The module is organised around debates in four areas: (1) a set of scene setting questions to introduce the material; (2) conceptual frameworks, derived from the scholarly tradition of political economy and world politics, including liberalism, Marxism, gender-based approaches, and racial capitalism; (3) the post-WWII history of governing the capitalist system, including attention to finance, trade, development, and energy and the environment; and (4) contemporary issues transfixing the world economy, including the global ecological crisis, the global financial crisis and its fallout, the politics of trade regulation, socio-economic inequalities, new concerns around technology, the political economy of work, and macro debates on capitalism and its possible futures. Students are asked to think critically about how the politics of the economy is conceived, governed, and experienced, in particular through evaluating dynamics of power.