Introduction

Abstract

There is a well known history textbook which commences its account of economic transformations in England with the anticlimactic observation that Britain is an island, a fact noted by its writer to be of contextual importance, even if ‘not very original’.¹ It is no doubt just as uncontroversial to say that the advanced capitalist economies of today differ amongst themselves: Sweden is different from Canada, Germany from France, and the United States from Japan. Similarly, it would hardly excite controversy to say that the EU differs in its contested economic character from parts at least of what an able caricaturist would wish to highlight for North America, were regional rather than national state territories being compared. Debate over how best to describe and interpret such differences in economic organization within the world’s advanced capitalisms as seem not only to coexist but also to persist over time is hardly new, however much the contexts within which the debate occurs changes; but the collapse of the Soviet Union with its satellite planned economies, and the clear emergence of aggressively state-backed capitalisms in the world’s most populous nations, China and India, have given contemporary debates about differences in economic organization within mature capitalist economies a new kind of urgency and (for writers on the left) a particular kind of piquancy.