Review of Thomas Bender’s Rethinking American History in a Global Age

Social History (February 2005)

During the 1990s social scientists, journalists and policy-makers collaborated in the assembly of
the powerful organizing concept of ‘globalization’. While theorizing on a global scale was
hardly new, ‘globalization’ was represented as both a revolutionary process and the name for a
novel historical moment, one in which dense, fluid and instantaneous movements of capital,
information and commodities were challenging the power of nation-states and producing, for
the first time, an authentically unitary world.