Extract

The history of capitalism has become all the rage; global perspectives have become the scale of privilege. But with historiographic excitement has come some confusion. Is the gap between the West and the Rest, the “great divergence,” what needs explaining? Or should the global history of capitalism be about a great convergence, or even a great escape from timeless Malthusian constraints? Or have we been sliding inexorably into a common overheated and overcrowded planet?

What is often lost in big stories of uplift or downfall, integration or disintegration, are the fates of particular peoples and their places, especially when seen over the very long run. They waltz through grand global accounts as details or anecdotes to color the master narrative of division or integration. To the extent that global history has accented particular places as the engines of those narratives, they tend to be located in Europe, especially for the modern period.

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