[This sweeping survey of the post-war period contains fascinating
insights but lacks an organizing principle. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A BREATHLESS RACE THROUGH RECENT HISTORY  
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Pratinav Anil
January 4, 2023
The Guardian
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_ This sweeping survey of the post-war period contains fascinating
insights but lacks an organizing principle. _

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_The Age of Interconnection
A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century_
Jonathan Sperber
ISBN: 9780190918958

It takes chutzpah to write a synoptic history of the world in the
second half of the 20th century, a period within living memory of the
reading public. But it is a history Jonathan Sperber handles with
brio, summoning evidence from personal anecdotes and high theory,
vignettes and statistics. In its range of themes and reconstructions,
The Age of Interconnection invites favourable comparison with that
other survey of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of
Extremes. Yet it is quite unlike it. Where the Marxist historian
offered a sweeping narrative arc illustrating the relentless advance
of capitalism, Sperber dispenses with a unifying theme altogether.
It’s a sign of the times: we’ve lost faith in grand narratives,
more’s the pity. His framing sheds little light on his period. As
every historian knows, all ages are ages of interconnection.

But what he loses in explanatory depth, he gains in intellectual
breadth. Reading the book is a bit like watching a pentathlon. In lieu
of fencing, riding, swimming, shooting and running, we have sections
on the environment, economy, politics, society and cultural and
intellectual life. It appears Sperber has taken Proust’s dictum to
heart: “to write on everything to the point of exhaustion”. The
exhaustiveness verges on redundancy at times, as in his tortuous
excursions on staphylococcus and streptococcus infections, and rocket
velocity. Class in the 20th century “took the form of a
hierarchy”, he explains, as if to a Martian.

But even if he doesn’t spell it out, there is a story being told. He
divides his Age into three sub-periods: the Postwar Era (roughly, the
baby boomer generation), the Age of Upheaval (the children of Marx and
Coca-Cola), and the Late Millennium Era (the heirs of the end of
history). A simpler schema would have been just as serviceable: the
first half was the age of ambition; the second, one of apathy.
Nothing screamed mid-century ambition like five-year plans. There’s
something touching about the confidence of the Soviets’ state
planning committee, whose annual inventories of necessary commodities
ran to 70 volumes and 12,000 pages. Not so China’s Second Five-Year
Plan, the famous Great Leap Forward, which redirected farm labour to
backyard furnaces to augment steel output, destroying crop yields and
also some 30 million lives in the process.

But it was colossal state power, Sperber reminds us, that made modern
public heath possible. Mass production of penicillin helped secure
allied victory in the second world war. It took scarcely a decade to
eradicate smallpox by 1977. The insecticide DDT came close to
dispatching the gypsy moth and fire ant in the US two decades earlier.
Asahi Gurafu, Japan’s answer to Life magazine, informed readers in
the 50s that nuclear power would prevent sashimi from spoiling. The
director of the Kurchatov Institute, the nerve centre of the Soviet
atomic programme, thought it could be harnessed to transform Siberia
into a subtropical paradise.
Nature had its revenge, of course. The decimation of insects’ avian
predators called into question the wisdom of spraying the midwest with
DDT. Drug-resistant superbugs emerged. TB and malaria returned. Aids
appeared on the scene. The blase response did little to help. “Aids
is primarily a disease of homosexuals and there is no homosexual in
Botswana,” an official declared. One of the statements must have
been wrong, because by 2000, one in four adults there was HIV
positive.

Five years after the release of David Bowie’s Life on Mars?, a 1976
Viking expedition to the planet answered his question. Nuclear
missiles remained in their silos, but cigarettes accounted for the
death of one in five men in the second half of the century. The oil
shock revealed the dark sides of both communism and capitalism.
Struggling to pay off dollar-denominated debts, the GDR had a Stasi
agent sell art and literary manuscripts to western collectors for hard
currency. Romania went further, “selling” Jews to western
governments for $25,000 per person. Labour, king in the middle of the
century – saving Juan Perón, then Argentina’s vice president,
from a military coup in 1945; overthrowing Edward Heath in 1974 –
lost to capital, which regained the upper hand after a string of
strikes were put down in the early 80s, from Girangaon to Orgreave.

Sperber offers a sobering balance sheet of “heavily regulated
capitalism”, which delivered phenomenal growth but also produced
trade imbalances and global hierarchies. He doesn’t say as much, but
I get the impression that he thinks this is the worst way of
organising societies except for all the others. It’s a worldview
that puts him in the company of sociologist Raisa Gorbacheva, who
road-tripped around Rome in 1971 fleetingly with her husband, to whom
she said, I imagine over pasta alla carbonara and frascati: “Misha,
why do we live worse than they do?”
 
 
Pratinav Anil is a lecturer in history at St Edmund Hall, University
of Oxford and author of Another India (Hurst).

* Global Capitalism
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* History
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* regulated capitalism
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* State Power
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