Globalization and Culture 4th Edition

Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/globalization-and-culture-4th-edition-jan-nederveen-pi
eterse/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Globalization in World History 4th Edition Peter N.

Stearns

https://ebookmeta.com/product/globalization-in-world-history-4th-
edition-peter-n-stearns/

Globalization A Very Short Introduction 4th Edition

Manfred B. Steger

https://ebookmeta.com/product/globalization-a-very-short-
introduction-4th-edition-manfred-b-steger/

Home Property Related Issues 1st Edition Kobus Pieterse

https://ebookmeta.com/product/home-property-related-issues-1st-
edition-kobus-pieterse/

Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China

(Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and
Society) David Craig

https://ebookmeta.com/product/wanghong-as-social-media-
entertainment-in-china-palgrave-studies-in-globalization-culture-
and-society-david-craig/
Cartography: Visualization of Geospatial Data 4th
Edition Menno-Jan Kraak

https://ebookmeta.com/product/cartography-visualization-of-
geospatial-data-4th-edition-menno-jan-kraak/

Plant Tissue Culture: Techniques and Experiments 4th

Edition Sunghun Park

https://ebookmeta.com/product/plant-tissue-culture-techniques-
and-experiments-4th-edition-sunghun-park/

Popular Culture Introductory Perspectives 4th Edition

Marcel Danesi

https://ebookmeta.com/product/popular-culture-introductory-
perspectives-4th-edition-marcel-danesi/

Re-globalization: New Frontiers of Political, Economic

and Social Globalization 1st Edition Roland Benedikter
(Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/re-globalization-new-frontiers-of-
political-economic-and-social-globalization-1st-edition-roland-
benedikter-editor/

Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture, 4th Edition

William H. Stiebing Jr.

https://ebookmeta.com/product/ancient-near-eastern-history-and-
culture-4th-edition-william-h-stiebing-jr/
GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE
GLOBAL MÉLANGE

FOURTH EDITION

JAN NEDERVEEN PIETERSE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Executive Editor: Susan McEachern
Editorial Assistant: Katelyn Turner
Senior Marketing Manager: Amy Whitaker

Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and
reproduced with permission, appear on the appropriate page within the text.

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

First Edition 2004. Second Edition 2009. Third Edition 2015.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, author.

Title: Globalization and culture : global mélange / Jan Nederveen Pieterse,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Description: Fourth Edition. | Lanham : ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, [2019] | Series:
Globalization | “First Edition 2004. Second Edition 2009. Third Edition 2015”—T.p.
verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019007534 (print) | LCCN 2019009135 (ebook) | ISBN
9781538115244 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538115220 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781538115237 (paper : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Globalization. | Globalization—Moral and ethical aspects. |
Globalization—Political aspects. | Acculturation. | Popular culture.
Classification: LCC JZ1318 (ebook) | LCC JZ1318 .N43 2019 (print) | DDC 303.48/2
—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007534

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
 CONTENTS

Preface to the Fourth Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 What Is Culture?
Nation and Culture
Culture Sprawl
Disentangling Threads of Culture

2 Globalization: Consensus and Controversies

Consensus
Controversies
Twenty-first-century Globalization

3 Globalization and Human Integration: We Are All

Migrants
Globalization as a Deep Historical Process
Utopian Visions: Human Unity as a Theme
 Uneven Globalization
We Are All Migrants: Migration and Human Integration

4 Globalization and Culture: Three Paradigms

Clash of Civilizations
McDonaldization
Hybridization: Rhizomes of Culture
Futures

5 Globalization as Hybridization
Globalization and Modernity
Structural Hybridization
Global Mélange
Politics of Hybridity
Post-hybridity?
Forward Moves

6 Hybridity, So What? The Anti-hybridity Backlash

Varieties of Hybridity
The Anti-hybridity Backlash
Hybridity and the longue durée
Different Cultural Takes on Hybridity
Patterns of Hybridity
So What?

7 Globalization Is Braided: East-West Osmosis

East-West
Islam-West
Easternization, Westernization, and Back Again

8 Hybrid China
Silk Roads
New Silk Roads
Hybridity with Chinese Characteristics
Globalized, Globalizing

9 Populism, Globalization, and Culture

 Meridians of Populism
Populism and Globalization
Populism and Culture

10 Global Mélange

Bibliography

About the Author

 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH
EDITION

New to this edition are chapter 1 on culture and chapter 9 on

populism. The chapter on culture unbundles culture, teasing out its
various meanings and developments. Since globalization has been
addressed in an opening chapter, culture, too, should be discussed
and problematized. Culture is all pervasive in conversations, in media
and scholarship and runs through all the chapters and arguments in
this book. Lack of clarity about culture is a key problem. I notice it in
teaching too. Simplistic and naïve ideas about culture (often equated
with national cultures) are prevalent. Hence, unpacking culture is
fundamental for a book like this. The book should also address first
principles, the basics and foundations of key problems. Updating in
light of recent developments, chapter 9 on populism combines a
timely and controversial issue with the book’s overarching themes of
globalization and culture. In addition, there are revisions throughout
all chapters. Since the third edition was published, Korean (Seoul,
Ecolivres) and Chinese (Beijing, Chinese Social Sciences Press)
translations of the book have come out.
 Nezar AlSayyad dedicated his volume on Hybrid Urbanism “To the
peoples of hybrid persuasions.” I simply dedicate this book to
everyone, on the assumption that everyone is hybrid.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among friends and colleagues who commented on earlier editions,

I would like to thank in particular Durre Ahmed in Lahore, Mike
Feather-stone, Sergio Costa, Vittorio Cotesta, Jeroen Dewulf, Sang-
Dawn Lee, Bhikhu Parekh, Amit Prasad, Fazal Rizvi, Livio Sansone,
Chan Kwok-bun, and Daniel Vukovich in Hong Kong, Surichai
Wungaeo in Bangkok, and Ulrike Brunotte and René Gabriels in
Maastricht. At Maastricht University I held a chair on globalization
and culture (2008–2011, honorary professor 2011–2014). My cordial
thanks to Susan McEachern, senior editor of Rowman & Littlefield,
for her consistent support for the book and for inviting me to do a
fourth edition.
 INTRODUCTION

A familiar thesis in media and cultural studies is global cultural

homogenization. Another recurrent theme, in political science and
political journalism, is ethnic politics (ethnic cleansing, new
nationalisms) and religious fundamentalism, which suggests a link
between globalization and local identity politics. In effect, on the one
hand, much literature has been polarized in diagnosing either
growing global cultural uniformity (along the lines of
commodification, consumerism) or, on the other hand, growing
cultural differentiation, a kind of global “Lebanonization” or cultural
fragmentation (as in identity politics and the “clash of civilizations”).
While culture figures in many treatments, it often does so as the
annex of another paradigm or problem. A trend in sociology is to
revisit, through globalization, discussions of modernity, and a trend
in political economy is to revisit, through globalization, debates on
capitalism. The career of globalization coincides then with the career
of modernity (1800 plus) or the career of capitalism (1500 plus).
Other approaches focus on relations between late capitalism and
culture. Both modernity and capitalism are quite pertinent, but if
discussing globalization is another way to continue conversations on
modernity, there is a risk of carrying on an Atlantic conversation
extrapolated to planetary scope. Would it make sense to expect
treatments of globalization to be global in spirit?
Globalization and culture is a live-wire theme in constant flux—in
lifestyles, cross-cultural encounters, migration, global-local relations,
music, media, movies, marketing, fashion, cuisine, and so forth. As
dynamics of globalization change—and in the twenty-first century
they are changing markedly, even dramatically—so do not just the
tides, but also the shorelines of culture. A significant change since
this book was first published (2009) has been the rise of Asia, China,
and the global South as drivers of the world economy and global
transformation. This isn’t new, but its pace has quickened and its
scope widened, with changes in international trade, the rise of
multinational and sovereign wealth funds from the global South,
demand for commodities, and growing South-South relations. This
sea change in globalization is showing in changing cultural styles and
flows. For some two hundred years, since 1800, globalization was
shaped and determined by North-South relations with overwhelming
dominance of the North in economic, political, and cultural spheres.
Eurocentrism, Orientalism, cultural imperialism, and a palette of
western images and prejudices about the global South are familiar
testimonies of this hegemony.
Most globalization literature took shape during 1980–2000 when
neoliberalism and American hegemony were overriding trends. So
keynotes of globalization literature have been critiques of
neoliberalism and of Washington consensus policies of structural
adjustment prescribed for developing countries. During the past two
decades (since 2000), these features have weakened. Neoliberalism
and American hegemony have not left the stage, but they are past
their peak and face mounting problems. A new phase of
globalization has begun in which emerging societies play a greater
role (Nederveen Pieterse 2018a).
This book is distinctive in that it takes a historically deep
approach, problematizes culture, and develops perspectives of global
mélange or hybridization. Hybridity, a theme that is both well
established and controversial, is a leitmotiv that is developed in
several chapters. In developing this perspective, I adopt an analysis
of globalization that is historically deep and geographically wide.
Most globalization studies tend to be confined to a narrow time
frame. Most economists view globalization as a matter of the past
decades. For social movements, the key issue is neoliberal
capitalism, so engagement with globalization becomes a polemic
with neoliberalism. I share this concern, but I also find that
globalization refers to a much wider human rendezvous, which is
particularly relevant in relation to culture. As pressing as current
issues are, there is more to globalization than its current form.
The major thrust of this book is that in cultural terms,
globalization tends toward a global mélange. This is essentially a
book about globalization as hybridization. Chapter 4 introduces this
perspective as one of three paradigms of globalization and culture.
Chapter 5 sets forth the hybridization argument in detail, chapter 6
responds to critics of hybridity or the anti-hybridity backlash, chapter
7 develops it in East-West relations, and chapter 8, in relation to
China.
When some of the material of this book was first written (one
article was originally published in 1994) it was pioneering. At the
time, hybridity was mainly argued in postcolonial studies; in most
social science, the other two paradigms—cultural homogenization
and lasting or growing difference—were more prominent. Over the
past decade or so this has changed radically. Hybridity has become a
regular, almost-ordinary fixture in popular and mainstream culture—
widely recognized as “The Trend to Blend.” The Tiger Woods and
Barack Obama aesthetic and sensibility—pardon the shorthand—
have become standard fixtures in media and marketing. In social
science and cultural studies, hybridity is inching up to become a
leading paradigm with a steadily growing literature. Cultural studies
take hybridity as a point of departure; regional and thematic studies
use hybridity perspectives. Criticisms of hybridity arguments, of the
kind discussed in chapter 6 persist, but the momentum of everyday
and experiential hybridity is unstoppable and outflanks criticisms—
certainly in quantity. The point of most discussion now is not to
argue for or against hybridity but to explore finer points and
meanings of hybridity. Since “everything is hybrid,” discussing
examples of hybridity is like drinking from a fire hydrant. It follows
that only those forms of hybridity are worth discussing that
illuminate the variety, depth, and meanings of hybridity or shed light
on controversies, past or present.
This book probably owes much of its appeal and bite to a
combination of traits. I am originally an anthropologist, and
anthropology is a savvy perspective on culture. I have done
extensive work in history, and globalization is a deeply historical
theme. I have worked on visual cultural studies, which is an
appealing sensibility. I have done work on global political economy
and development studies, which lends the treatment an edge
beyond culture for culture’s sake and embeds globalization and
culture alongside political economy.
While most of my work has been in sociology, development
studies, political economy, and intercultural studies, I’m an
anthropologist by training. At the University of Amsterdam at the
time, cultural anthropology was synonymous with “nonwestern
sociology,” and the line between anthropology and sociology was
thin. My family background from a Dutch East Indies colonial family
also shapes my outlook. Ancestors came to Java, Sulawesi, and
Sumatra in the late 1700s as traders or planters or with the Dutch
East Indies Company (VOC). The family remained in the archipelago
for more than two hundred years, mixed with Javanese, Sulawesi,
Bugis, Portuguese, French, Germans, and others, steeped in Indo-
Dutch mestizo culture (known as “tempo doeloe”).
My father’s line goes back to the East Indies from the early
1800s. The family came to the Netherlands after the Second World
War. I was born in Amsterdam after their arrival, the only member of
the family born outside Indonesia for many generations. We are
Eurasians and hybrid in a genealogical and existential sense. This is
not a matter of choice or preference but a just so circumstance. It
happens to be a matter of reflection because my work is social
science. My family history then is steeped in the history of western
expansion, colonialism, and intercontinental migration. I don’t
mention this because I think it is unusual but rather because I think
it is common; one way or another, we are all migrants. I feel affinity
with the world’s migrants and am inclined to view human history in a
global setting, not merely since the past fifty years or so but for
thousands of years. My choice of studying anthropology reflects this
background. My personal history includes several intercontinental
migrations and has been influenced by many travels and stays
across the world. I have kept the character of this book as a tight
and fluent treatment, concise and focused rather than sprawling and
cumbersome, so it serves not merely scholarly purposes as a critical,
probing treatment of a vital and salient domain of globalization, but
educational purposes as well.
A brief guide to the chapters is as follows. Chapter 1 unpacks
culture as a general problem and reviews notions of culture over
time. The second chapter discusses perspectives of social science
and humanities disciplines on globalization and their widely diverse
views on the fundamentals of globalization. Globalization invites
more controversy than consensus. Late twentieth-century
globalization comes in a package together with informatization and
flexibilization in production and labor, and neoliberal globalization
adds deregulation, financialization, and marketization. Twenty-first-
century trends include the rise of emerging economies.
Chapter 3 asks whether globalization involves a trend toward
human integration and develops a historical perspective on
globalization. Visions of human unity are part of our legacy, but have
been confronted with steep and growing inequality. Globalization is a
long-term, uneven, and paradoxical process in which widening social
cooperation and deepening inequality go together. This perspective
is examined from the point of view of migration and diasporas,
whose role has long been underestimated. Chapters 3 and 7 outline
deep historical approaches to globalization.
Chapter 4 takes us directly into the globalization and culture
debate. This chapter argues that there are three fundamentally
different paradigms of cultural difference: differences are lasting;
they give way to growing homogenization; and they mix and
generate new differences in the process. Thus, according to the
“clash of civilizations” view, cultural difference is enduring and
generates rivalry and conflict. In the second view, global
interconnectedness leads to increasing cultural convergence, as in
the global sweep of consumerism—in short, “Mc-Donaldization.” The
third position holds that what have been taking place are processes
of mixing or hybridization across locations and identities, which is
elaborated in two chapters on global mélange.
Chapter 5 sets forth the thesis of globalization as hybridization.
Globalization is often interpreted as a process of homogenization,
but does this make sense considering there are multiple globalization
processes at work? Globalization is also often tied up with modernity,
but this amounts to a theory of westernization, which is
geographically narrow and historically shallow. This chapter argues
for viewing globalization as hybridization—institutional hybridization
or the emergence of new, mixed forms of social cooperation, and
cultural hybridization, or the development of translocal mélange
cultures. Examining politics of hybridity shows the variety of
hybridities, across a wide spectrum from mimicry to counter-
hegemony. Two distinct concepts of culture are in use—territorial
and translocal, inward and outward looking—that produce divergent
views on cultural relations and globalization. “Hybridization” refers to
opening up inward-looking understandings of culture, in the process
ushering in post-hybridity.
Chapter 6 addresses criticisms of hybridity. According to anti-
hybridity arguments, hybridity is inauthentic and “multiculturalism
lite.” Examining these arguments provides an opportunity to deepen
and fine-tune perspectives. What is missing in the anti-hybridity
arguments is historical depth; this treatment deals with the longue
durée and suggests multiple historical layers of hybridity. The
chapter next turns to the politics of boundaries, for the real problem
is not hybridity, which is commonplace throughout history, but
boundaries and the social proclivity to boundary fetishism. Hybridity
is a problem only from the point of view of essentializing boundaries.
What hybridity means varies not only over time but also in different
cultures, which informs different patterns of hybridity. In the end,
the importance of hybridity is that it problematizes boundaries.
 Chapter 7, on the braiding and interlacing of East-West and
Islam-Europe influences, offers historical elaborations of mélange
perspectives. Chapter 8, on hybrid China, focuses on the key issue of
agency and power in hybridization, which is important in emerging
economies generally, with China as a particularly momentous case.
This chapter draws a key distinction between passive (globalized)
and active (globalizing) forms of globalization and hybridity (being
hybridized and hybridizing). This produces perspectives on hybridity
as selective fusion that are markedly different from most literature.
Chapter 9 analyzes contemporary populism (and anti-globalization)
in relation to the key themes of the book: globalization and culture.
Chapter 10 rounds off with reflections on global mélange.
 CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS CULTURE?

Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,

morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired
by man as a member of society.
—Edward Burnett Tylor, anthropologist

Culture is the memory of a people, the collective consciousness, the

continuity of history, the way we think and live.
—Milan Kundera, writer

It is social process that needs to be preserved rather than merely the

items produced, to ensure the continued creation of (a community’s)
valued products.
—Lyndel V. Prott, jurist

Culture is the profound exercise of identity.

—Julio Cortazar, writer
Enter the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Seville, Spain,
and these accounts of culture are on the wall of the entry hall, in
English and Spanish. They are reasonable definitions, though old-
fashioned. The museum opened in 1973 and these ideas reflect
views at the time. The perspectives are from different fields
(anthropology, literature, law), different societies (Britain, Spain,
Yugoslavia), and different periods (from the nineteenth century on).
Edward Tylor’s definition is a classical view of culture in anthropology
(1871). Milan Kundera’s definition speaks of memory and
consciousness (one wonders, does culture also include habits that
are unconscious?). Lyndel Prott refers to preservation, so in this view
culture becomes a matter of cultural heritage. Julio Cortazar, a
novelist well-known for his progressive views on the importance of
Muslim history and culture for Spain, views culture as the “exercise
of identity” and thus views identity not as given, but as something
that involves agency.
Culture is everywhere, at every junction. Culture is the sphinx
one meets at nearly every crossroads of social science and
humanities. The riddle of the sphinx is What is culture? Every
traveler tries a different answer. According to Raymond Williams,
“Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the
English language” (1976: 76). Culture is the central focus of
anthropology, which features numerous approaches to and
definitions of culture.
In order to map culture, consider the following options. One is
etymology: looking at the origins of the word and how it has
changed over time. An indispensable guide is Raymond Williams and
his book Keywords. Williams finds that culture derives from Latin and
French words that indicate a range of activities: “inhabit [hence
colony], cultivate [the tending of natural growth], protect, honor
with worship [hence cult].”1 According to Williams, “Culture as an
independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a
process, is not important before 1C18 [early eighteenth century] and
is not common before mCl9” [mid-nineteenth century] (1976: 78).
Thus, the use of culture as noun is quite recent in European
languages. Raymond Williams’ work concerns the etymology of
culture in European languages. If we consider the origins and
synonyms of “culture” in many other languages (see table 1.1), key
origins are also variants of agriculture and cultivation as well as
education.
 Other guides to how thinking about culture has developed over
time are understandings of culture in anthropology. Studies in
literature and art are sources as well (Williams 1981). A fourth
approach is inductive—how culture is used in everyday,
contemporary language and with what connotations give us a sense
of its sprawling uses and meanings, which is taken up later in this
chapter.
In anthropology, discussions of culture have been extensive and
meandering in various directions over time. Edward Tylor’s definition,
quoted above, has long been the standard. Tylor was the first
anthropologist to hold a chair in anthropology at Oxford University.
Viewing culture as people’s attributes “acquired as a member of
society” is a nineteenth-century theme (which is discussed below).
Culture is often summed up as customs and beliefs that are “learned
and shared”: learned—that is, they are not biological; shared—that
is, they are not acquired individually but as part of a social group.
This overlaps with another classical theme in anthropology: “the
importance of environment over heredity, ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’ or
culture over biology” (Erickson and Murphy 1998: 77). This echoes
in a recent definition of “culture” as “the accumulated way of living
created and acquired by people and transmitted from one generation
to another extrasomatically, other than through genes” (Erickson and
Murphy 1998: 35). Thus, cultural evolution differs from biological
evolution. In Alfred Kroeber’s work this leads to a search for cultural
patterns and trends, a search that continues in the psychological
anthropology of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. A related
perspective is cultural evolutionism. In this framework Leslie White
proposes a “layer-cake model of culture” with technology and
economy at the bottom, social and political organization in the
middle, and ideology at the top.
In cognitive anthropology, culture is viewed as “a classificatory
logic that creates meaning. Different cultures have different meaning
systems” (Erickson and Murphy 1998: 115). Clifford Geertz’s semiotic
theory of culture focuses on meaning and on the social circulation
and ritual performance of symbols. For Geertz, the interpretive tool
of “thick description” is the best technique to approach the text of
culture.
Political economy approaches in anthropology (such as Sidney
Mintz, William Roseberry), no longer view culture as a unified whole
but instead problematize culture as a composite of competing forces.
Culture, then, is the product of power struggles. This approach
matches Gramscian views. According to Gramsci (writing between
1929 and 1935), for social revolution to succeed in western
European societies one needs to control not just the state (as in
Russia and in Lenin’s view) but also civil society; achieving this
requires establishing cultural leadership or hegemony. When his
Prison Notebooks came out in English translation (1953; see Gramsci
1971), it exercised wide influence. It became a keynote of English
cultural studies, such as the Birmingham school, which views culture
as a terrain of struggle. Raymond Williams’ work is close to this
approach.
In postmodern approaches, the emphasis shifts to the
subjectivity of experience and culture becomes contingent and
unstable (Monaghan and Just 2000). In the work of Michel Foucault,
discourse is a major tool of power struggles. In Pierre Bourdieu’s
sociology, culture becomes cultural capital, alongside social and
knowledge capital, and a tool to achieve distinction. Thus, in late
twentieth-century perspectives, culture comes to be viewed as a
terrain of contestation—like ideology, an arena of struggle.

NATION AND CULTURE

Flashback to the nineteenth century. Culture in the sense of Tylor
and early anthropology is that which one learns “as a member of
society” and “society” refers to people and nation. An influential
voice early in the nineteenth century was Johann Gottfried Herder, a
German Romantic thinker (1744–1803) whose views influenced
Goethe and many others. According to Herder, language is the
genius of a people. Herder introduced the use of the plural—cultures
—in contrast to the singular—civilization.
The Westphalian state system, introduced by the Treaty of
Munster of 1648, had ended the medieval principle of overlapping
powers and jurisdictions, yet it remained centered on the monarchy.
The religion of the monarch determined the religion of the nation.
This changed when the French Revolution inaugurated the principle
of popular sovereignty. Hence, the new worship of the nation, of
which culture (viewed as national culture) became a cornerstone. In
the wake of the French Revolution popular sovereignty, rather than
royal sovereignty (“divine right”) emerged as a keynote. Hence
ensued the era of “the springtime of peoples,” the emergence of
nations—along with national anthems, national symbols, national
education policies, national monuments. Culture and language
became major strategic properties. Across Europe a major project
became the alignment of people, nation, language, and culture. Of
course, these were not givens, they were constructed and, if
necessary, invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). It involved the
alignment of regional cultures and customs with national standards.
“It took two hundred years to make Frenchmen” is a familiar
observation, with education and language policies as keynotes. The
“nationalization of the masses” (Mosse 1975) was a long-term
project.
In nineteenth-century settings of the making of nations, this was
a project, not an existing reality. National institutions, borders, and
border documents emerged gradually over time. Regional cultures
needed to be aligned with national culture, such as in France,
Occitania and the Langue d’Oc, the Provence, the Elzas, Bretagne,
and Normandy. In Spain, Catalonia, Basque country, Galicia, and
Andalusia all had traditions different from the center of Castile and
Madrid, and so forth. In every country, centrally positioned elites felt
that culture should serve as a cement of national cohesion. From
Scotland to Russia, boulevards, streets, parks were (and are) named
after poets, writers, composers, musicians, or thinkers that were
thought to represent national identity.
This understanding of culture was not the description of an
actual existing situation but a project, a normative approach that
was often imposed “from above” on people and from the center on
peripheries. The project had clear political overtones. In post-
revolutionary France the central state needed to be strong to
counter challenges from aristocracies and the Church in the
provinces. The establishment of central power and the national
alignment and standardization of culture were tandem projects.
These transformations were replete with struggles—the resistance of
the old order, the Church, and the provinces. Modern times were in
the making but the passing of the ancien regime, the power of
aristocracy and the Church, took well over a hundred years (Mayer
1981).
 Germany and Italy were outliers to the Westphalian settlements
of 1648. In Germany the princedoms remained intact and in Italy the
city-states remained in power. Both were latecomers to national
unification: Italy, with the establishment of the monarchy in 1861,
and Germany, with the lead of Prussia and Bismarck in 1871. For
years Germany was an arena of Kulturkampf between the state and
the Catholic Church and the papacy on matters of jurisdiction and
education (1872–1887). Tensions between religions (Protestantism
in the north, Catholicism in the south, as in the Netherlands) and
between rural and urban worlds played a part in many societies. The
nineteenth century was also an era of emancipation movements of
Catholics, Jews, the working class, women, slaves, serfs, and anti-
colonial movements, all of which spilled over into cultural terrains.
From the early twentieth century on, the Catholic Church embraced
modernization and began to support political parties and trade
unions. In the 1920s political parties and interest groups began to
mobilize not just newspapers, but also radio, for propaganda. Thus
the sphere of “national culture” also became more cluttered.
Nations and their borders are the outcomes of regional politics,
while culture, language, and customs are outcomes of wider
historical flows. Thus, culture as a deep code, a glue of social
cohesion, and a national project was a tool of social and political
alignment that only slowly inched forward as part of the making of
national institutions—and never without contestation.

CULTURE SPRAWL
According to Williams, the term “culture” is complicated “partly
because of its intricate historical development, in several European
languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for
important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in
several distinct and incompatible systems of thought” (1976: 76).
Culture looms large in the humanities—in language, literature,
theater, art, music. In social sciences, culture leads in anthropology,
sociology, cultural studies and communication, film and media
studies. In addition, many social sciences include cultural subfields.
In international relations, cultural approaches deal with how
countries’ cultural leanings affect international diplomacy and affairs.
In political science, culture comes up in ethno-politics and
comparative studies of political culture. In economics, cultural
economy (culture and economics) deals with emotive, experiential,
or libidinal dimensions of economics and overlaps with behavioral
economics (Amin and Thrift 2004). In business studies, culture
influences organization studies with work on power distance and
uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede 2005) and it influences
management studies of diversity in personnel and marketing. The
saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is attributed to the
management guru Peter Drucker. The point is that whatever
business strategy companies set forth, the culture of the
organization is decisive to what actually happens (cf. Coffman and
Sorensen 2013). A further set of meanings is high culture (as in
Ministry of Culture, Culture big C), low culture, popular culture, pop
culture.
The term “culture” works overtime. Spend a day listening to
radio, watching TV, reading a newspaper or magazine and note how
frequently the word “culture” comes up and in what varied
meanings. A sample of contemporary uses of culture is categorized
in table 1.2.
“Society” was never a homogeneous whole. Learning “as a
member of society” depended all along on whether one was rural or
urban, central or peripheral, provincial, rich or poor, belonging to the
mainstream or to minority religions or subcultures, and so forth. If
the nineteenth century was a time of the centering of nations, which
went on during much of the twentieth century, in the second half of
the twentieth century the decentering of nations went forward under
the headings of regionalism, globalization, migration, and
multiculturalism. The nineteenth-century assumptions no longer
apply, yet the classical ideas live on. The idea of culture as the
culture of a society (Japanese culture, French culture, American
culture) lingers on. Civilizational cohesion, another nineteenth-
century theme—as in Kipling, “East and West, never the twain shall
meet”—lingers as well (Asian culture, Islamic culture, western
culture). A familiar theme of the 1990s was the “clash of
civilizations” (discussed in chapter 4). Culture increasingly turns into
a set of Russian dolls.

In development studies and policy, “culture” has been used to

explain countries’ progress or stagnation. Politicians, East and West,
have paraded Asian values, the neo-Confucian ethic, or Islamic
values as slogans or barriers. Scholars have tried to use culture as
an independent variable to explain the difference in development
between, for instance, South Korea and Ghana, as in the book
Culture Matters (Harrison and Huntington 2000). According to
Samuel Huntington, we define culture as “the values, attitudes,
beliefs, orientations and underlying assumptions prevalent among
people in a society” (Huntington 2000: xv). Culture as an
independent variable, a cause, is difficult to handle because which
culture or part of culture does it refer to? This premise simply
glosses over culture as diverse and as a terrain of struggle. In
development studies, culture and development has become a wide
theme in which culture is generally understood as a terrain of
diversity (such as by class, status, ethnicity, religion, age, gender)
and contestation (Nederveen Pieterse 2010).
In 2018, I was approached for an “opportunity to speak on
globalization and its impact on culture” at a conference. The
invitation came from someone who works at a major American food
company (General Mills) and takes part in a working group on
“sensing.” I gradually understood that “sensing” refers to
understanding consumer habits and tastes. I was invited to speak,
via e-mail and Skype, on the following topics:
1. Talk about the interaction of food and social connections and
its impact on people’s food choices (i.e., solo consumption vs.
group consumption).
2. What is the purpose of meals in different cultures (i.e.,
primarily fuel, social connections, etc.)?
3. Is measurement within people’s minds the same around the
world or different? Or how does culture impact how people
rate products?
4. What is the impact of digital penetration around the world and
its impact on interconnectedness?
5. How does the amount of energy/effort that goes into
food/water acquisition impact culture?
6. How might one approach studying situations where people use
products very differently or similarly around the world?
Again these questions treat “culture” as if it is a clear-cut unit
that is homogeneous or at least homogeneous enough. What is the
purpose of meals in “different cultures”—among whom? In urban or
rural settings, in small towns or big cities? Among old or young
people? What about ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on? All
cultures are mixed; many are mixed across the measurement criteria
mentioned. Thus most of these questions cannot be practically or
legitimately answered. Answering them would require thick
description.
The problem in this approach is the use of abstract, low-
resolution categories (culture, different cultures) to find answers to
high-resolution questions. In other words, this tries to use “culture”
as a shortcut. Many categories of culture are low-resolution notions:
they apply but apply mostly at a long-distance view. If we try to
answer detailed high-resolution questions at this frequency, they
simply cannot be generated by means of these categories.
Diversity matters and has come to matter more over time. In
political economy, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies,
development studies, and history, “culture” has unraveled and
cultural frictions and wars have come to the foreground. How do we
explain this change in perspective? First, diversity isn’t new.
Societies have been differentiated and segmented all along. This was
plastered over in nineteenth-century evocations of “national culture”
that relied on coopting or sidelining differences of class, region, and
minorities, while at the same time hosting or nurturing stereotypes
of other nations that contributed to chauvinism and to the twentieth-
century world wars. Emancipation movements were part of
nineteenth-century changes and have grown and widened over time.
Population growth and growing population density, urbanization,
print media, mass media and higher education, growing mobility,
and migration have increased communication and interaction. The
scale of culture has expanded along with the increasing reach of
state policies, regionalism (such as the EU), and globalization as well
as the widening scope of public concerns such as labor conditions,
energy, water, environment, animal rights, and so on. Ideologies
have organized the public sphere and have often exaggerated the
capacity of storylines to deliver meaningful social change. Marketing,
a thoroughly cultural toolkit, has achieved “total penetration” in all
spheres. Through all this, culture has been the terrain and the
medium through which social, political, economic, and commercial
tensions are expressed.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century and societies have
changed much more radically, well beyond the idea and the fiction of
“national culture.” And besides the diversity and sprawl of uses of
culture, another option arises: the use of “culture” as a residual or
factor X variable. If we don’t quite understand what is going on, we
call it “cultural.” If other variables don’t deliver or explain, we toss it
in the culture bin.

DISENTANGLING THREADS OF CULTURE

If we review the discussions, key meridians emerge. One is the
fundamental distinction between nature and nurture, between
biology and culture. Here culture is equivalent to general human
software (Banuri 1990: 77), the capacity for language, using
symbols, classification and generating, and communicating meaning
that enable humans to navigate various environments. Culture in this
generic sense is everywhere. Humans do not and cannot function
without culture. We all wear “cultural glasses” of one kind or other.
We can term this generic culture.
At the same time, this software, like any software, does not
operate “in general”; it operates in specific modes and specific
settings of space and time. Just as the capacity for language exists
in general, language in effect exists in the form of languages, in
different forms and for different purposes—vernaculars, dialects,
national languages, contact languages, trade languages, lingua
franca, technical and professional languages, languages of
mathematics, astronomy, law, accounting, engineering,
programming, and so on. Thus, generic human software always
exists and functions as specific software in specific settings, which
we can term culture 1. Culture 1 is embedded in and enabled by
generic culture. These understandings of culture are compatible:
generic culture finds expression in culture 1; cultures are the
vehicles of culture.
 Culture in the sense of a culture, the culture of a society or social
group, was elaborated on in twentieth-century anthropology, as in
cultural relativism and the notion of culture as a whole, a Gestalt, a
configuration. The understanding of culture 1 as national culture
(Japanese culture, French culture, German culture) is a convention
that goes way back and has been influenced by nineteenth-century
projects of aligning people and culture—which implied sidelining,
marginalizing, and suppressing differences in the name of national
ethos, the nature and understanding of which also changed over
time.
Another feature of conventional views of culture is the
assumption that culture stems from learning processes that are, in
the main, territorial and localized in one’s home town, home country,
home region. This overlooks another dimension of culture—that
which one learns as pilgrim, sojourner, seafarer, migrant or traveler:
translocal culture such as Arabic numerals (that are understood
transnationally, yet pronounced differently in each language);
transnational conventions such as time zones; learning in
multinational and transnational corporations in the setting of global
value chains and global supply chains, emoticons, and Internet
codes. Learning is not necessarily localized in that we also learn from
travel, pilgrimage, migration, media, movies, Internet, transnational
sources, and so forth. In past centuries, cultural evolution was often
thought to take place through diffusion from civilizational centers.
Prominent themes in nineteenth-century archeology were
Egyptianization, Hellenization, and Romanization. Thus, culture as
translocal learning has all along been part of theories of evolution
and diffusion. We can term this culture 2.
Culture 2, or translocal culture, is not without place, but where
place comes in it involves an outward-looking sense of place,
whereas culture 1 is based on or is understood as being based on an
inward-looking sense of place. Culture 2 involves what the
geographer Doreen Massey called “a global sense of place”: “the
specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the
focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations”
(1993: 240).
 Understanding culture as human software implies, first, that
culture is a learning process; second, that it is ongoing and open-
ended; third, that it involves agency; and fourth, that it includes
translocal and supra-territorial learning. Learning involves agency in
that we can choose to cultivate, for instance, humanities or science
knowledge, a taste for beer or wine, rice or bread. In sum, we can
distinguish layers of culture—generic culture (such as the capacity
for language), territorial culture such as local and national cultures,
and translocal, transnational culture. A brief overview is in table 1.3.2
In addition, culture is also a medium through which terrains find
expression. These perspectives on culture are developed further in
the chapters that follow. Specifically, culture is taken up in relation to
hybridity in chapters 4, 5, and 6 and in relation to history in chapters
7 and 8. Culture as a terrain of struggle and jostling for hegemony is
taken up in chapter 9 on populism.

NOTES
1. Text in [brackets] are my insertions. “The fw is cultura, L(atin), from rw
[root word] colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect,
honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still
with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus ‘inhabit’ developed
through colonus, L to colony. ‘Honor with worship’ developed through cultus, L to
cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in
Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and
worship (cf. in English culture as ‘worship’ in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of
cultura were couture, oF, which has since developed its own specialized meaning,
and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning
was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth.” (Williams 1976: 77)
 2. I also discuss layers of culture in Nederveen Pieterse 2007, Conclusion. For
further meanings of culture see, for example, Williams 1981.
 CHAPTER 2
GLOBALIZATION
CONSENSUS AND CONTROVERSIES

“Globalization” is both an historical fact and a political football.

—Stephen Toulmin (1999)

Globalization is like a prism in which major disputes over the

collective human condition are now refracted: questions of
capitalism, inequality, power, development, ecology, culture, gender,
identity, population, all come back in a landscape where
“globalization did it.” Like a flag word, globalization sparks conflict.
Globalization crosses boundaries of government and business, media
and social movements, general and academic interest. As a political
challenge, it crosses the ideological spectrum and engages social
movements and politics at all levels. It involves a paradigm shift
from the era of the nation state and international politics to politics
of planetary scope.
This chapter gives an overview of globalization debates to situate
questions of globalization and culture in a wider context and to show
that major issues come up in other debates as well. Now some
decades into the sprawling globalization debate, the literature is
advanced enough to begin to identify areas of consensus and
controversy. This bird’s-eye overview focuses on the major debates;
within each terrain there are numerous subsidiary debates, but that
kind of treatment would require a book in itself.
Among analysts and policy makers, North and South, there is an
emerging consensus on several features of globalization:
globalization is being shaped by technological changes, involves the
reconfiguration of states, goes together with regionalization, and is
uneven. Another common understanding, that globalization means
time-space compression, may be vague enough not to cause much
stir. It means that globalization involves more intensive interaction
across wider space and in shorter time than before, in other words,
the experience of a shrinking world; yet this may also be too simple
and flat an account. There is ample controversy about what these
features mean, so it’s not easy to draw a line between the consensus
and controversies on globalization. Globalization invites more
controversy than consensus, and the areas of consensus are narrow
by comparison to the controversies. Controversies in relation to
globalization are, in brief: Is globalization a recent or a long-term
phenomenon? What is the definition of globalization? The use and
abuse of the global. Is globalization neoliberal capitalism? And is
globalization manageable? Older controversies, going back to the
1990s, are whether globalization is multidimensional or essentially
economic, and whether globalization actually exists or is globaloney.
These have now faded, but I will review the arguments.
A précis of areas of agreement and dispute is in table 2.1.
Questions of globalization and culture are taken up in other
chapters. The treatment follows this agenda with vignettes under
each of these headings.

CONSENSUS
GLOBALIZATION IS BEING SHAPED BY TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
A thread that runs through all globalization episodes and discourses
is increasing connectivity. The boom in information and
communications technologies (ICT) forms part of the infrastructure
of globalization in finance, capital mobility and export-oriented
business activity, transnational communication, migration, travel, and
civil society interactions.

Information and microelectronics-based computer and

telecommunications technologies since the early 1980s provide the
technical means for financial globalization, such as twenty-four-hour
electronic trading. They create the conditions for global product
information and thus for the globalization of demand. Global
marketing and the attempt to establish global brand names has
made for an increase in global advertising expenditures from $39
billion in 1950 to $256 billion in 1990, growing three times faster
than trade. By facilitating communications within and between firms,
information technologies further enable the globalization of supply.
For firms, the shortening life cycle of products leads to pressure to
expand market shares to amortize growing research and
development (R&D) costs. This prompts the globalization of
competition and corporate tie-ups, mergers, and acquisitions to
handle the cost and risks of R&D and global marketing.
Together the globalization of finance, demand, supply, and
competition forms a series of interlocking flows of global circulation
of information, which is wired in turn to the flexibilization of
production. At issue are not simply the growth of international trade
and the role of transnational corporations, but a new system of
industrial organization, which is variously termed flexible
specialization, flexible accumulation, lean manufacturing, just-in-time
capitalism, or Toyotism. The shift from standardized mass production
to flexible production systems, from Fordism to post-Fordism (D.
Harvey 1989), involves greater flexibility in the organization of
production, labor and enterprises, location, and marketing. These
changes ramify throughout the international division of labor.
Neoliberal trends since the 1980s result in deregulation of economies
and informalization. Further developments include the new economy,
e-commerce, dot-com, and mobile technologies.
At times this is interpreted in the sense that globalization is
driven by technological change. But technology itself is socially
embedded and shaped; technological determinism is not
appropriate. What matters is not technology per se but the way it is
harnessed by economic, political, and social forces. Technological
changes and their ramifications contribute to the impression that
globalization is “inevitable,” “unstoppable.” A reality underlying this is
that globalization is a macroeconomic phenomenon that is also
driven by micro-economic forces, that is, on the level of firms. The
opportunities that new technologies provide apply not merely to
transnational corporations but also to small and medium-size firms.
Globalization is not merely driven by major corporations,
international institutions, and governments but also by social forces,
including consumers and social movements.
Globalization involves major changes in the economic landscape
that are all intertwined: accelerated globalization comes in a package
together with informatization, flexibilization, and deregulation. This
package effect contributes to the dramatic character of the changes
associated with globalization. In effect, globalization serves as the
shorthand description of these changes. Since “globalization” per se
refers to a spatial process, that is, world-scale effects (precisely of
what is not determined), the term itself is inadequate but serves as
a stand-in for or flag word signaling wider changes.

GLOBALIZATION INVOLVES THE RECONFIGURATION OF STATES

Earlier analyses claimed that globalization leads to the retreat and
erosion of states (Strange 1996). According to a radical view,
globalization means the onset of a borderless world (Ohmae 1992),
the end of the nation state and the formation of region states
(Ohmae 1995). Stephen Kobrin notes, “A critical issue raised by
globalization is the lack of meaning of geographically rooted
jurisdictions when markets are constructed in electronic space”
(1998: 362). Thus, a general account of the political implications of
globalization is the erosion of boundaries and the growth of
crossborder and supraterritorial relations (Scholte 2000). These
arguments now come with more nuanced views about the role of
states.
According to sociological perspectives on globalization, the form
of globalization from the nineteenth century onward was the
growing predominance of nation states (Roland Robertson 1992).
Between 1840 and 1960, nation states were the leading format of
political organization worldwide (Harris 1990). From the 1960s,
regionalization has come into the picture as a significant dynamic;
the European Union is the leading example. Over time, state
authority has been leaking upward—in international and
supranational forms of pooling of sovereignty, a process that is also
referred to as the internationalization of states—and leaking
downward. If the latter happens in a controlled fashion, it is referred
to as decentralization; if it happens in an uncontrolled fashion, it is
termed ethnic or regional conflict, resulting in fragmentation and
possibly state disintegration and collapse. The internationalization of
the state refers to the blurring of the boundaries between
international and domestic politics (producing “intermestic” politics).
What is the scope for state authority in contemporary
globalization? States are not merely on the receiving end of
globalization but are strategic actors (Boyer and Drache 1996, Mann
1997, Weiss 1998). States may now be leaner but also more active,
and in some areas assume greater responsibility (Griffin and Khan
1992, Adams et al. 1999). This unpacks differently for different kinds
of states—large or small, central or peripheral, advanced or
developing. The question is not so much whether states are more or
less important, but rather what kind of state; hence the importance
of public sector reform. The fiscal crises of states in the wake of
recessions and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s have led to cutbacks
in government spending. The accompanying growth of market forces
has led governments from local to national levels to attract foreign
investment, and since they tend to follow similar strategies of fiscal
concessions, infrastructure development, and “place marketing,”
they have been characterized as “hostile brothers.” In the changing
architecture of the state (Cerny 1990), the form of states has
changed as they are increasingly involved in international
arrangements; the basis of states has changed as they face fiscal
crises; and the function of states has changed as they become
competitor states. Connectivity and ICT infrastructure as a strategic
area inspires the idea that those cities, countries, or regions that
have been able to position themselves most successfully in relation
to globalization are those that have stressed the development of
information and communication infrastructure, such as Singapore,
Malaysia, parts of India (Bangalore, Hyderabad), and the Dominican
Republic. This is termed the “race to the intelligent state” (Connors
1997).
Does globalization foster democratization through transnational
demonstration effects, growing human rights awareness, and civic
activism across borders, or do the economic effects of globalization,
by fostering social inequality, outweigh these democratic trends?
Since the package deal of globalization coincides with growing social
and political inequality and with trends toward democratization, the
outcome is uneven and volatile.
Probably what meager consensus exists could be formulated in
the twin processes of the pooling of sovereignty at different levels
(regional, international, supranational) in combination with the shift
from government to multilevel governance, from local and municipal,
national and regional, to supranational levels. Table 2.2 is a précis of
political processes associated with contemporary globalization.

GLOBALIZATION GOES TOGETHER WITH REGIONALIZATION

If between 1840 and 1960 the main political form of globalization
was the nation state, presently the leading political form of
globalization is regionalization. This takes forms ranging from
regional customs unions (such as AFTA), common market zones
(such as NAFTA, ASEAN, APEC, Mercosur, SARC, and many others),
and security alliances (NATO, SEATO, SCO) to the deep
institutionalization of the European Union (Oman 1994). Beyond this
factual account, the consensus unravels.
According to one view, what is happening is not globalization but
regionalization, or the formation of regional free trade or investment
zones (Ruigrok and van Tulder 1995), regional trade blocs along with
regional neomercantilism, or the “regionalization of competition”
(Morrison et al. 1991). As a general scenario, this does not seem
likely because trade and capital flows and technological and market
interdependence on the whole run across regional zones, which is
only logical if a large share of world trade occurs within and between
transnational corporations.
Can regional integration strengthen the bargaining position of
developing countries in relation to transnational corporations and
international institutions, or does it strengthen the orientation
toward the market and toward liberalization and deregulation? A
more precise question is under what political and international
conditions is regional integration enabling for development? Regional
formations may be viewed as anchors around which peripheries align
—with China and Japan as centers in East and Southeast Asia; North
America with Latin America and the Caribbean; and the EU and
eastern Europe, the southern Mediterranean, and Africa (Stallings
1995). This is a political-spatial perspective on regional organization;
a temporal perspective is to view regionalism as a stepping-stone
toward growing multilateralism and eventually global governance
(e.g., Group of Lisbon 1995).

GLOBALIZATION IS UNEVEN
Like predecessor notions such as internationalization and
interdependence, globalization does not refer to a global level
playing field or to symmetric or equal international relations.
Twentieth-century globalization has been largely concentrated in the
Triad of North America, Europe, and East Asia. Income and wealth
are extremely unequal in distribution: in the period 1980–1991, 14
percent of the world’s population accounted for 80 percent of
investment flows, and in 1992, for 70 percent of the world’s trade
(Hirst and Thompson 1996: 15). The ratio of income of the top 20
percent of the population to the income of the bottom 20 percent
has jumped from 30:1 in 1960 to 78:1 in 1994. The personal assets
of 385 billionaires in the world now exceed the annual income of
countries representing 45 percent of the world population (UNDP
1999). This circumstance is captured under headings such as
“truncated” or “selective globalization.” The idea of globalization as
“Triadization,” confined to the “interlinked economies” of Europe,
North America, and Japan, is being overtaken by the rise of China,
India, and East Asian economies. The closing section of this chapter
on twenty-first-century globalization develops this further.
This prompts the idea that the “Third World” is excluded from
globalization, but this overlooks the numerous ways the majority
world is being affected by global dynamics. It would be too simple to
describe these relations as exclusion; they are more accurately
described as relations of asymmetric inclusion or hierarchical
integration (see chapter 3).
While during the past decades the North-South development gap
has widened in several respects, the development gap between
advanced economies and new industrial countries has narrowed, but
the gap between these and the least developed countries has been
widening. Since the late 1970s, inequalities within and between
societies have been growing steeply (Sutcliffe 2001, Nederveen
Pieterse 2004). Paraphrasing the earlier terminology of uneven
development, the present situation may be referred to as combined
and uneven globalization.

CONTROVERSIES
Controversies over globalization range from fundamentals—what is
globalization and how important is it?—to downstream questions
about the politics and direction of globalization. Disputes over
fundamentals are intertwined with everyday globalization issues. I
first briefly review two older controversies.

IS GLOBALIZATION MULTIDIMENSIONAL?
A widespread but also rather vague understanding is that
globalization refers to complex, multidimensional processes.
Attempts are made to distinguish and combine different dimensions
of and approaches to globalization (Roland Robertson 1992), but this
often happens in too add-on a fashion (as in M. Waters 1995) to
meaningfully change the understanding of globalization. Economic,
political, cultural, and social dynamics are not simply different facets
of a single globalization; rather, they are each prisms through which
globalization takes shape and is experienced and mapped differently,
yet they all mingle and interpenetrate as well. Thus, as each of the
social sciences holds a different perspective on globalization, even a
multidisciplinary approach to globalization still resembles eating soup
with a fork.
Economic globalization is at times referred to as “corporate
globalism,” while globalization in the sphere of values is termed
“global humanism” (Gurtov 1994). Globalization in politics is viewed
as an extension of multilateralism, but also as “postinternational
politics,” or the entry of nonstate actors into international politics
(Rosenau 1990). Globalization “from above” differs from
globalization “from below” (Falk 1994). While none of these terms is
particularly precise, what matters is the general awareness of
globalization as a multidimensional process. An implication is that
actual representations of globalization would match a post-cubist
painting rather than the international trade statistics of economists
or gung-ho accounts in business magazines.
Another controversy runs between quantitative and qualitative
perspectives on globalization. Many economists view globalization
essentially as an economic phenomenon that can be proven or
disproved by statistical measures. Until recently the dominant
thinking in economics has been to reduce globalization to trade,
investment, and financial statistics, which constitute “objective” or
“real” globalization, and all the rest is myth or fantasy (e.g., Sachs
1998). This approach can serve to circumscribe globalization or to
deny its occurrence or significance. I don’t dispute the validity of this
empirical approach, but I consider it a partial account, if only
considering dimensions of globalization such as global consciousness
and global projects. More complex assessments of globalization
prevail in global political economy (e.g., Palan 2000, Woods 2000).
Globalization by its nature requires a multi-perspective and holistic
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
permanently only about “twenty years” since. The latter statement is
sufficiently correct, as 1623 was the year when a permanent colony
was established by the Dutch. The former statement carries us back
to the date of the “Greenland Company.”
So far as present evidence goes, it is perhaps unnecessary to say
anything more in vindication of the statement of the Dutch
Committee of 1644, claiming that representatives of the Greenland
Company wintered here in 1598. Nevertheless, as a matter of
interest, and to show how well the Hudson was known at this time by
both Dutch and English, we may quote from the English translation
of the Dutch narrative of Linschoten, which clearly describes the
coast. He says: “There is a countrey under 44 degrees and a halfe,
called Baccalaos.” This country of Baccalaos reached nine hundred
miles, that is, from the Cape de Baccalaos [Cape Race] to Florida.
The distances are given approximately, of course, by Linschoten,
being on the decimal system, but they distinctly mark the principal
divisions of the coast and fix the fact beyond question that the
Hudson was perfectly well known.
On the general subject it may be said, that the record of the
“Greenland Company” is not satisfactory, yet the word “Greenland”
at that time had a very general use, and all that the Committee of
Accounts may have meant by the phrase was, that a company or
association engaged in the fur and fish trade, which for centuries,
even, had been prosecuted at the north, had sent some ships to this
region in 1598. There is certainly nothing unreasonable in this
supposition, the coast being so well known. Various adventurers of
whom we know nothing doubtless came and went unobserved, being
in no haste to publish the source from which they derived such a
profitable trade in peltries. The Committee of Accounts either falsified
deliberately or followed some old tradition. Why may not a tradition
be true?
We turn next to examine a map recently brought to notice and
which is of unique value. Formerly the map usually pointed out as
the oldest seventeenth century map of this region was the Dutch
“Figurative” Map, which was found by Mr. Brodhead in the Dutch
archives. We have now, however, an earlier map of 1610, which was
prepared from English data for James I., a copy finding its way to
Philip III., by Velasco, March 22, 1611. Sandy Hook, though without
name, is delineated about as it appears in later maps, while Long
Island is shown as a part of the main, with no indication of the
Sound, though Cape Cod and the neighboring islands are well
delineated, and Verrazano’s Island of “Luisa” appears as “Cla[u]dia,”
the mother of Francis I. Clearly at this time neither Block nor any
other Dutch navigator had passed through Hell Gate into Long Island
Sound.
There is nothing whatever in this map relating to explorations by
any nation later than 1607. Jamestown appears on the Virginia
portion, and Sagadehoc in Maine. It was simply a copy of a map
made soon after the voyage to New England and Virginia in 1607.
The compiler had not heard of Hudson’s voyage, as that navigator
did not reach England until November 7, 1609. If he had received
any information from Hudson, he would have shown the river
terminating in a shallow, innavigable brook, whereas the river is
indicated, in accordance with Captain John Smith’s idea, as a strait,
leading to a large body of water. Further, the map contradicts
Hudson, who represents the Hoboken side of the river as
“Manhatta,” while this map puts the name on both sides, “Manahata,”
on the west and “Manahatin” on the east. It is not unlikely that
Hudson had with him a copy of the map, for his guidance on the
voyage in the Half-Moon.
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

Though this map bears a date subsequent to Hudson’s voyage,

the contents prove that the original could not have been drawn later
than 1608. It was evidently one of the various maps of which Smith
spoke and which he underrated. Its substance indicates that it was
drawn from a source independent of the Dutch and French, showing
that the English knew of the Bay of New York and its relation to
Sandy Hook, and that they supposed the great river delineated was
a broad stream which, in someway, communicated with the Pacific.
On the original map of which Velasco’s example was a copy, the land
west of the river was colored blue, and the legend says that it is
described by information drawn from the Indians. What we need now
is the original map, which may still exist in some obscure collection
in England or Holland, and quite as likely in the archives of Spain,
sent thither by jealous Spanish spies, who lingered, like Velasco, at
the court of James I., to learn what they could with respect to English
enterprise in America. At all events we have in this English map the
first seventeenth century delineation of this region, and one showing
that the English knew the form and general character of the country
which the crown conveyed to the colonists of North and South
Virginia in 1606. So far as now known, it was clearly the English who
first became acquainted with the name that the Aborigines applied to
the island upon which our great metropolitan city stands. Whether or
not this was an aboriginal word or a corruption of a Castilian term
future investigators may decide. The unexpected finding of this old
English map in the Spanish archives revives our hopes relating to
the discovery of new sources of information concerning early
voyages to this coast. English enterprise and adventure on the
Virginia coast, extending from Raleigh’s expedition, 1584, to
Gosnold’s fatal quest, 1603, must have brought Englishmen into the
Bay of New York, unless miracle was balanced against curiosity and
chance. There are archives yet to be opened that may give the origin
of the delineations of this region found in the remarkable map from
Samancas, and we need to be cautious in making claims even for
the priority of the Dutch in 1598.
The period under consideration was a period of reconnoissance,
one that offered some romantic incident, but more of disappointment
and mortification. Here was a site for one of the noblest cities in the
world, but the voyager was blind. The river offered no route to the
gorgeous Indies, and Verrazano had little inclination to test its swift
tide. Gomez, in the short January days of 1525, had no desire to
ascend, for when his ship met the drift ice tossing on the cold,
swirling stream, he thought of Anthony in his desolate retreat on the
Red Sea, put the river under his charge, and sailed away in search
of happier shores. Sailors of other nationalities, doubtless, ascended
the river; but, finding it simply a river, they took what peltries they
could get, and, like Gomez, turned the whole region over to the care
of the solitary Saint, who for nearly a century stood connected with
its neglect. Much remained to be done before steps could be taken
with regard to colonization. The initial work, however, was
inaugurated by the sturdy Englishman, Henry Hudson, and the proud
Spanish caravel disappears, while the curtain rises upon the
memorable voyage of the quaint Dutch fly-boat, the Half-Moon.

FOOTNOTES
[2] Letter addressed to the writer in 1890.
[3] The vignette on proceeding page is a faithful representation
of the Florentine portrait.
[4] The usual course was to sail southward and reach Florida
coasting north, or to sail to Newfoundland and coast southward. It
required especial boldness to take the direct course, and, in 1562,
when Ribault followed this course, he was proud of the
achievement. The fact that Verrazano sailed the direct course at
that time proves the authenticity of his voyage, as a forger would
not have invented the story.
[5] On the Map of Verrazano, to which attention will be directed,
this triangular island is delineated. The voyager approaching the
island from the west comes to a point of the triangle where he can
look away in the easterly direction, and at a glance take in two
sides; while on reaching the eastern limit the third side plainly
appears. In sailing past Block Island, as Verrazano did, from west
to east, the navigator could not fail to discover its triangular
shape. Indeed it is so marked that one is struck by the fact.
[6] The story of this map is curious. The American contents
were first given to the public by the writer in the “Magazine of
American History,” and afterward reprinted in “Verrazano the
Explorer.”
[7] In “Cabo de Arenas,” the coast names taken from a large
collection of maps are arranged in parallel columns, illustrating
three main divisions of the coast, showing that Cabo de Baxos
was the name applied to Cape Cod, and Cabo de Arenas to
Sandy Hook. Capo Cod in the early times was not a sandy cape,
but a beautiful and well-wooded cape. Sandy Hook ever since it
was known has borne its present character.
[8] Those who have fancied that Cape Arenas was Cape Cod,
and that the bay behind it was Massachusetts Bay, have the
same difficulty as regards dimensions. Students of American
cartography understand perfectly well that latitudes in the old
maps were often more than two degrees out of the way, the
instruments of that period being so defective.
[9] To convince himself of this fact the reader may compare the
reconstructed Map of Chaves with the coast surveys, when the
main difference will be found to consist in the exaggeration of
Sandy Hook. The “Narrative and Critical History of America,”
dealing with this point, suppresses all allusion to the fact that Kohl
recognizes the cape on the Map of Chaves with the names
“Santiago” and “Arenas” as Sandy Hook, which follows, as the
river inside of the Hook he identifies with the Hudson. Dr. Kohl,
though generally very acute, failed to see that Oviedo’s
description of the Map of Chaves was, substantially, the
description of Ribeiro, and that in identifying, as he chanced to,
the “Arenas” of Ribeiro with Cape Cod, he stultified his own
reasoning. Nor did he consider this, that if the great Cape
“Arenas” was intended for Cape Cod, there is no representation
whatever of Sandy Hook and the Hudson in the old cartography
and that all the voyages to this region geographically went for
nothing. Credat Judaeus Appellus! This exaggeration of Sandy
Hook is conceded, yet the inlets along the New Jersey shore may
have been viewed as connected by Gomez; and indeed, so great
have been the changes along the coast that no one can well deny
that they were connected in 1525, and formed a long bay running
down behind Sandy Hook. It will prove more historic to follow the
writer, who says, “that the coast of New York and the neighboring
district were known to Europeans almost a century before Hudson
ascended the ‘Great River of the North,’ and that this knowledge
is proved by various maps made in the course of the sixteenth
century. Nearly all of them place the mouth of a river between the
fortieth and forty-first degrees of latitude, or what should be this
latitude, but which imperfect instruments have placed farther
north.”—Nar. and Crit. His. of Amer., 4: 432.
 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE.
Seventy-odd years ago the Rev. Sydney Smith wrote in the
Edinburg Review as follows: “Literature, the Americans have none—
no native literature, we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin,
indeed, and may afford to live for half a century on his fame. There
is, or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal
name was Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia, by
Jefferson, an epic by Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by
Mr. Irving. But why should the Americans write books, when a six
weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science
and genius in bales and hogsheads?”
Times have changed since Mr. Smith wrote this somewhat
sarcastic summary of our native literature; for, while it is true that we
still import British “sense, science, and genius in bales and
hogsheads,” it is done now on principles of reciprocity, and we return
quite as good and perhaps nearly as much as we receive.
Americans do not instance Mr. Dwight, whose “baptismal name
was Timothy,” or Mr. Barlow, the author of the epic so sneeringly
referred to, as the chiefs of American poesy; yet we need not blush
for either of them; for the first was a distinguished scholar the
President of Yale College, and the author of the hymn so dear to
many pious hearts:

“I love thy kingdom, Lord!

The house of Thine abode;
The church our blest Redeemer saved
With His own precious blood.”

The other, Mr. Barlow, was a well-known man of letters and

politician in his day, author of the “Columbiad,” the epic referred to by
Mr. Smith, and minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the
coast of France at a critical period of our history. As to the
“Columbiad,” it has been pronounced by competent critics to be
equal in merit to Addison’s “Campaign,” and surely it is no disgrace
to have equalled Addison.
It was the fashion in those days for Englishmen to sneer at
Americans; and so we find in another review, written by the same
gentleman in 1820, this language: “During the thirty or forty years of
their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the
sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesmanlike
studies of politics or political economy.... In the four quarters of the
globe who reads an American book? or looks at an American picture
or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or
surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or
what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have
been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they
done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats
from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps
in American blankets?” In the very same year that this array of rather
insolent queries was propounded by Sydney Smith, the genial
Washington Irving, in the advertisement to the first English edition of
his Sketch Book, remarks: “The author is aware of the austerity with
which the writings of his countrymen have been treated by British
critics.” We have not a particle of doubt as to the “austerity” in
question. The salvos of Old Ironsides and the roar of Jackson’s guns
at New Orleans, were unpleasant facts not yet forgotten by
Englishmen.
But Sydney Smith was not quite fair towards our countrymen. It
was “during the thirty or forty years of their independence” referred to
that Fulton’s steamboat revolutionized navigation, that Rittenhouse
developed a mathematical skill second only to that of Newton; that
West delighted even royalty itself with the creations of his pencil;
while in “the statesmanlike studies of politics or political economy,” it
was during this very period that Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and
their coadjutors did more to develop the true principles of
government and politics than had ever been done before in the
history of the world. True, we had not much to boast of, but it would
have been only just to give us credit for what we were worth.
Moreover, in a small way, but to the extent it was possible under the
circumstances, the English colonists in America had cultivated letters
from the beginning. In 1685, Cotton Mather wrote his Memorable
Providences; in 1732, Franklin began to issue his Poor Richard’s
Almanac; in 1749, Jonathan Edwards published his Life of David
Brainerd, and in 1754, his famous treatise on The Freedom of the
Will and Moral Agency. Besides these, which perhaps stand out
most conspicuously, there were many minor works of more or less
excellence, over most of which the iniquity of oblivion, to use the fine
phrase of Sir Thomas Browne, hath scattered her poppy.
The moment that the Edinburg Review was thus dealing our
fathers these heavy blows seemed to be the real starting point in our
career of literary greatness. William Cullen Bryant, Washington
Irving, James K. Paulding, Richard H. Dana, James Fenimore
Cooper, Mrs. Sigourney and a host of others were giving direction to
that stream of literature that has since flowed broad and free over
our land, imparting life and vigor and beauty to our society and
institutions. It is, however, anterior to the year 1820, the thirty or forty
years of our national independence, during which Mr. Smith says we
have done “absolutely nothing” in literature, science or art, to which
we must more particularly advert. The literary product of those years
was scanty enough, it is true. The student of this period will not find
much, and not all of that of the first order, to reward his labor—not
much, at least, as compared with other nations at the same time. But
may there not have been some sufficient reason for this, outside of
any downright intellectual deficiencies on the part of our fathers? Let
us for a moment consider the condition of things at that time in this
country.
In the first place, at the time referred to, the citizens of the United
States were in a daily struggle with the material difficulties of their
situation. The country was new. The region west and north of the
Ohio and Mississippi was yet an almost unbroken wilderness, while
the country east and south of those rivers was but sparsely
populated. At the same time the tide of immigration was sweeping
into the country, and with it all the rush and turmoil incident to life in a
new country was going on. Forests were to be cut down; farms were
to be cleared up; houses were to be built; roads were to be made;
bridges were to be thrown across the rivers; while a livelihood was to
be compelled from the forests, the streams, and the fields. The
conditions of a new country are not favorable to the cultivation of the
arts, of sciences, or of literature. Why do not Englishmen twit the
people of Australia because during the past forty or fifty years in
which they have prospered so greatly in material things, they have
not produced a Macaulay, a Tennyson, a Gladstone, a Tyndall, or a
Huxley? It would be just as fair to do it.
Not only was there this hand to hand contest with their physical
environment, but the political conditions were also unfavorable to
any general dalliance with the Muses. Only in times of tranquility and
ease is it possible.

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair.”

The country at the period referred to, had just emerged from a
long and exhausting war. Society was almost broken up; the arts of
peace were well nigh forgotten; the finances were in almost hopeless
confusion; the form of government was unsettled, and scarcely yet
determined upon. The first thing to do was to evolve some system
and some security out of this chaos. Politics alone occupied the
moments of leisure. When, finally, authority had crystallized into
definite government the people were not allowed to be at rest.
Murderous wars with the Indians on the frontiers; the machinations
of French emissaries; British oppression of American commerce,
and at length another long and bloody war with England, harassed
the minds of the people, and prevented them from giving themselves
up more generally to the kindly and refining influences of literature
and art. When we consider all the circumstances in the case, there
seems a degree of severity in Sydney Smith’s sneers and taunts.
But though circumstances were thus unfavorable to the cultivation
of letters, yet something was done in this direction nevertheless.
Smith refers flippantly enough to Dwight, Jefferson, Barlow and
Irving. But besides these there were others, not brilliant luminaries
perhaps, yet stars shining in the darkness according to their orders
and degrees. We do not design here to enter upon any discussion of
their respective merits, but we may mention as a writer of that period
no less a character than George Washington, whose greatness in
other spheres of life has entirely eclipsed any fame of which he may
be worthy as an author, yet whose Farewell Address alone would
entitle him to a place among the most accurate writers of English.
Among others we may name John Adams, whose pen was scarcely
less eloquent than his tongue; Francis Hopkinson, author of The
Battle of the Kegs and many other pieces, of which it has been said,
that “while they are fully equal to any of Swift’s writings for wit, they
have nothing at all in them of Swift’s vulgarity;” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a
distinguished writer on medical and social topics; John Trumbull, the
author of McFingal and The Progress of Dullness; James Madison,
afterward President of the United States, one of the ablest writers in
The Federalist; Philip Freneau, a poet of the Revolution and the
period immediately following; Alexander Hamilton, a contributor to
The Federalist, and one of the clearest of political writers; Joseph
Dennie, the author of The Lay Preacher, and editor of The Portfolio;
Joseph Hopkinson, author of Hail, Columbia; Charles Brockden
Brown, author of Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and other works, and who
was perhaps the first American who wholly devoted his life to literary
pursuits; William Wirt, author of the British Spy, the Life of Patrick
Henry, and other works; and Lyman Beecher, the author of a work on
Political Atheism, anti several volumes of sermons and public
addresses. This list might easily be extended, but its length as it now
stands, as well as the merits of the writers adduced, is sufficient to
contradict effectually the statement that America had “no native
literature,” and that during the thirty or forty years immediately
subsequent to the Revolution she had done “absolutely nothing” for
polite letters. Much of this early literature still remains, and is read;
many of these authors are still familiar to this generation, and it is
generally admitted that the writer whose fame survives a century is
assured of a literary immortality. Sydney Smith was an acute man, a
learned man, a great wit, a ready and elegant writer, a trenchant
critic, but the names of some of these humble Americans whom he
did not deign to mention, or mentioned only to scoff, bid fair to stand
as long in the annals of literature as his own.
On the eastern slope of the Andes are a thousand springs from
which the slender rills, half hidden at times by the grass, scarcely at
any time seen or heard, trickle down the side of the immense
mountain range, here and there falling into each other and swelling
in volume as they flow, until at length is formed the mighty Amazon,
that drains the plateaus and valleys of half a continent. So the
beginnings of our literature, like the beginnings of every literature,
are small, indistinct, half hidden; but as they proceed, these little rills
of thought and expression grow and expand, until the mighty stream
is formed that irrigates the whole world of intellectual activity.
This stream, as we have said, first began to assume definite form
and direction about the time that Sydney Smith was uttering his
tirades against the genius and achievements of our countrymen. In
1817, appeared in the North American Review a remarkable poem
called “Thanatopsis.” The author was a young man named William
Cullen Bryant, only twenty-three years of age; yet the poem had
been written four years before. The annals of literature do not furnish
another example of such excellence at so early an age. The poem
yet stands as one of the most exquisite in the language. A recent
critic has characterized it as “lofty in conception, beautiful in
execution, full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery,
and, above all, pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious
philosophy.” This first effort on the part of Bryant was succeeded by
a long career of eminence in the field of literature. In 1818 appeared
a volume of miscellanies called “The Sketch Book,” by Washington
Irving, a young man who had already acquired some slight
reputation as a dabbler in literature of a trifling or humorous kind.
The Sketch Book was almost immediately honored by republication
in England. This initial volume was followed by a second series of
miscellanies called “Bracebridge Hall,” which was published in
London in 1822. In the preliminary chapter the author pleasantly
adverts to the general feeling with which American authorship was
regarded in England. “It has been a matter of marvel to my European
readers,” says he, “that a man from the wilds of America should
express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something
new and strange in literature; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather
in his hand instead of on his head; and there was a curiosity to hear
what such a being had to say about civilized society.” In the same
year with Irving’s Sketch Book appeared Drake’s Culprit Fay, a poem
that has not been surpassed in its kind since Milton’s Comus. In
1821 Percival issued his first volume of poems, Dana his Idle Man,
and Cooper, his Precaution. His last named volume was at once
followed by a long list of works including such famous titles as The
Spy, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
It marked the advent of our most distinguished novelist—a man who
has been styled the Walter Scott of America. He justly stands in the
same rank with the mighty Wizard of the North, and has no other
equal. Thus the stream of American literature rolled on its course,
and was swelled as it flowed by the contributions of Everett,
Prescott, Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Willis, Holmes,
Whittier, Lowell, and a host of others, whose names the world will not
willingly let die.
America has not yet produced a Shakespere or a Milton; but it
must be remembered that England has produced but one, each of
these in a period of a thousand years. Anywhere below these two
great names, American literature of the last seventy years is able to
parallel the best work that has been produced by our kinsmen on the
other side of the Atlantic. In wealth and elegance of diction, in depth
of thought or feeling, in brightness and grace of expression, in any of
the thousand forms and flights in which genius seeks to express
himself, the current literature of America stands on a level with the
current literature of England; and Sydney Smith’s sneers, which
must have touched our fathers to the quick, find no response now
except the smile of contempt which alone they ever deserved.
T. J. Chapman.
 THE OHIO SOCIETY, AND OHIO IN
NEW YORK.
I.

There are many things that link the capital city of financial and
commercial America, to the State of Ohio, that New England
enterprise, and New York encouragement, and Virginian patriotism,
did so much to build beyond the Alleghenies. It is not merely in the
associations and connections of to-day that New York and Ohio are
bound together. A pregnant era of the early past, was disposed
toward good results forever, by the patriotic generosity of the Empire
State, at a time when Ohio was but a name in the far off wilderness;
a promise that many things must nurture, before it could be realized.
Historians will recall, when this much has been said, the events
that were pressed close upon each other, before the soil upon which
Ohio now stands, was declared the property of the nation,
disentangled from the conflicting claims of jealous States, and how
New York by her self-renunciation, led the way to harmony. For a
century had Virginia and Connecticut made their claims to the vast
westward territory; vaster than the imagination of any living man then
conceived. When the French were driven from the lands west of the
bounds of Pennsylvania, the contention commenced, and claims
were urged from time to time, until both voices of dispute were
temporarily silenced by the war in which the rivals fought side by
side for the freedom of both. When that conflict was ended, the
question again arose; not, this time, with the English Crown as the
greater power, but with the loose jointed Confederation, under which
America endeavored to work out a national salvation. Virginia, made
her demand under the grant of James, in 1609, which gave her: “All
those lands, countries and territories, situated, lying, and being in
that part of America called Virginia, from the point of the eastern land
called Cape or Point Comfort, all that space and circuit of land lying,
from the seacoast of the precinct aforesaid, up into the land,
throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest, and also all the
islands lying within one hundred miles along the coast of the both
seas of the precinct aforesaid.”
This generous King, who was giving away so much that did not
belong to him, was really giving more than he dreamed of; for the
writer of the grant evidently believed that the South Sea, or Pacific
Ocean, was but little westward of the Atlantic, and never dreamed
that he was extending his line so as to take in the magnificent
Western and Northwestern empire of to-day.
Connecticut made her claim under Charles the II, who in 1662,
gave to the colony “All that part of our dominion in New England, in
America, bounded on the east by the Narragansett River, commonly
called Narragansett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea, and
on the north by the line of the Massachusetts plantation, and on the
south by the sea, and in longitude as the line of the Massachusetts
colony, running from east to west; that is to say, from the said
Narragansett Bay, on the east to the South Sea on the west part,
with the islands thereto adjoining.”
It was under this very vague, but very extensive grant, that
Connecticut laid claim to, and maintained that claim, for that part of
Ohio known the world over, as the “Connecticut Western Reserve.”
While Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were warring in the
courts, in the legislatures, and before the people over their various
claims, there were many others who virtually assumed that the whole
unoccupied and unorganized land to the west, belonged to the
nation at large, and that no state had a right to exclusive jurisdiction.
This discussion threatened all sorts of difficulties, at a time when
peace and prosperity could only come through a mutual helpfulness
and internal harmony, and the wisest and most patriotic declared
themselves willing to waive all personal claims, and allow the
national government to administer the general estate for the general
good. Congress so viewed it, and appealed to the States to yield
their claims. The first response came from New York, which
conceded all her possible ownership to western territory, to the
general government, and the other States followed in her wake.
Virginia followed New York; and Massachusetts Virginia; and
eventually Connecticut came into line.
In the appeal of Congress to the States there was no ambiguity as
to the purpose to which these lands were to be devoted. The act of
October 10, 1780, resolved that “the unappropriated lands that may
be ceded or relinquished to the United States by any particular
State,” should be disposed of “for the common benefit of the United
States, and shall be settled and formed into distinct republican
States, which shall become members of the Federal Union, and
have the same right of sovereignty, freedom and independence as
the other States; that each which shall be so formed shall contain a
suitable extent of territory not less than one hundred nor more than
one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as
circumstances will admit, that the necessary and reasonable
expense which any particular State shall have incurred since the
commencement of the present war, in subduing any part of the
territory that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States, shall
be reimbursed.” It was further agreed that said lands should be
“granted or settled at such times and under such regulations” as
should be thereafter agreed upon by the United States, or any nine
or more of them.
In less than six months after the issuing of this broad invitation,
New York set an example of generosity to her young sister States,
which had so much yet to learn in the way of mutual concessions for
the general good. And she made no conditions in her surrender. She
simply said that she would draw a line across the western end of
Lake Ontario, north and south, and that while all east of it should be
hers, all west would be forever quit-claimed to the nation. It took
Virginia three years to make up her mind, and when she waived her
claim in March, 1784, she yet reserved nearly four million acres to
the south and east of the Ohio. The year following, Massachusetts
came in with no conditions, while Connecticut followed, in the fall of
1786, conditioning that she should retain the magnificent Western
Reserve, upon which a New Connecticut was eventually built in the
wilderness—that Reserve that has played so important a part in the
history, and the moral development of the republic. South Carolina,
North Carolina and Georgia, at last straggled, one by one, into the
path of manifest destiny; although the century had turned the point of
time by two notches, before the last hand was lessened, and the
Nation became in law what she had already been in fact—the
architect and master of the splendid empire that stretched from the
western edge of the civilization of that day, to where the Spaniard
and the Frenchman still held a nominal right to the westward of the
Mississippi.
With these cessions, the territorial system of our government
came into existence. That which Georgia gave, became the
Mississippi Territory; that from the Carolinas, the Southwest Territory;
and all that north of the Ohio River, the Northwest Territory; and this
brings us to a point where New York again had a part in creating the
State of Ohio, and in dedicating the soil upon which she was reared,
forever to the cause of human liberty.
It was within the limits of her chief city that the very foundation
stones, not only of the one State but of many, were laid with a far-
seeing wisdom and prophetic foresight that mark the men of that
early Congress as among the sages of legislative wisdom. In the old
hall, that stood at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the
restless oceans of a financial world roll in a flood that never rests,
and to which the lines of monetary interest center from all the far-off
corners of the land, upon the spot now hallowed to the memory of
Washington by a colossal statue of bronze, there was enacted, in the
midsummer of 1787, an ordinance that has well been called[10] “The
most important legislative act in American History”—there came into
existence a law that gave Ohio and Indiana, and that galaxy of
northwestern states to the Union; those free states, without which
that Union never could have been saved in the day of its imminent
peril.
Many States have been created, many important acts have been
passed by the various Congresses that have sat in New York, in
Philadelphia, and in Washington, but there was in this measure
something that saved the nation from being sometime all slave; that
reserved for freedom an empire that by mere stress of moral
example if in nothing else, was a menace forever before the
slaveholder. In that ordinance was one little clause that made Ohio
and Wisconsin and Illinois what they afterwards became.
“There shall be,” it recited, “neither slavery, nor involuntary
servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of
crimes.” Simple enough these words sound now, when human
bondage upon American soil is but the echo of a dead past, but for
the day in which they were uttered, they were the clarion call of a
new era—the death knell of a monster wrong; and the voice was
none the less that of God speaking in human legislation, because
many of the men who had become His instrument, had no dream of
the great things to which they had put their hands, and to which they
had given their votes.
So, in one sense, Ohio may be said to have had her beginning in
New York. From the days of her earliest childhood, she has been a
willing neighbor, willing to give and take of friendly offices with her
elder sister to the East. Two of her chief magistrates were the sons
of the Empire State; she has borrowed not a little of her legislation
from the experience of the older State; she patterned her canals
after those which DeWitt Clinton had so largely aided to bring into
being; she has developed many of her native resources by New
York’s financial aid; she has sought to build her railways so that they
should lead direct to the metropolis; she has in a thousand ways
acknowledged the commercial and financial supremacy of the
greater city and State; and last, but not the least, she has sent
scores of her sons to the East, to prove that the Buckeye is capable
of gaining and holding his own among the best, in any lines of
human labor or human thought—and it is with this subject largely,
that we have at present to deal.
There hangs in certain cheerful rooms at No. 236 Fifth avenue, a
modestly framed document that is more significant in that which it
suggests, than in what it declares. It is a call for a meeting, and a
pledge of certain gentlemen whose names are attached, that they
will do what lies within their power to create in this great metropolis,
a hearthstone around which those who claimed Ohio for a mother or
a foster-mother, might congregate now and then, for such mutual
help or association as would keep the memory of the old home alive
in the new. The beginning was modest and quiet, and yet out of it
has grown an organization that is in many ways a model of its kind,
and that certainly has fulfilled the intentions of its originators.
“We the undersigned,” to quote from the language of the call,
“hereby agree to unite with each to form an association to be known
as The Ohio Association in New York, and to that end will meet at
any place designated, for the purpose of completing such
organization upon notice given to us whenever twelve persons shall
have signed this agreement. There is to be no expense incurred until
the organization is completed, and assented to by each member.”
“New York, October 7th, 1885.”
Attached to this document were names that would have carried
weight in many of the walks of the business and professional life of
the metropolis. General Thomas Ewing, an honored member of the
New York Bar, Samuel Thomas and Calvin S. Brice, of the more
active fields of Wall Street and the railway world, C. W. Moulton, Col.
W. L. Strong, one of the leading merchants of the city, Hugh J.
Jewett, Wallace C. Andrews, Homer Lee, J. W. Harman, Warren
Higley, Milton Sayler, Anson G. McCook, Col. Fogg, Mahlon Chance,
J. Q. Howard, General Henry L. Burnett, and others who had
acquired reputation at home, before making New York the scene of
later operations and more recent successes. There was more than
mere formal agreement in this compact; it was understood by all that
such a society should come into being, and all were in one mind that
then was the time for beginning.
Other attempts looking in the same direction had been made in
times past, but had come to naught. Early in the days of the great
war, many of the sons and daughters of Ohio, residing in this city,
met at the Murray Hill Hotel, and took steps to give active aid to the
soldiers in the field; but these weekly gatherings ended with the
noble purpose that called them into being. In the first annual report of
the Ohio Society, its first secretary, Homer Lee, gives a brief sketch
of this effort, and of the things that followed in its wake. “The object,”
says Mr. Lee, “was to send supplies, clothing, medicines, etc., to the
soldiers at the front. A handsome silk and satin banner was made at
a cost of some $500, upon which was a beautifully embroidered
Coat of Arms of the State of Ohio, to be presented to the bravest
Ohio regiment. As might have been expected there was much rivalry
for the possession of this prize, as glowing descriptions of the
beautiful souvenir were given by the newspapers at that time. The
commanding officers were appealed to, but could not be prevailed
upon to decide the question, because, as one officer put it ‘It could
not easily be decided which was the bravest, where all the regiments
by their valor and heroism had covered themselves with glory.’ At the
close of the war the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, of Cleveland,
secured the prize.”
Another organization, somewhat similar in character and purpose,
was called into being about the same time. It was the Ohio Soldier’s
Aid Society, and Theron R. Butler, was its president, and Mr. John R.
Cecil the treasurer. Its members made it their duty to call upon the
Ohio soldiers in the New York hospitals, and to minister to their
wants. In various forms of help, this society expended over fifteen
thousand dollars, and performed many eminent services for the
wounded and the sick, and like its companion organization above
described, its days ended with the close of the war.
In 1877, the subject of an association of Ohio men was again
discussed, when a number of gentlemen had been called together
by the death of Chief Justice Chase, but it came to naught. Again, in
1874, some of the younger sons of the Buckeye State in this city,
held various meetings and talked organization, but nothing came of
the movement beyond talk. It was reserved for the call above quoted
to produce enduring results, and to bring into being the flourishing
society that has bound the Ohioans of New York together with bonds
of enduring union.
When the twelve, and more, had signed the call and thus made it
operative, a meeting was held in the office of General Ewing, No.
155 Broadway, on November 13, 1885. There was then no question
of success, and the gentlemen present went to work in a mood to
make that success of the most pronounced character. General
Ewing was elected president pro tem., and Mr. David F. Harbaugh