The Introduction frames global trade as a central arena where the crisis of neoliberalism becomes politically legible and geopolitically explosive. It argues that the post-2008 era transformed trade from a largely technocratic domain into a stage for nationalist performance, elite fragmentation, and coercive statecraft. Using Trump’s tariff politics as a diagnostic case, the Introduction shows how “trade shocks” operate simultaneously as material disruptions (deindustrialization, inequality, supply-chain volatility) and as cultural-symbolic shocks (racialized narratives of betrayal, masculinist sovereignty, and anti-globalist resentment). The book’s guiding approach—Cultural Political Economy—treats trade regimes as historically constructed, institutionally enforced, and discursively legitimized projects. The Introduction previews the central arc: neoliberal trade globalization generated countermovements that range from emancipatory re-embedding to xenophobic reaction, and the struggle over post-neoliberal trade governance is inseparable from contests over democracy, empire, and ecological survival.