THE GLOBAL ECONOMY AND THE PLACE OF NIGERIA BEFORE 1990

2003

International Journal of New Economics and Social Sciences, 2018

This article attempts to compare the processes of modern economic globalization with analogous processes that have taken place in the past. The socio-economic, political and business changes taking place in the global dimension since the middle of the last century have contributed to a significant modification of the contemporary dominant market structures and models of financial systems. The main determinants of modern globalization pro-cesses include the third technological revolution that took place in the second half of the twentieth century and mainly concerned the multifaceted development of information technology and the implementation of information technologies for many different industries and also other spheres of human life. The processes of globalization in a more distant past were somewhat different in nature, when other factors of production prevailed in the production of goods, and economics was not yet a separate science.

2002

C apitalist production, trade, and market relations are driving forces of contemporary globalization. While globalization cannot be reduced to its economic dimension as some economists have been prone to do, there is no doubt about the central importance of exchange and production in the extension of social relations across world-space. 1 Globalizing exchange goes back long before the emergence of modern capitalism. Long-distance market relations drew connections between peoples along lines of trade such as the Silk Route between Europe and China; lines that stretched for thousands of miles. In the contemporary period, layers of modern and postmodern capitalism have taken these interconnections to new levels of integration and intensity. The process remains uneven, but notwithstanding the continuing importance of national and regional economies today, global capitalism is undoubtedly the dominant framework of economics in the world. There are many debates about what this means, but across the political spectrum 'capitalism' has become the taken-forgranted way of naming the economic pattern that weaves together the current dominant modes of production and exchange. Ideas and practices as diverse as consumerism, entertainment, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, tourism, and sport are now so bound up with processes of globalizing production and exchange that it is difficult to extricate broader social relations from their grip. It seems that everything can now be conceived of in terms of goods and services that can be sold (commodification) or processes that are organized to offer a return on investment (capital accumulation). 2 Each of these processes has spread across the globe. This volume, as the first in a set of four volumes on economic globalization, begins with the emergence of a globalizing market and subsequently the consolidation of what some writers have called the modern capitalist 'world system'. It examines the relationship between global trade, commodity relations and economic development across the course of traditional and modern history, and into the present. 3 Along the way, the volume covers the major radical approaches to global markets-world systems theory, Marxism, and more xxiv Globalizing Markets and Capitalism: A Critical Introduction mainstream approaches to economic globalization including Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Later volumes take up the issues of global finance systems, global economic institutions, the globalization of labour, respectively.

The article outlines the analytics and criteria that inform periodizing globalization. It criticizes presentist and Eurocentric views on globalization, the contemporary view, the modernity view (1800 plus) or the capitalism view (1500 plus). It discusses approaches to world history and how globalization fits in. Understandings of globalization, such as multicentric and centrist perspectives, and units of analysis affect how timelines of globalization are established. Taking into account global history going back to the Bronze Age and oriental globalization, these require inserting the Greco-Roman world as part of globalization history. It concludes by outlining phases of globalization in the (very) longue durée.

Quite paradoxically, retrospectively one can trace the beginning of the process of the Great Convergence already in the nineteenth century when the European and Western domination seemed to have become overwhelming. The main reason of such a change was the necessity to support the Western industrial output and export of goods. However, this change caused a demand for the increase of the export of capital and technologies to the non-European countries. As a result, these encouraged both the growth of national movements for political and economic independence and the rise of a stratum of entrepreneurs with new business ethics. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increasing export of British and European capital also marked the start of the formation of the contemporary World System. The chapter traces the development of a number of colonial and dependent countries, the impacts of the two world wars on this process, as well as the collapse of the colonial system. The authors describe in detail the various factors that contributed to the process of convergence. If the task was to define the most important reason (or rather a set of reasons) then, in the authors’ opinion, it would consist of the fact that the process of the growing connectedness of different countries aimed at supporting further innovative development sooner or later would demand equalization (at least to a certain level) of the developmental levels of different regions of the world. One can call this a “law of communicative vessels” in the global economy. Up to a certain moment this law did not work to its full extent as there were some social and cultural, and technological and political impediments required for its implementation. The authors also offer a detailed analysis of the development of views on this convergence and explain why Western economists actually overlooked it.