The study of international political economy has a long history, and the majority of IPE work today is still, broadly speaking, historical. However, there has never been a greater diversity among IPE researchers in their approaches to studying history, the weight they place on it, or their perspectives on the prospects for advancement. In this chapter, each of these changes is examined. It starts by looking at the three main approaches to engaging history used in the field: holistic, comparative, and deep. Utilizing both traditional and contemporary historical methods, tactics, and approaches is part of this. The following section of the chapter explores the diverse perspectives held by academics regarding the impact of the past on future results, ranging from strong path dependence accounts to those of 

Learn more about political economy, a subfield of social science that uses a variety of tools and methodologies, primarily taken from sociology, political science, and economics, to study the interactions between people and society as well as between markets and the government. The word political economics is derived from the Greek words polis and oikonomos, which indicate "one who governs a home or estate," respectively. Thus, political economy can be defined as the study of the management and governance of a nation, the home of the public, taking into account both political and economic variables.



Participants: John Stuart Mill Longfield, William Stanley Jevons Mountifort Hansen, Alvin Harvey Cairnes, John Elliott

Associated Subjects: Economics economic receptivity

historical progression

Political economy is a very old field of study in academia.


During the Cold War era of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, contemporary international political economics emerged as a subfield of the study of international relations (1945–91). The initial focus of analyses was primarily on international security, but they eventually expanded to cover economic security as well as the function of market actors, such as multinational corporations, foreign banks, cartels (such as OPEC), and international organizations (such as the IMF), in terms of both domestic and global security strategies. The collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 and the oil crisis of 1973–74 are two examples of the significant worldwide economic events that increased the significance of international political economy.


Political scientists focused on the realist, or power politics, aspect of U.S.-Soviet ties during the early Cold War, whereas economists tended to