Between Capitalism and the State-System

How should we explain periods of profound global transformation? Since the late nineteenth century, historically-minded scholars have viewed socio-political change as a reflection of property relations and technological shifts in the productive process. Capitalism was positioned as the principal driver of the international state system, with states broadly operating in the interest of maintaining capitalist social relations. In recent years, however, a parallel tradition of thought has gained ground. In this tradition, the bureaucratic and military consolidation of states operates as the driver of economic relations. From this perspective, capitalist forms of exploitation appear as a means to finance the state’s coercive power and navigate competition between states internationally. The relation between states and markets underpins nearly every major challenge of our time, from climate change, to war, to austerity and sovereign debt. Should we understand these developments through the interests of Capital, or should we instead conceive of them as the product of inter-state competition and power? The question is not merely of analytical interest; where we place emphasis directly informs the sort of solutions we envision to global problems. If climate change and war are the result of inter-state competition, greater cooperation can lead to a solution. If they are the result of capitalism, instead, they will remain unresolved until we do away with the economic system itself. In what follows, I survey this longstanding debate and introduce an important and overlooked turningpoint: the rise of Great Power politics. Ultimately, however, I argue that our global order cannot be understood outside of the complex social contexts out of which it emerges—contexts which cannot be reduced to any single dimension alone.

Capitalism and the state system

Immanuel Wallerstein’s landmark Modern World-System (1974) dates the origins of our existing order to North-western Europe in the sixteenth century, where a new mode of production geared towards the “endless accumulation of capital” and grounded in a world-spanning trade-based division of labor takes hold.1Immanuel Wallerstein, (<)em(>)The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century(<)/em(>), 66–131; Giovanni Arrighi, “Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Nondebates of the 1970’s,” (<)em(>)Fernand Braudel Center Review(<)/em(>) 21, no. 1 (1998): 113–29. As he puts it, this capitalist world economy is defined by “production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit.”2Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” (<)em(>)Comparative Studies in Society and History(<)/em(>) 16, no. 4 (1974): 398. In his account, an international system of states emerged shortly thereafter, fully enshrined by the time of the Peace of Westphalia (1648).3Wallerstein, (<)em(>)World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction(<)/em(>) (Duke University Press Books, 2004), 42. This, for him, was a non-coincidental development— capitalism could never emerge and sustain itself in the state apparatus characteristic of  world-empires like China and Rome, where bureaucracies absorbed too much profit. The development and persistence of capitalism required an economically connected world that was “larger than any juridically-defined political unit.”4Wallerstein, (<)em(>)The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century(<)/em(>), 15–16. The implication of this view was that any serious analysis of the global economy and world politics would involve tracing major transformations back to capitalism’s internal dynamics. 

In what was hardly a ringing endorsement of the position, John G. Ruggie summed up Wallerstein’s solution, stating that for him the international system of states was “at one and the same time an epiphenomenal byproduct of intercapitalist competition and the necessary structural condition for the existence and continued survival of capitalism.”5 John Gerard Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,” (<)em(>)World Politics(<)/em(>) 35, no. 2 (1983): 262. In a related vein, other prominent social scientists like Aristide Zolberg thought this work exhibited a ‘systematic neglect of political structures and processes.’ See his “Origins of the Modern World System: A Missing Link,” (<)em(>)World Politics(<)/em(>) 33, no. 2 (1981): 253–81. A decade after the publication of Wallerstein’s magnum opus, the historical sociologist Charles Tilly offered a more muted critique, hoping that someone would “succeed in writing a ‘total history’ that would account for the entire development of both” capitalism and the states-system, which he described as “the two interdependent master processes of the modern era.”6Charles Tilly, (<)em(>)Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons(<)/em(>) (Russell Sage, 1984), 147, 73–74.

For Wallerstein’s framework, the central issue is that the two timelines—the emergence of capitalism, and the emergence of the international state system—have to align, with the rise of the former preceding that of the latter by some margin, as well as plausibly causing its rise. If no relationship between the two can be established at the point of origin, then we know that one has existed without the other, and that the two can accordingly be treated as relatively autonomous social processes, with their own potentially clashing dynamics. Over time, pace Wallerstein, this alignment has appeared increasingly elusive. The first major challenge originated among Marxists attacking Wallerstein’s conception and periodisation of capitalism, and seeking to trace the international consequences of its rise. 

Defining capitalism

There is of course ongoing disagreement about where and when capitalism began. Yet, for many involved in the discussion of origins, the dominant thesis to engage is that defended by Robert Brenner and Ellen M. Wood. Theirs was a thesis elaborated in large part as a response to Wallerstein’s, whose definition of capitalism as “production for profit via exchange,”7Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” (<)em(>)New Left Review(<)/em(>), no. I/104 (August 1977): 32. offered little to prevent scholars from identifying its rise in fourteenth-century Renaissance Italy, thirteenth-century medieval European cities, or even 5,000 years ago.8Giovanni Arrighi, (<)em(>)The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times(<)/em(>), New and Updated Edition (London : New York, NY: Verso, 2010); Braudel, (<)em(>)Civilisation Matérielle, Économie, et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe Siécle(<)/em(>); Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, eds., (<)em(>)The Cambridge History of Capitalism: Volume 1: The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848(<)/em(>), vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Andre Gunder Frank, (<)em(>)The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?(<)/em(>) (Hoboken: Routledge, 1993). The starting point for Brenner and Wood was therefore to identify a more specific definition that would clearly situate capitalism as a historical phenomenon and so avoid “naturalizing” it as something eternal (and possibly insurmountable). To that end, they sought to re-center the issues of production and class relations. In their view, what defined capitalism was the fact that 

producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on “extra-economic” powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion—such as the military, political, and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labor from peasants—but must depend on the purely “economic” mechanisms of the market.9Ellen Meiksins Wood, (<)em(>)The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View(<)/em(>) (Verso, 2017), 6. 

This definition is much narrower than Wallerstein’s, excluding slave labor from its purview and opening up the possibility of multiple co-existing modes of production. One common criticism is precisely that it is too narrow, because it excludes many widespread types of labor related to production (including slavery) and reproduction. 

In turn, the problem these critics face is that the more they have tried to expand the scope of relations that fall under the ambit of “capitalism,” the more the possibility of a clear definition recedes. In any case, on the basis of the above (narrower) definition, the rise of capitalism was identified in the fifteenth-century English countryside—a process completed by the seventeenth century at the heart of which we find the landed aristocracy, tenant farmers, and free wage laborers.10Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” (<)em(>)Past & Present(<)/em(>), no. 70 (1976): 30–75; Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development”; Wood, (<)em(>)The Origin of Capitalism(<)/em(>). Since capitalism is here typically linked to a local or more often state-level property (i.e. England is a capitalist state, whereas for Wallerstein capitalism defines the world-system, not a specific state), a flurry of subsequent works adopting this definition have made it their object to identify the transition to capitalism in other countries or, in a different vein, to identify the international conditions that enabled its emergence in England.11See e.g. Xavier Lafrance, (<)em(>)The Making of Capitalism in France: Class Structures, Economic Development, the State and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1750-1914(<)/em(>) (Haymarket Books, 2020); Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, (<)em(>)How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism(<)/em(>) (Pluto Press, 2015). But for my purposes, the most important offshoot of the Brenner-Wood thesis is one that has sought to grasp the relationship between this definition of capitalism and the nature of the international order. 

The landmark work that adopted the Brenner-Wood definition of capitalism in the context of the states-system is Benno Teschke’s Myth of 1648. In Teschke’s account, the emergence of capitalism in early modern England led to a gradual shift away from dynastic towards de-personalized, parliamentary sovereignty, crystallized after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As a result, Britain became the first “modern” state, removing itself from petty dynastic politics obsessed with rank and prestige, and adopting an explicit policy of “balancing” instead, thereby neutralizing threats from the continent. It also gained new institutions, such as the Bank of England (and the national debt), which allowed it to bring incredible financial pressure to bear on its continental rivals. Teschke argues that in Europe international relations were “modernizing” from 1688 to the First World War—and in the rest of the world until the mid-twentieth century.12Benno Teschke, (<)em(>)The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations(<)/em(>), Second edition (Verso, 2009 [2003]). Teschke explains that this ‘processual’ view is what distinguishes his account from Justin Rosenberg’s earlier work. See Justin Rosenberg, (<)em(>)Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations(<)/em(>) (Verso, 1994). This means that all states were forced to respond to the economic and military might that “modern” states brought to bear against them. This adaptation took place through a process of geopolitically combined and socio-politically uneven development, out of which modern international relations were eventually produced.

Teschke’s study concludes that “the formation of a territorially fragmented states-system preceded capitalism” such that “there is no constitutive or genetic link between capitalism and a geopolitical pluriverse.”13Teschke, (<)em(>)Myth of 1648(<)/em(>), 145. For a sense of the intra-Marxist theoretical debate, see Alex Callinicos, “Does Capitalism Need the State System?,” (<)em(>)Cambridge Review of International Affairs(<)/em(>) 20, no. 4 (2007): 533–49; Benno Teschke and Hannes Lacher, “The Changing ‘Logics’ of Capitalist Competition,” (<)em(>)Cambridge Review of International Affairs(<)/em(>) 20, no. 4 (2007): 565–80. In other words, it is not possible, as Wallerstein and others would have it, to derive the problems posed by our existence within a competitive system of states from the allegedly “more fundamental” issue of global capitalism. A system of states without capitalism is not just theoretically possible, but a real historical occurrence. Rather than tracing the origins of global developments to the international functioning of capitalism, we ought, according to Teschke, make room for the pressures exerted by a “geopolitical pluriverse.”

International ordering beyond the state system

What happens if we consider the origins of the other side of the equation—the system of states? The works considered above describe the modern international order as a system of states emerging sometime in early modern Europe. But over the last two decades, IR scholars, international historians and international lawyers have subjected this “early modern thesis” to sustained criticism. Several accounts now identify the birth of this system of states much later, in the long nineteenth century. David Armitage for instance argues that “the creation of a world of states has been largely the work of the last two centuries,” while Andreas Osiander claims that “nothing akin to what we call the state existed” prior to the nineteenth century, and Jordan Branch, that “sovereign territorial statehood was […] constructed out of the ruins of Napoleonic Europe.”14David Armitage, (<)em(>)Foundations of Modern International Thought(<)/em(>) (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 48; Andreas Osiander, “Culture, Change and the Meaning of History: Reflections on Richard Lebow’s New Theory of International Relations,” (<)em(>)Millennium(<)/em(>) 38, no. 1 (2009): 138; Andreas Osiander, (<)em(>)Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution(<)/em(>) (Oxford University Press, 2007); Jordan Branch, “Mapping the Sovereign State: Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change,” (<)em(>)International Organization(<)/em(>) 65, no. 01 (2011): 19.  Relatedly, legal historian David Kennedy explains that while early modern jurists ‘rarely spoke of “sovereigns” at all’, their nineteenth century counterparts ‘placed the authority of sovereigns at the center of a reimagined legal order.’ David Kennedy, (<)em(>)Of War and Law(<)/em(>) (Princeton University Press, 2006), 61. Such arguments are not mere amendments to the traditional historical account. In so far as they do not identify any states-system in the preceding period, the language of statehood becomes quite unhelpful to make sense of world politics across large chunks of early modernity.

In fact, identifying an international system of states assumes that international relations were increasingly imagined as relations between abstract legal persons called states, which recognized one another’s external and internal sovereignty. It elides the parallel rise of increasingly hierarchical imperial arrangements between Europe and the non-European world (which can hardly be said to resemble those of the emerging system of states in Europe), based not on sovereign equality but on the division of sovereignty.15Edward Keene, (<)em(>)Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics(<)/em(>) (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martti Koskenniemi, (<)em(>)The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960(<)/em(>) (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Precisely for this reason, Keene describes two co-existing patterns of international order in the long nineteenth century: one dedicated to the broad principle of toleration and characterised by sovereign equality, and another dedicated to civilization and based on the divisibility of sovereignty. Precisely for this reason, many have noted that a system of sovereign states only came to cover the entire globe after decolonisation, i.e. around the time when Wallerstein is writing. 

International relations, then, are rarely reducible to a single pattern of order. But one important, and underdiscussed, historical development did begin to give world politics an increasingly competitive flavor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—namely the birth of a “great power system.”16Hamish Scott, (<)em(>)The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740-1815(<)/em(>) (Routledge, 2014).

Great power and great politics

The very language of power in international politics admittedly began much earlier than in the eighteenth century. We can find discussions of “powers” in the fourteenth-century writings of people like Bartolus of Sassoferrato, in Giovanni Botero’s sixteenth-century Reason of State, or yet still in Henri de Rohan’s seventeenth-century Treatise of the interests of the princes and states of Christendome. Nevertheless, it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that this language, and particularly the concept of a “great power,” became pervasive. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Abbé de Mably was identifying different “classes” of powers— great, middle, and small powers—while German cameralists like Gottfried Achenwall and British journalists like John Campbell were busy trying to measure this power, the former group inventing the discipline of Statistik for this very purpose.17Harm Klueting, (<)em(>)Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten: Das aussenpolitische Machtproblem in der “politischen Wissenschaft” und in der praktischen Politik im 18. Jahrhundert(<)/em(>) (Duncker & Humblot, 1986). Thus, a form of international political thought in which power was the be-all and end-all of international relations became widespread. 

This strand of thought was markedly different from that discussing “sovereign states.” Although both understood world politics in terms of relations between abstract persons (“states” or “powers”) instead of the more traditional focus on individuals (e.g. the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel), the language of power underlined inequality and military capabilities while that of “sovereign states” tended to stress equality and rights. Emer de Vattel’s oft-cited formula is a striking encapsulation of the latter: “A dwarf is as much a man as a giant; a small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom.”18Emer de Vattel, (<)em(>)Le Droit Des Gens Ou Principes de La Loi Naturelle Appliqués à La Conduite & Aux Affaires Des Nations & Des Souverains.(<)/em(>), 2 vols. (London, 1758), 11. Eventually however, the languages of power and sovereignty were partially merged, producing a strikingly modern way of thinking about international politics, that is, one in which the world was populated by juridically equal sovereign states, of vastly different power.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the principle of sovereign equality coexisted uneasily with the language of power. From the Congress of Vienna (1815) onwards, the great powers carved out an exception to the principle of sovereign equality, laying claim to a specific set of privileges in shaping the very content of international law—including the right to determine legal limits to sovereignty by authorizing interventions.19Gerry J. Simpson, (<)em(>)Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order(<)/em(>) (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Part of the rationale here was that they were the ones most able to enforce international law (and they would indeed have specific duties in that respect), since military power was so unevenly distributed in the international system. To this day, these legal privileges constitute the central exception—built into the very structure of the United Nations Security Council—to sovereign equality. 

The gradual emergence of an international system explicitly organized around power in the second half of the eighteenth century meant that military competition increased and with it, the potential for devastating wars. For this reason, the atavistic competition for power as well as the ensuing practice of acquiring territory and extinguishing international actors through war characterise the long nineteenth century far more than it does the early modern period.20Mlada Bukovansky, “The Altered State and the State of Nature: The French Revolution and International Politics,” (<)em(>)Review of International Studies(<)/em(>) 25, no. 2 (1999): 197–216; Tanisha M. Fazal, (<)em(>)State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation(<)/em(>) (Princeton University Press, 2007). Even in the nineteenth century, no unrestricted right to war seems to have existed however, see Hendrik Simon, (<)em(>)A Century of Anarchy?: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order(<)/em(>) (Oxford University Press, 2024). This interpretation runs counter to some quite prominent social scientific accounts such as Charles Tilly’s, which depict early modern Europe as a cutthroat world that gave birth to modern states precisely because of the demands of war. For him and many others, ‘until recently only those states survived that held their own in war with other states.’21 Tilly, (<)em(>)Coercion, Capital and European States(<)/em(>), 63. And yet, recent scholarship notes that it is almost impossible to think of “any European actors destroyed because they were unable to defend themselves” prior to the French Revolution.22Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” (<)em(>)International Organization(<)/em(>) 55, no. 2 (2001): 278; Philip Gorski and Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Beyond the Tilly Thesis: ‘Family Values’ and State Formation in Latin Christendom,” in (<)em(>)Does War Make States?: Investigations of Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology(<)/em(>), ed. Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 98–124. Osiander notes the minor exception of a handful of Italian city-states in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Before that time, conquest was widely “regarded as a dubious title to possession”—a rather different state of affairs from the nineteenth century.23Osiander, “The Westphalian Myth,” 262. Relatedly, notions of (<)em(>)terra (<)/em(>)(or(<)em(>) territorium(<)/em(>)) (<)em(>)nullius(<)/em(>) typically did not constitute valid legal justification for colonisation. On that debate, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” (<)em(>)Australian Historical Studies(<)/em(>) 38, no. 129 (2007): 1–15. It was largely after the French Revolution that the ‘word empire came into official use in western Europe outside the Holy Roman Empire’, taking on a new meaning that referred to ‘the conquest of lesser people.’ James Muldoon, (<)em(>)Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800(<)/em(>) (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 149. It was only at the dawn of the long nineteenth century that power increasingly became the measure of states’ rank, could grant them additional rights, and ultimately determined their very survival. In this new world, the acquisition of military capabilities was now at an absolute premium.

The economic consequences of the great power system

The rise of this great power system and the military competition it produced called for large amounts of capital.  However, states of the late eighteenth century were still largely embryonic, a fact often obscured after the nineteenth-century invention and retrojection of the concept of “absolutism” onto early modernity.24Nicholas Henshall, (<)em(>)The Myth of Absolutism: Change & Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy(<)/em(>) (Routledge, 2014). They had weak central governments, were unable to impose a uniform political and legal order, could only rely on very meagre police forces, and were typically riven by internal tariffs and multiple competing currencies. These fledgling states’ demand for capital was therefore met in large part by borrowing. To that end, they tapped into nascent networks of financiers that spanned the European continent. Established by families like the Barings and the Rothschilds to finance long-distance trade, these networks had only emerged in the late eighteenth century.25Stanley D. Chapman, (<)em(>)The Rise of Merchant Banking(<)/em(>) (Allen & Unwin, 1984); Quentin Bruneau, (<)em(>)States and the Masters of Capital: Sovereign Lending, Old and New(<)/em(>) (Columbia University Press, 2023). 

At the same time, in France, a new noun emerged to designate this type of lender: le capitaliste. When it was coined, the term referred to “someone who supplied one or other of the branches of the French royal government with the capital they needed to fund the cost of war,” or more simply, “someone who invested in royal and public debt.”26Michael Sonenscher, (<)em(>)Capitalism: The Story behind the Word(<)/em(>) (Princeton University Press, 2022), 31–39. By the 1830s, French speakers were using yet another word to describe this system of war finance inherited from the second half of the eighteenth century, “when states and their rulers borrowed large sums of money to fund the sudden, often massive increase in government expenditure caused by war or the threat of war”: capitalisme.27Sonenscher, (<)em(>)Capitalism(<)/em(>), 67. 

What was adamantly not included in this discussion were questions that pertained to labor. Those were typically framed in the context of debates about the “division of labor” inherent to “commercial society.” That problem was global almost in its very nature, and apparently much more difficult to solve than that of capital and capitalism in the eyes of early nineteenth century observers. Eventually, the two issues were cobbled together and subsumed under the label of capitalism. But as Michael Sonenscher has brilliantly argued, we may have lost something of great value in underwriting this merger.  

In any case, for early nineteenth-century contemporaries, capitalism, that “sovereign of sovereigns” epitomized by merchant banking families like the Rothschilds, had been ushered in by the rapid development and explosion of sovereign debt. This itself depended on a growing sense that polities’ standing and their chances of survival were in the last instance determined by military power. In this world, fine words would indeed butter no parsnips. This became even truer after the French revolution and the destruction of ancien régime rules of international intercourse. Only a few decades later, the end of the Napoleonic Wars constituted a huge financial event. The enormous war indemnity imposed on France helped produce a truly international bond market and enshrine what contemporaries then called capitalism.

Embedding capitalism in international society

The nature of international political and legal order (whether it is a system of states or something else) is an independent constraint on humanity that we must recognise as separate from capitalism. As a result, any attempt to grasp the current global conjuncture that is entirely focused on the internal dynamics of capitalism fails to capture the full complexity of the forces at play.

The very terms of the debate that pit capitalism against the states-system are inadequate. While once widely accepted, the assumption that the concept of “states-system” accurately and exhaustively describes the modern pattern of international order is too restrictive. The political and legal organization of international order cannot be reduced to a single logic; there are always multiple logics of international ordering at work in a given epoch, rarely playing in unison. The emergence of a states-system was a new way of ordering the world that took root in the long nineteenth century, but so too was the development of modern power politics and of a great power system. In its original, more restricted sense, capitalism was an outgrowth of this new mode of international ordering. 

New patterns of international order such as the one I have just described are thus the source of profound economic change. On some level, we already know this to be intuitively true: isn’t it precisely for this reason that scholars and pundits discuss the impact of shifts in the balance of power, “hegemonic transitions,” and war on the world economy? From an analytical perspective, however, we should focus not about the rise and fall of a specific polity, or the consequence of a specific war. Instead, we should look to shifts in the very “texture” of international relations, shifts that exceed the impact of any single event or the aims of any single polity.

 How exactly we try to capture this changing “texture” of international relations is an open question for which there is no single answer. One possible path runs through the well-known notion of “embeddedness.” The global economy, just like the American economy, is embedded in a society, albeit one that we seldom think about but that many lawyers, historians and historically inclined International Relations scholars call “international society.”28For examples from different fields, see e.g. Hedley Bull, (<)em(>)The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics(<)/em(>), Third edition (Columbia University Press, 2002); Keene, (<)em(>)Beyond the Anarchical Society(<)/em(>); Evan Luard, (<)em(>)Types of International Society(<)/em(>) (Free Press, 1976); Erez Manela, “International Society as a Historical Subject,” (<)em(>)Diplomatic History(<)/em(>) 44, no. 2 (2020): 184–209; Yasuaki Onuma, “When Was the Law of International Society Born?,” (<)em(>)Journal of the History of International Law(<)/em(>) 2, no. 1 (2000): 1–66; Evgeny Roshchin, “(Un)Natural and Contractual International Society: A Conceptual Inquiry,” (<)em(>)European Journal of International Relations(<)/em(>) 19, no. 2 (2013): 257–79. To truly understand transformations of the global economy, we must grapple with the changing nature of the society within which it is embedded.