Language and nationhood in a time of globalisation

Abstract

In a recent volume entitled Globalization in World History A.G. Hopkins makes the interesting and important point that globalisation is 'an agenda for historians'. If we take an historical view of the progressive interactions among various human societies we can indeed observe that globalisation is as relevant to historians as it is to those interested in languages and education, to students of nationalism and to economists. All too often these days we imagine that globalisation is a phenomenon of our age and that the "new realities" it confronts us with are unique. It is salutary to realise that glopalisation has an ancient history, and while we can trace the term in its more recent emergence to the middle of the 1970s it is clear that religious, aesthetic, military and economic modes of globalisation are ancient and universal. Of course the kind of globalisation that is today's buzzword has spread further, and in some ways more deeply, than previous globalisations, and this mass phenomenon of globalisation constitutes a 'new reality'.