At least since the 1990s, social scientists and the media have widely assumed that globalisation exacerbates socio-economic inequalities—not least in 'global cities,' in which Saskia Sassen diagnosed growing socio-spatial polarisation. Urban historians have similarly identified increasing levels of urban segregation by class and ethnicity during an earlier phase of globalisation between 1880 and 1914, when steamships connected the world. Empirical evidence for this assumption, however, has long remained patchy. Only with the recent mass digitisation of historical sources, such as censuses, is it gradually becoming more possible to test how spatial residential clustering, by ethnicity in particular, developed in a variety of global cities avant la lettre.

Focusing on several commodity entrepots on different continents between 1850 and 1950, this talk points to contradictory tendencies and argues that blanket assumptions about the relationship between globalisation and inequality need to be empirically unpacked to be meaningful.

Michael Goebel, Associate Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute and the Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World.
 

The event will be followed by a cocktail.
 

Organised by the Department of International History