1. Foundations of the Global System: Empire, Capitalism, and the “West and the Rest”

Capitalism

an economic system in which private capital or wealth is used in the production or distribution of goods and prices are determined mainly in a free market; the dominance of private owners of capital and of production for profit.

• expands unevenly, producing both wealth and exploitation

• more self-interest/self-growth

• Capitalism in Europe always depends on the rest of the world

Capitalism: Chang

Chang critiques the myth that capitalism is “free”; governments have always shaped markets

• every market is governed by law (e.g. child labor bans, environmental standards, trade restrictions → reflects moral and political decisions, not neutral economic truths

• What one person sees as “market freedom: another sees as exploitation.

• economics is not an objective science but a political process. When economists argue to “free” markets, they are really advocating specific political and moral views

• supports capitalism as an economic system, but not the free-market or neoliberal version 

  • believes it must be regulated, managed, and guided by the state to serve social goals rather than corporate interests.

  • supports is as a tool for growth and development, but only with social responsibility and strong governance (developmental capitalism)

Imperialism

Imperialism: expansion of the power of one state beyond its borders to control other people, places, and cultures

Colonialism

Colonialism: one form of imperialism

• Formal control over one territory and its people by another

• Based on claims about differences between colonized and colonizer

Early Globalization: Imperialism/Capitalism

Colonialism is often the mechanism through which imperialism operates

• European imperial expansion over non-European Land and peoples, driven largely by desire for

  • Cheap resources

  • Cheap (coerced) labor

  • New markets

• Rising living standards Europeans

• Development of modern manufacturing and Industrial Revolution

• Cheap European wage labor

• Rise of an interconnected, but highly uneven and unequal, capitalist global economy

Globalization: Highs and Lows

• 1990s – high point of rapid economic integration, optimism about

  • globalization

• 21st c. challenges to globalization:

  • 9/11 and the War on Terror

  • 2008 Global financial crisis

  • 2016 Trump’s 1st election; Brexit

  • Global spread of rightwing nationalism

  • 2020 COVID pandemic

  • Growing “state capitalism,” trade protectionism, economic nationalism

  • Ukraine (2022...), Gaza (2023...)

  • 2024 Trump 2.0

2025: Globalization in Crisis?

• Growing trade wars and economic nationalism

• Harsh crackdowns on migration

• • Collapse of international governance institutions

• • Increasing military conflicts

• • Fracturing of global geopolitical order

• • Worsening environmental disaster and slowing of green transition

Phases of Imperial Expansion

• 1450 – c. 1750: 1st Age of Empire

• 1750 – 1885: Informal empire

• 1885 – 1914/45: 2nd/High/Classic Age of Empire

• 1945 – 1965: Widespread decolonization

• 1965 – present: Contemporary globalization

1st Age of Empire

• 1450 - c. 1750

• Formal colonization of the Americas

• Mainland “settler colonies”

• Caribbean “plantation colonies”

• Large-scale agriculture (cotton, sugar)

• Mineral extraction (silver)

• Harsh Labor conditions

• The “Great Dying” (due to illness brought by Europeans)

• African Slave Trade

• “Triangle trade”

Informal Empire

• c. 1750-1875

• Fewer formal colonies

• Intensification of empire in Asia and Africa

• Combination of

  • Informal “sphere of influence”

  • Trading/mining colonies

• European/Us

  • extraction of resources

  • control over vast economic networks

• Rising European/US living standards

• Industrial Revolution

  • Gradual abolition of slavery

2nd or “High” Age of Empire

1885 - 1914/45

• Formal colonization of Africa and Asia

• Driven by:

• Domestic and international tensions

• Growing indigenous resistance

• Economic changes:

  • Industrial revolution → need industrial inputs 

  • Capitalist expansion → need new markets

  • Rising Western living standards → need to feed new consumption habits

The Scramble for Africa

• 1884 Conference of Berlin

• By 1900, Europeans controlled → 

  • 90% of Africa

  • 6 million sq. miles

  • 110 million African people

  • 30 new African colonies

• Shows how industrial capitalism required new markets, labor, and raw materials linking empire to global economic integration

Early Globalization

Imperialism + Capitalism → “globalization”

• interconnected, uneven, and unequal economy

• Mass migration of European and non-European peoples

• Cross-border cultural changes and exchanges

Set the stage for 20th and 21st century 

In fact: capitalism in Europe/US always depended on the rest of the world

→ Europe/US and the rest of the world made each other

→ “Modern” society has always been global

Industrial Revolution

• Technological and industrial transformations (18th-19th c.) that increased productivity and accelerated European dominance

  • fueled imperial expansion and global inequalities

• Ex: Bicycles, automobiles, electrical wiring

  • Required rubber from Belgian Congo

  • Rubber tapping in the Belgian Congo

• Internal combustion engine 

  • requires oil (from Middle East, Nigeria…)

• Electricity 

  • required copper (from Chile, Peru, Zaire, Zambia…)

• Western luxury consumption

  • required gold and gems (from South Africa, Australia, California…)

• European/US consumption habits

  • Global “drug tade”...(from Caribbean, east/southeast Asia)

Methodological Nationalism

• Conceptual approach that takes nation-state as primary unit of analysis

• Tends to emphasize “domestic” over transnational factors

• Treats each country as if developed separately, ignoring how empire, trade, and slavery connected them\

• Hall and Spark both critique this fallacy: to understand global capitalism, we must look beyond national borders to transnational and historical relationships.

Methodological Nationalism (Hall and Spark)

Hall would oppose methodological nationalism because of everything he argued: discourse, colonial entanglement, hybridity, and global interdependence

• show that nations are not natural, bounded, or self-sufficient, but historically produced through global power relations and cultural flows.

Spark would oppose it because it hides how globalization works

• argues that understanding global inequality requires looking beyond national boundaries - at transnational institutions, flows of capital, and networks of power that connect the “global” and “local”

Relational Analysis

• Foregrounds connections between places

• Doesn’t assume national = most important scale

• Considers not only international, but transnational dynamics

• Instead of asking why some nations succeeded and others failed, relational analysis asks how the success of some depends on the subordination of others.

  • Britain’s industrial revolution, for example, was tied to cotton from colonies and enslaved labor in the Americas.

• Cook’s “Follow the Thing: Papaya” demonstrates this by tracing how one fruit connects workers, consumers, and economies across borders.

Blank Slate v. Historical analysis

Blank Slate

• Idea(explicit or implicit) of the” blank slate” or the fresh beginning

Historical Analysis

• Emphasizes ways past always shapes the present

  • Examines how things came to be the way they are now

• (Key critique in Hall, Sparke, Chang)

Imperial Discourse

• Discourse

  • A group of statements that form a systematic body of knowledge/way of representing a topic

  • Shapes mainstream ideas and human actions

    • → Discursive practice

• European imperialism → “The West and the Rest”

Imperial Discourse: The West and the Rest

• Produced in process of European imperial expansion and encounters with non-European peoples

• Aimed to describe and explain differences between colonized and colonizers, through

  • Stereotyping

  • Binary thinking

→ Legitimized European imperialism

• Helped produce

  • Imperial domination

  • Racialized social and labor hierarchies

  • European identity

  • Western philosophy/social sciences...

Imperial Economic Legacies

“West”

• More industrialized

• Higher wages

• Higher living standards

• Higher labor and environmental standards

• “Rest”

• Less industrialized

• More dependent on primary commodities

• Lower wages

• Lower labor and environmental standards

Imperial Demographic Legacies

• reshaped demographic patterns in Europe and colonies

• New forms of social and cultural mixing

• continued influence on migration patterns

Imperial Legacies: National Borders

• Decolonization→new nation-states

• → Post-colonial struggles to forge national unity

• → Sometimes lasting border conflicts

Imperial Legacies: Environmental

• Land use change

• Intensification of export-led agriculture

• Continued resource extraction

• Uneven carbon footprints

  • Ex: Cobalt mining, DRC; Soy plantation in the Amazon, Brazil; Cotton plantation, India

Imperial Legacies

• Twin processes of capitalism and imperialism produced a globalized world with lasting effects

  • Global but very unequal economic integration

  • Demographic and migration patterns

  • National borders and political conflicts

  • Uneven environmental effects

  • Race and racism

    • Discourse of the “West and the Rest”

“West and the Rest” (Hall)

Hall explains how Europe defined itself as “the West” by constructing the “Rest” (non-European peoples) as backward, irrational, or inferior.

• This discourse justified imperialism and slavery.

• The “West” became associated with rationality, modernity, and capitalism; the “Rest” with tradition and savagery

“West and the Rest”

Produced in process of European imperial expansion and encounters

with non-European peoples

• Aimed to describe and explain differences between colonized and

colonizers

• Used to frame and legitimize European imperialism

• And shaped how that imperialism was carried out

Are split into two categories

• 1st West v. the Rest

• 2nd Noble v. Ignoble “savages”

Stereotyping

• Simplification: simplifies things about them

• Essentialization: characterized by their traits and are what identify them

• Homogenization: making statements about a population as a whole

Dualisms

• Binary categories

• Opposites

• Hierarchical: superior to

Discourse/ Discursive Practice

• Discourses are never neutral

  • Shaped by unequal power relations

  • Discourses → practice, ie to doing things in the world

• West and the rest helped produce →

  • Imperial domination

  • Racialized social and labor hierarchies

  • European Identity

  • And Western philosophy/social sciences

    • Explaining different societies

    • Theories of race and evolution

    • Concept of “ladder” of development/process