“A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”? Even the review does tell us almost nothing about how much Malcolm Harris incorporates ‘the world’ in his book. “ Malcolm Harris’s new book shows how Californian capitalism has thrived by exploiting an unequal world.” Which world? the world from Mexico to China and from Congo to India? Not a world about how the title relates to this world. The review informs us that the book is about California and capitalism. Nick Burns: “Most glaring is the mismatch between the book’s stated purpose and its actual content. For most of its 700 frustrating pages, Palo Alto refuses to be the very thing it insists that it is: a history of capitalism. A “fitting bookend to Harris’s opening, equally earnest assertion that Palo Alto is “haunted” not only by the spectre of communism but also by supernatural forces – hardly suits the sober realism that the book’s subject demands.”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51