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Cover image for product 1405187166
BAYLY
ISBN: 978-1-4051-8716-9
Paperback
512 pages
September 2018, ©2013, Wiley-Blackwell
List Price: 34.95 USD
10,485,000 IRR / 6,291,000 IRR افزودن به سبد
  • Description
  • Author Information
In this sequel to his monumental work 'The Birth of the Modern World', C A Bayly provides a history of the world from 1914 to the present. Within the framework of a clear narrative history, he explores a series of unifying themes covering the politics, economics, social, cultural and intellectual life through the 'long' twentieth century. As before, he explains how disparate parts of the world were connected in often unexpected ways and provides a new understanding of development over time. This is historical writing at its best: intellectually ambitious, breathtaking in its geographical and interdisciplinary range, and compellingly written.

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From the author:

World history, global history and trans-national history are now major elements in history and politics courses in universities across the world. In the USA, many faculty positions are now advertised for a regional specialism and ‘world history’, and this has replaced the older courses on ‘European civilisation.’ This book, The Crisis of the modern world, would build on the success of The Birth of the Modern World and aim to provide an advanced historiographical work on the ‘long’ twentieth century. I use the word ‘advanced’ because I would see this very much as a book for final year students or graduate students in the USA, though, judging by BMW more specialist

first- and second-year courses in European and British universities might also assign it. Earlier, there was some discussion with Blackwell about whether I should write a simpler textbook-type work, with a stronger narrative element, as a version of BMW. I don’t, however, think this would be a particularly rewarding thing for me to do, and besides, there are a number of such works already on the market (e.g. David Reynolds and several US textbooks). The distinctive feature of BMA was its historiographical sections and its perspective from the point of view of the world outside Europe. I would hope to maintain this in the second book.

Critique


This does not mean that critiques of BMW will not be taken seriously. On the contrary, I will attempt to simplify the very complex narrative history that appeared in the first book. It seems to me critical to deal with the complex political and economic links between Euro-America and the rest of the world during the twentieth century, but they can be dealt with more lucidly in this volume without the amount of complex detail. Indeed, with the vast array of detailed historical works available for this period, it would be better if a book of this sort eschewed detail, though I still enjoy including pithy anecdotes to bring the text alive. At the same time, areas such as Latin America and Africa, which received short shrift in BMW would receive much fuller treatment (Megan Vaughan produced an excellent critique of BMW along the lines of how Africa did not fit into the paradigm).


Broadly, twentieth century history has produced a significant number of basic undergraduate textbooks and a large number of good regional or national histories (e.g,, Judt on Europe, Mitter on China, large numbers of highly competent, but not particularly challenging American text books, Clarke on Britain, etc.), but precious little that tries to tie it together. It is remarkable that the huge effusion of works on modernising dictatorships (Mussolini, Franco, Salazar) has never, to my knowledge, dealt with, directly in the context of, say, Reza Shah Pahlavi, Attaturk , Chiang kai Shek or the emerging racial dictatorship in South Africa. Similarly discussions of ‘partition’ have rarely brought Ireland, Palestine, Vietnam, India and Korea into the same frame, though similar interests and perceptions informed them.

Narrative


The most difficult thing about this project will be to merge the narrative elements with the analytical ones. As with BMW, I would want to mix historical narrative with analysis. Earlier, I said that I wanted to deal with issues such as: the individual and its interpretation, society, religion, science and social theory, ecological change and the aesthetic. But I now feel that even for advanced students, a strong narrative structure, however pedestrian, is important to locate these broader intellectual issues. Exactly how the narrative sections inter-relate with the analytical ones is at present unclear. For instance, 1945 might be an obvious narrative break, with the rise of Communism, the end of fascism, American consumerism and the beginning of the end of empires (including the Soviet one). Yet other less obvious crises, which may loom larger to a twenty-first century audience, might well be better narrative break points: e.g., the 1970s and ‘80s, with the defeat of the US in Vietnam, the decline of Mao, the Iranian revolution, the end of European Communism and the triumph of the youth consumer. Again the early 2000s might seem to be critical, with 9/11, the rise of China and India, international concern about the survival of the planet (however misplaced). This will be worked out when the book is written.


Equally, there is an important issue about how the analytical sections are written. Even if we are dealing with the nature of the individual and its representation, the role of religion or the creation of the consumer after the 1930s, the state and the global economy constantly intervene in the construction of these entities. How exactly the balance between these different forces is represented will remain a major challenge of this type of writing and explains why it has taken some time to engage with your proposal.


Possible Structure

1. Can we write a history of our present and how should we go about it?

2. The impact of war: transformation and terror: both World War I and II: mobilisation, science and genocide.

3. Dictators east, west and south: war and the emergence of authoritative regimes, but starting with the non-west; modernisation and rage.

4. The transformation of democracy: women, war and work, the rise of the state and its ideals, America, a state without a state and the new deal, the invention of the citizen and consumer, the depression and the empowerment of the consumer.

5. Reflecting on society: the individual, the socialist producer, the family as a unit; moral rearmament in Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism.

6. The falsification of Marx, Engels and Mao: The economy wins out: challenges to capitalism and their utter defeat from America in the 1930s, through Europe in the 1950s and ‘60s, to contemporary China and India; the decline and destruction of the peasantry and proletariat.


7. How science made the modern world, but also destroyed it: scientific thinking, modernity, connection and the mental change in humanity. But this went along with the extinction of species, the destruction of difference.


8. Decentralisation and the new insecurity. The decline of western dominance, the marginalisation of international bodies, the confrontation between ideology and power.



9. The end of humanity: the world in 2010 viewed through the lens of modern and contemporary thinkers: Spengler, Heidegger, Russell, Khomeini, Chomsky, Ashis Nandy, Bauman et al.

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