Conceptualizing Capitalism: Conversations with Henning Trüper 

Find all four Blogs with Henning Trüper here!

BS: Our previous conversation could be summarized as capitalism made the states, and the states made capitalism. In this phrasing, capitalism becomes a process of continuous transformation, not a more or less stable system. Capitalism and the state constitute one another. They are entangled, not in a lasting equilibrium but in a continuous state of tension. 

Of course, this phrasing, capitalism made states and vice versa, draws on Charles Tilly. In a book in the early 1990s, Coercion, Capital, and European States, Tilly derived the beginning of a history that many at the time believed had finally come to an end. World and Market began to replace state and war as heuristic key concepts in the political discourse. The third chapter was titled How War Made States and Vice Versa. Tilly described a long process of slow monopolization of the means of violence and tax collection. It was one process rather than two because the two dimensions were closely connected.

Tilly referred explicitly to Norbert Elias, who, in British exile, wrote Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, published in Basel in 1939. Elias described a slow three-step development from feudalization via monopolization to Vergesellschaftung, “societalization.” He described modernization as a long but inexorable development process of civilization. In retrospect, it is, of course, difficult to understand how a Jewish refugee could conceptualize world history in this way in 1939. However, it becomes more apparent if one thinks that he only saw the early phase of what would follow. He admitted that there could be temporary Entzivilisierungsschübe, decivilizational pushes, but the end was clear. And 1992, when Tilly quoted him, it seemed to give him the right. Tilly departs from Elias’s emphasis on “an intimate relationship between taxation and military force.” However, he added, “Elias’s duo… forms two voices of a trio.” The missing member was credit, which linked the military monopoly to the monopoly of taxation. Tilly emphasized the role of the monetization of the economy and the availability of credit, which depended on the presence of capitalists, who advanced money to the state in antecipation of taxes, thereby promoting the monetization of the state’s economy. Is this a history to connect to when we discuss what capitalism is today?

HT: What I find striking about both Elias and Tilly, fascinating as their grand-sweep histories still are, is the glaring absence of empire and imperialism as a problem and a driving force of this history of European modernity. “Civilization” now, just for example, appears a remarkably tainted term, as a legitimizing ideology of colonialism and the catchword for the Europe that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it so momentously, ought to be “provincialized.” The Tilly perspective seems one-sidedly focus on the national state as a financial-military compound, to which the welfare state would later be added as a stabilizing factor. But all those paradigmatic nation states that were crassly militarized and, as one might say, hyper-aggressive, were engaged in more or less open imperial pursuits. They wanted to conquer territories to exploit, but not to integrate; they wanted to subdue imperial competitors. I was quite impressed by Sven Beckert’s “King Cotton,” his account of how the pursuit of cotton – as a material, as a trade, as a production regime – could be seen as the decisive simultaneous driver of industrialization and the second wave of empire building from the eighteenth century onward. Already in the earliest period of this process, there are private-public partnerships to use a very contemporary phrase because groups, corporations, and merchants see the need to use military force to insert themselves into the Indian Ocean and African networks of cotton trading violently. And for the supply of such military force, the state is needed as a facilitator and supplier. Industrialization would have been triggered by the need to process the cotton material without reliance on labor in not-yet controlled colonial spaces; the slow acquisition of skills of cotton processing that had taken place in South Asia over centuries could not be matched in England; hence the enormous market for machinery. This is an account in which “war is the father of all things,” or something like it, anyway, as the underlying wars from which the needs and solutions of modernity sprung, were semi-private affairs. Beckert does not supply much of a theoretical framework for his very wide-ranging empirical account; but I thought there was much merit in his understanding of capitalism as a much more idiosyncratic, historical thing, as coinciding in many ways with the actual history of empires since the eighteenth century. The price to pay, though, is that it becomes harder to understand why the nation state emerged at all, in Europe, under these circumstances. Probably, the history of capitalism has to grapple with both the nation state and empire.

BS: Industrialization was mass production of commodities driven by new technology to generate and transmit power to and concentrate labor in new kind of factories. The scale was revolutionary compared to the handicraft and artisan production where each produced unit was unique. The steam engine drove the machines in the factories as well as new means of land and sea transport for raw materials and finished products. The acquisition of raw materials and labor (slaves) underpinned colonialism that followed the circumnavigators’ “discoveries,” colonialism as a web of global trade stations and settlements of white people. Everything became bigger and faster when the mobilization of capital and the organization of credits became more intense after 1870, and colonial exploitation led to increasing capital accumulation and concentration that ever more demanded military support to control occupied territory, not against the indigenous proprietors but against claims by other imperialist powers. This power situation was the background of the beginning of the drafting of international law in the 1870s, the “gentle civilizer” as Martti Koskenniemi aptly called it, international law to regulate the conflict between the empires in the colonies over the heads of the indigenous peoples. Yes, I agree, industrialization and technology were closely connected to imperialism, intertwined with it. They were two dimensions of one process. 

The growing capacity of mass production of ever more destructive weapons was a crucial dimension of the industrial revolution. Social protests about labor conditions and distribution of wealth accompanied the industrial revolution and the spread of capitalism but this was something different than capitalism and democracy going hand in hand. We are used to studying all these processes, the industrial revolution, the spread of capitalism, the growth of military power, colonialism, imperialism with the emergence of empires, state building with nationalism, democratization, the expansion of knowledge production, the spread of knowledge and information as separate processes. I think that a better understanding comes from seeing them as various entangled dimensions of one larger process of progress, jolts, and setbacks, idiosyncratic and coincidental. Ever more violent wars accompanied the process which was a struggle for power over land and seaways, natural resources and the transport of them and their refined products. Empires and nation states coexisted. The choice was often a matter of size, scale, and the entangled industrial, commercial, and military capacities. Both were driven by nationalism. In the empires there might have been a more multiethnic understanding of ethnicity but there was never any doubt about what ethnic group was superior.

The industrial revolution and capitalism were for a long time seen as the logical and intrinsic consequence of a particular European capacity to order and master space and time, a particularly brilliant way of thinking and inventing. Today there is growing insight that this is wrong. I agree very much with what you say about idiosyncratic development. What is called the great divergence (Kenneth Pomerantz) between Europe and other world regions in the nineteenth century was a contingent event where different processes coincided or were brought to coincide. It was conditioned by the triangular commercial relations across the Atlantic around slaves, raw materials, and industrial production that had slowly evolved during the previous three centuries. There is no “endogenous” and self-propelling European history here. A similar multilateral trade with slaves, raw materials and spices, and commodities emerged even earlier across the Indian Ocean between Persia/the Arabic sultanates, Africa, and India. Military power supported the emerging order, which was often understood as progress, but the experiences of economic crises, wars, revolutions, world wars, and totalitarianism shook regularly optimistic expectations about the future. The spread of capitalism under the name of modernity and civilization was a history of deep ambiguity and ambivalence (Link Publications/Monographs/European Modernity), initiating a history of oppression while at the same time serving as the point of departure for resistance to oppression and struggle for justice.

HT: Yes, I think historical research has made great strides in showing the intricate interweaving of all those processes. Even the “triangular trade” we probably all still learned about in school has been rather dismantled, as far as I understand, by research that showed the importance of Indian Ocean trade networks and the – violent – European self-insertion into them as a prerequisite for establishing the Atlantic slave trade. But I do think that we still do not spend enough time on trying to understand the political side of empires. The pattern of state and private interests, all the way down to the “ordinary people” seeking imperial “adventure” as a way of self-enrichment or social or even just spatial mobility – it sets up the state as what in German one would label a “Beutegemeinschaft,” a mutually profitable outfit of shared prey-making, one might perhaps say. The term “cleptocracy” became fashionable a few years ago; but it remained a somewhat superficial, even moralistic concept without much of a historical consciousness. This is also akin to Max Horkheimer’s somewhat abortive attempt to theorize capitalist society in terms of a “racket,” a fraudulent scheme for obtaining money, a mafiotic outfit of the coercive collection of protection money, though to my mind this is perhaps a bit too narrow in that it is about the mutual profitability of two or more different outfits, the state and “capital.” I think the underlying historical phenomenon might be imperialism, and the main question might then be about empire’s transformations.

I do think that all those public-private partnerships we can see even in today’s politics have a point of origin in the strange spread of global European empires. The model of the democratic nation state, which provided the teleological understanding of political history as progressive over the last 250 years or so, is abandoned by voting publics for the promise of profit. If in electoral decisions “it’s the economy, stupid,” and only the economy, and never mind anything else, this is a clear indicator that there is a sustained hope of profiting at someone else’s expense, within democratic nation states. This pattern apparently can be activated very easily. I think that this activation also explains the seemingly outlandish recurrence to models from US imperial history in what is only the early days of the second Trump administration: Buy Greenland, annex Canada, re-occupy the Panama Canal, change the names on the map, etc. I doubt the average American would know much about William McKinley during whose presidency, through the Spanish-American War, the US became a full-blown overseas colonial power. In a typical imperialist manner, McKinley’s name was also bestowed on North America’s highest mountain until the Obama administration, as it were, decolonized it by giving back the Athabascan people’s original name, Denali. In an act of symbolic re-colonization Donald Trump reverted it back to “Mount McKinley” by presidential decree in January 2025. And yet, that era’s history of empire continues to haunt them – as well as the rest of the world. We have, in a sense, been trained to think of liberal democracy, the rule of law, and international regulation and legalization, as the toolkit for overcoming imperialism. It seems quite clear that it has not worked out that way. The irony in the US case appears to be that the promise of imperial profit is now used to dismantle the reality of the at least locally (i.e. in Western Europe and East Asia) benign and democracy-oriented American imperial hegemony from the period of the Cold War onward. But even this is not a profoundly novel contradiction, I suspect. Wild reversals, or “disruptions” (to use a favorite term of today’s), in imperial policy have happened before, if for instance one looks at the process in which the British government ended up taking over colonial rule in India from the East India Company; or the reorganization of imperial domination after the descent of European empires and the ascent of the American-Soviet system of worldwide domination in the Cold War period with the many proxy wars with conventional weapons all over the planet whereas the nuclear threat lead to a stalemate in the North.

Anyway, this would appear to be the economic side of the politics of empire. But this is also where the question of theory of value that we broached in the previous conversation retains some relevance. There is that profound emptiness of exchanging money for more money. The promise of profit is one of participating in that emptiness. And I think there is a potential trap there, in taking for granted that this history is merely driven by the pursuit of (monetary, economic) profit. The public component in it, I think, is irreducible, but it is often relegated to the sidelines especially in “leftist” political thought. Heuristically, I think we need a sort of corrective abstract étatisme. The étatisme should be understood as abstract because this would not be limited to the national states as the primary actors, but rather to the wider mesh of statal institutions that is always-already international – it was so even in the more distant past, with all manner of coordination through conflict, of institutional emulation. And I think the abstract étatisme in question should be seen as heuristic; I do not mean to accord an actual primacy to the state, but it helps thinking about matters in this way because of the dominance of a mode of analysis that focuses so one-sidedly on capitalism. In fact, the state as a war machine has a longer history than capitalism; and this history remains relevant. The war machine is needed to prop up any imperial Beutegemeinschaft. And it is perhaps even needed as a force of interruption in the chain of empty value exchanges. 

I think what we are seeing in certain sectors of historical writing, with e.g. the history of inter-imperialism on the rise for the period of, say, 1750-1950, is in many ways the right kind of impulse. No one would now think of studying capitalism as limited to a national container. I think statehood, as well as imperiality, are entitled to a similar claim.

BS: This perspective is indeed something very different than Marx’s stereotype of the international, transnational is maybe better, working class against international capital, but isn’t there also a scope for international social protests and revolts? What about a world society? There were at least ideas of it in the 1990s. And how would your empire/capital tangle relate to the fiction of an unbounded global market? With these questions I agree very much that state/empire/capitalism is the relevant field to drill deeper into. It quite obviously undermines the one-sided focus on capital ruling the world on/through a global market. The connections you draft are full of boundaries and attempts to transcend them.

HT: I must admit to, and perhaps even apologize for, my rampant pessimism, I suppose. But I would be tempted to say that the revolts and protests we have seen over the last decades, while sometimes adding necessary corrections and improving on specific aspects of the general mess, have mostly been coopted by the states and the imperial public-private partnership. There has been little in the way of revolutionary action that has managed to break the pattern. Graeber and Wengrow make the important point of how there appears to be much evidence, in human history, of people simply abandoning political systems that had become oppressive. However, this idea of just going elsewhere and starting from scratch is hard to conceive in the present-day world. That is why the inter-imperial perspective is so important. It is actually not one political system that has become oppressive, but multiple ones, and they collude. This would appear to be the true and unresolved heritage of the “Age of Empires.” 

BS: Our conversation is moving towards the argument that capitalism as a concept connotes too much of an independent closed economic system demarcated from politics to help us understand and describe today’s world situation. The world as an unbounded market is ideology, powerful but still a myth. What we see is not a self-propelling economic system called a market but the ordered or disordered tangle of politics and economics, political and financial powers, private and public. Empire and inter-imperialism are more fruitful concepts. Trying to define capitalism as an isolated phenomenon is like chasing a shadow. The shadow exists. It is real. But it is only accurate in relation to the light source and the object that gives the shadow. The same is true if, as in the neoliberal era, we call the shadow the market. In the debate, it became a fetish, a myth, a supposed self-propelled machine. The self-deception was revealed when everything collapsed in 2008. That’s when the market players came out into the open. The same applies to all previous speculative bubbles that burst. In our next conversation, let us see how this conceptualization and understanding of capitalism works out when discussing the Cold War and its mix of armament and welfare state. 

Find all four Blogs with Henning Trüper here!

How to quote:
Cit. Bo Stråth, “Conceptualizing Capitalism: Conversations with Henning Trüper. Blog 2. States Made Wars and Wars Made States. And Capitalism? Empires? Colonialism?” Blog. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/blog-2-states-made-wars-and-wars-made-states-and-capitalism-empires-colonialism/ Published 29.05.2025

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