The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City

NPR host Madrigal (Powering the Dream) offers a sprawling history of Oakland, Calif., that situates the bustling port city at the heart of a new, technology-dominated world economic order. Oakland and its port are integral, he writes, to the “pacific circuit” of global capitalism with its “trade routes and trade deals, human migrations and technical exchanges... cargo ships and corporate relations.” Tracing the city’s history since WWII, he depicts how the welfare of its mostly Black, working-class residents has been slowly “sacrificed” to the “economic growth” of this international trade circuit—a story he teases out from documentation of real estate deals, reports on city hall politics, and interviews with activists. He also offers fascinating insight into Silicon Valley’s rise by framing it as part of a major turn in world history: “what the Mediterranean was for millennia and the Atlantic was for centuries, the Pacific is now,” he writes, exploring how the “marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity” has birthed the world’s foremost economic engine. Madrigal’s fine-grained analysis engrosses, especially as he follows local politicians struggling to “tap” the vast amounts of capital flowing through Oakland, or environmental activists trying to untangle the complex routes by which pollution ends up in their community. The result is an eye-opening window into the opaque and circuitous “market logic” that dominates modern life. (Mar.)