ABSTRACT
While there have been significant power shifts in international relations over the last four centuries, there are two threads that run continuously through this period. The first of these is the foreign policy aims of states from the North, which have been driven by elite interests. As I have shown, early European imperial powers were driven by the aim of acquiring territory to increase their global presence and dominance, and to secure access to resources in the interests of the economic elite. This same goal drove early American imperialism. While contemporary liberal democratic states from the North are not interested in acquiring territory, they are still motivated by a wish to ensure access to and dominance of resources and markets in the South for the benefit of elites. This in turn is intended to maintain their positions of power in terms of their political, economic, military and ideological strength. I have traced this continuity through European colonialism, British imperialism, early American imperialism and US hegemony in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I have shown that from the end of the Second World War, as the remaining European colonial powers finally rescinded the last of their colonies, the US led its allies from the North in efforts to increase and sustain access to resources and markets in the South, which was achieved through the spread of global capitalism and efforts to entrench neoliberalism. I have attempted to develop a framework for explaining the configuration of actors in this process, and have shown that the US state and US capital benefited most from this process, but that other states and other national fractions of capital, particularly those from the North, also exercised agency and reaped considerable benefits for their elites.
