states. Records preserved in the
First Historical Archives in Beijing are important for the student
of these changes, and show the limitations of Qing information,
understanding, and ability to intervene. The emergence after
the chaos of stable regimes that resumed regular tributary relations
with Beijing was one source of Qing oblivion to the massive
changes that were taking place in Southeast Asia and would expand
to engulf China in the Opium War of 1839-1842.
John E.
Wills, Jr. earned his Ph.D. under the direction of John K. Fairbank
and Yang Lien-sheng at Harvard. Since 1965 he has taught Chinese
history and early modern world history at the University of
Southern California. His research centers on the history of
maritime China and Sino-Western relations in early modern times,
using printed and archival sources in Chinese and in European
languages. Most recently he has published Mountain of Fame:
Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton University Press,
1994) and 1688: A Global History (W.W. Norton and Granta
Books, 2001).
Crossing the Sahara: The Failure of an Early Modern Attempt
to Unify Islamic Africa
Stephen Cory, University of California at Santa Barbara
The traditional area studies approach towards Africa is to divide
the continent between North Africa (Arab Africa) and sub-Saharan
Africa (black Africa). Through the use of this model, a mental
barrier is constructed, located approximately in the middle
of the Sahara desert, which can blind scholars to the many economic,
cultural, religious, and ethnic links between North Africa and
sub-Saharan Africa. This mental barrier has not always existed
in the minds of Africans and, despite the difficulties associated
with crossing the Sahara, attempts have been made in the past
to unify the two regions.
My paper examines the attempt made by a sixteenth-century Moroccan
monarch, Ahmad al-Mansur, to unify these regions using the traditional
Islamic concept of the caliphate as the link to adjoin sub-Saharan
Africa to his domains. Even though this effort ultimately
failed, I argue that al-Mansur recognized some long-standing
connections between the two regions, which he sought to capitalize
upon. The reasons for this invasion as well as the causes of
its failure can be instructive in understanding the commonalties
and the differences between the two regions, and the beginnings
of proto-nationalism in Northwest Africa. In contrast
to al-Mansur, modern nationalistic ideologies emphasize difference
and competition, rather than the unifying elements of traditional
Islamic doctrines.
In summary, I discuss the question: Are there other ways to
view this continent that are more productive in allowing us
to clearly see the many links that continue to exist between
the regions of North, West, and East Africa?
Stephen
Cory is a graduate student studying Islamic History at the University
of California at Santa Barbara. He is currently completing
his dissertation research in Morocco, with funding from a Fulbright
Hays fellowship. His dissertation is entitled, "Chosen
by God to Rule: Messianic Islam and Political Legitimacy in
Early Modern Morocco." Stephen lives with his wife
and four daughters in the Middle Atlas mountains, not far from
the historic city of Fes.
Going Beyond Nation and the "East-West" Divide
Palmira Brummett & Lydia Pulsipher, University of Tennessee
We illustrate two alternatives to the nation-state as the primary
unit of historical and geographic analysis: 1) the islandcomparing
the Caribbean and parts of island Southeast Asia, e.g. East
Timoras the focus of decolonization; and 2) the city-stateusing
Goa and Dubrovnik as two examples that enduringly resist integration
into the nation. Both cases are comparative and counter assumptions
about the "East-West" divide. These two cases illustrate
the limitations in space and imagination of the nation-state.
On the one hand, the island, by its very nature (size, boundedness,
isolation) has an enduring geographical identity that can aid,
resist, or confound the constraints of national identity. Colonization
often attempts to overturn cultural and environmentally determined
identities but succeeds only in muting or being muted by them.
On the other, Dubrovnik and Goa stand as enduring examples of
the autonomous city-state with their own "glorious"
histories of sub-regional rule and resistance to the attempts
of colonial powers to subordinate them. These city-states were
ultimately integrated into the nation-states of Croatia and
India, but continue to insist on their historically defined
identities as separate, independent, and "different."
Our two cases are linked by the following: the tenacious efforts
of colonial powers to dominate long after the imperial era has
ended; geographic isolation; traditional connections to the
sea; and now, dependency on tourism. The latter leaves these
places with the contradictory needs to appear safe destinations
while trying to construct identities that counter long histories
of control from outside.
Lydia Miheli
Pulsipher was raised in the Middle West, by a Slovene
immigrant father and a German mother. She received a Ph.D. in
Geography from Southern Illinois University and is Professor
of Geography at the University of Tennessee. For 27 years she
has done field archaeological and historical geography research
in the Eastern Caribbean, focusing on the human ecology of enslaved
Africans in plantation settlements. She is the author of professional
articles and monographs and of the college textbook, World
Regional Geography, published by W.H. Freeman, NYC, 2000.
Palmira
Brummett is Associate Professor of History at the University
of Tennessee. She received her Ph.D in Middle Eastern
History and Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago in
1988. Her primary interest is the intersections of rhetoric
and reality. She is the author of various articles and two books:
Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery
and Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press.
She is co-author of Longmans Civilizations Past and Present,
a world history text.
Analyzing the Phenomenon of Borderlands
From Comparative and Cross Cultural Perspectives
John A. Mears, Southern Methodist University
In order to address the primary themes suggested by a conference
on interactions, this paper begins with a definition of world-historical
regions and then discuss borderlands as particular kinds of
closely knit yet permeable regions of interaction between strongly
contrasting cultures. It then draws on examples from four unique
contextsChinas northern frontier with the pastoral nomads
of Inner Asia, classical Romes frontiers with Germanic peoples
to the north and the Parthian-Sassanian empires to the east,
the Christian-Moslem confrontation on early modern Europes
steppe frontier, and the borderlands of the American Southwest/northern
Mexicoto suggest how the divisions and accommodations between
diverse peoples create nexuses of distinctive interests within
these shared meeting grounds. Particular attention is given
to how we might investigate the social realities characteristic
of borderlands as well as the historical consequences these
zones of transition have tended to produce. The paper concludes
with observations about the use of comparative methods in identifying
the systemic differences as well as the structural similarities
of borderland dynamics in various historical periods and different
places around the world.
John A.
Mears, an associate professor of history at Southern Methodist
University, received his B. A. from the University of Minnesota
and Ph. D. from the University of Chicago. A specialist in early
modern Europe with a particular interest in the Habsburg monarchy,
he initially published a series of articles on relationships
between the development of professional standing armies and
state-building in the seventeenth century as well as essays
on comparative revolutionary movements. With a growing interest
in global history, he became an active member of the World History
Association, eventually serving as its president. Having published
on methodological and theoretical issues related to world history,
he is currently working on a book tentatively entitled To
Be Human: A Perspective on Our Common History.
The 1970s in World History: Economic Crisis as Institutional
Transition
Lauren Benton, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers
University, Newark
The decade of the 1970s marked the beginning of an extended
global institutional shift away from a world interstate order
and toward a more fractured international regime. This
argument requires both a revised understanding of earlier global
shifts and an approach to macrohistorical narratives that manages
to incorporate the insights of post-structuralism.
The 1970s marked a striking set of conjunctures. Deep,
twin recessions prompted an energetic round of global economic
restructuring. The United States withdrawal from Vietnam coincided
with the Portuguese Revolution and the end to formal, Eruope-centered
colonialism. New forms of developing-country association
made a noisy entry. And the failure of cold war politics
was signaled by such events as the ill-fated Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan, the brutal, U.S.-sponsored coups in the Southern
Cone, and the multi-sided and ideologically blurry conflicts
in Angola and the Horn of Africa. Historical accounts
of the decade have managed so far neither to show the relation
among such events nor to agree upon their impact
One way to stimulate new approaches to the decade is to model
our strategies on new interpretive approaches to global history
more generally. In particular, institutional world history
promises to help merge economic and cultural narratives. An
example is the study of international legal regimes in world
history. Of special relevance is the interpretation of
the rise of the interstate order in the long nineteenth century
as a phenomenon resulting not from colonial imposition but from
institutional responses to repeated sets of conflicts over the
location of political authority and cultural boundaries inside
colonial polities.
Returning to the 1970s, we find that this approach is also useful
in understanding the institutional and cultural dimensions of
the decades economic crisis. Three processes, in particular,
help us to see these connections: the reemergence of cross-national
diasporas as significant economic and political forces; economic
re-regionalization and its accompanying political and cultural
de-centering; and the growing complexity and depth of global
commodity chains.
A review of the literature on these phenomena reveals pressures
on governance in two directions. On one side, sub-national
institutions and regional identities gained new autonomy and
legitimacy; on the other side, new forms of inter-state association
(OPEC, trade accords, the Lom¹ Convention) emerged in the 1970s
and proceeded to gain importance. These shifts were also
met, paradoxically, with various efforts to reinvigorate state
institutions and enhance state coercive powers.
The emerging international regime that was so decisively initiated
in the 1970s is perhaps best characerized as a modified interstate
order that is historically novel in the depth and variety of
non-state and extra-state transnational interconnections. The
1970s did not give us this new order, but we will do well to
look to the decade and the peculiar confluence of economic crisis
and restructuring, cultural pluralism, and political conflict
and transition as a pivotal time in its emergence. As these
narratives of 1970s institutional change unfold, we need not
choose between the insights of post-structuralism and the certainties
of narrative history. Understood broadly, institutional shifts
are linked in specific ways to cultural discourse and political
economy. The study of these connections offers a theoretical
opening for merging analysis of culture and economy, as well
as a means to reconceptualize the ties between local conflicts
and the reconstitution of global regimes.
Lauren
Benton has research interests in comparative economic development
and institutional world history. She is the author of
Invisible Factories (SUNY Press, 1990) and Law and
Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900
(Cambridge University Press, 2001). Benton is Associate
Professor of History at NJIT and Rutgers University, Newark.
