Eric Helleiner's "The Contested World Economy"

Eric Helleiner is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. His books include The Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods, The Status Quo Crisis, and The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History.

Helleiner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy, and reported the following:

My book provides a history of the deep roots of the field of international political economy (IPE) by analyzing diverse perspectives about the world economy that existed across the globe in the pre-1945 era. One of these perspectives was Marxism, including its theories of imperialism that were developed by Vladimir Lenin and others in the early twentieth century. Following a description of Lenin’s theory on previous pages, page 99 of my book describes his creation of the Communist International after the Russian Revolution, a body that he hoped would cultivate anti-imperialist movements around the world as a means of weakening global capitalism.

Unfortunately, the Page 99 Test does not work very well in conveying the central goal of my book. My objective is to challenge the way in which IPE’s deep roots in the pre-1945 years are usually depicted. The conventional depiction in IPE textbooks focuses on a number of thinkers who are described as pioneering the three perspectives of economic liberalism (Adam Smith, David Ricardo), neomercantilism (Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List), and Marxism (Marx and Lenin). My book describes the ideas of these thinkers, including Lenin’s, but its central purpose is to show how IPE’s deep roots can be told in a much wider way.

This widening of the history includes a focus on many thinkers from other regions of the world than the one from which those well-known figures came. It also involves an analysis of perspectives about the world economy that go beyond the conventional depiction of three-way debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. By widening the history in these ways, this book shows how the deep roots of IPE are not just more interesting than textbook accounts suggest but also more relevant to many contemporary concerns about the world economy.

Learn more about The Contested World Economy at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods.

The Page 99 Test: The Neomercantilists.

--Marshal Zeringue