The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

"When they write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter 'September 11, 2001 to March 2004,' what will they say was most important? The attack on the World Trade Center and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of PCs, telecom and workflow softwares into a tipping point that allowed India to become part of the global supply chain for services the way China had become for manufacturing--creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations (India and China), giving both nations a huge new stake in the success of globalization, but also flattening the world in a way that requires us all to run faster in order to stay in place? Has the world gotten too small, too fast, and too flat for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?

"What I am sure of is that the world has gone from round to flat. Once I realized that, a lot of things that I was reading on the front pages of the newspaper and in the business section became much clearer to me. This book is an effort to share this framework with readers in the hope that they will be able to make better sense of the bewildering world unfolding before their eyes. It is an attempt to explain how this flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century, what are the up-sides and down-sides of it for countries, companies, communities, and individuals, and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.
--From the Introduction