The Distant Horizon

The chronological range of Bernstein's book is staggering, although unevenly spread, spanning from ancient Sumer to the present day. Bernstein juggles this saga of human endeavor (and the massive bibliography of works he has himself consumed) with a deft use of specific examples and anecdotes that illustrate his larger narrative. Take, for example, the lively account of the rise of the lucrative coffee trade, from a single-source commodity grown and harvested in Arabia Felix (today part of Yemen) to a product that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had established a global demand, with consumers residing in places as far afield as Indonesia and the East End of London; a widening plantation base in Africa, Asia, and South America; and some ferociously competitive trading networks. Consider, also, Bernstein's skillfully presented vignettes of important theorists of and pundits on free trade -- Robert Heilbroner's "worldly philosophers." A discussion of the economist David Ricardo, for example, allows Bernstein to insert a clear and simple explanation of the tricky principle of comparative advantage.

Bernstein's fine book ends far too fast. Unlike most other large histories, in which the narrative swells as it moves toward the contemporary world, A Splendid Exchange shrinks rapidly from 1900 onward. Bernstein is clearly happiest with his preindustrial merchants and dealers, with silk routes and sugar islands. That is great, but one wishes he had brought such scrutiny in like proportion to the tumultuous past century of international commerce. A few last pages on "the battle of Seattle," about the riots at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999, and on today's red-hot debate over the merits or demerits of globalization is not enough.

Talbott's The Great Experiment has a very different teleology -- a good half of it deals with the years after 1945 -- yet is equally interesting and enjoyable to read. This book was, I suspect, a fairly risky enterprise for Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state who now heads the Brookings Institution. Not only does it take him much further back in time than do any of his works on the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, or the end of the Cold War, but he also ventures to give us an unusual hybrid of a book, partly a sweeping history of what might be termed "the rise of the West," partly a personal account of the transformations that have occurred in international affairs over the past 30 years or so. The danger here is that reviewers will find this tome to be neither fish nor fowl and see it as a rather self-indulgent account of humankind's progress from King Nebuchadnezzar II to life beyond the current Bush presidency -- which indeed it is, since the language ranges from the obvious/historical ("Napoleon Bonaparte understood the power of ideas and violence when they were combined") to the personal/anecdotal ("During one of my trips to New York shortly afterward, Albright and I went out to dinner [Chinese, I recall] and . . ."). Sometimes it reminded me of eighteenth-century books with titles like A History of All the Worlde With Special Reference to Mine Own Times, and Thoughts Upon the Future.

Yet The Great Experiment is valuable precisely because it offers a current public intellectual and policy practitioner's view of the centuries-old caravan of human progress, with its mixture of disasters and triumphs. Like a spotlight hitting a jagged hillside, it illuminates only the most prominent aspects. But in that selectivity lies the book's strength, and in its audacious sweep lies its claim to be included in this discussion of Big History. Talbott's spotlight illuminates Cicero's pleadings for a republic rather than an empire and casts a nice light on the contrast between Thomas Hobbes' notion of "perpetual war" and Immanuel Kant's argument for "perpetual peace." The book also has nifty vignettes on Woodrow Wilson's failures and Harry Truman's successes at postwar settlements and an intriguing commentary on Dwight Eisenhower and Dag Hammarskjöld's joint diplomacy to end the 1956 Suez crisis -- Eisenhower out of raison d'état concerns, Hammarskjöld out of an abiding wish to establish a universal rule of law. It is also studded with bad guys, with conquerors and mass murderers, many of whom dreamed of establishing their own "world order." But even if these characters may have slowed down, or even temporarily checked, the broader Tennysonian advance toward a parliament of man, they never succeeded in reversing the advance toward global civil society.

The Great Experiment is, all in all, a Whiggish tome in modern guise, and worth a serious read on that score alone. Even if in its final few pages he worries about the twin, unprecedented threats to humankind of nuclear conflagration and catastrophic climate change, Talbott asserts both the possibility and the imperative to head off such dangers and improve the world: "In taking the steps necessary for survival, we will give ourselves the chance of taking global governance to a higher and more promising level." Perhaps, but Talbott is making a heavy investment in the faith that today's leaders and publics possess far greater wisdom than those of the past.

THE TOLERANT HEGEMON