Is globalization over? What tariffs tell us

Jeanne Lazarus
Crises are multiplying – whether it be climate change, as the previous three issues, edited by Leon Wansleben, have so insightfully examined; the resurgence of wars that international law, designed to guarantee peace, fails to prevent; societies that are fracturing; freedoms once thought permanently secured that are being trampled; or economic instability. As Quinn Slobodian reminds us in the interview he granted us: “We are in a dark moment in Western democracies and for the world at large.”

Jonathan Levy
In 1878, a Chinese writer named Zhang Changjia published the book Opium Talk about his addiction to smoking opium (McMahon 2005). China had little experience with opium, until European traders brought it to Southeast Asia. By the early nineteenth century, the British were growing opium in colonial India for export to China. Before, there was little from the West that China had sought to buy besides silver, the Chinese fiscal base, mined from Latin America. The opium trade replaced silver, reversing Britain’s negative bilateral trade balance. 

Jeanne Lazarus and Quinn Slobodian
In your research, whether in your book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2020) or in Crack-Up Capitalism (2023), you investigate a highly structured and determined social world: That of the neoliberals since the 1960s. Could you describe this social world, its history and actors?
The approach of my work has reflected an effort to bring the often overly abstract discussion of neoliberalism down to earth [...] by following the pathbreaking work of German scholars Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen, as well as the historian of economics Philip Mirowski.

Yingyao Wang
The US tariffs on China have been perceived as a black swan event – an external shock that rocked the economic status quo in Asia. The extent to which these tariffs were endogenously related to the ongoing transformation of investment and trade patterns within Asia, however, is less explored. True, US tariffs are known to have provoked direct reactions from heavily affected countries like China: Chinese plants and companies scrambled to relocate to Southeast Asian countries to dodge them. To date, Vietnam and Indonesia have been the most frequent destinations, followed by Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia.

Timur Ergen
On April 7, 2025, just five days after “Liberation Day” – the announcement of across-the-board US tariff hikes sending shockwaves through financial markets – Steve Miran made some much-cited remarks at the Hudson Institute. The second Trump administration’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers demanded large-scale reparations from the United States’ trading partners – not for war, but for relying on US hegemony, and in particular on the international system of military hegemony and dollar reserve currency provision.

Patrik Aspers, Jens Beckert, Alya Guseva, and Zsuzsanna Vargha
Economic Sociology. Perspectives and Conversations was founded more than twenty-five years ago. It follows a simple model: The editors change every year, and each editor is responsible for three issues. This gives new ideas and perspectives in the field of economic sociology a chance to be published.

Kim Pernell · 2024
Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Reviewer: Nils Röper

Yingyao Wang · 2024
Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State
New York: Columbia University Press
Reviewer: Chi Jin

Jamee K. Moudud · 2025
Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?
New York: Routledge
Reviewer: Sarah Höne