ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to take civic imagery of global governance—rather more literally than it was intended to be—as a heuristic device. It explores the relationship between what Fernand Braudel called the defining cities of economies-mondes and the rather more abstract, ideologically-created, global city of global governance. The chapter aims to better situate global governance as a moment in the history of organized capitalism on a world scale. It examines the politics of the cosmopolitan calls to order issued by the organs of global governance. The growth of inter-national intercourse continued apace through the first phases of the Bretton Woods crisis. Though it appeared to its contemporaries as a crisis of capitalism itself, the Bretton Woods crisis was rather that of the particular inter-national regime which had steered global accumulation since the end of the world war.
