Helen Thompson - Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

In retrospect, this book had its genesis in the summer and autumn of 2016. In part, this came from a sense of what I thought I understood. Over that summer I worked to finish a short book on why oil has proved so disruptive to Western economies since the turn of the century and wrote a piece for the magazine Juncture, arguing that whichever way the referendum result had gone, Brexit was in the long term most likely unavoidable. After I submitted my book manuscript, I began an academic article interrogating the relationship between what I judged Brexits eventual inevitability with the contingencies of David Camerons premiership. As I pursued that argument, the contingency seemed weaker than I first thought and the structural forces propelling Britain out stronger. In thinking my question through, I realized that the long-standing monetary divergence between Britain and the Eurozone became particularly consequential from 2011 because of the very different responses of the Bank of England and ECB to high oil prices. In a rather different way, an energy story also seemed part of the 2016 presidential election, which was the first election for nearly fifty years that had taken place with the United States as a top oil producer. To my analytical mind, Trumps election victory seemed an explicable political phenomenon. If that was not a particularly comfortable place to occupy, it gave me some confidence that I could explain to myself anyway why 2016 had taken the turns it had.

Just as importantly, the impulse to write this book came from a sense of what I did not understand in the turbulence of that year but instinctively judged to be geopolitically significant, in particular the fallout from the attempted coup in Turkey. During my research on oil, I had begun to think geopolitically. But there was much I still needed to learn.

My responsibilities in Cambridge meant it was several years before I pulled my thoughts together and sketched with broad brushes a version of the arguments in this book. In September 2019, I began a years academic leave and started writing. I was two-thirds of the way through a draft when the pandemic hit. Initially, I wondered if there was still a book: if I was trying to explain the present political moment, what happened if that moment changed out of all recognition? But, relatively quickly, I concluded that the fallout of the pandemic was not replacing the story I was telling with a different one but in crucial respects deepening it. The additional time I have taken to complete the book in order to include 2020 in my analysis gave me the chance to reflect again on the last decade of the geopolitical story, in particular its relationship to green energy.

In writing a book that looks to la longue dure to explain ongoing economic and political change, the vantage point can never be quite right. The book risks trying to explain more than can be seen clearly at this moment in time. There are a lot of moving parts that I am well aware in their interaction may unfold in the future in different ways than my historically driven narrative would suggest. I am generally wary of predictions, and those few I have made in the conclusion I have done with some hesitancy. Getting to grips with the appropriate time frames for political analysis is an inherently troublesome task. The fact that how to think about risks in relation to time has become a central problem of modern politics only compounds this difficulty.

My title is a homage to Dickens and his meditation on industrial civilization pitted against the innumerable horse-power of time in his most schematic novel, Hard Times for These Times. It is also a small reminder to myself of the need for epistemological humility: what I was unable to see when I read the novel for the first time as a 16-year-old stupidly deprived me of more than a decade of missed opportunities to enjoy Dickens insight and pleasures.

My primary debts are to Sarah Chalfant, Emma Smith, and Luciana OFlaherty. My agent Sarah and her colleague, at the Wylie Agency, Emma guided me with consummate professionalism through every stage of this book, including the last discussions of my title. Their phenomenal support through the stresses thrown up by events during the first months of the pandemic allowed me to work much more productively that spring and summer than I would otherwise have done. Luciana, my editor at Oxford University Press, has been a huge assistance in helping me improve the text. I try not to dwell on what it might have done to her sanity in the process.