World Financial Orders challenges the predominance of neo-liberalism as a mode of knowledge about contemporary world finance, and claims that it neglects the social and political bases as well as the malign consequences of change. He looks to the field of International Political Economy (IPE) to construct an alternative mode, one that critically restores society and politics. An 'historical' approach to IPE is advanced that accounts for modern world finance since the seventeenth century as a succession of structurally distinct hierarchical social orders. Comparative historical inquiry across modern world finance reveals the unique character of the contemporary order. This order combines new forms of credit practices, decentralized and de-territorial spatiality, change in the very nature of financial power, unprecedented multilateral governance arrangements and contradictions that threaten its own future. This book will be of interest to those working in the field of IPE and to those scholars, researchers and students from across the social sciences who seek to challenge the common-sense, neo-liberal explanation of contemporary world finance.