World Government

To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for good or for ill. But knowing what makes capitalism work - and what makes it fail - is crucial to understanding its long-term health and the vast implications for the global economy that go along with it.

Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies in the heart of West Africa.

Today's most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity's story has always been on a global scale. Sachs takes listeners through a series of seven distinct waves of technological and institutional change, starting with the original settling of the planet by early modern humans through long-distance migration and ending with reflections on today's globalization.

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.

Indonesia is by far the largest nation in Southeast Asia and has the fourth-largest population in the world after the United States. Indonesian history and culture are especially relevant today as the island nation is an emerging power in the region with a dynamic new leader. It is a land of incredible diversity and unending paradoxes that has a long and rich history stretching back a thousand years and more.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) now lives under the shadow cast by his more famous brother Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859, naturalist, explorer, geographer and much else), but Wilhelm was an important figure in Prussian-German history in his own right. He contributed considerably through his work as a diplomat, educationalist (he was one of the principal founders of the Humboldt University of Berlin), philologist and linguist. Yet The Sphere and Duties of Government (originally titled The Limits of State Action) has proved to be one of his most enduring legacies.

From the bestselling author of The Sleepwalkers comes an epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe, and the charismatic figures who propelled them forward, with deep resonance and frightening parallels to today. As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the...

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise - and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world's leading superpower.

The Great Game between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia was fought across desolate terrain from the Caucasus to China, over the lonely passes of the Parmirs and Karakorams, in the blazing Kerman and Helmund deserts, and through the caravan towns of the old Silk Road - both powers scrambling to control access to the riches of India and the East. When play first began, the frontiers of Russia and British India lay 2000 miles apart; by the end, this distance had shrunk to 20 miles at some points.

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks? These are some of the questions at the heart of Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant new book, Chatter. In the late 1990s, when...

Marx and Engels were right when they observed in the Communist Manifesto that free markets had in a short time created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined. A century and a half later, all the evidence shows that capitalism has lifted millions and millions from hunger and poverty. Today's story about global capitalism, shared by right-wing and left-wing populists, but also by large sections of the political and economic establishment, does not deny that prosperity has been created, but it says it ended up in far too few hands.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

¿Quién domina el mundo? Encarnizado, implacable y meticulosamente documentado, proporciona la explicación indispensable de los conflictos y peligros clave de nuestro tiempo que siempre se espera de Noam Chomsky. En un análisis incisivo y concienzudo de la presente situación internacional, Chomsky argumenta que Estados Unidos, por medio de sus políticas predominantemente militaristas y su ilimitada devoción por mantener un imperio de escala mundial, está arriesgándose a una catástrofe que destrozaría los bienes comunes del planeta.

Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.

This new edition of Yasmin Khan's reappraisal of the tumultuous India-Pakistan Partition features an introduction reflecting on the latest research and on ways in which commemoration of the Partition has changed, and considers the Partition in light of the current refugee crisis.

In Israel and the West, it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War or, simply, as "the Setback". Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen, and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the intifada, and the rise of Palestinian terror are all part of the outcome of those six days.

From Lt. General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army, ret., the former National Security Advisor and author of the bestselling classic Dereliction of Duty, comes a bold and provocative re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and an...

A brilliant investigative narrative: How six average Soviet men rose to the pinnacle of Russia's battered economy. David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for

The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals.

Since the Second World War, Arab armed forces have consistently punched below their weight. They have lost many wars that by all rights they should have won, and in their best performances only ever achieved quite modest accomplishments. Over time, soldiers, scholars, and military experts have offered various explanations for this pattern.