If you listen regularly to much of the debate around major multilateral trade initiatives, such as the so-called ‘Doha Development Round’, or the multiple variants of ‘Aid for Trade’ schemes that every now and then come into fashion, you have probably on many occasions concluded that we have, as a global people, barely snapped out of the self-indulgent 1960s.

You can almost hear Samuel Huntington's typewriter clattering away, ‘modernization theory’ after ‘modernization theory’ dribbling down the ribbon like so much cheap ink. The high notes are of course Wallersteinian, with every chord striking home such strong points as: ‘core’, ‘periphery’, ‘metropolitan’, ‘dependency’, ‘de-industrialization’ etc., though of course it is also true that the language in current use has done away with certain words and brought in a considerable number of new ones.

That the structure of world trade has not changed – as far as inequity, underdevelopment and exploitation are concerned – is nearly the most uncontested truism in modern-day written and oral geoeconomic literature. The enduring relevance for many a latter-day global theorist of the Polanyis, Habermases and even the Gadamers in the description of the North–South imbalance of power, influence, sovereignty and authority speaks powerfully to the relentless persistence of that intellectual ideology.

Like all truisms, however, this grand consensus disintegrates very shabbily when it leaves the mantelpiece and enters the toolkit of enquiry.