Mercantilist origins of capitalism and its legacies: from birth to decline of Western hegemony
Journal: Estudios Críticos del Desarrollo
Year: 2011

In this paper we trace capitalism from its origins in European expansion by commerce and conquest to the financialization of Western economies and the unraveling of Anglo–American hegemony. We emphasize continuities in the domination of metropolitan capital over peripheral production from the slave plantations to the outsourcing of manufacturing to cheap labor locations by multinational corporations. But the subordination of production to powerful agglomerations of commercial and financial capit