Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language (Audiobook)

It seems impossible: a small island in the North Atlantic, colonized by Rome, then pillaged for hundreds of years by marauding neighbors, becomes the dominant world power in the nineteenth century. Equally unlikely, a colony of that island nation across the Atlantic grows into the military and cultural colossus of the twentieth century. How? By the sword, of course; by trade and industrial ingenuity; but principally, and most surprisingly, by the power of their common language.

London in the eighteenth century was a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666 that had destroyed half its homes and great public buildings. The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and large-scale projects, of rapidly changing culture and commerce, as huge numbers of people arrived in the shining city, drawn by its immense wealth and power and its many diversions.

Volume 3 surveys the economic history of the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean during the twentieth century. Its chapters trace the century's major events, notably the Great Depression and the two world wars, as well as its long-term trends, such as changing technology, the rise of the corporate economy, and the development of labor law. The book also discusses agriculture, population, labor markets, and urban and regional structural changes.

This volume seeks to get behind the surface of political events and to identify the forces which shaped politics and culture from 1680 to 1840 in Germany, France and Great Britain. The contributors, all leading specialists in the field, explore critically how 'culture', defined in the widest sense, was exploited during the 'long eighteenth century' to buttress authority in all its forms and how politics infused culture.

Modernist literature and art have been dominated by a disinterest in mere empirical and social reality and a discontent with habitualized perception and the world-view of convention, reason, and pragmatism. This anti-realistic attitude originated in the epistemological scepticism of the early 20th century which was even radicalized by the advent of the »linguistic turn«, constructivism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. Yet it would be a gross simplification to describe the 20th century flatly and globally as an age of anti-realism.