Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Globalization imperially fractured
- 3 America and its empire in the Progressive Era, 1890–1930
- 4 Asian empires
- 5 Half-global crisis
- 6 Explaining revolutions
- 7 A half-global crisis
- 8 The new deal
- 9 The development of social citizenship in capitalist democracies
- 10 The Fascist alternative, 1918–1945
- 11 The Soviet alternative, 1918–1945
- 12 Japanese imperialism, 1930–1945
- 13 Explaining the Chinese revolution
- 14 The last interimperial war, 1939–1945
- 15 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Globalization imperially fractured
- 3 America and its empire in the Progressive Era, 1890–1930
- 4 Asian empires
- 5 Half-global crisis
- 6 Explaining revolutions
- 7 A half-global crisis
- 8 The new deal
- 9 The development of social citizenship in capitalist democracies
- 10 The Fascist alternative, 1918–1945
- 11 The Soviet alternative, 1918–1945
- 12 Japanese imperialism, 1930–1945
- 13 Explaining the Chinese revolution
- 14 The last interimperial war, 1939–1945
- 15 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The third volume of my history of power in human society concerns the period of history leading up to 1945. However, I cannot put a precise starting date on this period because two different timescales are involved. My second volume, on the advanced industrializing countries, ended in 1914, so here I resume their domestic stories in 1914, although I go back a little further in the cases of the United States and Japan. I am also concerned here with global empires, which I neglected in my second volume. This involves the second, much longer, timescale, starting well before 1914. We will also see that the years 1914–1945 must not be seen as a period quite apart, an island of chaos amid a sea of tranquility; its crises were the culmination of long-standing structural tendencies of modern Western civilization.
The main story in both periods is that globalizations were well under way. Note the plural: there was more than one process of globalization. As I have argued throughout my volumes, human societies form around four distinct power sources – ideological, economic, military and political – that have a relative degree of autonomy from each other (this is my IEMP model of power). So what is generally called globalization (singular) actually involved the plural extension of relations of ideological, economic, military, and political power across the world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sources of Social Power , pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012