After lengthy and tough negotiations, China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, which is widely considered as a landmark economic event in modern world history. The WTO accession marked a milestone of China’s economic opening and success in integration into the world economy. China’s trade opening, as well as global economic integration and multilateral trade rules, worked together to facilitate China gaining extraordinary economic and trade growth. In return, China has proved to become an indispensable engine for global economic growth, and its WTO membership has made the WTO a truly global and more relevant international organization. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of China’s WTO membership, this chapter focuses on China’s performance in the multilateral trading system during the past 20 years, analyzing China’s overall implementation of WTO commitments and its contribution to the world economy and trade. More specifically, it takes the Initiative on Investment Facilitation as an example to analyze China’s leading role in spearheading recent “Joint Statement Initiatives” under the WTO framework. Furthermore, the chapter touches upon how China could assume its responsibility and commitment to the broader WTO reform.

In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

After Llewellyn Smith initially set the League Economic Committee on a cautious course, Franco-German conflict helped stimulate the development of a more ambitious trade agenda that found expression in the League’s 1927 World Economic Conference. Bernhard Harms participated by demanding a more broadly institutionalized international economic regime that would include the United States and would cover sensitive issues skirted by Llewellyn Smith, including reparations, raw materials, and colonial markets. Harms had a prominent bully pulpit from which to promote this vision, as the director of the IfW. He used his position to facilitate ongoing policy dialogue among a large community of League collaborators and critics. He helped establish a novel think-tank environment that spanned business, academia, and government and became an important base of support for the League. In recognition of his pivotal role in international information networks, Harms was asked to coordinate a massive economic bibliography for the League at the end of the 1920s, with backing from US philanthropic societies. This abortive project revealed the limits of Harms’s strategy of transatlantic outreach.

Scholars of international political economy (IPE) often locate the origins of their field in the contested nature of the world economy of the early 1970s, but many of its early proponents drew important inspiration from political economists who had an international focus from the pre-1945 period. This chapter summarizes the book’s analysis of the field’s pre-1945 roots, an analysis that challenges conventional depictions of this history in two ways. First, the book embraces a more global conception of the field’s pre-1945 roots by highlighting many contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States. Second, it shows that discussions of the international dimensions of political economy before 1945 involved much more than a debate between the three perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. This introductory chapter also highlights some limitations of the analysis as well as some of the motivations behind the project.

The introduction opens with a methodological discussion. I explain my preference for the method of connected history over other approaches to global history. There follows a look at the changing meaning of ‘India’, from the fuzzy notion of an entity without clear territorial boundaries c.1750 to a nation-state with well-defined borders by 2000. I propose to chart the transition between these two moments in time, not through a close chronological account that would involve embarking upon a narrative of world history but through a thematic approach. I take a retrospective look at some of the main features of India’s global history prior to 1750, which brings out the fact that it was involved in a variety of connections that made it an important participant in the world economy and in the world political system, connections that were, however, not always recognised by the Indian elites as significant, a paradox that is a recurring theme in the book. The introduction ends with an outline of the book’s chapters.