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Description:
On the history front, I want to demonstrate that non-western countries have long, complex histories of modernization which can't be explained simply by reference to the 'impact of the West'. And, and this particularly interests me, that people in non-Western countries remember these changes 'vertically', not 'horizontally', that is, they remember something like the railway or the cinema as an event in their own society in the past, not as something that 'came from the West.' Tricky to 'prove' but interesting to explore. On the geography front I will demonstrate that it's very easy to exaggerate the impact of globalization, not least because it's often measured against a static 'other,' whereas in fact local, national, 'regional' frames of reference are mutating all the time too (link here with the history). And time and place?--time, mostly the last two hundred years; place--six cities (countries) which function a bit like people, they're a way of 'humanizing' the story--they're Fukuoka (Japan), Yangzhou (China), Semarang (Indonesia), Mysore (India), Mansoura (Egypt and the Cuno connection) and Queretaro (Mexico). Deliberately not well-known, not dystopian or utopian, just 'plain ordinary' places.
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Biography:
Malcolm McKinnon is a freelance historian, having lectured in History at Victoria University of Wellington and served as senior researcher at New Zealand's Ministry of Heritage and Culture. His books include Independence and Foreign Policy: New Zealand in the World Since 1935 (1993), Immigrants and Citizens: New Zealanders and Asian Immigration in Historical Context (1996), and Treasury: The New Zealand Treasury 1840-2000 (2003). He led a team of contributors to produce the prize-winning New Zealand Historical Atlas (1997). Currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Center for European Studies, he is working on a book entitled Parallel Worlds? Comparing Modernity and Globalization in Six Non-Western Cities.
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