Age of Interconnection

David Motadel, Times Literary Supplement The book, most exclusively based on western materials, gives more space to developments in western Europe and America than to those in other parts of the world...Jonathan Sperber has written a landmark study of the twentieth century. A monumental work of scholarship, it will shape our thinking about the most global era in human history.

Harold James, author The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization Jonathan Sperber has provided the first genuinely global history of the late twentieth century. It is a work of massive intelligence and erudition, beautifully rendered in eloquent and moving prose. Sperber really shows how interconnections work, and how apparently unrelated trends or events fit in with each other. A must-read for anyone interested in global order, and in the precarious legacy the twentieth century left for the new millennium.

David Blackbourn, author of The Conquest of Nature and the forthcoming Germany in the World, 1500-2000: A Global History A preeminent historian of the nineteenth century has turned his attention to the second half of the twentieth, with spectacular results. Jonathan Sperber tackles the largest and most important themes head-on, with intellectual energy and a remarkable command of telling detail. The Age of Interconnection is bold, original, imaginatively organized, and exceptionally well written. This is a deeply serious book that is also exciting to read, a true tour de force.

J. Bradford DeLong, author of Slouching to Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century A truly brilliant, gripping, and readable history of the 1945-2001 world, making a very persuasive case that globalization is the main thread for economics, politics, and sociology in moving toward not utopia but at least a world in which a smaller proportion of us are in dire want and desperate fear.

Choice An excellent volume, particularly given Sperber's apparent ability to remain optimistic through it all.

Carole Fink, Journal of Modern History This is nonetheless a major achievement: a book reflectingthe author's erudition and acumen, which enlarges our store of knowledge and stirs us to think anew about the world that emerged after WorldWar II and ushered in our present age.

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.