the global city : new york, london, tokyo

While the first author highlights the limited attention of many world historians to the more theoretical debates surrounding “globalization” – the widely-acknowledged central “buzzword” of at least the two decades around the turn of the millennium – the second author acknowledges the popular and academic importance of the term and asserts world history’s focus upon a longer history of waves or phases of increasing globalization.

Moreover, Northrup acknowledges that the rapid growth and popularity of the world history movement in the United States derives, in part, from the relevance it offers to students and faculty in an era of increasing interactions.ģI cite these texts because together they help to raise some interrelated points relevant to our work on “global cities”. 2 He acknowledges that a primary inspiration for his model comes “from looking backward through time to discover the origins of the contemporary globalization”. In what is primarily a temporal model far from high-theory social science analytics, Northrup invokes globalization in his definition of a “Great Convergence” that, since 1000 AD, began to unevenly draw the peoples of the world into closer economic, cultural and political contact. Regarding my use of “AD”, or Anno Domini, the (sometimes politically controve (.)ĢJust two years later, David Northrup’s insightful presidential address to the World History Association (WHA) both refuted and confirmed some of the previous author’s observations. In contrast to the avid attention paid to the globalization debates by other social scientists, he notes that “world historians somewhat silently question whether the process of globalization is new at all”. Reviewing two works by non-historians, he urges his colleagues not to write off their efforts as some descent into theory or a “literary exercise”, and reminds his readers that “globalization is about growing interaction in world history, which is our main object of study, after all”. 1 He attributes this to what he describes as “their ‘natural’aversion to post-modernism, latest fashions and hypes”. “World historians”, he observes, “do not seem to have much interest in the debate on globalization”. One of the books under consideration in Oonk’s review – edited by Brigit Meyer an (.)ġIn 2002, a contributor to the Journal of World History noted the apparent ambivalence of the journal’s readers regarding theoretical approaches to contemporary globalization.

The global city : new york, london, tokyo