The purpose of Part II is to widen the focus of approaches to International Studies so as to provide for a more integrated and global form of analysis. In so doing, contributors consider the productive, ecological and social anatomy of the political economy. They stress that transformations called ‘globalisation’ require historical analysis. Indeed, each contributor develops a critique of orthodoxies, for example orthodox Marxist methodological postulates such as ‘the primacy of the economic’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ or ‘determination in the last instance’. They also criticise the liberal separation of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’, the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’. Finally, each chapter considers theoretical and practical innovations, for example those associated with ‘imagined communities’ in a process of ‘global transformation’.

Indeed, the first chapter in Part II by Mitchell Bernard reminds us that Polanyi's approach was an innovative ‘substantive’ form of political economy, going beyond ‘formal economics’ that abstracted states and markets from a real social context. Polanyi analyses how particular societies are actually constituted and reproduced, allowing for a theorisation of political economy as an anthropology and ecology of human reproduction. Polanyi's account of the emergence of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism is prescient for those concerned with contemporary forms of globalisation. Polanyi's analysis of the destructive aspects of ‘market mentality’ underlines its subordination of human life and nature to the imperative of competitiveness. A Polanyian perspective thus involves ethical and ecological dimensions of explanation.