Age of Discovery

‘A landmark new book.’ – The Guardian

Age of Discovery looks at the world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks the question, how do we avoid chaos and disruption, and share more widely the benefits of progress?

Now is humanity’s best moment. And our most fragile. Global health, wealth and education are booming. Scientific discovery is flourishing. But the same forces that make big gains possible for some of us deliver big losses to others—and tangle us together in ways that make everyone vulnerable.

We’ve been here before. The first Renaissance, the time of Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg and others, redrew all maps of the world, liberated information and shifted Western civilization from the medieval to the early modern era. Such change came at a price: social division, political extremism, economic shocks, pandemics and other unintended consequences of human endeavour.

Now is our second Renaissance. In the face of terrorism, Brexit, refugee crises and the global impact of a Trump presidency, we can flourish—if we heed the urgent lessons of history. Age of Discovery, revised and updated for this paperback edition, shows us how.

Author Biography

Ian Goldin is Director of the Oxford Martin School and Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford. He was Vice President of the World Bank and prior to that the Bank’s Director of Development Policy. From 1996 to 2001 he was Chief Executive and Managing Director of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and also served as an advisor to President Nelson Mandela. He has been knighted by the French government and is an acclaimed author of 20 books.

Chris Kutarna is a two-time Governor General’s Medallist, a Sauvé Fellow and Commonwealth Scholar, and a Fellow of the Oxford Martin School with a doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford. A former consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, then entrepreneur, Chris lived in China for several years, speaks Mandarin, and remains a regular op-ed contributor to one of China’s top-ranked news magazines. He resides in Oxford, Beijing and Regina.