We have a fondness for the metaphor of a world turned upside down. It is a preferred metaphor of history writing and history-making. Successful revolutions are said “to turn the world upside down.” Marx supposedly turned Hegel’s dialectic upside down (or right side up depending on how one sees it).
We need a new metaphor for conceptualizing the perspective of global history and focalizing the trends that now embody the developments of globalization: that of a world turned inside out. The story we tell ourselves about the emergence of the West and about the blank backwardness of “the Rest” is a tale of intrepid explorers and bold, though cruel, conquerors. We might be ready to flip the valuation so that those we once saw as intrepid and bold are now villains triumphing over innocents. But what if our entire way of conceptualizing world history, of dividing it between good guys and bad guys, is wrong?
Globalist historiography is now correcting the patently false perspective according to which, before the arrival of Westerners, the non-western world was somehow void or passively subsisting outside of real history—waiting, that is, to be wrested into history by the conquerors and colonists whom we once venerated and now, no less self-righteously, vilify. The global story is rather one of economics than of heroic discoveries. There was a quest not only for gold but for a more prosaic and profitable sugar, cotton, bananas, rubber, furs, or oil. The exploitation of cane sugar and raw cotton elicited the European invention of the plantation system, which Howard French accurately designates as the “prison-industrial labor camp,” designed to use up humanity as if it were an expendable fuel; and, in order to fuel itself, there is the innovation of chattel slavery, unique in that a black skin qualified one and one’s progeny as indelibly marked for involuntary servitude and sale.
These and other products were made feasible by conquest and subjugation, even before technical innovation accelerated production and required ever more raw materials with sometimes genocidal collateral damage. This economic approach to globalization by no means deemphasizes exploitation and genocidal oppression. By no means. But it does shift the perspective from a moralistic tale of the evil deeds and moral failings of our European ancestors to a more materialistic account of economic developments—in which some groups gained much and others lost everything, yet in which none was altogether without agency. “The West and the Rest” were from the very beginning interacting in a developmental process that evolved into our present unequal world. The strangers at our borders are not strangers to the system that led to a world starkly divided between haves and have-nots.
I don’t believe that the 21st century is likely to see repetitions of the classic revolutions, said to have “turned the world upside down.” For one thing, they played out mainly within the confines of nation-states, perceived as stand-ins for the world. Anything that derives its significance from the nation-state as such is not likely to be revolutionary in a globalizing age. It won’t be the general strikes and street barricades that will determine the patterns—not when the wretched of the earth, the masses of nomadic proletarians, are the ones who will unsettle, if not storm, the bastions of the privileged. Unlike our wretched nomads, strikers had jobs; barricade builders were defending the streets where they lived, situated in national territories in which they held citizenship. Our century is therefore less likely to revert to those patterns of classic revolutions, but rather—to what?
I am sure that the nationally minded conservatives will be irresistibly drawn to the metaphor of the barbarian hordes at the gates of civilization, the Goths who overran the boundaries of a moribund Roman Empire. I can remember my Latin teacher in high school who predictably knew the perils of our decadence. What did they want, those Gothic horsemen who decimated the legions of Emperor Valens at Adrianople in A.D. 378, signaling the beginning of the end of the ancient empire? They wanted the same thing as the caravans and families streaming toward our southern border: to be allowed to settle on Roman territory and enjoy the fruits of Roman law, peace, and prosperity. Turned away, they took matters into their own hands.
The Roman Empire did not simply disappear. Overwhelmed by illegal immigrants, it evolved so that its mass lay further north and its population shifted to include the peoples it had once held at bay. This transformed empire of the same name, with territories and peoples it had once excluded, was truly a world turned inside out. It eventually called itself the Holy Roman Empire. Archconservatives now look back on its cathedrals and hierarchies with bitter nostalgia. No doubt some who now decry “the great replacement” look back with clannish pride upon their descent from the most prominent among what the historians refer to as the Migration of Peoples. The great migrations of this century will make the outsiders insiders and sideline the old elites. A Völkerwanderung that re-mixes states, bringing outsiders in and marginalizing traditional insiders, is perhaps a better metaphor for an age of universal Grenzgänger, of border-crossers testing all the limits and seeking escape from whatever oppresses us.
(For a new perspective on global history, I recommend Sven Berkert’s Empire of Cotton and Howard W. French, Born in Blackness.)
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 