...corporations taxes in offshore accounts. Or a variety of new cultural possibilities may come up first: the Indian diaspora, Bollywood or the Hong Kong film industry, the rising popularity of "World Music," or the diversity of foods and other products readily available around the world on a daily basis. Whatever one thinks of, however, most commonly it seems to be something happening in the here and now, occurring as a result of the informational, communicative, and physical contractions of time and space that our technological innovations have made possible. But it is important to remember that we are not alone in experiencing these phenomena; in fact, to a degree every generation before us has also had its share of the process of globalization, even if they didn't have such a handy name for it, and many of these generations even had their own outspoken critics of it. Herman Melville was just such a critic.

Melville scholars have, of course, noticed the multitude of ideas, symbols, and signs in Melville's work, as well as the great variety of physical things associated with them. Few of them, however, have tried to make sense of them all together, and it is in this very regard, as the most globally conscious of the transcendental writers, that one of Melville's greatest strengths lies. Even the briefest biography of his life points toward his perpetual engagement with the world: born in New York City in 1819, he was thrust into poverty when his father lost his fortune through the vagaries of the global economic system in 1830, and he lost his father so shortly thereafter that it must have seemed his father's death was associated with the system itself. Upon entering manhood, he served on an Atlantic merchant vessel one year, and a transoceanic whaler the next, giving him better than most a sense of the world's actual size. He quickly recognized that it only seemed vast, and that in fact, several nations, including his own, had the ability to exercise their political and economic control over much of it. At the same time, he saw his own nation, bounded at first by wilderness, nearly double its size even while his countrymen were in every possible way hacking away at its rough edges, subordinating its wildness to their will to civilize. He saw the invention and widespread application of a telegraph machine that could deliver a message hundreds of miles away in seconds, and of trains and steamships that enabled massive human migrations over great distances in less and less time. Lacking much formal education, he read romance novels and travelogues and the classics of European and American literature, but certainly nothing that could provide him with the critical method he needed to address the complexity and the sophistication of the condensing world in which he lived. And yet, at his very core seemed to dwell a burning desire to do just that, to understand and express some truth about the enormous interconnectedness of all of these things. Because this dilemma lies at the heart of all his life's work, if Melville and his work are ever to be understood as fully, and richly as the world made an impression on him, we must examine him as a critic of globalization, who was interested in the ways interconnected global processes shaped his world, and determined to represent that world with all its myriad interconnections intact.

Certainly I am not the first to suggest that globalization is a very old process. Amartya Sen has pointed to the technological transfers from East to West around 1000 AD that in many ways spurred the scientific investigations and discoveries that ultimately led to the European Renaissance. Without the spread of the decimal system, paper, the printing press, and the magnetic compass, among other things, Europe's Age of Discovery would never have happened. (1) In a similar vein, Immanuel Wallerstein places globalization within a context of expanding capitalist domination over an equally expansive length of time. (2) But while contextualizing such as Sen and Wallerstein's helps us to think of globalization in its largest scopes, it does not lend itself to making distinctions about certain times throughout this process when the global has seemed to be particularly intense, making radical departures from the recent past through the sudden innovation of new technologies and from the sociological adaptations, migrations, and cultural transformations that have subsequently arisen. Eric Hobsbawm suggests that just this sort of gestatory period occurred late in the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and began to spawn technological and social standardizations. The International Telegraph Union of 1865, the Universal Postal Union of 1875, and the International Meteorological Organization of 1878 are examples of the kind of "international, and interlinguistic standardization of culture which today distributes, with at best a slight time-lag, the same films, popular music styles, television programmes and indeed styles of popular living across the world" and which has created a "substantial difference between the process [of globalization] as we experience it today and that in the previous century." (3)

Even so, there were many other indicators of globalization readily apparent by the 1840s that did revolutionize the way many people thought of the world and their place in it. To this point, Roland Robertson has argued that globalization is just as much our consciousness of it as a process, as it is a process itself. As Robertson attempts to "make analytical and interpretive sense" of how people "go about the business of conceiving of the world," he argues that "in an increasingly globalized world there is a heightening of civilizational, societal, ethnic, regional and, indeed individual, self-consciousness," and he roots the late twentieth century discussion of globalization consciousness in the other kinds of consciousness-raising movements of the 1950s and 1960s. But Robertson, like Hobsbawm, also argues that the real take-off period for modern globalization occured between 1870 and 1925, citing "basic geohuman contingencies," such as the establishment of time zones, the international dateline, and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, as the critical components. (4) Both Robertson's geohuman contingencies and Hobsbawm's standardizations value most highly the kinds of things that typically constitute traditional historical records, and as a result, they both overemphasize the importance to globalization of the late latter half of the nineteenth century. They do so at the cost of missing the indicators of a consciousness of the globalizing process in the 1840s and 1850s that one might argue are partly what made the standardizations of the 1870s possible in the first place.

The writing of Herman Melville shows just such a global consciousness at work, as it contends with global issues like massive and rapid human migrations, the strengthening of European and American control over much of the globe along with the development of the systems necessary to maintain that control, as well as the establishment of regular, global communication and media pathways. Examining the impact of these events on the formulation of Melville's global consciousness, as evidenced by the formal and structural representations of them in his work, will demonstrate that Melville's mid-nineteenth century experience with globalization was just as intense and meaningful as our own today, making it a crucial threshold in the history of globalization, and essential to understanding Melville as an artist as well.

Marshall McLuhan's coining of the term "global village," as Robertson points out, was seminal to contemporary scholars' recognition that we can extend our notion of community beyond the local. It is a good starting point to establish what is meant by a global consciousness, for us as well as for Melville in the nineteenth century:

During the mechanical age we had extended our bodies in space.

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have

extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,

abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man--the

technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness ... will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together.... ... As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political

functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media. (5) Given the distances in time and space that were eradicated or compressed by the telegraph and the steamship and the train, the ability of the press to cover more events more quickly as a result of those innovations, the time-saving devices such as John Deere's steel plow and Cyrus McCormick's reaper and Richard Hoe's rotary printing press and the many others whose innovation Melville witnessed between 1830 and 1850, it becomes apparent that the nineteenth century underwent a series of physical and metaphysical contractions just as intense as those about which David Harvey writes in the twentieth century. (6) A far greater number of human lives could be known as a result of these innovations in transportation and communication, and more time and energy could be spent in caring about them. Thus one can begin to imagine how Melville's global consciousness was not terribly dissimilar to that involvement expressed by McLuhan more than a hundred years later. The television and the telephone had their...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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