Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Arrighi, Giovanni, PUBLISHER: Verso, An authoritative exploration of China's emergence as the most dynamic center of economic and commercial expansion in the world today. In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the conquering West and the conquered non-West. In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China's extraordinary rise invites us to read "The Wealth of Nations" in a radically different way than is usually done. He examines how the recent US attempt to bring into existence the first truly global empire in world history was conceived in order to counter China's spectacular economic success of the s, and how the US's disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People's Republic of China the true winner of the US War on Terror. In the 21st century, China may well become again the kind of non-capitalist market economy that Smith described, under totally different domestic and world-historical conditions.