Underground Empire is a Prime Day deal

Buy it! Read it! Tell your friends about it!

So my and Abe Newman’s book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, is one of the books that Amazon has chosen to promote and sell during its Prime Day sale. The hardback - usually $28.99 - is now less than half price. You can buy it here, and, obviously, I’d love it if you did.

This is - and will remain - a free newsletter. But if you get some value from this newsletter, and would like to be able to give back a little, buying my and Abe’s book allows you to get a very good book while you’re at it. Obviously, my judgment of the book is liable to bias. But Underground Empire has been out in the world for a while now, and it’s picked up a lot of praise from people who, unlike me, have no self-interested incentive to give it. I was absolutely thrilled last week when Jo Walton, who is a wonderful writer herself, wrote this short review of it:

Riveting non-fiction book that dives deep into the internet, the world banking system, and international politics of the last few decades to link them into one evolving story. Although some of this stuff is highly technical, this is written so as to be not so much approachable as gripping. This is important, and I’m glad to see that the book has been winning awards. C.J. Cherryh has a line about the little piece of information that slots into place and suddenly illuminates the whole picture and makes things make sense. This book contains a lot of those little pieces of information.

I can’t speak for Abe, but the book that Jo describes is exactly the kind of book that I wanted to write. Put a little differently, I wanted to write a book that unveiled the hidden complexities of the world, but that avoided being tedious and pedantic, using pacing and expository techniques that aren’t like those you are taught as an academic. And being told by a widely loved and respected senior member of the guild of really good authors that you’ve done it - well, it’s a big deal for me.

When I started co-authoring Underground Empire, the first thing that I discovered is that writing popular non-fiction is really hard. This is in part because academics’ instincts are close to the opposite of what is required to do it well. You are taught to develop and elaborate a set of research claims, building on the existing literature, and then to explain the evidence, showing how the evidence (you hope) mostly supports the argument, and explaining any deviations. You’re supposed to do all of this in dull careful prose where the merest hint of an epee’s flourish is likely to get a withering response from Reviewer #2.

That kind of pedantry Just Won’t Do for a broader book. You have to learn how to use stories, not abstract claims, as load bearing structures for your narrative, all the while keeping some kind of argument going, because in the end you are still trying to tell your reader something important about the world.

But doing this is also hard because it is hard. It is really difficult to explain complex, important things in clear, lively language, and to work backwards and forwards between compelling stories and the hidden structures of the world. Academics regularly sneer at journalists - this is in part because they have no idea how difficult it is to do what journalists do well.

So I went to books and writers I admired to figure out how to do it. I had my models, and Abe had his. Who I looked to: writers who hovered between non-fiction and science fiction, like Kim Stanley Robinson and Francis Spufford, for an initial sense of how to tell complex, intricate stories about big systems. Modernists who did the same for more personal stories like Ford Madox Ford - I couldn’t emulate what he did, but I could at least get a sense of the flair. Historians: the narrative drive of C.L.R. James, not just in The Black Jacobins, but his history of cricket (a sport I don’t care for at all, except when I am reading James writing about it). Margaret O’Mara’s The Code, which shows how to pull apart something that everyone thinks they understand and turn it into something different. Non-fiction writers writing about ideas: there is a lot that is worth stealing from Steven Berlin Johnson (especially his early book Emergence, which I will always be grateful to my brother-in-law, William Erb, for turning me onto) and James Gleick’s The Information. Other, weirder influences: the chilly historical authority of Marguerite Yourcenar. John Crowley’s version of John Dee, itself stolen wholesale from Dame Frances Yates and adapted ruthlessly to new purposes.

But writing is also a process of unexpected discovery. Some discoveries were made by Abe, some by me. When Abe uncovered the history of North Virginia’s technology cluster, it unveiled a different understanding of how the combination of government spending and chance early decisions have shaped the world we lived in. For me, the discovery of Walter Wriston - an extraordinary, mostly forgotten figure who helped shape the modern global economy - was crucial. It was mostly down to luck: I had guessed that Citibank had to have played some interesting role, and started chasing sources from footnotes, but I could have had no expectations of what I would find. Wriston provided an antagonist who Abe and I could disagree with, but also like and respect: someone to explain to the reader how the world of globalized free markets that is now falling into desuetude seemed in its time to be an extraordinarily powerful and attractive vision. He also provided a memento mori - a skull on the table beside the monastic cot, whispering through its frozen grin that in time, our carefully worked out stories, arguments and notions about the world too shall be as dust.

There are, of course, parts of the book that I’d change in retrospect, and Abe too. As we were writing it and thinking about it, we went back and forth between talking about the extraordinary extent of US empire, and the problems as it struck its limits. We could have said more about the limits it faces as it discovers that other countries are more willing to press back than they used to be. The last chapter is correspondingly much more sanguine about the political prospects for the US, if it only it pulls its act together, than either of us would likely be today. But I still think that we got the big story right - how empire is not the product of planning and intention, but of the combination of power, accidents, and the haphazard accumulation of advantage. The Underground Empire didn’t come about in a fit of absent-mindedness, but nobody planned it either.

I could say more. And more. And more. And more. Writers transform into bores when they’re given half a chance to expound on their books and the choices they made in writing them.

But reading about those choices at second hand is no substitute for reading the book itself, if you want to read it. So if a book about the profound transformations of the globalized economy, and the US role in it sounds like something you would like to read, buy it! It is much cheaper than it usually is - but likely just for a couple of days (I’m not sure how long the sale lasts). If you have friends who might want it, feel encouraged to buy it for them, or tell them about it, or send them this newsletter. I’m extraordinarily proud of this book (Abe is too), and I’m thrilled that lots of people have the chance to buy it for buttons, read it, maybe argue with it, and keep and the conversation going.