I chose to read Alex Perry’s 2008 Falling off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization when I came across a copy at my small town public library because it deals with international politics. But also because I have a habit of grabbing library books I’m unfamiliar with and/or are older. Falling off the Edge looks like the kinda book a few people might have checked out when it was new but since then has spent the last 15 years or so ignored on the shelf. Thanks to the public library I’ve been exploring overlooked and forgotten books for years. Some have been memoirs like Paula Fox’s 2005 The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe or Sarah Erdman’s 2003 Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village. Some have been history books like Mark Mazower’s 2005 Salonica, City of Ghosts; Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 or Walter Russell Mead’s 2005 God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. Or even the occasional piece of fiction like Paul L. Maier‘s 2011 Da Vinci Code-ish thriller The Constantine Codex. I don’t care if it’s old, dog-eared and worn out if the subject matter interests me I’ll read it.
For over two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall we were told we were living in an age of globalism. Thought leaders and pundits ranging from Francis Fukuyama to Thomas L. Friedman proclaimed the death of totalitarianism and Eastern Bloc socialism and welcomed a worldwide age of liberal democracy and free markets. But what if this rising tide of freedom and prosperity wasn’t raising all boats?
South African-based foreign correspondent Alex Perry has spent his career traveling the globe, from war torn Iraq and Afghanistan to Chinese boomtowns to Mumbai slums. Based on what he’s seen the forces unleashed by globalism tend to benefit only a minuscule number of people around the world. Especially in the developing world for every one person who’s managed to join the privileged ranks of the global entrepreneurial elite, millions or even hundreds of millions of others live impoverished and frequently vulnerable to the horrors of violent crime, terrorism and armed conflict.
While China is always lauded as a winner in the new global economy, and the degree its economy has grown since the nation’s leaders embraced capitalism in the early 1980s is truly impressive, all is not rosy. Wealth is almost exclusively concentrated in the major cities with the countryside and distant regions remaining dirt poor. Factory work is terrible, frequently unsafe and workers are forbidden to unionize. Corporations are rife with corruption as is the government and the ruling Communist Party. Decades of warp-speed industrialization has left the air and water polluted. Criminal gangs run amok as crooked police are paid to look the other way. China might be the new workshop of the world, but it’s also home to dark locales far bleaker than any Dickensian landscape.
Another reputed winner is India. While it hasn’t experienced China’s breakneck pace of economic growth the country has managed to make a name for itself in information technology-related fields and steel manufacturing. But unlike China the Indian state is weak, relatively poor and thus unable to provide the infrastructure needed to take India to the next level economically. A huge chunk of the population lacks access to clean water while sprawling slums bump up against high rises with multimillion dollar condos. The nation’s colleges and universities are sub-par when compared to the West and therefore unable to produce enough talented graduates needed for India’s aspiring tech industry to pull the country out of grinding poverty.
Just like any book, Falling off the Edge is a product of its time. During the early and mid 2000s when Perry was criss-crossing the globe insurgencies were raging in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. In these years following 9-11 Islamic terrorism was seen as the number one scourge of humankind. One wonders if this book were written today if Perry would view climate change as an equal, or even greater threat to our planet’s well-being as he did globalism a decade and half ago. (Although in Falling off the Edge Perry, to his credit does discuss the dangers of climate change, albeit in a somewhat passing fashion.)
Whenever I read books about politics and international relations that were published over 10 years ago I value them less for their insight on current events but almost as history books. Occupying some nebulous middle ground between news and history I’m left calling their category “near history.” Considering my love of these overlooked and forgotten editions you’ll undoubtedly continue to see books like this featured on my blog.