"History on an epic scale-sweeping, provocative, and unsparing in its judgment." -Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed An immensely readable history, To Govern the Globe narrates the rising empires and fading world orders of the last seven centuries, from the Iberian Age to the British Empire to the post-World War II American era. As historian Alfred McCoy explains, each world order has been defined by shifting principles of sovereignty, debates over human rights, and the quest for profitable forms of energy. Today as the US world order, with its voracious consumption of fossil fuels, faces mounting crises, McCoy shows how past patterns of energy use will trouble the planet for the rest of this century and beyond. This paperback edition has a new preface by the author.

Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama offered an impassioned denunciation of the 'enhanced' interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration in its War on Terror - methods that included sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and waterboarding. But four years later America has yet to prosecute or punish these abuses. Tracing the origins of this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U. S. government under presidents Bush and Obama. During the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject's resistance to interrogation. For many of those subjected to these experiments, the result was an experience akin to psychosis. Leaving its most lasting scars on the psyche rather than the body, such torture lent itself to propagation, and for three decades the U.S. shared these methods with its anti-Communist allies around the globe. After the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11th, 2001, the CIA opened its own prisons, and American agents began, for the first time, to dirty their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. Simultaneously, mass media offered enticing, often eroticized simulations of torture in film, television, and computer games that normalized this illegal practice for millions of Americans. In the absence of legal sanction for the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, media exposes and congressional hearings have proved insufficient deterrents. The American public, preoccupied with the nation's failing economy, has seemingly moved on. But the images of abuse from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America's moral authority as a world leader.

Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors.Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power, including: erosion of economic and fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scale; misuse of military power through micro-military misadventures; breakdown of alliances among major powers; weakened controls over the subordinate elites critical for any empire's exercise of global power; insufficient technological innovation to sustain global force projection.

During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a massive, secret air war in neighbouring Laos. Fred Branfman, an educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over 1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged them to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. Voices from the Plain of Jars was the result of that effort. When first published in 1972, this book was instrumental in exposing the bombing. In this expanded edition, Branfman follows the story forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after the war when they returned to find their farm fields littered with cluster munitions- explosives that continue to maim and kill today.