ABSTRACT
The common intellectual project informing the present book was centred upon four key questions. Framed and refined at the outset, these questions and the stance of the present writers towards them soon underwent far-reaching revaluation, made necessary by the events of 1997. At mid-year much of the world was mesmerized by the transfer of power and the return of Hong Kong to mother China, and looked in those dramatic events for some signs of the new importance of the Asian region as a whole in world society and the global economy. Meanwhile, scarce-noticed events were beginning to unfold to the southwest that would soon compel an urgent reassessment of the entire framework within which political leaders, investors and their economic advisers, and scholars – as well as everyday social actors – experienced and understood the ground on which they stood, the cosmos which they inhabited. Beginning with a ‘run’ on the Thai baht, not simply an ‘Asian economic crisis’ but, emanating from its Asian epicentre, a crisis of the entire world economy announced itself. If the post-Cold War world economy had been thought to stand on rock-solid foundations, this was an earthquake, perhaps the ‘Big One’.
