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Prepared for delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, September 2 - September 5, 2004. Copyright by the American Political
Science Association
Hegemony and Resistance: Linguistic Globalization in the Early 20
th
Century
Selma K. Sonntag, Humboldt State University
Economic historians have used conventional economic measurements to identify
the period immediately preceding World War I as a moment of intense international
activity. Mira Wilkins (1974) has shown that foreign investment, one of the most
prominent indicators of contemporary globalization, increased tremendously in the
nineteen-teens. Measured as a proportion of total global production of goods and
services, this amount of investment activity was not reached again until the 1990s.
Similar studies measuring volume of trade in the early 20
th
century also indicate
heightened global economic activity (see, e.g., O’Rourke and Williamson 1999).
Christopher Chase-Dunn (1998) has used these indicators to establish this period as a
moment of globalization.
Less attention has been paid to the cultural forms of this early 20
th
century
moment of globalization. This is in contrast to the current moment: Tomlinson (1999)
and others (see, e.g., Featherstone 1990) have offered interdisciplinary, theoretical
approaches to studying the cultural dimension of contemporary globalization.
Nevertheless, recent reassessments of culture and colonialism (see, e.g., Cooper and
Stoler 1997) have begun to transform the historiography of the metropole-colony cultural
dialectic. However, an explicit linkage to globalization, and globalization theory, has not
been thoroughly developed in this revisionist historiography.
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