The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century. By Robert Gilpin, with the assistance of Jean Millis Gilpin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 373p. $29.95.

Abstract

The word globalization first appeared in the second half of the 1980s and now has become the most ubiquitous in the language of international relations. It has spawned a new vocabulary: globaloney (Why all the hype when the global economy was more integrated in the age of Queen Victo- ria?): globaphobia (the new, mainly mistaken, backlash); globeratti (the members of the international nongovernmen- tal organizations [INGOs] who travel around the world from conference to conference, except when they are on the Internet mobilizing for the next conference), and so on. For Robert Gilpin, among the world's most eminent scholars of international relations, globalization is insightfully defined as the deepening and widening integration of the world econ- omy by trade, financial flows, investment, and technology.