I'm a writer, lecturer, biologist, ecologist, and two-time Fulbright Scholar (to India and Malaysia). I'm now a fiction writer, but basically I’ve always been a storyteller who writes in a historical framework. While I feel an almost compulsive obligation to keep faith with the facts, my main objective is to tell a story—as dramatically and suspensefully and entertainingly as I can. My first non-fiction book, Papyrus: the Plant that Changed the World, tells the story of a plant that still evokes the mysteries of the ancient world while holding the key to the world’s wetlands and atmospheric stability. It changed the world as did all five of the plants on my list below.
As Harp says, “…confronting the realities of the past will make us wiser, better-informed global citizens in the future.”
He tells us about rubber tree seeds stolen from trees in Brazil that allowed British rubber plantations to thrive in the Far East where they provided a British monopoly of rubber during WWI when rubber made its mark as a ‘must have’ for the war machine.
Rubber collected in the wild in Brazil and the Congo set the stage for the early development of this miracle substance that would eventually waterproof the world. Then in 1904 an international campaign exposed the brutal abuses in rubber collection in the Congo Free State, a colony solely owned by Belgian King Leopold II.
A slump in production after WWI hit the United States, which by then consumed 70-80 percent of the world’s supply, most of it going to a gigantic automobile industry. This encouraged…
A World History of Rubber helps readers understand and gain new insights into the social and cultural contexts of global production and consumption, from the nineteenth century to today, through the fascinating story of one commodity.
Divides the coverage into themes of race, migration, and labor; gender on plantations and in factories; demand and everyday consumption; World Wars and nationalism; and resistance and independence
Highlights the interrelatedness of our world long before the age of globalization and the global social inequalities that persist today
Discusses key concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including imperialism, industrialization, racism, and inequality, through…
The world around us is an amazing and beautiful place and for me science adds another layer of appreciation. I am a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London - which means I am lucky enough to research climate change in the past, the present, and the future. I study everything from early human evolution in Africa to the future impacts of anthropogenic climate change. I have published over 190 papers in top science journals. I have written 10 books, over 100 popular articles and I regularly appear on radio and television. My blogs on the 'Conversation' have been read over 5.5 million times and you might want to check them out!
Let us be realistic, we all know that our economic system is broken. We cannot go on making stuff and throwing it away on a finite planet.
There are now 8 billion people on Earth all wanting to have a good life. So what is the alternative to economic growth? Well, Tim wonderfully shows us how the economy of tomorrow could protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality, and deliver both ecological and financial stability.
When this book was first published it was seen as a radical and dangerous text. Now with the rise of environmental and ecological economics it is the fundamental book that kicked off the revolution in the way we see the future.
Is more economic growth the solution? Will it deliver prosperity and well-being for a global population projected to reach nine billion? In this explosive book, Tim Jackson - a top sustainability adviser to the UK government - makes a compelling case against continued economic growth in developed nations.
No one denies that development is essential for poorer nations. But in the advanced economies there is mounting evidence that ever-increasing consumption adds little to human happiness and may even impede it. More urgently, it is now clear that the ecosystems that sustain our economies are collapsing under the impacts of rising…
I grew up in Brooklyn in a family that often faced financial difficulties and started working in my early teens in my father’s grocery store. These experiences made me painfully aware of the great disparities in education, security, material well-being, and opportunity in our society. I saw how these inequalities caused some people to become cynical, resigned, or indifferent—while others became determined to overcome them. I became fascinated by them. I felt that if I wanted to live in a more just and productive society, I first had to understand how it worked. My recommended books inspired me further and helped me to gain that understanding.
This is the first of four book recommendations that may not be as inspirational as The Grapes of Wrath, but which make up for that by providing real-world information that can be useful to people trying to improve our world. This book shows how fresh thinking about economics can help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems. Innovative research, careful observation, and plain common sense enable these two Nobel Prize-winning MIT economists to upend a lot of conventional wisdom and develop interesting and compelling policy proposals, which they discuss in a particularly accessible way.
The winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day.
Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it.
Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to…
I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of outsiders. I’m probably attracted to the topic because I come from a couple of misfits who reared me in a small town in the deeply conservative South. My mom is an irreverent, Socialist, Croatian immigrant with half a dozen kids, and my dad a curmudgeonly polyglot who loves books more than people. First as a journalist, then as a historian, I’ve long studied the economies and cultures created by those systematically marginalized or merely with a healthy disdain for the mainstream—enslaved people, queers, disenfranchised women, downtrodden artists, poor immigrants. The books here all capture things that make our society beautifully textured, diverse, and resilient.
This book shows how fashion can be a powerful political tool and how subcultures can effectively fight back against oppression. From the civil rights movement to anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s, Black women all over the world used elements of “soul style” to physically defend themselves and advocate for equality. Along the way, they forged a universal identity that helped create solidarity and refute ideologies of racial inferiority.
I personally value how Ford’s insight into the expressive power of fashion has cleared a sartorial path for cultural historians working in all areas. I also deeply admire her clear and captivating storytelling chops, which make this book feel perpetually relevant.
From the civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s through antiapartheid activism in the 1980s and beyond, black women have used their clothing, hair, and style not simply as a fashion statement but as a powerful tool of resistance. Whether using stiletto heels as weapons to protect against police attacks or incorporating African-themed designs into everyday wear, these fashion-forward women celebrated their identities and pushed for equality.
In this thought-provoking book, Tanisha C. Ford explores how and why black women in places as far-flung as New York City, Atlanta, London, and Johannesburg incorporated style and beauty culture into…
Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk-the early decades of the twenty-first century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history. But it is not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What are these revolutions, and how can they help us to understand our fraught world?
In this major work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world. Three such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating…
Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
Being one of the first books to scrutinize the origins of Trumpism and its impact beyond U.S. borders, I very much appreciate the argument that right-wing populism in the West—which includes the forces that culminated in the Brexit process—shall be a catalyser for the power transition to the East.
Hence, the likely end of Western dominance does not arise only from Asian continuous economic growth but would also stem from the centrifugal forces that emerged at the heart of the advanced industrial democracies.
From the winner of the 2016 Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize for Commentator of the Year, a provocative analysis of how a new era of global instability has begun, as the flow of wealth and power turns from West to East.
Easternization is the defining trend of our age — the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations, and the great questions of war and peace.
I have worked on the problems of poverty, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, for much of my professional life. I worked at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, which is part of the Department of Economics at Oxford University, from 1991 until my retirement in 2012. I continue to work both with the Centre and the Department as a Managing Editor of Oxford Economic Papers and Chief Editor of the Journal of African Economies. My recent book The Poor and the Plutocrats grew out of this background where I wanted to understand the links between very poor countries and those of much richer ones.
The approach of Milanovic is very different from that of Hickel in that it is intensive in the use of data which, he would argue, shows a much more nuanced picture of the success of the global economy in reducing poverty than argued by Hickel.
He begins by reproducing the ‘Elephant Chart’ from his earlier work. This is a chart showing the relative gain in real per capita income by global income level. The name ‘Elephant’ comes from the shape of the chart which shows the largest income gains to have occurred for those in the middle of the distribution and the lowest in the range of 70 to 80 in the percentile distribution and the highest for those at the very top. Those in the middle being the hump of the elephant those at the top being its trunk.
Milanovic argues that in many respects the years before the…
Winner of the Bruno Kreisky Prize, Karl Renner Institut A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year A Livemint Best Book of the Year
One of the world's leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what…
I've been interested in children’s lives for as long as I can remember. I think my own childhood experiences provoked my curiosity about the world as observed and perceived by children. My own childhood was affected by globalization in the broadest sense. When I was a child, my family moved to the United States from Iran. I grew up in Utah where I encountered a different way of life than the one I left behind. The shift from one culture to another was thrilling and scary. The encounter with a new world and a different culture has taught me important lessons about children’s creativity, strength, and curiosity as well as their fears, insecurities, and vulnerabilities.
This book is very emotional and affecting to read for me. It presents two of the earliest autobiographical accounts from American women, with an introduction by Sharon Halevi. As they trace their lives, they depict a world in which childhood, as modern readers understand, does not exist, and even young women need to navigate the intricacies of their controlling and patriarchal world. I often ask what has changed and what has unfortunately stayed the same.
I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.
No one has wrestled more deeply with globalization than the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Here, he reveals how the shape of our modern world is colored by a mutant form of freedom that has captured society and the levers of power—the notion that individuals and businesses left to their own devices somehow maximize social good.
You don’t need a Nobel of your own to recognize how this fantasy has fallen short.
We are a nation born from the conviction that people must be free. But since the middle of the last century, that idea has been co-opted. Forces on the political Right have justified exploitation by cloaking it in the rhetoric of freedom, leading to pharmaceutical companies freely overcharging for medication, a Big Tech free from oversight, politicians free to incite rebellion, corporations free to pollute, and more. How did we get here? Whose freedom are we-and should we-be thinking about?
In The Road to Freedom, Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dissects America's current economic system and the political ideology…
My plan to write my book clicked after I bought an apple grown in New Zealand, 10,000 miles away from my home in Ohio. How did it make sense that we could buy apples so cheaply from so far away? What was the carbon footprint of that one transaction? Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, I had seen our industrial cities decay as trade globalized. Later I watched with horror as global financial markets crashed in 2008. With these experiences in mind, I wanted to write about both the benefits and the costs of globalization—and about its ethics—for religious communities like mine. So I did.
Professor Peters was my first and foremost guide when it came to framing the ethics of globalization from within my own religious perspective.
She helped all of us later writers by mapping the academic terrain, describing two dominant theories of globalization and two resistance theories. The two dominant theories are neoliberalism (as exemplified by Thomas Friedman) and reformist social development (as exemplified by John Maynard Keynes), while the two resistance theories stem from ecological and postcolonial perspectives.
She evaluates all four theories according to how they contribute (or don’t) to human flourishing. While I don’t always agree with her conclusions, she is asking the right questions and applying them to the most important perspectives on globalization.
Rebecca Todd Peters provides a helpful overview of the complicated contemporary debates about globalization. By engaging in a careful reading of the cacophony of views on the subject, she unearths four identifiable positions within these debates, each offering a different moral vision of the world. As she observes, policy debates about the direction in which globalization should move are morally serious debates about what values humanity will choose as most significant in the post-Cold War world. In Search of the Good Life argues that our moral task is to ensure that globalization proceeds in ways that honour creation and life,…
