Primitive Times 1st Edition by Shane Moran 9780639709505 0639709508

Primitive Times traces the roots of contemporary globalisation to the enlightenment legacy of human rights, colonialism, and imperialism. Fear of global enslavement under the boot of corporate masters, and pleas for a rational world order, are part of a tradition that can illuminate the present.

Taking the long view, the course towards what we now call globalisation has been charted by predecessors making their own plea for a rational world order.

As the rest of the world catches up with South African levels of inequality, the South Africanisation of the globe suggests that the former polecat of the world community may represent the future rather than the past.

Unmoored from its native soil, the global South-Africanisation of society’ denotes minority rule in international decision-making and implies a parallel between Bantustans and the poorer states in the world. With this in mind Primitive Times addresses the following topics:
1. Colonial modernity, taking South Africa as privileged but unexceptional example in terms of economic development, apartheid, and human origins.
2. The discourse of human rights in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, and the model of human development underlying both the pro- slavery and the abolitionist arguments.
3. The philosophical elaboration of the concept of race and human development underlying the idea of the human race and the prospect of planetary colonisation.
4. The liberal rationale for imperialism and colonialism in terms of responsibility and development, and the place of South Africa in this financial and political nexus.
5. The impact of the Boer War, and South African colonialism and development in general, on H.G. Wells’s representation of alien invasion and world government.
6. Recent scenarios concerned with global health security and genetic engineering that reassemble the infrastructure of the discourse of race in the process of claiming to save the human race.