Arguing that ethnicity and multiculturalism are essential for understanding globalization, Jan Nederveen Pieterse offers one of the first sustained treatments of the reach of these key forces beyond a limited national context. He shows that multiethnicity preceded the nation-state by millennia; but argues that states, feeling the threat to their national identities, seek to control or suppress it. Contemporary multiculturalism, another attempt to regulate multiethnicity, is a work in progress in which dramas of global inequality are played out. This groundbreaking book adopts a kaleidoscopic and comparative-historical perspective that intertwines strands of social science and western and non-western research as a strategy to overcome the disciplinary and regional fragmentation of most discussions. Moving beyond worn notions of ethnicity and multiculturalism, Nederveen Pieterse proposes ethnicities and global multiculture as alternative, wide-angle perspectives on cultural diversity. Global multiculture, he convincingly demonstrates, offers a fresh account of layered cultural dynamics amid accelerated globalization.

"Recommended as a means of stimulating debate in upper-division social science courses that explore questions of identity, class, and power in the postcolonial world." - Multicultural Review

"Pieterse has very effectively analyzed the forces shaping the contemporary world and has connected these dynamic tensions to the past as well as to a rationally and optimistically envisioned future. Here is one of those rare books that scholars in the humanities and the social sciences should read as quickly as possible in order to advance to the next level of scholarly discourse." - European Legacy