On a cold November morning in 1999, Rainforest Action Network member Harold Lind was attempting to hang a large sign from a construction crane hundreds of feet above the ground in downtown Seattle. While slinging down a rope from the tower, he lost control and began to fall.

Lind could have died, but thanks to training from the Ruckus Society, a nonprofit that trains action groups, he knew to remove his non-resistance brush gloves, grab the rope with his bare hands, and wait for his colleagues to pull him back in. With the help of “prayer” from “a bunch of pagan witches on the ground,” Lind and his friends were able to unfurl a 100-pound flag with two arrows pointing in opposite directions, one labeled “Democracy” and the other “WTO.”

This dangerous move marked the beginning of the “Battle of Seattle” protesting the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization, which combined lofty idealism, drama, careful organization, activism and superb public relations skills, becoming a hallmark of the anti-globalization wave movement in the decades after the Cold War.

D. W. Gibson’s sweeping oral history, The Week That Changed the World, offers a panoramic view of this multi-day celebration of dissent, from government-mandated marches and semi-legal “direct action” to extremely illegal acts of sabotage. There was even a concert.

The protests attracted the attention of enlightened elected officials like Sherrod Brown and Dennis Kucinich, grunge stalwarts like Nirvana’s Krister Novoselic and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, presidential candidate Ralph Nader, linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, and British actress Julie Christie. Nader recalled thinking, “Wow! We’re really going to give them a taste of this.” The taste ended with mass arrests, broken windows, and tear gassing of demonstrators.

That WTO ministerial was aimed at lowering trade barriers by “harmonizing” common rules — such as nationally agreed food safety standards — and advancing the project of linking the newly liberalized world together. Ambassadors and NGO officials from around the world gathered in Seattle, a city that was rapidly becoming associated with the new digital economy that promised to accelerate globalization and would soon become the site of the first major protests organized in part online.

As Gibson outlines, the anti-WTO protests in Seattle became a natural rallying point for a wide range of leftist groups that felt they were being abandoned by the neoliberal turn reinforced by the Democratic president in the White House. American union leaders worried that cheap overseas labor would put downward pressure on blue-collar wages, while many environmental activists worried that trade liberalization would be used as a battering ram against environmental protections at home.

While the protests themselves made front pages around the world, Gibson and his interviewees spent a great deal of time recounting the months of preparation leading up to the rallies and the uneasy alliance between prim and proper progressive political leaders and provocateurs who would climb trees to stop them from being cut down. “We’re here, we’re nonviolent, but we’re committed to shutting down the WTO,” one activist remembered saying at a pre-protest press conference.

Gibson also devotes ample space to the political and law enforcement officials who ultimately failed to quell the demonstrations. In quote after quote, the blame falls primarily on former Seattle Mayor Paul Scheer, who died in 2014, and his police chief, Norman Stamp: They did not have adequate intelligence before the protests; they did not request National Guard support soon enough.

Despite more (and more security-conscious) meetings since Seattle, the WTO has failed to reach another major global trade agreement. Nonetheless, the WTO, through its existing rules, provided a framework that allowed trade liberalization to advance in the years that followed, helped by China’s integration into the global economic system. China joined the WTO in 2001 and quickly became the world’s factory. China’s growing importance in the global economy also set the stage for the massive blow to global trade that the coronavirus pandemic dealt two decades later.

Peter Goodman’s How the World Ran Out of Everything is an impassioned account of the rise and fall of globalization. A longtime economics reporter for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Goodman offers a broad view of the modern supply chain, from the port of Long Beach and long-distance truck routes across the middle of the United States to ranchers in Montana and the trials of a Mississippi-based toy company trying to ship goods from China in time for the holiday season.

At every step of the supply chain, workers have faced deteriorating conditions and financial instability during the pandemic. As container ships idle at ports, prices for toilet paper, meat and other consumer goods have soared and supplies have dwindled.

Goodman believes the crisis has exposed the fragility of a system that relied on “just-in-time” production for years, which led to low inventories. Big retailers like Amazon and Walmart and food processors like Tyson and JBS have also squeezed suppliers and the workforce. The system “works,” judging by the lower prices borne by consumers and the increase in market share these giant companies have achieved, which Goodman believes has reached monopoly levels. When the pandemic hit, manufacturers with low inventories were unable to cope with the dual pressures of increased demand and fewer workers, while some middlemen, such as global shippers and meat processing plants, were able to profit.

The unusually strong pandemic-era economy has also put pressure on manufacturers. Americans, unable to spend money on restaurants and travel, have begun buying more cheap goods brought in by international trade on Amazon: TVs, basketball hoops, powder beaters. “The result of this surge is chaos,” Goodman writes. Lightbulbs flickered as power shortages “ran out as Chinese factories used every available production line.”

Goodman is not naive to think that globalization can or should be reversed, or that the political or business risks that companies see in China spell a renaissance for American manufacturing (the final section of the book is devoted to the ways that manufacturers are finding their way out of China not back to the United States but to Southeast Asia and Mexico).

While global supply chains are unlikely to be dismantled, the ideology of globalization is under attack both practically and politically. Linguist Chomsky told Gibson: “The United States is moving toward a kind of nationalist mercantilism.” Biden and Trump disagree on many issues, but are close on trade policythey differ more from their predecessors in their respective parties than from their respective party predecessors, and both prefer to use tariffs rather than resolve trade disputes through the World Trade Organization.

The seeds of the backlash against pro-business globalism were planted in 1999. Although no one in the Biden administration climbed a crane to announce their policy proposals, many of the concerns expressed by the demonstrators are now shared by Democratic lawmakers — environmental protection, labor rights, skepticism of global trading arrangements — and woven into a policy complex that rejects the bipartisan consensus that the Seattle protesters sought to overturn.

At the end of the 20th century, the United States hoped that China’s economic development would go hand in hand with political liberalization, integrating China into the global economy. This plan was misguided at best. Offshoring led to a foreseeable loss of American jobs, while programs designed to help Americans negatively affected by global trade were underfunded, Goodman writes.

What remains to be seen is whether the new policy response can win over not only American activists and intellectuals but also American consumers, who tend to prefer low prices above all else and who far outnumber specific groups such as truckers, ranchers or union workers who have suffered under the economic pressures of long, lean supply chains. The WTO may have lost, but democracy still has something to say.