Vijay Prashad’s new book chronicles the key moments in the unimpeded rise and triumph of neoliberalism during the second half of the twentieth century, while simultaneously tracing the Global South’s attempts to resist neoliberalism. Prashad shows how the South’s “condition of abject economic and political servitude” (p. 12) was constructed by the powerful nations of the North Atlantic and bolstered by the complicity of Third World policymakers and elites: in other words, the “haves” of the South for whom the neoliberal logic of the market held great promise.

In principle, neoliberalism is a doctrine of adherence to market logic that calls for economic growth to be driven by individual initiative in the private sector, while the realm of the “public good” is increasingly shrunken. But Prashad’s Marxist analysis is deeply attentive to power inequities, insisting that neoliberalism itself is “less a coherent doctrine than a fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of dominance” (p. 47). And, he rightly reminds us, its appeal “is that it appears to be a discourse of equal opportunity … but which of course has very divergent effects since it has to operate in social conditions that are highly unequal” (p. 135).

In Chapter 1, Prashad chronicles the “demise” of North Atlantic liberalism during the 1970s, a period in which the North, rejecting liberal discourse on its obligation to address the widening global inequality gaps, recruited global economic and political institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank to participate in the birth of the new neoliberal order. Despite the valiant attempts of leaders like Willy Brandt and Robert MacNamara, the South’s attempts to put forth a new international economic order (NIEO) were summarily crushed. Political elites and institutions of the North sought to “ensure the combined strength of the ‘North’ against the ‘South’” (p. 37), disrupting alliances among non-Atlantic nations and insisting that development be understood as “self-help” engineered by free trade, liberalized financial systems, and export-oriented “growth.”

Chapter 2 tells of subsequent attempts by Third World leaders to forge alliances with one another as the South’s wealth was drained into crushing debt payments to the North during the 1980s. The attempt to build South–South solidarity appears to hinge largely around the writing of a report (The Challenge of the South) by the “South Commission,” with actors like Julius Nyerere and Manmohan Singh playing key roles in the narrative. A combination of the North’s refusal to forgive debt, the creation of GATT and TRIPS (the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) regimes to protect the intellectual monopolies of the North, and, eventually, the “quiet accommodation [of the] South Commission to neoliberal views” (p. 103) ensured that no meaningful challenge would emerge to neoliberalism’s global hegemony.

Chapter 3 shifts to the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, during which the “locomotives” of the South—the demographically large countries of Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, collectively known as BRICS—attempted to speak for “South–South cooperation.” However, in attempting to mimic the economic success of Japan and the East Asian “Tigers,” they eventually capitulated to what Prashad calls “neoliberalism with Southern characteristics,” best understood as a kind of “neoliberalism-lite.”

Chapter 4 is the first moment in which Prashad appears to meaningfully disaggregate the entity that he repeatedly refers to as the “South.” Here, we see that those disaffected by neoliberalism are a plurality of nonstate actors who may have vastly divergent concerns and agendas. He addresses the “internationalism joining the peoples of the South and the North who suffer the ravages engendered by the dictatorship of the financial markets” (p. 243), jointly opposing militarized, neoliberal globalization. This twenty-first-century internationalism brings environmental activists, indigenous peoples, the international women’s movement, and a variety of other social movements into solidarity. For Prashad, true hope rests in what he calls this “South from below” (p. 12), although he cautiously notes that the very disparate nature of these movements makes ideological unity continually elusive.

The author spends a good portion of his analysis documenting how North Atlantic states repeatedly fortified their own economic advantages, rejecting demands for equitable and redistributive global measures such as debt forgiveness, while insisting that the South’s responsibility for its destiny was its own. But equally prominent in his narrative are the actions of governments and elites of the Global South. Ultimately, he suggests that the juggernaut of neoliberalism was able to roll on mostly due to the South’s inability to articulate a viable and credible ideological alternative to neoliberalism. The “locomotives” of the South adopted a watered-down version of neoliberalism, prodded largely by their own elites who were eager for a slice of the neoliberal pie. Meanwhile, their alliance was able neither to create an institutional foundation for its emergent authority nor to counter the military dominance of the United States and its North Atlantic allies.

By far the most enjoyable parts of the book are the introduction and Chapter 4. In both, we are treated to Prashad’s vast knowledge of the complex history of North–South relations. Less enjoyable, however, are the frankly dry and minute-by-minute accounts of global summits, accords, documents, reports, and statements that characterize Chapters 1 through 3. His analysis shines in its more theoretical moments where he undertakes a treatment of the “uneven geometry of imperialism” (p. 26), reminding us, for instance, that correct ideas “are not believed or enacted simply because they are right. They become the ideas of the time only when they are wielded by those who [use] them in ideological and institutional struggles that … consolidate their social authority” (p. 76). But such glimpses of theoretical perspicuity are sandwiched between lengthy and minutely detailed accounts that chronicle the various permutations of the international nation-state system and institutional action through which neoliberalism repeatedly prevailed while southern resistance repeatedly failed.

Part historical investigation and part manifesto, the book is replete with slogans such as “what we know for sure is that … the time of the impossible has presented itself” (p. 13). While Prashad’s self-described adherence to Marxist thought resonates clearly throughout the work, less well elaborated is his debt to Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. Among other things, Foucault’s work on governmentality reminds us that neoliberalism as a project develops indirect techniques for leading and controlling individuals without being responsible for them. This is implicit in Prashad’s analysis, as he touches upon repeated insistence by the North that the South “take responsibility” for its own financial destiny, that it stop expecting global “charity” and acknowledge its poverty to be “of its own making” (p. 45). One wishes, however, that the author had spent more time engaging explicitly with a Foucauldian mode of analysis, demonstrating how the neoliberal governmentality of the North sought to “responsibilize” subjects of the South by making them see poverty not as the responsibility of a global public realm but as a problem of the South’s (and its individual subjects’) own “self-care,” an issue that cries out for deeper elaboration.

In the end, Prashad’s prognosis is neither completely optimistic in its hope for revolutionary change nor entirely hopeless. Rather, he wavers between confidence that the “time of the neoliberal state … is now over” (p. 13) and the cautious warning that “neither neoliberalism nor the capitalist logic that governs it has been displaced” (p. 13). While historians of international relations and international political economy may derive great satisfaction from the accounts in The Poorer Nations, those who theorize politics and power may be left wanting a little more. Still, the book is wide-ranging and ambitious, covering a vast sweep of historical narrative. As such, it deserves a central place in any history of the international economic and political system.