Abstract

By all accounts, the distinguished economist Jagdish Bhagwati's recent rigorous and urbane defense of the material and social benefits of globalization, In Defense of Globalization (2004), is likely to become a classic. According to Ernesto Zedillo, the former President of Mexico, for instance, the book constitutes "a precise rebuttal of the most common and pernicious fallacies about globalization." In this essay, I offer a reading of Bhagwati's book through the argument of grace as it is articulated in one of his favorite Shakespearean plays, The Merchant of Venice. I do this in order to draw attention to some of the cultural problems inherent in globalization that literary criticism seems more able to illuminate than instrumentalist economics.

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