Introduction
Page 2
experiential world and daily lives of young, middle class women in nineteenth century
Britain. They were supposedly too delicate and emotional to engage with or even discuss
the harsh and rational world of political economy. Yet, as contemporary feminist scholars
of and commentators on international or global political economy (IPE or GPE) have
increasingly revealed, the lives of nineteenth century “young ladies” in colonizing
countries and those of countless women across the colonized world were intricately and
inextricably bound up in the creation of what was to become a global capitalist political
economy. Now most often referred to as globalization, it has everything to do with the
lives of women across the world in the twenty-first century.
In the introduction to the first edition of this collection, we made the case for the
centrality of gender, as relation of inequality based on social constructions of masculinity
and femininity, to the process of globalization that we prefer to call global restructuring to
better capture the multi-dimensional, multi-speed, and disjuncted nature of this economic,
political, social, and cultural phenomenon. We review some of these arguments in this
second edition introduction because there is still resistance, particularly in conventional
IPE literature but also in the popular imagination, to seeing this powerful relationship in
all its complexity and acknowledging that globalization is not an overarching, unitary
force majeure out of nowhere. Rather it is an open-ended, historically produced social
and political construction with uneven and contradictory dimensions and effects that are
subject to change.
Beyond reviewing the substance of these arguments, however, we also bring to
Convention