What is the Global? Rise and Demise of the Metanarrative on Global Change

In the past, historians tended to perceive the global as a set of encompassing processes that made the world smaller and generated an upward trajectory of economic development in the industrialized countries, as we saw in the nineteenth and the better part of the twentieth centuries. At the core of the processes were the technological innovations, the rise of humanism, and the emergence of democratic systems, all of which were closely associated with western European culture. Only recently, have we begun to comprehend not only the multiplexity of the global, but also the deterritorialized, dispersed, and regionalized nature of global change. In this article, I suggest that the global is only the reification of the local. Instead of studying the global, we should focus on the changes in the local societies.