ABSTRACT
Capitalism is the first system of social organization able to turn the forces of nature against themselves through a technology that explicitly aims to dominate and correct nature. Capitalism shapes the planet to meet the immediate, but historically unsustainable, appetites of capital. During the sixteenth century the geography of capitalism was formed. James Scott shows how capitalism disarranged nature to reorder it again according to its interests. Fernand Braudel insists on the importance of asymmetry as a starting point in the establishment of the capitalist world-economy. Asymmetry offers privilege, and Europeans achieved this by combining advanced navigation technology with the use of gunpowder for their warlike objectives. Europeans had inferior ships but the Castilians had cannons, muskets, and the whole power of the Catholic Church. European traders, sailors, warriors, and evangelists, with the support and authorization of the monarchies, burst into Asia, Africa, and America in what became the great and definitive foundational act of the modern world.
