Worlds of Political Economy explores the meanings and workings of political economy as knowledge and power in national, imperial, and transnational settings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of the conventional narrative with a focus on the differentiation between professional economics and political culture from the 1880s, this volume reveals the persisting significance of economic knowledge in political culture, civil society, and state and international organizations. Experts discuss the creation, diffusion, and contestation of political economy in Britain, Germany, France, the British Empire, and Japan. Giving attention to the rich and contested social and cultural nature of political economy as a cluster of ideas and working practices, this volume brings together original essays on sociability, philanthropy and self-interest, imperial land and ecology, international development and public health, expert cultures and transnational diffusion. Worlds of Political Economy makes a significant contribution by resituating economic knowledge regimes in their broader cultural, political and international settings.

MARTIN DAUNTON is Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Trinity Hall. He has published widely on all aspects of modern social and economic history. His most recent publications include Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700-1850 (Oxford, 1995) and Just Taxes: The Politics of British Taxation, 1914-1979 (Cambridge, 2002).

FRANK TRENTMANN is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Birkbeck College, London, and is the director of the Cultures of Consumption research programme (ESRC and AHRB). He is the editor of Paradoxes of Civil Society (Oxford and New York, 2000/2003) and (with Mark Bevir) of Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2004).