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Political Economy of World-Systems 2002 Conference Riverside, California |
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Abstract Matter, Space, and Technology in Globalization Past and Future S. Bunker Our research on the mechanisms and processes that drive economic and financial globalization departs from the notion that each systemic cycle of accumulation in the world economy has surpassed its predecessor in both the material intensity and the spatial extent of integrated production and trade. We provide a comparative historical analysis of the material intensification and the spatial expansion of world production and trade driven by the ascent of Amsterdam, Great Britain, the U.S. and Japan to trade dominance. We use this analysis to speculate on the future sustainability and security of processes that have driven the world economy toward globalization for over 8oo years, once the world economy starts to reach global, or spatial limits. . We focus on the material processes that these hegemonic nations have transformed and intensified at the beginning of each systemic cycle of accumulation.(cf. Arrighi, 1994), starting with Amsterdam in the 16th and 17th centuries, then Britain from the 17th through the 19th, the U.S. from its colonial beginnings through the 20th century, and Japan's rise and subsequent troubles in the late 20th century. We reason that the national societies that succeed in integrating appropriate material and spatial conditions with new technological and organizational forms sufficiently to transform world raw material markets and transport systems to their own advantage have driven the material intensification and spatial expansion of the world economy. Each case of trade dominance the expanded production and cheaper transport pioneered by the ascendant national economy has driven a spatial expansion of raw materials markets. Our logic is as follows: Globalization has emerged as the culminating, or at least most recent, manifestation of the expanded reproduction of capital and the long-term increase in the productivity of labor.. National economies can compete successfully only if they resolve this contradiction between economies of scale in production and the diseconomies of space that result from the resulting increase in volumes of raw material transformed. The leading nations in each systemic cycles of accumulation made radical improvements in the technologies of bulk transport and vast extensions in the built environment needed to implement these new technologies. The capital costs of devising and implementing these technological improvements and the infrastructure on which they depended required new organizational forms, knowledge, and powers in states, firms, financial institutions, and sectoral associations. In this sense, successful solutions to the contradiction between economies of scale and diseconomies of space generate both technological and social organizational innovations, understandings, skills, and collaboration that simultaneously maintain and transform the hierarchies, or regional inequalities, that characterize the world system and the global economy while progressively expanding both. |
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27th Annual Conference of the Political Economy of World-Systems Spring Hosted by the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside |