Sperber Jonathan - The Age of Interconnection

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Jonathan Sperber 2023

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937044

ISBN 9780190918958

eISBN 9780190918972

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190918958.001.0001

In the course of writing a very long book, I have received a lot of advice and encouragement. What follows is a small selection from a larger universe.

Material from this book was presented at the University of Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon University, and as the 2021 Gerald Feldman Memorial Lecture at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Invitations for these opportunities were extended by Jan Goldstein, John Boyer, Donna Harsch, Simone Lssig, and Kenneth Ledford. My thanks to them and to the participants in the events for their many questions and observations. I am indebted to my colleagues in the department of history at the University of Missouri, who made unusually helpful suggestions, generously deployed their specialized knowledge, and saved me from evident blunders: Merve Fejzula, Gerrit Frank, Victor McFarland, Jay Sexton, Robert Smale, Steven Watts, and Dominic Meng-Hsuang Yang. I am particularly obligated to Catherine Rymph and John Wigger, who provided cogent criticisms of my approaches and findings; read portions of the manuscript; and, above all, listened patiently as I rambled on about my overly ambitious aspirations. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, to be attributed to me and not to them. Tim Bent of Oxford University Press demonstrated his considerable editorial skills in his work on the manuscript I submitted. As this book was going to press I received the sad news of the death of my agent, John Wright. I remember him not just for his actions on behalf of his clients but also for his dedication to the literary genre of serious nonfiction.

The writing was completed in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, a particularly unpleasant example of an interconnected world. I dedicate this book to the healthcare personnel, scientists, and public health workers who have battled the pandemic, often against considerable resistance and in difficult circumstances.

The World in 1945

The World in 2001

Colonial Empires in 1945

Colonial Empires in 2001

Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is time to perceive the years 19452001 as a period of human history separate and distinct from the present, in some ways rather distant from it, yet also at the origins of our contemporary condition. There is good reason to do so, since those fifty-five years between the end of the Second World War and the onset of the new millennium were a period of varied, enormous, and far-reaching transformations, from human relations with nature, to interactions of the Great Powers; from the structures of production and exchange of goods and services to the structures of religious faith. These were all changes that occurred on an increasingly global scale.

Overestimating the changes of the years between 1945 and 2001 would be difficult. Emerging from the most destructive war in human history, the world experienced a quarter century of unparalleled economic growth, along with unprecedented growth in population and in human exploitation of the biosphereonly to be followed by a period of economic crisis and then unsettling global economic, demographic, and environmental realignments. The entire five decades were an era of scientific and technological advances, eliminating deadly diseases that had killed hundreds of millions of people, uncovering the secrets of life and of the origins of the universe, expanding agricultural productivity, computing power, and worldwide communications in ways previously unimagined and even unimaginable.

Most of the second half of the twentieth century was an age of global political confrontations, when humanity teetered on the brink of extinction in a thermonuclear conflagration, while millions of combatants and civilians died in proxy conflicts across the world, and millions more through mass murder. Colonial empires covering most of the globe were dismantled, in both peaceful and violent fashion. The centuries-old worldwide domination of European countries and their former settler colonies was called into question. The all-encompassing combat that was the Cold War came to an unexpectedly peaceful end, as heavily policed authoritarian regimes suddenly collapsed before a handful of demonstrators. Hopes that the end of this global confrontation also marked the end of all major dissonances and political conflicts around the world were disappointed, most dramatically in 2001, and more gradually over the following decades.

The question for a history of the second half of the twentieth century is how to understand the nature of these transformations and to offer a narrative of their development. One answer comes from journalists and pundits who overuse phrases like globalization, the world is flat, or the singularity, all implying unprecedented and worldwide changes. Their work tends to lack historical context, flattens out the past, and fails to make distinctions between the pasteven the recent pastand the present. Historians, tracing change over time, attempt to provide a systematic account of the origins and shaping of the contemporary world, global in a double sense: worldwide and also encompassing central realms of human existence. Yet so much of global history focuses on a distant past. Responding to the contemporary realities of globalization with, for example, lovingly drawn portraits of the silk route, or of the crisis of twelfth-century monarchies, is to investigate a time when global connections were sparse, change slow and hesitant, opportunities for global comparisons few and far between, and links to the present hard to find.