I’ve never been a big fan of the terms “Global North” and “Global South,” which in some quarters are used as synonyms for “developed” and “developing” economies. This is mainly because their actual meanings are too disconnected from their literal meanings. If the south of the globe means anything, it means the southern hemisphere. And yet the “Global South” is conventionally understood to include China, which is, let’s face it, in the northern hemisphere. To me, it doesn’t seem to clarify things to use a term from geography in a way that makes its geographical meaning incoherent.

So I was interested to come across William Polk’s new book Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (thanks to a nice review by Malise Ruthven), in which the conventional identities of the Global North and Global South are slightly altered. He calls the Global North “the relatively rich, advanced, and formerly imperial powers” and the Global South “the relatively poor, traditional, mostly former colonial peoples–here, specifically those of the Muslim world.”

Yet China and Russia are, in his view, unquestionably members of the Global North, along with usual suspects Britain and France. Not being a small-minded geographical pedant like myself, he does not focus too much on the fact that both are located in the northern hemisphere. What seems to matter for Polk is that they were clearly imperial powers, who acted toward Muslims in ways not very different from the imperialists of Western Europe. Here is an example:

When the Northern powers set out to conquer and control the Muslim South, they saw Arabic as a sort of defensive wall. It encircled nations and united generations. The Chinese, Russian, British, and French imperialists each tried to suppress it and to replace it with their own languages. …

In dealing with the Chinese-dominated Turkish-speaking peoples of Central Asia, Chiang Kai-shek went even further than the British and French imperialists. Following revolts in 1933 by the Kazakh peoples and the proclamation in 1944 by the Uyghurs of the short-lived East Turkish Republic, Chiang decreed that there were no such people as the Turks, even though the Chinese had a name for them, Chantou. He said that they were just part of the “greater Chinese race.” He tried to force Turkish speakers to give up their native language and learn Chinese. Chiang’s successors in the People’s Republic of China still employ his policy: they are linguistically “denationalizing” the Uyghur people.

At the same time as Chiang was suppressing the Uyghurs, Joseph Stalin was tightening the linguistic screws on the Asian peoples who had been conquered by the tsars. The better to dominate them, the Soviet Union divided what had been the common written language (Ottoman Turkish) “horizontally” by converting all written materials from the traditional (Arabic-based) script first to Latin in 1926– 1927 and then to Cyrillic in 1936.

I have to say that this grouping makes some sense to me. It is useful to recall that the only only major nineteenth-century imperial power whose borders are largely unchanged today is China.

China is these days unquestionably a great power, whose relationship with other developing countries is not exactly one of equality. The term “Global South” was originally coined in the 1970s, when it was more plausible to see China as differing from other developing countries mainly in its size. I wonder if Polk’s book might mark the beginning of a rectification of these names for groups of countries, for a time when it seems more appropriate to put China in with other large economies and great powers.