This volume is devoted to documenting the development of economic thinking across the world and in all historical eras, partitioned on nation-state/geographical lines.

If Ptolemy's Cosmographia was an early attempt to delineate the world's physical geography, then this Cosmoconomy (or Economographia) is a much more modest attempt to map the global contour-lines of economic ideas.

Part of the limitation here was the existing state of knowledge in this field: as the authors of the chapter on Southeast Asia imply, no-one had ever thought of writing a history of economics in the Malay Peninsula before. Hence, although an attempt to be geographically comprehensive was made in the commissioning process, it proved impossible to find authors to write on some countries. What this volume can fruitfully do is provide a condensed introductory over­view and regionally coordinated analytical account of a significant number of national/regional traditions in economics (28 chapters in total) that will facilitate comparisons across nations and between historical eras, something that has been lacking in the literature, at least within a single easily accessible volume.

This type of national/global world-view approach is especially relevant to the current period of a dramatic increase in the pace of economic globalization, which has been facilitated in part by technological changes such as the birth of the internet and the growth in affordable air travel, and in part by socio-political changes such as increased migration and heightened attempts at democratization in regions previously under autocratic rule. Not everyone agrees that globalization has entirely negated the nation-state as a socio-economic entity. Some have argued that advanced capitalist nations have gained increased power and autonomy from globalization, through the heightened control over their economies that the dissolving of existing nationally rooted relations of accumulation has enabled (Gritsch, 2005).

It is perhaps more accurate to say that globalization has simultaneously heightened and also negated national boundaries, but in various different ways. Together with increased economic and financial globalization, which is undoubtedly a real and a partly positive development, has gone a sense of an emboldened national consciousness in areas previously under forms of political subjugation that have been freed partly by globalizing cultural forces. But parallel with this there has also been a feeling of heightened threats to some national cultures in areas where this globalization has brought the most extensive changes to customs that have been long- lived and deeply embedded. As will be seen, such dramatic change is not only a very recent phenomenon.

However, there is an important difference between firstly the globalization of trading/ technological links and fashion/popular culture, and secondly the globalization of economic ideas, business traditions and fundamental belief systems. The former does not necessarily require or produce the latter, although in some situations it might do so. As an example, the rise of the Chinese economy in international (capitalist) commerce is one of the most important develop­ments in recent times, but it has not been accompanied either by China wholeheartedly adopting a purely free-trade/liberal economic ideology, or of contemporary Chinese-style state-led ideas being successfully propagated elsewhere. It could be argued that the Chinese economy has been so successful on the global stage in the very recent period in part because of the disconnection between its own domestic development ideology, and the ‘liberal’ economic ideas that have held sway in the more ‘advanced’ Western countries. These globalization relativities may change again in the future, but it is precisely these spatial/temporal and national/international relation­ships that can be more clearly understood by means of a local/regional approach.

This volume is therefore devoted in part to asking the question: how far has economic theory/discourse been globalized alongside the globalization of the world economy? Taking a long-view approach to this question by examining national trends over centuries will enable wider changes/patterns in the development of economic belief-systems to more clearly be dis­cerned. But how did the idea of the nation-state develop in historical terms?