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In August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the Indian Constituent Assembly on the eve of independence: ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge.’ The phrase captured something genuinely extraordinary. But it concealed as much as it revealed. Independence came simultaneously with partition — and the violence that accompanied it remains one of the largest catastrophes of the twentieth century. The tryst with destiny was written in blood before it was written in ink.
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In 1839, Louis Daguerre announced to the French Académie des Sciences a process by which light acting on a chemically prepared surface could produce a permanent image of whatever lay before the lens. It was not simply a technical innovation. It was an epistemological event. For the first time in human history, the external world could be made to represent itself, bypassing the intermediary of the human hand. The question of what this meant — for knowledge, for art, for memory, for truth — has been argued over for nearly two centuries, and has not yet been resolved.
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On 17 December 2010, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi stood outside the regional headquarters of the Tunisian government in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, doused himself in paint thinner, and set himself alight. His act of self-immolation became the symbolic catalyst for the most significant wave of popular uprisings in the Arab world since decolonisation. Within weeks, the president of Tunisia had fled. Within months, the presidents of Egypt and Libya had fallen. Within five years, most of those hopes were extinguished.
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In 1978, the People’s Republic of China was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its economy had been devastated by the convulsions of the Maoist era — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — and its population of nearly a billion people had a per capita income comparable to sub-Saharan Africa. Forty years later, China was the world’s second-largest economy, the largest manufacturer, the largest trading nation, and a military and technological power whose capacities no other country could ignore. The transformation was without precedent in the history of economic development.
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The twentieth century produced more kinds of music than any previous era, and the proliferation was not random. Each major genre that emerged — gospel, blues, jazz, country, R&B, soul, reggae, hip-hop, electronic music — arose from a specific social location, carried specific values and grievances, and tracked the history of the communities that created it with a fidelity that no other art form matched. Popular music was not the accompaniment to the social history of the century. In many respects, it was the most accurate record of it.
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On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen men boarded four commercial aircraft on the east coast of the United States and turned them into weapons. By the time the day was over, nearly 3,000 people were dead, two of the most recognisable buildings in the world had collapsed, and the most powerful government on earth had begun the process of deciding what it would do in response. The decisions it made over the following months and years reshaped the world in ways that are still being reckoned with.
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In 1962, Rachel Carson published a book about pesticides. It was written in a style more usually associated with poetry than with science, and it argued that the application of synthetic chemicals to the natural world was producing consequences that no one had planned and that no one had yet begun to measure. The book did not save the environment. But it created the political and cultural conditions in which saving the environment became thinkable.
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The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is sometimes described as ancient, and it is not. It is a modern conflict, born of the specific conditions of the late nineteenth century — the rise of nationalism, the decline of empire, the crisis of European Jewry — and of the specific decisions taken by specific people in the first half of the twentieth century. Understanding it requires going back to those origins, without assuming that the outcome was in any way inevitable.
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The internet was built by the American military to survive a nuclear war. It became the infrastructure of global commerce, the primary means by which most of the world’s population communicates, and the most powerful surveillance apparatus in human history. None of these outcomes were planned. All of them followed, with a logic that seems almost inevitable in retrospect, from decisions made without any clear sense of what they would produce.
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Cinema was the twentieth century’s own art form — the only major artistic medium to be invented after industrialisation and before the digital age. No other form matched its combination of mass reach, emotional immediacy, and technical complexity, and no other was so thoroughly shaped by the specific conditions of the century that produced it.