I'm joined in episode 11 of the Ryan Research podcast by Eric Helleiner. He is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Toronto, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Department of International Relations of the London School of Economics. His single authored books include The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell, 2021), States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Cornell, 1994), The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective (Cornell, 2003), The Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell, 2014), and The Status Quo Crisis: Global Financial Governance After the 2008 Meltdown (Oxford, 2014). He is also co-editor of Nation-States and Money (1999), Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World (2005), The Future of the Dollar (2009), Global Finance in Crisis: The Politics of International Regulatory Change (2010), The Great Wall of Money: Politics and Power in China’s International Monetary Relations (2014) and Governing the World’s Biggest Market: The Politics of Regulating Derivatives Markets After the 2008 Crisis (2018).

In our chat, we discuss his latest work The Neomercantlists: A Global Intellectual History. He explains the hidden history of Neomercantalism as a third school of thought usually left out of economic dialogues that consist of the two dominant strains of free trade or marxist schools. He discusses key figures in its formation like Friedrich List and Henry Charles Carey. His most fascinating insight is the global dimensions of this movement and references endogenous development in non-western countries that cuts against arguments of pure diffusionism. In conclusion, his book is most relevant to this current world of multipolar geopolitics that encourages refreshed exploration of these ideas.

You can purchase his work, The Neomercantilists here:
https://www.amazon.com/Neomercantilists-Global-Intellectual-History/dp/1501760122

His university profile:
https://uwaterloo.ca/political-science/people-profiles/eric-helleiner

You can watch the video version here:
https://youtu.be/Pl9D_TQtSmo

Support the show

S7: E16 An OKR journey with learnings along the way…