The author and politician analyzes the troubled state of Britain's post–World War II political and economic systems, and proposes a solution.When World War II ended for Great Britain in 1945, MP John Strachey wondered what he and his country were going to do with the freedom they had fought for and won. The men who ran the country before the war had taken England so far down the road to disaster that it seemed almost impossible to save. To prevent history from repe...

**An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied“A magisterial history.”—Paul KrugmanNamed a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company**Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. ...

“I defy anybody—Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”—John Cassidy, The New YorkerAs the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics profes...

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, i...

A #1 Sunday Times bestseller [UK]A titanic battle is being waged for Europe's integrity and soul, with the forces of reason and humanism losing out to growing irrationality, authoritarianism, and malice, promoting inequality and austerity. The whole world has a stake in a victory for rationality, liberty, democracy, and humanism.In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek pa...

Vladimir Lenin created this hugely significant Marxist text to explain fully the inevitable flaws and destructive power of Capitalism: that it would lead unavoidably to imperialism, monopolies and colonialism. He prophesied that those third world countries used merely as capitalist labour would have no choice but to join the Communist revolution in Russia.GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each ot...

Populism of the right and left has spread like wildfire throughout the world. The impulse reached its apogee in the United States with the election of Trump, but it was a force in Europe ever since the Great Recession sent the European economy into a prolonged tailspin. In the simplest terms, populism is a political ideology that vilifies economic and political elites and instead lionizes 'the people.' The people, populists of all stripes contend, need to retake power from the unaccountabl...

"Magisterial history...one of the most comprehensive histories of modern capitalism yet written." —Michael Hirsh, New York Times Book ReviewIn 1900 international trade reached unprecedented levels and the world's economies were more open to one another than ever before. Then as now, many people considered globalization to be inevitable and irreversible. Yet the entire edifice collapsed in a few months in 1914.Globalization is a choice, not a fact. ...

Shortly after arriving in the White House in early 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard. His opponents thought his decision unwise at best, and ruinous at worst. But they could not have been more wrong.With The Money Makers, Eric Rauchway tells the absorbing story of how FDR and his advisors pulled the levers of monetary policy to save the domestic economy and propel the United States to unprecedented prosperity and superpower status. Drawi...

Now in a fully revised and updated edition, this book remains the standard for concise histories of the European Union. Mark Gilbert offers a clear and balanced narrative of European integration since its inception to the present, set in the wider history of the post-war period. Gilbert concludes by considering the Union’s future in light of the mood of crisis that has taken hold in the EU in the aftermath of the global recession, the refugee crisis, and Brexit.Listen to a New Book...

Originally published in 1916, it was one of the first attempts to account for the increasing importance of the world market in the twentieth century. The essay is a synthesis of Lenin’s modifications and developments of economic theories that Karl Marx formulated in ‘Das Kapital’. This remarkable Marxist text explains fully the inescapable flaws and destructive power of Capitalism.Lenin offers a predictive scenario of a world shaken by competitive instability, warfare and crisis, dominated...

The Parliament of Man is the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America's greatest living historians.Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN's roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: falli...