I blame this particular acquisitions recently in Guardian Eric Hobsbawm recommended Göran Therborn The World: a beginner’s Guide to the following, what can I do, but buy it: “survey of the State, problems and Outlook of the world by sociologist master Sweden, is one of the rare book that lives up to the title. Very obviously, savvy about the future and the wonderfully researched. “
Honestly, this is not a gripping read. It’s kind of an encyclopedic nature, survey leave I sometimes wonder if it might wash up needed doing, or maybe some weeding, but I’m glad that I read it-and I am sure that I will regularly refer to some time to come.
This is one of the books that continues to throw at you facts that make You look up and ask anyone else in the “did you know that …?” “In 1820 more than half of the world’s goods are still produced in Asia and only about a fourth in Europe”, or “people who are illiterate are not getting votes in Brazil until 1989″ or “40% of elderly people in the world still have a say over their children’s marriage”.
As a small example that illustrates, this book is not really about the world, but of humanity, and it takes awesome global, even-handed approach in the accounts, pretty well all parts of the world quite closed. (That is, the United Kingdom, it was almost sorry is never significant and different enough to get a mention.) At various points it’s Sweden that is now professor emeritus at the University of Camdridge allow drop about teaching in Korea and Iran, and the breadth of experience out in his work. He also had a vast tracts of land. He explicitly did not write the history-he recommends Fernandez-Armesto The World: A Global History, for it-but he must take the long view of today’s developments in relation to the events during the last few centuries or more, and sometimes longer.
He wants to understand “culture-see” the effect of geological endowment of ancient civilisations, several waves of globalisation, the different paths of modernity “. Then he wants to understand human evolution (of course not in determining biological sense), as a result of the interaction between man and nature, competition between the various political and economic systems, cultures and values, and coercion put up by life events.