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Globalization and the City

 | 
Andreas Exenberger
, 
Philipp Strobl
, 
Günter Bischof
, 
et al.

Global Cities and the “New” World History: Narratives and Teaching Perspectives from the United States after the Fall of “Western Civilization”

James Mokhiber

Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 Oonk (2002), 532. One of the books under consideration in Oonk’s review – edited by Brigit Meyer an (...)

1In 2002, a contributor to the Journal of World History noted the apparent ambivalence of the journal’s readers regarding theoretical approaches to contemporary globalization. “World historians”, he observes, “do not seem to have much interest in the debate on globalization”.1 He attributes this to what he describes as “their ‘natural’aversion to post-modernism, [the] latest fashions and hypes”. Reviewing two works by non-historians, he urges his colleagues not to write off their efforts as some descent into theory or a “literary exercise”, and reminds his readers that “globalization is about growing interaction in world history, which is our main object of study, after all”. In contrast to the avid attention paid to the globalization debates by other social scientists, he notes that “world historians somewhat silently question whether the process of globalization is new at all”.

  • 2 Northrup (2005), 253. Regarding my use of “AD”, or Anno Domini, the (sometimes politically controve (...)

2Just two years later, David Northrup’s insightful presidential address to the World History Association (WHA) both refuted and confirmed some of the previous author’s observations. In what is primarily a temporal model far from high-theory social science analytics, Northrup invokes globalization in his definition of a “Great Convergence” that, since 1000 AD, began to unevenly draw the peoples of the world into closer economic, cultural and political contact.2 He acknowledges that a primary inspiration for his model comes “from looking backward through time to discover the origins of the contemporary globalization”. Moreover, Northrup acknowledges that the rapid growth and popularity of the world history movement in the United States derives, in part, from the relevance it offers to students and faculty in an era of increasing interactions.

3I cite these texts because together they help to raise some interrelated points relevant to our work on “global cities”. While the first author highlights the limited attention of many world historians to the more theoretical debates surrounding “globalization” – the widely-acknowledged central “buzzword” of at least the two decades around the turn of the millennium – the second author acknowledges the popular and academic importance of the term and asserts world history’s focus upon a longer history of waves or phases of increasing globalization. Together, they offer some clues to the relative marginalization of the “global city” model – elucidated most famously by urbanist and sociologist Saskia Sassen in her eponymous 1991 text – within world history discourse and practice, despite its paradoxical influence in generating and focusing attention on “globalization” within the wider academy itself.

4From my perspective of teaching world history surveys and more specialized courses, I would like to explore world history’s narrative and pedagogical relationship to Sassen’s “global cities” in this chapter. I begin by briefly outlining Sassen’s technocratic but insightful analytical model, and contrast it with Janet Abu-Lughod’s understanding of the longer-term global significance of linked cities. I will then chart the emergence of the “new” world history in the United States and its partial embrace of contemporary globalization as a culmination of its narrative. Using textbooks as a guide to mainstream discourse and teaching practices in the United States, I will seek to show how most world history narratives nevertheless maintain their distance from Sassen’s “global cities” and thereby risk losing a sense of “place” in their discussion of contemporary globalization. In my conclusion, I will highlight some of the ways that world historians of various stripes have begun to intervene, albeit in a limited and circumscribed fashion, in the “global city” debates.

Defining the “Global City”: Saskia Sassen

  • 3 Sassen employed the term “global city” as early as 1984; Sassen (2004), 373.
  • 4 Sassen (1991), 5.

5As elucidated most fully by sociologist Saskia Sassen in 1991, the “global city” is not a historical model or understanding in the strict sense, but one that proceeds from the growing awareness of the increasingly complex economic present.3 In a multi-layered hypothesis, Sassen seeks to counter the tendency within existing globalization scholarship to focus on technology’s role in assuring the hypermobility and flexibility of the global economy.4 Instead, Sassen seeks to reassert the importance of “place” in this new economy of globe-straddling firms and forces.

  • 5 Sassen (2005), 35.

6Her analysis hones in on the significance and effects of global corporate practices. She argues that the worldwide dispersion of economic activity by today’s major transnational corporations requires such increasingly sophisticated coordination and management that these firms are required to outsource crucial corporate services, such as financial, accounting, advertising, legal, computer and communications functions. To provide global coverage and serve their clients’needs, these service firms, in turn, establish international connections, locating themselves in cities around the globe. Through these webs of corporate service industries, cities thus guarantee the global reach of multinational firms, serving as “central places where the work of globalization gets done”.5

  • 6 Amen et al. (2006), xi (a foreword by Sassen).

7Building on research carried out in the late 1980s, Sassen famously found three exemplars of the parallel developments she was charting in New York, London and Tokyo. The three served related functions in the global economy in that, as she later pithily describes them, “Tokyo was the leading global exporter of money as a raw, unprocessed commodity; London was the ultimate entrepôt, a legacy of its imperial past; and New York was the Silicon Valley of financial innovations”.6 All three booming cities certainly exemplify one aspect Sassen seeks to highlight through her work: the growing social and economic disparities occasioned by the development of a highly-specialized managerial elite. The outsized economic and general importance of these cities, partially de-linked from their surroundings and more dependent on global trends and currents, also supports her contention that the emergence of “global cities” results in the decline of the nation as a spatial unit.

  • 7 Sassen (2006), x.

8The attention Sassen’s work earned in the context of the changing global zeitgeist helped it to serve as something of a bridgehead for a host of scholarship in related fields and to reinvigorate the debate about the relationship between cities and the world economy. According to Sassen, the ensuing scholarly flood, which met up with currents coming from a number of different directions, “spawned a rather large literature across the world, producing, in turn, many advances and quite a few confusions”.7

  • 8 Michele Acuto traces a lineage of world/global cities thinking back to the early twentieth century (...)
  • 9 Friedmann (1986).

9This “invisible college” of researchers investigating the relationship between the world economy and world cities was led by John Friedmann, who had touched off a preceding wave of such work in the 1980s with his “world city hypothesis”.8 Looking beyond a city’s size to its economic role and its relationship and links to other cities within the world system, Friedmann draws on early work by Sassen, as well as a host of scholarship on the emergence of the modern world system.9

  • 10 Sassen (2004), 373.
  • 11 Sassen (2004), 373-374.

10Despite their early intertwining, Sassen has long sought to disentangle her “global city” paradigm from the wider “world city” discourse, citing her resolve to remain rooted in “the specificity of the current period” of economic globalization.10 This desire translates, in part, into an effort to bracket one aspect of historical experience, the growth of contemporary globalization and its “global city” agents, while simultaneously acknowledging the existence and potential utility of a separate, historical “world city” category of analysis. Indeed, along these lines, Sassen has sought to suggest that some cities, such as Miami, may evince “global city” qualities without possessing the lineage or characteristics of the pantheon of “world cities”.11

  • 12 Sassen (2006), x.
  • 13 See Sassen’s “Afterword” in Gugler (2004), 371-386 and “Foreword” in Amen et al. (2006), ix-xiii.
  • 14 The Relocating Global Cities editors tellingly insist that “there really is something qualitatively (...)
  • 15 Amen et al. (2006), xii (a foreword by Sassen).

11In recent years, Sassen has extended her work on the social costs associated with the rise of the “global city”, and she has collaborated with those who would apply the model and its insights to the global south and “globalizing” areas in general. She has done so in part by stressing that the search for the global in the urban is her main concern, and that, rather than bestowing honorifics or crowns, her analytical model’s key function is to detect globalization and the unevenness of its penetrations into even the most globally-focused cities.12 Sassen has remained a participant and commentator in debates and works that have sought to move beyond the core global cities, works that have included more political, cultural and historical approaches.13 These collections have sought to move “global city” debates away from supposed “winners” to those on globalization’s margins, and to a host of “wannabe cities”, allegedly driven by neoliberal agents, discourse and practices that might challenge the positions of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo as leading global cities. As approaches begin to move beyond economics and contingency and change come to light, history seems to be welling up within the “global cities” paradigm despite the insistence of many of its practitioners that today represents an irrefutable break with the past.14 Nevertheless, while Sassen asserts now that “the deep history of a city becomes more, not less, significant under conditions of globalization”, it is clear that she maintains her belief in the distinct nature of contemporary globalization.15

Challenging Sassen: Janet Abu-Lughod

12Sassen thus has sought to recalibrate her approach and model in recent years, and her “global city” work remains vastly influential, shaping debates about globalization in academic and wider worlds. Rather than trying to discuss the full impact and range of reactions by scholars to her work, however, I would like to turn to the one most closely associated with our topic: Janet Abu-Lughod. A noted urbanist, sociologist and world historian, Abu-Lughod is uniquely suited to challenge Sassen’s work and, for us, to open a discussion of world history’s treatment of the “global city”.

  • 16 Abu-Lughod (1981).

13Throughout her career, Abu-Lughod has deftly interwoven her roles as an urbanist, sociologist and historian. Those of us interested in the French colonial world were probably first exposed to Abu-Lughod through her provocative history of urban planning in colonial Rabat, which showed how in the “dual cities” of French Morocco, a modern, European-style city constricted and cut off a “preserved” Medina – social polarization in an extreme form that she likened to a form of apartheid.16

  • 17 In the introduction to her work on the subject, Abu-Lughod calls herself “lucky indeed to have enjo (...)
  • 18 Abu-Lughod (1999), 2.

14When Abu-Lughod entered the “global cities” debate, she did so as a clear, albeit cordial, critic of her colleague Sassen’s approach.17 In Abu-Lughod’s 1999 New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities, the criticism is sharp: the global cities literature, she notes, has been “remarkably ahistorical, as if contemporary trends represent a sharp break with the past, if not an entirely new phenomenon”.18 The supposed hallmarks of Sassen’s “global cities” – from the decentralization of production, international transfers of labor and capital, foreign investment, the increased role of external or subcontracted business services, transformation of communications and transport, and even the social polarization of cities – Abu Lughod claims, were developments that had been planted in early nineteenth century New York (and subsequently in Chicago and Los Angeles), or before the current era of globalization.

  • 19 Abu-Lughod (1989).
  • 20 For a recent restatement and review, see Wallerstein (2004).

15For the world history community, Abu-Lughod’s arguments are consistent with the line she took in 1989 in a different, paradigm-defining work. Her Before European Hegemony: The World System, 1250-1350 AD draws a picture of a vast, linked Afro-Eurasian trading system – a series of overlapping orbits or circuits – that constituted the most sophisticated system of trade and production the world had seen.19 As part of this ambitious work, she also sets out to describe how this system united an “archipelago of ‘ world cities’” from a wide variety of societies. Together, these interacting cities produced a world system that anticipated the one later dominated by Europe and characterized by Immanuel Wallerstein as the “modern world system”.20 The overriding goal of this ambitious book is clear: Abu-Lughod sets out to challenge the image of the modern world system – and indeed the so-called “Rise of the West” – as something sui generis, new and inevitable, arising from an innate power or quality of Europe itself. In this new formulation, an overlooked “fall of the East” necessarily anticipated and possibly brought on the period of Western ascendance.

16I cite Abu-Lughod’s criticism of Sassen, as well as her bona fides as a practitioner of world history, because she opens a window on the attitudes and orientation of the world history community toward the novelty of the “global cities” model and, potentially, contemporary “globalization” itself. Before we can approach these potentially intertwined topics, however, it is necessary to briefly locate and review the emergence of world history as a sub-field and intellectual force in the United States academy.

The Fall of “Western Civilization” and the Rise of World History

  • 21 Geyer/Bright (1995).

17For those who are not fully aware of the place the “new” world history has assumed in the American university and secondary school system, let me offer a summary with a view toward understanding its transformations and the eventual significance of “globalization(s)” within its narrative. It has been, on the whole, a remarkable ascent. From a wholly marginalized subfield, sometimes derided as the preserve of dilettantes and popularizers, world history has emerged over the past thirty or so years as a vital, self-confident and expanding area of research with wide pedagogical influence.21

  • 22 Less reductively, Allardyce (1990) also considers the influence of Louis Gottschalk and Leften Stav (...)
  • 23 Manning (2003), 54.
  • 24 Manning (2003), 52-54.

18In the United States, the launch of “new” world history has typically been tied to the publication of William McNeill’s 1963 Rise of the West.22 Well received by both scholarly and popular audiences, McNeill’s formulations reflect the times and circumstances, with both the Cold War and decolonization shaping McNeill’s effort to create a more inclusive historical narrative to fit the tense, changing world.23 It also “told a good story”, and set an ambitious narrative example for those who would follow. As Patrick Manning notes in his useful guidebook to the world history literature and discipline, McNeill’s seminal work drew on and in many ways extended a tradition of history writing in a popularizing “grand synthesis” mode, reaching back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the work of Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells and Arnold Toynbee.24

  • 25 For an invaluable collection of early articles by Crosby, Curtin, McNeill, Wallerstein and other fo (...)
  • 26 Stearns (2010), 9-10.

19The strong narrative thrust of the “new” world history inspired by McNeill was joined, and sometimes interrupted, by important analytical counterpoints and models, as well as significant interdisciplinary work.25 Some of the new work offered elegant and encompassing models and themes – such as the ecological history of Alfred Crosby – that helped to bolster the broad narratives McNeill and others were drafting, while a polite skepticism regarding the grand narrative emerged in the comparativist orientation of Phil Curtin. World history profited from, and began stitching together, the scholarship on Asia, Africa, the “Middle East” and the Americas produced by U.S. “area studies” programs.26 As noted earlier, “world systems” writers like Abu-Lughod also staked an important claim in world history territory, offering analytical rigor and a sense of the inequalities produced by growing interaction. Scholars intent upon stretching the parameters of the debate and narrative to include even the Big Bang itself joined. The “big tent” created to bring together this diverse group was the World History Association (WHA), dating from 1982.

  • 27 See Johnston (2005).
  • 28 Dunn (2000), 3.

20From its inception, and despite its diversity of approaches, the WHA has consistently pursued the mission of making world history a more “teachable” subject, despite raging debates about topics, narratives, themes and periodization. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the WHA, reflecting the breadth of its object of study and seeking to parry its academic and outside critics, has embraced its pedagogical responsibilities and mission more than most professional organizations.27 Some claim that teaching, in these early years, largely drove world history’s development; as Ross Dunn has noted in his own guide to the discipline, for nearly a half-century “the teaching project nourished research more abundantly than research nourished teaching”.28 This was particularly true given the rise (or re-emergence) of the world history introductory survey course at both the university and secondary school level in the United States and the controversies in which world history’s practitioners soon found themselves.

  • 29 Johnston (2005), 257-258; Allardyce (1990).

21For the advent of the world history survey in the United States has involved a shift from what had for so long been seen as the bread-and-butter course at most American universities: the Western Civilization introductory survey. Familiarly called “Western Civ” in student vernacular, this enduring class more or less explicitly tied contemporary U.S. history back to that of Europe and, eventually, back to ancient Rome and Greece, tracing a supposed legacy of human freedom and cultural sophistication. Subsequent authors have underlined how this historical narrative emerged from the understanding of historical change and relationships that was shaped in part by perceived needs arising around the time of World War I and, later, the Cold War.29 Fostering commonality with our allies, and raising the stakes of the struggles in and over Europe and beyond, helped to explain “why we fight”. Thus, one might say, Western Civ’s focus on the rise of “civilization”, its passage into the “West”, and its ongoing contest with variously construed “barbarians” forever storming the gates.

  • 30 Johnston (2005), 258; Allardyce (1990).

22The tumult of the 1960s challenged the liberal theme of “freedom’s progress” and Western Civ’s dominance in the U. S. university system. Slowly, into the 1980s, experimental “new” world history courses began to appear throughout the American academy, though these earliest efforts still encountered the skepticism of those who saw it as either un-teachable, un-American, the purview of generalists and amateurs, or a revival of previous failed experiments.30

  • 31 Hopkins’introduction to his edited volume is itself a revealing piece of evidence about the tenor o (...)

23In the 1990s, though, world history began to experience a period of unprecedented growth throughout the American educational system. Explanations for the rapid development of research in and teaching of the “new” world history should include the patient cultivation of a diverse intellectual community through the WHA and related institutions, the long experience of its practitioners preparing effective narratives with broad appeal, and the rising tide of the multicultural movement and identity politics in the United States. Current events also played their role: the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, as well as high-profile World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 and other cities thereafter, drove some world historians to call for a greater engagement with all forms and phases of globalization, so as to better inform the public and policymakers alike.31

24Indeed, in an era when the humanities are constantly called upon to justify themselves, this particular conjuncture provided ready arguments for the relevance of world history and, perhaps, history itself. Globalization heightened world history’s appeal to university students because, as David Northrup put it in his presidential address,

  • 32 Northrup (2004), 259.

“Not only does it place them at the center of things, but it also makes the past a meaningful backlight to give perspective on the future decades of their lives […] our fascination with world history is a product of the forces of globalization in our times.”32

  • 33 By my estimation, there were 31 distinct mentions of “globalization” in the Journal of World Histor (...)

25For the increasingly internationally-minded student body, world history appeared to offer them a kind of cosmopolitanism, prepare them for careers with global dimensions, and, perhaps, reassure them about U. S. primacy in an age of challenges and interaction. Belatedly, academic world history globalized.33

26By this time, world history’s more mature pedagogical style and narratives exhibited far fewer of the “civilizational” hallmarks that it had inherited from the previous Western Civ era or from McNeill’s earliest formulations, though most courses still were not so radically different as to alienate Western Civ instructors forced to retool. The Agricultural Revolutions simply had to be studied in their plural form, the Roman Empire could be contrasted with the Han, Christian pilgrims with Buddhist and Muslim ones, and exchanges in the Mediterranean and Atlantic juxtaposed to those across the Sahara, Silk Road or Indian Ocean. Slave trades, the birth of nationstates, the rise of modern empires, and industrial revolutions could be compared worldwide, the world wars examined in all their theaters and from multiple perspectives and so on.

  • 34 See Hopkins (2002).
  • 35 Interestingly, while Hopkins notes many of the kinds of economic factors Sassen discusses, the “glo (...)

27By the turn of the millennium, then, world history had emerged as a highly contingent story of the increasing velocity of connections, interactions and exchanges between people over long distances and vast spans of time. As the previous discussion of Abu-Lughod suggests, many world historians came to see and portray these as taking form within successive networks, systems or cycles of “globalization”, up to the present.34 Along these lines, A. G. Hopkins usefully identifies both trends within the existing historiography and a typology to group globalizations, and set out an impassioned agenda for future study and research.35

  • 36 Mazlish (1998) 385 and 395. The empire reference was no single slip of the pen. In 2005, he again a (...)
  • 37 Mazlish (1998), 395.

28At the same time, some dissenters began to see world history’s insistence upon deep cycles of globalization and cursory gestures toward the connected “present day” as downplaying the significance of contemporary transformations. This is also what has propelled the effort to create what some practitioners have sought to define in a sometimes stark manner against mainstream world history as the “New Global History”. This diverging scholarly trend became particularly clear in the later 1990s, as its adherents increasingly became uncomfortable within the WHA’s “big tent”. Bruce Mazlish, for one, warns of “obfuscation” and even (tongue apparently only slightly in cheek) an “imperial turn” by world historians seeking to control academic discourse about the present by assimilating “global” to “world” history.36 In an insurgent tone in one of several manifestos he published, Mazlish calls for “greater definitional precision” that would allow global histories to emerge from world history’s shadow and thrive independently.37

  • 38 Mazlish (1998), 389.

29Along these lines, Mazlish recommends that truly global historians should follow two principal paths. On the one hand, they should continue the work of world historians by studying the development, past and present, of those processes that transcend local, national or regional levels. More crucially, he suggests, the “heart and novelty” of the New Global History is the writing of the history of contemporary globalization itself, through the study of “the ‘ factors of globalization’[…] as far back in the past as seems necessary and useful”.38 For Mazlish, these date to either the 1950s or 1970s (he subscribes to the latter date) and include a host of phenomena – “the basic facts of our time” – including the exploration of space, the development of satellite communications, the emergence of nuclear and environmental threats, the rise of the multinational corporation, the expansion of global consumerism, the elaboration of human rights and the globalization of culture and so on. The interactions of these factors in a changing political and economic environment, he asserts, has resulted in the compression of time and space that we know of as globalization itself.

  • 39 A clearinghouse for information about the New Global History Initiative can be found online at http (...)
  • 40 Mazlish/Iriye (2005), 11.

30In recent years, Mazlish and others have continued their efforts to rally the troops for the New Global History, building on a series of conferences begun in the 1990s.39 Central to such efforts has been an insistence that “global history […] is emphatically an interdisciplinary practice”, necessarily drawing on theory and work from throughout the social and natural sciences. It is perhaps revealing, then, that its flagship journal New Global Studies, founded in 2007, omits mention of history in its title. Equally revealing, for our purposes, is the presence of Saskia Sassen on the new journal’s editorial board. Indeed, Sassen’s writing on the “global city” appears in the 2005 collection of foundational texts edited by Mazlish and Akira Iriye as The Global History Reader.40 Sassen’s affiliations with this group are clearly consistent with her desire to highlight the distinctions she perceives to be inherent in the present era.

World History Textbooks in the U.S.: Narrating Globalization without Cities

  • 41 Along these lines, one recent textbook notes that it was subjected to 83 editorial reviewers, 300 m (...)

31The emergence of the New Global History, and the affiliation of Sassen with this group, suggests the tension with regard to the place of contemporary globalization within the narrative explored by the “new” world history. Along these lines, it can be instructive to examine the ways world historians describe contemporary globalization by examining some of the major textbooks used in college-level U.S. world history surveys. Often co-authored by leading historians, vetted by dozens of reviewers, and subject to multiple editions and corrections, textbooks offer approachable narratives intertwined with the world history consensus that began to appear roughly twenty to thirty years ago.41 As we will see, if contemporary globalization has found its way into textbook narratives, “global cities” have only barely done so.

  • 42 While discussions of contemporary globalization do not always appear within a single chapter, see: (...)
  • 43 Strayer (2011), 1133-1134.
  • 44 Please note that I recognize that I am not undertaking the widest review of all such textbooks, and (...)

32A common feature of the world history textbook in the United States today is a concluding chapter or section that describes contemporary globalization through a selection of broad themes and issues.42 For example, the University of New Orleans’current textbook, Robert Strayer’s thoughtful and sometimes provocative Ways of the World, examines globalization – “the process of accelerating engagement among distant peoples” – by looking at the spread of feminism and other liberation movements, the rise of fundamentalisms, the emergence of global environmental concerns, and the question of American “empire”.43 Other textbooks, when they break with chronological narrative, invoke similarly broad themes like international pop culture and consumerism, technology, the internet and social media, religious and ethnonationalist revival, terrorism, civil war and genocide, immigration, democratization and civil/human rights struggles, energy and agricultural challenges, environmental degradation, pollution and climate change, AIDS and international health, supranational organizations and NGOs, and North/South inequality and poverty.44

33The diversity of themes treated in such textbooks certainly helps to illustrate the breadth of the discussion of globalization in the contemporary era, and such chapters make a case that world history is relevant and useful in providing an understanding of the world our students will face. At the same time, however, the discussion of these broad issues and themes tends to describe globalization, rather than explain or analyze its development or maintenance. Specificities regarding today’s globalization disappear. In the final chapter of most world history textbooks in the United States, today’s globalization frequently remains untethered, or as Sassen would have it, disconnected from a sense of “place” that might help to explain the specifics and dynamics of the contemporary era.

  • 45 Strayer (2011), 1134-1135.
  • 46 Craig et al. (2009), 1092.
  • 47 Von Sivers et al. (2012), 1107

34Even when they devote more time to precise explanations of economic globalization – an area in which Sassen’s observations obviously might well apply – few of the reviewed texts define or explain the phenomenon in a way that engages or references the “global cities” debate or paradigm. For example, Ways of the World acknowledges the popular definition of globalization as “the immense acceleration in international economic transactions that took place in the second half of the twentieth century and has continued into the twenty-first”.45 It then discusses how the massive economic transformations of the twentieth century were fueled by the post-war “reglobalization” of the world economy, with the signing of the Bretton Woods agreements and the creation of institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Technology, in the form of transport and communications revolutions, like containerized shipping and the internet, get their due. The text also nods toward the post-Cold War rise of neo-liberal economic policies promoting the reduction of state spending, regulations, tariffs and taxes as well as the privatization of state-owned industries. It focuses on the transnational corporations that shuttle their production capacities around the world in a search for the most advantageous labor and environmental climates. Another text, The Heritage of World Civilizations, notes how, in the post-Cold-War era, “the character of the world economy, including issues of trade, financial investments, and resource allocation, has led to new phases of economic, social and cultural independence, now usually termed globalization, that remain ill-defined and troublesome, whether they relate to automobile production, oil reserves, trade restrictions, currency failures or international debt”.46 A sophisticated third textbook, Patterns of World History, characterizes globalization as “the ongoing process of integrating the norms of market economies throughout the world and binding the economies of the world into a single uniform system”.47 It goes on to detail the rise of the dollar regime in the 1970s, the Clinton-era development of the American financial services sector and the promotion of more speculative financial instruments like derivatives, the rise of the Washington Consensus, the Mexican, Asian and Russian debt crises, IMF policies, and the international ramifications of consumerism. Thus, despite delving into some rather detailed and technocratic discussion of globalization’s causation, in economic areas frequented by Sassen, all of these texts fail to discuss or reference “global cities” and their roles.

  • 48 Stearns et al. (2011), 1003.
  • 49 Stearns et al. (2011), 962, 970, 984, 989, 991 and 998,
  • 50 It should be noted that this text discusses urbanization and cities – “the main habitat of humans” (...)
  • 51 Fernández-Armesto (2009), 1054-1055.
  • 52 Tignor et al. (2010), 796 and 832.
  • 53 Tignor et al. (2010), 841.

35This is not to say that cities and urbanization writ large, though, are entirely absent from these texts. The approach of most textbook authors and their editors, however, has been to use cities as visual sources, usually as Janus-like illustrations of the contemporary era’s contrasts, especially with regard to economic development and social polarization. For example, the last section of World Civilizations: The Global Experience includes a photo of skyscrapers in Dubai being built by migrant workers, while the accompanying text notes that in recent years the city has become “a world commercial center, with banking telecommunications, and other services. Many international corporations located regional offices there.”48 Other photos in this last section include a street scene from Hanoi dominated by a huge Pepsi can, a McDonald’s in Moscow, the World Trade Center collapsing on 9/11, a beauty pageant protest in New Delhi, the celebration of the millennium in Sydney in 2000, and people passing a prostrate homeless man on a Hong Kong sidewalk.49 Similar photos appear in the final sections of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s The World.50 A photo of “pell-mell urbanization” of Lagos, Nigeria reinforces Fernández-Armesto’s points regarding too-rapid urbanization and “overcrowding, gerry-building, a transport system that barely functions, unregulated trading, accumulating litter”, while prominent maps detail world urbanization and the distribution of the world’s cities of five million or more inhabitants.51 At first glance, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart seems to follow a similar approach. Here photos of cities convey unchecked urban growth in Lagos, pollution in smoggy Hong Kong and poverty through a wide-angle photo of the favelas of São Paulo, Brazil.52 Income disparities and social polarization are brought out by the juxtaposition of a picture of a suburb of Santiago, Chile “where the well-heeled live and shop just as they do in Beverly Hills” with the sprawling shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro.53

  • 54 Tignor et al. (2010)
  • 55 See, for example, Patel (2004). In an afterword to this collection, Sassen recognizes the contribut (...)
  • 56 Tignor et al. (2010), 802. The 1997 volume, edited by Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, entitled Bomb (...)
  • 57 Tignor et al. (2010), 803.

36This last textbook, however, contains evidence that the authors of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart have gone a step further than most and have struggled to engage the “global cities” debate in a more nuanced manner. The text notes that globalization has “functioned through networks of investment, trade, and migration that operated relatively independently of nation states […]. Members of societies now often identified more with local, subnational, or international movements or cultures, rather than with nation-states.”54 The agents of globalization, the authors note, were international financiers and banks, based mainly in New York, London and Tokyo, as well as internet-connected networks of investors and traders. Globalization’s effects reach into cities around the world, including Calcutta (Kolkata), Jakarta, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Tokyo; all of the largest cities in the world are now located outside the traditional “West”. The aspect of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart most evocative of “global cities” thinking, though, can be found in a two-page boxed feature on the transformation of Bombay/Mumbai since the 1980s. Clearly drawing on the Sasseninfluenced work of Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner,55 the feature discusses how globalization and economic liberalization have made the city a “strategic place in transnational geography”.56 This place in the global economy is “evident in the increasing presence of financial institutions, trading organizations, insurance companies, telecommunications corporations and information technology enterprises with worldwide operations”. Moreover, the textbook’s authors note that these industries and corporate headquarters “generate profits and employee wages on a much richer scale than other sectors of the economy”, which exacerbates the city’s longstanding divide between rich and poor.57 As a result, the city experiences globalization in diverging ways and these dislocations have allowed for an upsurge in Hindu nativist ideology and mobilization. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart thus engages Sassen indirectly and offers an example of how globalization can be “located” and tracked in and through a “global city” - though this is accomplished primarily through a boxed feature distinct from the main text.

Conclusion

  • 58 See, for example, Von Sivers et al. (2012), R1-R12; Stearns et al (2011), 1006-1008; and the volumi (...)

37These observations about the relative narrative silence of world history textbooks with regard to Sassen’s “global cities”, even in discussions of contemporary globalization, are of course preliminary and partial. One can always argue that such textbooks, aimed at a generalist audience of university students and constrained by the need to present a broad narrative and themes, are not the most conducive vehicle for bringing out the subtle and complicated “global cities” debate. But even in the bibliographies and suggestions for further reading that are featured in most U.S. textbooks, Sassen’s work and the wider “global cities” literature goes unacknowledged, as it does in other basic world history texts.58

  • 59 Baer (2007), 165; Wasserstrom (2007), 221.
  • 60 Winder (2010), 295-296. Winder’s paper was a result of the 2008 World History Association Annual Me (...)

38Indeed, this relative silence continues within the WHA’s flagship research journal, the Journal of World History. Virtually unmentioned until 2000, Sassen and the “global cities” model remain far from the center of the journal’s debates. Two exceptions help to prove the point. In 2007 the journal published a special forum on “Globalization and Global Cities”, including articles on Ottoman Salonica and global Shanghai in which Sassen’s work is noted.59 These were followed, in 2010, by perhaps the most explicit effort to engage Sassen, a provocative examination of how the Reuters news service in London emerged as a significant nineteenth century provider of global producer services through a network of bureaus in distant cities – long before London’s supposed emergence as a “global city”.60

39Whether this kind of research heralds further consideration of Sassen’s analytics, or simply shuts some doors, is unclear. What this brief review does suggest, though, is that the world history community has fallen short in not engaging a debate that generated tremendous interest for an extended period throughout and beyond the academy. If globalization is to remain a key part of the narrative, and part of the raison d’être of world history, this and future such debates will need to be considered more carefully.

Bibliographie

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Abu-Lughod, Janet L. (1981): Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Notes

1 Oonk (2002), 532. One of the books under consideration in Oonk’s review – edited by Brigit Meyer and Peter Geschiere and entitled Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) – grew out of a series of conferences co-organized in the Netherlands by Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells and others under the aegis of an international group of universities.

2 Northrup (2005), 253. Regarding my use of “AD”, or Anno Domini, the (sometimes politically controversial) American practice in world history textbooks and other works has been to use the “BCE/CE” distinction. However, I appreciate observations in the editorial process that the “Common Era” designation does little to alter the inherently Western and Christian origins of this convention, and I defer to these comments here.

3 Sassen employed the term “global city” as early as 1984; Sassen (2004), 373.

4 Sassen (1991), 5.

5 Sassen (2005), 35.

6 Amen et al. (2006), xi (a foreword by Sassen).

7 Sassen (2006), x.

8 Michele Acuto traces a lineage of world/global cities thinking back to the early twentieth century in a recent article; see Acuto (2011), 2953.

9 Friedmann (1986).

10 Sassen (2004), 373.

11 Sassen (2004), 373-374.

12 Sassen (2006), x.

13 See Sassen’s “Afterword” in Gugler (2004), 371-386 and “Foreword” in Amen et al. (2006), ix-xiii.

14 The Relocating Global Cities editors tellingly insist that “there really is something qualitatively new about global relations today, and not only economically, that is manifested most in cities […] globalization is not just a new, obfuscating conceptualization of a state or process that is actually quite old […] globalization theory is necessary and not necessarily prone to folly, even though some attempts at it may turn out to be”. Amen et al. (2006), 208 and 204.

15 Amen et al. (2006), xii (a foreword by Sassen).

16 Abu-Lughod (1981).

17 In the introduction to her work on the subject, Abu-Lughod calls herself “lucky indeed to have enjoyed the friendship of Saskia Sassen”, noting that she found in Sassen’s work on globalization and the global city both “inspiration” and, perhaps more tellingly, a “goad” or provocation. “I never turned down any of the frequent opportunities to appear on panels with her as we debated and clarified our propositions”, she writes, “because I knew I would always learn from her”. Sassen returned the carefully-bounded compliment in an updated second edition of her book Global Cities, referring to Abu-Lughod’s work as “masterly” – before directly challenging Abu-Lughod’s research and conclusions. See Abu-Lughod (1999), viii and Sassen (2001), 157-161.

18 Abu-Lughod (1999), 2.

19 Abu-Lughod (1989).

20 For a recent restatement and review, see Wallerstein (2004).

21 Geyer/Bright (1995).

22 Less reductively, Allardyce (1990) also considers the influence of Louis Gottschalk and Leften Stavrianos in his discussion of the emergence of the “new” world history in an article published in the first volume of the World History Association’s new journal.

23 Manning (2003), 54.

24 Manning (2003), 52-54.

25 For an invaluable collection of early articles by Crosby, Curtin, McNeill, Wallerstein and other founding figures, see Dunn (2000).

26 Stearns (2010), 9-10.

27 See Johnston (2005).

28 Dunn (2000), 3.

29 Johnston (2005), 257-258; Allardyce (1990).

30 Johnston (2005), 258; Allardyce (1990).

31 Hopkins’introduction to his edited volume is itself a revealing piece of evidence about the tenor of academic work in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; Hopkins (2002), 1-11.

32 Northrup (2004), 259.

33 By my estimation, there were 31 distinct mentions of “globalization” in the Journal of World History from 1994 to 2000, versus 90 mentions in articles appearing in the period stretching from 2001 to 2007. Source: JSTOR (accessed 30 Oct 2011).

34 See Hopkins (2002).

35 Interestingly, while Hopkins notes many of the kinds of economic factors Sassen discusses, the “global cities” debate does not loom large in this collection either; Hopkins (2002), 1-11 and 12-44.

36 Mazlish (1998) 385 and 395. The empire reference was no single slip of the pen. In 2005, he again asserted that “World history practitioners […] tend to take the global under their wings imperialistically, and to pooh-pooh its claims to an autonomous existence”. Mazlish (2005), 37.

37 Mazlish (1998), 395.

38 Mazlish (1998), 389.

39 A clearinghouse for information about the New Global History Initiative can be found online at http://toynbeeprize.org and http://newglobalhistory.org.

40 Mazlish/Iriye (2005), 11.

41 Along these lines, one recent textbook notes that it was subjected to 83 editorial reviewers, 300 marketing reviewers, 27 class testers and more than 1,000 students before publication. See the promotional overleaf to Von Sivers et al. (2012).

42 While discussions of contemporary globalization do not always appear within a single chapter, see: Tignor et al. (2010), 745-843; Craig et al. (2009), 1014-1129, esp. 1090-1092; Von Sivers et al. (2012), 1100-1139; Adler/Pouwels (2008), 716-723; Bulliet (2006), 712-733; Spodek (2006), 827-840; Stearns et al. (2011), 988-1009; Wallech et al. (2007), 507-523.

43 Strayer (2011), 1133-1134.

44 Please note that I recognize that I am not undertaking the widest review of all such textbooks, and that my treatment is somewhat restricted to those which we have assigned or considered for use at UNO. It is testimony to the continuing success of world history in recent years that there are many new textbook offerings each year. While I have tried to reference the most recent editions, this unfortunately is not always the case.

45 Strayer (2011), 1134-1135.

46 Craig et al. (2009), 1092.

47 Von Sivers et al. (2012), 1107

48 Stearns et al. (2011), 1003.

49 Stearns et al. (2011), 962, 970, 984, 989, 991 and 998,

50 It should be noted that this text discusses urbanization and cities – “the main habitat of humans” – in far more detail than the others under consideration; Fernández-Armesto (2009), 1038-1040.

51 Fernández-Armesto (2009), 1054-1055.

52 Tignor et al. (2010), 796 and 832.

53 Tignor et al. (2010), 841.

54 Tignor et al. (2010)

55 See, for example, Patel (2004). In an afterword to this collection, Sassen recognizes the contribution of Patel’s work in bringing out the political and cultural variables of global cities; Sassen (2004), 379.

56 Tignor et al. (2010), 802. The 1997 volume, edited by Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, entitled Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, is noted in the “further reading” section of the 2008 edition of Tignor’s textbook.

57 Tignor et al. (2010), 803.

58 See, for example, Von Sivers et al. (2012), R1-R12; Stearns et al (2011), 1006-1008; and the voluminous bibliography in Manning (2003), 379-413.

59 Baer (2007), 165; Wasserstrom (2007), 221.

60 Winder (2010), 295-296. Winder’s paper was a result of the 2008 World History Association Annual Meeting in London, one of whose themes was “Global Cities”. Many of the other papers treating this theme at the conference still tended to discuss the world historical significance of cities from a broader perspective distinct from contemporary “global cities” theory, though the conference’s discussions suggested promising new directions.

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