The Emergence of the Global Political Economy challenges assumptions that the international political economy is a recent phenomenon. Instead, this volume asserts that the current global political economy began to take shape around 1500 and that some of todays key processes were already perceivable hundreds of years ago. The author explains the interdependence between long-term economic growth, global political leadership and global war and how this interdependence has evolved over the past 500 years, and includes discussions of: the ascendance of Western Europe and the significance of the 1490s the military superiority thesis sequences of leadership and of challenge to the global political economy the importance of commodities from sugar and cloth to slaves and bullion.