To ask whether ‘globalisation’ is useful for understanding modern history is to ask a question of a different order from asking whether globalisation happened. Usefulness is a property of concepts; it is assessed by what analytical work the concept performs, for whom, and at what cost. This distinction, easily elided, is the hinge of the whole enquiry. A term can name a real transformation and still be a poor instrument for studying it – cluttered with connotations that smuggle in conclusions or stretched across so wide a span that it explains everything and therefore nothing. My argument is that ‘globalisation’ is useful for modern history under two strict conditions: that it is treated as a category of analysis rather than a self-evident feature of the past, and that it is disaggregated into the rival, precisely specified claims it usually conflates. Handled with that discipline, it illuminates the preconditions and contexts of modern history powerfully; handled loosely, it obscures more than it reveals, and risks becoming, in Bocock’s phrase, an ideological tool of the very process it claims merely to describe.
The concept
The first difficulty is that ‘globalisation’ is a family of rival operationalisations. Jan de Vries’s study of the early modern world makes the point with unusual clarity. He distinguishes ‘soft’globalisation – sustained intercontinental contact with deep and lasting effects – from ‘hard’globalisation, defined as the intercontinental convergence of commodity and factor prices. On the soft definition the early modern world globalised; on the hard definition, associated with O’Rourke and Williamson, it largely did not, because transaction costs remained stubbornly high. De Vries’s verdict, that this was an age of soft but not hard globalisation, suggests that each definition generates a different periodisation and thus a different modern history. The Cape route carried roughly eleven thousand outbound ships between 1497 and 1795, yet by the 1770s the entire annual Asia-Europe flow amounted to something like half a kilogram of Asian goods per European per year. Whether that counts as ‘globalisation’ is settled by the definition one brings to it.
The point deserves pressing, because de Vries’s precision is itself the argument for the concept’s utility. His own dataset reframes the question the early modern historian should ask. Trade on the Cape route grew at a remarkably steady 1.1% per annum across three centuries, yet the Atlantic trades grew at least twice as fast, sugar at over 2% and Chesapeake tobacco at more than five, so that by the 1770s the Atlantic was some three times the value of the Asian imports. The interesting question is therefore ‘why was its growth held back,’ and the answer de Vries reaches – high transaction costs rather than the monopoly rents O’Rourke and Williamson posit – could only be reached by someone who had first refused to let ‘globalisation’ stand as an undifferentiated whole. He questions, too, whether convergence is even the right measure, since the real consumer impact of the early modern trades was expanded choice – tea, coffee and cottons reaching the ‘middling sorts’ by the eighteenth century – rather than a falling price for goods the rich already bought.
This is the concept’s first hazard and its first vindication together. Except for VOC fine spices, the supposed ‘monopolists’ face competition from each other and Asian merchants alike, their gross margins falling secularly from around four-to-one in the 1640s to under two-and-a-half after 1720. Faced with squeezed profits the companies chose territorial control over cost reduction, so that, in de Vries’s formulation, what began as an age of globalisation ended as an age of colonialism. The dispute over ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ definitions is what compelled historians to quantify, and that quantification produced de Vries’s findings. ‘Globalisation’ is therefore worth using when it is framed as a testable claim.
Periodisation
If definition is the first line of dispute, periodisation is the second, and here A. G. Hopkins offers the most useful corrective to the vice the concept most often falls into: the assumption that globalisation is a single, inevitable movement toward integration, running in one directionfrom Columbus to the present day. Hopkins insists instead on a stadial account, in which globalisation passes through successive and qualitatively distinct forms – archaic, proto, modern and post-colonial – each with its own agents, motives and geographies. The value of this for modern history is that it de-naturalises the integration narrative. ‘Modern’ globalisation, on Hopkins’s scheme, is one stage among several, the product of the nation-state and industrial capitalism. It becomes important for the historian only when it is understood as occupying a specific place within that sequence. This matters because the alternative – an undifferentiated, teleological ‘globalisation’ –produces the anachronisms that discredit the concept in the eyes of its critics. To treat Columbus’s landfall as ‘the beginning of global history,’ or the Seven Years’ War as simply ‘the first global war,’ is to flatten distinct historical formations into a single ascending line, and to attribute to earlier agents a connectedness they neither experienced nor could have named. Hopkins’s stages allow the historian to keep the genuine insight – that the mid-eighteenthcentury conflict between Britain and France really was fought across four continents, that Enlightenment thought really was fertilised by the encounter with the New World, so that Rousseau’s Social Contract drew on reports of societies organised on principles unfamiliar in Europe – without merging all of it into one homogeneous ‘globalisation.’ Periodised carefully, the concept can register both interconnection and its historical specificity at once. Left unperiodised, it converges the difference between the world of 1500 and the world of 1900, which is the very difference modern history exists to explain.
Anachronism
The problem of anachronism needs a fuller answer than periodisation alone can give, because it reaches down to the concept’s philosophical foundations. To describe the steamshipandtelegraph world of the 1870s as ‘the first wave of globalisation’ is to deploy a term coined in the 1980s, one that no contemporary could have used of themselves. On a Skinnerian view this is a methodological sin: we attribute to historical agents a self-understanding they could not have held, describing what they did in terms they could not themselves have accepted, and thereby misrepresent what they took themselves to be doing. But taken to its logical end, the objection would make all history impossible. Historical understanding is constitutively retrospective. Danto’s ‘narrative sentences’ describe past events in terms unavailable to those who lived them: Petrarch could not have intended ‘to open the Renaissance,’ yet the description is not thereby false, because events are, in Danto’s phrase, saturated with later-to-be-interpreted significance. No ideal chronicler recording everything as it happened could write history, since significance accrues only from the future. ‘Globalisation’is a paradigmatic narrative sentence. This makes it illegitimate as a claim about past agents’consciousness – the error Bell catches when he tests the idea that French revolutionaries inhabited a ‘mental space of globalisation’ – but wholly legitimate as a description imposed by the historian for the historian’s purposes. The distinction to hold onto is between globalisation as something people thought and globalisation as something we use to think about them. The concept fails at the first and can succeed at the second; the critic who rejects it wholesale on grounds of anachronism has rejected the possibility of history as such.
Context versus process
If globalisation is a legitimate analytical imposition, how much can it actually explain? Bell’s stress test of the ‘global turn’ against the French Revolution is the most honest attempt to draw the line. Bell sorts global approaches into three ascending claims – outward influences, integrated transnational processes, and inward influences shaping the event itself – and finds the third, most ambitious claim mixed at best.
What survives his scrutiny is considerable. Global finance and trade belong in any account of the Revolution’s origins: speculative bubbles and sovereign debt forcing the calling of the Estates General, the smuggling of colonial goods, the socioeconomic damage of the Eden Treaty. What does not survive is the claim that global forces explain the Revolution’s character. Saint-Domingue appears some 204 times in the 1789 assembly debates against over a thousand mentions of grain; in the cahiers de doléances ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ appears 120 times, but only 28 refer to actual Caribbean slavery. The rest are metaphors for domestic despotism. Caribbean slavery remained, for most French people, an abstraction, and the political class largely sidestepped it. Global perspective illuminates the context in which the Revolution began but not the ‘chiliastic fervour’ of its radicalisation, the geographically bounded creative process by which source material was melted down and reforged. Its energy came from inside the confined space, and no amount of tracing outside influence can explain it.
Therefore, globalisation is useful for explaining why then – origins and crises – and weak on why like that – the specific character and radicalism of events. Bell’s finding pairs naturally with de Vries’. Bell adds a warning against over-transfer, moreover: the global turn works better for Britain, with its larger empire and more traceable inward flows, than for France.
Concepts do not migrate between cases automatically, and a framework that flatters one national historiography may distort another. The corollary is that its utility is local and must be re-earned case by case, which is exactly what one should expect of a genuine analytical instrument.
The strongest case for the concept
The strongest positive argument draws from John Dunn, whose claim is epistomological: once previously discrete human populations have undergone what he calls their ‘at best semivoluntary de-insulation,’ a parochial understanding of a now de-insulated parish is not merely incomplete but structurally defective – it ‘cannot be cognitively self-sufficient and must be at least inadvertently under-informed and confused.’ On this view some concept of global interconnection is mandatory for modern history, because the object of study has itself changed. Historians who fail to globalise their subject matter will fail to grasp it, because the subject matter is now global. National ‘Just So Stories’ – Dunn’s mordant examples are ‘Why the British have such exquisite political taste’ and ‘Why China is the only real civilisation’ – fail for the modern period in a way they arguably did not for earlier ones, because the modern period is the one in which parishes ceased to be self-contained.
Two features of Dunn’s argument sharpen it against loose usage. First, his vocabulary is deliberately unlike the standard one. He says ‘de-insulation,’ not ‘globalisation,’ and the word is chosen to stress loss of separateness, often imposed and unwilled, rather than a benign process of integration. This is decisive because it shows that the very same process can be conceptualised differently, with different analytical consequences. To ask whether ‘globalisation’ is useful is partly to ask whether we can separate the process it names from the freight the word carries; Dunn suggests we can, but only by not using the word, which is itself a verdict on the concept’s usefulness in its usual form.
Second, Dunn inverts the economism that dominates popular usage. Popular and much academic writing treats globalisation as an economic process – trade, capital flows, improvements in technology – to which politics merely reacts. Following Istvan Hont, Dunn argues the reverse: the vehicles of global economic competition were states struggling to master one another, the ‘jealousy of trade’. The apparently economic character of globalisation is, in the last instance, illusory, because the carriers of every contending economic model were always states or states in the making. For modern history this is liberating rather than deflationary. It converts ‘globalisation’from a spontaneous market phenomenon into a political process of inter-state competition and category-imposition. And it supplies concrete content: the arrival, ‘at gunpoint or in eager quest to augment domestic firepower,’of Western categories – state, constitution, empire, democracy, citizenship, revolution, representation, even market –forcing their way into the rest of the world, each intrusion simultaneously a struggle to understand a predicament, and in part an imposition of power. Meiji Japan, the late Qing and Republican China, Ottoman and Turkish reform: these become legible as episodes in a single process without being flattened into passivity, since each is at once a reception and a re-forging of the travelling category.
The reflexive danger
However, if ‘globalisation’ is itself one of these travelling Western categories, then using it uncritically risks writing the ‘unified imperial higher truth best apprehended from elsewhere’that Dunn warns against – imposing, in the very act of describing global integration, exactly the view-from-nowhere that global integration is supposed to have discredited. Shortman’s second-order move is the right response here. Just as he treats historians’ language of ‘obligation to the dead’ as an object of analysis – asking what work it does, for whom, and whether its normative force is earned – so we should treat ‘globalisation.’ Its usefulness is inseparable from the present-facing projects it serves: Dunn’s ecological urgency, Kelly’s ‘hope for some more generous futures,’the ‘duty for global history’that provokes Cadeddu’s backlash against the moralising of the discipline. Bocock’s question presses hardest of all: how is global history to be other than an ideological tool of globalisation? A concept that legitimates the process it claims merely to describe has stopped being analytic and become performative, dissolving the parochial communities within which, on a Pocockian view, intelligible political action actually occurs.
The confrontation this sets up, between the ambition of global history and the suspicion that its categories are contaminated at the root, is best staged as a quarrel between O’Brien and Chakrabarty. Modern history is the ground they fight over. Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe mounts the sharpest version of the reflexive objection: the concepts through which global modernity is narrated – citizen, state, civil society, the very idea of ‘history’ as a secular, homogeneous time in which development unfolds – are provincially European analytical tools, universalised by the power that carried them. To write the modern history of India, or anywhere outside Europe, in these terms is to consign it forever to ‘the waiting room of history,’perpetually not-yet-modern, measured against a standard it did not set. On this account ‘globalisation’ is the latest and most seductive of these categories, all the more dangerous for presenting itself as the dissolution of Eurocentrism rather than its consummation.
O’Brien takes the objection seriously. He grants that global meta-narratives are contaminated by Eurocentric categories, yet rejects ‘provincialising’ and the flight into micro-history as an abnegation of intellectual responsibility that surrenders the field to patriotic gatekeepers. His historical case is useful here, because it denies that Europe’s ethnocentrism was ever unique. Every major tradition was ‘centric’: Herodotus ended in Greek triumphalism, and Thucydides thought foreigners not worth studying; Chinese historiography graded ‘barbarians’ by cultural proximity within a sinocentric tribute hierarchy; Islamic historiography, was teleological and strikingly incurious about Christian Europe. European triumphalism was the datable product of an ‘Imperial Meridian’ between 1783 and 1825, after which – crucially – every other tradition reorganised itself around responding to the West. On this account globalisation-asframing has done great work: it has broken history out of the national perception and de-centred multiple chauvinisms at once, and its meta-narratives can be made ‘negotiable’ rather than imperial. Rigó and López-Barajas’s formula captures the state of the question exactly: historians today ‘can be anti-global or pro-global, but not pre-global’.
Conclusion
That formula is the right place to end, because it concedes the concept’s inescapability while denying it any automatic authority. ‘Globalisation’ is useful for modern history, but its usefulness is conditional and asymmetric. It is a legitimate narrative sentence and an illegitimate description of past consciousness; it must be periodised, with Hopkins, into distinct stages rather than projected backward as a single inevitable integration; it explains preconditions and conjunctures, with Bell, but not the character of transformative events; it names a real change in the object of historical study, as Dunn insists, yet carries connotations that a more careful vocabulary would discard. Its greatest danger is reflexive: that a concept born of the process it studies will legitimate rather than analyse it, and, as Chakrabarty warns, will smuggle a provincial European standard into the very framework meant to transcend it. The concept is therefore most useful precisely when it is least taken for granted: disaggregated into testable claims, as de Vries and Bell disaggregate it; periodised rather than naturalised; held to the distinction between context and process; and used, in Shortman’s spirit, with full consciousness of the present-facing projects it serves. Understood that way, ‘globalisation’ is not a truth about modern history but a disciplined question we put to it – and a question, earns its usefulness by remaining open.
Bibliography
Works cited directly
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Bell, David A. “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution.” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 1-24.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
De Vries, Jan. “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World.” Economic History Review 63, no. 3 (2010): 710-733.
Dunn, John. “Why We Need a Global History of Political Thought.” In Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought, edited by Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus A. Reinert and Richard Whatmore, 285-307. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 7
Hopkins, A. G., ed. Globalization in World History. London: Pimlico, 2002.
O’Brien, Patrick. “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History.” Journal of Global History 1, no. 1 (2006): 3-39.
Rigó, Máté, and José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas. “Global History Wars: Dispatches from the East-Central and Southern European Frontlines.” Contemporary European History 35 (2026).
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Works cited through Shortman Cadeddu, Davide. “Trusting the Process: Current Fashions in History of Political Thought.”Scienza & Politica 35, no. 68 (2023): 239-48.
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