When the 20th century began, there was history. Capitalists and Socialists alike believed that time unfolded with moral purpose, leading human society through periodic crises into inevitable improvement. By the end of the century, there was globalisation.

Glass towers and shopping malls sprouted in the world’s cities, annihilating older forms of commerce. Millions were pushed out of villages by war, drought and the global market’s takeover of agriculture. In 2005, the UN said it counted 30 million refugees ‘of concern’ – equivalent to the total number of refugees in 1945 – as if what was previously disaster had become run-of-the-mill. Many of these fleeing multitudes lived in the era’s most startling innovation: vast, rapidly expanding, slum-city-states, such as the one surrounding Lagos. Meanwhile, barricades intensified around wealthy neighbourhoods, cities and nations, and the affluent of the world were subjected to a media fantasy of universal freedom and mobility.

There was no more talk of ‘progress’. The gigantic processes of the global market were their own purpose, and no one could really say what they meant, or what human end they served.

Elites of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were serenely confident about the direction their own experiments in ‘globalisation’ would take. In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells warned of the ultimate consequences of the class inequalities he saw around him. But his time traveller had to journey 800,000 years into the future to detect workers and elites splitting into separate, degraded species, and 30 million years for the effects to be complete. There was a certain lack of urgency to the prediction, and his readers could feel reassured that the mighty engine of European commerce would continue for the foreseeable generations.