Understanding Globalization

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Steven Hugh Lee

"Following World War II the United States, determined to prevent the extension of Soviet and Communist Chinese influence, took the lead in organizing the defence of Western interests in Asia. In Outposts of Empire Steven Lee explores the foreign policy objectives of the United States, as well as those of Great Britain and Canada, and examines the role that economic and military aid played in their attempts to establish pro-Western, anti-Communist governments on the periphery of Communist East Asia.". "Drawing on a wide range of recently declassified documents, Lee outlines the regional and international context of American diplomatic relations with Korea and Vietnam and analyses the relationship between containment, the bipolar international system, and American and European concepts of empire at the beginning of the era of decolonization. He argues that although policy makers in the United Kingdom and Canada adopted a more defensive containment policy toward Communist China than the United States did, they generally supported American attempts to promote pro-Western elites in Korea and Vietnam."--BOOK JACKET.

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William Stueck

This first truly international history of the Korean War argues that its timing, its course, and its outcome made it in effect a substitute for World War III. Stueck draws on recently available materials from seven countries, plus the archives of the United Nations, presenting a detailed narrative of the diplomacy of the conflict and a broad assessment of its critical role in the Cold War. In Stueck's view, contributors to the UN cause in Korea provided support not out of any abstract commitment to a universal system of collective security but because they saw an opportunity to influence U.S. policy. At the moment of Chinese intervention in Korea in the fall of 1950, as in other instances prior to the armistice in July 1953, NATO allies and Third World neutrals succeeded in curbing American adventurism and so in blocking the spread of hostilities to other parts of the world. While conceding the tragic and brutal nature of the war, Stueck suggests that it helped to prevent the occurrence of an even more destructive conflict in Europe.

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Charles R. Morris

The Great Crash of 1929 profoundly disrupted the United States' confident march toward becoming the world's superpower. The breakneck growth of 1920s America--with its boom in automobiles, electricity, credit lines, radio, and movies--certainly presaged a serious recession by the decade's end, but not a depression. The totality of the collapse shocked the nation, and its duration scarred generations to come. In this lucid and fast-paced account of the cataclysm, award-winning writer Charles R. Morris pulls together the intricate threads of policy, ideology, international hatreds, and sheer individual cantankerousness that finally pushed the world economy over the brink and into a depression. While Morris anchors his narrative in the United States, he also fully investigates the poisonous political atmosphere of postwar Europe to reveal how treacherous the environment of the global economy was. It took heroic financial mismanagement, a glut-induced global collapse in agricultural prices, and a self-inflicted crash in world trade to cause the Great Depression. Deeply researched and vividly told, A Rabble of Dead Money anatomizes history's greatest economic catastrophe--while noting the uncanny echoes for the present.

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Michael Parenti

Political essays and poems. In Young People Are Different, he writes: "Hostage in their homes, / kept alive by the telephone / fully animated only when taking flight / in rough formation. / They rebel / so better to submit / to their totalitarian peerage."