Globalisation and Development: The Imperative of Political Economy

The purpose of this contribution is four-fold. First, it seeks to provide an answer to the questions that have recently been posed, if not for the first time, by David Harvey (2000, p. 13). He recognises that globalisation “is now one of the most hegemonic concepts for understanding the political economy of international capitalism. And its uses extend far beyond the business world to embrace questions of politics, culture, national identity, and the like. So where did this concept come from? Does it describe something essentially new?” I provide an answer to the first question in section 2, arguing that globalisation neatly captures two intellectual trends, the common retreat from the excesses both of neo-liberalism and of postmodernism. Globalisation represents a return in emphasis to the study of material realities, how the world is organised and functions internationally and nationally, and a departure from a virtual world of increasingly free and unconstrained markets and imaginations.