Eric Helleiner

Most accounts explain the postwar globalization of financial markets as a product of unstoppable technological and market forces. Drawing on extensive historical research, Eric Helleiner provides the first comprehensive political history of the phenomenon, one that details and explains the central role played by states in permitting and encouraging financial globalization. Helleiner begins by highlighting the commitment of advanced industrial states to a restrictive international financial order at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and during the early postwar years. He then explains the growing political support for the globalization of financial markets after the late 1950s by analyzing five sets of episodes: the creation of the Euromarket in the 1960s, the rejection in the early 1970s of proposals to reregulate global financial markets, four aborted initiatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s to implement effective controls on financial movements, the extensive liberalization of capital controls in the 1980s, and the containment of international financial crises at three critical junctures in the 1970s and 1980s. He shows that these developments resulted from various factors, including the unique hegemonic interests of the United States and Britain in finance, a competitive deregulation dynamic, ideological shifts, and the construction of a crisis-prevention regime among leading central bankers. In his conclusion Helleiner addresses the question of why states have increasingly embraced an open, liberal international financial order in an era of considerable trade protectionism.

From Bretton Woods to the 1990s

States and the Reemergence of Global Finance

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West. Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.

A Global Intellectual History

The Neomercantilists

Presents a detailed analysis of Canada's exchange rate politics. This book challenges the view that the country's deepening economic integration with the United States is likely to lead a North American monetary union.

The Politics and History of Canada's Exchange Rate Regime

Towards North American Monetary Union?

Emily Gilbert

National currencies appear to be threatened from all sides. European Union member countries are due to abandon their national currencies in favour of a supranational currency by the year 2000. Elsewhere, the use of foreign currencies within national economic spaces is on the increase, as shown by the growth of eurocurrency activity, and currency substitution in many parts of the world. In the last decade, privately-issued sub-national local currencies have also proliferated in a number of countries, and predict the emergence of private electronic monies of the future. In the light of these transformations, this book asks what the future holds for national currencies. The first half of the volume addresses issues relating to money leading up to, and during, the formation of national currencies. Ranging widely in their historical and geographical context, the papers problematise the relationship between money and nation-states by examining alternative forms and uses of currencies during this period. The second half look at contemporary challenges faced by national currencies.

Eric Helleiner

Books

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