The advent of the twentieth century saw an incredible advance in scientific technology. By the inter-war period of the 1920s and early 1930s cars, planes and radios were a part of everyday life, and science became a popular cult for a new age. Faith in science surged amidst an atmosphere of intellectual and social crisis.



Jo-Anne Pemberton looks in detail at the rhetoric used by the political classes of the time that propagated a vision of a new global unity, and reveals the way in which those same metaphors and imagery are used today in the rhetoric of globalisation. Then, as now, the idea of 'one world' was challenged by notions of multiplicity.



Drawing parallels between then and now, Global Metaphors reveals how much of the appeal of globalisation rhetoric relies on shimmering technological fantasies about the future.