Globalization

'This reader is an education in itself. A student who reads this rich collection carefully will be able to think intelligently about the world in which we are living and where we are heading. Bravo.' – Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar, Yale University, USA

'Globalization achieves several important objectives: it destroys the naïve sociological belief that globalism is a recent development; it interweaves the historical rise and fall of empires with global processes; it gives due recognition to the interaction of culture, technology and war; and it puts pay to the notion that globalization is just westernization. With a feast of readings, it provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the debates. Authoritative and judicious, Globalization is a significant achievement.' – Bryan S. Turner, Presidential Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, USA

'What a marvelous compendium! Globalization: A Reader is a Wunderkammer, a social-critic's desk-book, a provocative yet elegantly expressed argument about history, especially as domination, and a serious effort to construct a canon useful across several academic disciplines. In short, for students in the broadest and best sense, there is a great deal of real education to be had here. But while Globalization surely has much to teach anyone, it is also a book to be savored. At least for an aging imperialist like me, the book's vaguely Edwardian stance, its insistence on decorum while discussing moral compromise, and worse, along with its dryly horrified tone and finely wrought diction, make Globalization an excellent choice for leafing through on a cold evening, in the library, preoccupied with sin and perhaps distracted by a good whisky. Well done indeed.' – David Westbrook, Professor of Law, University of Buffalo, USA

'This thoughtful and sophisticated reader offers students the opportunity to pass through all the vexing dichotomies in today's scholarly discourse: the universal and the particular, the historical and the contemporary, the classical and the postmodern views of globalization. Pedagogically sound. The right stuff for the wrong times.' – Keith Doubt,Professor of Sociology, Wittenberg University, USA

'This is the collection I have been waiting for. It puts globalization in its appropriate historical context: reaching from 5,000 years ago to the near future. It is only within this broad sweep of history that we can see what is truly new now in the twenty-first century. These readings and their careful introductions show that much of what passes for new in popular accounts, is not new at all, but has been going on for millennia. They illustrate that globalization or at least globalization-like processes have been occurring, with many variations for a long time. Furthermore, today is not the end of time as some have argued, the only a prelude to what comes next. With this broad approach, we gain a better chance of figuring out what sorts of things might come next, and how to act in order to improve the chances of those changes we want, and prevent those we do not want.' – Thomas Hall,Professor of Anthropology, Depauw University, USA