The Cold War on Five Continents offers an original, provocative analysis of the Cold War, which was nothing less than the largest, longest, and most consequential conflict in modern world history.
Instead of focusing on the doings of leaders in Moscow and Washington that fill most conventional accounts, this book uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to explore the surrogate wars on five continents that caused at least 20 million deaths. Not only did these regional wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America transform their Cold War battlegrounds into veritable wastelands, but they also left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that persisted for decades, often right to the present.
McCoy offers intimate personal portraits of both the battle-hardened World War II generation who conducted covert operations on the disparate frontiers of empire and the younger activists who mobilized millions of citizens for long years of antiwar protests that helped end this global conflict. Through such a novel multi-generational analysis, this account humanizes the history of the Cold War, which has too often been told in terms of impersonal elements like economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.
By showing how otherwise ordinary individuals fought this monumental war and brought its threat of nuclear holocaust to an end, this account has important lessons about the possibilities of change for today’s younger generations, who are facing the challenge of climate change in a world where the great powers are devoting humanity’s scarce resources to a “new cold war.”
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Praise for To Govern the Globe:
"An ambitious effort to discern patterns in the rise and fall of world empires.... McCoy’s account is compelling...with many provocative observations on world history and its present twists." —Kirkus
"To Govern the Globe is a brilliant distillation of 700 years of geopolitics, exposing how we arrived where we are, amidst the worsening climate crisis and collapsing world orders. Al McCoy’s eloquently written book is a call to action for us all, as time still remains to prevent an unprecedented cascade of catastrophes."
—Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!
"McCoy is one of the most eminent scholars in the world on the abuse of power and authority, on surveillance and repression, on the historical evolution of state-sanctioned torture in the US and elsewhere, and, more recently, on the rapidly declining state of the US empire.”
—Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist and author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars
“To Govern the Globe ... offers a kaleidoscopic and timely analysis of the present US decline, contextualizing it among a succession of empires and world orders across the past millennium.” —Counterpunch
“In an age where most scholars concentrate on a limited specialty, no one sees a bigger picture more brilliantly than Alfred McCoy. In this powerful, enlightening, and frightening book he gives us a magisterial view of the empires of the past—and of the force in our future which promises to dwarf them all.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
“To Govern the Globe is history on an epic scale—sweeping, provocative, and unsparing in its judgments. Alfred McCoy's immensely readable narrative spans centuries, charting the rise and fall of successive world orders down to our own present moment shaped by China’s emergence as a great power and the blight of climate change.”
—Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed