History of the Future presents a set of ideas about where we are in history. It focuses on the great majority of people in each society, and shows that life in the modern world will be almost completely different from all previous human experience. The present time is best understood as a period of transition during which one country after another is following along parallel paths from traditional to modern. The process of becoming modern is so powerful that it will have similar effects on...

International BestsellerWinner of the Warwick Prize for Writing18th in The Guardian's top 100 Greatest Books since 2000"Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell.” —John le CarréThe bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq

The Beautiful and the Damned presents an affecting, incisive portrait of the vast, fascinating, and incongruent country that is globalized India.Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast...

In a remarkable pairing, two renowned social critics offer a groundbreaking anthology that examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwideWomen are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nur...

The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy.—from the IntroductionThe greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has bee...

In The Great Brain Race, former U.S. News & World Report education editor Ben Wildavsky presents the first popular account of how international competition for the brightest minds is transforming the world of higher education--and why this revolution should be welcomed, not feared. Every year, nearly three million international students study outside of their home countries, a 40 percent increase since 1999. Newly created or expanded universities in China, India, and Saudi Ar...

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders owed much of their unexpected popularity in the 2016 primaries to their respective stances on trade and immigration policy. Political elites and policy experts were bewildered by combative talk of building a wall and the ubiquity of anti-TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) sloganeering in what many saw as a bizarre election cycle. They have scrambled to explain both Trump's victory and the new political fault lines that have emerged in both major political parti...

At the start of the twenty-first century, Cairo's cityscape has acquired a spectacular global touch. Its luxurious five-star hotels, high-rise office buildings, immaculately clean malls, and swanky coffee shops serving café latte and caesar salad, along with the budding gated communities in the city's desert expanses, exemplify three decades of economic liberalization. In the surrounding social landscape, the gradual abrogation of the Nasser-era structures that provided many with low-cost ...

This powerful call to arms offers a realistic vision for getting locally produced, healthy food onto everyone’s table, “[blending] a passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor” (Dr. Jane Goodall)In Closing the Food Gap, food activist and journalist Mark Winne poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations around food: What about those people who are not financially able to make conscientious choices about where and how t...

The world is facing a wave of uprisings, protests and revolutions: Arab dictators swept away, public spaces occupied, slum-dwellers in revolt, cyberspace buzzing with utopian dreams. Events we were told were consigned to history—democratic revolt and social revolution—are being lived by millions of people.In this compelling new book, Paul Mason explores the causes and consequences of this great unrest. From Cairo to Athens, Wall Street and Westminster to Manila, Mason goes in searc...

Since September 2011, the Occupy movement has captured the world's imagination. The media has been flooded with accounts of demonstrations, descriptions of the encampments, interviews with Occupiers, and discussions of Occupy's merits, political and otherwise. But what do its participants have to say?Dreaming in Public gathers together dispatches, essays, blog posts, and images from within the movement aimed at influencing its development and addressing those not yet in th...

With the end of the 1990s economic boom, The Race to the Bottom deftly explores how the United States has entered a no-win global competition in which the countries with the lowest wages, weakest workplace safety laws, and toughest repression of unions win investment from the U.S. and Europe. Tonelson analyzes how the entry of such population giants as China, India, and Mexico into the global market has accelerated the erosion of wages and labor standards around the world. And he ...