The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy, 2023

Eric Helleiner has written an impressively wide-ranging book about the pre-1945 intellectual roots of International Political Economy (IPE). As he puts it, not only have IPE’s ‘antecedents’ in the pre-1945 era not received much attention, but the brief existing treatments of this topic offer a history of IPE’s deeper origins that is both Eurocentric – focusing almost entirely on European thinkers – and theoretically narrow, often reducing the topic to a stuffy fireside chat among liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. The Contested World Economy aims to avoid those pitfalls and proceeds in two steps to do so. The first section discusses the development of liberalism – beginning with the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 – along with neomercantilist and Marxist responses to it. However, departing from conventional textbook accounts, it also discusses the reception and adaptation of these ideas by thinkers beyond Europe such as Rammohun Roy, Olaudah Equiano, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Ziya Gökalp, and Tan Malaka. The second section moves beyond this familiar terrain and presents a series of chapters concerned with traditionally marginalized (if at all acknowledged) strands of thought in IPE: autarkic perspectives, environmentalism, feminism, pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism, as well as economic regionalism. Here one encounters a dizzying array of figures among which one finds Johann Fichte, Shizuki Tadao, Mohandas Gandhi, Black Elk, Frederick Soddy, Harriet Martineau, Clara Zetkin, Marcus Garvey, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Sun Yat-sen. Two chapters then wrap up the volume by discussing ideas of ‘embedded liberalism’ at Bretton Woods and by restating the case for the kind of history Helleiner has just offered us.

By broadening the pre-1945 history of thought about international economic relations and including an eclectic selection of non-European thinkers in such a succinct volume, Helleiner performs a valuable service to the field, notably by drastically expanding its ‘canon’ – an endeavour that has been garnering support in numerous adjacent fields such as international political thought. An equally distinctive feature is the inclusion of many practitioners who were not theorists but ‘whose ideas became quite well known’ and had a direct impact on the world. Thanks to Helleiner, those of us who teach IPE and the history of international economic thought now have an obvious resource to reach for to introduce students to a less parochial and more pluralist set of intellectual traditions. Because of its quality, this book also constitutes an interesting starting point for researchers pursuing historically-inclined projects in IPE. Time and again, one encounters figures whose work is of obvious relevance to the field, and yet make no appearance whatsoever in most IPE scholarship and courses.

Helleiner’s intellectual map is breath-taking in its coverage, but it runs into at least two issues because it lacks a sufficiently clear framework to approach the ‘history of ideas.’ The first problem pertains to the ‘perspectives’ around which the book is structured. At the outset, Helleiner explains that each perspective on the international dimension of political economy is distinguished based on its core normative goal. This is not a self-evident way of organizing a body of thought; for instance, the history of economic thought can be told through a focus on schools (‘-isms’), individual thinkers, or yet still languages, concepts and tools of analysis. But even if one chooses to present ‘-isms’, as Helleiner does, relying on normative goals to distinguish them is less than straightforward, as most of them typically embrace a wide set of aims. As a consequence, several thinkers appear in more than one chapter. While liminal figures that stand at the edge of a specific tradition of thought are not unusual in intellectual histories, the proliferation of such figures may be the sign of an inadequate typology of ‘perspectives.’ In fact, it is at times unclear whether some of the perspectives under consideration (e.g. environmentalism) should not simply be labelled ‘themes’ – that is, themes which cut across many strands of thought about international economic relations. But even some of the more commonly accepted labels such as ‘neomercantilism’ seem to be problematically constructed and liable to produce new forms of Eurocentrism. For instance, Helleiner identifies Muhammad Ali as a neomercantilist, but since he was active as a ruler before the very term ‘mercantilism’ was coined in European languages in the first half of the nineteenth century, he could hardly have made sense of his intellectual orientation in those terms. How, then, did he make sense of it? By tucking him into the procrustean bed of ‘neomercantilism,’ we may forego the very pay-off that comes with expanding our canon of IPE thinkers.

The second issue concerns the book’s intense effort to globalize the history of IPE’s ‘antecedents.’ Within each chapter, the primary organizing device is geographical, impressing on the reader a real sense of variety in terms of the origins of the people discussed. Each ‘perspective’ is populated by thinkers from different sets of countries, and the geographical grouping of thinkers varies in each chapter. The downside is that the chapters tend to lack direction; each one ends up reading somewhat like a list of important figures. The issue here is not Helleiner’s material, but the lack of a crisp analytic frame to systematically organize and present vastly different strands of thought about international economic relations. A deeper engagement with scholarship dealing with the history of ideas in adjacent fields, such as the history of political thought, could have helped tackle this admittedly tricky problem. Some of this scholarship has been remarkably innovative in its attempts to break free from the traditional presentation of fields through portraits of thinkers as well as ‘-isms,’ focusing for instance on conceptual innovations or new ‘languages’ – as for instance in the work of Anthony Pagden or Edward Keene. It is not too difficult to imagine a version of The Contested World Economy in which conceptual innovations such as the idea of a ‘world economy’ are used as central organizing devices for every chapter. Whereas the current breakdown in terms of ‘-isms’ somewhat flattens the one and a half centuries under consideration (1776-1945), one potential payoff of this approach would be to restore a sense of discontinuity by emphasising deep shifts in the basic vocabulary used to theorise international economic relations.

None of the issues I raised in the last two paragraphs should lead readers away from this book. Those teaching and researching IPE, the history of economic thought and economic history will learn a great deal from it. Indeed, upon finishing this work, most readers will be struck by the narrowness of the existing set of thinkers that scholars of IPE and historians of economic thought spend their time discussing. Helleiner’s drive to radically expand the canon of IPE, a much overdue task, is truly admirable. There is no book like this one at present and for that reason it is invaluable.