What lies behind the geopolitical, economic and political crises of the 21st century?

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century
HELEN THOMPSON
(oxford university press, 384 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

History, some wag once quipped, is just one damned thing after another. You know what he meant, though isn’t it more the case that history is one damned thing before another? Certainly that’s how Helen Thompson seems to see things. Her new book, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, seeks to account for the political shocks of the past few years by taking us back to what she believes are their multifarious origins. It’s a bold and brilliant book, studded with insights and arguments so take-you-aback, they’d have Pangloss mouthing Edgar’s line: “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.” For all that, there’s something unconvincing about the case Thompson, a professor of political economy at Cambridge, makes. When an historian starts talking about things that had to happen, she’s not writing history. She’s predicting the past.