Globalization, Capitalism and the Market: Beyond a Historical and Flat-Earth Arguments (Essay‪)‬

Capitalist production, trade, and market relations are driving forces of contemporary globalization. (1) 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 capitalist exchange and production in the extension of social relations across world-space. (2) 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). (3) Each of these processes has spread across the globe. It should also be said that 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, globalizing capitalism is undoubtedly the dominant framework of economics in the world. Debates abound in relation to what this means economically, socially and politically. Across the political spectrum 'capitalism' has become the taken-for-granted way of naming the economic pattern that weaves together the current dominant modes of production and exchange. Yet there is still not much in the way of clarifying discussion that addresses the relationship between globalization and capitalism, and its history in long-term processes. This is the task of the present article. It begins by discussing the emergence of a globalizing market before the consolidation of capitalism and the subsequent 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, and argues that this is linked to a broader process of the abstraction and spatial extension of social relations. (4)