Making Global Society

My thanks to Forsyth, Pal, and Pardesi, for taking the time to read Making Global Society (MGS), and write thoughtful responses to it. It is always interesting to be shown frankly how others filter what you have done through their own concerns and expertise. The responses cover a range of positions. Forsyth seems to like a few bits, but not the whole. Pardesi likes the whole, but not some aspects. Pal is torn between liking and disliking the aggregative, big picture, approach.

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Becoming attentive to the material and the structural has linked me much more to the kinds of themes Barry Buzan raises in Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras. Though in reading it I also became conscious that my inner cultural historian still has, and wants, a voice. Let me explain.

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This is a story about institutional transition, and most importantly, about the institutional transition to a modern global society. Modernity, for Barry Buzan in Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras, is not the period that was established sometime between the early modern and nineteenth century period in Europe, or as a ‘quick jump early in the nineteenth’.

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Barry Buzan's Making Global Society: A Study of Humanking Across Three Eras is a big and an ambitious book. In this volume he tells us the story of 50,000 years of humankind by constructing a “world history” (p. xi) with the social structure of humankind as its object of study. In doing so, Buzan has undertaken two main tasks.

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