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Westerners on both the left and right overwhelmingly conflate globalisation with Westernisation and presume that the global economy is a pure Western-creation. Taking on the traditional Eurocentric Big Bang theory, or the 'expansion of the West' narrative, this book reveals the multicultural origins of globalisation and the global economy, not so as to marginalise the West but to show how it has long been embedded in complex interconnections and co-constitutive interactions with non-Western actors/agents and processes. The central empirical theme is the role of Indian structural power that was derived from Indian cotton textile exports. Indian structural power organised the first (historical-capitalist) global economy between 1500 and c.1850 and performed a vital, albeit indirect, role in the making of Western empire, industrialisation and the second (modern-capitalist) global economy. These textiles underpinned the complex inter-relations between Africa, West/Central/East/Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe that collectively drove global economic development forward.
Chapter 1 introduces the key conceptual themes/problems that underpin this book. It begins by arguing that current accounts of globalization and the global economy are Eurocentric in that they view these phenomena as the sole product of Western power and agency. It then feeds into the analysis of Benjamin Cohen's call for the return to ‘big picture’ visions and accounts of IPE given my belief that British- and US-School IPE have produced ahistorical/presentist and narrow conceptions of the global economy. To counter this I advance a global historical sociological approach that reveals the origins of both the global economy and capitalism in the last half-millennium. In problematising the dominant, naturalised Western conception I seek to replace it with an alternative non-Eurocentric approach that foregrounds the interconnections between Western and non-Western agency. I then sketch a picture of what ‘Eurocentrism I’ comprises before providing a critique of ‘Eurocentrism II’ that is advanced by fundamentalist critical postcolonialism, with the latter reproducing Western-centrism (i.e., ‘Eurofetishism’). Finally, having provided a sympathetic critique of the California School of global history on the grounds of its fetishization of non-Western agency I conclude by defining capitalism and providing a sketch-map of the journey ahead.
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