Multicultural Origins of the Global Economy: Beyond the Western-Centric Frontier

"Westerners on both the left and right overwhelmingly equate globalization with Westernization and presume that the global economy is a pure Western-creation. While such a conception flatters the Western ego, this book challenges it via more inclusive thinking. It reveals the multicultural origins of globalization and the global economy, not so as to marginalise the West but to show how it has long been embedded in complex interconnections and 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 textiles, which organised and linked the first global economy together (1500-1850) and performed a vital, albeit indirect, role in the making of modern Western industrialization and the second (modern) global economy post-1850. These textiles underpinned the complex inter-relations between Africa, West and Central/East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe that collectively drove global economic development forward"--