Colonial labor flows and racial subjugation predated and founded modern globalization.

Evidence

The histories of colonial conditions were constitutively tied to the racial histories of metropolitan shaping. The circulation of slave and indentured labor from Africa and Asia to metropolitan Europe and especially the Americas indicates the depth of those linkages. It reveals the causal connections between sources of labor supply, raw materials, and later markets for the making and selling of metropolitan goods, and so the source of metropolitan national wealth and at least economic wellbeing. Global connectivity, interactivity, and mutual constitutiveness were long in place before the notion of globalization became vogue. And racial understanding and its subjugating and exploitative effects were the fabric – that glove I mentioned metaphorically above – of this global connectedness. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to work on racial capitalism (Robinson, Cedric) and world-systems theory (Wallerstein) — the claim that race was the fabric of early global connectivity, not a byproduct of it. — connects to: Post-1850 capitalist globalization proceeded through imperial conquest that reterritorialized world space. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1674; Colonialism created the conditions for modern capitalism’s emergence — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 251; Racial slavery and indentured labor made metropolitan Europe wealthy long before globalization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 92
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Globalization was not a new phenomenon but built on racialized colonial networks of labor, raw materials, and markets’ — pushing back against the novelty framing in popular globalization discourse.
• DEFINE: Reverses the usual direction — race is the fabric of global interconnectedness rather than a side effect.