When you asked "This makes me wonder if you could make Globalize an instance itself, where this.cldr is the default locale...", I thought you were wondering if we could return `new Globalize()` instead of `Globalize` as shown below in reference to https://github.com/jquery/globalize/blob/master/src/core.js#L38.

```diff
- return Globalize;
+ return new Globalize();
```