The Challenges of Periodizing Globalization

Manfred B. Steger

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Chapter 4 The Challenges of Periodizing Globalization

In: Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

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Manfred B. Steger

Manfred B. Steger
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 60–79

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004500365_005

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Pointing out that Robertson’s original five-phase periodization of globalization, while a good starting point, is too narrowly Eurocentric and restricted to the modern era, the chapter introduces a more encompassing, fourfold periodization. In the Great Divergence the human species physically spread across the globe. The Great Universalizing was the long period of the traditional empires from the Chinese and Roman to the Mayan and Muslim. Although none became global in extent, they developed universalizing tendencies translated into long-distance communication, cultural and economic exchange, organized forms and spread large-scale diseases. During the Great Convergence of the modern era, Europe for the first time played a key role and set off the long modern era of the past four centuries. The contemporary period is the Great Unsettling or postmodern period. To analyze the specifics of each of these phases, the analysis suggests four different social formations of globalization, namely embodied, objectified, organizational, and disembodied. These refer respectively to human persons locating all around the globe, the human movement of objects such as trade goods around the world, the extension of social structures like empires and states, and social relations and ideas extended across the world. All four of these formations are present in all four of the great periods to a limited extent, but the last three formations are only significant aspects of the last three periods, and this in ever increasing extent and intensity as we pass from one to the next.

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Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson

Series: International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Volume: 139

Cover Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004500365

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 19 Nov 2021

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Chapter 4 The Challenges of Periodizing Globalization

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Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson

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