A plethora of influences, inspirations, experiences and encounters prompted me to write this book. But if I was to nominate the seminal moment in its evolution, then it would have to be one morning in the middle of September 2003, when I met with a senior economist in his office at the World Bank on H Street in Washington DC to talk about the place of human rights within the work of the Bank. I was doing some preliminary research for a Senior Fulbright Scholarship project that I was to take up in 2004 on that same subject. My host was and is a highly respected economist and strategic thinker both inside and outside the Bank. He was most hospitable, not least for honouring the meeting in the first place given the deluge of work that was pouring into his in-tray following the collapse of the Cancún ministerial trade talks barely twenty-four hours earlier. I enjoyed the encounter and I learnt a lot. During the meeting he said one thing in particular that struck me then and stayed with me thereafter. We were discussing the nature of human rights, and from that building a picture of what impact Bank operations had on them, and they on the Bank. We agreed that the Bank's impact on matters of people's economic and social welfare was profound, as indeed one would expect given the Bank's goals to alleviate poverty and bolster standards of living.