Launch event for three major new Palgrave titles
On 7th May, Warwick University hosted a launch event to mark the publications with Palgrave Macmillan of two of Warwick’s members of staff. André Broome and Ben Clift are both based at the University’s Department of Politics and International Studies and published within a month of each other, major new texts on political economy. André Broome’s Issues and Actors in Global Political Economy provides a state of the art introduction to the key questions at the intersection of politics and economics in today’s globalized world. Ben Clift’s Comparative Political Economy comprehensively introduces the comparative approach to political economy while connecting it systematically to the subfield of International Political Economy (IPE), making the case for cross-fertilisation between these closely related fields.
At the event, chaired by Matthew Watson, both authors introduced their texts to the audience – reflecting on their experiences of writing such ambitiously broad books and on their content. John Hobson from the University of Sheffield responded to Andre Broome’s text. He described it as “a brilliant IPE textbook for the 21st century” and particularly praised its innovative inclusion of actors in the global political economy. Ben Clift recounted how the idea for his book had come from a discussion with Andrew Gamble, at a Political Studies Association conference, about the lack of an introduction to the field of comparative economy, so it was appropriate that Gamble (University of Cambridge) should respond to his book. He has called it a “path breaking book” and one that “all students of political economy will benefit from reading”. It was also a good occasion to celebrate Palgrave Macmillan’s publishing in political economy as, in addition to the two books being launched, Palgrave published in June 2014 Andrew Gamble’s Crisis Without End, a major contribution to our understanding of the financial crisis and possible paths to the future.