Wal-Mart is the world's largest company and it sets the standard--both social and commercial--for a huge swath of the global economy. In this probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein shows how the company's success has spread evangelical Protestantism into the workplace, made South China an American workshop, and pushed American politics to the right. At the same time, he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire. Insightful and original, The Retail Revolution gives a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has reshaped international commerce.

Nelson Lichtenstein is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is the author of Labor's War at Home: the CIO in World War II (1982, 2003); Walter Reuther: the Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (1997); and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002), which won the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. His edited books include Industrial Democracy in America: the Ambiguous Promise (1993); Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (2006); American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006); and Major Problems in the History of American Workers (2003).