Globalization: A Reader

Expected to become a classic in the field and the classroom standard for teachers and their students, this book offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary readings on globalization currently available.

Here, for the first time in print, is the full historical story of globalization - drawn from original sources, explained by accessible introductions and biographical commentaries, and clearly organized as a comprehensive teaching text to guide students through the ins and outs of globalization. With astonishing social, political and historical depth, the book ranges from the Babylonian and Persian empires in Mesopotamia to the global electronic economy of the 21st century, from ancient Greece and imperial Rome to transformations in contemporary state power and global inequalities. From Kenichi Ohmae to Al Gore, from Osama bin Laden to Timothy Garton-Ash, from Amartya Sen to Abdou Maliq Simone: this is a dazzling collection of the most important academic and public statements on globalization.

Throughout, the Editors expertly guide the reader through the complex terrain of globalization - its engaging histories, its transnational economies, its multiple cultures and cosmopolitan politics.

Review:

'This reader is an education in itself. A student who reads this rich collection carefully will be able to think intelligently about the world in which we are living and where we are heading. Bravo.' - Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar, Yale University, USA

'Globalization achieves several important objectives: it destroys the naive sociological belief that globalism is a recent development; it interweaves the historical rise and fall of empires with global processes; it gives due recognition to the interaction of culture, technology and war; and it puts pay to the notion that globalization is just westernization. With a feast of readings, it provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the debates. Authoritative and judicious, Globalization is a significant achievement.' - Bryan S. Turner, Presidential Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, USA

'What a marvelous compendium! Globalization: A Reader is a Wunderkammer, a social-critic's desk-book, a provocative yet elegantly expressed argument about history, especially as domination, and a serious effort to construct a canon useful across several academic disciplines. In short, for students in the broadest and best sense, there is a great deal of real education to be had here. But while Globalization surely has much to teach anyone, it is also a book to be savored. At least for an aging imperialist like me, the book's vaguely Edwardian stance, its insistence on decorum while discussing moral compromise, and worse, along with its dryly horrified tone and finely wrought diction, make Globalization an excellent choice for leafing through on a cold evening, in the library, preoccupied with sin and perhaps distracted by a good whisky. Well done indeed.' - David Westbrook, Professor of Law, University of Buffalo, USA

'This thoughtful and sophisticated reader offers students the opportunity to pass through all the vexing dichotomies in today's scholarly discourse: the universal and the particular, the historical and the contemporary, the classical and the postmodern views of globalization. Pedagogically sound. The right stuff for the wrong times.' - Keith Doubt, Professor of Sociology, Wittenberg University, USA