I was full of good intentions about reviewing some books at greater length in July, as term had ended, but it turned out meetings hadn’t ended. In any case, most of the books I read were non-work, listed below. But I did read Jeremy Adelman’s new book, The Capitalist Era. Very long-standing readers of this blog might remember that his biography of Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher, won the second Enlightened Economist Prize back in 2013.
The new book is also excellent. Its subtitle is more informative: The Making – and Unmaking – of the Global Mind. It’s theme is globalisation, and the role played by successive waves of media and information technologies in shaping how people think of the rest of the world, and those who inhabit other countries. There are surprisingly few studies – at least that I’ve come across, no doubt many in other fields – that look at the role of radio and TV in previous decades, even though the internet and social media are intensively discussed. Charles Kenny is one of the exceptions who comes to mind, writing about the dramatic impact of cable TV in developing economies – of seeing the almost unbelievably different lives of those in the west.
The Capitalist Era does range wider than this. For example, the Chapter ‘After Nagasaki’ covers the sense of universal vulnerability caused by Bomb, and goes on to discuss other phenomena such as the ‘population time bomb’: “Fears of a population explosion affecting the whole planet required thinking in interconnected ways about the planet as a whole.” The following chapter goes on to environmental interdependence, symbolised by the famous ‘blue marble’ photo of Earth from Apollo 17.
The interdependence in the final chapter is financial; it begins with the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The tide is turning against global thinking, it suggests, in reaction to the injustices of globalization. And yet the images from social media, satellites, mean what is happening elsewhere is more present than ever in our consciousness; we experience a “fluid mixture of self-interest and sympathy that bind the world’s strangers together while producing the fissures and torn feelings that are intrinsic to the global mind.”
I really enjoyed the book, which zips along and presents really interesting slices of recent world history. I’m not sure what conclusion to take from it, but perhaps that’s the point. Events unfold in a complex and unclear way. We live in the same world but different moral universes – and the forms of media we access mean these can collide or coincide.
Other reading – lots of fiction:
The Glass Room – Simon Mawer – a terrific novel about a mixed Jewish-Christian marriage and community in pre-war Czechoslovakia, and the same house and family after the war.
Mr Hire’s Engagement – Georges Simenon – one of his romans durs, the dark side of human psychology, although it’s all dark side to Simenon even in the Maigret novels.
The Spy in the Archive – Gordon Corera – the extraordinary tale of Mitrokhin, whose archive I only just realised is in my college, Churchill.
Twighlight in Musashino -Seicho Matsumoto – interesting sort-of policier, but more about the the role of the west in postwar Japan
The North Road – Rob Cowen – an actual and psychological journey up the Great North Road
By The Sea – Abdulrazak Gurnah – from a country we assume to be Tanzania and its fraught post-independence politics to the life of a refugee in an English seaside town, another great novel
Land of Green Plums – Herta Muller – coming of age in Ceaucescu’s Romania – took me a while to get into it, ended being very compelling
Who’s A Good Dog – Jessica Pierce – randomly sent to me, about the ethics of being a dog owner and why all dogs are good dogs really, just misunderstood