Development and Migration

Abstract

The term globalization did not gain wide currency until the 1990s, yet the process to which it refers was retrospectively given a much longer history that varied somewhat by discipline.¹ While the rise of multinational and transnational economic entities, the accelerating speed and scope of migrations, and the emergence of a worldwide infrastructure of information and communication are regarded by many as the first indicators of a global era taking shape since World War II (e.g., Appadurai 1996, Bauman 1998, Miyoshi 1996, Sklair 2001), others attend more closely to the continuities linking contemporary capitalist formations to the histories of imperialism and colonialism (e.g., Wallerstein 2006, Hardt and Negri 2000, Grewal and Kaplan 1994). The dual process enabled by conquest and colonization of expanding and intensifying resource extraction in overseas territories and spurring modernization in the metropole was accompanied by the first intellectual attempts at creating what anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt called planetary conceptual grids. Such conceptual grids, exemplified by the botanical and zoological classification systems of Enlightenment scientists like Blumenbach and Linné, enabled people for the first time to grasp the diversity and interconnectedness of life across the regions of the earth, while literary narratives, cultural artifacts, and visual images produced by travelers fueled Europeans’ desire for exotic encounters, exploration, and conquest.