This final part of the book is headed ‘prospective conjectures’: as with Part II, the narrative is described as a ‘conjecture’ because the discussion cannot be based upon as sound an evidential grounding as we would wish. In the case of beginnings it is impossible to think that we will ever assemble enough surviving evidence to answer definitively the questions asked, and for futures, the subject of the next chapter, empirics is simply impossible: there can be no evidence on an upcoming world, only extrapolation of the present and theoretical arguments about why such extrapolation will not be. But what of the present? Our present world is dominated by globalization, which is richly researched. It may be surprising that the contemporary globalization of the early twenty-first century is included in conjectures. To be sure today’s macro-social change can be interpreted as a continuation of the narrative describing the modern historical interlude in the last chapter, for instance as Americanization eliding into globalization, but the present can never be that simple.
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