The Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage

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The Cold War on Five Continents offers an original, provocative analysis of the Cold War, which was nothing less than the largest, longest, and most consequential conflict in modern world history.

Instead of focusing on the doings of leaders in Moscow and Washington that fill most conventional accounts, this book uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to explore the surrogate wars on five continents that caused at least 20 million deaths. Not only did these regional wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America transform their Cold War battlegrounds into veritable wastelands, but they also left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that persisted for decades, often right to the present.

McCoy offers intimate personal portraits of both the battle-hardened World War II generation who conducted covert operations on the disparate frontiers of empire and the younger activists who mobilized millions of citizens for long years of antiwar protests that helped end this global conflict. Through such a novel multi-generational analysis, this account humanizes the history of the Cold War, which has too often been told in terms of impersonal elements like economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.

By showing how otherwise ordinary individuals fought this monumental war and brought its threat of nuclear holocaust to an end, this account has important lessons about the possibilities of change for today's younger generations, who are facing the challenge of climate change in a world where the great powers are devoting humanity's scarce resources to a "new cold war."