The World in the Twentieth Century

This provocative history of the twentieth century, our age, dares to take a new approach and offers compelling new perspectives. Eshewing the standard political history of the West, Jeremy Black points up the deeper issues of the century and those which will surely determine our path in the twenty first: belief, race, gender, technology and the environment. At the same time, there is a determined engagement with other continents, especially Asia and Africa.

 From this major author comes a totally unique history of the twentieth century. Eschewing the traditional model for histories of this kind – blow-by-blow political narratives typically overloaded with detail - Jeremy Black offers us instead a brilliant thematic account of the last 100 years with the environment and the continuing strength of religious belief at its centre.  

Looking back to the 1910s and 1920s, Black begins with "the greatest issue of all" – the natural environment and its destruction, and moves to show how our world been transformed by urbanisation and development. Amazing developments took place across the century: men walked on the moon, the internet revolutionised communications; advances in health and medicine; developments in manufacturing and technology; economic globalization – all have changed the way different parts of the world related to each other.  How have these revolutionary changes impacted on religion and politics?

In the final sections of the book, Black looks at the persistence and growing extremism in religious belief, how change creates instability and wars, and how power blocs emerged and collapsed in response to all these developments.  This is twentieth century world history on a truly global scale. The Twentieth Century World forces us to rethink the way we view the past, and offers us a new way to understand the present.