John O'Regan's original and critically engaging Global English and Political Economy seeks to account for the continued global dominance of English, particularly standard English, despite much scholarly debate aimed at questioning and debunking its supremacy. While appreciating the contemporarily popular disciplinary perspectives on global English—World Englishes, English as a lingua franca, translanguaging, superdiversity stances, and so on—for the insights they furnish on English linguistic diversity and change, O'Regan stresses the need to see beyond claims to diversity recognition and consider the root causes underlying the widespread hegemony of standard English.

Adopting a critical-realist-cum-Marxist world-systems perspective, he retroactively traces the global spread of English and its ongoing hegemony as a normative form to the rise of the capitalist world-system and the endless accumulation and circulation of capital within it. O'Regan undertakes a longue durée study of the dominance of English and explains at length how English has been spreading its influence since the origins of the capitalist world economy in the sixteenth century and up to the present day. He argues that it has done this via the successive ascendancies of Britain and the United States as capitalist world-economies in the world-system. As O'Regan argues in his book, the global persistence of English in its standard form is structured within the enduring capitalist world order itself where English has acted as a ‘vehicular free rider’ (5) on capital. He illustrates the privileged symbiotic relationship of English with capital through Marx's formula for capital accumulation, M-C-M’ which he modifies to M^E-C^E-M’^E thus signalling the presence of English in the various moments of capital and its circulation. In this way, according to O'Regan, English has acted as a transactional lingua franca and free rider on capital and he provides a detailed historical account of how English has been implicated in this process for the past 400 years.

Through critically sharp and thorough argumentation, O'Regan points out that the widespread supremacy of standard English is vested in the structural power it has accrued from the capitalist world-system and in diverse geographical regions—India, China, Africa, Japan, Latin America, and so on—over centuries, and it is for this reason that standard English occupies a basis of power too solid to be shaken off simply through arguments in favour of diversity recognition. As he emphasises, approaches to linguistic diversity and English translingualism that have gained in popularity during the last few decades still need to face the ‘longer reality—and longue durée’ (35) of the hegemonic dominance of normative English over the last four centuries. O'Regan's political economic analysis of the global spread of English thus raises important questions for perspectives that contend that the hegemony of standard English is simply a discursive construct whose time has passed. Deeply insightful and intellectually stimulating, O'Regan's book will be essential reading for scholars and students of applied linguistics, World Englishes, and associated fields of study.