Archeologies of Globalization. European Reflections on Two Phases of Accelerated Globalization in Cornelius de Pauw, Georg Forster, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Alexander von Humboldt

Abstract

In our present globalized world, an attempt to reflect on the “Archeology of Globalization” confronts us with a decisive question: Globality seems to be a singular phenomenon, the inevitable outcome of a teleological history which conforms our present. But can we think it as a plurality? Can we retrace this history in other form as a linear progression? By exploring European discussions that took place between the last third of the eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries and which reflected on globalization, I will try to expose another development of this phenomenon. My focus emphasizes the very specific dynamics, modes of representation, and reflections that set up not an archeology but archaeologies of globalization: a world-consciousness that recognizes the patterns of movement and relationality that constitutes it, transforming itself into knowledge about how to live together in difference.