INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF POST-IMPERIAL STERLING: FROM EXORBITANT PRIVILEGE TO NEO-DEPENDENT RESILIENCE IN THE GLOBAL MONETARY HIERARCHY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32689/2523-4536/81-10Keywords:
currency hierarchy, currency internationalisation, international political economy, monetary power, reserve currency, transmission mechanism, monetary statecraft, global liquidity, distributional economicsAbstract
The article reconceptualises sterling’s post-imperial role as an institutionally determined regime in which monetary reach stems less from economic mass than from jurisdictional authority, London market infrastructure, and credible crisis backstops. It defines a “sterling order” as an infrastructural–juridical configuration and shows how English-law contracting, network externalities, sterling-collateral liquidity, and Bank of England interventions sustain conditional resilience while reproducing hierarchy and asymmetric distribution. Privilege survives as convenience premia and intermediation rents, while crises transmit via liquidity spirals and confidence shocks. The framework informs the diagnosis of fragilities, non-bank backstops, payment-settlement resilience, and mitigation of unequal burdens.
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