The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Order
By Branko Milanovic
Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News
By Martin Moore and Thomas Colley
The War that Made The Middle East: World War I and The End of the Ottoman Empire
By Mustafa Aksakal
Democracy and Inequality in India: Political Economy of a Troubled Giant
By Atul Kohli and Kanta Murali
Political Trust in China
By Lianjiang Li
Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime
By Marlene Laruelle
The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Order
By Branko Milanovic
University of Chicago Press, March 2026
280 pages
The world’s two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution—a dramatic shakeup of each country’s political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.
In The Great Global Transformation, . . .Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow—and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to the breaking point.
Milanovic’s new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms “national market liberalism,” in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic’s indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway.
Reviews
“Milanovic declares that ‘Nationalism, greed and property define the era of neoliberalism and will continue to define the period of ”national market liberalism,” probably even more so because all three, but especially the nationalistic factor, are globally becoming stronger. The creation of new forms of property also creates new forms of market power. The need to create more property, in turn, is driven by human greed. Greed in turn fuels nationalism whose aim is to ensure that national wealth is protected and increased. Milanovic, in short, sees the world through a Marxist lens. That makes his thinking both intriguing and original.” ― Financial Times, Best Books in Economics
“For Milanovic, greed is the iron cage of our times, and our future is bleak. . . . His body of research, as a whole, has firmly established the importance of tackling inequality from a critical, world historical perspective. The Great Global Transformation provides a useful and accessible summary of his work.”– Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz ― Nature
“In his fine new book The Great Global Transformation, the former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic describes how our political and economic order is now coming to an end. China and the global south now account for more of the world economy than the US, Japan, Europe, and the many others put together that he terms the “capitalist core”; at the same time, capitalism is being redefined. The elites who prospered under the regimes shaped by Reagan and Thatcher are now redefining their nations into narrower, meaner, harsher societies, ditching the old commitments to multiculturalism and equality for women. They are forcing upon the rest of us capitalism without secure contracts, unions, or even the HR department.”– Aditya Chakrabortty ― The Guardian
“Milanovic postulates an implicit premise: democratic systems cannot survive being stretched across larger swathes of the global income distribution without experiencing severe political stress. . . . his findings are incredibly striking and powerful. To my mind the facts he marshals must now stand as the basic parameters of any political and historical attempt to explain the ‘backlash’ against neoliberalism and the global economic system that defined the period between 1979 and 2016.”– Nicholas Mulder ― Weltinnenpolitik
“In this masterful account of The Great Global Transformation, Branko Milanovic combines his deep knowledge of political economy and philosophy and mastery of distributional statistics to the utmost limits of their ability to explain the rise of Asia and the corresponding decline of the West.” — James K. Galbraith, The University of Texas at Austin and author, Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production
“This latest grand narrative from Blanko Milanovich vividly captures a world at another crossroads, caught in shifting geopolitical and ideological megatrends marked by the phenomenal rise of China and the rise of Nationalism in the West in the last two decades. Liberal democracy is under siege even in the West and in retreat elsewhere. With eloquence, humour, astuteness, and magisterial presentation of quantitative data, Milanovich offers a penetrating tale of how we arrived here in the last fifty years and, most importantly, some critical insights on where we might be heading.” — Debin Ma, coeditor The Cambridge Economic History of China
About the Author
Branko Milanovic is research professor and a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, City University of New York, as well as visiting professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of numerous books, including Visions of Inequality; Capitalism, Alone; and Global Inequality.
Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News
By Martin Moore and Thomas Colley
Columbia University Press, October 2025
365 Pages
From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.
Martin Moore and Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments’ efforts to take control of the media. Dictating Reality details how Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, AMLO’s Mexico, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orban’s Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities—and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies. Combining keen analysis of contemporary world events with years of original research, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how authoritarian leaders use the media, why more and more people are living in different realities, and the ways democracy is under threat.
Reviews
While the news industry collapses in democracies, authoritarian regimes are reinventing “news” as a weapon to oppress opposition at home and enemies abroad. This book is the ultimate guide to this brave news world. — Peter Pomerantsev, author of How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
Compelling and persuasive. Moore and Colley describe how authoritarian and democratic governments around the world seek to control news―and to create a parallel or sovereign reality. A valuable primer for our dark times. — Luke Harding, author of Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival
This is an elegant, expert, disciplined, and important book about the most urgent contemporary problem: the decay and disorder of information. Different autocracies and governments, as this brilliant analysis shows, do it differently, but they are all manipulating news for their own ends―representing a threat not just to ‘the media’ but to our entire sense of reality. — Jean Seaton, University of Westminster, official historian of the BBC
Dictating Reality isn’t just a story about authoritarian regimes―it’s an investigation of how to reset and overcome the media infrastructures that keep them in place. In each of the countries studied by Moore and Colley, there are also important stories of resistance, political expression, and democracy advocacy in which digital media is also embedded. This book should inspire both fear and hope. — Philip Howard, author of Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives
This is an innovative, well-written analysis of news subversion. Its great strength is its comparative reach, contrasting, for example, state-sponsored media duplicity in Russia and Hungary with internet-based, populist news distortions in South America. It concludes with a compelling solution that cries out to be read. — James Curran, professor of communications, Goldsmiths University of London –This text refers to the paperback edition.
About the Authors
Martin Moore is senior lecturer in political communication education and director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London. His books include Democracy Hacked: How Technology Is Destabilizing Global Politics (2018).
Thomas Colley is senior visiting research fellow in war studies at King’s College London and senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. His books include Always at War: British Public Narratives of War (2019).
The War that Made The Middle East: World War I and The End of the Ottoman Empire
By Mustafa Aksakal
Princeton University Press, January 2026
264 Pages
In The War That Made the Middle East, Mustafa Aksakal describes how European imperial ambitions and the Ottoman commitment to saving its empire at any cost—including the destruction of the Armenian community and the deaths of more than a million Ottoman troops and other civilians—led to the empire’s violent partition and created a politically unstable Middle East.
. . . Until 1914, the Ottoman Empire was a viable multiethnic, multireligious state, and relations between the Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Palestine were relatively stable. When war broke out, the Ottoman government sought an alliance with the Entente but was rejected because of British and French designs on the Eastern Mediterranean. After the Ottomans entered the fight on the side of Germany and were defeated, Britain and France seized Ottoman lands, and new national elites in former Ottoman territories claimed their own states. The region was renamed “the Middle East,”erasing a robust and modernizing 600-year-old empire.
A sweeping narrative of war, great power politics, and ordinary people caught up in the devastation, The War That Made the Middle East offers new insights about the Great War and its profound and lasting consequences.
Reviews
“A revisionist history of World War I that elevates the role and importance of the Ottoman Empire in the conflict. . . . A fresh examination of a little-reckoned theater of war.” ― Kirkus Reviews
“This is a landmark new history of the origins of war and dictatorship in the modern Middle East. Mustafa Aksakal deploys an astonishing breadth of research to weave a tragic story about the disastrous choices made by Ottoman rulers confronting existential threats during World War I. He shows how the Ottoman Empire, like so many other states, destroyed its own people in a war against both external imperialists and internal opponents. A must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the Armenian Genocide, Islamic politics, Middle Eastern dictatorship, and the region’s ongoing trauma.”—Elizabeth F. Thompson, author of How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs
“. . . Offering a corrective to Eurocentric diplomatic accounts, deterministic national histories of successor states, and reductionist genocide-centered narratives, Aksakal draws on rare Ottoman archival materials and overlooked German sources to illuminate the complexity of a transformative war.”—Hasan Kayali, author of Imperial Resilience: The Great War’s End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations
“Few wars have more profoundly affected the future than World War I. Mustafa Aksakal, the leading expert on the final struggles of the Ottoman Empire, demonstrates in clear, powerful prose that the Young Turk radicals who seized control of the empire on the eve of the war were the architects of Ottoman destruction. Going deeper than diplomatic or military history, Aksakal grounds his book in the social realities and misperceptions that led Ottoman leaders to kill hundreds of thousands of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects in a desperate, ill-conceived fight against perceived internal enemies.”—Ronald Grigor Suny, author of “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide
About the Author
Mustafa Aksakal is an associate professor (at Georgetown University) in the Department of History as well as the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in the School of Foreign Service. He is the Nesuhi Ertegun Chair of Modern Turkish Studies.
Democracy and Inequality in India: Political Economy of a Troubled Giant
By Atul Kohli and Kanta Murali
Cambridge University Press, October 2025
360 Pages
Through in-depth analysis of democracy, economic growth and distribution, caste, labour, gender, and foreign policy, Atul Kohli and Kanta Murali provide a framework for understanding recent political and economic developments. They make three key arguments. First, that India’s well-established democracy is currently under considerable strain. Second, that the roots of this decline can be attributed to the growing inequalities accompanying growth since the 1990s. Growing inequalities led to the decline of the Congress party and the rise of the BJP under Narendra Modi. In turn, the BJP and its Hindu-nationalist affiliates have used state power to undermine democracy and to target Indian Muslims. Finally, they highlight how various social groups reacted to macro-level changes, although the results of their activism have not always been substantial. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand democracy in India today.
Reviews
‘A comprehensive, erudite, and immensely readable account of a vast and complex subject. Kohli and Murali explore the impact of growth and economic inequality on India’s democracy, with a thoroughness and depth of scholarship that make this volume invaluable.’ — Niraja Gopal Jayal, author of Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History
‘This thoughtful and nuanced account by two seasoned scholars of India is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the country today.’ — Prerna Singh, author of How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India
‘Kohli and Murali have produced the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the Modi era yet. They cover a whole range of important political issues, including caste, gender, labor, regional disparities and India’s changing relationship to the world. Economic growth and distribution constitute an important core of the book. Significantly, they argue that India’s democratic backsliding is linked to the nation’s rising economic inequalities. A book that should be widely read.’ Ashutosh Varshney — author of Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy
About the Authors
Atul Kohli is David K. E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Politics, Princeton University. His recent books include Greed and Guns: Imperial Origins of the Developing World (2022) and Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the US Shaped the Global Periphery (2019).
Kanta Murali is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto. She is author of Caste, Class and Capital: The Social and Political Origins of Economic Policy in India (2017).
Political Trust in China
By Lianjiang Li
University of Michigan Press, July 2025
258 Pages
Reviews
“In this thoughtful study, Lianjiang Li draws on survey evidence to newly conceptualize how political trust in China is configured. He shows that political trust in the center is highly personalized in a paramount leader and that assessments of its trustworthiness distinguish between commitment and capacity. Citizens assess the center’s commitment from policy promises and assess its capacity from local implementation of central policies. Li analyzes the strategies the regime uses to build political trust and suggests implications for the patterns of trust he discovers for citizen behavior and political system stability.” — Melanie Manion, Duke University
“Li examines complex questions about people’s relationships with their government. This book is an excellent tool for political science professors and researchers in a time of pervasive political distrust and growing concern over manipulated information.” ― Emma Schindler-Wood, Library Journal.
About the Author
Lianjiang Li is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. He is a scholar who has spent decades measuring the foundations of political and social trust in China. He challenges overly positive views of Chinese citizens’ support for the government.”
Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime
By Marlene Laruelle
Stanford University Press, January 2025
400 Pages
Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits’ clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin’s grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian regime’s ideological production process and the ways it is operationalized in both domestic and foreign policies. Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible and represents a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions. By placing the current Russian regime into a broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history, this book gives readers key insights into how the Russo-Ukrainian War became possible and the role ideology played in enabling it.
Reviews
“The most comprehensive examination of how illiberal ideology is crystallizing in Putin’s Russia. This book confirms Marlene Laruelle’s reputation as a leading expert in the field. It is essential reading to understand not only ‘how Russia works’ but also the broader dynamics of ideological contestation.” ―Mikhail Suslov, University of Copenhagen
“One of the world’s premier experts on Russian political thought, Marlene Laruelle offers a rich, nuanced, and lucid explication of ‘Putinism,’ its mélange of ideological formulations across a quarter century, its intellectual-historical heritage and grassroots sources, and its dissemination in contemporary media and popular culture.” ―Edith W. Clowes, University of Virginia
“Laruelle’s thorough examination of the ideological trends underpinning modern Russia demonstrates how these are the product of a process of co-creation by state and society, rather than Kremlin diktat. Understanding Russia has rarely been more important, and this detailed and nuanced analysis is an important contribution to that cause.” ―Paul Robinson, University of Ottawa
“One can hardly overstate the importance and the scholarly contribution of Laruelle’s book. It definitively belongs on the reading list of any scholar interested in understanding the political logic of contemporary Russia.” ―Alexander Libman, The Russian Review
About the Author
Marlene Laruelle is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science and Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at The George Washington University. Trained in political philosophy, she works on the rise of illiberalism in different national contexts and has published widely on Russia’s society and politics, as well as foreign policy.