What’s Worth Reading, October 2023 Nicola Phillips, ed, Global Poli)cal Economy, Oxford University Press. 'Perhaps the most revealing test of a field of enquiry lies in the structure and assumptions of "texts" produced for teaching purposes. These would normally synthetically represent the "orthodox" view of the "state of the art"' (Roger Tooze, 'In Search of "International Political Economy"', Political Studies, 32, 1984, p. 641). This is a cleverly positioned text, with a distinctive character. It does not offer an authoritative account of the global political economy, or resolve key controversies surrounding it, but rather works on the values, beliefs and practices of student readers themselves. It orients them towards a cosmopolitan liberal perspective: a belief that a global economy based on market forces subjected to regulation and democratic oversight in order to soften their impact on the disadvantaged offers the best of all available worlds, coupled with a commitment to openminded debate and respect for others within those parameters. So, it positively declines to present a comprehensive account of the forces that drive change in the global political economy, or to arbitrate between different academic perspectives. Its normative approach is skilfully presented in the editor's introduction, which enjoins its readers to cultivate an attitude of respect for diverse identities throughout the global political economy, and, through the 'roundtable' discussions that follow each of the topic-based chapters, to accept that all the varying perspectives that fall within its cosmopolitan liberal ideological frame have something to contribute, so that it is not necessary, or even appropriate, to choose between them. And in the other two chapters in Part 1 Seabrooke and Young advocate a 'non-paradigmatic' approach (21), while Benjamin Cohen suggests that 'choice demands that we abandon dogmatic allegiance to any single research tradition, no matter how appealing', and endorses 'pragmatism and eclecticism' (45). The text which Roger Tooze had in mind in the statement cited above - Joan Spero's The Politics of International Economic Relations, first published in 1977 - was very different. It came at a significant moment in the postwar development of the global political economy, and has since gone through six further editions, latterly with Jeffrey Hart as co-author. The first edition in particular is well worth reading today. Spero studied and taught at Columbia University, served as ambassador to the United Nations 1980-81, joined American Express in 1981 as senior vicepresident of international corporate affairs, served as Undersecretary for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs in the State Department throughout Bill Clinton's first period in office, from 1993 to 1997, and picked up various other company directorships in industry and finance along the way. In her 1977 introduction she described the book as 'a study of the way in which groups have managed or have failed to manage international economic relations since World War II', and identified 'three [inter-connected] subsystems of the larger international economic system: the Western system of interdependence, the North-South system of dependence, and the EastWest system of independence' (12). She devoted more space to the 'North-South' system than to the 'Western' system, and defined the key issue for each as follows: 'Management problems of the North-South system are quite different from those of the Western system. For the system of the developed market economies, the dilemma is whether it is possible to achieve the necessary international political capability to manage mutually beneficial international economic relationships. In the North-South system of dependence, the management dilemma is whether it is possible to achieve the necessary international political capacity to create a system which is mutually beneficial for all' (121). Global Political Economy takes a strikingly different approach. The introduction is focused from the opening lines on including student readers, and initiating them into the role expected of them in the classroom and the wider world. First, consistent with the need to be mindful of their status as customers and consumers, it sells the 'fascinating' world of GPE as 'a marvellously rich, varied, and relevant subject for you to study', and positions them within it: 'You will see its connections immediately to your own everyday lives and the world we all live in together'. But it immediately insists that they must be diligent students, and active learners rather than passive consumers: 'It will stretch you intellectually in thinking about difficult questions, in understanding rich and complex bodies of theory, and in being able to work with different approaches and methods to explore and analyse the subject matter that you will encounter in the field'. And it spells out clearly the orientation appropriate to the role of learner: 'It is a wonderful place for people with open minds and curiosity, who want to be challenged and provoked into deeper thinking. It offers a set of debates which will stimulate you and often unsettle the assumptions you make about the world, and which will encourage you to understand how other people see the world. It doesn't contain easy answers, and you will need to push yourself to engage properly with it. But it is worth every bit of the effort' (6). In short, Global Political Economy is explicitly a vehicle for turning students into diligent and empathetic cosmopolitan liberal citizens - the key is that it does not aim to give students a key to understanding the world, but rather to have them recognize that they don't understand it, and to appreciate how others see it. And as we shall see, there is more going on here than is immediately apparent. As for the subject matter itself, 'GPE, at its core, is the study of the forms of power - economic, political, material, and social - which shape how the world operates' (6). There is no need, Phillips, says, to get hung up on the distinction between 'IPE' and 'GPE'. Focus instead, she suggests, on the breadth and scale of the field, 'the richness and variety of its subject matter, the wide variety of people who cluster under its banner, and the diversity of theories, methods and approaches', which are part of its charm and fascination. Admittedly, the field is not yet as global as it should be: 'IPE and GPE have evolved as fields dominated by scholars from North America, the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia, with rather little room afforded for scholars in other parts of the world. ... It remains true that the majority of people who call themselves scholars of GPE are working in universities in North America, the UK, and Australia. But this is changing rapidly, and the calls for more engagement are being heeded. One of the aims of this textbook is to make a real contribution to this project of GPE as a genuinely ‘global’ field of study. You will see from the list of authors ... that they have been drawn from many different parts of the world and diverse national identities, whether in relation to where they have lived, where they were educated, and/or where they now work as academics' (7). Second, the field has traditionally not only been 'Anglo-centric', but also neglectful of some important voices: 'It was a long time ago now that feminist political economists started to argue that GPE was guilty of a complete neglect of gender, and this is a point which more recently has been made forcefully in relation to race. Thanks to the huge range of scholars and scholarship making the argument - again and again - about the importance of these perspectives over the years, we now have a field of study genuinely capable of accommodating ways of seeing the world that go beyond the dominant masculinized, White, Eurocentric perspectives. We can understand power in its many dimensions, including at the intersections of gendered and racialized forms of power, and our understanding of every issue and topic encompassed by GPE is enhanced: how otherwise could we possibly think properly, for instance, about inequality, or labour and work, or globalization, or trade and finance?' (8-9). In summary, 'The value of diversity for our academic field cannot be disputed: the different light that is shed on the core questions, the new question which are posed, the challenge to dominant ways of thinking that all come from diversity - all are critical to us as individuals and as a community in unsettling our own assumptions and causing us to seek deeper understanding of how others see the world in order to understand, decide, and continually question how we ourselves see it' (9). This introduction is discursive tour de force - and it concludes by returning to the place of the students themselves in the field: 'So you are also part of this field of GPE, and this textbook is designed to encourage you to take your place in it, to participate in the debates, and to think deeply about your own perspectives and the arguments you want to make' (9). GPE, it seems, will be what students (appropriately guided) make of it. Following this, the book delivers two chapters on theories and approaches: 'How to study Global Political Economy' (Leonard Seabrooke and Kevin L. Young), and 'How to think about Global Political Economy' (Benjamin J. Cohen), which complete Part I, and twelve chapters on specific topics in Part 2, Debating GPE, each one concluding with a four-person 'roundtable' where a relevant issue is debated: Chapter Topic Roundtable 4 GlobalisaBon and neoliberalism (Jacqueline Best) Does the renewed prospect of global trade conflict revalidate the argument for free trade? Do we need stronger global governance arrangements to hold big business to account? Has the Covid-19 global pandemic been a ‘great leveller’ across countries and socieBes? Is responsible consumpBon the soluBon to the environmental crisis? Is global poverty really falling? 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Finance (Lena Rethel) Trade (Erin Hannah and James ScoU) ProducBon and business (Kate Macdonald) Health (Simon Rushton) Environment and climate (Hayley Stevenson) Inequality (Eduardo OrBz-Juarez and Andy Sumner) Crime (Asif Efrat) Labour and work (MaUhew Alford) MigraBon (Stuart Rosewarne and Nicola Piper) Does internaBonal crime control work? Is increased automaBon the soluBon to global labour exploitaBon? To what extent should states be open to migraBon? Has global economic governance failed over the last half-century? Is the increasing geopoliBcal rivalry between the United States and China reshaping globalizaBon? 14 15 Global governance (Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss) State power and geopoliBcs (Andrew Hurrell) Does the renewed prospect of global trade conflict revalidate the argument for free trade? Do we need stronger global governance arrangements to hold big business to account? How far, then, and in what ways, does Global Political Economy remedy previous exclusions, in relation to the contributors and the topics covered? At first sight, not at all. But closer inspection reveals a consistent strategy of hegemonic incorporation that introduces new voices and themes, but subordinates them systematically to its dominant Anglo-centric liberal cosmopolitan narrative. So, first, the contributors. Nicola Phillips (PhD LSE) is currently at the University of Melbourne, having previously held a number of posts in the UK, at King's, Manchester, Sheffield and Warwick. The authors of the other two chapters in Part I are Leonard Seabrooke (PhD University of Sydney, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark), Kevin L. Young (PhD LSE, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Benjamin J. Cohen (PhD Columbia University, University of California, Santa Barbara). The sixteen authors contributing the twelve chapters in Part II listed above have PhDs from Australia (2: Adelaide and Melbourne), Canada (1, Toronto), the UK (9: Aberystwyth, King's, London South Bank, Manchester (2), Oxford (2), Sheffield, Warwick), or the US (4: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Yale). Eight of them teach in the UK (King's, 3; Manchester, 1; Oxford, 1; Sheffield, 1; Sussex, 1; Warwick, 1), 3 in Australia (Melbourne, 1; Sydney, 2), 2 in Canada (Ottawa and Western Ontario), and one each in Argentina (Torcuato di Tella), Israel (Reichman), and the US (City University New York). All received their PhDs in the 'core' countries, and eighteen are affiliated to core country universities. As for the exceptions, Hayley Stevenson spent ten years at ANU and Sheffield before moving to Buenos Aires, and has only recently stepped down as an editor of Political Studies; and Asif Efrat (at Reichman University, a private university which describes itself as 'modelled on Ivy League universities in the United States'), is by some distance the only one apart from Benjamin Cohen committed to the ahistorical positivism of the 'American School'. But the picture changes if you add in the 37 contributors to the roundtables who are not chapter authors themselves - a substantial minority do come from countries outside the 'core', a few from continental Europe but most from further afield. You could just say that the claim that the authors 'have been drawn from many different parts of the world and diverse national identities, whether in relation to where they have lived, where they were educated, and/or where they now work as academics' is a tad over-stated, and leave it at that. But any sensible editor would commission background chapters on the field from established figures within it, and draw heavily on her own professional networks thereafter after all, the first requirement for an edited textbook is to get the chapters delivered, from people you know and trust. But there is more to it than that. It is significant that the authority of the Australia/North America/UK core is unchallenged in the fifteen main chapters in the book. But it is just as significant that other voices are systematically introduced in the roundtables. I'm sure I don't need to labour the point: the structure of the book constitutes a hierarchy in which voices from the periphery are included in circumscribed and subordinate roles, as part of a practice that extends the hegemony of the core on a global scale. This would not be so much the case if they were dissident voices, but they are not - in terms of their training, affiliations and perspectives, they are members of the global liberal cosmopolitan network that spans the field. Second, for all the talk of richness and variety, the set of themes covered is pretty conventional. Neither in the topics themselves nor in the roundtable questions is there any opening towards gender or race, or any other challenge to 'dominant masculinized, White, Eurocentric perspectives' on the global political economy. Further inspection reveals, though, that challenges to the traditional core of the field are not entirely absent. Rather, as with the contributors, they are worked into the dominant cosmopolitan liberal narrative in subordinate positions in a way that serves to extend its hegemony. And indeed, this strategy is precisely captured in the claim that the field is now 'genuinely capable of accommodating ways of seeing the world that go beyond the dominant masculinized, White, Eurocentric perspectives': the use of the term 'accommodating' is more revealing than perhaps the editor was aware. As with the claim of diversity in the contributors, the interest is in the manner in which inclusion and accommodation in the dominant narrative are achieved. Again, it is hardly necessary to labour the point: the issues of gender and race - the two most frequently invoked - are not accorded the status of core topics, meriting a chapter of their own. Nor are slavery and colonialism. Nor, come to that, is social reproduction, despite the fact that it is the cutting edge of approaches to 'everyday politics' in the global economy today. But references to the significance of colonialism, gender, race and slavery are worked in throughout the twelve topic chapters, as we shall see. In this and in other key respects, Jacqueline Best sets the tone perfectly, dwelling on the significance of slavery and colonialism (54-6), and acknowledging (via Quinn Slobodian) that the core of twentieth-century neoliberal theorizing involves 'the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world' (Slobodian 2018; 2, cited p. 59). But having 'recognized' these issues, she leaves them aside, identifying 'three core puzzles' and reminding students that they do not need to resolve them: 'should we see globalization and neoliberalism as strategies for taking the politics out of economics or as deeply political strategies? Should we understand them as primarily global, macro-level processes or as having their greatest impact in reshaping everyday lives? And should we see them primarily as material phenomena or as powerful ideas? We do not have to choose one answer over another in resolving these puzzles - but can instead use them to develop a better understanding of the complexity and power of these concepts' (66-7). In foregrounding these particular puzzles, posing them as alternatives, and reassuring readers that there is no need to choose between them, Best steers the reader sharply away from any attempt to explore further either issues of race and colonialism, or 'the meta-economic or extraeconomic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world'. First, the supposed contrasts presented are spurious. Globalization and neoliberalism are deeply political strategies for taking the 'politics' out of 'economics'; they are global, macro-level processes that continually 'reshape' everyday lives; and they are both material phenomena and powerful ideas. Second, to say this is in any case only to scratch the surface. The basic problem is that capitalism itself is not an object of enquiry, either in broad general terms or in its current global character, and this turns out to be the case for the book as a whole. Globalization is reduced to the question of the state versus the market (Table 4.1, p. 54), and a brief discussion of 'the ways in which neoliberalism operates at the micro-level' (64) makes no reference at all to the increasing structural pressure that operates on a global scale, systematically reinforced by reforms to 'social protection', to oblige people everywhere to look for paid work in increasingly competitive labour markets. This perspective is introduced by Quinn Slobodian, though, at the very end of the fourth and last contribution to the roundtable. Describing capitalism as 'a world where distribution is primarily determined by private rather than public actors through the institutions of private property and the price mechanism', he concludes with the remark that: 'Even if the neoliberal model is exhausted and, in defiance of all premature obituaries, happens to perish this time, then the capitalist model would live on in a different guise' (77). But this thought is not taken up further anywhere else. Best's chapter sets the tone for the rest. They generally feature a standard liberal account of their topic, a disinclination to arbitrate between different approaches or to explore the conditions required for safeguarding capitalism on a global scale, and a conscious effort to 'accommodate' other voices and perspectives. Rethel highlights the 'inherent instability of global financial markets' (90-91), and describes a 'diversity in thought and approach, underscored by the recognition of the limits of one-size-fits-all explanations and policy solutions' as 'another important contribution that GPE scholarship makes to the study of Global Financial Crises' (91), then offers work on Islamic finance and 'the everyday turn' as 'other ways of doing and studying global finance' (91), noting that the latter is 'inherently intersectional in nature in that it recognizes hierarchies of difference - including class, gender, and race - and their impact on how we experience finance in our daily life' (94). And she is careful to emphasise that 'while the everyday presents a distinct entry point in the GPE of finance, it by no means rejects the idea that there are other levels of analysis' (95). The short section on everyday global finance (94-5) is a perfectly achieved example of the politics of accommodation of 'other' approaches in action. Immediately following, Hannah and Scott deliver an impeccably liberal reformist account of trade and the international institutional regimes through which it has been governed, then consider at length the extent to which it can be said to be gendered, what is being done about it, and what more might be done. They draw on a recent body of work to which Hannah herself has been central (118-23), but regrettably suggest that inattention to this issue 'began to change in 2017 when policymakers started to talk about the importance of gender mainstreaming in trade policy' (119). There are dozens of sources that this ignores, examples being Williams (2003), van Staveren et al (2007), and the chapters by Liebowitz and True in Rai and Waylen, eds (2008). Following, Macdonald's chapter on production and business begins by addressing the reader as consumer: 'It is perhaps not surprising ... that the ways in which we organize and regulate production of the goods and services that we all enjoy consuming have become one of the most contentious subjects of debate within the field of GPE' (136). This consumer, by the way, 'stumbles to the kitchen for a coffee' in the morning, then, once dressed, 'sprints outside to leap into a car or bus' - powerful testimony to the benefits of a caffeine boost. The focus then turns to the once 'new international division of labour' and global value chains, with heavy reliance on Gereffi and associates. Macdonald attributes these developments to the strategies of firms seeking to lower production costs in the face of competition from foreign manufacturers benefiting from lower labour costs or economies of scale, made possible by revolutions in communications and transport technologies, and supported by national and international policies of liberalisation and deregulation, along with the creation of export processing zones and other stimulants to the attraction of foreign investment. In a balanced account of 'winners' and 'losers' from GVCs she signals the gendered and racialized character of opportunity in the global labour force and the danger of 'immiserizing growth' (Shaffer, Kanbur, and Sandbrook 2019), offering coffee as an example in which farmers 'struggle to make a living from the very low prices they receive' (143), and Walmart as an example of the power of large retailers (145-6). The practices of major corporations and retail brands 'are in turn facilitated by huge pools of cheap labour produced by large-scale poverty in many countries', while the formal economy 'could not function without a huge amount of what is known as "reproductive labour", not only involving biological reproduction and child rearing but also unpaid caring or domestic work that provides ongoing support to waged workers' (147). This chapter concludes with a review of state- and non-state forms of governance and their limited effectiveness, and Macdonald takes up the same theme in the roundtable: 'While we should indeed continue to advocate for strengthened global governance arrangements, we need to be careful not to take our eye off an equally important objective: to empower pro-accountability social forces to weave together the political conditions that are needed to hold big business more effectively to account' (156). Nothing could be better attuned to the ethos and orientation of the volume as a whole. The following chapters, on health, and environment and climate, are good and excellent respectively. Rushton gives an informed account centred on the role of the WHO, but touches only in passing on the MDGs (with their significant gendered content) and on the link to labour productivity, while Stevenson, foregrounding eco-Marxism and global environmental justice, offers the only chapter that pushes against the limits of liberal perspectives. For historical perspective, though, her chapter should be read in conjunction with Schmelzer (2017), on the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972), and its links to the OECD. It is well complemented by the best roundtable in the book. In comparison, the chapter on inequality is weak, as it spends too long going through different available measures, and not long enough exploring neoliberal justifications for inequality, fails to raise the related issues of opportunity and risk, and makes the massively anachronistic suggestion that welfare regimes 'seek to insulate the population from market volatility and pursue security via collective, public insurance mechanisms' (240, cf. 243) - thereby rendering invisible the very different regimes of 'social protection' that are the results of decades of 'welfare reform', and shape the political economy of contemporary global capitalism. In the final comment in the roundtable, Craig Murphy offers a different perspective: 'The late nineteenth century pioneers of the study of poverty understood that destitution was not required to create a proletariat. What we now call "precarity" was enough to maintain the flow of exploitable workers into the job market' (250). Food for thought, but not ingested elsewhere. Sandwiched between this chapter and Matthew Alford's discussion of 'labour and work' is Asif Efrat's on crime, which focuses on 'the joint effort of states to tackle crime through bilateral or multilateral action' (254). As liberalization policies may unintentionally facilitate illicit flows (260), which are ultimately commercial activities in which goods or services are provided and consumed (262), and many otherwise law-abiding citizens are happy to consume the products of crime (263), it is not surprising that 'the illicit economy presents significant challenges of international cooperation: governments may be unable to suppress transnational criminal activities, or they may be unwilling to do so' (270). With this already said, the roundtable, 'Does international crime control work?' is rather superfluous, and the chapter as a whole, because of its rather narrow focus, does less to enrich our understanding of global political economy than it might. Alford's chapter, in contrast, is a prime example of the reformist liberal cosmopolitan framework that is dominant in the text as a whole. He takes as his starting point the 'globalization' of production by Western multinationals since the 1990s (sic, 282), and deprecates the rise of 'precarious' or 'adversely incorporated' labour. This represents a 'shift towards more insecure, non-standard forms of employment', and it is 'mainly undertaken by informal, migrant, thirdparty-contracted, and female workers, with the most extreme forms involving the purposeful use of forced labour' (284). But 'the transnational nature of global production means that parallel examples of labour exploitation due to pressure on wages, contracts, and conditions, and examples of forced labour, occur everywhere in the world', an example being Bangladeshi strawberry pickers in Greece who were fired on by their supervisors when they demanded their wages (287). Alford's focus on precarious work and the need for improvements in labour conditions and rights is overwhelmingly on locations in or workers from the 'Global South', and only at the very end of this discussion does he note that 'The rise of e-commerce is also leading to the expansion of precarious work in the Global North, where employment is traditionally seen as better regulated and more secure. This includes the insecure employment status of gig economy workers at the 'sourcing' end of e-commerce platforms, such as delivery couriers and warehouse workers subject to low pay and intensive working conditions, and at the 'production' end, with recent reports of below-minimum wage payments and exploitation of garment workers by clothing suppliers in the UK, serving wellknown e-commerce platforms based in the same location' (296). The rest of the chapter and the roundtable turn to the question of whether automation, robots, and AI will 'take our jobs' (so that again the roundtable does not break new ground). True to form, given that business calls the shots, Alford favours regulation and democratic (trade union) contestation, and with some nuances, the other contributors agree. From this point on, the normative and ideological character of the text comes fully to the fore, as a pro-reform and regulation cosmopolitan liberal perspective entirely dominates the concluding chapters on migration, global governance, and geopolitics. On migration, Rosewarne and Piper highlight the instrumental attitude of the 'income-rich' countries, and their primary focus on attracting migrants who meet workforce needs, and can become 'productive members of the community' (312). They adopt an intersectional approach, pointing out by way of example that migrant domestic work 'epitomizes how the intersection of class, race/ethnicity, and gender creates a hierarchy between migrant and non-migrant women as well as between different nationalities' (323); and more generally they point to the tendency for widespread schemes for temporary migration to limit the options migrants have, their rights and security entitlements, and their ability to contest 'untoward employment practices' (322). This is entirely in line with the World Bank's 2024 World Development Report, and the authors duly go on to endorse reform through international institutions, highlighting the Global Compact for Migration: 'New cooperative organizational arrangements are being forged and appear to be successfully injecting renewed momentum into a collective purpose. ‘Global partnerships’ that bring together key international organizations, including the ILO and the IOM, and the decision to charge the ILO and the World Bank with oversight for advancing social protection as a universal right are creating fresh possibilities for advancing the rights and protections of migrant workers' (326). Richard Jolly and Thomas Weiss approach global governance in exactly the same way, counterposing multilateral cooperation to hostile 'new nationalisms' (339) or 'national populisms' (341), and adding later that 'not all non-state actors are progressive, globally minded, and altruistic. Internationalists and cosmopolitans must beware of counterproductive actions by non-state actors with vested interests - for example, of fossil-fuel producers lobbying against reducing carbon footprints or corporations emphasizing profits over poverty alleviation' (345), and that 'filling leadership gaps [in international governmental organizations] requires more resistance to government pressures and less tolerance for interference' (349). Because their focus is a general one, embracing 'world-wide problems that go beyond the individual capabilities of any state, however powerful', they do not actually exclusively on global political economy. Rather, they identify six 'gaps' in global governance, in relation to knowledge, norms, policies, institutions, leadership and compliance, taking in each case an inclusive perspective, name-checking alternative approaches such as 'decolonizing' knowledge (344), and acknowledging 'poorer countries without voice' (345), racial inequalities (347) and 'gender inclusion' (348). They then offer three illustrations: health threats and the WHO; financial instability and the international financial institutions; and child welfare, development, and UNICEF. In each case, the focus is on the institution: the WHO is chronically underfunded, and therefore weak; the IMF and World Bank, with their emphasis on stringent free-market policies, balanced governmental budgets, and openness to foreign trade and investment, are far more powerful than other UN agencies with more progressive agendas; but UNICEF (in which Richard Jolly worked for over a decade) has succeeded in challenging economic orthodoxy with an agenda of 'adjustment with a human face' (344-5, a telling phrase, obviously). The concluding lines of the chapter bring out its assertive normative stance, and link it back directly to the appeal to readers with which Phillips introduced the volume: 'A much denser network of global governance institutions exists in the 2020s than in 1945, but the dearth of global public economic goods remains. In the aftermath of a global economic meltdown amid the Covid-19 pandemic, we are perplexed that anyone would dispute the need for more international cooperation and muscular IGOs. Yet, in the early 2020s, the onslaught on multilateralism ... was alarming. While the menace from the Covid-19 pandemic is short term, the threats to the planet and human civilization from climate change are far more dire. Reaching global agreement about supportive action will require vision and creative innovation - above all, by you, the reader of this book. The younger generation will suffer most from contemporary failures to act, and has much to gain from more bold, focused, and effective international collaboration' (355, emphasis mine). It would have made sense for the book to end there. As it is, Andrew Hurrell's liberal perspective on geopolitics follows, returning the reader to the underlying issue of power in the global economy. He begins by invoking headlines 'full of the return of geopolitics and the intensification of geoeconomic rivalry' (366), painting a picture of liberal values and liberal capitalism alike under threat. The chapter is broader than the title suggests: along with the obligatory liberal critique of political realism, it discusses economic statecraft and the institutional order that global liberal capitalism requires, before turning in conclusion to the topic of 'power in GPE' (377-9). Judged on its own terms, its major shortcoming is its failure to consider either the issue of international law, where a huge literature of direct relevance has followed from Anghie (2004), or the role of the 'Third World' or 'Global South' in the building of the post-WW2 global order. But it is a competent discussion all the same - and one that would have been better positioned much nearer the beginning of the book. Supporting all this, the text has all the 'aids to learning' that you would expect - boxes, figures, one- or two-page 'case studies', and multiple choice questions, along with flashcards and videos on line that I have not seen. Each chapter has a short list of suggestions for further reading, and there are close on 1,000 references in the bibliography at the end. Overall, production and editing standards are high and mistakes are few: phenomenon (p. 17) should be phenomena; the illustration on p. 143 shows roasted coffee beans not green beans, and that on p. 257 shows a rather smart fake Gucci bag, although a Louis Vuitton fake is promised in the text; 'what' is missing, at the foot of p. 187; and the context on p. 394 suggests dynamics, not dynamism. But the text is put together well, and the number of themes covered is appropriate - you can imagine it working over a semester-long course. It does have one significant weakness, but it is easily sidestepped. This is that the two 'theory' chapters that follow the editor's introduction have very little to recommend them. First, they are confusingly inconsistent: Seabrooke and Young offer ontology, epistemology, theory and methods as key points of reference, and state that GPE, in contrast to IPE, 'explicitly transcends state-centrism as a matter of course' (13). Cohen identifies ontology, epistemology, agenda, purpose, and boundaries as key dimensions, and centres his discussion on the positivist, empiricist, ahistorical and grand-theory averse 'American school', for which GPE is 'above all about sovereign states' (36), mostly indistinguishable from IPE, and oriented towards 'micro- or mid-level theory concentrating on key relationships isolated within a broader structure whose characteristics are unquestioned and assumed, implicitly, to be stable through time. 'Heterodox' perspectives are presented as contrasting with this 'orthodox' approach in a number of ways, rather than on their own terms, and are treated as fundamentally normative in orientation, with no regard for their analytical content. Beyond this, the first is distractingly eccentric (do students need a 'wordcloud' of key terms found in the most recent 500 journal articles and book chapters containing the topic 'Global Political Economy' according to the Web of Science database, or a mapping of the network of relationships between journals cited in the Review of International Political Economy?), while the second is too closely tied to a half-baked reprise of the American versus British IPE debate that will mean nothing to most students. These chapters are not going to persuade them that the study of GPE is 'exciting and wonderful', and of course they fail to reflect the editor's claim that 'we now have a field of study genuinely capable of accommodating ways of seeing the world that go beyond the dominant masculinized, White, Eurocentric perspectives' (8-9). What to do? As both cheerfully admit that it doesn't really matter what theory you follow, and more importantly as the coherence of the text comes anyway from its normative cosmopolitan liberal perspective, to which these chapters add nothing, they can be set aside. You might want to encourage students to look at them for an idea of what the field has been, but with the proviso that they should not waste too much time on them. I suggest that in the second edition the editor should ditch them, and replace them with a more sensible one of her own, then move Hurrell's chapter up to complete Part I. With that important caveat, I do recommend this text for adoption - not in spite of its normative orientation towards a cosmopolitan liberalism supportive of reform and international regulation, but because of it. It reflects the dominant ideology in this and related academic fields (and its critique of a narrowly neoliberal perspective), and it is helpful that it is so confidently done on its own terms. If you happen to share this perspective, you might want to teach it on those same terms, but that would be an unduly uncritical approach to adopt. Cosmopolitan liberalism with a commitment to ameliorative reform carries with it a sometimes explicit and always implicit air of moral superiority, and is all too seldom challenged. In this respect, the greatest virtue of this text is that it lays down and signals so clearly the limits to its approach, and the boundaries it seeks to draw around it. In doing so it opens the way to apply more critical perspectives on each of the core topics profiled, and to unsettle the hegemony of its standpoint. As noted above, it recognizes broader and more critical perspectives, but accommodates or contains them both by establishing a hierarchy of core versus peripheral contributors, and by acknowledging but not pursuing on their own terms issues of gender, race, post-colonialism, decolonialism, and class/capitalist exploitation. This lays the text open to a counter-hegemonic or subversive teaching strategy. A more critically minded teacher will have work to do, beginning with making it clear just how and how much the text does promote the hegemony of cosmopolitan liberalism. Time and again, discussion ends with acknowledgement of a more critical approach thereby inviting students to take it further. The second step, therefore, is to develop alternatives short lists of further reading that do take critical discussions further, and alternative topics for 'roundtable' discussion in class. Work worth doing, that would turn a course on global political economy into a comprehensive critique of cosmopolitan liberalism. In short, there are many possible paths in the text out of a cosmopolitan liberal perspective, but none are taken - where another textbook might begin is exactly where this one ends. I illustrate this in conclusion with reference to the capitalist logic of the global political economy - noting at the same time that various references above point to similar starting points for other types of critique. You will find plenty more. First we have the final comment from the final contributor (Quinn Slobodian) to the roundtable that follows Chapter 4: 'Even if the neoliberal model is exhausted and, in defiance of all premature obituaries, happens to perish this time, then the capitalist model would live on in a different guise' (77). Second, we have Craig Murphy's comment in the final contribution to the roundtable following Chapter 10: 'The late nineteenth century pioneers of the study of poverty understood that destitution was not required to create a proletariat. What we now call "precarity" was enough to maintain the flow of exploitable workers into the job market' (250). Third, we have Alford's almost offhand remark, not explored further, that: 'The rise of ecommerce is also leading to the expansion of precarious work in the Global North, where employment is traditionally seen as better regulated and more secure' (296). And fourth, we have Gabriele Koehler's pointed critique in his contribution to Chapter 14: 'Why is there this failure? I would argue it is because the UN’s principles and norms are systemically undermined by the dominant global economic rationale. The global economy is profit driven: unfettered capitalism is no longer reined in by enlightened welfare states to balance the interest of citizens and residents versus economic elites (see Chapter 4). Large companies dominate global value chains (GVCs) as well as national policy decisions (see Chapter 7). Thus, there are too few brakes on a global race to the bottom—in terms of human rights, climate justice, incomes, and decent work' (361). Taken together, these remarks provide cues for a thorough exploration of 'the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world', of the kind the text itself seeks to naturalize and obscure. They illustrate a teaching strategy - equally applicable to other critical perspectives identified above - made possible precisely by the manner in which the text, to return to the comment from Tooze with which I began, is structured to establish the hegemony of core cosmopolitan liberal assumptions, and shape the attitudes and behaviour of student citizens accordingly. References Anghie, Antony. 2005. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rai, Shirin and Georgina Waylen, eds. 2008. Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmelzer, Matthias. 2017. '"Born in the corridors of the OECD': the forgotten origins of the Club of Rome, transnational networks, and the 1970s in global history', Journal of Global History, 12, 1, 26-48. Shaffer, Paul, Ravi Kanbur, and Richard Sandbrook, eds. 2019. Immiserising Growth: When Growth Fails the Poor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Staveren, Irene, Diane Elson, Caren Grown and Nilufer Cagatay, eds, 2007. The Feminist Economics of Trade. London: Routledge. Williams, Mariama. 2003. Gender Mainstreaming in the Multilateral Trading System: A handbook for policymakers and other stakeholders. Commonwealth Secretariat.