When I reviewed the second edition of the Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy earlier this year (Goodin et al., 2007) (RR 2009/58) I recommended it, but criticized it for using a “… narrower definition of ‘political philosophy’ than I would have wished… Political activity, and therefore political philosophy, would surely continue even if the nation‐state withered away entirely. I suspect that if there is a third edition in a dozen years or so, it will need to be much more different from this … ” The book I was looking for was this one, or something very like it.
I went to university in 1962; graduating with a degree in International Relations (Politics, Economics and Modern History) but the history we were taught was still the history we had been taught in school: the story of the development of the modern western nation‐states. Empires rise and fall but the nation‐state goes on, as the culmination of the historical process. The editors of this enterprising book date this attitude back to the re‐creation of scholarly history in the mid‐nineteenth century. I would personally put it earlier: the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is basically an account of the development of the European nation‐states out of the crumbling Western Empire. I suspect that part of Gibbon's blatant irritation with the Eastern Empire was that it obstinately refused to follow what he already regarded as the “normal” pattern. Byzantium varied over the years from being a sprawling empire to being a commercial city, but it was never a nation or a state.
For many of us at the time, Karl Marx provided the first idea of an alternative approach, both in looking back with Engels at the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State and looking forward, somewhat vaguely, to the ultimate withering away of the state. The state is now withering away in all sorts of its aspects that never occurred to Marx. Being an old fogy I tend to find my way around using maps drawn up by Her Majesty's Ordnance Survey for example, but an increasing number of people navigate using equipment made in China for a Dutch‐owned firm, which gives access to California or India‐based servers distributing data from satellites located significantly outside any national jurisdiction. The nation‐state may have made sense in post‐Napoleonic Western Europe, but it is arguable that the American insistence on imposing it on the defeated Austro‐Hungarian and Ottoman empires in 1919 was not conducive to the common peace, and arbitrary attempts to impose it on chunks of post‐colonial Africa have contributed largely to a range of humanitarian disasters. Whether the state will wither away peacefully or go down fighting remains to be seen. I was encouraged recently by reading Superorganism (Hölldobler and Wilson, 2009), which I recommend to the editors' attention for the next edition of this book. During the 1930s South American fire ants were accidentally imported to the USA. Instead of forming discrete nation‐nests, they have covered most of the southern states with millions of interconnected settlements. “With territorial boundaries erased, local populations now coalesce into a single sheet of inter‐compatible ants spread across the inhabited landscape.” If ants can do it and remain ants, perhaps humans can do it, and remain human.
The editors of this enterprising volume realised that the history of the modern age, more than that of any other period, has been incessantly written up from a national perspective, but is really the story of ever‐increasing flows of people, ideas, goods and processes operating over, across, through, above or under national lines. There are numerous encyclopedic guides to world history but all are organised along national lines. I do not know of any other reference work which attempts to cover recent world history from a transnational perspective. This is called a dictionary, but is really more of a compact but weighty encyclopedia, with just under 500 signed entries, varying from a column to seven or eight pages in length. Most are supplemented by bibliographies, mainly of printed English‐language works. The cross‐referencing is adequate, and some introductory tree diagrams help guide the reader through inter‐related entries. There are two indexes, one supposedly of names and one of subjects, so that, for example, Amsterdam is in the name index, but Amsterdam, Treaty of is a subject. This arrangement does not work well, and does not indicate major entries. Thus Woodrow Wilson gets fourteen mentions in the name index, scattered through the book, but no indication that he has a whole column, located in a box under the general heading Pax Americana.
Getting over 300 contributors to complete their work on time must have been a horrendous task. Some entries were obviously written some time ago and were not updated immediately prior to publication. Thus, for example, the most recent reference under Debt Crises is to a 2002 publication, and none of the economic entries hold any suggestion of the present world financial crisis. I am sure that several would have been very different if written a year later. Similarly, entries on the internet and on IT standardisation are already rather dated. There is a nice entry on library history from a transnational angle, but no index entry for digitization. Digitization is clearly going to do far more for the transnational availability of knowledge. This ought to have been obvious even at the point when this book was being commissioned. The human brain is much more plastic than used to be thought. It is clear that modern transnational methods of communication are changing human mental processes (Guha, 2009). It might be worth getting a psychologist to write on this for the next edition, as well as an entomologist to write about fire ants.
Many entries are, inevitably but annoyingly, incomplete. Thus, to take a random example, the rather trite article on “Jazz” jumps chronologically from big bands to “modern”, completely ignoring the extraordinary way in which enthusiasm for the New Orleans revival swept large parts of the world in the 1940s – I was reading recently the story of the Dutch Swing College, which started, under that English‐language name, in 1944. (Other events in The Netherlands in 1944, we may recall, were the arrest and death of Anne Frank, the British Army's catastrophic landing at Arnhem, and the beginning of the largest mass famine in modern Western European history, but those boys were playing Dixieland, in the same way that Claude Luter was defying the Gestapo in Paris.) The editors, as this entry might suggest, have cast their net extraordinarily widely. This has lead to inconsistencies – McDonalds gets an entry of its own, but Coca‐Cola only has a box column under the general heading America. From a transnational point of view I would have thought that Coca‐Cola had the first historic impact. Similarly the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC) seems to be the only bank with an individual entry, though there is a lot about the development of international banking. From a historical point of view I would have expected Rothschild's to have an entry. There are curious omissions – there are entries on Femininity and on Women's Movements but not one on feminism (and neither of these cite Ehrenreich and Hochschild's Global Woman and neither are up to date enough to cite Marilyn French's four‐volume From Eve to Dawn). Many of the articles are marvellously succinct discussions of complex issues however. The seven pages on Climate Change provide the best summary of this topic that I have come across, for example. Though there are omissions, and inconsistencies of approach, I have not come across any serious factual inaccuracies at all, and even the blandest entries contain something worth reading.
This book suffers, of course, from being a pioneer work. I am sure that a better one will come along eventually. As, I believe, Gertrude Stein remarked about Hemmingway “You do something new, then someone comes along and does it pretty”. The editors quite rightly point out the limitations of their own Anglo‐American centeredness. The book, they admit, would have been “very different if it had been edited, say, by a Latin‐American historian born/living in China and a Middle Eastern scholar with some experience in Indian universities”. They “are looking forward to another such dictionary or encyclopedia, or to a new edition of this … ”. In the meantime, we have to consider whether libraries should purchase this one. Though I can always find something to carp at and quibble over, my firm recommendation is yes. The nation state is clearly withering away, whether you like it or not, so the study of history will have to change with it. All university libraries catering for academic work in any aspect of modern history, as well as in international relations, politics, law, etc. should seriously consider buying this book, in preference to any more conventional historical encyclopedias – they have almost certainly got enough of those. The general public's enthusiasm for history still centres on kings and battles, or on local history and genealogy, so public libraries may feel less willing to invest a substantial sum on this. It is still worth their bearing in mind though.
