The Arabic-Speaking Peoples and “Globalization”: The Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, there could be no globalization without navigation and ocean-worthy fleets that could carry trade, ideas, colonists, and missionaries far and wide. The Arabic-speaking peoples from Morocco to Iraq did not have such means of communication and therefore whatever was ‘globalized’ in terms of books and ideas was done by means of European Arabists and publishers. Two cases in point are Hayy ibn Yaqzan and the Arabian Nights. In that century, there was a globalization of western culture, but not a culture of globalization.