The right of governments to employ capital controls has always been the official orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund, and the organization's formal rules providing this right have not changed significantly since the IMF was founded in 1945. But informally, among the staff inside the IMF, these controls became heresy in the 1980s and 1990s, prompting critics to accuse the IMF of indiscriminately encouraging the liberalization of controls and precipitating a wave of financial crises in emerging markets in the late 1990s.

This book offers a new approach to the history of English. Contemporary linguistic research in various areas - ranging from discourse analysis and stylistics to literacy and the study of pidgins and creoles - raises new historical questions. Access to large corpora of English has in recent years enabled scholars to assess the minutiae of linguistic change in much greater detail than before, and consequently the timing and interpretation of events is having to be reconsidered. Furthermore, the focus of interest in a history of the language is rather different in the 1990s than it was a decade and more ago, and this book reflects this shift.