Book Review: The post-American world and the rise of the rest

A few months back, I started reading a 40 year old edition of “Economics” By Samuelson which my father had used during his academic days. It was very interesting to note how the book mostly spoke about the US and the Soviet economies, Japan was the rising sun and India was often shown as a poor economy at the opposite end of the US and Soviet ones. Somewhere between the time my father understood Keynes and I first came across the term macroeconomics the world saw several transitions – China had a Deng Xiaoping, UK had a Baroness Thatcher and India saw a P V Narasimha Rao, a wall fell down in Europe and my history and geography text books underwent a revision, while China and India surged, Japan the rising sun suddenly seemed stationary, cold war went into cold storage and I had more than one friend christening his dog “Buddy”. Fareed Zakaria’s “A Post-American World and the rise of the rest” presents the remarkable transformations that the world has undergone and how economics and policies governing the markets have been the key to strength of nations. Mr Zakaria with his journalistic style of writing takes us on a journey from the present to the heydays of the Chinese and Indian civilizations, to the pinnacle of the British Crown’s dominance of the world and back thus providing a sequence of events that has led to the current US dominated uni-polar world. But how long will this dominance of the US last before it is challenged by a cluster of rising stars? This seems to be the central question that one would expect the book to address however after reaching a high tempo discussing America’s rise to power and the ascent of it’s allies and challengers the book does little to present a picture of what a Post American world would look like. Mr Zakaria also assumes the current trend of the rising economies to continue and not lose steam like the Japanese challenge. The book however does well to string together global events and presents a very detailed description of how the world came to be where it is.The book is a must read for people with interest in world history, economics and politics and despite being a concise work it does not compromise on details. The author’s writing style makes it an easy, the takeaway from this book is the enormous wealth of information and the author’s acute analysis of history. All this makes this book one that you will find difficult to close before you get to the last page. And when I did get to the last page of the book, I realized why economists from my father’s generation could not have predicted what the world would look like in the 21st century.