ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is a basic guide to the diverse issues, problems, and approaches within the field of world political economy. It seeks to develop the field’s substantive unity. The book identifies the analytical and normative commitments that inform the study of world political economy as an intellectual enterprise. It introduces the subfields in which specialized research occurs. The book also introduces world political economy by demonstrating, among other phenomena, how structures of state power and transnational modes of production help sustain inequitable conditions of poverty amidst plenty. It also identifies the abstract concepts and theories that serve merely as limited devices for understanding particular and concrete conditions of social existence. Two economic shocks of the early 1970s punctuated the beginning of a new era. One signified the gradual erosion of US economic supremacy, and the other, the rise of non-Western economic power.
