HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Most scholars associate the emergence of a more distinct Global History with Kenneth Pomeranz's work on the Great Divergence. Although it rests on a comparative analysis of parts of Asia with parts of Europe, it also suggested tentative links between the two distinct economic structures.¹² Pomeranz returned to a more traditional understanding of the suddenness of the Industrial Revolution that was not the product of European exceptionalism, highlighting that the economies of Europe and Asia had shared a range of 'interactions and connections' for centuries.¹³ To some extent, Pomeranz reshaped the debate to consider the convergence of global economies, too. Although largely dominated by economic historians, the Great Divergence debate soon transformed itself into a much wider field of investigation. Indeed, histories of the production and circulation of goods and material culture had also become a popular line of enquiry and in itself a new direction in Global History. Prominent amongst these have been the work of scholars such as Maxine Berg whose focus on luxury and consumerism has traced the production of oriental goods and their impact on European society, transforming tastes, demands and even sensibilities.¹⁴

The formation, exchange and circulation of knowledge has also emerged as a similarly burgeoning field of enquiry. From the medical to the technological, the production and distribution of knowledge relied on global networks, agents and audiences in the early modern period. Such histories bring into sharp relief the crucial role played by subaltern actors in global exchange, as these 'go-betweens' or 'brokers' mediated and channelled the local and the global.¹⁵ In tracing such actors, scholars have been able to uncover the sheer breadth of geographical, cultural, national, linguistic, religious and sovereign borders crossed to produce everything from culinary recipes to travel accounts. The latter proved a particularly significant format of knowledge, as they also incorporated histories, anthropological observations and even diplomatic intelligence that was then distributed to a global audience.¹⁶ However, knowledge was not always an intentional construct created for a domestic intellectual or commercial audience, but rather could be formed through the practice and experience of global environments and patterns of weather in determining maritime routes and port settlements.¹⁷

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the role of trade and commerce in establishing global connections and integrating global actors has been arguably the most significant direction of enquiry in Global History, and one that very much unites histories of material culture and knowledge. As Claude Markovits points out, one of the key criticisms aimed at Global History is that it often lacks the empirical foundation of other fields, a critique that can easily be discredited through a study of trading networks, 'as they extend across vast distances and often left significant archival traces'.¹⁸ For Rila Mukherjee, the establishment of long-distance commercial networks created the 'first global age' in the fifteenth century, in which Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia became connected into 'an open, complex, dynamic, nonlinear system' of trade and exchange.¹⁹

The study of networks has become an all-pervasive methodological approach in the study of global commerce and trade. Networks serve not only to trace the connections between actors, communities and diasporas, but more critically they help us to understand the relationship between these global actors, especially in explorations of transnationality and cross-cultural exchange.²⁰ The normalisation of networks with global exchange and movement has of course mirrored our twenty-first century integration of networks into everyday life. And, like the latter, despite some concerns, there nonetheless seems no end in sight for the utility of networks as both methodological tool and historical actor in Global History.²¹ The sophistication of network analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, by historians over the past two decades has been especially fundamental in understanding the relationship between the local and the global on a number of levels. Historians have shown how particular regions, spaces or people become nodes or integrated into wider circuits depending on the intensity of exchange taking place. Thus the entirety of the British Empire can be reconceptualised as a global 'web' of circuits with nodes in the Atlantic and Asia through which knowledge, goods, people and expertise travelled and transformed.²² Some of the most empirically rich studies have uncovered the expansive networks of Sephardic Jews and Armenian merchants that have operated through multiple oceanic spaces and across numerous continents.²³ The role played by individuals, families and kinship groups in establishing commercial networks was clearly substantial in the early modern period, especially with their ability to negotiate complex interpersonal relationships.^{24 25}

Networks were connective, but more importantly they were often transformative, and became key agents in processes of globalisation. Emily Erickson's recent study of the decentred commercial strategy of East India Company captains in Asia observed how networks 'link individual behaviour to larger macro-level social and organisation outcomes'.²⁶ Becoming part of a wider network, whether commercial, theological, scientific, political or social, integrated the individual into larger institutional structures. Thus when Europeans and non-Europeans joined global networks, they adopted the group's norms and values, but as a member of that collective institution, were also able to exercise agency to reshape the larger network.²⁷ This could create networks of exchange and interaction, but it also created a conflicted institution in which the rules governing participation were contested by its members. As Francesca Trivellato has pointed out in her study of Sephardic networks, tracing global networks can sometimes 'evoke a romanticized view of merchant communities as harmonious, cohesive, and full of pride'.²⁸ Even the understanding and practice of trust was amorphous and negotiated.

Finally, the role of trade not only helps us understand global dynamics of exchange and relationships of negotiation, but essentially provides goods and objects themselves with global histories. New research on cotton, for example, has recast it from a colonial resource imported by European metropoles, to a global commodity that transformed the early modern world economy, with Asian manufactured cotton-goods spreading as far afield as Japan and the Atlantic, and even contributing to the industrialisation of Europe.²⁹