Market Economists Beyond the West: The Agents of Peripheral Liberalism, 1970–2020

This book offers a survey of ideas and practices of economic liberalism beyond Western Europe and North America. It traces the intellectual development and political agency of pro-market economists in Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and West Africa, from the 1970s onwards. Drawing on original primary-source research from five continents, the contributors to this volume – both internationally recognised senior scholars and emerging historians and social scientists – bring deep regional and linguistic expertise to their analyses. Each chapter critically examines the transformation of planned and state-centric economies into deregulated market systems, exploring these transitions from the perspective of the economists who drove the reforms. By challenging Western-centric narratives of neoliberal policy advice, this book offers fresh insights into the chronology, circulation of ideas, and power dynamics that shaped one of the late twentieth century’s major transformations. Offering a new approach to the study of liberal ideas outside the West, the book will be of interest to not only academics cutting across disciplinary boundaries, including historians of (the marketisation of) state socialism, but also area specialists on Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Global South.