Multicultural Origins of the Global Economy

Develops a fresh non-Eurocentric analysis of the rise and development of the global economy in the last half-millennium.

The general assumption in the West is that the global economy and globalization are Western creations. Hobson brings into focus the many non-Western agents and processes that have been left out of mainstream accounts, counteracting the numerous blind-spots in conventional Eurocentric preconceptions about the world.Westerners on both the left and right overwhelmingly conflate globalisation with Westernisation and presume that the global economy is a pure Western-creation. Taking on the traditional Eurocentric Big Bang theory, or the 'expansion of the West' narrative, this book reveals the multicultural origins of globalisation and the global economy, not so as to marginalise the West but to show how it has long been embedded in complex interconnections and co-constitutive interactions with non-Western actors/agents and processes. The central empirical theme is the role of Indian structural power that was derived from Indian cotton textile exports. Indian structural power organised the first (historical-capitalist) global economy between 1500 and c.1850 and performed a vital, albeit indirect, role in the making of Western empire, industrialisation and the second (modern-capitalist) global economy. These textiles underpinned the complex inter-relations between Africa, West/Central/East/Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe that collectively drove global economic development forward.