Right up front I should say that Henry Farrell, one of the authors of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, is a friend from graduate school. Part of me read this book the way one would read a draft of a friend’s project — not that Henry has ever wanted or needed my editing — pulling at the arguments, applauding good lines, suggesting tweaks here and there throughout the manuscript. And while doing that here would be fun (for blogger/editor values of “fun”), it would be entirely beside the point for Underground Empire. The book builds on the two authors’ academic work and aims to bring their ideas to a larger audience of policy practitioners, people who influence international relations, and interested citizens.

If everything exceeds expectations, Henry and co-author Abraham Newman will break out of the half-academic corner, and their book will join the line of discourse-shaping works such as The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, The End of History and the Last Man, The Clash of Civilizations and The World Is Flat. In contrast to most of those works, which are almost all expansions of journal articles,* Underground Empire is better for the non-specialist to read than its underlying article for at least three reasons. First, the authors have had four more years to refine their ideas and presentation, to gather more examples, and to have seen how officials have reacted to — and sometimes made use of — their ideas in real-world international relations. Second, they have taken out most of the academic and theoretical apparatus behind their ideas. They have left in the insights, and made them approachable for a larger audience without simplifying them to the point of caricature. Third, they are willing to look forward as well as backward and sideways. Henry and Newman close with a chapter that takes the interdependences the rest of the book has described and sketches how they could be used to help create a sustainable future in which humanity overcomes many of the perils of the twenty-first century.

What are their ideas? Henry and Newman take readers on a journey to some key places of the early twenty-first century. In short, after the end of the Cold War new global institutions were built around the idea of networks. I use the passive voice advisedly, because in contrast to the institutions that states made after the end of World War II, the ones that emerged from the aftermath of the Cold War were not grand designs. The World Trade Organization evolved from the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. The builders of the internet gave the network of networks characteristics, not a detailed plan. International banks found solutions to pressing business problems; what they came up with was not what anyone would have done if they were building a global financial system from the ground up, it was what held together well enough until the next crisis came along.

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