Abstract

Global Political Economy (GPE) scholars have often claimed an interest in thinking historically, contextualizing how the world economy is managed today through reference to the dilemmas faced by older generations of policymakers. Yet their historically-oriented analyses often seem to be divorced from some of the biggest issues on which they might be asked to adjudicate, such as race, empire and colonialism. This work reveals how narrowly GPE typically draws the parameters of intellectual history, as well as how much it simplifies the multi-dimensional arguments of early modern political economists who did address at length many of the issues that GPE scholars have recently ‘discovered’ should have been central to their own research all along.