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, gives a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has reshaped international commerce.