This book began life in many scattered forms, including some of my earlier writings. But the central argument was forced into a unified form during a course of ten public lectures that I gave in the autumn of 1998 at the American University in Cairo. There I tried to explore some of the implications of the emergence of a single global economy, of globalisation or, in its most extreme form, the fusion of national economies. One of the implications lies in the way we regard the economic history of the world, of economic development and the role of government; another, how we understand contemporary events and current trends
