This lecture was a short history of globalization, examining its origins in the 1970s to its legacies. With the world decomposing into pieces, it is tempting to look back on the last forty years as a short-lived convergence in a long history of fragmentation and failed efforts to assemble a cooperative whole out of the world’s competitive parts. The lecture asked: can a global history of the present reveal a different unity or even new integrative concepts among the splinters of globalization? From what Charles Taylor once called “deep diversity” can we find the coordinates for shared ways of belonging to one planet, beyond the prevailing narratives of dread and existential threat?
Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University.
IWM Permanent Fellow and Acting Rector Ivan Vejvoda introduced the speaker and moderated the evening.
