Going deeper into the stories of Others afar and Strangers at home means dispensing with the idea that global integration was like an electric circuit, bringing light to the connected. Becoming inter-dependent is not just messier than drawing a wiring diagram. It means reckoning with dimensions of networks and circuits that global historians – and possibly all narratives of cosmopolitan convergence – leave out of the story: lighting up corners of the earth leaves others in the dark. The story of the globalists illuminates some at the expense of others, the left behind, the ones who cannot move, and those who become immobilised because the light no longer shines on them.
– Jeremy Adelman, What is Global History Now?
