What makes the world go round: California's history of globalization.

Janssen, Volker

The history of California has always been more than the narrative of a state or region. Rather than placing the Golden State primarily in the context of the West, frontiers and borderlands, or the national narrative, however, I try to teach California as a specific example of globalization. Just as New York makes for a fine case study of the Atlantic world--and by extension of the concept of empire--so does California's role in the emergence of a transpacific world invite us to consider the West Coast as a specific place in the history of globalization.

My inspiration for this approach did not originally stem from the enormous ethnic and racial diversity in the state, its central significance for global commerce and migration, or its importance in the development of postindustrial information technologies, but from the observation of a young German journalist regarding the Gold Rush. Pondering the new levels of mobility he observed in both capital and labor as a result of the alleged opportunities in the Sierra, and elaborating on the ways in which the incorporation of California into a world economy would bolster the ties across the Pacific to East Asia as well as Australia, Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels in 1858: "Since the world is round ... the colonisation [sic] of California ... complete[s the] process" of creating a global market. (1) I think it's time that we move California history from an exception within American exceptionalism to a study of globalization and its transnational dimensions.

NOTE

(1) Marx to Engels, Oct. g, 1858, Der Brief wechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, MECW 40: 345; Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-Okonomische Revue, Feb. 1850.

BY VOLKER JANSSEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON