How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

by Vaclav Smil

technical advances do not make continued progress inevitable: most notably, the first half of the 20th century saw a significant retreat from economic globalization and hence also from the accompanying international movement of people. The reasons for this retreat are obvious, as the decades were marked by an unprecedented concatenation of large-scale tragedies and reversals of national fortunes. The list, limited to the key events, includes the end of the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty (1912); the First World War (1914–1918); the end of Czarist Russia, when the Bolsheviks took power and years of civil war followed, ending with the establishment of the USSR (1917–1921); the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire (final dissolution by 1923); the political instability in Europe of the postwar 1920s; the stock market collapse in late October 1929; the subsequent worldwide economic crises that lasted for most of the 1930s; Japan’s invasion of Manchuria (1931), the true beginning of another great war; the Nazi takeover of Germany (1933); the Spanish civil war (1936–1939); the Second World War (1939–1945); the renewed civil war in China (1945–1949); the beginning of the Cold War (1947); and Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (1949). The retreat of economic globalization was substantial. The share of trade in global GDP fell from about 14 percent in 1913 to about 6 percent in 1939 and then to only 4 percent in 1945.[90]