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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GLOBALIZATION,
CULTURE & SOCIETY

Other Globes
Past and Peripheral Imaginations
of Globalization

Edited by Simon Ferdinand

Irene Villaescusa-Illán · Esther Peeren
Palgrave Studies in Globalization,
Culture and Society

Series Editors
Jeroen de Kloet
Centre for Globalisation Studies
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Esther Peeren
Literary and Cultural Analysis
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the
boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically
explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary ­globalization
processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through
and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understand-
ing how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series
asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is
taken to be and do in and across specific locations, and what social, polit-
ical and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders
obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different
forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception,
experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies
in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globali-
zation across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through inter-
disciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded
in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined
above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for mon-
ographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact
the series editors for more information: b.j.dekloet@uva.nl/e.peeren@
uva.nl

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15109
Simon Ferdinand · Irene Villaescusa-Illán
Esther Peeren
Editors

Other Globes
Past and Peripheral Imaginations
of Globalization
Editors
Simon Ferdinand Irene Villaescusa-Illán
Amsterdam School for Cultural Department of Spanish Language
Analysis and Culture
University of Amsterdam University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Esther Peeren
Literary and Cultural Analysis
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society

ISBN 978-3-030-14979-6 ISBN 978-3-030-14980-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14980-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934456

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Plate XXXI from Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of
the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature, and Solving by Mathematical
Principles the General Phenomena of the Visible Creation; and Particularly the
Via Lactea. London: H. Chapelle, 1750, p. 162. Digital image courtesy of the
Getty’s Open Content Program
 Acknowledgments

This volume is an outcome of a conference held at the University

of Amsterdam in July 2017, “Other Globes: Past and Peripheral
Imaginations of the Global.” We are very grateful to everyone who
participated in making the conference such a stimulating event. Patrick
D. Flores, Ursula K. Heise, and Peter Hitchcock gave riveting key-
note lectures. Nick Baron, Sourit Bhattacharya, David Brydan, Alicia
Fuentes-Calle, Grzegorz Czemiel, Moritz Herman, Peter Hess, Milou
van Hout, Alison Hulme, Sibylle Machat, Mahshid Mayar, Lucas
Pohl, Alexis Radisoglou, Christoph Schaub, Miriam Tola, Jennifer
Wenzel, Shirley Lau Wong, and MeLê Yamomo all delivered inspir-
ing presentations. Jeroen de Kloet, Miriam Meißner, and Hanneke
Stuit each chaired enriching panel discussions. Among the attendees,
David Jeevendrampillai was a committed interlocutor across the panels.
Peter Hitchcock and Miriam Meißner rounded things off by launch-
ing new monographs (both of which also appear in ‘Palgrave Studies
in Globalization, Culture and Society’). We wholeheartedly thank Eloe
Kingma and Jantine van Gogh, who helped us enormously in organizing
the conference, and the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis for funding it.
Crucially, this volume exists thanks to the work of its contributors.
We would like to thank the authors of chapters in this volume for their
patience, labor and enthusiasm. Thanks also to Lucy Batrouney and Mala
Sanghera Warren for seeing the project through to publication, and to

vii
viii    Acknowledgments

the two anonymous reviewers whose comments prompted us to develop

key aspects of the manuscript.
This collaborative volume is the culmination of a number of years
during which Simon Ferdinand and Irene Villaescusa-Illán both under-
took and defended doctoral dissertations under the supervision of Esther
Peeren. Accordingly, Simon and Irene would like to take this opportu-
nity to thank Esther in print for her tireless diligence, enthusiasm and
support in guiding us through the process of completing our PhDs and
editing this volume.
 Contents

1 Introduction. Other Globes: Past and Peripheral

Imaginations of Globalization 1
Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa-Illán
and Esther Peeren

2 Protest from the Margins: Emerging Global

Networks in the Early Sixteenth Century
and Their German Detractors 41
Peter Hess

3 Being in the Globe: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden

of Earthly Delights at the Fringes of Modern Globalism 63
Simon Ferdinand

4 The Nature of the Historical: Forming Worlds,

Resisting the Temptation 85
Patrick D. Flores

5 H. G. Wells and Planetary Prose 107

Cóilín Parsons

6 Visions of Global Modernity in Hispano-Filipino

Literature 125
Irene Villaescusa-Illán
ix
x    Contents

7 Global Africa 149

Bill Ashcroft

8 World-Imagining from Below 165

Jennifer Wenzel

9 Novelization in Decolonization, or, Postcolonialism

Reconsidered 177
Peter Hitchcock

10 Ethnoplanetarity: Contemporaneity and Scale

in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz
and El botón de nácar 195
Alexis Radisoglou

11 Weirding Earth: Reimagining the Global Through

Speculative Cartographies in Literature, Art, and Music 213
Grzegorz Czemiel

12 Planetary Lovers: On Annie Sprinkle and Beth

Stephens’s Water Makes Us Wet 231
Miriam Tola

13 A World in Miniatures: Judith Schalansky’s Atlas

of Remote Islands 249
Christoph Schaub

14 The End-of-the-World as World System 267

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Index 285
 Notes on Contributors

Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, founding exponent of

postcolonial theory and co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first
text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial studies.
He is author and co-author of twenty-one books and over 190 articles
and chapters, variously translated into six languages, and he is on the edi-
torial boards of ten international journals. His latest work is Utopianism
in Postcolonial Literatures. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of
NSW and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Grzegorz Czemiel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anglo-
Irish Literature at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin,
Poland. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw on the
basis of a dissertation on Ciaran Carson’s poetry (Limits of Orality and
Textuality in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry, Frankfurt am Main 2014). His aca-
demic interests include contemporary poetry, speculative and weird fic-
tion, and translation studies, as well as literary theory and philosophy,
especially ecopoetics and Speculative Realism. Currently, he is developing
the concept of “speculative cartography,” involving poetry as a geophil-
osophical mode of making cognitive maps. He also translates academic
books.
Simon Ferdinand is an interdisciplinary researcher whose inter-
ests sit between visual culture, geography, and globalization studies.
Having read Theatre and Performance and taught History of Art at
the University of Warwick, he received his Ph.D. cum laude from the

xi
xii    Notes on Contributors

University of Amsterdam in 2017. He is the author of Mapping Beyond

Measure: Art, Cartography and the Space of Global Modernity, which
will appear with the University of Nebraska Press in 2019, as well as of
numerous articles and chapters on artistic mapping practices and cul-
tural visions of globalization and the global. Currently, he is co-editing a
book named Interrupting Globalization: Heterotopia in the Twenty-First
Century.
Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies in the Department of Art
Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997
to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He was one of
the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in
2000 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a vis-
iting fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999
and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publica-
tions are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999);
Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006);
and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee
of the Asian Cultural Council (2010), a member of the Advisory Board
of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989
(2011), organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, and
member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011 and
2014). He co-edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third
Text (2011). He convened in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and
the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines the
conference “Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia” in Manila. He
was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in
2014. He curated an exhibition of contemporary art from Southeast
Asia and Southeast Europe titled South by Southeast and the Philippine
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. He has been appointed the
Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019.
Peter Hess is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
His main research focus has been on early modern German literary and
cultural studies (1480–1680) with occasional forays into current issues.
His earlier work focused on rhetoric, poetics, and generally on literary
studies, with books on the poetics of Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and
on the epigram. Recent work has taken a cultural studies perspective.
He has just completed a book manuscript entitled Crisis, Transgression,
 Notes on Contributors    xiii

Discipline, Ordering: Resisting Pluralization and Globalization in

German Literature, 1490–1540. Currently, he is preparing a criti-
cal English edition of Nikolaus Federmann’s Jndianische Historia, an
account of the first phase of the conquest of Venezuela in 1530–1531.
Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at the Graduate Center (GC)
and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is also one
of the faculty of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the GC and is
currently the Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and
Politics. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed, Oscillate Wildly,
Imaginary States, The Long Space, and Labor in Culture. He has also
co-edited two collections, on the New Public Intellectual, and The Debt
Age. His current research projects include a book on postcoloniality and
the state, and another book on critical finance studies called “Trading
Objects.”
Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown
University. He is the author of The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish
Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), and a co-editor of Science,
Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse University Press, 2019) and
Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (University of Cape Town
Press, 2015). The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature was
awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for best book on literature by the
American Conference of Irish Studies, and shortlisted for the Modernist
Studies Association First Book Prize. He is currently working on a mon-
ograph on astronomy, scale, and modernism.
Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University of
Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
(ASCA). She leads the ERC-funded project “Imagining the Rural in a
Globalizing World” (2018–2023). Recent publications include The
Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave,
2014) and the edited volumes Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing
Present: Space, Mobility, Aesthetics (Brill, 2016, with Hanneke Stuit and
Astrid Van Weyenberg) and Global Cultures of Contestation: Mobility,
Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity (Palgrave, 2018, with Robin
Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet and Thomas Poell).
Alexis Radisoglou is a fellow of Lincoln College at the University of
Oxford, where he teaches German and Comparative Literature. He pub-
lishes on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, film, and visual
xiv    Notes on Contributors

art, and is currently working on a book project titled Globe and Planet in
Contemporary Aesthetics.
Christoph Schaub received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages from
Columbia University in 2015 and subsequently taught at Columbia
University and Duke University. A former fellow of the Fulbright,
Whiting, and Rosa Luxemburg Foundations, his research on literary
and cultural globalization, labor movement literature, urban culture,
modernism, and popular music has been published in such journals as
New German Critique, Modernism/modernity, Monatshefte, Weimarer
Beiträge, IASL, and Amerikastudien/American Studies.
Robert T. Tally Jr. is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in
the Humanities and Professor of English at Texas State University. He is
the author of numerous books, including Topophrenia: Place, Narrative,
and the Spatial Imagination (2019), Fredric Jameson: The Project
of Dialectical Criticism (2014), Poe and the Subversion of American
Literature (2014) Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013), Spatiality
(2013), and Melville, Mapping, and Globalization (2009). His edited
collections include Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018), The
Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017), Ecocriticism and
Geocriticism (2016), The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015),
Literary Cartographies (2014), and Geocritical Explorations (2011). He
is also the general editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a
Palgrave Macmillan book series.
Miriam Tola is an interdisciplinary scholar of feminist theory, politi-
cal ecology, social activism, and film studies. Her work has appeared in
Theory & Event, PhaenEx, South Atlantic Quarterly, Feminist Review,
and Environmental Humanities. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor
in the Media and Screen Studies Program and the Women, Gender and
Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University.
Irene Villaescusa-Illán has taught Spanish language, literature, and cul-
ture in France, Hong Kong, and The Netherlands. Currently, she is a
guest researcher at ASCA, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis
at the University of Amsterdam, where she completed her Ph.D. disser-
tation entitled Writing the Nation: Transculturation and Nationalism
in Hispano-Filipino Literature from the Early Twentieth Century. She is
working on her first monograph derived from her Ph.D. research. She
has published on Philippine literature written in Spanish in the Revista
 Notes on Contributors    xv

de Crítica Literaria Lationamericana (2018) and Unitas, the bi-annual

journal of the University of Santo Tomás in the Philippines (forthcom-
ing). Her research interests include global Hispanic Studies, world and
comparative literatures, globalization studies, and travel writing.
Jennifer Wenzel is a scholar of postcolonial studies and environmental
and energy humanities at Columbia University, where she is an Associate
Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and
the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.
She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in
South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009) and
co-editor (with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger) of Fueling Culture:
101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, 2017). A new mon-
ograph on world literature and environment crisis is forthcoming from
Fordham UP in 2019.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 “The Third Day.” Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of

Earthly Delights, closed state, 1490–1510. Panel Painting,
205.6 × 193 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado (Courtesy
of The Print Collector/Alamy Stock Photo) 64
Fig. 3.2 Detail of “The Third Day” 66
Fig. 3.3 Detail of “The Third Day” 69
Fig. 3.4 Children’s drawings of the earth (From Vosniadou
and Brewer [1992]. Reprinted with permission from
Elsevier [under STM permissions]) 72
Fig. 3.5 Hieronymus Bosch, The Pedlar, 1494–1516. Oil on panel,
71 × 70.6 cm (Courtesy of Peter van Evert/Alamy Stock
Photo) 76
Fig. 3.6 Being in the globe. Detail of Hieronymus Bosch,
The Garden of Earthly Delights, central inner panel
(Prado Museum) 80
Fig. 3.7 “Is this a globe or a sphere?” Detail of Hieronymus
Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, central inner
panel (Prado Museum) 82
Fig. 4.1 Esteban Villanueva, Basi Revolt, 1821. Oil on canvas,
92 × 92 cm (Photograph by the author) 86
Fig. 4.2 Esteban Villanueva, Basi Revolt, 1821. Oil on canvas,
92 × 92 cm (Photograph by the author) 87
Fig. 4.3 Anonymous, Meditation on the Creation of the World,
the Life and Sacred Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ, His
Glorious Ascension, the Coming of the Holy Spirit, Death,
and Assumption of Most Holy Mary Our Lady, 1794. Medium

xvii
xviii    List of Figures

unknown, dimensions unknown (Courtesy of the San

Agustin Museum, Intramuros, Manila and
the Luis Ma. Araneta Gallery) 102
Fig. 4.4 Anonymous, Meditation on the Creation of the World,
the Life and Sacred Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ, His
Glorious Ascension, the Coming of the Holy Spirit, Death,
and Assumption of Most Holy Mary Our Lady, 1794.
Medium unknown, dimensions unknown (Courtesy
of the San Agustin Museum, Intramuros, Manila
and the Luis Ma. Araneta Gallery) 103
Fig. 12.1 Dirty Sexecology, Calderwood Pavillion, Boston, 13
November 2009 (Photograph by Mark Snyder,
Courtesy of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens) 233
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction. Other Globes:

Past and Peripheral Imaginations
of Globalization

Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa-Illán and Esther Peeren

In the incendiary opening lines of their Dialectic of Enlightenment,

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observe how although “the
Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and estab-
lishing their sovereignty,” “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster
triumphant” (2002 [1944], 3). We begin this Introduction with this
stark statement on the outcome of the enlightenment, not because we
adhere to Horkheimer and Adorno’s gloomy teleologies, which now
seem all too transparently overdetermined by the backdrop of exile, gen-
ocide, and global war. What interests us, in introducing this volume, is
rather how the Dialectic’s grand narrative begins with an image of the
earth. Through this image, we approach the disasters of “enlighten-
ment,” which, for Horkheimer and Adorno, describes not just the
eighteenth-century hegemony of positivist experimental science, but a
deep history of instrumental rationality, culminating in capitalist regimes

S. Ferdinand (*) · I. Villaescusa-Illán · E. Peeren

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

© The Author(s) 2019 1

S. Ferdinand et al. (eds.), Other Globes,
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14980-2_1
2 S. FERDINAND ET AL.

of enframing and exploiting people, places, and polities. The “earth” is

not a neutral backcloth against which this history plays out. Instead, the
“fully enlightened earth” can be construed as the specific conception
of Earth produced by enlightenment, that is, the “wholly grasped and
mathematized” globe (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 25, translation
modified).1 Indeed, the mapped modern globe encapsulates the differ-
ent characteristics that the Dialectic imputes to instrumental rationality.
It reduces nature to the “mere objectivity” of an inert surface; equal-
izes qualitative differences by asserting general fungibility and calculabil-
ity; distances the viewing subject from earthbound objects, establishing
its mastery over them; and constructs a framework for total knowledge,
which curves back on itself in a global rotundity (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002, 3–42). Admittedly, Horkheimer and Adorno write of the
“fully enlightened earth” and the “disenchantment of the world” with-
out explicitly theorizing the spatialities of enlightenment. Extrapolating
from their analysis, however, we would suggest that instrumental ration-
ality reduces both world and earth—the specificity of which we go on
to discuss—to the reified framework of a geometrically conceived globe
(2002, 3).
Today, advertising and media especially are saturated by figures of
the global, ranging from photographs of the Earth taken from space-
craft or its moon, through daily references to “globalization” or
“global issues” in news broadcasting, to the global logos that brand
transnational corporations. As Bronislaw Szerszynski has argued, such
unobtrusive forms of global imagining have permeated quotidian cul-
ture so thoroughly in recent decades as to “constitute an unremarked,
all-pervasive background to people’s lives … with the potential to
reshape their sense of belonging” (2005, 166). Szerszynski uses the
term “banal globalism” to refer to the commonplace condition in
which taken-for-granted imaginations of globalization—whether they
relate to finance, environmentalism, news, or tourism—frame iden-
tities and experience in inconspicuous ways that escape conscious
reflection (Szerszynski 2005, 165–167).2 It is important to empha-
size that Szerszynski does not invoke banality in the evaluative sense
of inconsequential or trite. Rather, banality here signals how global
images are so pervasive and familiar in contemporary culture as to
evade scrutiny. While some banal global images are much more
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

idiosyncratic than their commonplace character might first suggest

(Ferdinand 2018b), most reinforce dominant ways of construing
globalization and inhabiting the global. In the imagination of glo-
bality thus reproduced, the Earth is conceived as a neoliberal globe
of frictionless circulation through which flows of commodities, com-
munications, and communities move unimpeded by the constraints
of time and geography; and as a calculable geode, available to meas-
urement, management, and manipulation. In a manner consonant
with Horkheimer and Adorno’s vision of calamitous totality, critical
scholarship has tended to emphasize the deleterious effects of this
now pervasive imagination of the global. As we go on to demonstrate
below, critics have variously argued that dominant global imaginations
estrange people from place; reduce the planet’s ecological and cultural
diversity to an objectified, homogenous system; occasion visions of
imperial conquest and mastery; and expedite the exploitation of peo-
ples and environments.
Against this backdrop, Other Globes sets out to show how the pre-
vailing vision of the capitalist and calculable globe represents only one
among many possible ways in which the global has been—and might
be—articulated. Although the volume draws extensively on scholarship
critical of dominant global discourses, our intention is less to enlarge this
critical mass than to highlight the abundance and variety of alternative
imaginations of globalization and the global. Whether before the histor-
ical ascendance of the capitalist and calculable globe in the early modern
period or at its fringes today, cultural practice brims with different, imag-
inative ways of narrating and representing the global. In the contempo-
rary context of intensive capitalist globalization, ruthless geopolitics, and
unabated environmental exploitation, these various “other globes” offer
paths for thinking beyond the globality we have—paradigms for alter-
native relations among people, polities, and the planet. Accordingly, the
chapters in this volume present a collection of case studies of diverse cul-
tural imaginations of the globe, the earth, the world, and the planet in
works of art, literature, performance, film, and music, emphasizing how
they emerge or can be mobilized as counterpoints to hegemonic rep-
resentations of globes and globalization. Derived from, among others,
the disparate historical and cultural contexts of the Holy Roman Empire
(Hess); late Medieval Brabant (Ferdinand); the colonial and postcolonial
4 S. FERDINAND ET AL.

Philippines (Flores; Villaescusa-Illán); early twentieth-century Britain

(Parsons); contemporary Puerto Rico (Hitchcock); occupied Palestine
(Hitchcock); postcolonial South Africa (Ashcroft) and Chile (Radisoglu);
and California (Tola), these alternative articulations of the global often
contradict one another. Nonetheless, their diversity emphasizes how
there is no single, transparent way in which to imagine globalization—no
neutral or natural way to inhabit the global. A renewed cognizance of
the rich multiplicity of global imaginations underlines the contingency
and constructedness of the supposedly fully mapped and spanned mod-
ern globe, and interrupts the cultural work of naturalization through
which dominant imaginations fade into the taken-for-granted back-
ground of everyday life.
The volume collects an archive of qualitatively different ways of con-
ceiving and approaching the global. To avoid establishing new hier-
archies among diverse global imaginations, it is largely organized
chronologically. Though the counter-imaginations analyzed are specific
to each case study and must be grasped on their own terms, overall they
tend to emphasize relationality and heterogeneity, while challenging
detached, dominative, and homogenizing global representations. Besides
showing how they dispel the global’s dominant associations with tran-
scendence, objectivity, and mastery, the contributions underline how
“other globes” are themselves emplaced and entangled in the power and
politics of globalization processes, and participate in shaping them. As a
result, there can be no absolute distinction between dominant and alter-
native global imaginations: hidden complexities may inhabit dominant
global imaginations, while alternative global imaginations may exhibit
forms of ideological reduction.
The remainder of this Introduction is structured as follows. We begin
with a discussion of the divergent meanings of the words “globe,”
“world,” “earth,” and “planet,” highlighting how each preconditions
distinct perceptions of and practices toward what is currently named
“the global.” Subsequently, we explain how the volume situates global
imaginations, describing what we mean by central and peripheral, and
elaborating a genealogy of global imaginations focusing on how the
opposition between dominant and alternative imaginations emerged in
and through modern terrestrial globalism’s rise to hegemony. After sur-
veying some major theoretical critiques of dominant global imaginations,
and explaining how the volume’s contributions relate to them, we close
this Introduction with a chapter outline.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Globe, Earth, World, and Planet

In attending to different cultural imaginations of globalization, this vol-
ume insists from the outset on the importance of the globe embedded in
its very name. Although this may seem obvious, the presence of the globe
in globalization—or, alternatively, the monde in the French mondialisa-
tion and Dutch mondialisering—is seldom reflected upon explicitly. As
W. J. T. Mitchell has written, even when scholars set out to actively scru-
tinize prevalent understandings of globalization, “the general tendency
has been to talk about the global distribution” of its various products,
flows, risks, and rewards, while allowing globalization as an idea—a cul-
turally mediated imagination, grounded in specific “images of the world
and the global as such”—to proceed unexamined (2007, 50, empha-
sis in text). And yet, to speak about globalization, whether extolling its
virtues or bemoaning its consequences, entails grasping and inhabiting
social reality in and through a specific thought-image that is, ultimately,
cartographic and astronomical: the spherical globe—whether measured
and visually mapped, or photographed from afar against a backdrop of
stars and void. If, as Denis Cosgrove has argued, it is from this global
figure “that ideas of globalization draw their expressive and political
force” (2001, ix), then exploring alternative words for the global might
destabilize and reconfigure our ideas of globalization. Accordingly, we will
proceed to offer a partial taxonomy of ostensible synonyms for the globe,
emphasizing their different histories, cultural associations, and social-
political implications. By attending to the notions of globe, earth, world,
and planet, we mean to unpack some of the alternative conceptual bases
through which the case studies in this volume approach globalization
processes.
The modern word globe denotes “a spherical or rounded body”;
“the earth” itself; or “a spherical representation of the earth” (OED).
It derives from the classical Latin globus, which means the “sphere of
a celestial object,” but also a “dense mass,” such as a “closely packed
throng of soldiers” (OED).3 Since antiquity, the globe has been asso-
ciated with the arts of geometry and metaphysical reflection (Sloterdijk
2014, 13–43). As the “most geometrically perfect three-dimensional
body,” it was a key conceptual figure in Neoplatonic thought, for which
the globe signified the “incorruptible perfection of mathematical rela-
tions and forms” held to lie behind given appearances (Cosgrove 2001,
10). As such, the globe is abstract, detached, and artificial. It emphasizes
6 S. FERDINAND ET AL.

“volume and surface over material constitution”; is observed from with-

out by a distant calculative gaze; and reduces environmental diversity to
geometrical regularity (Cosgrove 2001, 8). The globe has also signified
territorial dominion. An especially influential early example is the medi-
eval and early modern iconography of the globus cruciger: a globe, often
trisected to connote the three continents known to medieval European
cultures, to which a Christian cross is affixed (Cosgrove 2001, 10–11;
Sloterdijk 2014, 53–57). In its metaphysical mode, then, the globe is
associated with an impulse to transcend and rationalize the given world.
In its political mode, it signifies unbounded dominion. Together, these
connotations indicate a mastering, “implicitly imperial” vision of the
globe as a “geometric surface to be explored and mapped, inscribed with
content, knowledge, and authority” (Cosgrove 2001, 15–16).
Although often used interchangeably with globe, the term earth has
a very different cultural significance. Notions of the globe emphasize
dimensionality; earth, in contrast, connotes materiality and substantial-
ity. It names both “the planet Earth” (OED) and the “nourishing, fer-
tile and fecund substance … which covers its surface” (Mitchell 2007,
54). Earth denotes the substance common to different terrestrial scales,
encompassing both planetary immensity and the ground beneath one’s
feet. It figures centrally across historical understandings of physics, from
the five agents (wu xing) of ancient Chinese philosophy to the four ele-
ments of Platonic and Aristotelian thought. A feminine noun in Germanic
and Latin languages, earth has been personified or referred to as a woman
in numerous cultures. As Miriam Tola shows in her contribution to this
volume, in patriarchal contexts, such imaginations of earth reduce wom-
en’s possible social roles to a “natural” realm of earthly fertility, imma-
nence, and reproduction, in contrast to the masculine, historical space
of the global. Above all, writes Cosgrove, “Earth is organic” (2001, 7).
Whereas the globe is associated with artificiality and geometrical order,
earth, as the nourishing soil of agriculture and horticulture, “denotes
rootedness, nurture, and dwelling for living things: earth is the ground
from which life springs, is lived, and returns at death” (Cosgrove 2001,
7). Through burial practices and cultural modes of being toward buried
ancestors, as Robert Pogue Harrison has emphasized, the earth becomes
a medium through which cultural legacies are interred and retrieved—or
“unearthed” (2003, x–xi). If the globe implies extraterrestrial detach-
ment, for Harrison the earth provides the “humic foundations” in the
absence of which notions of “humanity” lose their meaning (2003, x).
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Until the eighteenth century, the Latin mundus was often used to
signify totality: the “agglomeration of all totality of existent things”
(Leibniz, qtd. in David 2014, 1220). Since then, however, that mean-
ing has been taken up by universe, with world dissociated into different
meanings. In current usage, world refers to “the earth and everything on
it, the globe,” but also to a “state or realm of human existence on earth”
(OED). As such, it is a distinctly more anthropocentric and conceptual
term than earth, which connotes the organic reciprocity of life as such.
“Consciousness alone can constitute the world,” writes Cosgrove, for
whom “world implies cognition and agency” (2001, 7). A world indi-
cates a domain of human activity in its spatial and experiential dimen-
sions. It can form at individual, collective, and universal scales. We speak
of someone being in “their own world”; entering the “business world”;
or fret that “the whole world knows.” A world’s geographical dimension
does not necessarily coincide with the entire physical earth, but rather
indicates the scope of particular cultural domains. In foregrounding the
domain of lived experience, world has been an important concept in phe-
nomenology and existential philosophy.4 For Martin Heidegger, world
was among the three “fundamental concepts of metaphysics” (1995,
title). In his famous analysis of an ancient Greek temple, Heidegger
defines world as the “open relational context” of a “historical people”
(1992, 167). It is the existential space in which a given culture’s under-
standing of existence unfolds: “a horizon of disclosure” or “horizon of
intelligibility” within the bounds of which particular beings take on par-
ticular purposes and meanings, and possibilities for relating to them are
determined (Young 2001, 23, 104). This Heideggerian concept of world
stands in stark contrast with earth, for a world establishes what the earth
is and means, and the possible ways of relating to it, in the first place. As
such, this notion of world opens up a wider taxonomy, in that various
cultural worlds might each contain further specific ways of naming the
global.5
Two senses of worldliness are also pertinent to this volume. The first
has to do with cosmopolitanism. To say that a person is worldly is to
suggest that they have experience of, or familiarity with, wide-ranging
cultural contexts, and have adopted variously flexible, realistic, or open-
minded attitudes as a result. To be worldly in this sense—to “know the
world” or the “ways of the world”—may also connote “sexual experi-
ence, a certain fleshy materialism” (David 2014, 1221). The second
sense relates to Christianity, which, in its several traditions, has opposed
8 S. FERDINAND ET AL.

a transcendental and eternal heavenly realm to all that is temporal, fallen,

appetitive, and profane—in a word, all that is worldly. Here, the worldly
“takes on a negative connotation, even one of damnation” (David 2014,
1218). Worldliness in this sense aligns closely with the idea of the mun-
dane; as Mitchell points out, this implies that the French mondialisation
comes “close to equating globalization with an epidemic of boredom
and inanity” (2007, 53).6
Set in the context of extraterrestrial space, the world, earth, or globe
becomes a planet, derived from the ancient Greek word for “wanderer”
(OED). A cosmic body among innumerable others in a largely barren
and ancient universe, the planet is not constructed, controlled, and con-
templated like a globe: it preceded (and will succeed) human life by
many billions of years. Unlike a world, the planet exceeds the domain
of specifically human experience and meaning. Given the planet’s resist-
ance to anthropocentrism and control, concepts of “planetarity” or “the
planetary” have been mobilized as conceptual alternatives to globality
and the global. Although Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, in their
survey of the planetary “structure of awareness” in culture and theory,
indicate diverse precedents and influences for the contemporary “plan-
etary turn” (2015, xi), work by the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak remains its central point of reference.7
Spivak emphasizes how “the ‘global’ notion allows us to think that we
can aim to control globality,” while “planetarity … is not susceptible to
the subject’s grasp” (2014, 1223). Her concept of planetarity remains
explorative; the “motif of the planet,” as Satoshi Ukai picturesquely puts
it, “like a so-called comet … cast a streak of light through [Spivak’s]
works and then vanished” (2017, 27). Still, Spivak’s remarks on planeta-
rity, above all in Death of a Discipline (2003), have become touchstones
across contemporary reconsiderations of the global:

I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the impo-

sition of the same system of exchange everywhere. In the grillwork of
electronic capital, we achieve that abstract ball covered in latitudes and
longitudes, cut by vertical lines, once the equator and the tropics and
so on, now drawn by the requirements of Geographical Information
Systems. … The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows
us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species
of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.
(2003, 72)
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

To be human is to be intended towards the other. We provide for ourselves

transcendental figurations of what we think is the origin of this animating
gift: mother, nation, god, nature. These are names of alterity, some more
radical than others. Planet thought opens up to embrace an inexhaustible
taxonomy of such names. (2003, 73)

Several aspects of Spivak’s formulation warrant emphasis in introduc-

ing this volume.8 First, she conceives the planetary in opposition to the
distance and disengagement imputed to global overviews: even as we
are confronted by the planet’s alterity, its startling strangeness, humans
inhabit and participate in it as “planetary creatures” (Spivak 1999,
46).9 Against the detached modern globe’s attempted severing of all
earthly ties, then, planetary thought is distinguished by a heightened
consciousness of relationality, a recognition of our thrownness among
“inexhaustible” species of planetary difference. It is on the basis of this
relationality that Elias and Moraru write that planetarity’s “preeminent
thrust is ethical” (2015, xii). Second, the planetary indicates an alter-
native subjective stance toward beings and the world. In a 2006 essay,
Spivak conveys humanity’s planetary condition by quoting the musi-
cian Laurie Anderson, for whom “the scale of space” invites “thinking
about human beings and what worms we are” (108). We are, Spivak
expands elsewhere, “a glitch/blip on the cycle that pushes up the dai-
sies” (2012, 495). In his analysis of interplanetary travel in H. G. Wells’s
First Men in the Moon in this volume, Cóilín Parsons reflects at length
on this “humbling” of humanity before the planetary. In Wells’s imagi-
nation of space travel, Parsons demonstrates, imperial attitudes of global
mastery and Apollonian composure disintegrate before the disorienting,
vertiginous spatialities and undifferentiated temporalities of the planetary
scale. Third, Spivak suggests that planetarity “is perhaps best imagined
from the precapitalist cultures of the planet,” yet does not develop the
thought (2003, 101). Other Globes picks up this orphaned suggestion,
which resonates complexly with Peter Hess’s discussion of reactions
to the onset of capitalist globalization in the sixteenth-century Holy
Roman Empire; Simon Ferdinand’s analysis of late medieval paintings by
Hieronymus Bosch, which depict the created world “from within”; and
Patrick Flores’s account of Filipino naturalesa.
In discriminating different ways of naming the global, this discussion
has shown how there is no neutral terminology with which to refer to
the object of the narratives and representations explored in this volume.
10 S. FERDINAND ET AL.

All of the available terms—globe, earth, world, planet—are laden with

specific cultural associations and historical baggage. Thus, although in
introducing this volume we refer to “global” imaginations, and to the
“earth” as their object, we do so under erasure, acknowledging how
these terms are differently constituted, mediated, and contested by the
narratives and representations discussed in the contributions.

Situating Global Imaginations

In focusing on past and peripheral global imaginations, the contributions
to this volume not only attend to visions of the global, but also reflect on
how these visions are positioned within a global field of shifting politi-
cal fortunes and cultural hegemonies. This emphasis on the situatedness
of global imaginations dispels the aura of transcendence and objectivity
that often surrounds global views. Visions and discourses that imagine
the whole Earth from an unidentifiable perspective are an extreme exam-
ple of what Donna Haraway has influentially termed the “God’s eye
trick” of “seeing everything from nowhere” (1988, 581). Through this
rhetorical strategy, masculinist discourses of control claim to rise above
the distorting effects of value-laden earthbound vantage points and sub-
ject positions, purportedly being able to fully access, grasp, and manip-
ulate situated objects. This same trick is played by global views, which
assume the “appearance of worldless neutrality, purged of all residues
of situation and subjectivity” (Ferdinand 2019, n.p.). The intellectual
historian Lorraine Daston has termed this denial of positionality “aper-
spectival objectivity,” showing how it emerged with the development of
an international scientific community in the nineteenth century (1992,
599). Aperspectival objectivity, Daston explains, was constructed around
the elimination of contextual influences and personal characteristics from
experimental inquiry, such that scientists came to see the knowledge they
produced as escaping perspective, context, and embodiment altogether.
Although it is now possible to see the whole earth from spacecraft,
throughout history, imaginations of the earth seen from an unmarked,
seemingly impersonal, and contextless extraterrestrial gaze have been cul-
turally associated with fantasies of a “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986;
see also Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, 62–63).
Critical feminist standpoint theory has mounted a thoroughgoing
critique of the “God’s eye trick” or “view from nowhere” evoked by
modern representations of the globe. In allowing, as Marianne Janack
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

puts it, “the views of some-people-in-particular” to pass as “the view of

no-one-in-particular,” the construction of a positionality amounts to a
power-laden rhetorical strategy, endowing some knowledge claims with
(false) epistemic authority over others (2002, 273). Other Globes extends
standpoint theory’s critique of the rhetorics of objectivity and insist-
ence on the “radical historical contingency of all knowledge claims and
knowing subjects” (Haraway 1988, 579) to the study of global imagi-
nations. By emphasizing the situatedness of global discourses, our aim
is to dismantle received epistemological hierarchies through which cap-
italist and colonial, masculinist and measurable articulations of the
global have prevailed over other imaginations, historically and today.
This focus on grounding ostensibly transcendental global imaginations
comes across strongly in Grzegorz Czemiel’s contribution to this vol-
ume, which explores new “speculative cartographies” as alternatives to
detached global visions. Drawing on the work of the ecocritic Timothy
Clark, Czemiel emphasizes how extraterrestrial views, even though they
look back on the Earth from geostationary orbits or still greater dis-
tances, can never truly “server the cords”—material, cultural, political—
connecting them to earthbound institutions, concerns, and perspectives.
“No matter from how far away or ‘high up’ it is perceived or imagined,”
writes Clark, the Earth “is always something we remain ‘inside’ and
cannot genuinely perceive from elsewhere” (2015, 33). In insisting on
the dependency of global views on terrestrial institutions and frames of
understanding, Czemiel and Clark undercut the basis of their association
with a transcendent, unmarked “outside.”
Even when people physically escape earth’s gravitational pull through
spaceflight, they remain caught ineluctability within the intellectual force
field of earthbound cultural imaginations. The pathos of this inescapabil-
ity is explored in this volume in Alexis Radisoglou’s analysis of planetary
visions in Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, which explore traditions
and practices of astronomy in the deserts of northern Chile. As the films
trace the astronomers’ ostensibly transcendental narrations of star for-
mation and intergalactic distances, Guzman’s presentation of planeta-
rity becomes inexorably bound up with Chile’s all-too earthly histories
of colonialism and dictatorship. Calcium released from exploding stars
becomes the bones of “the disappeared;” the crystal-blue ocean water,
which, in the image of earth seen from space, we admire as a miraculous
and precious force for life, is also the medium that first brought colo-
nizers to Chile and where the Pinochet regime disposed of its victims.
12 S. FERDINAND ET AL.

“The planetary,” Radisoglou writes, offers “no escape from the exigen-
cies of history” (this volume).
The work of situating global imaginations in sociohistorical contexts
has a double significance in this volume. First, it annuls received hier-
archies among global imaginations, undercutting the way certain con-
ceptions of the global have been valorized, often on account of their
imputed objectivity, and prompting a reappraisal of the myriad narratives
and representations disprivileged because of their perceived partiality
or parochialism. Second, it emphasizes that, far from being immaterial
abstractions, the ways in which the global has been imagined are impli-
cated and entangled in the very globalizing processes they represent or
describe. In particular, several contributions to this volume highlight
how different ways of perceiving, depicting, and narrating the global
are imbricated in histories of capitalism and colonialism, which have also
played a crucial role in drawing center–periphery distinctions. Significant
here is Bill Ashcroft’s contribution, which shows how African literatures
have narrated global connections and spaces by describing all-too earth-
bound processes of diaspora, migration, and enslavement. It is precisely
because of its status as the exploited periphery of colonial empires that
Africa has played a constitutive role in sustaining the capitalist world sys-
tem and global modernity.
At this point, it is important to pin down what we mean by “periph-
erality” in the context of shifting historical imaginations of the global.
Numerous critics have problematized this loaded term. Some, like
Katherine McKittrick, argue that, in calling on a spatial metaphor “to
name difference” in the field of social relations, discourses on periph-
erality and marginality are often inattentive to “actual geographic
displacements”—“material realities of spaces unheard, silenced, and
erased” that exist outside a metaphorical register (2006, 57–56). Others
suggest that critical references to peripherality might reproduce hier-
archical designations of power and cultural value. Denis Cosgrove, for
example, writes that “core and periphery … depended upon an imperial
and Eurocentric vision” (2001, 15). Still, while we would agree that it is
of paramount importance to contest the dubious justifications adduced
by colonial powers to posit and rationalize their centrality, which have
included protestations of ethnic superiority and civilizing missions, the
language of centrality and peripherality remains indispensable in grasp-
ing the power relations that inhere between different global imagina-
tions: “to reject the terminology [of centers and peripheries] as outdated
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 2. Placoid Scale.[45]

3. Ctenoid Scale; as sole or

perch.[46]
 4. Cycloid Scale; as herring.[47]

1. Heterocercal.

The heterocercal fish, it will be seen, are unequally lobed, that is,
the spinal vertebræ are prolonged into the upper lobe of the tail, as
seen in the shark, and of which our own dog-fish is an example;
while the homocercal fish are equally lobed, and the spine does not
extend into either.
The fossil fish of the old red sandstone belong almost, if not
entirely, to the classes of fish that have ganoid or placoid scales, and
heterocercal tails; and of these fish we will now say a few words of
the four most remarkable specimens of the one thousand and
upwards fossil species that have been discovered, and which can only
be known familiarly by accomplished geologists in the ichthyolite
department.
1. Here is a drawing of the Cephalaspis,[48] or buckler-headed fish.
What an extraordinary looking creature this is! Like the crescent
 shape of a saddler’s knife without
the handle—broad and flat, with
points on each side running
down, ever fixed in warlike
attitude against its enemies—it
reminds one of an extinct
trilobite, and of a living sole or
ray, at the same time; and one
can easily fancy how hard it must
have been for its ancient foes to
swallow down so singular and so
knife-like looking a creature. This
is one of the curious organisms of
old life discovered in Cromarty,
Herefordshire, and in Russia, the
original of which, restored in the
2. Homocercal. drawing, seldom if ever exceeded
seven inches.
Let us look now at another
curiosity from the same quarter.
2. Here is a drawing of the
Coccosteus,[49] or berry-boned
fish. This creature is equally
singular with his long extinct
neighbour. Hugh Miller’s
description is the best, and as he
was its discoverer, let us give it.
“The figure of the Coccosteus I
would compare to a boy’s kite;
there is a rounded head, a
triangular body, a long tail 3. Homocercal.
attached to the apex of the
triangle, and arms thin and
rounded where they attach to the body, and spreading out towards
their termination, like the ancient one-sided shovel which we see
sculptured on old tombstones, or the rudder of an ancient galley. A
ring of plates, like the ring-stones of an arch, runs along what we
may call the hoop of the kite. The form of the key-stone plate is
perfect; the shapes of the others
are elegantly varied, as if for
ornament; and what would be
otherwise the opening of the arch
is filled up with one large plate of
an outline singularly elegant.”[50]
 3. Above is the Pterichthys,[51] or winged fish. We have here a fish
more strikingly different to any existing species than either of the
other two just passed under review. “Imagine,” says Miller, “the
figure of a man rudely drawn in black on a grey ground; the head cut
off by the shoulders; the arms spread at full, as in the attitude of
swimming; the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from
the chest downwards; one of the legs cut away at the hip-joint; the
other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directly in the centre of
the figure, which it seems to support. Such, at the first glance, is the
appearance of the fossil.”[52]
We will now turn to the fourth and last of the singular fishes of this
formation.
 4. The Osteolepis,[53] or bony scaled fish. Here we have in the old
red sandstone the first perfect specimen of a fish with pectoral,
abdominal, and caudal fins, ending as the others do in the
heterocercal tail. The vertebral column seems to have run on to well-
nigh the extremity of the caudal fin, which we find developed chiefly
on the under side. The tail was a one-sided tail. Take into account
with these peculiarities such as the naked skull, jaws, and operculum,
[54]
the naked and thickly set rays, and the unequally lobed condition
of tail, a body covered with scales that glitter like sheets of mica, and
assume, according to their position, the parallelogramical,
rhomboidal, angular, or polygonal form, a lateral line raised, not
depressed, a raised bar on the inner or bony side of the scales, which,
like the doubled up end of a tile, seems to have served the purpose of
fastening them in their places, a general clustering of alternate fins
towards the tail—and the tout ensemble must surely impart to the
reader the idea of a very singular little fish.[55]
Most hasty and superficial is this glance through the wonders of
the old red sandstone. On the economic uses of this formation, as
tile-stones and paving-stones, we need not dwell; apart from this,
these singular inhabitants of the seas of past ages, the mud of which,
elevated and hardened, has become solid rock, tell us stories of that
long since ancient time to which no poetry could do justice. Carried
away from the present into those remote eras, our minds revel in the
realization of scenery and inhabitants, of which now we possess only
the fossil pictures. At the British Museum, we gaze with feelings
approaching to repulsion on the stiff and unnatural forms of
Egyptian mummies, but with what feelings of profound wonder do
we look on these small fishes, so numerous that the relics of them,
found in the Orkneys, may be carried away by cartloads! No number
of creations can exhaust God, for in Him all fulness dwelleth. The
God in whom we now live, and move, and have our being, is the same
God who gave to these pre-Adamite fish their marvellous structures,
minutely but fearfully and wonderfully made, and who, when their
joy of life and functions of life had ceased, consigned them to a calm
and peaceful grave. He is the same God who now upholds all things
by the word of his power, and whom we desire to honour by the
attentive and reverent perusal of his manifold works. We are
tautologists; we say and do the same thing over and over again. God
never repeats himself: each successive creation—and how many,
extending through countless ages, does geology disclose!—only
reveals some new aspect of wisdom, love, and beneficence. To the
mind that cannot repose in God, we say, Study God, in his works and
in his word; yea, come back to this remote sandstone era and ask of
the “fishes, and they shall declare unto thee” the might and majesty,
the skill and contrivance of the Almighty; and though you and I were
not there, nor had Adam yet trod this blessed earth,—
“Think not, though men were none,
That heaven could want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual creatures walked the earth,
And these with ceaseless praise His works beheld.”
 CHAPTER VI.
THE CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM.

“As for the earth, out of it cometh bread, and under it is turned up as it were
fire.”—Job.

Suppose this lump of coal could speak, what would it say? Would it
not say something like this: “To get me up out of the earth involves
dirt, danger, slush, and much tallow-candle; but now you have me,
let me tell you my story, for though black I am comely, and but for
me—but I anticipate. Now and then I make a dust in your libraries,
and inadvertently shoot out sparks and firestones, but nevertheless I
am of more use to man than the old granite or the proudest Parian
marble; you may get a long way in philosophy, but you will never get
beyond coal. I am the real Koh-i-noor of the British empire; and
though I can’t, like my namesake, put on a white dress, I am
nevertheless worth the soiling of your whitest gloves. Chemistry
makes no discoveries without me: I light the fire of the laboratory,
and furnish man with the means of every crucial test. Civilization
wants me every day on land and sea, and though in one sense my
labours end in smoke, in another they end in commerce, progress,
national brotherhood, and interchanging productions of every clime.
The poor student needs me, for I light his lamp, warm his feet, and
cook his food while he is doing sweat-of-brain work for others. And
best of all, the poor man is a rich man when he has me; he knows
that next of kin to good food is good fuel, and man by my help is
making such progress, that the day will come when every man will sit
by his own blazing fire, instead of seeking joy elsewhere amidst false
and pernicious excitements.”
Something like this our friend Coal would be sure to say; and that
Coal may not complain of any aloofness on our parts, let us proceed
to an examination of the carboniferous system.
“’Tis very pregnant,
The jewel that we find, we stoop and take it,
Because we see it; but what we do not see,
We tread upon, and never think of it.”
Measure for Measure.

The carboniferous system is not all coal; underlying, and often

overlying, the coal measures, for the most part, is the mountain
limestone, a formation pre-eminently rich in marine fossils. During
the tremendous convulsions experienced by the earth immediately
after the deposition of the old red sandstone, a vast sea of lime, thick,
muddy, and hot, seems to have been poured out over a large portion
of the British islands and elsewhere. This flow of liquid lime covered
and encased many then existing animals, and we now find it full of
fossils of the crinoidean family, a few molluscs, and traces of fish. We
shall not, however, stay to examine these now, as we shall meet with
them again in the Oolite; our attention will be limited to that part of
the carboniferous system which includes only the coal measures,
properly so called.
Coal is a vegetable that, by chemical change and by mechanical
pressure, has become a bituminous mineral; and this will render it
needful to say a word or two on the ancient vegetable kingdom. The
vast quantities[56] of remains of leaves, ferns, and stems of trees,
found in the coal measures, are not in themselves evidence sufficient
of the vegetable origin of coal; we arrive at that conclusion in
consequence of the researches of modern philosophers, who having
applied the powers of the microscope to the internal structure of
coal, have discovered the cellular and reticular construction of
vegetable life beautifully preserved, and thus previous convictions
have become certainties. The examination of the ancient vegetable
kingdom is, however, attended with much difficulty, in consequence
of the total destruction in most cases of the stems and trunks of the
plants, and the entire absence, in consequence of pressure, of all
fructification on the fronds of the ferns. If we take an existing species
of fern, say the rare and delicate “maiden-hair fern,”[57] one of the
smallest and most elegant ferns of England, we find the fructification
very distinct on the under side, and the different methods in which
this fructification is arranged is now the principal guide in the
classification of ferns. But if we take a fossil fern, say the pecopteris,
found in the coal measures, we shall see that there has been so much
dislocation and crushing, that all appearance of seed-vessels has
disappeared. The following sketch will explain this.

EXTINCT FERN, AND MAIDEN-HAIR FERN.

“Nothing,” says Professor Ansted, “however, is more certain than

that all coal was once vegetable; for in most cases the woody
structure may be detected under the microscope, and this, if not in
the coal in its ordinary state, at least in the burnt ashes which remain
after it has been exposed to the action of heat, and has lost its
bituminous and semi-crystalline character. This has been too well
and too frequently proved by actual experiment to require more than
the mere statement of the fact.” And here let us say a few words,
which to a few perhaps may have the charm of novelty, about the
economic history of coal; for as Cowper says that the first curse,
“labour,” has, by God’s blessing on it, been “softened into mercy,” so
do we add also, in his words, heartily subscribing to their truth,—
“Thus studied, used, and consecrated thus,
On earth what is, seems formed indeed for us;
Not as the plaything of a froward child,
Fretful unless diverted and beguiled;
But as scale, by which the soul ascends
From mighty means to more important ends;
Securely, though by steps but rarely trod,
Mounts from inferior beings up to God;
And sees, by no fallacious light or dim,
Earth made for man, and man himself for Him.”

How long coal has been known and used, we cannot certainly tell,
but a writer in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia states that the first
mention of coal is in the pages of one Theophrastus, who was, it
seems, a pupil of Aristotle. He says, “Those fossil substances that are
called coals,” (Greek, ἄνθραξ) “and are broken for use, are earthy;
they kindle, however, and burn like wood coals; they are found in
Liguria and in the way to Olympias over the mountains, and are used
by the smiths.” Cæsar, although he speaks of the metals of the British
isles, does not once mention its coal; but it seems more than likely
that it was both known and used by the Romans during their
occupation of Britain. Horsley, in his “Britannia Romana,” says of
Benwell, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne, “There was a coalry not
far from this place, which is judged by those who are best skilled in
such affairs to have been wrought by the Romans; and, in digging up
the foundations of one of the Roman walled cities, coal cinders very
large were dug up, which glowed in the fire like other coal cinders,
and were not to be known from them when taken up.”
During the time of the Saxons, we find ourselves on less doubtful
ground. In a grant made to the monks of Peterborough Abbey for one
night’s annual entertainment, those good old souls had, we find, “ten
vessels of Welsh ale, two vessels of common ale, sixty cartloads of
wood, and twelve cartloads of fossil coal,” (carbonum fossilium.)
The Danes had so much fighting on hand, that they troubled
themselves neither with coal nor civilization; and we know little of
our English diamond until we come to Henry the Third’s reign,
when, in 1239, a charter was granted to the inhabitants of Newcastle-
on-Tyne to dig coals, and we find the coal called for the first time
“carbo maris,” or sea-coal, a term retained through all the
succeeding centuries. About this time chimneys came into fashion.
As long as people burnt wood they scarcely needed chimneys, but
coal introduced chimneys, to say nothing of steamboats and
railroads. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who at that time used to
reside alternately at Croydon and at Lambeth, had by royal
permission thirty cartloads of “sea-borne coal” annually delivered at
his archiepiscopal palace, because, says the historian, “for his own
private use in his own chamber he now had the convenience of
chimneys.”
The smoke nuisance of that day deserves a passing notice. Smoke
was then with many a grand luxury. Old Hollingshed says, “Now we
have many chimneys, yet our tenderlings do complain of rheums,
and catarrhs, and poses. Once we had nought but rere-doses,[58] and
our heads did never ake. For the smoke of those days was a good
hardening for the house, and a far better medicine to keep the good
man and his family from the quack or the pose, with which then very
few were acquainted. There are old men yet dwelling in the village
where I remain, who have noted how the multitude of chimneys do
increase, whereas in their young days, there was not above two or
three, if so many, in some uplandish towns of the realm, and
peradventure in the manor places of some great lords; but each one
made his fire against a rere-dose in the hall, where he dined and
dressed his meat. But when our houses were built of willow, then we
had oaken men; but now that our houses are made of oak, our men
are not only become willow, but a great many altogether men of
straw, which is a sore alteration.”
Leaving this digression, let us try and get a bird’s-eye view of the
coal-fields of the British Isles. If we commence in Devonshire, we
find there the Devonian culms, or Bovey Tracey coal, lying near the
surface of the ground, and of little except local use. Crossing over the
Bristol Channel, we come into Pembrokeshire, to the Welsh basin,
remarkable because thence we mostly get our anthracite coal. Thence
we pass on to the Derbyshire coal-fields, that go with little
interruption into Scotland, averaging 200 miles in length, and about
40 in width,—once mighty tropical swamps, jungles, and forests, now
become chief minerals of commerce. Included in this last immense
field is the great Newcastle coal district, the most celebrated of any,
supplying almost all the south of England, and nearly all London,
with their best coals; and the Scotch carboniferous system,
celebrated for its numerous fossils, and for its general base of old red
sandstone. In addition to which there is the Irish carboniferous
system, occupying as much as 1,000 square miles, but of an inferior
quality, and not likely to be of any great economical importance.
In the words of Professor Ansted, we add: “This account of the
coal-beds gives a very imperfect notion of the quantity of vegetable
matter required to form them; and, on the other hand, the rate of
increase of vegetables, and the quantity annually brought down by
some great rivers both of the eastern and western continents, is
beyond all measure greater than is the case in our drier and colder
climates. Certain kinds of trees which contributed largely to the
formation of the coal, seem to have been almost entirely succulent,[59]
and capable of being squeezed into a small compass during partial
decomposition. This squeezing process must have been conducted on
a grand scale, and each bed in succession was probably soon covered
up by muddy and sandy accumulations, now alternating with the
coal in the form of shale and gritstone. Sometimes the trunks of trees
caught in the mud would be retained in a slanting or nearly vertical
position, while the sands were accumulating around them;
sometimes the whole would be quietly buried, and soon cease to
exhibit any external marks of vegetable origin.”[60]
There are various kinds of coal on which we may bestow a few
words. There is anthracite, or non-bituminous coal, and which,
therefore, burns without flame or smoke, and is extensively used in
malting; and sea-coal, which is highly bituminous, and which gives
forth so much flame and smoke, that in the good old times of 1306,
Parliament forbad its use in London by fine and by demolition of all
furnaces in which it was burnt, because “this coal did corrupt the air
with its great smoke and stink;” and cannel-coal, the etymology of
which, they say, is firm the word candle, because in many parts of
Lancashire the poor use it in place of oil or tallow for lights; and jet,
sometimes called black amber, which in France employs about 1,200
men in one district, in making earrings, rosaries, and other
ornaments; and last of all, there is wood passing into coal called
lignite, found only in the Devonshire culms.
Having thus glanced at the natural history and varieties of coal, we
may here try and realize the flora of the carboniferous era. An
examination of the fossils of this period enables us to come to
undoubted conclusions concerning the trees and plants of that era,
so that it is no mere dream to look upon a picture like the following,
and see in it a landscape of the coal-forming time of the British
islands.

FLORA OF THE COAL MEASURES RESTORED.

The sun then poured down his golden beams of heat and light, and
a tropical climate prevailed in our now cold and humid England. The
mountain tops were gilded with his rays; a vast ocean studded with
islands, and these crowned with gigantic palms and ferns, then
covered our northern hemisphere. In that ocean but few fish were to
be found, though many rare molluscous animals swam to and fro,
enjoying their brief term of life, and discharging all their appropriate
functions. Mountain streams discharged their muddy waters into
this ocean, leaving along their margin course broken trees,
vegetables, grasses and ferns. The giant Lepidodendron looked like a
monarch of the ancient world, while around him smaller ferns, vying
with each other in beauty and grace, grew, “first the blade” and then
the ripened frond, until, in obedience to the great law of organic life,
they died and decayed, and became material for the coming man’s
future use. But amidst all this prodigal luxuriousness of the vegetable
world, there appears to have been neither bird nor beast to break the
monotony of the scene; all was silent as the grave—rank, moist
verdure below; magnificent ferns and palms above, and the stillness
of death on every side.[61]
 Let us, however, glance at the principal ferns, whose fossil remains
we have often found at the mouth of many a coalpit thrown out
among the waste. The uncouth names given to them, uncouth only in
appearance, must not deter the reader from his acquaintance with
their peculiarities; for are not the names of botanical science almost,
if not quite, as repellent at first? This star-shaped beauty, (1) the
asterophyllite, (from aster, a star, and phyllon, a leaf,) was a
common one; this (2) is the sphenopteris (from sphēn, a wedge, and
pteron, a wing), so named from a fancied resemblance of the petals
of the frond to a wedge; the next (3) is the pecopteris (from pekos, a
comb, and pteron, a wing), from a resemblance of the frond to the
teeth of a comb; the next (4) is the odontopteris (from odous, a
tooth, and pteron, a wing), and in this the frond is something like the
jaws of a shark bound together by a central stem, from which they
diverge; and the last (5), our favourite, is the neuropteris (from
neuros, a nerve, and pteron, a wing), on account of the exquisite
beauty with which the fibres, like nerves, distribute themselves.
“Besides the ferns, then growing to a great size, there were other
plants whose modern representatives are uniformly small; but as the
resemblance in this case is simply one of general form, and the great
majority of other trees seem to possess no living type to which they
can be referred, it is by no means impossible that these also may be
completely lost. One example of them is seen in a plant, fragments of
which are extremely common in the coal measures, and which has
been called calamite.[62] The remains of calamites consist of jointed
fragments, which were originally cylindrical, but are now almost
always crushed and flattened. They resemble very closely in general
appearance the common jointed reed, growing in marshes, and
called equisetum, or mare’s tail; but instead of being confined to a
small size, they would seem to have formed trees, having a stem
more than a foot in diameter, and jointed branches and leaves of
similar gigantic proportions. They were evidently soft and succulent,
and very easily crushed. They seem to have grown in great
multitudes near the place where the coal is now accumulated; and
though often broken, they seldom bear marks of having being
transported from a distance.”[63] The fossils of the carboniferous
system here figured we found not long since in the neighbourhood of
Stockport.

CALAMITES.
 CALAMITE.

STIGMARIA FICOIDES.

This chapter on the carboniferous system must not be further

lengthened. We do not aspire to teach the science of geology; we aim
only to impart such a taste for it as shall lead the reader to consult
our master works on this subject, and if we succeed in this humble
but useful aim, our purpose will be fully answered. Only in reference
to the economic uses of coal, we will quote the following, copied, we
believe, from the “Athenæum” some time since, but unfortunately
copied without reference to its original; a lesson for common-place-
book keepers. The writer in speaking of coal-gas says: “The
consumption of gas is enormous. The following statistics give us an
insight into the extent which this branch of industry has attained. In
England 6,000,000 tons of coals are annually employed for the