The Cold War

An essential history of the Cold War, from the author of The Penguin History of the World.

"[A] big, serious, and thoroughly intelligent stud[y] of the cold war." -New York Review of Books

We think of the Cold War as a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. But in The Cold War, award-winning historian Odd Arne Westad argues that the war must be understood as a global confrontation, with roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, The Cold War expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically, and offers a new history of how today’s world was creased.