In the future, then, instead of there being one dominant Western modernity (itself, of course, a pluralistic phenomenon), there will be many distinct modernities. It is clear that we have already entered this era of multiple modernities: by the middle of the century we will be firmly ensconced in it. Hitherto, we have lived in a Western-made and Western-dominated world, in which the economic, political and cultural traffic has been overwhelmingly one-directional, from the West to others. That is already beginning to change, becoming a two-way, or more precisely a multi-directional process. An interesting illustration of how the old pecking order is steadily being disrupted, even inverted, can be found in the world of cricket. Formerly, cricket was largely dominated by England, together with two former white settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand. But in 2008 India, which already accounted for around 80 per cent of the game’s revenues, established the Indian Premier League and its eight teams, representing various Indian cities and states, proceeded to sign up many of the world’s best cricketers, much to the chagrin of the English cricket authorities, who have always thought of themselves as the centre of the game. The future of cricket now manifestly belongs on the Indian subcontinent, where the character, flavour and evolution of the game will increasingly be determined. [419] If Manchester United and Liverpool enjoy a global fan base in football, then the likes of Punjab and Chennai may well blaze a similar trail in cricket.
The Age of the West was not only marked by economic and military dominance but by Western ascendancy in more or less every field, from culture and ideas to science and technology, painting and language to sport and medicine. Western hegemony meant anything associated with the West enjoyed a prestige and influence that other cultures did not. White skin colour has been preferred globally – in East Asia too, as we saw earlier in this chapter – because it was synonymous with Western power and wealth. Western-style clothes have been widely adopted for the same reason. English is the global lingua franca because of the overweening importance of the United States. The history of the West – in particular, the United States and Western Europe – is far more familiar to the rest of the world than that of any other country or region because the centrality of the West has meant that everyone else is obliged, or desires, to know about it. Western political values and ideas are the only ones that enjoy any kind of universalism for a similar reason. But now that the West is no longer the exclusive home of modernity, with the rest of the world cast in a state of pre-modernity, the global equation changes entirely. Hinduism will no more be a byword for backwardness. Nor will Indian clothes. It will no longer be possible to dismiss Chinese political traditions as an obsolete hangover from the days of the Middle Kingdom, nor equate the Western family with modernity and dismiss those of India and China as remnants of an agrarian age. To growing numbers of people outside the West, Chinese history will become as familiar as Western history is now, if not more so. The competition, in other words, between the West and the rest will no longer be fundamentally unequal, pitting modernity against tradition, but will take place on something that will increasingly resemble a level playing field, namely between different modernities. We can already see this in the corporate world, where Korean, Japanese and Chinese companies, bearing the characteristics of the cultures from which they emanate, compete with their rather different Western counterparts, often with considerable success.
