Sublime

the question of why a stable international system suddenly collapsed after flourishing for centuries.

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

At Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the soon-to-be-victorious Allies met in July 1944 to devise a new financial architecture for the post-war world. In this new order, trade would be progressively liberalized, but restrictions on capital movements would remain in place. Exchange rates would be fixed, as under the gold standard, bu

Succession

Xi likes to compare “China’s order” with “chaos in the West.” As well he might, for it’s a playbook the world has seen before. Leaders of the Axis powers, after several successful invasions in the late 1930s, were themselves astonished by the disunity of their vanquished opponents.

With The Great Transformation, published in 1944, the Hungarian-born historian and economist Karl Polanyi offers one of the best accounts of that techno-economic transition[58]. Although it’s not autobiographical, the book is deeply rooted in Polanyi’s life. Like many who grew up in Budapest and Vienna before the Great War, he witnessed first-hand

History is an amazing teacher. The stories it has to tell are more interesting than any we could make up. And many of the more interesting relate to the fall of Rome. They document important lessons that could be relevant to your future in the Information Age.