Sublime

the Vietnam War, shock waves rattled the marble palaces of Washington.

despite the arrival of

In the two centuries that followed the death of Tamerlane, Eurasia remained divided between the three civilized worlds we have explored so far, and a number of others, Buddhist and Hindu, that we have passed over in silence. There was little to show that their cultural differences were narrowing. If anything, the energetic state-building that was t

the CBS Nightly News with the words, “And that’s the way it was.” Few of his viewers found it extraordinary that the clash and turmoil of billions of human

The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards. Standards—th

The United States wasn’t the only country facing a rubber drought. Germany had the same problem. As a major industrial power whose colonies had been confiscated after the First World War, Germany depended profoundly on foreign markets for crucial raw materials. It held coal and wood in relative abundance, but when it came to rubber, oil, iron, and

The synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics. Secure access to raw materials—one of the chief benefits of colonization—no longer mattered that much. One could procure the necessary goods through trade, and if, as in the thirties and forties, the markets closed down, well, that wasn’t the end of the world.

After the First World War, the newly established Weimar Republic was impoverished by inflation and economic crises and considered itself abused by the punitive provisions included in the postwar Treaty of Versailles. Under Hitler after 1933, Germany sought to impose its totalitarianism on all of Europe. In short, throughout the first half of the tw