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Wartime Globalization in Asia, 1937–1945, Conflicted Connections, and Convergences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2018

MARK RAVINDER FROST  and
DANIEL SCHUMACHER
MARK RAVINDER FROST
Affiliation:
University of Essex, UK Email: mfrost@essex.ac.uk
DANIEL SCHUMACHER
Affiliation:
University of Essex, UK Email: dschum@essex.ac.uk
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Extract

Given war's propensity for trampling over and demolishing borders—its literal, one might even say primordial, function as a motor of deterritorialization and reterritorialization—the scant scholarly attention paid to it as a globalizing force remains surprising. An extensive body of literature has responded to the complex role of globalization in the making, as well as the supposed unmaking, of conflict. Liberal economists and political theorists, in an intellectual lineage that dates back to the writings of the European Enlightenment, have made bold claims about global economic integration and the emergence of a ‘capitalist peace’. Critics of their arguments have pointed to the Western imperial violence which, from the mid-eighteenth century on, cleared the ground (and perhaps, more importantly, the seas) to make way for the so-called ‘free’ market world economy, a process which established several of those fundamental worldwide inequalities that have been perpetuated to this day. The hard evidence of a more recent past makes a mockery of the presumption that global capitalist enterprises such as Starbucks and McDonalds might bring about some kind of Big Mac and Frappuccino-mediated universal fraternity. Critical observers of globalization during the ‘Noughties’ (2000–2010) now recognize it as both one of the most interconnected decades in world history, and also one of the bloodiest.

Type
Forum
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Special Issue 6: Institutions and Economic Development in South Asia , November 2017 , pp. 1922 - 1935
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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28 L. Shi, ‘Jinnian samba jinianzhong de teshu renwu’ [‘The special task for this year's 8 March ceremony’], Xinhua Daily, 8 March 1938.

We are greatly indebted to Vivienne Xiangwei Guo for providing us with helpful insights into the networks of elite women across wartime China. Her current research at the University of Exeter centres on the social and political history of the Second Sino-Japanese War and includes the history of gender in China.

29 Danke, Li, Echoes of Chongqing: women in wartime China, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2010, pp. 12–14 Google Scholar.

30 Ibid.

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