The first comprehensive history of America’s attempts to promote international development by exporting private enterprise, a story marked by frequent failure and occasional success. Foreign aid is a primary tool of US foreign policy, but direct financial support and ventures like the Peace Corps constitute just a sliver of the American global development pie. Since the 1940s, the United States has relied on the private sector to carry out its ambitions in the developing world. This is the first full account of what has worked and, more often, what has failed in efforts to export American-style capitalism. Ethan Kapstein draws on archival sources and his wide-ranging experience in international development to provide penetrating case studies from Latin America and East Asia to the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and Iraq. After WWII the Truman and Eisenhower administrations urged US companies to expand across the developing world. But corporations preferred advanced countries, and many developing nations, including Taiwan and South Korea, were cool to foreign investment. The Cold War made exporting capitalism more important than ever, even if that meant overthrowing foreign governments. The fall of the Soviet Union brought new opportunities as the United States promoted privatization and the bankrolling of local oligarchs. Following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States believed it had blank slates for building these economies, but ongoing conflict eroded such hopes. Kapstein’s sobering history shows that private enterprise is no substitute for foreign aid. Investors are often unwilling to put capital at risk in unstable countries. Only in settings with stable governments and diverse economic elites can private enterprise take root. These lessons are crucial as the United States challenges China for global influence.

The US government has long sought investment opportunities for US companies in developing countries. But the results have been mixed: firms have preferred to invest in the industrial world and developing-world leaders have not always welcomed foreign investment. Violence and the presence of natural resources have also hindered foreign development.

This text examines the actions that governments have taken to cope with the economic and political consequences associated with the globalization of international finance. Topics covered include the Third World debt crisis and the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI.

'A fireball of terse information.'Oliver Stone'A remarkable collection. Blum concentrates on matters of great current significance, and does not pull his punches. They land, backed with evidence and acute analysis.'Noam ChomskyFor over sixty-five years, the United States war machine has been on automatic pilot. Since World War II we have been conditioned to believe that America's motives in 'exporting' democracy are honorable, even noble.In this startling and provocative book, William Blum, a leading dissident chronicler of US foreign policy and the author of controversial bestseller Rogue State, argues that nothing could be further from the truth.Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster.

In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter--buttressed by FDR’s "Four Freedoms" and the legacies of World War I--redefined human rights and America’s vision for the world. Three sets of international negotiations brought the Atlantic Charter blueprint to life--Bretton Woods, the United Nations, and the Nuremberg trials. These new institutions set up mechanisms to stabilize the international economy, promote collective security, and implement new thinking about international justice. The design of these institutions served as a concrete articulation of U.S. national interests, even as they emphasized the importance of working with allies to achieve common goals. The American architects of these charters were attempting to redefine the idea of security in the international sphere. To varying degrees, these institutions and the debates surrounding them set the foundations for the world we know today. By analyzing the interaction of ideas, individuals, and institutions that transformed American foreign policy--and Americans’ view of themselves--Borgwardt illuminates the broader history of modern human rights, trade and the global economy, collective security, and international law. This book captures a lost vision of the American role in the world.

An essential guide to the intractable public debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization, cutting through the complexity to reveal the fault lines that divide us and the points of agreement that might bring us together. Globalization has lifted millions out of poverty. Globalization is a weapon the rich use to exploit the poor. Globalization builds bridges across national boundaries. Globalization fuels the populism and great-power competition that is tearing the world apart. When it comes to the politics of free trade and open borders, the camps are dug in, producing a kaleidoscope of claims and counterclaims, unlikely alliances, and unexpected foes. But what exactly are we fighting about? And how might we approach these issues more productively? Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp cut through the confusion with an indispensable survey of the interests, logics, and ideologies driving these intractable debates, which lie at the heart of so much political dispute and decision making. The authors expertly guide us through six competing narratives about the virtues and vices of globalization: the old establishment view that globalization benefits everyone (win-win), the pessimistic belief that it threatens us all with pandemics and climate change (lose-lose), along with various rival accounts that focus on specific winners and losers, from China to AmericaÕs rust belt. Instead of picking sides, Six Faces of Globalization gives all these positions their due, showing how each deploys sophisticated arguments and compelling evidence. Both globalizationÕs boosters and detractors will come away with their eyes opened. By isolating the fundamental value conflictsÑgrowth versus sustainability, efficiency versus social stabilityÑdriving disagreement and show where rival narratives converge, Roberts and Lamp provide a holistic framework for understanding current debates. In doing so, they showcase a more integrative way of thinking about complex problems.

The reigning consensus holds that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this revelatory investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy. Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.

So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike without following the existing regulations. This book develops a critique of platforms and platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to the ongoing debates about the future of work and worker organising. It presents an alternative portrait returning to a focus on workers’ experience, focusing on solidarity, drawing out a global picture of new forms of agency. In particular, the book focuses on three dynamics that are driving struggles in the platform economy: the increasing connections between workers who are no longer isolated; the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms, leading to escalating worker action around shared issues; and the internationalisation of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity. Focusing on transport and courier workers, online workers and freelancers author Jamie Woodcock concludes by considering how workers build power in different situations. Rather than undermining worker agency, platforms have instead provided the technical basis for the emergence of new global struggles against capitalism.