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.
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2. Race, Empire, Colonialism, and the Pre-history of Global Political Economy
Matthew Watson
Book
Erin Hannah and John Ravenhill
What constitutes Global Political Economy? In whose interest is GPE constructed, and by whom? How can inequalities in GPE best be redressed? These are some of the key questions addressed in the 7th edition of this title.
As an ever-evolving field, subject to constant changes and developments, Global Political Economy provides a comprehensive introduction to GPE written by leading experts in the field. Under the direction of new editor Prof. Erin Hannah, the 7th edition surveys major contemporary issues and debates in GPE while being attuned to silences, marginalizations, and exclusions that predominate the field. By integrating a wide range of theoretical approaches, rich empirical material, non-western viewpoints and diversity of contributors, the 7th edition provides enhanced coverage of the central axes of inequality in GPE and centers topics such as colonialism, race, gender, North-South divides and everyday life throughout chapters on GPE theory, global trade and production, global money and finance, the resurgence of the state, development and inequality, the environment, and digital technologies.
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16. The Political Economy of the Environment
Kate Ervine
The global community is confronted with an unprecedented array of overlapping environmental crises, threatening humanity and non-human species, though the impacts remain highly uneven, with nations and communities least responsible for contemporary ecological problems paying the highest cost. With widespread climate disruption projected to intensify in the coming years and decades, this work illustrates the critical need for effective and democratic governance. It unpacks the prevailing relations of power connected to the global political economy of advanced capitalism, dominant debates and disagreement about how environmental crises are understood, and how governments and various actors respond to climate crises based on these understandings and power structures. It pays particular attention to how uneven development and colonialism have shaped inequality and ecological decline, showing that effective and meaningful responses to planetary crises will also need to respond to the deep injustices and inequalities that mark the contemporary GPE.
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13. The Political Economy of Global Inequality
Erin Lockwood
The GPE is characterized by tremendous disparities in wealth and income both within and between countries. Patterns of inequality have their origins in both historical institutions, like colonial extraction, as well as contemporary institutions, like the liberal trading order and financial capitalism. Although typically measured in economic terms, this work shows that the consequences of global inequality go beyond wealth and income to affect political institutions, labor conditions, and migration pressures and restrictions. However, not everyone agrees that global inequality is inherently a bad thing: some approaches to global justice emphasize absolute measures of economic well-being, such as GDP growth or declines in the number of people living in poverty, over relative concepts like levels of inequality. Nonetheless, many scholars and practitioners would prefer to reduce the level of global inequality in practice, and this work concludes with an overview of some policies that have been proposed as partial solutions.
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14. The Global Political Economy of Development
Ali Bhagat
Some major advances in the betterment of human life have been made in recent years but at the cost of accelerated climatic change and through uneven means of development. A reduction in child mortality, a rise in literacy and education, and by some measures the fewest people live in extreme poverty than they ever have before. Nevertheless, inequality on the multiple axes of health, income, environment, gender, education, technology, finance, shelter, food, water, and various other issues concerning access persist. This work examines efforts by various actors to deal with these problems with mixed and contested results. The analysis is centered around a key question: who benefits and why from globalised development? In so doing, it examines various development theories, traces the history of globalisation-led development post-WWII, and scrutinises contemporary challenges like the Great Recession and the Global Refugee Crisis, in order to understand the crisis prone tendencies of globalisation and its linkages to everyday practices in global political economy.
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15. The Global Political Economy of North–South Relations: A View from the South
J. P. Singh
Some major advances in the betterment of human life have been made in recent years but at the cost of accelerated climatic change and through uneven means of development. A reduction in child mortality, a rise in literacy and education, and by some measures the fewest people live in extreme poverty than they ever have before. Nevertheless, inequality on the multiple axes of health, income, environment, gender, education, technology, finance, shelter, food, water, and various other issues concerning access persist. This work examines efforts by various actors to deal with these problems with mixed and contested results. The analysis is centered around a key question: who benefits and why from globalised development? In so doing, it examines various development theories, traces the history of globalisation-led development post-WWII, and scrutinises contemporary challenges like the Great Recession and the Global Refugee Crisis, in order to understand the crisis prone tendencies of globalisation and its linkages to everyday practices in global political economy.
