STATE FORMATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ...

STATE FORMATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD MARKET

Philip McMichael

[Abridged version of article in Power and Social Theory, Volume 6, 1987, pp. 187-237. JAI Press.]

I. INTRODUCTION In spite of the conceptual advances in recent writings on the modern state,1 there has been little attention paid to its world-historical dimension.2 Two consequences of this focus on the ‘internal’ character of the state are that (a) there is ordinarily an implicit assumption that ‘economy,’ or ‘capitalism,’ is a national phenomenon, and (b) there is necessarily a serious neglect of the changing context of the modern state. This does not mean, however, that all analyses of state politics and/or state-formation processes require an account of the international setting. Rather, it means that a more comprehensive approach to the state would reveal the ways in which international relations are internalized, or embedded, in state structures and practices. In this manner, our conceptualization of ‘the state’ would of necessity assume a greater historical dimension -- meaning that the analyst would proceed from the notion that the state is continually being re-formed as a political relation mediating domestic and foreign social forces. If the focus is internal, there is always the danger of linear assumptions about the state -- whether at the level of identifying a process of progressive approximation of an ideal-typical conception of the state3 or at that of comparing instances of state formation with a historically advanced case, qua model.4 Furthermore, analysis of class politics will often evaluate instances from the point of view of historicist assumptions about class formation and class consciousness derived from abstract laws of capitalist development. In these cases, the politics of local class relations discount or ignore historic advantages or disadvantages deriving from that state's structural position in the international division of labor.5 The inclusion of a world-historical dimension would, in my opinion, serve to check these limitations. That is, it would not presuppose the state as an empirical given, rather, it would locate the state in history (both past and present) to enable us to better understand its social content.6 This paper represents an attempt to conceptualize state formation as a property of the consolidation of international capitalism. That is not to say that the state and its constituent forces derive from a (reified) capitalist world-system. Rather, it is an attempt to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the dimensions of state formation, by incorporating the world-historical context. The latter is not an external

dimension so much as it is an immanent dimension. That is, if the capitalist world market (which unifies various production systems) depends upon states to secure and regulate its operation, then it logically follows that the (world) history of capital is embedded in the history of states. In particular, it manifests itself in the processes of class formation and political struggle, which precipitate state practices.7 My assumption is that there is a determinate and reciprocal relationship between the modern state and the history of capital (as an international relation). This is not to say that the origins of the modern state are reducible to the international history of capital. It is to assert, at least, that there has been a mutual structuring process in which each social form: ‘state’ and ‘capital,’ have differentially shaped each other according to their distinct but combined ‘histories.’ The lack of historical coincidence between them is clearest at the inception of the modern world. Elements of the modern state predated capitalism. That is, its political and military antecedents (however fragile) were vested in the private power wielded and contested by feudal princes.8 These were then institutionalized in the Absolutist period, at the same time as modern capitalism was institutionalized within the Absolutist state--especially via the inclusion of Roman law precepts regarding private property. This particular process of regulation of ownership rights is quite properly viewed as a threshold of political and economic fusion that marked a new stage of' 'nationalization' 9 of (formerly ‘long-distance’) trade. The image is of a politically sponsored commercial involution in which capitalist relations obtained their domestic foundations. These mercantilist practices, however, were not simply the genesis of a national political economy. They extended to, and indeed presupposed, an international arena.10 Because of this I wish to specify ‘capitalism’ as including international relations -- not only quite distinct from the ‘transnational’ activities of merchants in earlier times, but also as precisely having its genesis in the fusion of state and commercial capital. The latter was at one and the same time a nationalization and internationalization of capital, in the sense that the economy of Absolutist rule was premised upon a (mercantilist) world market based in rival colonial systems. In other words, the ‘history of capital’ dated from the integration of age-old merchant capital into the structure (via legal and administrative means) and functioning (via mercantilist trade and the national debt) of the early modern state. It must be stressed that this is a conceptual issue, in that I am suggesting that the ‘world market’ of capital (whatever its form -- mercantilist, laissez-faire, or ‘internal’ to the multinational corporate organization) only began when states organized markets and provided the conditions for systematic accumulation of capital through the regulation of private property as a social construct involving labor force formation, regulation of banking, contract law, and so forth. Market organization in conjunction with legalizing ownership rights to mobile capital, via the state, institutionalized capital's (qua merchant capital initially) distinctive ability to unify regions or systems of production. This political process constructed a world market: “[t]he modern history of capital dates from the creation in the sixteenth century of a worldembracing commerce and a world-embracing market.” 11 Elsewhere,12 I illustrate the formation of the Australian settler state as a moment in the construction of the nineteenth-century capitalist world market under British hegemony. This moment particularizes my

general argument, which is that (a) one of the state’s roles is as a vehicle of international, and hence national, capitalist development (a profoundly uneven process); (b) each state experiences distinctive paths of capitalist development, and yet there remain universal theoretical conditions and/or tendencies -for example, all states must negotiate their (constituents’) relationship to an international economy; and (c) the ‘world market,’ like ‘capital,’ is a fluid, historical concept, and its (political) form and (socioeconomic) content change as capitalism and the (hegemonic) state mature. Colonial Australia was in effect a territorial extension of metropolitan nationality.13 As such, the elements of an incipient nation-state presented themselves in a direct and historically uncompromised form. Where the indigenous peoples embodied the only noncapitalist relationships, these were materially inconsequential, even if their destruction was a central cultural and ideological assumption of the colonial society. The settler colony was an extension of imperial England and therefore most likely to display the properties of its progenitor: Britain's international regime of industrial capitalism. The colonial state played a critical role in establishing a social nexus that productively matched British capital with immigrant labor. And this social nexus formed through those commodity relations established around key resources such as land and staple products. This was the context within which settler classes forged an increasingly representative state, in turn qualifying the imperial relationship. In these various ways colonial society and state emerged within and exerted influences upon a world-historical context animated by the dynamics of British hegemony. We now turn to that context.

II. SPECIFYING THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WORLD ECONOMY Just as the mercantilist state was the vehicle of market integration for merchant capital, so the British state was the vehicle of world market integration for industrial capital. Industrial capital did not act alone in revolutionizing world commerce and economy; rather, it depended upon a political reorganization of the international economy. Conceptually, ‘industrial capital’ presumes a world market for its expanded reproduction, as Marx wrote: Before the invention of machinery, the industry of a country was carried on chiefly with raw materials that were the products of its own soil: in England-wool, in Germany-flax, in Francesilks and flax, in the East Indies and the Levant-cotton, etc. Thanks to the application of machinery and steam, the division of labor was able to assume such dimensions that large-scale industry, detached from the national soil, depends entirely on world trade, on international exchange, on an international division of labor.14 But historically capital’s world market depended upon the mediation of the state. And in the process of reorganization of the international economy from international markets constituted by several colonial systems to a unitary world market, the British state played the decisive role.

It was not just a question of Britain being the dominant state in the nineteenth-century states system. It was also that the British state was in a position to impose a model of industrial capital accumulation upon international commerce. The condition for this was the unification of the world market, which rested upon a combination of British naval supremacy and the principles of commercial liberalism and liberal constitutionalism. To the extent that these political-economic organizing principles were adopted as the modus operandi of nineteenth-century state participation in world commerce, Britain achieved a situation of world hegemony.15 Britain's hegemony was fundamentally embedded in the universalist propensities of industrial capital and its drive to continually revolutionize commerce. The vehicle was free trade, in a double sense: to open markets and liberalize regimes, and to construct an international division of labor around Britain's industry. These developments depended on a historic threefold reorganization of the international market system: (1) the transcending of hitherto politically enclosed and finite markets associated with mercantilism; (2) the creation of new markets in European and non-European regions by underselling local artisans and manufacturers with cheap mass-produced goods; and (3) the establishment of colonial and ex-colonial regions as primary goods exporters to fuel Britain's re-export trade. The global character of British capitalism combined an imperial state structure,16 strengthened by the post-Napoleonic War settlements, and a global trading apparatus constructed in the eighteenth century.17 The political settlements were fundamentally asymmetrical: British imperial power contrasted with the Continental political balance of relatively unorganized states with comparatively localized economies. This facilitated the establishment of British economic (industrial and commercial) superiority in the world through an extensive (quantitative) growth of markets for manufactured consumer goods. Britain's Industrial Revolution was essentially the application of age-old techniques of textile manufacture to world market proportions.18 It is my contention that the British state was engaged in reproducing another colonial system -- this time on a world scale. With the displacement of rival colonial powers in the early nineteenth century, Britain was in a position to fashion a world economy resembling its colonial system and reap the benefits of international commercial supremacy. This was the foundation of the ‘workshop of the world’ ideal. (After the 1840s crisis in textile industrialism, Britain switched to the role of ‘engineering workshop’ with exports of capital goods such as the railway.) Thus, despite the liberal rhetoric, Britain had mercantilist designs on the world. This contradiction framed the changing fortunes of British hegemony. The mercantilist intent could not last once rivals digested free trade. It encouraged, rather than suppressed, industrialization in metropolitan states. Not only did they have access to growing peripheral markets, but also free trade distributed the productive and military possibilities inherent in British capital goods exports in mid century. Such technology was a condition for a mercantilist challenge to British hegemony. Following the overproduction crisis of the 1870s, rival states protected their domestic economies (organized around the technology of the Second Industrial Revolution) and their favored overseas markets, thereby dismantling the unity of Britain's world market.

However, Britain's ‘mercantilist intent’ was in form only, The market structure British capitalism projected into the world economy replicated the social division of labor that mercantilist states imposed upon their colonial relations. Where once this structure served the needs of respective metropolitan states. it now expressed the needs of British capital. But this was precisely the differentia specifica of the Pax Britannica. It may have been mercantilist in its framework and in the sense that this structure depended on the British state; however, its content was of a different order -- it was defined by industrial capital. That is, the Pax Britannica broke through the limits of mercantile capital accumulation, reconstructing a truly global economy. In this sense, British capitalism fundamentally transformed the world. British capitalism transformed the world along two related dimensions: industrial capital socially integrated world producers through the acceleration of commodity exchanges by the City of London's discount market, thus destroying space by time; and capitalism assumed a national form as states liberalized via political elevation of their bourgeoisies, and geared their currencies, and so their policies, to the ‘self-regulating’ requirements of the sterling/gold standard.19 Through military force and commercial diplomacy (e.g. at the inception of Latin American republicanism), the British state constructed a non-European periphery for metropolitan Europe.20 This stemmed from the British economy's specialized trading structure with the world. Because of the attrition of European navies and seaborne trade in the Napoleonic Wars, the subsequent commercial assaults of British goods, and general public insolvency on the Continent, Britain established a colonial relationship to the Continental economy following the wars. British loan capital flowed to Europe, which became Britain’s principal market for manufactured goods (and re-exports) and the source of a third of its primary imports in 1830.21 At the global level, food imports increased from one-seventh of total imports in the 1820s to one-third by 1850; ninety percent of the exports were manufactured goods.22 This trading structure, and its liberalization, produced a mid-century cyclical expansion in which world trade increased by eighty percent in the 1850s and by fifty percent, in the 1860s.23 Steamships and railroads (the symbols of industrialism) opened up European hinterlands and peripheral regions overseas to more intensive commercial exploitation. This produced a fifty percent increase in world crop cultivation between 1840 and 1880, half of which was from North America and Australia,24 and a switch from international trade in luxury items to a growing world trade in agricultural produce and raw materials. This shift from colonial trading patterns to world commodity trade was expressed in the increasing domination of the staples trade by world, rather than local, prices.25 The axis of this global network was the City of London, the clearinghouse of international finance and the source of sterling as the world’s currency.26 Britain's rule of the waves, and hence of world commerce, compelled other metropolitan states in particular to compete on Britain's terms. National prosperity could no longer be assured by mercantilist doctrine and practice, which were challenged by Britain's industrial capitalist regime. Liberal currents abroad in Europe were in Britain's long-term interest as popular and commercial classes combined in the aftermath of the 1840s economic crisis to contest the political and economic shortcomings of autocratic regimes.27 Following military defeat of these uprisings, several Continental states instituted reforms to

coopt the popular classes via the institutionalization of bourgeois influence in political and administrative structures (still primarily ruled by traditional social elites). These reforms (such as in civil service, public education, and market organization, including central banking) constructed the political framework for capitalism within states28 and complemented the adoption of economic liberalism in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (promoting mobility of land, labor, capital, goods, and people qua immigrants). Given the supremacy of British commerce and technology, and to the extent that such reforms intensified world commerce as they embraced Britain’s free trade regime, British hegemony grew. In this sense, British hegemony depended upon the transformation of the metropolitan nation-states. In terms of widening the sphere of world trade Britain pursued regime liberalization beyond Europe not simply to reduce protectionism but also to secure stable trading conditions. Here the principle of fixed foreign exchanges (which Polanyi remarked ‘was coincident with civilization’ 29) necessitated discretionary national budgets and hence constitutional government. In practice the principle rested on the near-universal acceptance of sterling as the international currency ---balances of which were maintained by foreign bank branches in London to facilitate transfer of bills payable in sterling. This reflected the City of London's axial role in world trade and finance as well as Britain's unwavering adherence to the gold standard from 1821-1914,30 such that sterling was as ‘good as gold.’ Precisely because of sterling's significance, Britain could promote its free trade regime in the world at the same time as London could manipulate sterling balances to maintain liquidity in the multilateral trading system centered on London.31 While the world market was thus integrated in ‘self-regulating’ fashion into state structures, the latter became the locus of the national reproduction of capital. This was because the fixed foreign exchange system linked the fortunes of capital (and its dependent classes) to the national trade balance via interest rates.32 That is, a nation's balance-of-payments situation affected the adjusting of domestic interest rates (e.g. upward to attract capital when there was a national trade deficit), and this in turn governed the possibilities for capital accumulation. As capital depended on the state of national trade, so states internalized the conditions of (world) capitalist competition in their commercial policy. Thus, in the center of world capitalism particularly, the nation-state emerged as the characteristic political structure of the world market.33 It is at the same time essential to see the ‘national’ limits that this period of international capitalist development placed upon capital. Given this kind of structuring, it is not surprising that the challenge to British hegemony assumed nationalist forms. This occurred in the wake of the overproduction crisis of the 1870s resulting from Continental industrialization,34 and the agricultural crisis in Europe, resulting from the competition of cheaper grains from settler regions developed with British capital.35 The social consequences were urban distress and a conservative agrarian mobilization to temper the winds of free trade.36 Economic nationalism emerged as the characteristic political response. Faced, then, with the altered balance of class forces (following political liberalization and industrialization) and fiscal crisis, states renegotiated their relationship to the world economy along neo-mercantilist lines.37

In summary, whatever the trend -- free trade or protectionism -- the structural consequence of British hegemony (in rise or decline) was a centralization of world capital accumulation in metropolitan states as a political exigency. It was not that capitalism was a national phenomenon in the nineteenth century, but rather that the structural constraints particular to the era of British hegemony gave it this appearance.38 However, this should not detract from the global character of this structuring process. This was the era of industrial capital, underwritten by the peculiarly international character of the British state and capital. III. HISTORICAL METHOD While the political history of capital imparts a historical form to the world market, via the reciprocal influence of state and capital, ultimately social change derives from the political consequences of class relations. These relations have a world-historical determinant: they are not simply relations specific to national formations; rather, they embody just as they “shape the global relations between [nations].” 39 The empirical referent of classes, to be sure, is the specific relations they constitute within a particular nation. But theoretically ‘class’ and ‘nation’ -- as social categories -- are themselves historical products. The political relations of capitalism have been universalized precisely through the actions of states and classes. This universalization, however, has presupposed, or occurred within the context of, capital’s world market. That is, from the Absolutist period onward, state-formation has been shaped, and indeed stimulated, by the universalization of the uneven relations of metropolitan capitalist expansion. Two points should be emphasized here: I. Historically, we can distinguish the original European states from successor nation-states, in the sense that the former, in predating capitalism, imposed a definite political structure upon its genesis such that its subsequent expansion projected state organizations globally. Within this era, state formation has thus proceeded within a progressively expanding sphere of capitalist relations of production and exchange -and this has clearly produced a structural differentiation among modern states. Tom Nairn has characterized the distinction thus: The…older states were all constituted in certain key respects before the age of nationalism proper. They are, as a matter of fact, the “original” nation-states which fostered modern capitalism, and whose impact upon the rest of the world precipitated the process of general “development” (imperialism and counter-imperialism) with which nationalism became inextricably linked. For this very reason, as many scholars have indicated, they belong in a rather special category. They themselves evolved prior to the general conditions of uneven development which they foisted on the world. They are not really so much “nation-states” as “state-nations,” in which the factors of nationality had placed a role quite distinct from that they would assume in nationalism proper.40

2. Theoretically, it is possible to make a more general abstract argument that the history of the modern state is coincident with (but not reducible to) the inter-national history of capital. It is possible precisely because of the historical record. That is, insofar as capitalism has generalized itself, and this is marked by both the consolidation of its world market and the proliferation of states, we can now from hindsight abstract the intimations of this universal fact in the organization of the Absolutist state. A narrative view of Absolutism confirms the lineages of, for example, Roman law and its initial recovery in feudal political structures, and cannot therefore conflate the Absolutist state and the rise of capitalism. However, historically informed theory that seeks to conceptualize the modern state in world-historical terms will reverse the narrative view in order to glimpse the emergence of capitalist politics in the Absolutist period. This approach stems from Marx's particular view of the historical method, which he stated as follows: Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the startingpoint as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property. After both have been examined in particular, their interrelation must be examined. It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.41 As far as the modern state is concerned, its integral relationship with capital’s world market can be abstracted as a universal dynamic only when capital has convincingly established its global dominance. Thus, “[a]s a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone.” 42 The perspective I am promoting does not claim to produce a comprehensive analysis of ‘the state’; rather, it seeks to contribute to our theoretical perspective on the modern state by stressing its worldhistorical dimension. Most analyses of the state proceed from the following question: in whose interest and/or to what end does the state operate? Few analyses pose questions from a world-historical perspective. That is, the structural dimensions of the state as a component of a changing international complex, with certain implications for domestic social forces, are generally untheorized. Either the state is taken as a given structure (rather than a produced and reproduced one), or it inhabits a relational international context abstracted into ideal-typical imagery such as neoclassical versions of international relations among discrete states, or dependency and/or world-system versions of permanent geopolitical structures that can take on a life of their own. Even where capitalism is understood to be ‘extra-national,’ there is rarely an attempt to conceive of international capitalist processes and the state in a reciprocal dynamic, governed by dominant forces in the ‘history’ of capitalist politics at that particular time. Let me now review the historic relationship between the state and the world market in more general terms.

IV. STATES AND THE WORLD MARKET How states relate to the world market raises two particular issues: (1) What is meant by ‘the world market’? And, a related question, (2) what are the origins of each? We shall consider the second issue first. There is some dispute over the relation of the state to the rise of capitalism. This concerns causality: Did capitalism produce the modern European state, or vice versa? Or is the state an institution with antecedents predating the capitalist epoch and therefore devoid of a determinate relationship to the rise of capitalism? Perhaps the lightening rod of contention in this debate is the following claim made by proponents of the world-system perspective: Stateness… is not a generic category of political life -- whose varied forms are to be traced within and across civilizations -- but an historically specific category, one distinctive to the relationally formed jurisdictions -- the sovereignties -- of the (initially) European-centred interstate system. It is a category conceptually given by, because factually imposed by, the development processes of the capitalist world-economy.43 Potentially, this perspective posits a historical conception of the nation-state, by contextualizing the conditions of its proliferation within the world-system. Here the properties of strength/weakness are a function of states’ positions within the international division of labor, which affect their production regimes and commercial competitiveness, and therefore revenue possibilities. Such conditions stimulate states’ efforts to improve their position within the world market. This scenario tends to differentiate states in quantitative terms, thereby reducing the modern state to a functional constant. Thus, the problem with this formulation is that it imposes its own generic conception of the state in the era of capitalism -- as if its character was formed and/or in place with the inception of capitalism. At the same time, such a formulation obscures the historical origins of the state-world market relationship: did one precede the other? We know from Wallerstein's historical study that he conflates the emergence of modern states and the world market via a logical argument that gives life to his concept of the world-system: Capitalism has been able to flourish precisely because the world-economy has had within its bounds not one but a multiplicity of political systems. [C]apitalism as an economic mode is based on the fact that the economic factors operate within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control. This gives capitalists a freedom of maneuver that is structurally based.44 This kind of conception becomes ideal-typical largely because it is formulated to distinguish the modern world-system from world empires, based on a single political structure. The juxtaposition provides a logical argument for the long-term viability of the world economy with an international states system, but it provides no account of the particular historical processes involved in the rise of capitalism and the

modern state. Further, in developing such generic terms to describe the components of the world-system we have logical formulations which meet the requirements of systems theory but not of historical theory. This is exemplified in Wallerstein's summary of the origins of “The New European Division of Labor”: But capitalism cannot flourish within the framework of a world-empire. This is one reason why it never emerged in Rome. The various advantages merchants had in the emergent world-economy were all politically easier to obtain than if they had sought them within the framework of a single state, whose rulers would have to respond to multiple interests and pressures. That is why the secret of capitalism was in the establishment of the division of labor within the framework of a world-economy that was not an empire rather than within the framework of a single national state.45 It was not, however, simply a question of advantage and political convenience. It was also the case that the individual states could enhance their financial and commercial interests by integrating mercantile enterprise into the state via property laws and economic policy. This nexus succeeded in linking merchant capitalism to the state at the same time it sanctioned what Wallerstein recognized to be the “various advantages merchants had in the emergent world-economy.” As Anderson remarked: “capital itself is par excellence internationally mobile, thereby permitting its holders to be nationally fixed.” 46 This captures the essential difference between the state as territorially bound and capital as potentially supranational but nevertheless historically embedded in the legal-bureaucratic structure of states. Referring back to Wallerstein, the ‘secret’ of capitalism is not in the antinomy of state and world market in a logical sense. Rather, it lies in the historical process whereby Absolutist states crystallized merchant wealth into capital by the political and legal regulation of commerce, thereby sponsoring the foundations of a world market which constituted the precondition of industrial capital. To posit a functional international structure, which abstracts its elements (by equating capitalism with merchants,47 and Absolutist states with subsequent state forms), deprives capital of its political history. What is at issue is not only the relationship of European states to emergent capitalism but also the specificity of this relationship, given that subsequent state formation outside of the European core has occurred as a consequence of, or in relation to, this metropolitan fact. In other words, even if we grant that the nation-state has become the characteristic political unit of the world economy, we cannot presume a linear replication of the initial European form. The characteristic unevenness of the global accumulation of capital, including the machinations of imperial power, exclude such a homogenizing assumption. Furthermore, it is a mistake to assume that the nation-state is the simple product of capitalism. The lineages of Absolutism confirm this, just as does the study of European imperialism in emphasizing the preexistence in the non-European world of political cultures as preconditions of metropolitan rule. We need to develop a historical theory of the changing character of the state/world market relationship as the state and capitalism develop.48

The prior history of European states is undeniable, but the problem is how to conceptualize the subsequent and reciprocal role of states in consolidating capitalism. Skocpol and Trimberger formulate the following conception: [C]apitalism from its inception has developed within, around, and through a framework of “multiple political sovereignties” -- that is, the system of states that originally emerged from European feudalism and then expanded through the incorporation of pre-existing imperial states, and through colonization followed eventually by decolonization, to cover the entire globe as a system of nations. We must emphasize that, in our view, this changing international system of states was not originally created by capitalism, and throughout modern world capitalist history represents an analytically autonomous level of trans-national reality, interdependent in its structure and dynamics with the world economy, but not reducible to it. 49 This prescription is of two analytically distinct planes -- the ‘states system’ and ‘capitalism.’ It does not attempt to formulate the interdependence in any substantive way, in particular whether and to what extent it is transformative. Reference to Skocpol’s analysis in States and Social Revolutions50 illustrates this. There Skocpol argues for consideration of the influence of ‘international pressures’ and ‘transnational contexts’ on states in crisis, especially at the military and therefore financial level. These contexts – “structures of the world capitalist economy and the international states system” and “world time”-- are never actually theorized as historically structured forces. While there are prior historical events (such as the Industrial Revolution or the Leninist party organizations) that alter historical possibilities for successor revolutionary situations, Skocpol tends to refer to “uneven or competitive transnational relations” (of a politico-military nature) in abstracted terms such as ‘modernization’ pressures. Formal comparative logic is at work here. In the construction of a sophisticated structural model of social revolution, derived from causal regularities across cases, comparative design formalizes conditions (at the level of international relations), and outcomes (in which the prototypical modern bureaucratic state replaces three distinct agrarian bureaucracies). The strength of this argument is that there is a world-historical logic compelling certain macroorganizational forms. However, the political content of these modern states remains insufficiently differentiated because the quite distinct spatio-temporal settings remain untheorized as governed by changing historical relations.51 The historical understanding of the specific nature and direction of interaction between states and the world market in each case is discussed in the general terms of a modernization continuum.52 Even a preliminary periodization, such as mercantilist vs. ‘monopoly’ capitalist eras, distinguishes the French from the Russian and Chinese cases in the history of the modern world, not to mention the quite distinct global structural positions each state inhabited in these periods (where France was a metropolitan European power, Russia an aspiring metropolitan power on Europe's periphery, and China a peripheral non-European state). And so, whereas Skocpol makes a strong case for

the irreducibility of states and the world market, the relationship between them remains problematic beyond the particular model she develops. With respect to state making, Otto Hintze and Perry Anderson have similar conceptions but different causal theories. Each views the early modern state in functional terms, where the monarchs or statesmen centralized power either as an exercise in “political entrepreneurship” concerned with “the creation and provision of means of power for the guaranteeing of safety and legal protection” (Hintze,53 following Max Weber), or as a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination” (Anderson 54). Each writer focuses on the political function of the absolutist state -- Hintze giving primacy to the military aspect: “a tool of power politics in the foreign sphere, but at the same time it served to maintain and extend the sovereign's power at home;” 55 and Anderson conceiving Absolutism as a politicized form of class rule by the European aristocracy. The emphasis on the role or politics is precisely to distinguish the early modern state as a historical interlude between the feudal and capitalist epochs. The shift from dynastic to territorial-based power is significant, as Hintze wrote: “These territorial states did rest in many respects on the feudal system; but they overcame it in their political organization, as England did, because feudalism was no longer needed. They produced the beginnings of a permanent bureaucratic organization, and an effective administration.” 56 Such a shift in the meaning and machinery of power was the precondition for the consolidation of merchant capital. Not only did state organizations now constitute the repository of power, over and above princely wealth and authority, distinguishing private property and public resources, but also the means to the latter’s increase (and security) lay in the development of commerce. Thus Hintze argues “[p]ower politics, mercantilism, and militarism are all related,” 57 and Anderson suggests “a potential field of compatibility … between the nature and programme of the Absolutist State and the operations of mercantile and manufacturing capital.” 58 Structurally, capitalist private property and commerce were integral to the new organization of power. It is at this point that consideration of the ‘world market’ becomes important. If the Absolutist states emerged out of medieval political domains, reformulating the concept and exercise of power, they also enhanced the conditions of merchant capital accumulation in the urban interstices of predominantly agrarian societies. The development of public authority necessarily advanced private property as both a recovery of aristocratic economic power and of Roman law. The extension of property rights was synonymous with the securing of state power insofar as merchants played a key role both commercially and financially.59 It was within this context that the world market emerged. Long-distance trade was an age-old activity, but prior to the Absolutist period it was excluded from gaining a foothold in the politically regulated local trade of medieval towns. Whereas profits on wholesaling between distinct and protected urban centers allowed for the characteristic form of circulation profit of merchant capital, the wealth of merchants in long-distance trade depended precisely on extending the circulation sphere. What Absolutism accomplished was a transformation of this sphere and the possibilities of accumulation. This involved the simultaneous integration of foreign and local markets and legitimation of the rights of merchants in securing this important link.60 Significantly, this was a political

act, as Hintze and Polanyi stress in their accounts or the rise of mercantilism. What Polanyi saw as the ‘nationalization’ of the market by the territorial state imposing “the mercantile system on the fiercely protectionist towns and principalities,” 61 Hintze characterized as “the political protection of capital” as “an indispensable means to political power.” 62 Hoarding of precious metals, and therefore encouragement of export trade, was integral to this goal. As Carr reminds us, “the only way for a nation to expand its markets and therefore its wealth was to capture them from some other nation, if necessary by waging a ‘trade war’.” 63 Anderson observes that the “birth of a multilateral political order, as a single field of competition and conflict between rival States, was thus itself both cause and effect of the generalization of Absolutism in Europe.” 64 In other words, recomposition of political power in Europe and the creation of a world market anchored in the states system mutually conditioned one another. In this way long-distance trade was assimilated to state-sponsored commerce as the precondition of world capitalist development. This combined process has been represented by von Braunmuhl as the reciprocal integration of world market and ‘national economy.’ 65 But in order to remain clear about the genesis of capitalism it is important not to conceptualize the interrelation between mercantilist states and foreign trade in such terms. Under mercantilist doctrine ‘national economy’ included colonies -- in part because of the self-conscious aggrandizement of national wealth via protectionist foreign policy, and in part because whatever ‘national economy’ existed during this period was an extension of the bureaucratic-patrimonial state (delimited as it was in its political infrastructure, and distinct from the later, nineteenth-century, constitutional nationstate). Von Braunmuhl misconceives the political history of capitalism as a permanent and undifferentiated articulation of national and international spheres of accumulation.66 My perspective is one which considers capital accumulation to be an international relation in which states mediate the circulation of capital (as commodities and money) and secure various forms of property or production relations via their organizational and legal capacities. The upshot of this is that states internalize accumulation ‘regimes,’ which are (internationally) uneven and combined -- and therefore neither nationally homogeneous nor serial. Nevertheless the unevenness comes to be structured by the wage-labor relation as the mature and governing principle of capital accumulation. To argue for the international character of capital is to argue that the preconditions of capitalist production by wage labor emerged in the mercantilist system. To be sure, merchant capital is an age-old, or antediluvian, form of capital, but under mercantilist policy its exclusivist propensities (monopolizing trade routes) were put to work by the state by enlarging and sanctioning its exchange activity. The colonial system was precisely the international regime that conjoined political monopoly with world commerce. Industrial capital was the eventual outcome. Marx put it this way: "Slavery has given value to the colonies; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry.” 67 Why? For two reasons: 1. Because industrial capitalism presumed a prior accumulation of capital, and colonial commerce was central to this process68--especially as local European production and trade (including the ‘putting-out system’), limited as it was by traditional agrarian relations and custom, could not match the social

organization of labor for large-scale commodity production available through colonial slavery.69 Slave labor was the first form of expropriated social labor.70 Merchants found the colonial system a ready apparatus with which to prefigure capitalist production and accumulation (and, incidentally, to spur the ‘putting-out system’ in rural Europe).71 This draws attention to the fact that the first forms of large-scale ‘national’ production and exchange appeared as an international relation within the mercantilist system and not within the European territorial state. The state was decisive in the process of ‘primitive accumulation,’ but capital was decisively international in origins and character.

2. Because capital develops out of the circulation of commodities, ‘commerce is both historically as well as conceptually a presupposition for capital.72 Marx repeatedly theorized capital as a “relation” and a “process,” whose “point of departure is money” 73 and whose original activity is the development of exchange. This is the distinguishing feature of merchant capital whose “function consists exclusively of promoting the exchange of commodities, [requiring] no other conditions for its existence…outside those necessary for the simple circulation of commodities and money.” 74 Merchant capital, then, presumes a world trading sphere of disparate and dispersed systems of production unified by exchange. Such activity anticipates the capitalist mode of production which “presupposes production for trade, selling on a large scale, and not to the individual customer, hence also a merchant who does not buy to satisfy his personal wants but concentrates on the purchases of many buyers into his one purchase,” 75 and so extending the commodity form. Historically, the merging of interests of states and merchants, as in the colonial system, channeled these tendencies to universalize exchange increasingly into a politically structured world market, all of which nurtured the rise of industry. The partnership of state and merchant capital in developing colonial trade and national industry in the mercantilist era was a protective one which inevitably entered into a crisis in the later eighteenth century.76 Colonial markets were finite, colonial territories were the object of international military rivalry, and colonial subjects (free and enslaved) were rebellious.77 Within Europe the commercial bourgeoisie contested the regulatory state, as Sir James Steuart observed in 1767: Trade and industry … owed their establishment to the ambition of princes principally with a view to enrich themselves, and thereby to become formidable to their neighbours. But they did not discover, until experience taught them, that the wealth they drew from such fountains was but the overflowing of the spring; and that an opulent, bold, and spirited people, having the fund of the prince's wealth in their own hands, have it also in their power, when it becomes strongly their inclination, to shake off his authority… When once a state begins to subsist by the consequences of industry, there is less danger to be apprehended from the power of the sovereign.78

In other words, the European state's promotion of capitalism (in home and foreign markets) as a means to the ruler's ends, engendered a growing ‘national’ interest in the form of a rising bourgeoisie committed to a positive exploitation of the state machinery for its own commercial ends.79 By the nineteenth century these ends, while premised on international commercial success, were assimilated to what Hintze refers to as the “national principle” whereby “parliamentarism was the tool of capitalism for the political advancement of its interests.” 80 This process of the “democratization of nationalism” had its origins in the initial distinction between public authority and private property that animated the transitional character of Absolutism.81 The politico-legal distinction between public authority and private property facilitated the cumulative and reciprocal development of each, producing the classic division, or opposition, of ‘state’ and ‘society.’ 82 Private property inevitably imposed itself upon the state-making process (in terms of the reciprocal dependence of rulers and merchants, as well as the growing class power of the bourgeoisie). As von Braunmuhl writes: “Once it has embarked upon the process of its development, capital imposes its laws upon the rulers within a defined territorial area, on pain of losing their power through the gradual erosion of its basis, mediated through either internal or external assault.” 82 In short, the partnership into which the early modern state entered with merchant capital, laying the foundations of capital’s world market, transformed both state and capital. By the age of industrial capital their social nexus, predicated on world commerce, took an increasingly national form as the movement and relations of capital insinuated themselves into the home markets and institutions of the metropolitan states. The decisive change was the development of wage labor as capitalist production emerged in the metropolitan states. While this appears to the historian as a development over time, it was in fact a consequence of the spatial developments inherent in the colonial system.83 As I have argued, the colonial system combined and concentrated the circulation activities of merchant capital into a politically articulated project. Capital accumulation became a competitive goal of the mercantilist state. What was formerly nonwage labor, coordinated by merchants for commodity production, became ‘precapitalist’ labor as the history of capital evolved.84 The colonial system was a principal mechanism for generating surpluses for the metropolitan economy, and markets for metropolitan manufacture. This global process of capital accumulation anticipated and then coexisted with wage labor, as the Industrial Revolution heralded a new regime in the history of capital. The regime was new in two senses: 1. With the consolidation of wage labor, capital now controlled rather than mediated production, and the enhanced scale and productivity generated new markets, new dimensions of commoditization,85 and a mode of self-expansion requiring the relaxation of mercantilist regulations. 2. Unlimited access to world, rather than colonial, markets was a central feature of the requirements of industrial capital; its dynamic depended on developing and organizing a division of labor based on capitalist production, rather than on the dictates of mercantile doctrine. Colonial systems of production using precapitalist labor were still part of the industrial regime, but where once they had been the

“pedestals” 86 of commercial capitalism they were now subordinated (via the law of value) to the competitive requirements of wage labor in a truly global economy.87 In short, the world economy of the nineteenth century stemmed not from the ambitions of state builders but rather from the reproductive dynamics of industrial capital. These dynamics centered upon the expansion of the wage-labor form, which in turn accelerated the production and circulation of commodities on a world scale. The historical origins of wage labor lay in political decisions attending the spread of commodity exchange,88 as private property developed under Absolutism. In the nineteenth century, wage labor originated in the processes of expanded reproduction of capital with the rise of modern industry, as rural outworkers and handicraftsmen lost their markets to industrial commodities. Capital now created its own conditions for accumulation, depending of course on the state for the protection of private property and the institutional infrastructure of the market (such as labor market legislation, colonial policy, and foreign diplomacy). Given the changed content of the universalist propensities of capital, namely, its selfexpanding capacities premised on the wage-labor form, commercial competition depended less on trade monopoly and more on commodity prices. It was this fundamental shift that underlay the reformulation of the state-market relationship. On the one hand, the economy became embedded in society as the commodity form emerged as the principle of social organization and as metropolitan states relaxed their historic control of markets.89 On the other, non-British metropolitan statesmen responded to this principle by encouraging the formation of national (industrial) capital in the face of British commercial exploitation of the newly constituted world market. That is, metropolitan states no longer so much created markets as they institutionalized (via regime liberalization and central banking) national capital as an organizational component of the world market. In this sense, (capital’s) world market was internalized within the nation-state, which in the nineteenth century became the locus of reproduction of capital. This may have produced a greater differentiation of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic,’ but these two categories of social life were merely reintegrated within a complex increasingly defined by the commodity form, and yet given expression within the state structure. In sum, this paper has attempted to distinguish the mercantile and industrial phases of capitalism and, in so doing, to emphasize the distinct character and relationships of ‘state’ and ‘world market’ in these different historical periods. V. CONCLUSION The goal of this essay has been to argue that the specificity of the process of nineteenth-century world market expansion through state-formation expressed the dominant principles at work in the world industrial capitalist regime produced (and reproduced) through the mechanisms of British hegemony; and that this specificity, being historical, could illuminate the more general point that the social field inhabited by the modern state is an international process of capital accumulation that, for historical reasons, is embedded in the very politico-organizational structure of states. It must be stressed that this approach is not intended to be definitive, I am not concerned here with the problem of the relation of the state to its constituent

population, qua citizens or classes, which invokes the questions of instrumentality or autonomy.90 What I am concerned with is suggesting a certain perspective which could enhance our understanding of the historical forces working through the state that express its international context. I have argued in this paper that ‘classes’ and ‘nations’ (or ‘states’) are social products of a cumulative world-historical (relational) setting produced by evolving capitalism. This may seem abstract until the reader recalls that ‘evolving capitalism’ is an empirical process rooted in a developing nexus between state structures, capitalists, and subordinate classes. We cannot understand this sociopolitical complex as a set of historical relations until we abstract sufficiently to see that the history of capital (as both social relation and process) generates ‘classes’ through the political organization of exchange, generating the modern ‘nationstate.’ 91 This does not mean that the world market has a life of its own, that there is a (world) division of labor that determines all else. What it does mean is that the category ‘world market’ is a profoundly historical category embedded in states and class relations but not analytically excluded by, or secondary to, them. Claudia von Braunmuhl claims: The appropriate analytical level is thus that of the world market, and the task before us is to explain its differentiation as national capitals and its organization as nation states… [A]ttention should be turned to specifying the conditions under which capital -- the movement of which is international in its very essence -- is particularised into national capitals and their delimited political organization in the national state.92 By positing the ‘world market’ as the analytically prior concept, von Braunmuhl is arguing for a view of the state as the political organization of capital. Here the concept actually implies capital’s internationalist character, which is historically realized and simultaneously fettered by the development of the modern state. It is this contradictory movement that allows a contextual understanding of the origins and character of the state. This does not mean that state organizations or national politics and constituencies are all derivations of global relations. This is far from it. What it does mean is that, given the political dimension of the ‘history’ of capital, the states system’s proliferation is an inherent feature of the expansion of world capitalism. What it also means is that the formation of capitals necessarily assumes a political and (in this case) a national form. The representatives of capital -- those who accumulate, concentrate, and centralize capital -- situate themselves nationally. That is the political reality of capital -- insofar as the state guarantees private property, and capital (which originates in exchange) is necessarily competitive. The state, the political unit of the world market within which capital moves, gives expression to competition, whether at the local (juridical) level or at the international (politico-military) level. The analytical autonomy of the ‘world market’ concept is significant. It allows us to see the unity that capital imposes through the (world) market, a unity constituted by competition and structured by class politics and state policies. It is a quite distinct unity from that posited by world system theory, which is preeminently an empirical unity constituted by a permanent geopolitical division among regions defined by

their role in a world social division of labor. This empirical definition of ‘world economy’ reduces all production systems to an undifferentiated conception of capitalism such that the animating principle is the structural logic of the system itself. Alternatively, the analytical unity implied by the use of ‘capital’s world market’ in this study carries a historical conception of capitalism as a developing complex of relations animated by class politics, which are governed by the competitive logic of capital accumulation. Classes may originate in production relations, but the conditions of their reproduction include not only political relations, but also exchange relations. It is in the latter that the law of value (under industrial capital) operates, whereby the competitive position of individual commodity producers is mediated by price and profit. Logically, the law of value constitutes an impersonal allocation of social labor on a world scale. Historically, it is qualified by commercial policy. This is, at one and the same time, the outcome of class politics and the ‘particularization’ of capital in a ‘national’ form. The ‘world market’ is the movement of capital, the history of which began when states institutionalized the exchange process of merchant capital -- internalizing the internationalist propensities of capital. It is for this reason that the idea of the analytical primacy of the category ‘world market’ helps us to situate the ‘state.’ It is for this reason also that the history of the state corresponds to the history of capital and its changing conditions of reproduction. Thus, the history of industrial capital unfolded in a particular political organization of the world market established under British hegemony. The overcoming of the limits of mercantilism, and the necessity of a (structured) global commodity market, encouraged liberalization of political regimes. At the same time the competitive pressures of British commerce led to metropolitan economic nationalist policies promoting ‘national capitals.’ Finance capital grew out of (and indeed profited from) this ‘particularization’ process, and the moral of the story is that this stage in the history of capital was not a logical but a historical development. That is, class, state and world market constitute each other. To carry the argument further, it is apparent that as the ‘national,’ or finance, capital of the nineteenth century has been replaced by conglomerate, or ‘multi-national,’ capital in the twentieth century, so the relationship of states and world market has further altered. Arrighi argues: [T]he big multinational company promotes its own more or less advanced internal division of labour, which tends to cut across the territorial division of the world into states and nations. High finance and its progenitors (the big merchant companies), far from developing within themselves an international division of labour, owed their very existence to the division of the world into separate national entities, each with its internal division of labour. They thereby had an influence upon the way in which the various productive activities were distributed among the nations; but it was an indirect influence exerted through market forces and mediated, to a greater or lesser extent, by inter-state relations.93 The difference here concerns capital's relationship to the nation-state. Where formerly it was a particularistic relation, it is now increasingly a general relation, theoretically. However, contemporary

states carry the impulse to particularization as a historical legacy of class-based national politics. This particularistic thrust (on a multiple basis) constitutes the general condition for the accumulation of multinational capital. Thus we see contemporary states presiding over the interpenetration of national capital and multinational (corporate and/or banking) capital as a characteristic of the era of American hegemony and its decline.94 The joint-venture policy, and the exploding use of international capital markets95 are consequences of the competitive advantages to be gained by ‘particularizing’ multinational capital to the ends of state policy. These ends may be enunciated as national, but they often display the contingency of state rulers and their constituent classes in an increasingly supranational system of production and exchange. In conclusion, the history of capital has always presumed international relations, but the content of these relations has changed with the maturation of capitalist production and exchange. Only by appreciating this changing universal context of capital’s unifying force can we fully understand the reciprocal relationship between the world market and the state.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank, for constructive criticism of earlier versions of this essay: Gary P. Green, Maurice Zeitlin, and an anonymous reviewer.

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See, for example, Mann 1980, 1984; Hamilton 1982; Skowronek 1982; Zeitlin 1984; Evans et al 1985. But see Hintze 1975 and Wallerstein 1974, 1984; and for a groundbreaking theoretical essay, see von Braunmuhl 1979. 3 This tendency even emerges from the comparative design in Skocpol 1977, whereby in the three primary historical instances analyzed the political outcomes ultimately resemble each other. As Calhoun puts it, “Skocpol's case studies are carefully constructed abstractions based on a thorough reading of secondary sources; they are designed to serve comparison not tbe evocation or interpretation of particularities” (1987: emphasis mine). 4 This is a strong tendency in Barrington Moore 1966, where the English ‘model’ becomes the touchstone for evaluation of comparable cases of state-building. 5 The debates about the ‘labor aristocracy’ phenomenon are an example of analysis which considers the impact of empire on metropolitan class formation processes. See Lenin 1965 and Hobsbawm 1970. 6 Anderson exemplies this approach where he defines ‘Absolutism’ historically as follows: “[T]he story of Absolutism has many, overlapping beginnings and separate, staggered endings. Its underlying unity is real and profound, but it is not that of a linear continuum… The first bourgeois revolutions occurred long before the last metamorphoses of absolutism, chronologically” (1974:10). And later, where he stresses the relations character of the division between Western and Eastern Absolutism: “[T]he birth of a multilateral political order, as a single field of competition and conflict between rival States, was thus itself both cause and effect of the generalization of Absolutism in Europe” (p. 431). 7 See McMichael 1985a. 8 See Mann 1980; Poggi 1978. 9 See Polanyi 1957:65; Mann 1989:176. 10 See Tomich 1982. 11 Marx 1965:146. 12 See McMichael 1984. Note that the original version of this essay included an extended case summary. 13 Compare Arrighi 1978b:36-37. 14 Marx 1966a:121-22. 2

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For elaboration, see McMichael 1985b. Lichtheim 1971:34, 39. 17 Wallerstein 1980:267, 271. 18 Schumpeter 1939:170, 252. 19 J. M. Keynes wrote, “Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country’s advantage at variance with its neighbours as the international gold standard. For it made domestic prosperity directly dependent on a competitive pursuit of markets and a competitive appetite for the precious metals” (quoted in Phillips 1977:18). 20 See Hobsbawm 1969:136. 21 Hobson 1968:98; Pollard 1974:16-17; Crouzet 1980. 22 E.A.G. Robinson 1954:446. 23 Fielden 1969:92; Woodruff 1967. 24 Hobsbawm 1975:179. 25 Woodruff 1967:268. 26 Jenks 1973; Cecco 1974. 27 Hobsbawm 1962:359-60. 28 Compare Hobsbawm 1975:94: “However powerful national feelings and (as nations turned into states or the other way around) allegiances, the "nation" was not a spontaneous growth but an artefact… It had actually to be constructed. Hence the crucial importance of the institutions which could impose national uniformity, which meant primarily the state, especially state education, state employment and (in countries adopting conscription) military service” (emphasis his). 29 Polanyi 1957:252. 30 Kenwood and Lougheed nd:124. The widespread adoption of the gold standard did not occur until after the 1870s. 31 See Polanyi 1957:252 and Saul 1960:45-58. Bagchi 1972:1565 adds: “This ability to balance deficits with one part of the world against surpluses with other parts was extremely important for the stability of the apparently automatic gold standard. Even more important from the point of view of capitalist growth, the mechanism enabled Britain to smoothly transfer capital resources from the non-while colonies to the white ones and support industrial growth in the latter.” 32 Polanyi 1957:265; Phillips 1977:18. 33 It is important to point out two specifications of this kind of statement: (1) The difference with mercantilist policy was the relative automaticity of the process of nineteenth-century state policy formation with respect to world market position: perhaps this marked the universalizing principle of laissez-faire economy which still rested on capitalist political economy. (2) In the nineteenth century capital had ‘socialized’ much more of the population than merchant capital of the mercantilist age, and this contributed to the political principle of ‘incorporation’ basic to the nation-state. 34 Hoffman 1933:14-16. 35 Hobsbawm 1975:179. 36 Rosenberg 1943. 37 Polanyi 1957:Chapters 17, 18. 38 Compare Phillips 1977. 39 Zeitlin 1984:234. 40 Nairn 1983:204; emphasis his. 41 Marx 1973:107; emphasis added. 42 Ibid:104; emphasis added. 43 Hopkins and Wallerstein 1981. 44 Wallerstein 1974:348. 45 Ibid:127. 46 Anderson 1974:31-32. 47 The most trenchant critique of Wallerstein’s undifferentiated conception of capitalism is Brenner 1977. 48 One clear example of this dialectical relation over time is provided by Mann: “European expansion, especially economic expansion taking an increasingly capitalistic form, required (1) increased military protection abroad, (2) more complex legal regulation of property and market transactions, and (3) domestic property forms (like rights to common lands). Capitalistic property owners sought out territorial states for help in these matters. Thus European states gradually acquired far greater infrastructural powers: regular taxation, a monopoly over military mobilisation, permanent bureaucratic administration, a monopoly of law-making and enforcement. In the long-run, despite attempts at absolutism, states failed to acquire despotic powers through this because it also enhanced the infrastructural capacities of civil society groups, especially of capitalist property holders” (1984:209). 16

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Skocpol and Trimberger 1977/78:110; emphasis theirs. Skocpol 1977:Chapter 1. 51 The problem perhaps lies in the separation Skocpol makes between the ‘world capitalist economy’ and the ‘international states system,’ allowing no real reciprocal structuring in a theoretical sense. Because of this, the states in question tend to be suspended in these abstracted contexts and compared as repeated ‘cases’ with common ‘conditions.’ Hopkins has observed of the methodological implications of this procedure: “One, then, almost without thinking about it, inverts the subject and the predicate, one moves from this ‘case’ exhibiting this ‘condition’ to this ‘condition’ having a ‘case,’ as an instance. Now, in so moving, one has ‘abstracted’ the condition and made it, in its new categorical form, the focus of attention and inquiry” (1978:212). It must be added, however, that Skocpol is mindful of this implication as she acknowledges the limit, on the generalizability of the specific causal patterns in her cases “because other social revolutions have occurred (mostly more recently) in countries with significantly different political histories located in more dependent international positions” (1977:289). 52 For example, Skocpol writes “modern social revolutions like the French, Russian, and Chinese have invariably occurred in countries caught behind more economically developed competitor nations Increasingly over ‘world time,’ opportunities and models have become available for using state power to promote national economic development” (1977:286). 53 Hintze 1975:429. 54 Anderson 1974:18. 55 Hintze 1975:201. 56 Ibid:171. 57 Ibid:201 58 Anderson 1974:41(emphasis his), 429. 59 Mann characterizes this ‘relationship of convenience’ thus: “The classes of capitalist society were shaped by the necessity for the regulation of basic ownership rights by states. Merchant and landlord capitalists entered a world of warring states. Their need for state regulation both internally and externally, and the state’s need for finances, pushed classes toward a national form of organization, eventually toward a British, a French, a Dutch, etc., bourgeoisie, between whom economic interaction was small. The geopolitical states were systems of production between which economic relations were only ad hoc (1980:203; his italics). Here, of course, international economy assumed the parcelized form of multiple, competitive colonial systems attached to the metropolitan states. 60 Mann refers to this process as the “reintegration of economic and state structures” as propertied classes and states “jointly” politicized economy (ibid:176). 61 Polanyi 1957:65. 62 Hintze 1975:447, 446. 63 Carr 1983:183. 64 Anderson 1974:431. 65 von Braunmuhl 1979:169. 66 Compare Fay and Stuckey 1980. 67 Marx 1966a:163. 68 See Hobsbawm 1967. 69 Compare “The creation of a world market and international division of labor through which colonial expansion and the imposition of new forms of commodity production and exchange enabled merchant capital to overcome the contradiction between town and country within the feudal mode of production” (Tomich 1982:16). 70 Compare: “The slaves … were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time…” (James 1963:86. 71 See Hobsbawm 1967. 72 Marx 1973:672. 73 Ibid:258, 253. 74 Marx 1966b:325. 75 Ibid:327. 76 See Hobsbawm 1967:56; Wallerstein 1980. 77 See, for example, James 1963, for a fundamentally world-historical perspective on this period. 78 From Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767); quoted in Hirschman 1978. 79 See Poggi 1978:Chapter 5. 80 Hintze 1975:447. 81 On the democratization of nationalism, see Carr 1983:184; Anderson 1974:429. 50

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This division is essentially antinomic, as Mann has stressed. “states cannot be simple instrument of classes, for they have a different territorial scope” (1984:199). However, this in itself does not rule out a determinate relation. 82 von Braunmuhl 1979:174. 144. 83 Compare Tomich 1982. 84 Compare Mintz 1978:86-87. 85 See Polanyi 1957. 86 The reference is to Marx’s remark that “the veiled slavery of the wage-workers of Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world” (1965:759-60). 87 See Beiguelman 1978; and Tomich 1982. 88 See Marx’s discussion of “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” (1965:Pt VIII). 89 This was a historical, not a tendential, event: “The duality of state and economy (market) reflects a nineteenth-century historical interlude, a brief condition in a small part of the world which was generalized into a principal ground of liberal social thought. It has no place as a basic theoretical duality in political economy” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1981:246). 90 Mann has produced some interesting conceptions of the irreducibility of the state to social forces, by virtue of its distinct spatial character, and indeed its generative role in producing “social forces with a life of their own” (1984:210) in the form of political economy. From my perspective this approach is complementary, especially insofar as it presumed the political history of capital: “When capitalism emerged as dominant, it took the form of a series of territorial segments -- many systems of production and exchange, each to a large (though not total) extent bounded by a state and its overseas sphere of influence. The nation-state system of our era was not a product of capitalism (or, indeed, of feudalism) considered as pure modes of production. It is in that sense ‘autonomous.’ But it resulted from the way expansive, emergent, capitalist relations were given regulative boundaries by pre-existent states” (ibid:209). 91 ‘Classes,’ in the strict historical sense, arise from the social organization of production in a market setting: and historically class politics only arose in the context of substantive interaction of states and markets. 92 von Braunmuhl 1979:164. 93 Arrighi 1978b:143. 94 See Evans 1977/78; McMichael 1982. 95 See Hawley 1979.

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