ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates the changing nature of global capitalism as a social order. It focuses on key issues of theory and method, and on the political standpoint. The book provides a brief historical account of how global capitalism has changed since the 1960s. The main paradigms of economic analysis current in the 1960s and 1970s saw global capitalism as an 'international' system: the study of any cross-border economic phenomenon such as trade began with the national economies linked thereby. The book examines Britain in particular, within the context of global capitalism. 'Capitalism restored: East-Central Europe in the light of globalisation', written in 1997, examines the transformation of that region from the Soviet system to a capitalism based upon neoliberalism and globalisation. The book reviews the global financial and economic crisis that exploded following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
