Globalization and the Postwar Liberal Consensus

Historians of globalization have identified two modern forms of global economic growth in history (following two premodern forms—archaic globalization and proto-globalization—antedating the emergence of nation-states and the onset of the first industrial revolution in the eighteenth century). Of the two modern forms, the first refers to the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, in which nation-states industrialized and colonized; while the second comprises the current postcolonial phase, following the period during which most colonies gained their independence between 1945 and 1975. Along with the ending of the Cold War and deregulation of international financial markets, this shift has formed the wider political context in which the global communications and information technology revolution of the last quarter-century has occurred, concomitant with a phase of almost unprecedented rapid economic and cultural change in the social and economic relations of the entire world. The net effect of all this, so far, has been the much commented-on liberation of the power of “the market,” “the consumer,” transnational corporations, and finance capital, at the expense of the incumbent power-holders of the previous century or more: nation-states and their elected governments, whose autonomy has putatively suffered a relative decline.

In fact for many countries, certainly including Britain, the current era of globalization and the challenges it presents are not at all without historical precedent. I will argue here that careful attention to historians' findings concerning the nature of the original historical episode of modern globalization, the eighteenth and nineteenth century industrialization with its epicenter in Britain, can provide important and unexpected perspectives on contemporary world problems of coping with transformative global economic change today.