World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability is a book published in 2002 and written by Amy Chua , as an academic study into ethnic divisions in a society. Ethnic minorities, says Chua, are often highly successful in a larger society, and tend to maintain a disproportionately higher socio-economic status relative to the "indigenous" majority, exaggerating and enflaming hostilities along these ethnic lines.
World On Fire is about what Chua calls "market-dominant minorities," groups like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Russia, whites in Zimbabwe and Indians in East Africa and Fiji. Market-dominant minorities control a hugely disproportionate slice of their countries' resources.
In her own home, the Philippines, she explains, the ethnic-Chinese minority maintains a far greater status than the indigenous majority. The fact that the Chinese Filipinos maintain offland business connections, as well as a tight economic community within the Philippines, is a hotbed for envied and bitter sentiments directed at the minority.
Chua continues to other examples, such as Bolivia's Spanish/Indio divisions, Indonesia's Chinese Buddhist/Native Muslim populations, and others. Each maintains she says a clear line of social and economic demarcations with are further outlined by social and religious taboo.
The United States, while it doesn't tend to have a national ethnic minority per se, does have regional ethnic divisions, such as the stereotypical Korean grocers in LA, or Jewish jewellers in New York, which despite being stereotypes, Chua says, has some truth to them. The United States, she adds, constitutes an ethnic minority on its own, with relation to the rest of the world. The U.S. has by far more wealth per capita than the world average, and holds a large portion of the total world wealth. This disparity of wealth, Chua says, is the result of hegemonial intrusions, in the form of bare-bones democracy, and fuels anti-American attitudes abroad, up to and including hostile reactions such as September 11, 2001.
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