The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

by Jonathan Sperber

A panoramic view of global history from the end of World War Two to the dawn of the new millennium, and a portrait of an age of unprecedented transformation.

In this ambitious, groundbreaking, and sweeping work, Jonathan Sperber guides readers through six decades of global history, from the end of World War Two to the onset of the new millennium. As Sperber's immersive and propulsive book reveals, the defining quality of these decades involved the rising and unstoppable flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas across boundaries, continents, and oceans, creating prosperity in some parts of the world, destitution in others, increasing a sense of collective responsibility while also reinforcing nationalism and xenophobia. It was an age of transformation in every realm of human from relations with nature to relations between and among nations, superpowers to emerging states; from the forms of production to the foundations of religious faith. These changes took place on an unprecedentedly global scale. The world both developed and contracted. Most of all, it became interconnected.

To make sense of it, Sperber illuminates the central trends and crucial developments across a wide variety of topics, adopting a chronology that divides the era into three distinct the postwar, from 1945 through 1966, which retained many elements of period of world wars; the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, when the pillars of the postwar world were undermined; and the two decades at the end of the millennium, when new structures were developed, structures that form the basis of today's world, even as the iconic World Trade Center was reduced by terrorism to rubble. The Age of Interconnection is a clear-eyed portrait of an age of blinding change.

Genres: History, Politics

816 pages, Hardcover

Published January 5, 2023

Reviews

[Christoffer Garland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn’t hit the mark for me. Sperber surely knows a great deal about the period and has marshalled a great many facts to tell his story, but the story he is telling is just so boring. For people who have never heard about the “green revolution”, the group of 77, the epidemiological transition or the events of may 1978 this is a great and thorough primer, but for those of us hungry for more this book will leaves you feeling unfulfilled. The book compares poorly to the expressed inspiration for it: Jürgen Osterhammel’s The transformation of the world. The great range of themes, innovative methods and sharp thought of that volume makes it feel more fresh and up to date than Sperber’s offering despite being more than a decade older. Sperber’s work also comes up short when compared to another recently published history: The project-state and its rivals by Charles Maier. That work genuinely makes one look afresh at the twentieth and twenty first centuries while Sperber limits himself to retelling the same old stories we have all heard before. It is not only Sperber’s lack of innovation that puzzles. One of the central theses of the book is the “Triumph of the prosaic”, how neither great fears nor great expectations were fulfilled in the second half of the twentieth century, but this in my opinion fundamentally diverts attention from the truly novel and radical aspects of the period since 1945. More than the pedantic observation that all moments in history are unique and different the period surveyed really did introduce elements that were unprecedented and fundamentally unimaginable for previous historical actors. The creation of nuclear weapons, the green revolution Sperber talks about (increases in agricultural productivity derived from pesticides, fertilisers and genetic engineering of crops) and the radically changed position of women in many societies. The change I want to home in on is the rise of China. Hardly any other phenomena are more relevant to the age we live in, but its implications or causes are not really taken seriously by Sperber. Even Osterhammel writing in 2007 was more clear sighted about this truly sui generis event when he wrote (in the context of the revolutionary aspects of the Industrial Revolution and its comparison to China) that “industry has never been more revolutionary then it is at this moment”. In a couple of years in the 2010s China poured more concrete than the US did in the entire twentieth century. We in the west have to seriously grapple with the notion that the economic development we experienced in the 18-and 1900s might well be just the prelude to the real drama. In Sperber’s telling however this truly is a prosaic tale. After the craziness of the Mao years some sensible people come in under Deng and introduce markets in a controlled manner and sim-sala-bim China is just another capitalist country. The sense that Sperber doesn’t really understand China is illustrated by the comparison between how the transition from state socialism was handled by China and the USSR respectively. In Sperber’s telling the incompetent leaders of the USSR and later the Russian federation was lead astray by free market dogmatists and should instead have followed China’s path. The criticisms of the free marketeers and the successor governments is well warranted but the suggestion that the USSR could have done what China did is belied by the structural constraints faced by these countries. The two are treated as identical in that both were state-socialist countries and the only thing separating them were the leaders. This however simply is not true. China, as a consequence of the Mao years, had very different power structures and prospects for growth then the USSR (something that in fact was recognised by the World Bank at the time) so the USSR couldn’t have taken China’s path even if they wanted to. This misunderstanding of China’s history (and much else besides) leaves the book feeling outdated, trapped in the mental worlds of the past and distinctly unhelpful for illuminating our current moment and the way forward.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a history book for little babies