The Capitalist Era: The Making-and Unmaking-of the Global Mind

A sweeping history of global interdependence from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century-with essential lessons for todayIn 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 a