In one of the essays in The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, Gordon Wood notes that American policy concerning the Western frontier “rested on the assumption that settlement of the western territories would be neat and orderly.” If wasn’t. Far from it:

“The people moving west ignored the federal government’s Indian policies and refused to buy land at the expensive prices at which it was being offered. They shunned the speculator’s land, violated Indian treaty rights, and moved irregularly, chaotically, unevenly, jumping from place to place and leaving huge chunks of unsettled land and pockets of hemmed-in Indians behind them. The government responded, and continued to respond until the Homestead Act of 1863, in a series of desperate efforts to keep up with popular pressures. It continually lowered the price of land, increased the credit it offered, and reduced the size of the parcels of land people had to buy; and still people complained and ignored the laws. Eventually the federal government recognized the rights of squatters to preempt the land, and finally it just gave the land away. It took more than a half century for governmental leaders to come to terms fully with the reality of popular settlement of the West” (270).

Among other things, this chaotic expansion “exploded” the dreams of the Federalists, the desire to create “a strong, mercantilist, European-like state.” Jefferson swam with the current, and his success “insofar as he had any, was his unwitting surrender to these popular commercial forces” (271).

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1970s, the US engaged in a series of Asian wars. They were “not separate and unconnected,” as often believed, argue Michael Hunt and Steven Levine in Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam. Rather, “they were phases in a U.S. attempt to establish and maintain a dominant position in eastern Asia sustained over some seven decades against considerable resistance. . . . The Philippines set the scene, Japan’s defeat brought the American protagonists to the apogee of their dominance, soon challenged in Korea and then broken in Vietnam.” The results were “profound” for both Asia and the US.

Hunt and Levine believe that the history they recount has important contemporary import: “The history of American empire building and warfare in one region speaks to the current imbroglio across the Middle East and Central Asia in a striking variety of ways. U.S. policymakers have ignored or have deliberately forgotten the lessons from the conflicts in eastern Asia. They have revived a misplaced faith in the efficacy of military power to shape a regional agenda to American liking.” The authors believe we are again likely to see “how beautiful dreams of democracy and development can easily turn into nightmares of death and destruction” (7-8).

Dubai came to the world’s attention only a few years ago, writes Daniel Brook in A History of Future Cities. It looked like an unprecedented miracle: “The instant global metropolis with a ‘skyline on crack’ captivated the world with record-setting skyscrapers, indoor ski slopes, and a stunningly diverse population. With 96 percent of its population foreign-born, Dubai makes even New York City’s diversity – 37 percent of New Yorkers are immigrants – seem mundane. As a pair of American observers put it, Dubai is a city where ‘everyone and everything in it – its luxuries, laborers, architects, accents, even its aspirations – was flown in from someplace else” (5-6).

Dubai was new. The idea of Dubai was not: “For three hundred years, instant cities modeled on the West have been built in the developing world in audacious attempts to wrench a lagging region into the modern world.” In addition to Dubai, Brook looks at the establishment of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai. “The idea of Dubai” is “also the idea of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai,” and Brook thinks it’s “the idea of our time” too (9).

Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 is intended as a monument to members of his family, and to the 30 million others, who died in Mao’s famine.

The famine left horrors in its wake: “Some villages transported corpses by the truckload for burial in common graves. In villages where survivors lacked the strength for proper interment, the limbs of the dead protruded from the ground. In some places, the dead remained along the roadsides where they had dropped in their futile search for food. More than a few were simply left in their homes, where rats gnawed at their noses and eyes” (13).

Not just rats: “Cannibalism was no longer exceptional . . . during the Great Famine, some families resorted to eating their own children. . . . Reliable evidence indicates that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism throughout China” (14).

It was unprecedented because it was not due to war, climate change, or epidemics. It was, Jisheng makes clear, Mao’s famine.

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World War II didn’t end when World War II ended, Keith Lowe shows in his numbing Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Instead of concentrating on the European miracle of recovery, he focuses on “the period before such attempts at rehabilitation were even a possibility, when most of Europe was still extremely volatile, and violence could flare up once again at the slightest provocation.” (xvii).

It was chaotic indeed: “in some parts of Europe, ethnic tensions actually became worse. Jews continued to be victimized, just as they had been during the war itself. Minorities everywhere became political targets once again, and in some areas this led to atrocities that were just as repugnant as those committed by the Nazis. The aftermath of the war also saw the logical conclusion of all the Nazis’ efforts to categorize and segregate different races. Between 1945 and 1947 tens of millions of men, women and children were expelled from their countries in some of the biggest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen” (xvi).

Europeans struggled for food and shelter. In many German cities, more than half the living space had been destroyed – 70% in Cologne. Reprisals occurred everywhere – Ukrainians attacking Poles and vice versa, Soviet troops raping their way through Eastern Europe, famine ravaging much of the continent.

Lowe’s book is an effort “to describe chaos.”