As the 2008 financial crisis and the accompanying ‘Great Recession’ slowed growth in the advanced industrial countries, emerging economies continued to grow rapidly, accelerating a shift in the world’s economic centre of gravity towards the latter, particularly China, and giving the lineaments of a multipolar order a sharper definition. “Globalization’ and ’empire’, the dominant cosmopolitan approaches to understanding the contemporary world order as a more or less single seamless unit, lost their self-evidence. ‘Globalization’ had portrayed the world economy as unified by markets and ’empire’, by a leading state, most recently the US. For the former, no state mattered and for the latter, only one did; for both, the division of the modern capitalist world into a multitude of states was a fact of little consequence.
