The seeds of globalisation’s informal empire in Britain’s formal imperialism

Days prior to big anti-capitalist demos in London at the G20 meeting, David Wearing presents the first draft of a research paper on his blog, The Democrat's Diary, tracing the origins of contemporary globalisation in the imperialism of the old British Empire:

Under twenty-first century globalisation, a transnational class of investors, bureaucrats and opinion-formers work together to shape the global political economy to serve their interests, in a process that frequently involves evading or thwarting democracy and the popular will. This international governing class is bound together both by shared material interests and by a shared legitimising ideology that it characterises as favouring mutually-dependent free-markets and liberal democracy.

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