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The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
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.
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.
809 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 7, 2022
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December 9, 2025
Jonathan Sperber’s The Age of Interconnection feels like someone finally took the madness of the post-1945 world—the wars, the ideals, the spiralling technologies, the migrations, the fears, the vibes—and placed them on a giant cosmic corkboard with red threads linking every dot.
Reading it is like watching the second half of the twentieth century switch on in neon: dazzling, chaotic, and dangerously interconnected, as if the world woke up after 1945 and collectively said, “Okay, let’s hit hyperdrive.” The result?
A dense but surprisingly lucid history that reminds you how the age you were born into was engineered not by isolated events but by a global churn of ideas, economies, ambitions, and moral collisions.
Sperber writes with an anchor in classical historical craft, but he also seems to have a sly awareness that post-1945 humanity basically reinvented itself every decade. He moves from diplomacy to economics to culture like he’s travelling big moments of world history, looping beats from Bandung, Paris, Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, Accra, Havana, and Tel Aviv into a single evolving track.
At times, it feels as if he is echoing Shakespeare’s sense that the world is “a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, except the stage lights, by 1950, became fluorescent, global, and powered by the anxiety of nuclear annihilation.
One of the book’s strengths is that it refuses to make the Cold War a simple two-player game. Sperber insists — and convincingly — that the real story of the second half of the twentieth century lies in the crisscrossing trajectories of newly decolonised nations, global capitalism’s expansion, scientific megaprojects, migrations of labour, and the deep structural transformations of everyday life.
It’s not just Moscow vs. Washington; it’s Moscow + Washington + everyone trying to breathe in the fumes of their competition. In that sense, the book channels the Vedic worldview of reality as an interconnected web — “Indra’s Net”, where every point reflects every other point — except here the jewels are nation-states, corporations, guerrilla movements, universities, and satellites.
Reading Sperber on decolonisation, one feels the pulse of a world trying to reinvent dharma itself — the rightful order of things. The Upanishads remind us: “As is your desire, so is your will; as is your will, so is your deed; as is your deed, so is your destiny.”
Newly independent nations acted exactly in this cycle: desire for sovereignty led to policies, often experimental or chaotic, that produced destinies still shaping the present. Sperber captures this beautifully: Nasser’s Egypt, Nehru’s India, Léopold Senghor’s Senegal, and Sukarno’s Indonesia — all searching for a path between superpowers, trying to build nations out of hope, fatigue, and sometimes sheer audacity.
The technological dimension of his narrative might be the most exhilarating. It’s here that the book channels its inner Milton.
If Paradise Lost dramatised the cosmic fallout of ambition, Sperber shows the earthly version: the rise of computers, nuclear energy, spaceflight, global telecommunications, and container shipping — all of which unleashed Promethean energies humankind had never handled before. “What in me is dark / Illumine,” Milton wrote, and in a way, the second half of the twentieth century is the story of humanity trying to illuminate the darkness with science while creating entirely new shadows.
Nuclear power promised abundance but gave birth to Chernobyl. Computers promised freedom but began the quiet colonisation of privacy.
Globalisation promised prosperity but produced new inequalities that the book carefully dissects without moralising.
And yet, Sperber never slips into doom-peddling. The narrative is analytical, not apocalyptic. He doesn’t shy from the horrors—Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, Pinochet’s Chile, the Rwandan genocide—but he situates them within a global matrix, showing how ideas, weapons, and alliances travelled across borders, shaping outcomes far beyond their points of origin.
Here, again, the Upanishadic idea of bandhu — the hidden connection between distant things — quietly animates the reading experience.
The CIA’s actions in Guatemala echo in Tehran. China’s famine whispers into global agricultural reforms. Oil shocks reverberate from OPEC meetings into small-town factories in England and Ohio.
Where Sperber really shines is his treatment of global economics. It’s almost comical how the world went from rigid Bretton Woods stability to financial hyper-creativity by the 1980s, as if capitalism suddenly drank an espresso shot too many. By the time he reaches the rise of Japan and later the Asian Tigers, the narrative becomes a masterclass in global flows.
He shows how trade, capital, and production networks turned the world into what Shakespeare in Henry V called “a little body with a mighty heart”—small in distance, massive in pulse.
Culture is where the book becomes downright fun. Hollywood, Bollywood, Afrobeat, youth rebellions, feminism, environmentalism, human rights movements — Sperber threads them in without reducing them to footnotes of political history.
He grasps that cultural revolutions are revolutions, full stop. When the Beatles and Bob Marley start appearing in a book about global interconnection, you know the historian gets the assignment. He argues that culture didn’t just reflect the world’s interconnections; it accelerated them.
Jeans, Coca-Cola, yoga, reggae, and television satellites did more diplomatic work than some treaties. “O brave new world,” as Miranda exclaimed in The Tempest, and indeed the twentieth century’s second half was a brave new world precisely because culture travelled faster than armies.
Migration is another major pillar of the narrative. Postwar labour flows reshaped Europe; decolonisation reshaped Britain and France; Cold War conflicts reshaped the United States, Australia, and Canada.
Through this, the book seems haunted — in a good way — by the Vedic sense that human beings are not rooted in soil but in consciousness. “The world is a single nest,” says the Atharva Veda, and Sperber’s account of diaspora communities proves how that nest kept expanding: Punjabi taxi drivers in Vancouver, Turkish workers in Berlin, Caribbean intellectuals in London, and Korean engineers in California. Migration became the global bloodstream through which ideas, cuisines, dreams, and frustrations circulated.
If there is a quiet argument in the book, it is this: the twentieth century’s second half created a world that is radically interdependent yet profoundly unequal, astonishingly innovative yet teetering on fragile foundations.
The forces that tied nations together — markets, media, technology, diplomacy — also bound them to shared vulnerabilities. In other words, the world we inherited is both a masterpiece and a glitch. Like Milton’s fallen angels, we fly “with dangerous wing,” and Sperber’s history reminds us that our age’s risks and rewards are inseparable.
By the final chapters, the book feels almost prophetic. The seeds of our current digital, geopolitical, ecological, and cultural tensions are all there: globalization’s uneven blessings, American hegemony’s limits, China’s rise, the thinning line between information and manipulation, the planetary impacts of consumption.
The book ends before the twenty-first century fully unfolds, but by then, the reader understands the plot twists already in motion. History, after all, never stops at the last page. It lingers, like an unresolved chord.
Sperber has done something rare: he has written a global history that actually feels global — not a survey but a tapestry. His narrative echoes the Chandogya Upanishad’s assurance: “Tat tvam asi” — you are that. Everything is connected, and you are inside it.
In the end, the book leaves you with Shakespeare’s reminder from Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”
But it also reminds you that humans, in every age, try to set it right — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously, always interconnected.
Very enjoyable and recommended.
Reading it is like watching the second half of the twentieth century switch on in neon: dazzling, chaotic, and dangerously interconnected, as if the world woke up after 1945 and collectively said, “Okay, let’s hit hyperdrive.” The result?
A dense but surprisingly lucid history that reminds you how the age you were born into was engineered not by isolated events but by a global churn of ideas, economies, ambitions, and moral collisions.
Sperber writes with an anchor in classical historical craft, but he also seems to have a sly awareness that post-1945 humanity basically reinvented itself every decade. He moves from diplomacy to economics to culture like he’s travelling big moments of world history, looping beats from Bandung, Paris, Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, Accra, Havana, and Tel Aviv into a single evolving track.
At times, it feels as if he is echoing Shakespeare’s sense that the world is “a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, except the stage lights, by 1950, became fluorescent, global, and powered by the anxiety of nuclear annihilation.
One of the book’s strengths is that it refuses to make the Cold War a simple two-player game. Sperber insists — and convincingly — that the real story of the second half of the twentieth century lies in the crisscrossing trajectories of newly decolonised nations, global capitalism’s expansion, scientific megaprojects, migrations of labour, and the deep structural transformations of everyday life.
It’s not just Moscow vs. Washington; it’s Moscow + Washington + everyone trying to breathe in the fumes of their competition. In that sense, the book channels the Vedic worldview of reality as an interconnected web — “Indra’s Net”, where every point reflects every other point — except here the jewels are nation-states, corporations, guerrilla movements, universities, and satellites.
Reading Sperber on decolonisation, one feels the pulse of a world trying to reinvent dharma itself — the rightful order of things. The Upanishads remind us: “As is your desire, so is your will; as is your will, so is your deed; as is your deed, so is your destiny.”
Newly independent nations acted exactly in this cycle: desire for sovereignty led to policies, often experimental or chaotic, that produced destinies still shaping the present. Sperber captures this beautifully: Nasser’s Egypt, Nehru’s India, Léopold Senghor’s Senegal, and Sukarno’s Indonesia — all searching for a path between superpowers, trying to build nations out of hope, fatigue, and sometimes sheer audacity.
The technological dimension of his narrative might be the most exhilarating. It’s here that the book channels its inner Milton.
If Paradise Lost dramatised the cosmic fallout of ambition, Sperber shows the earthly version: the rise of computers, nuclear energy, spaceflight, global telecommunications, and container shipping — all of which unleashed Promethean energies humankind had never handled before. “What in me is dark / Illumine,” Milton wrote, and in a way, the second half of the twentieth century is the story of humanity trying to illuminate the darkness with science while creating entirely new shadows.
Nuclear power promised abundance but gave birth to Chernobyl. Computers promised freedom but began the quiet colonisation of privacy.
Globalisation promised prosperity but produced new inequalities that the book carefully dissects without moralising.
And yet, Sperber never slips into doom-peddling. The narrative is analytical, not apocalyptic. He doesn’t shy from the horrors—Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, Pinochet’s Chile, the Rwandan genocide—but he situates them within a global matrix, showing how ideas, weapons, and alliances travelled across borders, shaping outcomes far beyond their points of origin.
Here, again, the Upanishadic idea of bandhu — the hidden connection between distant things — quietly animates the reading experience.
The CIA’s actions in Guatemala echo in Tehran. China’s famine whispers into global agricultural reforms. Oil shocks reverberate from OPEC meetings into small-town factories in England and Ohio.
Where Sperber really shines is his treatment of global economics. It’s almost comical how the world went from rigid Bretton Woods stability to financial hyper-creativity by the 1980s, as if capitalism suddenly drank an espresso shot too many. By the time he reaches the rise of Japan and later the Asian Tigers, the narrative becomes a masterclass in global flows.
He shows how trade, capital, and production networks turned the world into what Shakespeare in Henry V called “a little body with a mighty heart”—small in distance, massive in pulse.
Culture is where the book becomes downright fun. Hollywood, Bollywood, Afrobeat, youth rebellions, feminism, environmentalism, human rights movements — Sperber threads them in without reducing them to footnotes of political history.
He grasps that cultural revolutions are revolutions, full stop. When the Beatles and Bob Marley start appearing in a book about global interconnection, you know the historian gets the assignment. He argues that culture didn’t just reflect the world’s interconnections; it accelerated them.
Jeans, Coca-Cola, yoga, reggae, and television satellites did more diplomatic work than some treaties. “O brave new world,” as Miranda exclaimed in The Tempest, and indeed the twentieth century’s second half was a brave new world precisely because culture travelled faster than armies.
Migration is another major pillar of the narrative. Postwar labour flows reshaped Europe; decolonisation reshaped Britain and France; Cold War conflicts reshaped the United States, Australia, and Canada.
Through this, the book seems haunted — in a good way — by the Vedic sense that human beings are not rooted in soil but in consciousness. “The world is a single nest,” says the Atharva Veda, and Sperber’s account of diaspora communities proves how that nest kept expanding: Punjabi taxi drivers in Vancouver, Turkish workers in Berlin, Caribbean intellectuals in London, and Korean engineers in California. Migration became the global bloodstream through which ideas, cuisines, dreams, and frustrations circulated.
If there is a quiet argument in the book, it is this: the twentieth century’s second half created a world that is radically interdependent yet profoundly unequal, astonishingly innovative yet teetering on fragile foundations.
The forces that tied nations together — markets, media, technology, diplomacy — also bound them to shared vulnerabilities. In other words, the world we inherited is both a masterpiece and a glitch. Like Milton’s fallen angels, we fly “with dangerous wing,” and Sperber’s history reminds us that our age’s risks and rewards are inseparable.
By the final chapters, the book feels almost prophetic. The seeds of our current digital, geopolitical, ecological, and cultural tensions are all there: globalization’s uneven blessings, American hegemony’s limits, China’s rise, the thinning line between information and manipulation, the planetary impacts of consumption.
The book ends before the twenty-first century fully unfolds, but by then, the reader understands the plot twists already in motion. History, after all, never stops at the last page. It lingers, like an unresolved chord.
Sperber has done something rare: he has written a global history that actually feels global — not a survey but a tapestry. His narrative echoes the Chandogya Upanishad’s assurance: “Tat tvam asi” — you are that. Everything is connected, and you are inside it.
In the end, the book leaves you with Shakespeare’s reminder from Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”
But it also reminds you that humans, in every age, try to set it right — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously, always interconnected.
Very enjoyable and recommended.
November 21, 2025
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.
March 27, 2024
This is a history book for little babies
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