14 - Varieties of Global Economy

Summary

Chapter 14 closes the book by extending the analysis of chapter 8 and focuses on the two global economies. To counter the final Marxist rebuttal of the existence of a global economy before the nineteenth century, the first section brings into focus a key property of the first global economy (FGE): specifically the global Afro-Indian cotton whip of necessity. It also differentiates this from its modern capitalist successor that is given much emphasis by Marxists. The second section challenges the prevailing assumption in IPE and IR, not to mention many other disciplines, that transnationalism within a properly global economy emerged only after 1945/1979, given the (highly problematic) belief that mercantilist internationalisation prevailed before then. I challenge this temporal binary conception by revealing a significant number of important continuities between the two global economies. I focus on eleven ‘temporal capillaries’ that weave together the two global economies. For in highlighting critical continuities so I argue that the modern global economy is less unique than globalization scholars presume and that many of its features originated within the FGE.