The Cold War, which for nearly half a century so profoundly conditioned our thinking about the world in which we lived, ended in 1990. Most students now in our universities were young children then and have never consciously known the bipolar world. Yet the books they use on their courses are often the product of an earlier reality, even when nominally 'updated' in new editions. Lee's account is one of the first to reflect the emerging new paradigms that are beginning to refashion the way we think of the modern world. Lee argues that the causative agents of the revolutionary change experienced in so many spheres in the 'long C20' changed over time. In the pre-1945 era capitalism, with the technologies that underpinned it, and colonial empires were the most significant. After 1945, capitalist expansion was shaped by the bipolar international system and US hegemony. Globalization gained momentum after the 1960s but may already have passed its peak: according to a number of indicators, the world is no more globalized today than it was 100 years ago.

These and related arguments provide a conceptual framework for a text that covers a large chronology and a geography that is truly global. Unlike most comparable texts, which look out at the world from London or (more commonly) the eastern seaboard of the USA, this one makes a determined effort to reflect non-Western as well as Western perspectives.