Historical Foundations for Global IPE

When IPE textbooks discuss the pre-1945 roots of the field, they usually focus only on the ideas of European and American thinkers who helped to pioneer the three distinct perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. But the pre-1945 intellectual history of IPE can be told in a more global manner that reveals many important intellectual contributions made by thinkers from elsewhere. These contributions can be divided into four broad types: (1) those that “localized” the three well-studied European and American perspectives in creative ways; (2) those that endogenously developed similar perspectives as those three Euro-American ones; (3) those that developed quite different perspectives; and (4) those that influenced Euro-American thought about the world economy. This chapter provides examples of each of these types in order to contribute to the building of a kind of big picture analysis that not only deepens IPE’s intellectual roots temporally into the pre-1945 period but also widens those deep roots spatially to promote a more global understanding of them. This more global understanding helps to provide a more comprehensive history of IPE thought and to build the historical foundation for a more “Global IPE” today.