56. Climate Memo Mondays,
#56, January 3, 2022
To
Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change by Alfred W. McCoy Haymarket
Books, 2021.
In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across
five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of
catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming
climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires
and fading world orders.
During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for
new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as
a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and
social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary
profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to
death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature
of modern capitalism for over four
centuries.
After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions,
and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won
insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering
often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world
orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at
the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the
signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.
Product Details
About the Autho
rTable of Contents
Editorial Reviews
"An ambitious effort to discern patterns in the rise and
fall of world empires.... McCoy’s account is compelling...with many provocative
observations on world history and its present twists." —Kirkus
"To Govern the Globe is a brilliant distillation of
700 years of geopolitics, exposing how we arrived where we are, amidst 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!"
"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 US 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 gripping 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,
investigative journalists and author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars
"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 which 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
·
“In the four thousand
years since the first empire appeared,” writes McCoy, the chair of the history
department at the University of Wisconsin, “the world has witnessed a
continuous succession of some 200 [empires], of which 70 were large or
lasting.” Granted that many of those empires have faded into historical limbo, that’s
an impressive record of political organization. One plank on which empires
found their power is not often considered: energy and its flows and control. In
this regard, McCoy considers the transfer of world dominion from Great Britain
to the U.S. in the 20th century. After World War II, the U.S. controlled a vast
inventory of energy resources and was directed by a forward-thinking,
world-embracing governing class, as against Britain’s “leaders from its insular
landed aristocracy, animated by a sense of racial superiority.” Less than a
century later, the American empire is giving way to a new world order headed by
China. “While Washington was spilling its blood and treasure into desert
sands,” writes the author, “Beijing had been investing much of its accumulated
trade surplus in the integration of the ‘world island’ of Africa, Asia, and
Europe into an economic powerhouse.” China’s leaders play a very long game,
with energy and raw materials capture being key features in a time of
catastrophic climate change and upheaval. McCoy is not entirely successful in
forging the general theory of empires promised at the outset of his book, and
he might have better confined his argument to the U.S. and China from the
start. This rivalry—and soon, inevitable transfer of power—is, after all, at
the heart of his argument, and McCoy’s account is compelling as he details our
frittering away of political influence and fiscal treasure while China has been
busy building a superior navy and “the world’s largest high-speed rail system.”
·
Sometimes diffuse but with many provocative observations on
world history and its present twists.
·
Kirkus Reviews
Alfred McCoy, To
Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change. Chapter 7, “Climate Change in the
Twenty-First Century.” The following is
a shortened version of the final section of the final chapter (Dick):
A NEW WORLD ORDER?
Given that Washington’s
world system and Beijing’s emerging alternative show every sign of failing to
limit carbon emissions in significant enough ways, by mid-century the
international community will likely need a new form of global governance to
contain the damage.
After 2050, the world
community will quite possibly face a growing contradiction, even a head-on
collision, between the foundational principles of the current global order:
national sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations have the sovereign
right to seal their borders, the world will have no way of protecting the human
rights of the hundreds of millions of future climate-change refugees.
By then, facing a spectacle
of mass global suffering now almost unimaginable, the community of nations
might well agree on the need for a new form of global governance. Such a
supranational body or bodies would need sovereign authority over three critical
areas—emissions controls, refugee resettlement, and environmental
reconstruction. If the transition to renewable energy sources is still not
complete by 2050, then this international body might well compel nations to
curb emissions and adopt renewable energy. Whether under the auspices of the UN
or a successor organization, a high commissioner for global refugees would need
the authority to supersede state sovereignty in order to require nations to
help resettle such tidal flows of humanity. The future equivalents of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank could transfer resources from
wealthy temperate countries to feed tropical communities decimated by climate
change.
Massive programs like these
would change the very idea of what constitutes a world order from the diffuse,
almost amorphous ethos of the past six centuries into a concrete form of global
governance. At present, no one can predict whether such reforms will come soon
enough to slow climate change or arrive too late to do anything but manage the
escalating damage of uncontrollable feedback loops.
One thing is becoming quite
clear, however. The environmental destruction in our future will be so profound
that anything less than the emergence of a new form of global governance—one
capable of protecting the planet and the human rights of all its
inhabitants—will mean that wars over water, land, and people are likely to
erupt across the planet amid climate chaos. Absent some truly fundamental
change in our global governance and in energy use, by mid-century humanity will
begin to face disasters of an almost unimaginable kind that will make imperial
orders of any sort something for the history books.
ALFRED MCCOY is the J.R.W.
Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A
TomDispatch regular, he is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global
Power and Policing America’s Empire:
The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
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