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 existence: 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 periods: 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.

Jonathan Sperber is Curators' Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Missouri. His previous book, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Introduction

Part 1: The Material World

Chapter 1: Nature
Chapter 2: Disease
Chapter 3: Technologies

Part 2: Interactions

Chapter 4: Markets
Chapter 5: Migrations
Chapter 6: The Powers

Part 3: Varieties of the Social

Chapter 7: Societies
Chapter 8: Labor
Chapter 9: Leisure
Chapter 10: Consumers

Part 4: Dreams and Nightmares

Chapter 11: Beliefs
Chapter 12: Murder
Chapter 13: Utopias

Epilogue: The Zeroes
Conclusions

Select Bibliography
Index