This ambitious book effectively blends military, diplomatic, political, and economic history in its account of the U.S. revival of the international economy after World War II. The dust jacket features Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, who provided essential support for the project. The activists who developed and carried the task through were led by General Lucius D. Clay and industrialist Joseph Dodge. Grant Madsen, identifying himself with the “American Political Development” interpretive school, persuasively argues that the development of a relatively open and prosperous international trading system was less the outcome of a grand imperial design than the pragmatic response of U.S. occupation authorities coping with the challenges of poverty and hunger in defeated and ravaged countries.
MacArthur was himself a child of the U.S. empire, which originated with the Spanish-American war. His father, General Arthur MacArthur, commanded U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines in a somewhat uneasy...