The Capitalist Era

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, panics over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people see each other 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 each other—and 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 brought people closer together in search of wealth, security, and survival, huge clashes and collisions were set off, 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’s 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 the world today.