Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction, by James Fulcher — Summary
Synopsis
Fulcher’s central thesis is that capitalism is not a fixed system but a family of practices organized around a single logic — invest money to make more money — that manifests in historically variable, nationally distinct, and globally unequal forms. Against the two dominant narratives (capitalism as natural order and capitalism as monolithic bloc), Fulcher shows that the system has undergone at least three major reinventions — anarchic capitalism, managed capitalism, and remarketized capitalism — none of which was inevitable, permanent, or uniform across countries. Globalization has not homogenized capitalism; it has only enlarged the theater in which these differences operate.
The argument is built comparatively and historically. Fulcher uses Britain as the privileged laboratory (the first country to industrialize, therefore the clearest case for examining capitalism’s internal mechanisms), but complements it with parallel analyses of Sweden, the United States, and Japan to show that managed capitalism can take corporatist, corporate, or developmentalist forms without ceasing to be capitalism. In the second half of the book the focus shifts to the global dimension: Mexican maquiladoras, Asian production chains, service outsourcing, tourism, corporate agriculture, and financialization are treated as evidence of the same central mechanism — capital mobility as a lever of power over immobile labor. The method is that of a social scientist who prefers dense examples (the East India Company, M’Connel & Kennedy, Nick Leeson, Barings) to abstract models.
The book connects to the vault’s interests on at least three counts. First, the anarchic → managed → remarketized arc is analogous to the Brazilian arc of Vargas-era industrialization → state developmentalism → FHC/PSDB reforms → financialization and rentier capture that the Nova República project is mapping; the question of how a managed capitalism is dismantled without resolving its contradictions is precisely the question Brazil never answered. Second, the analysis of globalization as a redistribution of bargaining power — immobile labor loses while mobile capital wins — provides the economic structure underlying the thymos politics driving electoral realignment in rich countries and in Brazil. Third, the varieties-of-capitalism argument opens space to think about what is specific to Brazilian capitalism — its institutions, its rentiers, its coalitional presidentialism — without reifying the Anglo-American model as the norm.
Note: This summary covers the five available chapters (1–5). The concluding chapter has not been processed.
Chapter 1 — What is Capitalism?
Chapter 1 is built around a deceptively simple question: what exactly makes an economy, or an economic activity, capitalist? Rather than beginning with an abstract definition, the chapter answers by moving through three historical forms of capitalism—merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, and financial capitalism. The point of that structure is to show that capitalism is not one single institutional arrangement or moral philosophy, but a family of practices organized around a common logic. That logic is the investment of money in order to make more money. The chapter’s deeper argument is that once this logic becomes central not only to trade but to production, labor, consumption, and finance, it reshapes society itself.
The chapter first turns to the English East India Company to illustrate merchant capitalism in its early modern form. Long-distance trade to Asia required large sums of money, long time horizons, and a willingness to accept extreme risk. Voyages could return with enormous profits because the gap between the purchase price of spices in Asia and their sale price in Europe was so large. But a shipwreck, an attack, or a failed cargo could wipe out the entire investment. The chapter uses this world to establish a basic capitalist principle: profit is not a reward for effort in the abstract, but the outcome of calculated investment under uncertainty.
The East India Company example also shows that capitalist profit did not emerge from a free and open market in the modern sense. These ventures depended on scarcity, distance, and privileged access. High returns were possible because rare goods could be moved from one region to another where demand was strong and supply limited. Yet profitability was unstable. If too many ships returned with the same commodity, prices could collapse. So even at this early stage, capitalism appears as a system of constant adjustment, in which profit depends not only on buying and selling but on reading markets, managing timing, and reacting to saturation.
A major point in this section is that large-scale trade required large-scale capital. Ships had to be built, armed, repaired, and provisioned; crews had to be recruited and fed; bullion and goods had to be loaded for exchange abroad; and the entire enterprise had to survive a long gap between initial expenditure and eventual return. This meant merchant capitalism already relied on the concentration of resources and on financial organization. The chapter stresses that the sheer material complexity of overseas trade made capitalism something more than ordinary commerce. It was not simply a merchant carrying goods from one town to another, but a coordinated system of investment whose scale demanded institutions capable of pooling money and spreading risk.
That need for pooled capital led to important innovations in finance and corporate organization. Early East India voyages were financed individually, but this exposed investors to catastrophic losses when a specific expedition failed. Over time, the company shifted toward methods that spread risk across multiple voyages and eventually toward continuous joint-stock finance. In that shift, the chapter locates one of capitalism’s institutional breakthroughs: the ability to detach investment from a single concrete expedition and instead make capital mobile, divisible, and ongoing. The emergence of stock trading deepened this process by turning claims on future profits into assets that could themselves be bought and sold.
The chapter is equally clear that merchant capitalism relied on state power as much as on entrepreneurial daring. The East India Company’s privileges came from royal charters, monopolies, legal protections, and the authority to exclude competitors. Similar patterns existed elsewhere in Europe. This matters because the chapter refuses the comforting myth that capitalism is naturally identical with pure competition. From the beginning, capital sought profit not only through market exchange but through monopoly, political influence, and legal advantage. The state did not stand outside capitalism; it helped construct and protect it.
Market manipulation forms the last crucial element in the chapter’s treatment of merchant capitalism. The example of Dutch merchants, with their large warehouses and their ability to hold back or flood markets, shows that control over storage and distribution could be just as decisive as access to ships or exotic goods. The chapter uses this to make a sharp distinction: merchant capitalism is certainly capitalism because it involves the investment of capital for profit, but it is not an idealized world of transparent market competition. Profit often comes from controlling uncertainty, limiting competition, and shaping prices rather than passively accepting them.
The second form of capitalism examined is industrial or productive capitalism, illustrated through the Lancashire cotton industry and the rise of firms such as M’Connel and Kennedy. Here the decisive change is that capital is no longer invested mainly in moving goods across space, but in organizing production itself. Money is advanced to build mills, buy machinery, purchase raw cotton, and hire workers who transform materials into yarn. This is the point where capitalism becomes socially transformative in a much deeper way, because it enters the workplace and reorganizes everyday life. Production for profit is no longer occasional or external; it becomes the central engine of economic activity.
One of the chapter’s strongest claims is that capitalist production depends on wage labor. Workers do not own the machinery or raw materials; they sell their labor power for wages, while the owners of capital control the means of production and appropriate the surplus generated by production. This creates a structural conflict at the heart of industrial capitalism. Profit depends on keeping costs down, especially labor costs, while workers seek higher wages and better conditions. The chapter therefore presents industrial capitalism not as a neutral system of efficiency, but as an arrangement built on an enduring tension between capital and labor.
Competition intensifies this conflict. Early profits in cotton spinning attracted new investment, which increased output and pushed down prices. Once extraordinary margins disappeared, manufacturers had to search for profit through productivity gains, technological innovation, and tighter control of costs. The chapter’s account of the cotton industry shows capitalism as self-expanding and self-undermining at the same time: success brings imitation, imitation brings competition, and competition forces firms into further rounds of innovation and pressure. Capitalism is dynamic precisely because it is unstable. It continuously revolutionizes production because standing still means losing.
The exploitation of labor in this system is treated as more than a question of low wages. The chapter emphasizes discipline: industrial capitalism requires workers who arrive on time, work to a clock, maintain regular habits, and submit to routines imposed by the factory. The transformation is cultural as well as economic. Employers did not just purchase labor; they sought to reshape human behavior into a form compatible with the needs of machines, schedules, and continuous production. In this sense, capitalism produces a new kind of worker by producing a new sense of time, regularity, and obligation.
This leads to one of the chapter’s subtler insights: capitalism creates leisure as well as labor. Once work is disciplined, measured, and separated from the rest of life, non-work becomes legible as “leisure.” But leisure too becomes commercialized. Workers increasingly spend wages on entertainment and consumption rather than relying on older communal forms of pastime. So capitalism does not simply organize production; it also remakes consumption and everyday culture. It defines people not only as workers but also as consumers, binding them to markets on both sides of life.
The chapter then moves to financial capitalism through the example of Nick Leeson and the collapse of Barings in 1995. This section introduces derivatives, futures, options, and arbitrage, not as bizarre anomalies but as developments rooted in capitalism’s basic logic. Financial instruments derive value from underlying assets and can serve practical purposes, especially by reducing uncertainty. Futures, for example, can help producers and buyers lock in prices in advance. The chapter therefore does not dismiss finance as merely parasitic. Instead, it argues that finance grows out of real capitalist needs to manage risk, coordinate expectations, and move capital efficiently.
At the same time, the Barings episode reveals how financial capitalism can detach itself from productive activity and become highly unstable. Leeson was able to hide losses, expand risk, and continue betting because financial markets reward apparent success, obscure danger through complexity, and allow large positions to be built on fragile assumptions. The chapter’s point is not just that one trader behaved recklessly. It is that a system centered on speculation, leverage, and fast-moving markets can magnify errors dramatically. In financial capitalism, money is made directly from price movements, and the line between risk management and gambling becomes perilously thin.
In the final section, the chapter pulls these examples together into a more general definition. Capitalism is not simply commerce, money, or markets, all of which existed long before modern capitalism. It is a social order in which capital is routinely invested to generate profit, production is organized through wage labor, and markets mediate both what people produce and what they consume. This gives capital and labor an abstract, mobile character: money can move across sectors, and workers can in principle move between jobs, even though that “freedom” is constrained by the need to earn a living. Capitalism, in other words, is distinguished by the systematic dominance of investment, wage labor, and market dependence.
The chapter ends by insisting that competition and speculation are not accidents added onto an otherwise stable system; they are built into capitalism’s core mechanisms. Markets force firms to compete, but that same competition encourages concentration, monopoly, and efforts to reduce uncertainty. Financial markets connect savers and investors, but they also create constant opportunities for speculation. The result is a system that is productive, innovative, disruptive, and crisis-prone all at once. Chapter 1 therefore defines capitalism not as a fixed ideology or a single institutional model, but as a historically evolving order whose central principle is simple—invest money to make more money—while its social consequences are vast.
Chapter 2 — Where Did Capitalism Come From?
Chapter 2 argues that capitalism did not appear suddenly, nor can it be explained by a single national story. James Fulcher begins with Britain because Britain was the first society in which capitalism fully broke through into industrial life. But he quickly complicates that story. His central point is that although Britain was the first place where capitalist production became dominant, capitalism itself must be understood as a broader European development. The real question is therefore not only why capitalism emerged in Britain, but why Europe as a whole generated the conditions in which it could take shape.
The chapter first explains why Britain matters. Britain became the first industrial society in the nineteenth century because, in the eighteenth century, market relations had already expanded enough to support capitalist production. Consumption had grown, markets had widened, and more people needed wages in order to buy goods. That combination made investment in production worthwhile. Capitalist employers could then reorganize labor, concentrate workers, introduce machinery, and raise productivity. Industrialization was therefore not an isolated technological event. It rested on earlier social and economic transformations that made labor, demand, and profit-seeking fit together in a new way.
Fulcher stresses that capitalist relations in Britain were visible before the classic factory age. By the eighteenth century there were already organized conflicts between labor and capital. Workers formed “combinations,” early versions of trade unions, because they needed collective strength to resist employers’ attempts to lower wages and deskill work. The example of the wool-combers shows that labor conflict was not an accidental side effect of capitalism but one of its earliest signatures. Employers were seeking cheaper inputs and greater control, while workers were defending their place in a labor market that was becoming increasingly impersonal and competitive.
The Tiverton wool-combers illustrate how modern some of these struggles already were. Their friendly society tried to impose a minimum wage and exclude non-members, while employers sought cheaper labor, including by importing already combed wool from Ireland. The workers responded with direct action, including attacks on property. Fulcher uses this example to show that even in the early eighteenth century one can see patterns that later became characteristic of capitalism: the search for lower labor costs, the possibility of shifting production across borders, and the resulting conflict between employers and workers over control of the production process.
The chapter also notes that Britain was where people first began to theorize capitalism in a systematic way. Adam Smith articulated the virtues of division of labor, competition, markets, and profit-oriented production, while Marx later analyzed the same system critically and in a more conflict-centered framework. This matters because ideas were not detached from reality. British thinkers were describing and interpreting an economy already taking shape around them. Intellectual reflection followed and clarified material change, helping define capitalism as something that could be understood as a system with its own principles and dynamics.
Fulcher then asks why capitalist production became so extensive in Britain. One tempting answer is merchant capitalism: perhaps wealth accumulated through overseas trade was later invested in production, while empire supplied protected markets. He acknowledges that this seems plausible, especially given the East India Company and the later dependence of Lancashire cotton on India. Yet he rejects the idea that merchant capitalism alone explains the rise of capitalist production. Merchants engaged in long-distance trade were usually more interested in arbitrage, monopoly, and political privilege than in reducing production costs or transforming labor. Their world was commercial rather than industrial.
Instead, the origins of capitalist production are traced further back, to the sixteenth century. Fulcher points to a broad expansion in production, consumption, and markets well before the industrial revolution. Many goods were still made on a small scale, often in workshops or households, but the volume and variety of manufactured goods increased significantly. Wage labor also became widespread, with over half of English households partly dependent on it. This meant that more people were connected to markets as both earners and consumers. Britain also developed an unusually integrated national market centered on London, giving economic exchange a scope and coherence rare for the period.
Worker organization, Fulcher argues, also has deeper roots than is often assumed. The journeymen’s societies of the sixteenth century, and even earlier, reveal that social divisions between masters and workers were already hardening. Journeymen had usually completed apprenticeships but were blocked from becoming masters and therefore turned into a laboring class dependent on wages. Their associations still carried medieval rituals, yet their behavior could be strikingly modern: they bargained collectively, defended status, and even struck for higher pay. In this account, capitalism does not emerge from nowhere. It grows through gradual changes that rework older institutions into new class relations.
A crucial transitional form was the putting-out system. Merchants supplied raw materials to scattered workers, collected the finished product, and sold it. In textiles, for example, spinners and weavers often worked at home with their own tools, so this was not yet full capitalist production. The capitalist did not own the entire means of production and could not directly supervise labor in the way a factory owner later would. Even so, the system moved production in a capitalist direction, because capital increasingly organized the process, linked stages of work, and subordinated producers to market calculation. In later forms, employers rented out looms or workshops, tightening their control and gradually bridging the gap between household production and the factory.
Fulcher’s most important explanation for Britain’s precocity lies in agrarian change. In his account, the countryside was transformed as feudal relations gave way to market relations. Lords increasingly became landowners living from rents rather than feudal dues, tenants competed for leases, wage labor spread, and land itself became an object of purchase and sale. The enclosure movement symbolizes these changes. By fencing land, privatizing commons, and reorganizing fragmented holdings into consolidated property, enclosure helped turn land into a marketable asset and weakened older communal patterns of use. This transformed rural society in ways that made capitalist development more likely.
Market-oriented agriculture mattered because it generated both productivity and social displacement. Competition among farmers encouraged innovation and made it possible to feed a growing non-agricultural population. Agricultural workers and commercially oriented farmers earned money and became consumers of manufactured goods. At the same time, greater efficiency released labor from the land, supplying workers for rural industry and, later, factories. This argument links capitalism’s origins not first to foreign trade or urban finance, but to deep social changes in the English countryside. Agriculture helped create the demand, labor supply, and property relations that capitalist production required.
The decline of feudalism is then examined. One standard explanation emphasizes the Black Death, which sharply reduced the population and strengthened laborers’ bargaining power by making labor scarce. Fulcher accepts that the plague weakened landlords’ control in England, but he insists that this cannot be the full explanation because the Black Death affected all of Europe while capitalism did not emerge everywhere in the same way. To understand why feudalism declined earlier in Britain, he turns instead to the English state. Following Ellen Meiksins Wood, he argues that England was comparatively unified and centralized after the Norman Conquest, so its ruling class relied less on fragmented local military power and more on economic mechanisms such as rent, property, and wage labor.
That interpretation leads to a striking conclusion: the roots of British capitalism reach back as far as 1066, though not in any simplistic sense. The Norman Conquest did not “cause” capitalism directly, but the political order that emerged from it eventually created a society in which feudal power was less entrenched and market mechanisms could expand more easily. A relatively cohesive monarchy helped create a national market and reduced the dependence of ruling elites on explicitly feudal forms of extraction. Britain’s special path therefore depended on a very long historical sequence in which political structure shaped economic possibility.
At this point the chapter widens its lens and shows that many capitalist techniques were more advanced elsewhere in Europe than in Britain. The putting-out system had important roots in Flanders and Italy, capitalist mining developed powerfully in central Europe, and urban industries such as printing already displayed employer-worker conflict and capital-intensive organization on the continent. Fulcher also points to the Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam stock exchange as major innovations in corporate finance. Joint-stock permanence, transferable shares, and active securities markets were first developed in the Dutch commercial world, not in Britain. These financial advances later became indispensable to large-scale corporate capitalism.
Fulcher pushes the genealogy of these innovations still further back, from Holland to Antwerp and then to the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. There, merchants developed bills of exchange, new partnership forms, bookkeeping techniques, and other devices for financing trade and spreading risk. These were foundational to later financial capitalism. The chapter insists that if one focuses only on production, one misses the origins of the corporate and financial structures that dominate the modern capitalist world. Capitalism’s ancestry is therefore not purely industrial. It is also commercial, financial, urban, and transnational.
This European perspective is reinforced by the movement of people as well as capital. Refugees carried skills, techniques, and money across borders, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Huguenots, Jews expelled from Iberia, and other displaced groups contributed to the spread of industries and commercial expertise. England benefited from this openness, importing not only people but productive knowledge in textiles, glass-making, paper-making, and iron-working. Fulcher uses this history to make a broader point: capitalism did not emerge inside sealed national containers. It developed through European networks of migration, trade, finance, and technological transfer.
The final part of the chapter asks the biggest question: why Europe? Fulcher reviews several major explanations without reducing the answer to any one of them. Cities mattered because they hosted commercial and financial innovation, but cities alone cannot explain capitalism, especially since guilds often blocked the ruthless pursuit of cheaper labor and new methods. Feudalism mattered because it created conditions in which markets and wage labor could emerge, but feudalism did not always evolve into capitalism, as Eastern Europe showed. Europe’s multi-state political structure also mattered because competition among states, combined with enough order to protect exchange, allowed capital and entrepreneurs to move when conditions became restrictive. Religious ideas, especially Protestantism, may have shaped capitalist conduct, but Fulcher is skeptical that belief alone can explain capitalism’s rise.
His most convincing synthesis is structural. Europe was distinctive because it lacked a single, dominant, all-powerful ruling group able to monopolize surplus extraction through military or bureaucratic command. Post-Roman Europe was politically fragmented, socially contested, and institutionally plural. Rulers were constrained, cities could acquire autonomy, feudal bonds could loosen, markets could widen, and people could move. In that setting, economic activity became a more effective path to wealth than purely political domination. Capital accumulation, wage labor, and market exchange gradually displaced older bureaucratic and feudal mechanisms of power. The chapter therefore concludes that capitalism emerged in Europe not because of one miracle factor, but because Europe’s peculiar combination of fragmentation, mobility, conflict, and institutional diversity created the conditions in which the machinery of capitalism could form and flourish.
Chapter 3 — How Did We Get Here?
James Fulcher’s third chapter explains the history of industrial capitalism as a sequence of major transformations rather than a steady march in one direction. His central claim is that capitalism has repeatedly remade itself. The version dominant in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries did not simply emerge from the nineteenth century unchanged; it arose from a reversal of many institutions built during the previous hundred years. To make that argument legible, Fulcher divides modern capitalism into three broad stages—anarchic capitalism, managed capitalism, and remarketized capitalism. He is careful to present these labels as analytical tools, not rigid historical boxes, but they allow him to show how economic organization, political power, welfare, and ideology moved together.
The chapter is organized mainly through British history because Britain produced the first industrial capitalism and supplied many of the concepts, institutions, and political struggles that shaped capitalist society more broadly. Fulcher’s real subject, however, is not Britain alone. Britain functions as the clearest laboratory for seeing capitalism’s internal mutations. The chapter therefore asks a historical question with contemporary stakes: how did a society once defined by public ownership, welfare expansion, and negotiated class compromise arrive at an order centered on markets, privatization, and individual choice? The answer is not that markets naturally triumphed. It is that one capitalist settlement entered crisis and was displaced by another.
Fulcher’s first stage, anarchic capitalism, covers the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when industrial capitalism first broke through. He calls it anarchic because capitalist entrepreneurs operated with relatively few effective constraints from either organized labour or the state. Production was dispersed across small factories and workshops locked in fierce competition, while workers moved in large numbers into growing industrial towns and into the transport projects that made mass circulation of goods possible. This was a world of rapid expansion, mobility, and upheaval, not of stable corporate coordination. Market pressures were immediate and intense, and those pressures shaped the basic social relations of the period.
In that early phase, labour was weak, fragmented, and vulnerable, though not passive. Workers repeatedly tried to create collective organizations capable of counterbalancing employers, but they faced hostile bosses, unstable employment, and production units too small and fluid to support durable solidarity. Fulcher notes the ambitious but short-lived attempts to build general unions in the early nineteenth century, including the National Association for the Protection of Labour and the Grand National Consolidated Union. The fact that these projects failed matters to his argument: capitalism’s early dynamism depended in part on the difficulty workers had in organizing themselves. Only some skilled workers could sustain unions, because only they possessed scarce expertise that employers could not easily replace.
The state, in Fulcher’s account, was not absent during anarchic capitalism, but its interventions were sharply selective. There were early attempts to regulate factory labour, especially child labour, culminating more effectively in the Factory Act of 1833. Yet these reforms should not obscure the broader movement toward deregulation in economic life. Older state machinery that had governed apprenticeships, wages, and food prices was dismantled, and international trade was progressively liberalized. The repeal of the Corn Laws became a decisive symbol of this direction. Industrialists wanted labour markets free from statutory constraints and food imports cheap enough to reduce wage pressure. In other words, early capitalism combined limited social regulation with a larger political project of market liberation.
That deregulation, however, rested on a paradox Fulcher wants the reader to notice. The freer market did not mean a weaker state. On the contrary, the state had to be strengthened to preserve order in a society destabilized by industrial transformation. Riots, strikes, machine-breaking, and political radicalism threatened property and production, so coercive power remained central. Soldiers were used against crowds and demonstrators, and the defence of order was treated as a precondition for economic freedom. This is one of the chapter’s most important themes: capitalism has never simply been the market acting by itself. Even in its supposedly most laissez-faire form, it relied on organized state power.
The same point appears in Fulcher’s treatment of welfare. Under anarchic capitalism, public support for the poor was minimal and fundamentally disciplinary. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 did not express an expansive social conscience; it reflected the fear that poverty would burden local communities and undermine labour discipline. The workhouse system was designed to make relief humiliating and harsh, so that only those with no alternative would accept it. Fulcher uses this example to show that early capitalism did not merely tolerate suffering as an unfortunate by-product. It built institutions intended to force the poor toward labour-market dependence. The stage’s defining combination was therefore competitive small-scale production, weak labour, deregulation, coercive state power, and negligible welfare.
The second stage, managed capitalism, begins in the later nineteenth century and reaches its high point in the 1970s. Here the market loses some of its direct regulatory role because industry, labour, and the state all become more organized. Larger firms emerge, employers form associations, unions develop national structures, and governments assume greater responsibility for coordinating class relations and stabilizing the economy. International conflict also accelerates the process, since states confronting military rivalry and economic competition seek tighter control over national resources. Fulcher is not describing the end of capitalism. He is describing capitalism in a different mode—less raw, less decentralized, and more mediated by institutions.
A crucial part of that transformation was industrial concentration. Employers did not only cooperate through associations; they also absorbed competitors through mergers, creating larger enterprises capable of reducing uncertainty and planning production more effectively. The growth of giant corporations expanded managerial hierarchies and encouraged the idea of a “managerial revolution,” in which professional managers supposedly replaced owners as the real rulers of the firm. Fulcher is skeptical of the stronger version of that claim, because profitability still remained decisive and ownership was not truly displaced. Still, he accepts the broader point: industrial capitalism became much more consciously organized, and managerial coordination became one of its defining strengths, especially in the twentieth century.
Managed capitalism also changed the political status of the working class. Instead of relying mainly on repression, the British state increasingly incorporated labour into the political and industrial order. The extension of the franchise, the eventual creation of the Labour Party, and legal protections for unions all marked this shift. Workers were no longer treated only as disorderly subjects to be policed; they became a mass constituency and a recognized negotiating force. Fulcher stresses that this incorporation was uneven and often strategic, but it mattered profoundly. It made class conflict more governable and helped construct a framework in which bargaining, representation, and partial compromise could replace some of the open brutality of the earlier era.
The welfare state and public ownership were equally central to managed capitalism. Public health measures came first, but by the early twentieth century Britain had laid the foundations of modern welfare through pensions, insurance, and medical support, and the settlement deepened after the Second World War with the NHS, broader benefits, and free secondary education. At the same time, major services and industries moved into public hands. Municipal socialism, nationalization, and public housing all reduced the range of life directly exposed to market allocation. Fulcher insists that these measures were not driven by socialism alone. National efficiency, military preparedness, and administrative rationalization were also powerful motives. Even so, the cumulative effect was unmistakable: more of social life was protected from the market.
Empire, war, and protectionism helped sustain this model. The pressures of imperial rivalry and the organization of wartime economies strengthened both state intervention and centralized class organization. Protection from international competition also made domestic compromise easier, because employers could tolerate concessions to labour in conditions less exposed to global cost pressures. After 1945, managed capitalism reached its broadest and most confident form. Governments pursued full employment, expanded housing and welfare, experimented with incomes policies, and foregrounded equality in public debate. Fulcher presents this as a coherent settlement in which large corporations, organized labour, state planning, public ownership, and social citizenship reinforced one another.
Its collapse in the 1970s is the turning point of the chapter. Fulcher rejects any simple explanation. Corporatist machinery failed repeatedly because governments could not secure durable cooperation among unions, employers, and the state, and coercive incomes policies triggered resistance strong enough to damage governments themselves. But institutional failure was only part of the story. The deeper problem was the erosion of the protected national environment on which managed capitalism had depended. As empires declined, trade opened, and powerful competitors such as West Germany and Japan revived, old industrial societies came under much greater pressure. Employers sought wage restraint, layoffs, and productivity gains; unions, strengthened by the earlier settlement, resisted. The system became harder to reproduce.
At the same time, culture and political values were changing. Tax resistance increased, dissatisfaction with impersonal public services spread, and consumer expectations began to displace older collectivist priorities such as equality, welfare, and full employment. Fulcher treats this shift seriously. Managed capitalism did not collapse only because capital attacked it from above; it also lost legitimacy from below. A more individualist language of choice and freedom became attractive, especially when public institutions appeared unresponsive and economically stagnant. This ideological opening allowed the New Right to win the argument in the 1980s. Neo-liberalism, developed intellectually in the 1970s and implemented politically under Margaret Thatcher, promised not merely reform but reversal.
Remarketized capitalism, Fulcher’s term for the new stage, set out to revive market forces by privatizing public assets, cutting or restricting welfare, weakening corporatist institutions, shifting from full employment to anti-inflation priorities, and deregulating economic activity. The state sold major industries, promoted the right to buy public housing, imposed competitive tendering, and created internal markets in sectors like health and education that could not be straightforwardly privatized. Financial deregulation was especially consequential, because it dissolved older institutional boundaries, intensified international competition, and accelerated financialization. Fulcher links this process directly to the vulnerabilities that would later produce the crisis of 2007.
Yet one of the chapter’s sharpest arguments is that remarketization did not mean the disappearance of the state. A freer economy still required extensive political construction. Privatized utilities had to be supervised by new regulators; unions were subjected to unprecedented legal controls and punitive sanctions; local government, schools, and health services came under tighter central oversight. The defeat of the miners’ strike symbolizes this reality: the market was revived through direct state force. Fulcher therefore demolishes the myth that neo-liberalism simply withdrew government. What actually happened was a reorientation of state power—from cushioning citizens against the market toward enforcing market disciplines and designing competitive frameworks.
He then shows that this new settlement outlasted Thatcher herself. The Labour governments after 1997 modified neo-liberalism at the margins through measures like the minimum wage and tax credits, but they did not reverse its core direction. In health policy especially, they deepened market principles through patient choice, hospital competition, league tables, private finance, foundation trusts, and growing use of private providers within the NHS system. Fulcher’s point is blunt: once established, remarketized capitalism became bipartisan. The transformation was not just a Conservative episode; it became the new common sense of governance.
The chapter ends by weighing what was gained and lost across the two transformations. Managed capitalism mitigated some of the worst effects of market rule through labour organization, welfare, public ownership, and state coordination, but it also weakened the market mechanisms on which capitalist accumulation depended and became increasingly strained under international competition and rising individualism. Remarketized capitalism restored choice, flexibility, and opportunities for wealth accumulation, but at the cost of greater insecurity, more intense work pressure, and wider inequality. Fulcher’s final judgment is that no stage of capitalism should be mistaken for its final form. Just as managed capitalism once seemed permanent and then dissolved, the present order—despite its claims to inevitability—contains tensions, failures, and instabilities that will generate further change.
Chapter 4 — Is Capitalism Everywhere the Same?
The fourth chapter asks a deceptively simple question: if capitalism has spread across the world, does it now take the same form everywhere? Fulcher’s answer is no. He begins by noting that the era of managed capitalism produced very different institutional arrangements from one country to another, even if the neoliberal turn of the 1980s created the impression that all economies were being pushed toward a single market-centered model. To test that idea, he compares three major capitalist systems—Sweden, the United States, and Japan. The purpose is not merely descriptive. By putting them side by side, he shows that capitalism is always shaped by national histories, political conflicts, and institutional choices.
Sweden is presented first as a society that, at least on the surface, might seem close to Britain because it combined a strong labor movement, an extensive welfare state, and little direct state leadership in early industrialization. Yet Sweden’s path was distinct from the outset. It industrialized later, with a far smaller domestic market and without the imperial advantages Britain had enjoyed. That meant Swedish firms had to survive through export competitiveness. Some observers later explained Sweden’s famous labor peace as the natural result of this external pressure, arguing that employers and workers simply learned to cooperate because they had no alternative.
Fulcher rejects that easy explanation. Swedish capitalism, he insists, was born in severe class conflict, not consensual harmony. The general strike of 1909 is his emblematic example: it was massive, prolonged, and far more intense than the celebrated British strike of 1926. What made Sweden distinctive was not the absence of conflict, but the fact that conflict forced both sides to organize at a national level. Employers built a centralized association to confront labor, while unions—strongly shaped by socialist activism—did the same. Out of this confrontation emerged unusually strong class organizations, and those organizations later became the machinery through which class compromise could actually function.
This is one of the chapter’s central arguments: in Sweden, cooperation was not the opposite of conflict but its product. Because the unions and employers’ associations were so powerful and disciplined, they could regulate bargaining and keep their own members in line. This allowed a corporatist form of managed capitalism to emerge, one in which crucial decisions about wages and industrial relations were effectively delegated to the central organizations themselves. The result was the reputation for labor peace that Sweden later acquired. But that peace rested on structures created in struggle, not on some pre-political national culture of consensus.
The strength of Swedish labor organization also made possible the long dominance of Social Democracy, which governed from 1932 to 1976. Fulcher stresses that this political rule combined welfare reform with economic realism. The Swedish state responded early to unemployment, adopted Keynesian ideas ahead of many countries, and built a broad welfare system funded by high and progressive taxation. But this did not mean a rejection of capitalism. Rather, it meant an attempt to make capitalism socially manageable, politically stable, and compatible with low inequality.
That attempt went further than welfare spending alone. Sweden pursued a policy of wage solidarity that deliberately compressed wage differences, and it expanded workplace protections and employee participation. These measures were not only morally motivated; they also served a strategic political purpose. By narrowing social distance between manual and white-collar workers, Social Democracy tried to build a common labor identity large enough to sustain its institutional power. The Swedish model therefore combined redistribution, organization, and political engineering. It was a way of turning capitalist growth into collective social strength.
At the same time, Fulcher is careful to underline that Swedish Social Democracy was not anti-capitalist in any direct sense. Its leaders understood that welfare could only be sustained by a productive economy capable of winning in world markets. Unprofitable firms were not to be preserved for sentimental reasons; they were supposed to fail, so that labor and capital could move into more productive sectors. Labor-market policy was therefore not designed simply to protect existing jobs, but to retrain workers and facilitate mobility. In this sense, the Swedish model united strong collectivist institutions with a hard-headed acceptance of capitalist competition.
The trouble began when the very institutions that had made Swedish capitalism work started to generate tensions of their own. In the 1970s industrial conflict revived, individualist values grew stronger, and economic crisis exposed the limits of the model. Although the center-right briefly came to power, it could not carry through a Thatcher-style rupture because the Swedish Right was too divided. For a moment it seemed as if the Social Democratic order had survived. Fulcher argues that this impression was misleading. Underneath the political continuity, the corporatist machinery itself was beginning to break apart.
Part of the problem came from the success of centralized organization. As white-collar and public-sector employment expanded, new powerful labor organizations entered the system and began competing with older ones. Centralized bargaining became more difficult, longer, and more conflict-ridden. Employers also became increasingly hostile, especially as labor radicalism resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s. The Meidner Plan, which proposed a gradual transfer of ownership toward union-controlled funds, frightened business deeply even though only a diluted version was enacted. The old compromise between organized labor and organized capital was no longer stable.
From that point Sweden entered a process of remarketization. Employers abandoned central wage bargaining and shifted toward lobbying and political influence. Social Democratic leaders themselves moved first, accepting that high spending, inflationary settlements, and a swollen public sector were undermining competitiveness. Later, the center-right pushed much farther, cutting taxes and spending, introducing austerity, and expanding neoliberal reforms in public services. Yet Fulcher insists that this did not simply make Sweden identical to other capitalist societies. Inequality rose sharply, but Sweden remained comparatively equal, highly unionized by international standards, and still committed to coordinated bargaining in modified form. Its trajectory changed, but its national pattern did not disappear.
The American case stands at the opposite ideological pole. Where Sweden was marked by collectivism and centralized class organization, the United States developed in an environment of strong individualism, decentralization, and faith in personal advancement. Industrialization did produce class formation, but it did not generate a corporatist order. Instead, the dominant institution of American capitalism became the business corporation. The large domestic market encouraged enormous firms and high levels of concentration, especially through mergers that created corporate giants capable of controlling markets or integrating supply chains.
This gave American capitalism its specifically corporate character. Fulcher revisits the idea of the “managerial revolution,” according to which large firms came to be run by professional managers with strong organizational capabilities and long planning horizons. American unions, by contrast, were limited in scope and generally pursued “business unionism”: practical bargaining for wages and benefits rather than broader class transformation. Even welfare took a distinct form. In much of Europe welfare was chiefly a state function; in the United States it was often delivered through the corporation, in the form of insurance, healthcare, and other job-linked benefits. American welfare capitalism was therefore corporate before it was public.
Yet the United States was never simply a laissez-faire society. Fulcher emphasizes that the rise of huge corporations forced the state to intervene, above all through antitrust policy. The New Deal then pushed intervention much further. In response to the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s administration created relief programs, welfare measures, pro-union legislation, and institutions designed to regulate economic life. Unions grew rapidly, and New Deal reforms seemed at moments to be moving American capitalism toward a more European form of management. But this shift remained partial and vulnerable.
Its limits were built into American political structure. Federalism and the division of power among the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court gave opponents many opportunities to dilute or block reform. The New Deal was also less ideologically coherent than many European projects and less deeply rooted in a disciplined reformist party. Some of its pro-labor achievements were later rolled back. Still, managed capitalism persisted in important ways after the 1930s, through social programs, military spending, and even occasional experiments with prices and incomes policy. American capitalism did experience a managed phase, but it was always more fragmented, less universal, and more corporation-centered than in Sweden.
The neoliberal turn in the United States came later, but when it arrived it was powerful. Deregulation spread across transportation, communications, and other sectors. Taxes were cut, public functions were privatized in part, welfare was pushed toward workfare, and labor became more exposed to market pressure. Industry sought cheaper labor first within the United States and then beyond it, while unions failed to organize the new workforce effectively and declined steeply. Fulcher links this transformation to longer working hours, falling real wages in the 1980s, and a dramatic increase in inequality. In his account, the American model did not simply become freer; it became harsher and more unequal.
A major part of that transformation was financialization. The older managerial ideal, in which firms retained profits for long-term growth, gave way to the doctrine of shareholder value. Managers were increasingly rewarded through stock options and pushed to raise share prices rather than invest patiently in production. This fostered scandals, speculative bubbles, and complex financial engineering. Cases such as Enron and WorldCom were not accidents at the margins; for Fulcher they expressed a deeper change in the structure of capitalism itself. The deregulation of finance, including the dismantling of the barriers between commercial and investment banking, helped shift the center of American capitalism away from manufacturing and toward increasingly risky financial activity.
Japan provides a third pattern altogether. Unlike the United States, and unlike Sweden in a different way, Japanese capitalism was managed from the beginning. After the Meiji Restoration, industrialization was treated as a state project aimed at national strength and independence in a world dominated by Western empires. The government built model enterprises, later privatized many of them, and fostered the rise of the zaibatsu—large family-controlled industrial groupings spanning multiple sectors. It also created infrastructure, finance, and education on a national scale. Japan’s achievement mattered especially because it was the only non-Western society to industrialize successfully in the nineteenth century.
What made Japanese capitalism distinctive was the combination of a directive state, powerful corporate groups, weak autonomous labor organization, and limited public welfare. The state protected national independence by restricting foreign capital until Japanese industry was strong enough, while the costs of modernization fell heavily on the peasantry. In the postwar period this model was rebuilt in new form under the guidance of MITI. Industrial groups coordinated activity across sectors, competition remained intense, and firms could plan long term because mutual ownership and bank finance shielded them from shareholder pressure. In labor relations, enterprise unions replaced more independent unionism, and the core workforce was integrated through lifetime employment, seniority wages, company welfare, and a dense corporate culture of loyalty.
Fulcher is clear that this system produced both efficiency and hierarchy. The secure, integrated core of regular employees depended on a peripheral workforce of part-time, contract, and subcontracted labor, including many women, who absorbed shocks and lacked equivalent protections. The Japanese welfare state remained relatively rudimentary, which made workers more dependent on the company and also encouraged household saving. Those savings, in turn, could be mobilized by state-controlled financial institutions for industrial development. In this sense Japan created yet another kind of welfare capitalism, one based less on universal public provision than on company dependence and national financial coordination.
Japan did not initially answer the crises of the 1970s by embracing neoliberalism. Instead it preserved much of its institutional structure while shifting production abroad, pushing into high-technology sectors, and sustaining competitiveness. But the bubble economy of the late twentieth century eventually burst. The crash of the early 1990s led to stagnation, deflation, and rising criticism of the institutions that had once seemed exemplary. Lifetime employment, protected banking, cross-shareholding, and the developmental state were all recast as rigidities. Reforms followed: more casual labor, more performance-based pay, financial deregulation, and some opening to foreign capital. Even so, Fulcher does not portray Japan as simply collapsing into an Anglo-American model. Growth was weak, but unemployment remained comparatively low, major corporations stayed globally competitive, and distribution remained less skewed than in the United States or Britain.
The chapter ends by returning to the original question. All three societies developed distinctive forms of managed capitalism, and all three later underwent remarketization under the pressures of international competition, institutional exhaustion, and ideological change. But remarketization is not the same thing as convergence. Sweden remained more coordinated and egalitarian than the United States. America’s corporate and financialized capitalism remained unlike both Sweden’s social-democratic legacy and Japan’s state-shaped corporate order. Japan changed substantially, yet continued to combine reform with deep institutional continuity. Fulcher’s conclusion is therefore precise: capitalism is global, but it is not uniform. National histories do not vanish inside the market; they reorganize how the market works.
Chapter 5 — Has Capitalism Gone Global?
Chapter 5 argues that capitalism has undeniably expanded across borders, but that the phrase “global capitalism” is often used too loosely. James Fulcher begins by acknowledging the obvious evidence: money moves rapidly across continents, firms organize production in several countries at once, and markets for goods, capital, and labor are increasingly interconnected. Yet his central claim is that this reality should not be mistaken for a seamless, fully integrated world system. The chapter is built around a double movement: first, it shows the concrete ways capitalism has spread; then it dismantles the myths that make globalization seem newer, more universal, and more equalizing than it really is.
The first major correction concerns history. Fulcher insists that capitalism did not suddenly become global in the late twentieth century. From its earliest phases, capitalist expansion was tied to long-distance trade, imperial conquest, and forced labor. Merchant capital followed the great European navigations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while chartered companies linked Asian production to European consumption. The Atlantic triangular trade was a brutal early form of global capitalism, binding Europe, Africa, and the Americas into a system that depended on slavery, plantation production, and transoceanic exchange. The chapter therefore places contemporary globalization in a much longer historical arc.
What changed in the nineteenth century was not the existence of global capitalism, but its scale, speed, and organization. Steamships and railways made the movement of goods and people faster, cheaper, and more regular. Telegraphy sharply reduced the time needed for information to travel, and the telephone later made immediate communication possible across great distances. Fulcher treats this communications revolution as comparable in importance to the digital revolution of recent decades. Globalization became far more dense once transport and communication stopped being slow, unreliable, and dependent on physical messengers.
It was also in the nineteenth century that a more clearly structured world economy emerged. Fulcher describes an international division of labor in which a small number of industrial countries manufactured finished goods while much of the rest of the world supplied food, raw materials, and markets. Capital moved internationally, but not in a free-for-all. It circulated within a framework anchored by the gold standard, which stabilized currencies by tying them to gold. In this sense, even classical globalization rested on institutions and rules. That regime eventually broke down under the strain of the Great Depression, showing that global integration was never automatic or self-sustaining.
Just as important, this earlier global economy was not post-national. It was organized through empires. European states built overseas possessions and spheres of influence, the United States created its own looser imperial reach, and Japan joined the imperial race in the late nineteenth century. Under pressure from crisis and competition, the world economy became more segmented by imperial boundaries rather than less. After the First World War, integration actually retreated. Only after the Second World War, with decolonization and the weakening of imperial structures, did a new phase begin in which trade, capital, and labor moved more directly across national borders. Modern globalization, then, is a transformation of older patterns, not a complete historical rupture.
Fulcher next turns to manufacturing, where the globalization of capitalism is especially visible. Under the older international division of labor, wage labor in its most concentrated form remained centered in industrial countries, while in poorer societies it appeared more unevenly, mixed with peasant farming and informal trade. Late twentieth-century capitalism changed this by dramatically expanding wage labor in developing countries. Drawing on David Coates, Fulcher notes that capital’s search for labor roughly doubled the size of the world proletariat over the last decades of the century. Capitalism became more global not only because goods crossed borders, but because capitalist labor relations spread into new societies on a mass scale.
The key institutional vehicle for this transformation was the transnational corporation. Fulcher highlights the rapid growth in the number and overseas investment of such firms during the late twentieth century. Their reach did not mean that production became evenly distributed around the world, but it did mean that corporations increasingly relocated or extended operations to places where labor was cheaper and regulation weaker. The most vivid example is the rise of the maquiladoras in northern Mexico. These export-oriented assembly plants expanded after Mexico allowed duty-free import of inputs for re-exported goods, and they grew even faster after NAFTA reduced remaining trade barriers. The result was a borderland production system tightly integrated with the U.S. economy.
The maquiladora case illustrates both the economic gains and the social costs of globalized production. Foreign capital brought jobs and foreign-exchange earnings to Mexico, and the sector became economically significant. But those gains rested heavily on low wages, weak regulation, poor enforcement of labor rights, and the suppression of independent unionism. Fulcher is clear that the attraction of such locations lay not simply in labor abundance, but in labor’s political weakness. The chapter therefore presents globalization not as a neutral spreading of opportunity, but as a restructuring of bargaining power in favor of capital.
Asia provides an even larger-scale example of this logic. Fulcher traces successive waves of production moving from Japan to the so-called tiger economies, then onward to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and later into China and Vietnam as costs rose in each previous location. This sequence reveals a central mechanism of global capitalism: capital is mobile enough to keep searching for cheaper production sites, while workers remain much less able to move or organize at the same scale. The chapter also emphasizes that many of the new factory workers were young women, making gender central to the story. Capitalism often fused with patriarchal norms to secure especially cheap and compliant labor, sometimes shading into child exploitation.
This global redistribution of production weakened labor in the old industrial centers. Workers in richer countries did not just lose jobs; they also lost leverage. The possibility that firms could shift production abroad undercut unions and eroded earlier gains in bargaining power. Fulcher does not ignore the consumer side of the story: cheaper imported goods did raise real purchasing power in some developed countries. But he shows that this benefit came with a trade-off. Workers could buy less expensive products partly because other workers, often abroad and often less protected, were being paid less. The gains of global capitalism thus appeared unevenly and ambiguously, even within the advanced economies.
The globalization of labor did not stop at factories. Fulcher argues that information and communication technologies made it possible to relocate office work as well: typing, data processing, software tasks, customer service, and other forms of telework could be shifted to lower-cost sites. Call centers became a textbook case. Jobs once presented in Britain as replacements for manufacturing losses were themselves later outsourced to countries such as India, China, and Malaysia, while French firms used francophone Africa and U.S. companies long relied on the Caribbean and South Asia. Language skills, training, and management mattered, but the basic driver remained the same: labor-cost arbitrage on a global scale.
He then broadens the lens to tourism, a sector often left out of standard discussions of globalization. International tourism grew massively in the postwar era and became a major source of foreign exchange for many poor countries. What interests Fulcher is not only the scale of travel, but its transformative effect on local societies. Tourism introduces wage labor, stimulates transport and food supply chains, encourages the production of souvenirs, and spreads money-based consumption into remote places that may have had little prior integration into world markets. In that sense, tourism extends capitalism into areas that might not industrialize or export manufactured goods but can still be commodified as destinations.
That process, however, involves converting culture and nature into things with prices. Landscapes, rituals, wildlife, and even “authenticity” itself become marketable assets. Fulcher recognizes that commercialization can sometimes preserve practices or environments that might otherwise disappear, as in ecotourism, but the preservation is altered by profit-seeking. He pushes the point further by discussing sex tourism, where commodification reaches the body itself, including in some cases the bodies of children. Even where tourism generates income, much of the profit is captured by foreign airlines, hotel chains, and travel companies. So the local society receives some benefits, but the commanding heights often remain external.
Agriculture, Fulcher argues, should also be understood as part of global capitalism, even if agricultural globalization is older than many other forms. Plantation systems long tied tropical regions to industrial-country markets, but newer competitive pressures intensified corporate control. He uses the banana industry to show how multinational firms such as Dole shifted production to lower-cost countries like Ecuador, where labor was cheaper and unions weak, while using institutions such as the WTO to challenge trade arrangements that protected smaller producers in Africa and the Caribbean. The nominal language of free trade thus masked a harsh struggle in which large corporations enjoyed structural advantages over small farmers.
The chapter then moves from corporate farming to biotechnology and intellectual property. Drawing on Vandana Shiva, Fulcher argues that agriculture is increasingly dominated by concentrated “life science” corporations that sell high-yield genetically engineered seeds together with chemical inputs and water-intensive production models. This may raise output, but it can also deepen debt, damage ecosystems, exhaust water resources, and destroy biodiversity. More fundamentally, the very materials of life—seeds, genes, plants, water, and traditional knowledge—are turned into commodities and proprietary assets. Under global intellectual-property rules, knowledge previously held and developed collectively by poor communities can become the property of corporations, which then sell it back to those same communities.
In the section on finance, Fulcher describes perhaps the most dramatic face of globalization: the explosive growth of money moving across borders. He stresses that this expansion was driven less by the needs of ordinary trade than by speculation. New communication systems, digital networks, satellites, and financial innovation allowed immense volumes of currency trading and cross-border investment. Derivatives, investment funds, and “emerging market” vehicles multiplied the channels through which savings in rich countries could be redirected around the world. The move from fixed exchange rates under Bretton Woods to floating currencies in the 1970s increased uncertainty and therefore widened the scope for both hedging and speculation. Deregulation in the 1980s and competition among financial centers accelerated the process even further.
Yet Fulcher pauses to ask the crucial question: how global is this allegedly global system? His answer is blunt. Capitalism reaches most of the world, but it does not integrate it evenly. Most investment and most financial flows still move among rich countries, while the share reaching poorer ones is both limited and geographically concentrated, with East Asia—especially China—standing out as the major exception. He is skeptical of the claim that globalization naturally equalizes nations. Citing thinkers such as Robert Wade, Amartya Sen, and Thomas Piketty, he argues that enormous international inequalities remain and that wealth concentration within countries has also intensified. At the same time, transnational corporations are not detached from states: they remain rooted in particular national systems, depend on home-country institutions, and rely on state power even as they operate abroad.
The chapter closes by identifying the one sense in which capitalism truly has gone global: it has become the only broadly viable economic system. The collapse of Soviet-style state socialism after 1989 removed the main systemic alternative, and international institutions such as the IMF and World Bank pressed many developing countries toward a market-oriented model built on austerity, privatization, and liberalization. Fulcher uses Russia’s disastrous “shock therapy” and China’s more gradual transition to show that capitalism can emerge through very different political and institutional paths. His final point is the most important: capitalism is globally dominant, but that does not mean it is globally uniform. The four myths exposed in the chapter are that globalization is recent, that capital truly circulates everywhere, that national differences no longer matter, and that global capitalism integrates rather than divides the world. For Fulcher, the reality is harsher: capitalism has spread widely, but it remains uneven, state-dependent, and deeply structured by hierarchy.
See also
- milanovic_global_inequality_resumo — Milanovic’s “elephant curve” is the global empirical evidence for the bargaining-power redistribution mechanism Fulcher describes: mobile capital wins, immobile labor in rich countries loses
- wolf_crisis_democratic_capitalism_resumo — Wolf develops normatively what Fulcher describes historically: financialization and shareholder value as a rupture of the pact between capitalism and democracy
- steger_roy_neoliberalism_resumo — the ideology that legitimized the remarketized phase and its global diffusion via the IMF and World Bank
- neoliberalism — conceptual entry on the mechanisms and variations of the neoliberal project that Fulcher situates historically
- thymos — the reduction of labor’s bargaining power described in Chapter 5 is the structural economic basis of the recognition problem: workers lose not only income but status and leverage, fueling political resentment
- PUC-Rio vs. Unicamp — Por Que o Brasil Não Forma Consenso Econômico — the Brazilian debate between orthodoxy and heterodoxy restages, in local terms, the tension between managed capitalism and remarketization that Fulcher analyzes comparatively