The Era of non-Western Globalisation has Begun
empire, globalisation and history in the world crisis
Crises do not change the world. Crises reveal a changed and sometimes diseased world. The world entered a crisis when the war in Ukraine began in 2022 and has entered a new phase with the conflict in Gaza. As the crisis spirals outside any executive control, many pundits are declaring that surely some revelation is at hand. But what is this new world metamorphosing from the empty shell of the post-1945 world? How does it fit into the shared story that most of the Western world embraced after 1991 of irreversible, benign globalization in a world of democratic nations?
There are many ‘geopolitical’ pundits bestowing names on this changed and disordered world. Richard Haas some years ago described the New World Disorder that had emerged, in his view, from the slackened reins of American leadership. Joe Biden weighed in, with characteristic precision, to offer the new term, of a “new, new world order”. Many agree that the unipolar moment is over, yet until the recent events in Israel and Gaza many powerful decision makers were reluctant to accept the term ‘multipolar’ world. Since those events, some pundits of multipolarity, such as Phillip Pilkington of the Multipolarity podcast, report that Washington and London insiders now admit they were right. The US empire no longer rules the world alone, even if President Biden repeats the old story that it is the powerful nation ever in human history.
The attempt to fix the character of our new world struggling to be born into a single “order” reveals a mental habit that does not serve us well. History does not proceed like Powerpoint slides from one ‘world order’ to another, interrupted only by brief crises that never seem to displace the masters of the universe. World history does not fit snugly into a box set of eras, however much the old mental architecture of ancient, medieval and modern has shaped mythic stories of the past. The world’s real geography and true history is made of wilder processes and more chthonic chaos than is dreamt of in the fancies of geopolitical analysis.
We should resist the temptation to declare that a single event is the gateway into a whole new era, and a world of fundamentally different distributions of power, resources and ideas. We should be attentive to the tired politician’s habit of collective amnesia, whether it is to say that this war, like no other, is unprovoked, that these events are unprecedented, or that the world changed on October 7, and we cannot now go back.
We should remind ourselves that despite appearances time and historical processes do not change their pace because of 24/7 news coverage of the latest crisis. Time moves no faster in crises, and people have no magical capabilities to draw on to command the events of a crisis in ways they cannot otherwise do. The ships carrying oil from the Gulf go no faster to their destinations. The political leaders of the world make decisions with the same cognitive habits, shaped by the same old courtiers, emotions, misread briefings and mythologized histories.
In the cauldron of the televised crisis, it may seem that there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happens. But this is an illusion of the self-dramatising mind. What really happens in those weeks that shake the world are that the stories we have told ourselves about the world are suddenly revealed to be wrong. The central characters of our stories shuffle out of shot, and new actors, who stood for a longtime in a poorly lit corner of the scene, have the spotlight turned on them.
To avoid this illusion, we need to think mindfully with history. If we do, we can see more clearly how the world today is changing. It is leaving the empty shell of the post-1945 and post-1991 worlds, and something uncertain is coming into being. But to do so we need to use history as an antidote to the misleading stories about the past and the multipolar world that appear in most commentary on geopolitics. All the standard geopolitical and economic theories do not describe this world that is coming into being. They are all based on fossilized stories about those post-1945 and post-1991 worlds. They confused the real history, geography and social patterns of the world with a grand strategic chessboard. They confused the West’s experience of globalization since 1991 with universal history at its end. They confused the unsteady institutions of the last 30 years with a new world order, or even the liberal rules-based international order. They confused the modern consumer American West with the lineage of Western civilization, under threat from yet another reincarnation of the barbarian hordes beyond the gates of Europe.
Rather than these misleading maps, we should turn to that old-fashioned discipline of world history. But the world history we turn to must be different from the bowlderised version that has taken hold through the American academy. This view of world history conflates America with the world, and imagines the American Mind to be the sole inheritor of all the gifts of Greece, Rome, Western European modernity and the British Empire, without the imperialism. It spreads in the childlike stories of the rest of the world that fill popular YouTube channels, like whatifalthist, Hollywood and Netflix, and the vacuous analysis of the American intelligence community. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, the evil genius of American foreign policy adventurism, acknowledged that:
Americans don't learn about the world; they don't study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don't study geography.
As a result, the ideas of globalization that have been pumped out from the American ideaplex over the last 30 years have had little to do with the nuances of the real history of the whole world, the true subtleties of evolving human geography, or the contingencies of geopolitical decision-making. The history of the globalized post 1945 and post-1991 worlds has been a Reader’s Digest version of a richer, but more challenging story. It has been a Walmart store for a flat world, as Tom Friedman infamously wrote. It has turned cultures into brands, ideas into search algorithms, and politics into tweets. It has created a fairy tale of how this world came into be that affirms the American elite’s belief that they can make their own reality. It has fled the reality of world history.
The citizens of the multipolar world face a dilemma then. Do they accept the narrative of how this world came into be that is pumped out every day by think tanks and controlled media organisations, even when it seems to retell the story of 1984? Oceania is again in a just war with Eurasia. War is peace, again. Slavery is freedom. And above all else, ignorance is strength. Or do they seek to live respectfully with the world, to think mindfully with history, and to act independently with their own intentions by doing what Brzezinski said Americans do not do, to study world history?
But world history is vast, and some of its early practitioners like Spengler and Toynbee articulated intriguing but often ill-founded ideas. Moreover, since the 1980s, and especially since the public debates on globalization from the 1990s, world or global history has expanded enormously in the academy. All these books have created a vast literature. It is forbidding in its size, and the complexity of its range of references. Like any large field, there is a risk of getting lost if you leave a secured harbour. At times, it is scarred with its own ideological biases and lack of experience of the real world of affairs. But it does offer a vast treasure to the independent thinker to find some better stories that reveal the true nature of the world as revealed in today’s world crises.
So, what is an intelligent citizen of the multipolar world to read? There are many good starting points, so long as they break with the fixed conventions of the story of American globalization. The key question to keep in mind is: how are the processes of globalization itself changing? How do stories of world history help us to comprehend the whole world’s experience as it moves from one mode of globalization to another? What are the processes that lie beneath the transition from a “unipolar world” to a “multipolar world, whether we regard those adjectives as real, convenient or fictional. I do recommend the works of one global historian, in particular, to understand how these processes of globalization have changed over the grand sweep and whole map of history. That historian is John Darwin, who can help us understand the uncertainty of this moment we are in, the depth and breadth of the processes changing under our feet, and the phase of globalization that we are truly in.
John Darwin is a British historian of empire, now professor emeritus at Oxford University. Over the last 25 years he wrote a series of profoundly influential books on the rise and fall of empires over the last 500 years. These books have remade our understanding of the history of globalization and world orders. They have both built on and led the growing field of the global history and deep history of empires and geopolitics. Darwin’s work is influential among historians. Richard Overy, the distinguished war historian, and author of Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-1945. Overy credits Darwin for key ideas that enabled him to write this magisterial work from 2022 that reframes the history of empire, geopolitics and war in the 20th century. He recommends Darwin’s After Tamerlane as the best book to rethink the history of the world today. But, as yet, Darwin’s influence has not flowed so strongly into the rivers of commentary on geopolitics in mainstream and independent media. There, fashionable nonsense, tired comparisons with Rome and simplistic tropes of world order are more common.
Darwin wrote four books that ought to be on the reading list of anyone who wants to understand, and to act, in the “new, new world order”. The most recent of these four books is Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam 1830-1930 (2020). At first glance, this book may seem to be on a narrow topic of a bygone world, port cities in the world of steam engines. But his topic goes to the heart of the pivot of the world when the Atlantic region, North-Western Europe and its North American outposts, came to dominate the world and to generate the Great World Crisis of 1910-1918 (as described by Winston Churchill), and indeed the Great Imperial War of 1931-1945. In The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (2009), examines the specific case of British imperial globalization that sprang from those processes and ended in the tragedies of post-1945 decolonisation. In Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (2013) Darwin traces the longer story of that British Empire that fancied the sun would never set on its liberal rules-based international order. The earliest, most comprehensive and visionary of Darwin’s series of world histories, however, was After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (2007). I have written and made videos about this magisterial work that forever destroyed the North Atlantic stories of the rise of the West that still dominate both mainstream and independent commentary on geopolitics. It explores three themes globalization, the expansion of Europe or the ‘West’ through the means of empire, and the resilience of many of the world’s states and cultures to that expansion.
I have recommended it as the one book to understand geopolitics and history. Its central theme and metaphor is that all ambitions to bring the world under one order fail. It does not matter whether governed these dreams of a single world order are governed by American rules or Tamerlane’s conquest or the British navy. They all fail because the processes of global exchange break down the ambitions of empires. The world has always been globalizing and has always been multipolar. Yet empires and ambitious rulers of sword and pen do not stop thinking they can define new world orders. They would not think so if they studied world history more carefully. At the end of Darwin’s great work, written in the midst of dreamy American optimism about the end of history and control of a unipolar world, he concluded,
“if there is one continuity that we should be able to glean from a long view of the past, it is Eurasia’s resistance [and that of the wider world] to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules. In that sense, we still live in Tamerlane’s shadow – or, perhaps more precisely, in the shadow of his failure.” (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 506)
Darwin’s books are a rich gift for anyone who wants to think more deeply about world politics and history. They reward deep study, slow reading and more articles. In this piece, I will highlight the main inferences I draw from Darwin’s work for the purposes of understanding out current moment of globalization. Considered together, Darwin’s books support seven propositions that guide my thinking about the world crisis today.
Firstly, Darwin made a convincing argument that empires are the rule of the road in history. They are nearly ubiquitous as a form of dominion. They have taken many forms. They are not an evil distortion of a purer form of politics. Empire is a descriptive and analytic term not a political insult. They offer good and bad to both their rulers and ruled, and their history does not with the American century. Given the human tendencies to exchange goods and culture, and to accumulate power on a large scale, empires are a persistent feature of world history.
“Indeed, the difficulty of forming autonomous states on an ethnic basis, against the gravitational pull of cultural or economic attraction (as well as disparities of military force), has been so great that empire (where different ethnic communities fall under a common ruler) has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of human history. Imperial power has usually been the rule of the road.” (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 23)
Secondly, empire did not disappear from the world in 1945, when the USA emerged as a dominant power in a world of nations. Rather the decades following the Great Imperial War 1931-1945 demonstrated the difficulty of forming autonomous states on an ethnic basis. Indeed, the world of nations created after 1945 led to
the imperfect decolonization of the old European empires, especially in Asia and Africa, including the tragic failures of British decolonization from 1945 to 1970;
the ideological recolonization of the “Soviet Empire” and the communist world including China; the attempts by American intelligence agencies to undermine the integrity of its rival empire through activation of ethno-nationalism, as in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; and
the establishment of a commercial and cultural dominion of a new Atlantic Western civilization, the new American empire.
These realities sat uncomfortably with the ideas of a world of equal and sovereign ethnically distinct nations created after 1945. But as Darwin has said this world is weird, and increasingly we are seeing this world break down.
Thirdly, Darwin shows there has not been one period of globalisation that began in 1991 or even 1945. There have been many waves of globalization across the course of human history, since the movements out of Africa. The first peoples to walk or to raft across the Sunda straits to Australia began a wave of globalization that would change its face many times again. The Mongol exchange between 1200 and 1500, as outlined in Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World was another example of pre-Columbian globalization. (I discuss this very topic in my upcoming podcast interview with Marie).
This insight enables Darwin to define globalization in historical terms, rather than polemical or political terms, and in a way that advances our understanding of the current moment. He wrote, after decades of study of the process,
“Globalization is best understood as the long-distance exchange of people, goods, money, technologies, ideas, beliefs and biota – animals, plants and (less visibly) microbes….[each phase of globalization] must be understood as something wider and more complex than merely new patterns of trade. They embodied, in fact, a new set of cultural, demographic, geopolitical and ecological relations, as well as those that were shaped by technology and commerce.” (Darwin, Unlocking the World, pp. xxxii-xxxiii)
There is much more to globalization than is imagined in the mind of a callow McKinsey consultant or the reflexive revolt against the conspiracies of “globalists”. Trade and power swim in stronger currents: “cultural preferences of consumers, the distribution of populations, the physical power to force open markets, and the ease (or not) with which different natural environments could be ‘tamed’ and exploited.” (Darwin, Unlocking the World, p. xxiii)
Fourthly, all periods of globalisation are not equal or similar in their processes and effects. Each has its distinctive peculiarities that reflects the density of exchange, the complex interplay of factors, the speed and intensity of movement across the globe, and the contingencies of events, technologies and processes. The globalization experienced in Eurasia between 1200 and 1500 (as described in Favereau, The Horde) differed from the globalization in the age of steam and European exceptionalism that occurred between 1830 and 1930 (as recounted by Darwin in Unlocking the World). Both processes differed by the globalization of the internet sacralised in the West since 1990.
Fifthly, these changes of the world instigated in each period of globalization do not progress in a linear way across time or a uniform way across space. This proposition is an essential corrective to the Flatworld vision of American boosters of globalization. It is essential for understanding our current moment. Darwin wrote in .
“Global connectedness has always been uneven (and remains so today): favouring now one region, now another; constantly creating new cores and peripheries; and shifting the balance of power, wealth and cultural self-confidence across the continents. (Darwin, Unlocking the World, p. xxxiii)
Sixthly, the surging, submarine currents of chaotic global connectedness sometimes create great crashing waves of change. These waves of change are often experienced as sudden, catastrophic events. They seem to be weeks in which decades happen, or world crises in which we see changes not seen for a century. Darwin advises the mindful historian to think not in terms of liner progress or arcs of history, but in terms of “conjunctures” in which the underlying processes and the response of agents seeking to control events beyond their ken provoke sudden shifts of power and advantage across the world. “The appropriate imagery,” Darwin wrote, “is not of rivers and tides, but of earthquakes and floods.” (After Tamerlane, p. 18) Columbian globalization flooded the world with exchange, bounty and catastrophe. When the era of steam globalization ran its course, the catastrophe of World War One resulted.
Seventhly, the latest phase of globalization, which I date from 1991 and we may call American communications globalisation, will also come to an end. In After Tamerlane, Darwin spoke well before many others of the resilience of the multipolar world to the American dream of one world united under US leadership. Fifteen years later in Unlocking the World he concluded this magisterial study of history with a question for everyone who tries to understand the world revealed by today’s world crisis.
“Consequently, we live in a world that steam globalization helped to create, but which we have made almost unrecognizably different. Nevertheless, we may be struck by a parallel. Just as the advance of steam globalization appeared irresistible, driving Europe’s commerce and culture deeper and deeper into the non-Western world, it evoked a resistance that destroyed its legitimacy. Armed with doctrines of anti-imperialism, its enemies lay in wait for the time of troubles to come. In 1913 the crash of a world so recently made would have been inconceivable. But at what stage are we in our own global cycle?’ (Darwin, Unlocking the World, p. 358)
This question - at what stage are we in our own global cycle? - underlies all the discussion, wise and foolish, today of a new, new world order or the multipolar world or the fourth turning or the end of empire moment or the cycles of social collapse or even, in more fearful terms, the “global reset”. They all pose alternative terms to ask whether we have reached the end of one cycle or phase of globalization. They all observe the sudden shifts in power, advantage, self-confidence, initiative and security across regions and cultures of the world. But they often use old, hackneyed narratives of historical change, or the rise and fall of empires or world orders, rather than the sophisticated, deep historical interpretation to be discovered in Darwin’s books.
My view is that the current world crisis does reveal that we are at the end of one cycle or phase of globalization, and the beginning of a new cycle. From this perspective the history of the world over the last 300 years looks different to the standard accounts of geopolitics, which themselves are impossible to detach from the ambitions of the Anglo-American empires of the 20th century. I offer this brief alternative story of how our changed and sometimes diseased global world came to be.
There were of course major patterns of movement, exchange and partial integration over thousands of years, which I will glance over to begin the story with Unlocking the World in 1830. Rome is far less important than the Western story insists. There was the Mongol Exchange. There was the Columbian exchange. Yet in the 1700s, as Darwin, and so many others have shown the European/Atlantic world was not dominant. India was the workshop of the world, and that is why Britain was so determined to steal it. But the consensus of most global historians today is that there was a conjuncture around 1750-1830 in which the expansion of European globalization took off.
Between 1830 and 1914 there is the era of steam globalization which Darwin describes in Unlocking the World. This phase of globalization shudders to a halt in a period of catastrophic wars and unrest. The Great War of 1914-1918, the catastrophic wars in the Soviet Union and unrest in Europe and China in the 1920s, the backlash of the rivals to Britain, France and the United States that sought to create nation-empires from Germany, Italy, and Japan, and finally the Great Imperial War of 1931-1945.
Yet beneath these tragedies, a phase of American globalization had begun. The goal of the American century - to remake the world in the image of a nationalist, progressive, WASP democracy - was declared by Woodrow Wilson, and surged with the impact of oil, finance, flight and mass communications. American globalization fought its ideological opponents and power rivals in the Soviet Union, China and most of the decolonized world during the Cold War. Yet this era of frozen conflict between different models of globalization occurred within the first era of the World of the United Nations, subject to superpower competition. There was no single idea of the post-1945 world.
In 1988-1991, one of the great rival models to American globalization, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact disintegrated. America declared the mission of the American 20th century had been accomplished. They now ruled the world as the exceptional nation. They had triumphed. This cultural self-confidence was spurred by the era of internet communications and increased people-people exchanges around the world. A second era of the World of Democratic Nations was inaugurated, in which single superpower rule prevailed. The United States had succeeded where Tamerlane had failed, or so they thought.
But they forgot “Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.” Americans they could loot and invade the new flat world, and everyone would still love America and want to become a Western liberal democracy. They assumed wrongly that Russia was down and out, that India was a hopeless case, and that China just wanted to be like them. The leaders of the ever more illusory West were and remain catastrophically wrong.
New resources came into play. New trade flows surged. New ideas and cultures escaped the conformity of Hollywood pulp fiction. New agreements and geopolitical institutions formed: Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS. New cores and new peripheries formed. Bonds and networks between non-Western states and cultures strengthened, and were enabled as the new information technologies broke apart the world of mass communications on which the American century was built. Everyone could find their own world on the internet. Noone had to watch American anchors on the nightly news anymore. New processes of globalization got under way. And for the first time since 1830 the Atlantic world was no longer in command of this new phase of globalization. A new phase of non-Western globalization has begun.
The events of the world crisis since 2022, or arguably since 2014, have revealed the tremors breaking the world of American globalization. It is no longer the sole superpower, but just one of five. It is not the largest economy nor the strongest military force. Its diplomacy has withered, and its culture has soured. China, Russia and most of Eurasia have formed deeper bonds through exchanges of people, goods, money, culture and ideas are intensified, without regard to the world of the West. Through BRICS these exchanges reach out to Africa, Central and South America, and before long to South-East Asia. Behind the internet firewall of China, 1.4 billion social and technological flowers are blooming with no regard for who is on Facebook or what is showing on Broadway.
This new phase of non-Western globalization may not be born without further violence, and we must do what we can to prevent Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Taiwan, the Caucasus becoming the scenes of another attempt by an Atlantic Empire to keep the empire going for another few generations, as Winston Churchill described his intent to Franklin Delaware Roosevelt during World War Two. A dying empire, resentful about its decline, can be a dangerous state.
But the West also has a choice. It is exactly the choice Xi Jinping presented to Joe Biden in San Francisco in 2023.
“President Xi Jinping noted that China and the United States are faced with two options in the era of global transformations unseen in a century: One is to enhance solidarity and cooperation and join hands to meet global challenges and promote global security and prosperity; and the other is to cling to the zero-sum mentality, provoke rivalry and confrontation, and drive the world toward turmoil and division. The two choices point to two different directions that will decide the future of humanity and Planet Earth.”
Joe Biden and most Western leaders continue to stand and fight as the earthquake of this new phase of globalization unleashes floods of change and opportunity across the world. They maintain the pose of American supremacy, and dream Tamerlane’s ambition. They ought to read John Darwin on the true history of globalization, and walk from the shadows of Tamerlane’s failure.