
The Capitalist Era
The Making-and Unmaking-of the Global Mind
Jeremy Adelman(Author)
Princeton University Press
Will be published approx. on 1. September 2026
Book
Hardback
400 pages
978-0-691-17702-1 (ISBN)
Description
A sweeping history of global interdependence from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century-with essential lessons for today
In The Capitalist Era, leading global historian Jeremy Adelman puts the world's current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.
The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. As trade, migration, and new technologies have brought people closer together in search of wealth, security, and survival, there have been huge clashes and collisions involving writers and soldiers, biologists and economists, photographers and missionaries.
Strangers-are they partners or rivals, liberators or oppressors? As The Capitalist Era shows, this is perhaps the biggest question hanging over our past, present, and future. To understand our world, it is essential to grasp how strangers have regarded each other as they decided to welcome or exclude, to respect or dominate. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today's world.
In The Capitalist Era, leading global historian Jeremy Adelman puts the world's current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.
The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. As trade, migration, and new technologies have brought people closer together in search of wealth, security, and survival, there have been huge clashes and collisions involving writers and soldiers, biologists and economists, photographers and missionaries.
Strangers-are they partners or rivals, liberators or oppressors? As The Capitalist Era shows, this is perhaps the biggest question hanging over our past, present, and future. To understand our world, it is essential to grasp how strangers have regarded each other as they decided to welcome or exclude, to respect or dominate. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today's world.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
45 b/w illus. 1 table. 2 maps.
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-691-17702-1 (9780691177021)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (both Princeton).