Mike Mason's Turbulent Empires is a difficult book to review. It is clearly based on a half century of reading, teaching, and reflection on the past, the present predicament, and perhaps even the future of global capitalism. It aspires to a truly global reach, looking well beyond the major industrial states to describe the recent economic and political histories of much of the globe. And it seeks to offer a fitting extension of Eric Hobsbawm's famous world histories, starting midway through his Age of Extremes and extending well past that book's 1991 end point.
Yet Turbulent Empires, in spite of these virtues, does not add significantly to our knowledge of recent economic histories of the world. It is so devoted to geographic and thematic breadth that the book presents only glimmers of an argument about the turbulence of the postwar world—for which Mason blames global capitalism. The book's brief preface and afterword, which together amount to fewer than ten pages, do mention a few broader themes. First, as adverted in Mason's earlier Global Shift: Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1945–2007 (2013), the book devotes more attention to Asia than Hobsbawm did; this should be an uncontroversial position to stake out in 2018. Turbulent Empires calls on readers to consider American hegemony as the driving force in the world economy for many decades, now facing dire (or at least direct) challenge from China. Finally and most importantly, the book insists upon the “turbulence” of capitalism, an unsurprising perspective at least since the age of Joseph Schumpeter.
After announcing turbulence as the overriding characteristic of global capitalism since the end of World War II, Mason embarks on nine geographically defined chapters, or “snapshots” (p. xi). Most are regions, though the United States and China rightly get chapters of their own. While most chapters unfold according to their own regional logics, a few common concepts appear: a “commodities supercycle,” apparently about price and demand fluctuations; the unevenness of economic growth both between and within individual nations; and the political effects of economic volatility and inequality (p. 240).
These recurring themes, however, do not amount to a clearly articulated argument about the origins, nature, or consequences of global capitalism. The chapters vary in approach; many devote a few pages to each of a number of exemplary countries. Taken together, the chapters reveal an impressively broad reading in newspapers, scholarly monographs, and analyses of contemporary politics and economics intended for a broader audience. At their best, these accounts distill complex events over an extended period into brief and readable prose. At other times, however, these “snapshots” can get blurry; they can focus on tidbits about political leaders—for example, the forms of torture that Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff endured—rather than the link between economic and political volatility (p. 233). Or they move with dizzying speed; the section on Ghana, for instance, moves from the 1966 coup against Kwame Nkrumah to the end of Joseph Rawling's presidency in 2001 to Bono and Jeffrey Sachs's visit to the country in 2012 in six short paragraphs, one of which is an extended quotation (pp. 198–200). While such coverage is admirable, such pacing is not conducive to making or supporting analytical claims. Most frustratingly, the chapters often introduce new terminology without adequate explanation or points of reference: British Prime Minister Tony Blair promoted “neoliberal socialism,” for instance, while Iran's ayatollahs built a “neoliberal theocracy” (pp. 103, 175). Not all of such terms revolve around neoliberalism, though that term is used in many different ways to describe a wide variety of sins (at least in Mason's telling).
While emphasizing the turbulence of capitalism is undoubtedly a worthwhile effort in understanding post-1945 world history, the book has little space for other forms or causes of turbulence: Cold War ideological conflict, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, communal violence, and growing social and political inclusiveness, to name a few. To take one example, while the changing composition and direction of American trade was no doubt a factor in growing concerns about the winners and losers from international trade, it seems somewhat simplistic to suggest, as Mason does, that the domestic response to growing American imports from China was “ultimately the election of Donald Trump” (p. 244). Surely other factors—both structural and long-term as well as contingent—came into play.
Turbulent Empires, then, is best read as a reporter's notebook about economics and politics in the post-1945 world. While it lacks the you-were-there sense of Robert Kaplan's writings, Mason's book takes an expansive view of the post–World War II world and offers some useful insights in prose that is unburdened by academic stuffiness.
