To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

By Alfred W. McCoy

° By squeezing seven centuries and five continents between two covers, the book tracks the transition from one world order to the next—from the Iberian, British, American, and Chinese—explaining how the quest for a profitable form of energy led to the persistence of slavery for 400 years and how the discovery of fossil fuels simultaneously ended slavery and started carbon emissions that now threaten the current world order.

° For a younger generation born at the start of this century, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape their opportunities during the decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and 2100.

° For activists concerned about issues of race and social justice, the book explains the rise of the African slave trade as the critical element in the extraordinary profitability and persistence of the colonial sugar plantation, making coerced, captive labor a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642596755

Book preview

Praise for To Govern the Globe

"To Govern the Globe is a brilliant distillation of 700 years of geopolitics, exposing how we arrived where we are, amid the worsening climate crisis and collapsing world orders. Al McCoy’s eloquently written book is a call to action for us all, as time still remains to prevent an unprecedented cascade of catastrophes." —AMY GOODMAN, host of Democracy Now!

"In To Govern The Globe, Alfred McCoy deftly shows how successive world orders, seemingly entrenched and impossible to uproot, eventually decline. Periods of imperial decay, marked by unbridled greed, military overreach, and the spread of disease, can also give rise to revolutionary new perspectives. Where is the United States now, in the bloody, ultimately futile cycle of conquest and ruin? McCoy’s provocative work generates probing questions about our global capacity for humanism and our collective chances for survival. With new cold wars looming between the US, Russia, and China, McCoy’s writing is an indispensable guide for coping with the twin terrors of climate catastrophe and multiple pandemics." —KATHY KELLY, peace activist and co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones campaign

A fascinating look at the rise and fall of empires and what it means for world orders. From colonial exploitation and capitalist ravaging of people and planet to arms-racing and warfare, Alfred McCoy offers a deep dive into how this history has led to the climate crisis—and the impacts it will have on our future. —RAY ACHESON, disarmament program director at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

In an age where most scholars concentrate on a limited specialty, no one sees a bigger picture more brilliantly than Alfred McCoy. In this powerful, enlightening, and frightening book he gives us a magisterial view of the empires of the past—and of the force in our future that promises to dwarf them all. —ADAM HOCHSCHILD, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

"To Govern the Globe is history on an epic scale—sweeping, provocative, and unsparing in its judgments. Alfred McCoy’s immensely readable narrative spans centuries, charting the rise and fall of successive world orders down to our own present moment, shaped by China’s emergence as a great power and the blight of climate change." —ANDREW BACEVICH, author of After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed

It’s hard to believe a book spanning seven centuries could be so timely. Yet Alfred McCoy’s probing and original study links the fate of multiple empires—including Pax Americana—to the all-too-relevant histories of protracted war, brutal exploitation, and catastrophic medical, environmental, and demographic crises. —CHRISTIAN G. APPY, author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

© 2021 Alfred McCoy

Published in 2021 by

Haymarket Books

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Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

ISBN: 978-1-64259-675-5

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email [e-mail] for more information.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

For my sister, Dace, and her husband, Sir Richard Ground, who devoted their working lives to doing large things in small places—he as chief justice of Bermuda and she as founder of the National Trust for the Cayman Islands, which saved a species, the blue iguana, from extinction

Contents

Maps and Graphs

Foreword by Jeremy Scahill

Preface: Geopolitics of the New Cold War

Author’s Note

Chronology: World Orders, 1300 to 2300

1.Empires and World Orders

2.The Iberian Age

3.Empires of Commerce and Capital

4.Britannia Rules the Waves

5.Pax Americana

6.Beijing’s World System

7.Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Maps and Graphs

Mackinder’s World Island, 1904 (chapter 1)

Portugal’s Global Empire, 1570 (chapter 2)

Ottoman–Portugal Rivalry, circa 1570 (chapter 2)

Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 1550 (chapter 2)

Napoleon’s Empire, 1810 (chapter 3)

British and French Empires, 1920 (chapter 4)

European Empires in Africa, 1910 (chapter 4)

Imperial Mandates in the Pacific, 1921 (chapter 5)

Japan’s Empire in World War II (chapter 5)

Share of World Economy by Rising Powers (chapter 5)

China–Central Asia Infrastructure, 2020 (chapter 6)

China’s World Island Strategy, 2020 (chapter 6)

South China Sea, 2016 (chapter 6)

Antarctica’s Melting Ice Sheets (chapter 7)

Melting Permafrost (chapter 7)

Foreword

Alfred McCoy rose to prominence as a historian during the Vietnam War era when he blew the lid off the CIA’s role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia. Though McCoy is undoubtedly a brilliant scholar, that moniker hardly captures the true spirit of the immensely consequential and groundbreaking work he has given to us all.

For decades, McCoy has gone to where the history is unfolding, and, like an archeologist, has dug away to reveal stories that would otherwise go untold. McCoy was nearly killed by US-backed paramilitaries early in his career, and the CIA was so concerned about his revelations on drug trafficking that it tried to stop the publication of his book The Politics of Heroin. He was spied on by the FBI, audited by the IRS, and viewed as a threat by other three-letter agencies.

McCoy is one of the most eminent scholars in the world on the abuse of power and authority, on surveillance and repression, on the historical evolution of state-sanctioned torture in the United States and elsewhere, and, more recently, on the rapidly declining state of the US empire.

McCoy’s latest book, To Govern the Globe, is a formidable work of scholarship spanning an incredible arc of world history. Yet it is a gripping and fast-paced read that manages to distill the complex history of the rise and fall of world empires into a narrative that is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. The book’s scope is so massive that only a scholar of McCoy’s skill could even consider attempting to capture it. McCoy’s meticulous understanding of the past and present failures and excesses of empires gives him the rare credibility to offer a detailed, damning picture of the grim realities humankind faces as history transforms into our future. After reading To Govern the Globe, however, I must conclude that embedded within McCoy’s book is a ray of hope demanding to be seen by us all before it’s truly too late.

—Jeremy Scahill, August 2021

Preface

Geopolitics of the New Cold War

From his first days in office, president Joe Biden and his national security advisers seemed determined to revive America’s fading global leadership via the strategy they knew best: challenging the revisionist powers, Russia and China, with a Cold War–style aggression. When it came to Beijing, the president combined the policy initiatives of his predecessors, pursuing Barack Obama’s strategic pivot from the Middle East to Asia, while continuing Donald Trump’s trade war with China. In the process, Biden revived the kind of bipartisan foreign policy not seen in official Washington since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.¹

Writing in the December 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, a group of usually contentious academics agreed on one thing: Today, China and the United States are locked in what can only be called a new cold war.² Just weeks later, the present mimed the past in ways that went well beyond even that pessimistic assessment, as Russia began massing 190,000 troops on the border with Ukraine. Soon, Russian president Vladimir Putin would join China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing where they would demand that the West abandon the ideologized approaches of the Cold War by curtailing both NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and similar security pacts in the Pacific.³

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine loomed in February 2022, the New York Times reported that Putin was trying to revise the outcome of the original Cold War, even if it is at the cost of deepening a new one. And days later, as Russian tanks attacked Ukraine, the newspaper published an editorial headlined, Mr. Putin Launches a Sequel to the Cold War. The Wall Street Journal seconded that view, concluding that recent developments reflect a new cold war that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have initiated against the West.⁴ Rather than simply accept this mainstream consensus, we need to explore the Cold War analogy closely to gain a fuller understanding of how that tragic past does (and does not) resonate with our embattled present.

There are indeed a number of parallels between our Cold Wars, old and new. Over 70 years ago, in January 1950, Mao Zedong, the head of a People’s Republic of China ravaged by long years of war and revolution, met the powerful Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Moscow as a supplicant. Mao was seeking a treaty of alliance and friendship that would provide much-needed aid for his fledgling Communist state. After Stalin made him cool his heels for two weeks in a drafty dacha, a relieved Mao cabled the Communist leadership in Beijing: Our work here has achieved an important breakthrough in the past two days. Comrade Stalin has finally agreed to … sign a new Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship. With Russia begrudgingly giving up its territorial claims in exchange for assurances about demilitarizing the long border between the two countries, their leaders ratified the friendship treaty in February 1950. That, in turn, sparked a sudden flow of Soviet aid to China, whose new constitution hailed its indestructible friendship with the Soviet Union. However, Stalin’s behavior had already planted the seeds for the Sino-Soviet split to come, embittering Mao, who later said Russians have never had faith in the Chinese people and Stalin was among the worst.⁵

Within months, Stalin played upon this brand-new alliance by persuading Mao to send troops into the maelstrom of the Korean War, where China soon began hemorrhaging money and manpower. Until his death in 1953, Stalin kept the US military bogged down in Korea, as he sought what he called an advantage in the global balance of power.⁶ With Washington focused on war in Asia, Stalin consolidated his grip on seven satellite states in Eastern Europe—but at a cost. In those years, a newly created NATO would be transformed into a genuine military alliance, as sixteen nations allied with the West dispatched troops to aid South Korea.

In February 2022, in a reversal of Cold War roles, Putin arrived at that Beijing summit as a supplicant, desperately seeking Chinese president Xi Jinping’s diplomatic support for his Ukrainian gambit. Proclaiming their relations superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era, the two leaders asserted that their entente had no limits … no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation. On economic issues, they promised to enhance transport infrastructure connectivity to keep logistics on the Eurasian continent smooth and … make steady progress on major oil and gas cooperation projects. On strategic issues, the two parties were adamantly opposed to the expansion of NATO, any move toward independence for Taiwan, and color revolutions such as the one that had ousted Moscow’s Ukrainian client in 2014.⁷

Soon after that summit, the Russian president would invade Ukraine, while ominously putting his nuclear forces on high alert—a warning to the West not to meddle in his war.⁸ In a clear parallel to the old Cold War, the danger posed by nuclear weapons remains a barrier to the outbreak of direct superpower conflict, so the United States and its NATO allies chose surrogate warfare in Ukraine. Just as the Soviet Union had once armed North Vietnam with surface-to-air missiles and tanks to bloody the US military in the Vietnam War, so Washington now began supplying Kyiv with high-tech weaponry to damage the Russian army.

After Ukrainian defenders armed with US- and NATO-supplied shoulder-fired missiles quickly destroyed thousands of its armored vehicles, Russia was soon forced to pull back from its bid to capture the Ukrainian capital and shift to a months-long slog to seize the Russian-speaking Donbas region near its own border. This effort, in turn, sparked an artillery duel that soon became a strategic stalemate of the sort not seen since the Korean War (a conflict that remains unresolved 70 years later).⁹

As the Ukraine War entered its fifth month in June 2022, a NATO summit in Madrid formalized a new geopolitical alignment strikingly similar to the coldest days of the old Cold War. Not only did NATO brand Moscow as its prime adversary and declare China a strategic challenge, but it condemned their deepening strategic partnership … and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order. Lending weight to those words, the alliance extended membership invitations to long-neutral Finland and Sweden, while expanding its rapid-response forces eightfold to three hundred thousand men for increased deployments in Eastern Europe. In response, Putin, speaking from a Central Asian summit in Turkmenistan, shot back, We will have to respond in kind and create the same threats against the territories from which threats are created against us. On a similar note, China’s UN ambassador said, The outdated Cold War script must not be reenacted in Asia Pacific.¹⁰

The Geopolitics of Cold Wars

Beneath such surface similarities between the two eras, however, lies a crucial if elusive difference: geopolitics. Although a slippery concept, geopolitics is an exceptionally important tool we can learn to use, through the study of historical cases like those in the chapters that follow, to grasp the deeper meaning of the devastating war in Ukraine. By tracing a thread of geo-historical continuity and discontinuity beneath ever-shifting diplomatic alliances and constant economic change, we can understand the underlying strategic significance of this and any future global crisis. As I explain in greater detail in chapter 1, geopolitics is essentially a method for the management of empire through the use of geography (air, land, and sea) to maximize military and economic advantage. At the high tide of the British Empire in 1904, English geographer Halford Mackinder published an influential article arguing that Europe, Asia, and Africa were not, in fact, three separate continents but a unitary landmass he dubbed the World-Island, whose strategic pivot lay in the heartland of central Eurasia.¹¹ Mackinder later boiled his thinking down to a memorable maxim: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.¹²

Apply Mackinder’s principles to the old Cold War and you can indeed see an underlying geopolitics that lends coherence to an otherwise-disparate conflict spread across four decades and five continents. In the five hundred years since European exploration first brought the continents into continuous contact, the rise of every major world power has required one thing above all: dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70 percent of the world’s population and productivity. Those five centuries of imperial rivalry could thus be summarized in a succinct geopolitical axiom: the exercise of global hegemony requires control over Eurasia, and contestation over that vast continent thus determines the fate of empires and their world orders.

By the time the Cold War ended in 1991, Washington, as explained in chapter 5, had translated that axiom into a three-part geopolitical strategy to defeat the Soviet Union. First, it encircled Eurasia with military bases and mutual-defense pacts to contain Beijing and Moscow behind an Iron Curtain stretching five thousand miles across that region. Second, the United States intervened, using either conventional force or CIA covert operations, whenever the Communists threatened to expand their power beyond that curtain—whether in Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, Washington aggressively defended its own hemisphere from Communist influence of any sort, however homegrown—whether in Cuba, Central America, or Chile.

In a magisterial sweep through a millennium of Eurasian history, Oxford scholar John Darwin found that after World War II, Washington became a colossal imperium … on an unprecedented scale by being the first hegemon ever to capture the strategic axial points at both ends of Eurasia.¹³ Initially, Washington defended Eurasia’s western axis through the NATO defense pact signed with a dozen allies in April 1949, making the Cold War, at its outset, little more than a regional conflict over Eastern Europe.

In October 1949, however, Communists surprised the world by capturing China. Moscow then forged that Sino-Soviet alliance, which suddenly threatened to become the dominant force on the Eurasian landmass. In response, Washington moved quickly to counter this geopolitical challenge by negotiating five bilateral defense pacts, thereby developing a four-thousand-mile chain of military bases along the Pacific littoral from Japan and South Korea to Taiwan and the Philippines, and all the way to Australia. By serving as the frontier for the defense of one continent (North America) and a springboard for its dominance of another (Eurasia), the Pacific littoral would become Washington’s key geopolitical fulcrum.

In the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet alliance would suddenly collapse into a bitter rivalry—a lucky break for Washington that left Moscow without a major ally anywhere in Eurasia.¹⁴ Reeling from their breach with Beijing, the Soviet leaders would spend several decades trying, unsuccessfully, to break out of their geopolitical isolation by expanding into Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa, and, fatally, Afghanistan, catalyzing a succession of local conflicts that led to the deaths of some 20 million people between 1945 and 1990.¹⁵

A New Geopolitical Balance

At the close of the Cold War, when the United States seemed to stand astride the globe like a Titan of Greek legend, Zbigniew Brzezinski—former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and a devotee of Mackinder’s geopolitical theory—warned that the US must avoid three pitfalls that could imperil its global power. It must, he said, preserve its strategic perch on the Western periphery of Eurasia through NATO; it must prevent the expulsion of America from its offshore bases along the Pacific littoral; and it must block the rise of an assertive single entity in the middle space of that region—his equivalent for Mackinder’s pivotal heartland.¹⁶

Skip ahead three decades and, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO countries have worked with surprising unanimity to slap sanctions on Moscow, ship advanced weaponry to Kyiv, and even take in previously neutral Sweden and Finland as potential members. In this way, the US seems to have forged a trans-Atlantic solidarity not seen since the Cold War and thus preserved Washington’s strategic perch.

Moreover, by his surprisingly blunt statement at the height of the Ukraine crisis in May 2022 that the US would get involved militarily to defend Taiwan and his warning that a possible Chinese attack there would be similar to what happened in Ukraine, President Biden has been trying to assert an ever-stronger American military presence in the Pacific.¹⁷ China has, however, also been moving into that region militarily, economically, and diplomatically, potentially winning over island nations that were once an American preserve.¹⁸

Whatever Washington has done to strengthen its strategic position in Europe by rallying NATO, along with allies in the Pacific, it has clearly failed to meet Brzezinski’s critical third criterion for the preservation of its global power. Indeed, the rise of China as an assertive single entity in the pivotal middle space of Eurasia could potentially prove a fatal geopolitical blow to Washington’s global ambitions, equivalent in impact to that of the Sino-Soviet split on Moscow during the old Cold War.

As its foreign reserves reached an extraordinary $4 trillion in 2014, Beijing announced a trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to build an economic bloc encompassing the whole of Mackinder’s tri-continental world island. To overcome Eurasia’s vast distances, China, as detailed in chapter 6, quickly began constructing a steel grid of rails, roads, and gas pipelines that, when integrated with Russia’s networks, would reach across the continent. Within just five years, a 2019 World Bank study found that BRI transportation projects were boosting trade among 70 nations by up to 9.7 percent and lifting 32 million people out of poverty. At the end of its first decade in 2023, the initiative had already invested a trillion dollars for transportation and industrial infrastructure in 147 nations, representing two-thirds of all humanity and 40 percent of global GDP. By 2027, Beijing was expected to commit $1.3 trillion to this project, which would make it the largest investment in history—more than ten times the foreign aid Washington allocated to its famed Marshall Plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II.¹⁹ Amid the Ukraine crisis, in June 2022, Washington led the G7 bloc of wealthy democratic nations in committing $600 billion to counter the BRI, but this effort may yet prove a decade late and many billions short in checking China’s rise.²⁰

To strengthen its regional influence and weaken the US grip on the Pacific littoral, China has also used the BRI to court allies in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2020, in fact, it formed a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership—the world’s largest trade pact—with fifteen Asia-Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade.²¹

Taking a leaf out of Stalin’s geopolitical playbook, President Xi has much to gain from Putin’s headstrong plunge into Ukraine. In the short term, Washington’s focus on Europe slowed any serious strategic pivot to the Pacific, allowing Beijing to further consolidate its burgeoning commercial dominance there. By allying with Russia and so meeting its own food and energy needs while maintaining ties to Europe through formal neutrality in the Ukraine war, Beijing could emerge, like Moscow after the Vietnam War, with its global influence markedly enhanced and the US geopolitical position significantly weakened.

The Limits of Historical Analogy

However strong the geopolitical continuities between the two eras may be, history also spins skeins of discontinuity, making the past, at best, an imperfect guide to the present. For 30 years following the end of the Cold War, a relentless economic globalization, analyzed in chapter 5, has incorporated China as the world’s industrial workshop and Russia as a key provider of energy, minerals, and grains into the global economy.

As a result, despite recent economic sanctions, geopolitical containment of the sort once used against the old Soviet Union’s feeble command economy is no longer feasible. With the war already causing what the World Bank called an an enormous humanitarian crisis, pressures were building by the Ukraine conflict’s fourth month for some way to reintegrate Russia into a global economy that was already suffering badly from the ostracism of a country that ranked first in world wheat and fertilizer exports, second in gas production, and third in oil output.²²

By blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and advancing toward its main one, Odessa, Putin disrupted grain exports from both Russia and Ukraine, which together provide almost one-third of the world’s wheat and barley, and so are critical to feeding the Middle East, as well as much of Africa.²³ With the specter of mass starvation looming for some 270 million people, in July 2022 the UN brokered an agreement that allowed grain shipments to resume for 120 days, but renewals for this critical lifeline remain uncertain. As the UN warned, political instability has been growing in the world’s volatile regions, and the West will, sooner or later, have to reach some understanding with Russia.²⁴

Similarly, Europe’s escalating embargo of Russia’s natural gas and oil exports proved, within just three months, profoundly disruptive to global energy markets, stoking inflation in the United States and sending fuel prices soaring on the continent. Without undue difficulty, Putin successfully shifted much of his country’s oil and some of its gas exports from Europe to China and India. While world prices soared for petroleum products, the European Union’s escalating energy embargo avoided a major economic crisis, largely because of a relatively warm winter and rising shipments of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from overseas. Over the longer term, however, the embargo forced the continent on a difficult energy transition away from decades of dependence on low-cost Russian coal, oil, and natural gas.²⁵

After the conflict in Ukraine settled into a protracted military stalemate, there were signs, at the start of its second year, that both sides were reaching their war-making limits and may yet be forced to seek a diplomatic resolution. Even if the flow of heavy weapons from the West eventually matches Russia’s massive reserves of tanks and artillery, Ukraine’s overstretched army can, at best, push Russia back to the territory it held before the start of current hostilities, perhaps leaving Moscow in control of Ukraine’s southeast, much or all of the Donbas region, and Crimea.²⁶

In contrast to the Pentagon’s early triumphalist rhetoric about using the war to render Russia’s military permanently weakened, French president Emmanuel Macron made the sober suggestion that we must not humiliate Russia so … we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.²⁷ Although controversial, something akin to that view may yet prevail. If so, there might well be a diplomatic agreement in which Ukraine swaps bits of territory for the acceptance of a neutral status akin to Austria’s, allowing it to join the European Union, but not NATO.

By attacking Ukraine and alienating Europe, Putin has suffered a serious but not necessarily fatal geopolitical blow. Blocked from expanding westward, he accelerated Russia’s pivot to the East, rapidly integrating its economy with China’s.²⁸ In doing so, he is helping to consolidate Beijing’s geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, the epicenter of global power, thereby unleashing powerful yet invisible forces for political change. Simultaneously, the United States is experiencing a slow decline of its influence over this vast landmass as these deeper geopolitical shifts manifest themselves, on the visible surface of international relations, as a succession of adverse developments. As Beijing has tightened its geopolitical grip on Eurasia, Washington has suffered some sharp reverses there—notably, its chaotic retreat in defeat from Afghanistan in August 2021 and its marginalization by Beijing’s negotiation of a major diplomatic rapprochement between the Middle East’s rival powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, in March 2023. In this century as in the last one, the geopolitical struggle over Eurasia has proven to be a relentless affair—one that, in the years to come, will likely contribute both to Beijing’s rise and to the ongoing erosion of Washington’s once-formidable global power.

Yet, as chapter 7 argues, Beijing’s hegemony will likely be brief. Its strategy of capturing Russia’s petroleum exports to supplement its coal-fired electrical power will sustain China’s dependence on fossil fuels and perpetuate its status as the world’s leading source of greenhouse gas emissions. By mid-century, climate change will devastate the country’s economic heartland in northern China and likely force its retreat from global leadership. While Beijing’s carbon-fueled geopolitical strategy might be momentarily expedient, over the longer term it will lead to nothing less than China digging its own ecological grave.

Author’s Note

This book arose from the coincidence of two accidents, one imagined and the other all too real. During the first weeks of a sabbatical from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I was much taken with the idea of a book that would analyze the rise and fall of empires through their geopolitics. For nearly a month, the project raced along at accelerating speed, hitting five, six, seven thousand words until, unexpectedly, it crashed into a conceptual wall, leaving a wreckage of factors and actors lying on my desk. I had tried, and failed, to explain the multifaceted phenomenon of empire through a monocausal argument.

To recover, I called my editor, Tom Engelhardt. Thanks to a few minutes of his oblique, Zen-like questions without answers, I plunged into weeks of thought that led, in February 2019, to a short essay for his online journal TomDispatch that contained the core argument for this book.

About the same time my initial book idea crashed, I had an actual accident, slipping on black ice in the middle of a harsh Wisconsin winter and shredding three of the four tendons in my right knee. When I awoke from surgery, I was in a locked leg brace that prevented me from driving, flying, or even walking more than a few steps. For nearly four months, all I could do was sit at the kitchen table, leg propped up, hands at the computer, reading and typing eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. By the time the leg brace came off at the start of summer, I had turned that short article into a first draft of this book.

After those four months of immobility, the Association for Asian Studies flew me to Bangkok, where I had the opportunity to try out the book’s core argument, conceived in immaculate isolation, in a cavernous hotel ballroom full of regional experts. After that, I celebrated my mobility by continuing around the globe for some unconventional fieldwork, in order to liven up this narrative of world orders over the past six centuries—stopping at Angkor Wat for adjectives, an Oslo museum for visuals to describe Viking ships, Bruges to view the ceremonial fireplace celebrating the lineage of Emperor Charles V (with four statues of his grandparents, including Ferdinand and Isabella), and then on to London to stroll that city’s streets and museums with family, collecting insights as we went. As Julys go, it was different and memorable. I continued writing even as I flew, and by the time I got back home in August that first draft was largely edited. Those few exciting months of insight and travel were followed by a full year of painstakingly dull editing, cutting, revising, and fact-checking.

The text that emerged is an ambitious work, and, by the same token, it is necessarily imperfect. During my fifty-year career as a historian, I have published dozens of books and hundreds of essays that required the reading of countless thousands of historical studies and documents. Yet all that work proved woefully inadequate for the challenges of this project. In covering the globe and spanning seven centuries, this study required a depth and breadth of historical knowledge beyond the ken of any individual historian—indeed beyond what anyone could ever learn in the span of a single lifetime.

Fortunately, I did not have to work alone. For nearly a century now, historians have refined the discipline’s craft and expanded its coverage to allow us a nuanced understanding of the last millennium. I drew upon that rich corpus by reading several thousand articles and book extracts focused on centuries and continents beyond my narrow specialization as a historian of modern Southeast Asia. I came away impressed with both the magisterial sweep and granular focus of narrative history that makes it, in my view, the queen of social sciences. And I became convinced that our understanding of almost any contemporary problem, no matter how seemingly recondite or intractable, can be enriched by a historical perspective.

That belief in the exceptional analytic power of history underlies this study’s attempt to use the past as a prism for understanding the present and speculating about the future. But a caveat is instantly in order. When the present has receded far enough to become the past, most historians can tell us not only what happened, but why it happened just that way. Even if other historians argue about those conclusions, as they are wont to do, they still have to admit that the work in question has offered insight or understanding. However, in using the past to predict the future, historians have accrued a lengthy record of projections that are risibly wrong. Mindful of that dismal record, as I track key trends from the past through the present and into the future, I have tried to avoid the most obvious pitfalls by hewing closely to the published climate science. I hope this approach may deepen our understanding of this profoundly shared experience.

With the prospect of irreversible global warming bearing down upon us with undeniable force, such conjecture seemed to me a chance well worth taking. Despite the risks of error, we still need a way to apply our extraordinarily rich historical knowledge to the future, to try to understand our difficult choices and their likely consequences. Nonetheless, my conclusions about the future are obviously and necessarily speculative.

Another caveat is also in order. This is a work that sweeps across seven centuries, a vast span of human history, and touches, in varying degrees, on the stories of ten modern empires, each of which has a dedicated cadre of specialists. I am a historian of just one of those empires and one of these periods. Clearly, specialists will find fault with some of this study’s specifics. Indeed, I admit the likelihood of errors of fact or interpretation and apologize in advance for all of them. But in a larger sense, such failings are inherent in the nature of a work whose logic lies in its broad sweep through periods and empires in an effort to discern the deeper dynamics of change across centuries—which is, I would argue, the ultimate justification for the continued presence of the ancient discipline of history in the modern academy.

A final admission: although historians aspire to a timeless recounting of the past, we are all products of our own time, in some way recasting the past from the perspective of our present. In my case, writing at the cusp of a shift in Washington’s global power has, I hope, sharpened my analytic focus, allowing me to sort through the confusion of an ongoing imperial decline and identify a more lasting form of global power called the world order. Writing at a time when climate change threatens our ordered world has allowed me to look back over the past seven hundred years to see parallel moments, when maelstroms of various sorts acted with similar force, creating or destroying earlier world orders.

In a generation or two, historians, writing from the perspective of another time, will no doubt see this past differently. But for now, with all its limitations, this book is my attempt to look back on the past to identify the deeper, underlying trends that have shaped the present and may well influence our future.

Alfred W. McCoy

Madison, Wisconsin

Chronology

World Orders, 1300 to 2300

Iberian Age

British Imperial Era

Washington’s World Order

Twenty-First Century and Beyond

Chapter 1

Empires and World Orders

When the clock struck midnight on New Year’s of 2050, there was little cause for celebration. There were, of course, the usual toasts and air kisses in the high-rise apartments and climate-controlled compounds of the comfortably affluent. But for most of humanity it was just another day of adversity bordering on misery—a desperate and often losing struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety.

After storm surges had swept away coastal barriers erected at enormous cost, rising seas were flooding the downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people. The streets of Alexandria, Bangkok, Mumbai, Saigon, and Shanghai were flooded with several feet of standing seawater that fouled water mains, filled sewers, and shorted out power lines, rendering much of those cities uninhabitable. Low-lying regions like the Mekong Delta, the Nile Delta, and the coast of Bangladesh were sinking or had sunk beneath surging seas, displacing millions of farming families. Relentless waves were eating away at shorelines around the world, putting villages, towns, and cities at risk.¹

Every summer, temperatures in tropical latitudes worldwide soared, often remaining well above 100°F (38°C) for weeks at a time. Farmlands in Africa and Asia were being lost to drought and desertification, making staple grains increasingly unaffordable for the world’s poor. With the oceans still warming rapidly, coastal communities struggled to find the schools of fish that had once been their main source of protein. As 140 million climate change refugees in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia filled leaky boats or marched overland in their desperate search for food and shelter, affluent nations worldwide were shutting and walling their borders, leaving ships packed with people to founder at sea and pushing crowds back from those borders with tear gas and gunfire.²

Yet even these reluctant host countries were hardly immune from the pain. In the United States, there was insufferable heat, uncontrollable wildfires, unpredictable weather, and unending hunger. Every summer, powerful hurricanes pummeled the East and Gulf Coasts, forcing insurance companies to cancel coverage for millions of homeowners. New York, Boston, and San Francisco built massive seawalls to survive the storm surges, but the federal government had abandoned Miami and New Orleans to the relentless rise of the tides.³

Blistering summer heat and devastating storms had reduced the harvests from the country’s Midwestern and Southern breadbaskets by 10 to 20 percent, raising food prices and bringing ever more hunger to the nation’s poor. Every year, cities across America suffered one or two months of sweltering 90-degree weather, with Los Angeles and Phoenix regularly enduring weeks of temperatures above 120°F (49°C). Massive wildfires devastated vast stretches of the West, destroying dozens of towns and thousands of homes every summer.⁴

Such widespread suffering will not come from some unforeseen disaster but from a simple and already well-understood imbalance in the basic elements that sustain human life—air, earth, fire, and water. As carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels climb to an unsustainable 550 parts per million in the atmosphere by 2050 and average world temperatures rise by as much as 4.2°F (2.3°C), climate change will degrade the quality of life in every country and continent on earth in ways that are hard to grasp. With seas warming, permafrost receding, and moist rain forests in Africa and the Amazon drying into savannah, the closing decades of the twenty-first century will bring even more adverse conditions.⁵

This dismal vision of life on earth at midcentury comes not from some flight of literary fantasy on my part, but from the published environmental science on global warming. Such data-dense reports have long predicted a troubled future for humanity. Although the impact of climate change on the current system of global governance is still uncertain, we can all see the troubling signs of environmental crisis right now in the world around us—severe summers, intense storms, increased flooding, and worsening wildfires.

The Fiery Summer of 2019–2020

Indeed, in the summer of 2019, the world was already on fire. As temperatures around the globe climbed to scorching records, devastating forest fires