The title of The Evolution of the Trade Regime provides an implicit answer to an unasked question: Is this regime the product of evolution or intelligent design? The question is neither as flippant nor as unprecedented as it might sound. Dean Acheson quite deliberately entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation (New York: Norton, 1969), immodestly asserting that the post-war challenge was ‘just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis’ (preface). The United States played an indispensable, if not omnipotent, role in the establishment of global order and the creation of international institutions. While these bodies had many distinct objectives, from mutual security to economic development and trade liberalization, they were all part of the same grand design. Like Acheson, the authors of hegemonic stability theory saw an intelligence, and a power, behind the design of the post-war trade regime. This core concept of political economy holds that an open trading system is a public good that will be underprovided unless a single country has both the motive (economic efficiency) and the means (political power) to provide it. Great Britain had played this role in the nineteenth century, and the United States took it up in the twentieth.

The theory of hegemonic stability provides the point of departure for this book, which examines the prospects for the trade regime in a post-hegemonic period. Even if the regime needed a higher power for its creation, might it be capable of meeting new challenges when that hegemon is in relative decline? Here the authors adopt an evolutionary perspective. ‘The challenge for any institution’, they argue, ‘is to devise, ex ante, a mechanism that allows the organization to respond to environmental changes, ex post’ (page 9). They see the transition from GATT to WTO as an adaptive response that has thus far proven to be successful, if problematic. The question now is whether the process of institutional mutation can continue, and thus allow the WTO to survive internal and external challenges.

If the title suggests the main theme, the eclectic methodology is signaled by the subtitle: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO. In contrast to the typical ‘big picture’ book, in which we see the regime from the perspective of a single discipline, this book seeks to blend views from each of the Big Three into a unified text. The writers include one economist (Josling), one political scientist (Goldstein), one lawyer (Barton), and yet another author with one foot in each of the latter two professions (Steinberg); no biologists, theologians, or non-Americans made the squad. In place of the usual hallmarks of a collaborative venture, such as a single editor and a series of chapters under separate bylines, they have instead opted for a collective authorship in which no chapters are individually attributed. This rejection of the traditional division of labor is appropriate for a text that steps over disciplinary boundaries in order to examine the consequences of diffused power.

The authors see two major issues arising in the next decade, these being the legitimacy of the WTO system and the possibility that globalism will be undermined by regionalism. The questions over the WTO's legitimacy stem in part from the expanding scope of issues that now fall within the rules of the system. A regime that began with a narrow focus on tariffs and other border measures now covers a much wider array of policy instruments, many of which are employed behind the border. The proliferation of rules has made the trading regime more comprehensive, but the authors argue that this expanding scope has also given rise to an ‘authoritative gap’ that ‘reflects the regime's inability to recast its rules and norms of behavior in line with the changing interests and power of its members’ (page 2). The drift towards regionalism is, paradoxically enough, accelerated by the growing membership of the WTO, in which ‘the proliferation of regional and bilateral agreements indicates that it does not satisfy all the trade regime requirements of its members’ (page 178).

This is not the first text to identify the problems of overreaching and regionalism, but the authors explore them in a lively fashion. Their discussion of the tensions between the legislative and judicial functions of the regime is especially useful, examining such issues as gapfilling (‘judicial lawmaking on a question for which there is no legal text directly on point’ [page 75]) and clarification (‘judicial lawmaking on a question for which there is legal text but that text needs clarification’ [ibid.]). The book regrettably does not present any proposed solutions, however, beyond the somewhat pat observation that ‘the international economic order … is changing rapidly’ and the WTO ‘must respond to these changes to maintain its relevance’ (page 217).

Some aspects of the presentation could be improved. The intended audience, and thus the assumed level of knowledge, are not always clear. Did the authors write this book largely for specialists who are familiar with the key events, and for whom a recapitulation is sufficient, or is the book also suitable for novices? Newcomers might quickly be lost. Some of the more significant aspects of the GATT/WTO's evolution, such as the gradual incorporation of provisions that extend special and differential treatment to developing countries, are scattered across different chapters. The book offers useful historical background, but it does not attach many dates to the relevant events. While some of these chronological details are missing, others are provided in puzzling profusion. There is no list of the distinct rounds and their accomplishments, for example, but a full page is devoted to listing the names and nationalities of the director generals and their deputies from 1947 to 2005. Similarly, there is no summary of the main provisions of GATT 1947 or other legal instruments, but the WTO's flowchart of the dispute-settlement process is reproduced in its entirety. The text is not free from factual errors, such as the assertion that before Doha ‘no new round was initiated without authorization from the US Congress of a grant to the president of negotiating authority’ (page 44); in fact, the interval between the ministerial declaration and the grant of negotiating authority was shorter for Doha (nine months) than it was for either the Tokyo Round (15 months) or the Uruguay Round (23 months). One suspects that the flow of argument might have been improved if the authors had opted to designate one of their number as the editor, with full powers to prune and revise.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, The Evolution of the Trade Regime makes a useful contribution to the literature. For those who want to place the current problems in a larger perspective, this book would be a natural selection.