The World in the Long Twentieth Century: An Interpretive History by Edward Ross Dickinson (review)

A global history has much to cover. It requires, as Dickinson explains, a "coherent model of the causes and effects" of global transformations, a framework that identifies "the fundamental forces and developments that have shaped world history" (1). The great virtue of Dickinson's new study of the "long twentieth century" is to meet this challenge and to present a lucid and compelling analysis of global developments during the "long twentieth century," from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Dickinson locates the motor of global change in the technological revolution that began with high industrialization in Europe and has continued, despite a major interruption in the early twentieth century, to this day. Technological advance resulted first in population growth and then in the greatest migrations of human history into the world's dry grasslands and beyond. Industrial development followed from a base in Western Europe and North America, as much of the rest of the world became integrated via imperial expansion, whether formal or informal, into a dynamic global economy by the turn of the twentieth century. In what Dickinson calls "the Great Explosion," an era of global war and revolution followed until the middle of the twentieth century and the onset of what he characterizes as "High Modernity," when torrid technological, demographic, and economic growth and integration again accelerated.

From this material base, Dickinson seeks to link social, political, and cultural processes globally, from the emancipation of wage labor, global militarization, revolutionary unrest, and modernizing dictatorships to secularization and religious ferment, the increasing political power of women, and growing signs of global democratization after the end of the Cold War. His survey is comprehensive, persuasive, and insightful, not the least in putting events from today's newspapers, such as the ecological challenges of contemporary global development, in historical perspective.

The parts of the survey that are devoted to political developments are not as persuasive, particularly in the section that analyzes the turbulent politics of the early twentieth century. It lies in the nature of an analytical venture like this one to emphasize the coherence and comprehensive force of the trends that it describes. In this study, "development" flows pervasively from its European and North American core, until it encompasses virtually every region of the world. In ways that are reflected in the statistical tables with which the account teems, the principal units of analysis are global regions, which measure variations in the common theme of development. This approach also sets global terms for the analysis of political change; diversity and conflict among regions become the central themes. In this connection "oil" and "peasants" provide the pivotal metaphors, keying the analysis to issues that pertain to industrial resources and structural obstacles to development, respectively. Emphasizing the centrality of "oil" to the origins of World War I, Dickinson invokes a hoary interpretive tradition, arguing that the basic issue was competition among the world's developed powers for resources that lay in other regions. World War II similarly grew out of the quest of the Axis powers for oil and, in the case of Nazi Germany, the agricultural bounties of Eastern Europe. The "peasants" metaphor—which now signifies the fate of small-holding, subsistence farmers—plays an analogous role in the analysis of revolutions, which become a marker of delayed development, as well as the spur to developmental dictatorship in many parts of the world.

In the case of both wars and revolutions, the analytical framework leaves questions open about the mobilization of political conflict. Plotting political strife as the product of developmental disparities among regions, it underplays both the variety and potential for conflict within regions of the globe. Intraregional conflict was a critical element in the origins of both great wars. Peasants were a problem not only in Russia, China, and Togo but also in Germany, France, and Italy. This analytical difficulty becomes more central as the discussion turns to issues...