ABSTRACT
We are entering a period of turbulent, systemic change in the organization of the world economic and political order – a period comparable to the transition from the feudal to the modern era in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Hobsbawm (1990: 174) observes, the late twentieth century world economy appears temporally confused, involving a “curious combination of the technology of the late twentieth century, the free trade of the nineteenth, and the rebirth of the sort of interstitial centres characteristic of world trade in the Middle Ages.”
