Global Inequalities: Transnational Processes and Transregional Entanglements

Current understandings tend to presuppose that the transformation of inequality patterns entails a series of new phenomena, which make the coining of new concepts such as the Europeanization and the transnationalization of social inequality necessary. The paper argues that, at least since the European expansion into the Americas, inequalities have been the result of transnational processes arising from transregional entanglements between shifting metropolitan and peripheral areas. To this end, the paper uses the example of the Caribbean as Europe's first colonial backyard in order to show the historical continuities between creolization as a term originally coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean and what is being analyzed today under the label of the transnationalization of (Western) Europe. The paper subsequently claims that theorizing the continuum of structures of power linking colonialism to (post)coloniality is an essential element of the endeavor of creolizing Europe