ABSTRACT
The ascent of the west European bourgeoisies to global prominence was part of, and contingent upon, a set of specific geopolitical and economic transformations in the ways in which the societies of the world cohered. As I have argued in Chapter 1, these transformations were forced upon the rest of the world in the context of a global transformation that featured the emergence of a strategic, historical alliance between emerging west European for-profit private authorities (the historic precursors to today’s west-European-based global corporations) and nascent for-power public authorities (predecessors to today’s modern, west-European-based capitalist states). Capitalism, the for-profit logic of economic accumulation, has been created and maintained, in this sense, by organized, systematic violence. The driving force behind this change was a west European attempt to overcome the region’s chronic geopolitical-economic disadvantages, particularly the inadequacy of its units of authority in terms of their global economic weight.
