I began writing this book in the summer of 2018. It was an unusual summer in England. The English football team performed well in a major tournament. Weeks of endless sunshine sapped the grass of its colour. An unbreaking wave of heat slowed the normal pace of life. Shops across London sold out of fans as the high temperatures became unbearable. The weather was a daily challenge to my writing rhythms. But more than this, the extreme conditions offered a constant reminder of the deep changes going on in the world. The changing climate, more unstable, unpredictable, and extreme in its patterns than before, mirrored the sense of a political and economic world in flux.

All around us, the old certainties, from the comforting inconsistency of English summers to the onwards march of a more integrated world economy and the global ascendancy of liberal democracy, have seemed to give way over the past decade. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 marked a turning point in the world economy. It signalled the end of a triumphant period of Western expansionism and shook confidence in the globalization project. Ten years after that crisis began, the political consequences are only now coming more fully into vision. From the rise of Donald Trump to Brexit and the deepening trade war between China and the US, global politics after the crisis looks and feels very different. And underlying all of these changes we can hear the quickening, deepening drumbeat of climate crisis. It is a sound that still seems all too inaudible to many of the world’s political leaders. But it is one that we will have to heed much more sharply if we are to salvage a positive future for our species on this planet. How we deal with the crisis of the world economy will be central to our prospects for tackling climate change. We can no longer credibly think about these two dominant problems of our age in anything other than the deepest of unions.

This book is my attempt to make sense of these changing times – to try to gain a stronger foothold on a terrain that is shifting rapidly beneath our feet. While this has proved a cathartic effort in some respects, offering greater clarity where once there was only ambiguity, it has proved to be unsettling in others. It has forced me to look unflinchingly at the precariousness of our global condition. In writing this book my hope has been that it might offer the reader a clearer guide to understanding our times. I have aimed to do this by unearthing a deeper history of the ebbs and flows of the globalisation project, to show how the ideas and institutions that have guided it have developed, and to indicate how we might hope to change them for the better in the future. Knowing how to interpret the political and economic world of today is a matter of importance not only for specialists – it is vital for everyone. In an age when our faith in democracy has been shaken and ominous political forces are rising to the fore, a proper sense of the fault lines and pressure points within the global economy can help us apply our collective energies more effectively to push for a better future.