Global Economic History

The buying and selling of citizenship has become a legitimate, thriving business in just a few years. Entrepreneurs are renouncing America and Europe in favor of tax havens in the Caribbean with the help of a cottage industry of lawyers, bankers, and consultants that specialize in expatriation...

The intensified globalization that ensued after the end of the Cold War has resulted in an unprecedented level of interconnectedness between the economies of all rising and established powers. Economic interdependence makes today's world a much more complex place than when balance of power theory was initially developed. International relations literature has overlooked the fact that great powers have been using institutions to soft balance each other's power and aggressive behavior. Restraining Great Powers places the evolution of balancing behavior in historical perspective.

Winner of the American Meteorological Society's Louis J. Batton Book of the Year Award From a writer and expert who has been at the center of the fight for more than thirty years, a brilliant, big-picture reckoning with our shocking failure to address climate change. Fire and Flood focuses on...

The National Book Award-winning historian of Stamped from the Beginning charts how “great replacement theory” has moved from the margins to become the most dominant political theory of our time—and what we can do to safeguard democracy from this insidious threat. Recall the words chanted...

An extraordinary exposé of the industry flooding our world with plastic—and now ramping up to make more than ever “Deeply researched, sharply written, and totally compelling.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the The Sixth Extinction “It is impossible not to compare Beth Gardiner’s...

As Europe rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War, the former colonies of the major imperial powers sought their independence at the same time the US extended its economic and political power globally. In Turbulent Empires, Mike Mason analyzes the struggles for postcolonial sovereignty and economic domination and how these competing forces led to conflicts and shifting alliances around the postwar world.

Who is the richest person in the world, ever? Does where you were born affect how much money you'll earn over a lifetime? How would we know? Why, beyond the idle curiosity, do these questions even matter? In The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading experts on wealth, poverty, and the gap that separates them, explains these and other mysteries of how wealth is unevenly spread throughout our world, now and through time.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we...

Foreign aid organizations collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with mixed results. Part of the problem in these endeavors lies in their execution. Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects, Honig concludes that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery.

An incisive exploration of women and work, showing how globalization’s promise of liberation instead set the stage for repression—from the acclaimed author of Factory Girls “Vividly rendered . . . Chang brings us into living rooms and onto assembly lines with female characters as...

Visionary. Iconoclast. Political Survivor. "A powerful and entertaining look" (Governor Gavin Newsom) at the extraordinary life and political career of Governor Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown is no ordinary politician. Like his state, he is eclectic, brilliant, unpredictable and sometimes weird. And...

Singaporean-Canadian author Joanne Leow sheds light on the underbelly of Singapore's history and the human cost behind its glittering façade. "What unknowable chemical? How slow was this damage, this violence? . . . How might any of us stay uncontaminated by all that was built around us?" Sleek...

From the best-selling authors of The Right Nation, a visionary argument that our current crisis in government is nothing less than the fourth radical transition in the history of the nation-state. Dysfunctional government: It' s become a cliché, and most of us are resigned to the fact that nothing is ever going to change. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge show us, that is a seriously limited view of things. In fact, there have been three great revolutions in government in the history of the modern world.

¿Existe una alternativa a la globalización empresarial y al militarismo que asola nuestro planeta? Estas obras clásicas de Ernesto Che Guevara presentan una visión revolucionaria de un mundo diferente en el que la solidaridad humana y la comprensión sustituyen a la agresión y la...

Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the "workshop of the world." Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country's internal dynamics - China's politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development - few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world.

Before and after World War II, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity - between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. A global financial system was devised explicitly to allow nations to manage capitalism. Yet this golden era turned out to be lightning in a bottle. From the 1970s on, a power shift occurred, in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened, and disheartened voters turned to far-right faux populism. Can democracy find a way to survive?

This book brings unique perspectives to this key debate by exploring the history of green entrepreneurship since the nineteenth century, and its spread globally in industries including renewable energy, organic food, natural beauty, ecotourism, recycling, architecture, and finance. The book uses the lens of the extraordinary and often eccentric men and women who defied convention and imagined that business could help save the planet, rather than consume it. The social and religious beliefs that drove many of these individuals are explored.

Why has the Eurozone ended up with an unemployment rate more than twice that of the United States more than six years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Why did the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries suffer a prolonged economic slowdown in the last two decades of the 20th century? What was the role of the International Monetary Fund in these economic failures?

Dr. Henry Kaufman is the most famous economist Wall Street has ever seen, renowned well beyond the financial industry. He was the subject of New Yorker cartoons, had cameos in drama productions and two seminal literary works of the 1980s, was subject to death threats, and enjoyed the nickname "Dr. Doom." His pinnacle of influence arrived on August 17, 1982. That single day turned out to be the beginning of the world that we now live in.

In Sovereign Soldiers, Grant Madsen tells the story of how this cast of characters assumed an unfamiliar and often untold policymaking role. Seeking to avoid the harsh punishments meted out after World War I, military leaders believed they had to rebuild and rehabilitate their former enemies; if they failed they might cause an even deadlier World War III.