As Europe rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War, the former colonies of the major imperial powers sought their independence at the same time that the United States extended its economic and political power globally. In Turbulent Empires Mike Mason analyzes the struggles for post-colonial sovereignty and economic domination and how these competing forces led to conflicts and shifting alliances around the postwar world. Turbulent Empires surveys the major polities and economies of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Russia, and the West and traces the trajectory of nationalist ruling classes bent on exercising sovereign control over economic resources. It emphasizes the convulsions that brought about unanticipated realignments and shocking reversals, such as the rise and fall of regimes, continuous interventions in the Muslim world, the sudden collapse of the commodities supercycle, and the continuing challenge of inequality. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the global economic crisis of 2008 raised the question of a new global order while the question of American decline, captured in the slogan "Make America Great Again,” became commonplace. Both erudite and accessibly written, Turbulent Empires provides an insightful and sweeping analysis of world political and economic history that is an ideal introduction to postwar political science, history, and development studies.

Mike Mason has taught university courses in Third World history for more than twenty-five years. A former editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies, he holds degrees in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia, and African Studies from the University of Birmingham, where he specialized in Muslim Africa. He is presently associate professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal.

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"At once erudite and pleasantly readable, [Turbulent Empires] is the kind of broad international perspective that pretty much anyone should consume before reading or forming opinions on what’s happening in world news." Montreal Review of Books

"Turbulent Empires is a gem of a book – accomplished with impressive erudition, written with panache, brimming with insight. A book like this is the result a lifetime of learning." Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago