‘My Capitalism Is Bigger than Yours!’

Abstract

This article reviews Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’s How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (2015). It argues that the book offers a stimulating and ambitious approach to solving the problems of Eurocentrism and the origins of capitalism in growing critical scholarship in historical sociology and International Relations. However, by focusing on the ‘problem of the international’ and proposing a ‘single unified theory’ based on uneven and combined development, the authors present a history of international relations that trades off methodological openness and legal complexity for a structural and exclusive consequentialism driven by anti-Eurocentrism. By misrepresenting the concept of social-property relations in terms of the internal/external fallacy, and by confusing different types of ‘internalism’ required by early-modern jurisdictional struggles, the book problematically conflates histories of international law and capitalism. These methodological problems are contextualised by examples from the Spanish, French and British empires’ conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction and their significant legal actors and processes.

Law and Transitions to Capitalism

“…They do this by rejecting the placement of England or Europe as ‘internal’ and everywhere else as ‘external’ (2015: 41), which involves calling into question the ‘sharp distinction’ between direct and indirect extra-economic force. One particular scholar working at the intersection of law and the history of capitalism, Maïa Pal, sees Anievas and Nişancıoğlu's work as encouraging a more careful account of the legal dimensions of the history of capitalism (Pal, 2018: 102). I agree with her view and likewise interpret her own contributions to the debates as a testament to the role of law in blurring the internal/external divide (108).…”