Habits of Empire
David Priestland: Financial Imperialism, 27 July 2023
The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance
by Jamie Martin.
Harvard, 345 pp., £34.95, June 2022,978 0 674 97654 2 Show More
by Jamie Martin.
Harvard, 345 pp., £34.95, June 2022,
“... In The World Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past ... ”