ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ‘capital-centric’ English in the modern world-system. It recounts how English was able to free ride on the US-led trans-institutional management of the global debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s through to the international financial contagion of 2007–8. US economic management, often driven by domestic interests, was often the trigger for these crisis events, from US manipulation of domestic interest rates through to ideologically driven market deregulation. International debt crises in Latin America and Asia were responsible for making English-mediated structural adjustment programmes the cornerstone of US-instigated policy management of global sovereign debt. In this way, debtor nations were drawn ever more closely into the nexus of neoliberalization and eternal debt peonage. As a result of US ‘dirty wars’ in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, US structural power was greatly enhanced, along with the position of English. China’s turn to the ‘open door’ further strengthened this situation. The 2007–8 financial crisis and its resolution not only deepened the global prevalence of English, it also illustrated how in its relation to capital English and its grammatically normative form had become a structural effect.
