ABSTRACT
This chapter canvasses the origins and historical development of what we today call ‘global financial governance’. As a problem, financial governance can be located within the field of ‘political economy’, because it sits at the intersection of economic and political relations as defined by the mutually constituted organization and operation of markets and states (or governments). 1 Since the early modern period, roughly the 17th–18th centuries, a ‘global’ political economy has taken shape around the consolidation and extension of the capitalist market economy, together with the birth and growth of the modern state and its attendant interstate system. For this reason the creation of value and wealth made possible by capitalism and its social hierarchies has been organically connected to the organization and exercise of state power.
