From: "BLACKBURN Kevin Peter (HSSE)" <kpblack@nie.edu.sg>
 List Editor: Dr P J Martyr <P.Martyr@utas.edu.au>
 Editor's Subject: Reply: Query: Historical Perspectives on Globalisation
 Author's Subject: Reply: Query: Historical Perspectives on Globalisation
 Date Written: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:27:09 +1000
 Date Posted: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:27:09 +1000


Looking at the past using contemporary perspectives drawn from the process called globalisation today
does provide insights to the past, but it also tends to gloss over differences, which make me hesistant
about the value of any reinterpetation of such a multifaceted process that historians know as
imperialism as simply globalisation. A colleague (who works on Southeast Asia, not Australia) drew a parallel between the IMF's intervention in the Indonesian economy to "open it up" and the intervention of the British in the age of the "new imperialism" of the nineteenth century when the Egyptian government, in eyes of the British, could not manage its finances, and this provoked a political crisis that led to intevention and take over. I am not as enthusaistic about drawing such parallels. However, in Australia, there are also parallels that can be drawn. But I don't think seeing what is occuring as globalisation helps much. An example might be the pastoralist expansion of the 1820s and 1830s in Southeast Australia and in Tasmania. Large parcels of land were forcibly taken off Aboriginal people and turned into sheep runs to produce wool for the expanding textile industry in Britain. One could argue that this was simply part of bringing the land into the global economy. However, this is really reproducing the perspective of the pastoralists. Still, white historians happily did this until recent times. Frontier wars were fought between indigenous people and the invaders over these lands, such as the Black War in Tasmania, which occurred when the Europeans started to move out of the small areas that they had occupied for decades to establish large sheep runs to take financial advantage of the booming wool market. Adopting any perspective that this whole process of imperialism was globalisation brings with it the danger of reducing the efforts of indigenous people to keep their land (and their autonomy) as merely an attempt to resist globalisation.

Kevin Blackburn
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore