The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
By Parag Khanna
Allen Lane 496 pages, £25
FT bookshop price: £20

Shortly after his retirement as director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the historian Arnold Toynbee set off on a 17-month voyage around the world. His account of the journey was published as East to West. Fifty years later, at the beginning rather than the end of his career, Parag Khanna has followed in Toynbee’s footsteps. The result might well have been entitled “West to East’’. In Khanna’s view, that is certainly the direction in which world history is travelling.