James Muldoon, an emeritus professor of history at Rutgers University at Camden and a research scholar at Brown University's John Carter Brown Library, traces the seemingly inexorable process of globalization not to Nike, McDonald's, or Coca-Cola, but to a "vision of the right order of the world" that developed in medieval Europe. He writes that, contrary to popular thought, globalization is a culmination of "a process that has been going on not from 1492 but from the 11th century."
It was a process born, Mr. Muldoon continues, when the world view of medieval European thinkers -- who combined Christian ideals and Aristotelian notions of civilization -- bound religion, society, and law into a cohesive vision. These "medieval canonists," Mr. Muldoon concludes, "were probably the first to conceive humankind in truly global terms." And the rest is history: expansion overseas, "discovery" of "new" lands, curiosity about the rest of the world, and so forth.
But the religious underpinnings of these desires are too often overlooked, according to Mr. Muldoon: "The formal justifications for occupying newly discovered lands ... always explained contact and conquest in terms of the Church's universal mission." And "what we now call globalization is really a continuation of a process that has been proceeding for a millennium as European Christian society has expanded far beyond its original home."
An excerpt of the article is available on the magazine's Web site, at http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/feb02.html _________________________________________________________________
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