Re-viewing IPE’s Western-Centric Understanding of the Global Economy through Big Picture Analysis

This chapter answers Buzan’s call for big picture analysis (BPA) in IPE. Since the late-1990s/early-2000s IPE has retreated into a presentist, micro-approach, typified by US third-wave IPE, which revolves around Open Economy Politics (OEP). However, while one would anticipate a different, historical sociological approach that is more interested in the big picture on the other side of the pond, it turns out that Brit-school IPE has more or less mirrored the trajectory undertaken in the United States, even if OEP receives little or no interest. But without BPA, I argue that IPE remains stranded within a presentist micro cul-de-sac , wherein events/processes are either depicted as entirely new to the exclusion of all manner of continuities, or that they are situated within a trans-historical, asociological approach with no appreciation of unorthodox discontinuities. This chapter problematises IPE’s prevailing presentist/Eurocentric understanding of the global economy by revealing the origins of the first global economy (1500–1850) that are founded to a considerable degree on non-Western agents and processes. And in showing how this helped promote the rise of the second (modern capitalist) global economy that has existed since c.1850, the chapter also problematises some of the fundamental assumptions that underpin IPE more generally.