Audiobook: Turbulent Empires - A History of Global Capitalism Since 1945
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
this study deals with the recent origins of the globalized world that we inhabit. It is a coda to air Cobb's bombs, Age of Extremes, 1994 and unmatched history of the short 20th century that began with the outbreak of the Great War and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of communism throughout most of the world. Adding 1/4 century of recent history two hubs, bombs view into obscurity has led me to shift my focus away from Europe towards Asia. It is here, and especially in China, that we shall very probably witnessed the most dramatic events of the 21st century. Euro centrism is thus likely to be a costly vice. Likewise, America First Ism. The present study was originally to be called when the music stopped, but as time went by and the band struck up again, that seemed inappropriately pessimistic. So as the banks were recapitalized, the market revived, the colossal Chinese economy boomed, the show went on and the title was changed. The present title has been adopted not only to recognize the crisis of 2008 but all those crises national and international that have been the corollaries of the expansion and consolidation of post war global capitalism the 70 years that we might call so far at least the short American century. This process of expansion in earlier times have been dubbed free trade imperialism, but now we give it a more tender description. Globalization. As I compose this preface in the aftermath of the Brexit vote of June 23rd 2016 however, this globalization that engendered novel box of political and economic influence seems to have lost some of its mojo. There is nothing new I can say about capitalism, nor anything novel about globalization in different forms. Both have existed since at least the 17th century. Contemporary globalisation, driven by the economic explosion of Postwar America, has appropriated older forms of trade and commerce and to fix them to the new French bankers still squeeze foreign borrowers, as they did the Egyptians in the 19th century. But social media transforms political possibility, as in Syntagma and Tahrir squares. And like its ancestor, contemporary globalisation is both Marshall and commercial. It requires fleets and armies and huge defense and security expenditure, as well as a web of banks and transnational corporations and an Elektronik net to sustain itself. American dominated financial practices and institutions. The dollar, the I M f, the debt rating services, the Office of Foreign Assets Control served to channel the entire system, not to exaggerate globalization. Although the American version of English is the world's Latin in the marketplaces and accounting houses, the airports and a Davos, it will never be the lingua franca of the world's towns. And at the world's movies, one is just is likely to hear Hindi or Brazilian Portuguese. The overarching, ubiquitous Postwar imperial center is still America. The practice that America engages in economically, militarily and culturally to assure its dominance is called hegemony, a relatively contemporary word revived and popularized, as I noted, Chapter one in the 19 seventies. Often American writers call hegemony by the bashful term leadership, but the to refer to a similar practice. With the dissolution of the Soviet empire, circa 1990 it appeared that hegemonic competition had ceased to exist. The bipolar world was toast. So for a brief, giddy moment at the end of the 20th century, it looked like history had run out of road, and we were now safely in McDonald's parking lot, then a convulsion to the shock and horror of the world. 9 11 proved that the end of history view was premature. Then came a second convulsion, the crash of 2008 and with in the following years, a growing popular reaction to the assumptions and inequalities of the boom and bubble years. Among these reactions was the Brexit of June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US In some, in the snapshots that follow, I hope to consider several national developmental histories, most of which have shown themselves to be remarkable and all of which are distinctive yet globally. A miracle remains as the Hegeman, the slogan Bring America Back is therefore socios America never went anywhere to come back from. Meanwhile, we're turning the pages of the American Century. And to quote Joan Robinson, the show still goes on