of recent research in international relations, business history, and development studies to show how international organizations were created, what roles they have played in the evolution of the world economy since 1850, why successive world orders have broken down, and how they can be reconstructed. It provides the essential historical background to current debates about reform of the United Nations system and of regional economic systems throughout the industrial world, especially in its detailed discussion of two important episodes--in the generation before the First World War and in that which followed the Second--when unprecedented innovation within individual economies went hand in hand with effective world organizations central to the governance of a growing international industrial economy.

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