Inderjeet Parmar's self-proclaimed Gramscian analysis of the Big 3 foundations – Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller – shows how they strengthened the US state and helped it rise to a position of global hegemony. They did this first by countering isolationist arguments and promoting liberal internationalism at home and then by developing Americans' knowledge of other areas of the world (through area studies) and fending off “anti-Americanism” abroad in order to facilitate the penetration of US trade and ideas. Parmar argues that they accomplished this through the construction of liberal-internationalist networks and that these – rather than economic development or other publicly stated, humanitarian aims – are the primary achievement of a century of foundation activity.

In the initial chapter, Parmar engages the literature on foundations, systematically dismantling the idea that they are neutral, apolitical, or independent of the state or market; he also develops the rationale for using a Gramscian analysis to examine the power-based relationship between the foundations and the state. He argues that the foundations developed the state's research and policymaking strategy, formed and mobilized elite opinion, built formal and informal international organizations, directly promoted American ideas overseas, and facilitated neoliberal globalization in the wake of the Cold War.

Chapter 2 examines the leaders of these foundations and unsurprisingly reveals their close connections to the state and business before moving on, in the third chapter, to examining how the foundations combated isolationism and subsidized the study of realist-oriented international relations during the 1930s and 1940s through organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Yale Institute of International Studies. In the subsequent chapters, Parmar examines in turn the foundations' role in developing American, Asian, African, Latin American, and Islamist studies in response to the need to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the United States and of the cultures with which a hegemonic US state would have to engage. Readers of this journal might be particularly interested in the foundations' use of American studies not only to prepare US citizens for global leadership but also to combat anti-Americanism, especially in the United Kingdom and Europe. Parmar also points out how the foundations' racism was largely responsible for splits within the field of African studies. In examining the impact of foundations' regional interventions (which were paired with their respective area studies programs), he examines the role of the Ford Foundation's network in reorienting Indonesian elites “as part of the process of undermining and eliminating an anti-American regime” (126) under Sukarno; the role of all three foundations in cultivating a small, pro-American elite Nigerian government notable for its corruption, foreign indebtedness, and domestic inequality; and the role of the foundations not only in facilitating the overthrow of the socialist government of Chile's Salvador Allende but also in maintaining an elite network that was able to develop a post-Pinochet government along neoliberal lines. The final chapter on the post-9/11 American state covers the way in which the foundations' support of democratic peace theory has shaped a bipartisan US foreign-policy consensus since the end of the Cold War, putting a new shine on the continuing project of American hegemony.

This book makes a compelling case for a Gramscian analysis of the work of American (and other) foundations. It seems, however, that the author is judging the foundations against an overly idealistic standard. For example, he posits that the foundations are “at odds with some of [America's] core values. In a society dedicated to democratic accountability and responsibility, they are answerable to no shareholders, market forces, or electors [and skew] the ‘free market of ideas’ ” (31). Few scholars of American studies or of history can identify many institutions that meet up to such a high standard.

The audience for this book, ironically, is largely the same elite, intellectual audience that he is so critical of. While the book will be extremely valuable to scholars of foundations, development, American and area studies, and diplomatic history, those with only passing familiarity with the events in Cold War Indonesia, Nigeria, and Chile will find that context largely missing in this closely focussed account of the foundations' work in these countries. This same audience will likely lament the lack of bibliography in this as well as many other recent academic monographs; scanning through more than seventy pages of notes is not a pleasing alternative and can tend to camouflage the scale of research done to complete this outstanding study.