From Sarajevo to September 11 draws some interesting parallels between the globalized, free-market world before WWI and today:
John Maynard Keynes nicely describes the typical middle-class Londoner in 1914, “sipping his morning tea in bed” while ordering goods from around the world and planning his global investments. For such a man, “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restriction and exclusions, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements in his daily newspaper.” For such a man, and millions of others, Gavrilo Princip’s two shots marked a turning point.
That Londoner sipping his tea in bed in 1914 bears a striking resemblance to a Californian hunched over a cappuccino in Starbucks in 1998. The article also presents some startling facts:
People who talk excitedly about an unprecedented era of globalization should read more history. By some measures, the world is not much more integrated than it was before Princip stepped out of the crowd in Sarajevo. Much of the final quarter of the twentieth century was spent merely recovering ground lost in the previous 75 years — and today’s “global village” still effectively excludes billions of people. Most of the world’s citizens live on less than $10 a day; most don’t have access to phones; four out of every five have never traveled further than 100 miles from their home.