Free Traders: Elites, Democracy, and the Rise of Globalization
(Oxford University Press)
Malcolm Fairbrother will summarize the core messages of his new book, in the course of telling the story of how he began the project on which it was based... and how he learned his initial thinking was wrong.
- It's not unusual to learn from a research project and update one's ideas. But in this case I ended up writing a whole book about the kinds of wrong ideas I believed at the start. I did so because those ideas are widespread, and in fact they have had major consequences for the world: in an important sense, they both gave rise to the global economy, and are now contributing to the backlash against it.
Empirically, the book is a historical study of events in the 1980s and 90s--when the governments of most countries took big steps to open up their economies. But it also says a lot about the likely future of globalization, plus about the power of various kinds of elites in the world today.
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Free Traders: Elites, Democracy, and the Rise of Globalization
(Oxford University Press)