The Social Sources of Financial Power

Reviews / Votes

"How do states acquire and maintain international financial power? By intervening economically at home to benefit lower-income citizens, suggests Leonard Seabrooke. This unconventional argument offers a stimulating reinterpretation not just of the financial rivalry between England and Germany in the pre-1914 era but also of the U.S. success in withstanding the Japanese financial challenge in the late twentieth century." -- Eric Helleiner, CIGI Chair in International Governance, University of Waterloo "Leonard Seabrooke has written a remarkably prescient and important book, a landmark intervention. The Social Sources of Financial Power is a model of theoretical erudition, analytical precision, and empirical depth. Seabrooke makes a most powerful and convincing case for a constructivist political economy and, in so doing, recasts important parts of the prevailing wisdom on international finance." -- Colin Hay, University of Birmingham "This intelligent, bold, trenchant, and important book seeks to take the notion of legitimacy from the periphery of political economy into the mainstream. Leonard Seabrooke, supported by impressive archival work, forces readers to rethink much of what they think they know about the political economy of the United Kingdom and Germany in the early twentieth century and the United States and Japan in the latter half of that century. Seabrooke argues convincingly that if a state's credit policies at home are unstable, then that state cannot seriously affect the global financial order." -- Mark Blyth, Johns Hopkins University