Long Waves of Growth, Hegemonic Power, and Climate Change in the World Economy: Dutch, British, Us and Chinese Capitalism and Structural Polycrises

This book investigates eras of major geopolitical and socioeconomic power, development, relative demise and potential renewal, for four major political economies. It concentrates on the Dutch Golden Age of the late 1500s and 1600s, British hegemony of the 1800s, Pax Americana of the 1900s, and Chinese potential hegemony of the 2000s, as well as long wave patterns of change over successive centuries to the present (and to some degree into the future).

Dutch, British, US and Chinese economies are situated within patterns of long-term successive rise and fall (and fall and rise) of economic growth, hegemony and climate change in the world political economy, including linkages between core, periphery and semi-periphery. Patterns of multiple crises tend to appear in-between hegemonic periods, and climate change often undergoes complex dynamics through time, while currently climate anomalies are emerging during mostly long wave downswings and polycrises in the world economy.

Contemporary themes of the book include the ongoing competition for world domination between the US and China, the conflict over Ukraine-Taiwan that some think may generate world-war 3, the climate change crisis that continues to plague the world, and whether the world and its major economies are likely to undergo a Golden Age into the future. Chapter 7 of this book on US hegemony and long waves includes extracts of material that won the Myrdal Prize for Book of the Year Prize from EAEPE as well as Journal Article of the Year from Curtin Business School. Ideas from parts of Chapter 9 emanate from a volume that won Book of the Year Award from CBS. A climate change paper that won Journal Article of the Year Awards from EAEPE and CBS informed ideas that are used in several parts of this book.

The book outlines key stylized facts from the analysis and presents hypotheses for further investigation on the relationship between long-term growth, hegemony and climate change. The book uses the work of Kondratiev, Schumpeter, and company, themes in economic history, modern political economy schools, and the principles of political economy contingency paradigm to reformulate long wave, hegemony and climate change hypotheses and empirics.

​​Phillip Anthony O’Hara has a PhD in political economy, held a personal chair at Curtin University, and is currently Director of the Global Political Economy Research Unit (GPERU) in Perth, Australia. He specializes in studying concepts and principles, major problems of the world, institutional change and adjustment, global political economy, history of the world, and scholarly biography. He has published over 100 articles in refereed journals and edited books, 16 volumes of books and special issues of journals, was President of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), and currently is on the editorial or international advisory boards of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, Panoeconomicus, the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, and Terra Economicus. His major books include (among others) Principles of Institutional and Evolutionary Political Economy: Applied to Current World Problems, the two-volume Encyclopedia of Political Economy, the four-volume International Encyclopedia of Public Policy, plus Growth and Development in the Global Political Economy, as well as Global Political Economy and the Wealth of Nations. He has won many awards for his research, including Journal Article of the Year, and Book of the Year, from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) and from Curtin Business School, Researcher of the Year from CBS, as well as the Clarence Ayres Award from AFEE.