Title: ‘Introduction’, in Susan Strange (2016 [1986]) Casino Capitalism, reprinted edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.vii-xviii.

Extract from text: For anyone who is returning to [Casino Capitalism] for the first time in a number of years, it is a delight to be reacquainted with the nuance of a historical perspective that emphasises the significance of decisions that could have been taken but were not, just as much as the decisions that were actually taken (pp.47-58). History thus comes alive as a highly politicised lens in Strange’s hands through the analysis of alternatives that were available but were overlooked simply because they did not fit the prevailing political mentality. For anyone coming to this work for the first time, there will consequently by many moments of revelation. Even though a self-consciously theoretical voice was so often written out of Strange’s work, younger generations of IPE scholars will find on repeated occasions that her texts speak to them in a language that helps to confirm their own subsequent theoretical choices. Strange’s ‘amateur history’ thus pre-empts a good deal of IPE’s future, in its concern for both the way in which the financial system was becoming a repository for political power and for how this made more and more people susceptible in their everyday lives to the whims of financial market pricing dynamics.