Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The “city as a growth machine” is a concept first put forward by sociologist Harvey Molotch in 1976 to describe how cities are not simply urbanized places where people live and work; city-place functions as means for local elites to accumulate capital. Molotch, writing with John Logan (1987), argues that places, specifically “land markets,” are created through processes of accumulation: powerful individuals and groups, potentially with otherwise divergent interests, coalesce to form “growth machines” and compete with other cities to attract capital investment. Similar to what marxist urbanists like Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre were proposing in the 1970s, Logan and Molotch claim that modern cities do not develop “organically” or even according to a free market rationale, rather they function as (environmentally destructive) “growth machines” at the service of elite accumulation (1987). Chambers of commerce (which Molotch notes are often mistakenly assumed to be a part of city government (1993, 34)), claim that urban (re)-development will combat unemployment, housing crises, and fiscal crises. However, Moltoch argues that this is not the case: jobs actually come from “rates of investment return, federal decisions affecting the money supply, and other factors having very little to do with local decision making” (Molotch 1976, 320; 1993, 32). The discourse of development masks attempts to retrench political-economic power.

Following the Hungarian social democratic thinker Karl Polanyi, Logan and Molotch support their thesis by arguing that land is not the product of labor, it is a natural “free gift” and that its supply is fixed (Polanyi (1944) calls this a “fictitious commodity”). Urban land markets are therefore “inherently monopolistic, providing owners, as a class, with complete control over the total commodity supply” (Logan and Molotch 1987, 23). They do not fluctuate as neoclassical theory would dictate, rather because there is a qualitative difference in similarly sized allotments, because certain spaces become more desirable. Real estate “is essentially second hand” and there is no correlation between new housing and lower costs, nor between high vacancies and lower rent levels (Turner 1977, 39 as cited by Logan and Molotch 1987, 25). At the same time, there is a certain geographic or “landed” determinism in the use of redevelopment to solve urban social issues. Supposedly “value-free” land-use policies mask rentierism, and boosterism conflates this with a civic pride (what is good for landholders is good for the community), ensuring investors that a given locality is a safe bet. Furthermore, the contemporary financial obsession with risk is highly political in the context of the growth coalition. In relying on the public sector to fund infrastructure (often directly through public-private partnerships), municipal governments also take on the lion’s share of financial risk. In sum, the growth machine can only function with the help of ideology (Molotch 1993, 33), and Logan and Molotch argue that investment in urban and transurban infrastructure is not only done for society or for national/regional economies, but as an elite accumulation strategy and always at a cost to other cities.

Historically speaking, the authors suggest that the growth machine was thus an unopposed, driving force for U.S. expansion across the continent. We might see cities in the American west as not only “springboards” for conquering indigenous lands, but as spatial tools for rentier elites to prosper. Even transportation infrastructure (canals, ports, and railroads) did not necessarily develop for the benefit of an integrated national economy, but at the behest of elites in various cities and to the detriment of others. For example, in 1914 boosters successfully lobbied for a canal near Houston which helped spur local development by connecting it to global trade through the Gulf of Mexico, permanently putting it at  an advantage over nearby Galveston (Logan and Molotch 1987, 56).

In keeping with Logan and Molotch’s understanding of the growth machine, Harvey also shows how a sense of zero-sum inter-urban competition and macroeconomic development are interrelated, especially during periods of economic and political crises (1989, 3-5). The neoliberal period of the late 1970s and 1980s was characterized by a shift from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism, where “even the most resolute and avantgarde municipal socialists could [find] themselves… playing the capitalist game and performing as agents of discipline” (5). The growth machine becomes the only means to urban prosperity, the economic rationale without alternatives. Harvey also proposes that this shift is the cause of a conceptual confusion in the scholarship about what a city is, a confusion between city [government] and urban [geography/society]. This is because urban entrepreneurialism implies a reflexive dialectic between urban political institutions and the built environment–they are directly related (6). Logan and Molotch’s analysis is therefore ultimately quite similar to David Harvey’s analysis of urban entrepreneurialism and his notion of “the urbanization of capital” (1989). City space has become a driving force for accumulation.

The growth machine concept is fairly simple and powerful in its applicability, but it has been challenged in constructive ways. In the 1990s, geographer Kevin Cox described both Logan and Molotch and Harvey’s analyses as the “new urban politics” (NUP) literature. Cox claimed that ‘the international hypermobility of capital’ NUP is concerned with lacks an empirical basis in many cases (1993, 433), and he suggested that firms tend to be more locally dependent than the literature presupposes. In other words, urban growth politics ought not to be reduced to a geography of tax breaks or cheap-labor pools. Furthermore, he noted that Logan and Molotch’s paradigm has a difficult task because it studies the potential for firms to move, not actual mobility (438). In fact, accumulation strategies often lead to the localization of capital (434), and city governments often shift their economic dependence to higher levels of government (states) rather than private capital (441). The reverse situation is therefore when growth coalitions arise, and any increase in political devolution since the 1990s would seem to corroborate Logan and Molotch’s argument. Where Logan and Molotch emphasize the role of capital (based on Southern California case studies), Cox implies that earlier urbanists were correct by emphasizing collective consumption and social reproduction in cities, and that dualities between economic and political, growth and anti-growth, and local and global explanations for urban development tend to break down (436-437). In Silicon Valley, for example, rising housing prices threaten to undermine capital’s ability to attract and sustain a skilled labor pool (439).

Finally, Cox identifies an overlap with literature on global cities that can help it theorize global-local relations more effectively, a line of thought developed by Delphine Ancien more recently (2011). The NUP might have been a particularly North American phenomenon, but has had growing global application in recent decades as American finance capital moves into global cities (Cox 1993, 446). Ancien (2011) explains that the NUP, especially where it emphasizes states’ urban growth strategies, helps us to better understand how the social relations within and between global cities require constant reproduction and thus political support, materially and discursively. For example, the UK government of the 1960s refused to devalue the pound in order to stimulate export industries; it was national policy to maintain London’s position as a financial service leader and thus the strength of the currency (2011, 2482), and the rest of the country (and its trading partners) bore the cost. Today, we therefore must study growth machines in tandem with globalizing cities and with greater attention to scale.

(See Accumulation, Capital, Class, Global City, Critical Political Economy, De/Reterritorialization, Urban Political Economy)

Bibliography

Ancien, Delphine. “Global City Theory and the New Urban Politics Twenty Years On.” Urban Studies 48, no. 12 (2011): 2473–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098011411945.

Cox, Kevin. “The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical View.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11, no. 4 (1993): 433–48. https://doi.org/10.1068/d110433.

Harvey, David. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.1989.11879583.

Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Logan, John R., and Harvey Luskin Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of California Press, 1987.

Molotch, Harvey. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/226311.

Molotch, Harvey. “The Political Economy of Growth Machines.” Journal of Urban Affairs 15, no. 1 (1993): 29–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.1993.tb00301.x.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.  Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001  [1944].

Turner, D.M. An Approach to Land Values. Geographical, 1977.

Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The term “global city” is geographic and sociological; it refers to a city which has significant financial power and is a focal point or “node” in the global economy. While the associated term “world city” has been used since at least the 1910s (Geddes 1915), “global city” began to appear in the 1980s, when scholars such as Jonathan Friedmann and Saskia Sassen argued that the rise of high finance was contributing to a new international division of labor, and a hierarchy of “command and control” cities in the global economy (Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Friedmann 1986; Rodriguez and Feagin 1986; Sassen 1991). These authors also saw transformations within global north urban society itself: industry was making way for the agglomeration of financial institutions and related services (performed by the upper-middle class) on the one hand, and low-wage service jobs (performed by the urban precariat) on the other (Sassen 1991; Knox 1997).

The global cities research paradigm essentially began with Jonathan Friedmann and Goetz Wolff”s “world city hypothesis,” or the “spatial articulation of the emerging world system of production and markets through a global network of cities” in a hierarchical system of capital accumulation (1982, 309). Rooted in international political economy (IPE) and world-systems theory, Friedmann and Wolff, along with a variety of scholars in the same period such as Stephen Hymer (1972), Fernand Braudel (1982), and Jane Jacobs (1984), argued that cities rather than states were the driving force of global capitalism.

Having established this, however, Friedmann and Wolff were fundamentally interested in the socio-spatial stratification between the urban ‘citadel and ghetto,’ and asked how planners might serve the interests of residents, transnational corporations, and nation-states within the emerging system (Friedmann 1986, 69). They place seemingly local questions of urban capital accumulation and class conflict, as articulated by Manuel Castells (1972) and David Harvey (1973), within the context of the globalizing world system. Friedmann argued that the global control functions of respective cities affect their production and employment dynamics, and that “World city growth generates social costs at rates that tend to exceed the fiscal capacity of the state” (1986, 77). Corporations are often exempt from local taxes while the “the social classes that feed at the trough of the transnational economy insist… on the priority of their own substantial claims for urban amenities and services” (79). 

This new paradigm also introduced the idea that city specialization occurs at a world-systemic level rather than a regional one, and that this spatial structure is rooted in political economy rather than a naturalized ecology as the Chicago school (of sociology) had suggested. Nestor Rodriguez and Joe Feagin, for example, provide comparative historical evidence that specialization takes on different forms in different eras, and that urban studies in the past had been too concerned with local and cultural explanations. Terms like “node” and “division of labor” had been mistakenly “understood in a natural or technological sense rather than a political-economic context” (1986, 189). The authors see a relationship between financial and industrial cities (Amsterdam-Leiden, London-Manchester, and NYC-Houston) in eras preceding postwar globalization, and argue that specialization occurs through the global search for urban land and labor pools, and through globally-connected growth coalitions (Molotch 1976). For example, they note that “London developed as a world financial center even before it developed as a national financial center” (199) and that the New York financial district grew from the nearby port and Erie Canal rather than the city’s mid-Atlantic hinterland (204). Houston’s subsequent rise is then explained by the need of New York’s surplus financial capital to find a profitable outlet through industrial production and real estate (212). Specialization is not an outgrowth of natural processes or an invisible-hand type of logic, rather it is grounded in the (international) political economy of development.

Saskia Sassen further developed the concept of the global city by emphasizing the role of high finance in its formation. In The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo (1991), Sassen explains that in the post-Fordist era there has been a shift in ‘economic gravity’ away from transnational banks and toward financial firms and their advanced producer services (the supporting firms of legal, accounting, and economic consulting) agglomerated in global cities (84). Financial institutions outsource highly specialized services in respective city spaces, while spreading their own internal business structures across a global archipelago of major cities. Sassen has four main arguments:

1) “the territorial dispersal of current economic activity creates a need for expanded central control and management” (4)

2) this new logic effects economic order within cities themselves as they must produce new supporting services and financial tools (and infrastructures) (5)

3) the city and the nation therefore take on a new relationship; there is a disjuncture between urban and national economic growth (8-9)

4) the growth of the global city produces new social orders as firms still tend to agglomerate to harness innovation and highly specialized, contractual labor markets (11)

Cities remain important because of the combination of knowledge and labor they provide, but they now have a tendency to disconnect from their regional economies and urban elites are denationalized. The city is more than a concentration of capital, people, and nature surrounded by a hinterland, but a concentration of financial forces (and all of the capital, people, and nature that entails) in a global network. Global cities’ financial districts became political-economic focal points for accelerating transactions through easy access to information, a well connected community, and backroom dealing.

Despite the seemingly political nature of these assertions, Sassen claims that she is not concerned with “power,” nor the political capabilities that global cities afford banks, large corporations, and supranational organizations (1991, 6). Rather than concentrating on the political-economic “drama” of corporate power, Sassen is concerned with the operational space where financial processes develop; the impenetrable world of futures and risk management has given rise to an operational zone where financiers buy highly-specialized labor at a moment’s notice (meaning no more “in house” specialization). Writing in the early 1990s, Sassen saw this new economy as loose, “intermediate” and “networked sector,” but because it has taken over the development of city space and continually implements massive redevelopment projects, it has perhaps become something more concrete, permanent, and powerful today. Furthermore, if we were to offer a political addition to Sassen’s argument, we might begin by noting that both financial districts as spatial agglomerations, and the financialization of global-urban real estate as a process, are sanctioned and supported by local and national governments hoping to win out in a global economic competition.

Turning to Sassen’s third thesis on the new relationship between the city and nation state, it seems that global city concept does not only describe a new set of social relations, an integrated community of experts, and a “nodal point” in the global economy, but it is also signals the reterritorialization of space in a global archipelago of financial enclaves. Any given global city space is more properly connected to global city spaces across the world than its hinterland, and each casts a “shadow” on smaller cities and regions. In urban geography, this manifests as a global connection of financial fortresses, but also of enclaved communities, of export processing zones, and of American securitized ports. Whether one is in Dubai, London, or Shanghai, the core of the global city reads as the same space (see also Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor (2000)). What we might mistakenly read as integration and national connectivity is therefore best understood as a layer of financial, material, and informational flows separate from (but casting shadows on) regional economies.

In an important addition, David Bassens and Michiel van Meeteren (2015) take up this metageography, suggesting that a wider “world city archipelago” (beyond New York and London) remains essential for the realization of capital and the propagation of global uneven development against claims of “convergence.” For these authors, the command and control function for production has been “subsumed in a logic of financialization,” the financial services hold a “class monopoly” on the “the necessary and seemingly sufficient authority and expertise”  necessary for realization, and through their service fees earn “class monopoly rents” (754). The advanced producer service complex (APS) ‘aggregates service interventions in the production space, socially constructs material circuits of value, and enables capital switching’ (761). The APS complex constructs accumulation strategies through applied economic geography, centered on “emerging markets,” but also in carbon emissions markets and in pension funds (and thus in urban real estate) (763-764). 

Outside of the academy, geographer Peter Taylor and the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC)’s work on city hierarchy have had perhaps the most influence. The GaWC produces formal models of the global city network, and further elaborate on the subnodal intra-service firm networks which complement the supranodal geography of command and control (2001, 182-183). These models then allow the GaWC to rank cities within the global hierarchy. Regardless of its analytic value, the GaWC’s indexing of cities has become incredibly important because of how it is used by financiers, consultants, and city boosters themselves when opening offices and allocating capital (today we can also look at sustainability rankings)

Joshua Leon (2017) argues that the global city concept and indexing have been appropriated by neoliberal city managers and corporate power, that these elites ignore its complexity and internal academic debates, and that they create a discourse of competition to influence city governments’ actions in the world and degree of economic exposure to the world. States and cities provide generous tax incentives and subsidies to attract global capital, a process which Leon calls “municipal mercantilism” (14). Global cities do not rely on a “creative class” to compete (Florida 2003), rather “deploy state power to insulate themselves from markets” altogether. New York City, for example, has used public financing to attract and retain firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, and skyscraper developers–a form of global city boosterism (Leon 15). Furthermore, cities in the global south like Shanghai, Dubai, and Doha (and even Tokyo) have gained “Alpha” status characteristic of free-market, cosmopolitan cities while being very much state development projects (Richard Child Hill and June Woo Kim (2000); see also Acuto 2022). Leon concludes that we should not disparage global cities research, rather understand how corporate sponsorship reduces it to a simplified “‘how to’ manual” (2017, 20-21).

There are numerous other additions to global city theory, such as various postcolonial critiques which challenge the appropriateness of “global city” in the global south and its potential to exclude cities that are not financial centers but nonetheless important for global production circuits (Robinson 2002; Smith 2002). Lusaka, for example, is thoroughly connected to the global economy through copper exports, even though it lacks access to financial markets and foreign currencies (Robinson 2002, 537). Another type of related scholarship complicates Sassen’s third thesis on the shifting relationships between the global city and the state. For example Neil Brenner (1998) and Eric Swyngedouw (2004) both effectively make the point that global city theory erroneously presupposes the declining power of the nation state in global political economy. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods system (itself a product of tensions in global economic scale) and the subsequent globalization of financial capital and currencies leads to new arrangements in production, planning, and regulation (Swyngedouw 2004, 39) where the state “glocalises.”

In sum, whereas for Friedmann and Wolff, “global city-territorial state relations are expressed as a geoeconomic battle between globally mobile TNS [transaction network services] and immobile state territories” which leads to fiscal crises in the latter (Brenner 1998, 8-9 on Friedmann and Wolff 1982, 312), and where for Sassen there is “systemic discontinuity” between the rise of global cities and declining industrial cities in the US, UK, and Japan (1991, 129-167) and a decline in territorial state sovereignty over global cities (1996), for these last authors, city-state and city-city political relations are not zero-sum: scholarship should not conflate the “withering away of state territory” with the reconfiguration of national scale to the global city.

(See Capitalist State, De/Reterritorialization, Enclave, Geopolitics, Growth Machine, Production, Urban Political Economy)

Bibliography

Acuto, Michele. How to Build a Global City: Recognizing the Symbolic Power of a
Global Urban Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.

Bassens, David, and Michiel van Meeteren. “World Cities under Conditions of Financialized Globalization.” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 6 (2014): 752–75.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514558441.

Beaverstock, Jonathan V., Richard G. Smith, and Peter J. Taylor. “World-City Network: A New Metageography?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 123–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00188.

Brenner, Neil. “Global Cities, Glocal States: Global City Formation and State Territorial Restructuring in Contemporary Europe.” Review of International Political Economy 5, 1 (1998): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/096922998347633.

Castells, Manuel. La Question Urbaine. Paris: F. Maspero, 1972.

Child Hill, Richard, and June Woo Kim. “Global Cities and Developmental States: New York, Tokyo and Seoul.” Urban Studies 37, no. 12 (2000): 2167–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980020002760.

Florida, Richard. “Cities and the Creative Class.” City & Community 2, no. 1 (2003): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6040.00034.

Friedmann, John. “The World City Hypothesis.” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1986.tb00231.x.

Friedmann, John, and Goetz Wolff. “World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6, no. 3 (1982): 309–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1982.tb00384.x.

Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution. Williams & Norgate, 1915.

Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold, 1973.

Hymer, Stephen. “The Internationalization of Capital.” Journal of Economic Issues 6, no. 1 (1972): 91–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1972.11503013.

Knox, Paul L. “Globalization and Urban Economic Change.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 551, no. 1 (May 1997): 8–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716297551001002.x

Molotch, Harvey. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/226311.

Robinson, Jennifer. “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002): 531–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00397.

Rodriguez, Nestor P., and Joe R. Feagin. “Urban Specialization in the World-System.” Urban Affairs Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1986): 187–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/004208168602200201.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991.

Sassen, Saskia. “The Global City: Enabling Economic Intermediation and Bearing Its Costs.” City & Community 15, no. 2 (2016): 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12175.

Sassen, Saskia. “Locating Cities on Global Circuits.” Environment and Urbanization 14, no. 1 (2002): 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/095624780201400102.

Smith, Neil. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 427–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00249.

Swyngedouw, Erik. “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’? Networks, Territories and Rescaling.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2004): 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/0955757042000203632.

Taylor, Peter J. “Specification of the World City Network.” Geographical Analysis 33, no. 2 (2001): 181–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-4632.2001.tb00443.x.

Md Mizanur Rahman
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Mark Howard
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The term trade can be used to describe both a particular form of labor (i.e. a work specialization such as carpentry), and also as a general term for the transfer of goods and services. In the context of free trade only the latter description applies. However, what may appear at first to be a simple concept—the free transfer of goods and services—is complicated by many factors deriving from the unavoidably political dimensions of free trade practices. Indeed, many scholars working in the field of International Relations characterize trade, and by association free trade, as a clash of interests and where interests clash so too do freedoms (Skonieczny 2018, 441).

Of course, all trade within a closed economy is generally understood to be free. Most typically this closed economy would be coterminous with a sovereign state, even where multiple nations exist within one state. For instance, the UK has multiple nations within its economic borders—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—and yet in theory (and in post-Brexit terms) has one closed economy—the UK economy. That means that the transfer of goods and services between entities within the UK can move freely, without quotas, tariffs, industry limitations, or currency considerations. The UK’s economy is, however, presently complicated by its partial embeddedness within the European Union (EU); the one major counterexample to a sovereign state as closed economy paradigm (hereafter, domestic economy). The EU is a newer form of economic community which serves as a potential alternative to the closed economy of the sovereign state. It works by creating a theoretically frictionless economy of currency, labor, capital, goods, and services movements between distinct political sovereignties, and in doing so is intended to operate in the same way as a domestic economy.

This is not, however, the domain in which the term free trade generally appears; free trade is more commonly used in discussions pertaining to trade relations between domestic economies (hereafter international trade) in what has become over time a vast international market, or collection of international markets. Thus what becomes apparent for our definition, is that free trade only appears as a term where we have a presumed a prior (or potential) state of unfree trade; a state that has been (or ought to be) undone through the implementation of free trade . Free trade on these terms is a freeing up of otherwise unfree trade relations, which in regard to international trade remains an ongoing and unfinished process. Indeed, Adam Smith (1776, 593) noted over 200 years ago that it would be utopian for us to expect complete freedom of trade to become reality, and so far he remains correct.

Classical Political Economists such as Smith understood international trade, and particularly free trade, to be desirable because it produces an expanded and unfettered market beyond the resources, producers, and/or consumers of any one domestic economy. Smith (1776, 29) argued that “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” is a “certain propensity in human nature”, thereby implying that an expanded international market would lead to a greater capacity for humans to realize their true nature. There are however a number of other reasons offered through Classical Political Economy, beyond the human nature argument, that suggest an expanded international market to be a good thing. For one, bigger markets mean greater economies of scale—producing in quantity lowers costs, and provides a larger consumer base for greater volume of exchange (Chang 2014, 299).  For another, there is the possibility of greater productive efficiencies in what Ricardo refers to as comparative advantage. He gives a famous example involving the production and trade of cloth and wine between England and Portugal: assume England takes 100 hours to produce a certain amount of cloth, and 120 hours to produce a certain amount of wine, while it takes Portugal 90 hours for the cloth and 80 hours for the wine. Portugal has an absolute advantage in labor terms. However, says Ricardo, the opportunity cost of wine to cloth for England is in a ration of 6/5, while for Portugal it is a ration of 8/9. Because of the inverse opportunity cost, it is actually cheaper for Portugal to get cloth by making wine and then selling it to England, than it is for Portugal to produce cloth itself (Foley 1999, 60).

International trade is not necessarily free trade, however, and Ricardo’s thesis only applies in abstract theoretical terms that do not account for trade costs relating to market entry. In the absence of free trade, there are typically costs, such as tariffs, involved when trading between domestic economies; costs deriving from domestic economic policies put in place by sovereign states to give those sovereign states maximally beneficial economic outcomes. This suggests that while international trade may be beneficial for reasons of specialization and expanded market opportunities, free trade may not always be beneficial, nor desirable for that matter. Interestingly, one of the greatest early champions of protectionist policies (i.e. policies designed to create barriers of entry into a domestic economy by foreign domestic economic actors), was the US, who are today champions of free trade policies around the globe (Chang 2014, 48). So why the shift of position?

Put simply, there are reasons why free trade works for some economies and does not for others, and this depends on their level of economic development and the global demand relating to their economic specializations. Free trade negates what is known in technical terms as infant industry protection, a way for domestic economies to develop their own capabilities in a burgeoning industry by putting up barriers of entry to foreign economic actors, thereby blocking that industry from interference by other, more developed, economic actors (Chang 2014, 297). This is where protectionism can be beneficial, even if the term has today come to be seen as pejorative. The fact is, the US is the powerful nation it is today in part because its early protectionist policies allowed it to develop its industries relatively undisturbed by more technically advanced economic powers such as Great Britain, which was at that time (due to its empire, an example of unfree free trade) the greatest industrial power in the world. Now that the US is the world’s largest economy, it suits the US to have free trade policies with other nations, as it has a distinct economic advantage going into what are supposed to be equal trade interactions. This discourse of equality in economic freedom obscures what is in fact an unlevel playing field tipped to the advantage of developed economies. As it happens, the US has been far more inconsistent (and creative) on this point than many may think. Between 1981 and 1986, for instance, the US, under pressure to implement trade protection to stimulate its economy after years of stagflation, instead opted for currency depreciation relative to the currencies of its major trading partner (Frieden 1991, 448), a policy it currently criticizes China for given the negative impact it has on US trade. Free trade does not evidently signify trade practices free from hypocrisy.

It also does not signify trade practices free from unequal power relations. Isaiah Berlin (1969, 168) famously distinguished between two forms of liberty (i.e. social or political freedom): negative (e.g. freedom from interference from others), and positive (e.g. freedom to pursue an aim or cause). Most discourses of freedom focus on negative freedom, the removal of restrictions or threats. What is interesting about free trade  is that the form in which freedom appears in a trade agreement depends on who you are in that trade relationship: if you are a weaker economy that may benefit from infant industry protection, then free trade may actually mean negative freedom to trade without interference from others; if you are a strong economy with a distinct advantage, and in need of new markets, then free trade means both positive freedom to trade with the foreign domestic economy, and negative freedom from barriers to entry in that economy. The two are in tension, and rarely, unless there is genuine power parity, along with mutually compatible comparative advantage opportunities, is free trade not instigated without an element of force.

Being forced to be free is no kind of freedom, but such practices are very much part of the history of free trade. Gunboat diplomacy in the nineteenth century is a particularly brutal example of domestic economies being forced to engage in free trade, the most notable example being the infamously unequal Nanking Treaty that Great Britain imposed on China following their 1842 defeat in the Second Opium War (Chang 2014, 49). Today the imposition of free trade treaties constitute a central aspect of the neoliberal thinking propagated by US-created global institutions including the World Bank and the IMF. Though military force is no longer typically used—the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent implementation of neoliberal policies a (perhaps contentious) counterexample—weaker economies are frequently forced into free trade postures in return for debt restructuring or foreign aid (Harvey 2007, 7, 29). In the end, although the question we began with was ‘what is free trade?’, the question we arrive at is ‘what is actually free about free trade?’. The answer, it appears, depends on who you are.

(See Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Labor Migration)

Bibliography

Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, 1969.

Chang, Ha-Joon. Economics: The User’s Guide. Vol. 1. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014.

Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of Money Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy 24 (4) (2017): 657-680.

Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Foley, Duncan K. “Notes on the Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy.” 1999.

Frieden, Jeffry A. “Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance.” International Organization 45 (4) (1991): 425-451.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Skonieczny, Amy. “Trading with the Enemy: Narrative, Identity and US Trade Politics.” Review of International Political Economy (2018): 1-22.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 2003 ed. New York: Bantam Dell, 1776.

Mark Howard
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The term economic reason will be understood and defined differently depending upon the object to which it is applied. This keyword entry examines three: 1) the rationality of actors within an economy or economic system; 2) the rationality of economic analysts; and 3) the rationality of economic systems.

Raymond Williams (2014, 252-256) notes that the term ‘reason’ has an immensely complex history that from its earliest use connoted two distinct meanings: one specific (a statement, account, or understanding e.g. a reason for believing something); and one generic (a faculty of connected thought and understanding). The latter, which we shall distinguish with the capitalized form (i.e. ‘Reason’), has a history in both theological and philosophical tracts as being related to first principles: the opposite of empirically based practices of logical rationalization and calculation. To claim one has reason on their side has therefore led to bitter debates in intellectual history, with various factions claiming exclusive ownership. It is in connection with this understanding that rational and reasonable denote a being endowed with reason, and as such able to give reasons for exercising particular beliefs, actions, or behaviors.

When connected with the word ‘economic’ we are presented with a term that implies either a statement, account, or understanding relating to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, or a faculty for understanding the same. It is worth noting that this definition does not necessarily imply an empirically informed position, and may include behaviors and interactions that are based on logical reasoning divorced from practical experience. 

The rationality of economic actors (including individuals, institutions, corporations) within an economy or economic system are most commonly understood in economic discourse through the rational-choice paradigm, a principle that assumes individuals will always make logically reasoned economic choices (based on available information) according to the principle of individual preference. In the classical political economy of Adam Smith, this pursuit of individual preferences, when aggregated, produces a socially-beneficial outcome contributing to ‘The Wealth of Nations’, thus giving the title to his famous book on the subject, and bestowing us with the term ‘invisible hand’ (Smith 1776, 572). He notes that it is not out of the goodness of his heart that a butcher provides customers with meat, but as a manifestation of his rational self-interest to receive compensation. The butcher’s self-interest in turn services the rational self-interest of the hungry customer in need of satiation (Smith 1776, 23-24). The neoclassical school of economics took this idea further and, extending the principle of socially-beneficial outcomes arising from self-interest, developed the idea of laissez-faire economics, which concludes that the outcome of aggregate individual preference will be self-equilibrating markets—that is, markets that balance supply and demand (and consequently price) without the need to make individual sacrifices for the greater good (Chang 2014, 87-92). Essentially, the greater good will unfold if we simply leave people undisturbed to “truck, barter, and exchange” on the market (Smith 1776, 22). Thus the principle of modern economic individualism is born.

Of course, economic actors are not all equal in the information they possess when making a so-called rational-choice. The Austrian School of economics (e.g. Friedrich von Hayek) believed that custom and tradition stand in the way of rational choice, and that it is impossible for anyone to have all information and to reason from a fully informed position. They do however still argue that the free market is the best system, because leaving rational actors alone produces a ‘spontaneous order’ in which diverse preferences and actions of economic actors can be reconciled with each other (Chang  2014, 100-102). However, asymmetric information problematizes the notion of equilibrating markets, such that there are cases where some actors know more than others and are therefore able to exploit market situations from a position of information superiority. This means that different types of self-interested economic actors may reason towards different preferences based on what information they have or do not have. Furthermore, economic actors do not develop interests in a vacuum that is insensitive to broader objective factors of the market;  geography, technology, and political systems all play an influential role.

This is where the rationality of economic analysts come in. Economic analysts may be professional economists in the public or private sector, politicians, academics, or simply critics writing from activist or journalistic perspectives. Professional economists may generally accept the rational-choice model of economics, but will vary in opinion about how the rational choices of individuals will play out depending on various economic factors operating beyond individual preference. For instance, classical political economists such as Smith subscribed to Say’s Law, which proposed that economic supply creates its own demand, thus implying that the market preferences of economic actors will be affected by the behavior (i.e. rational preferences) of producers. The theory was that the interests of consumers and producers would balance each other out to produce overall social benefit (Foley 1999, 8). However, modern experience (particularly since the Great Depression and 2008 Global Financial Crisis) and analysis (such as that of John Maynard Keynes) has shown that market intervention by way of stimulus packages is occasionally necessary to stimulate demand in a deflated market (Harvey 2017, 17). Thus, we have a situation in which the economic reason of professional economists helps to manipulate the rational choice (i.e. economic reason) of consumers and producers. Similarly, interest rates and exchange rates may influence the rational action of economic actors in ways that economic analysts feel confident enough to predict with significant degrees of certainty. For example: low interest rates will discourage economic actors from saving and stimulate market demand, thus stimulating supply; high interest rates will encourage saving and bring foreign investment into a national economy from international economic actors applying their economic reason to self-interest and profit (Frieden 1991, 431). 

Economists also use reason to come up with principles that can guide their action in making economic decisions that will affect the rational-choice behavior of economic actors on the market. Mundell-Fleming conditions, for example, specify how rational-choice will be impacted by capital mobility, exchange rates, and monetary expansion policies, but cautions that there are limitations to the manipulation of these factors, such that they may cancel each other out if not organized in a rational way. Therefore, a state can only move towards two of the following at any one time: fixed exchange rate, monetary policy autonomy, or capital mobility. (Frieden 1991, 431) The impacts of mixing and matching these policies will have significant effects on the rational-choices of economic actors and the economy as a whole, but must be managed well and in accordance with market conditions in order to provide overall economic benefit. Similarly, professional economists reason about the response of the market and economic actors within it in relation to financial instruments pertaining to debt and credit. Cohen notes that for a state economy running in trade deficit with other states, there are two rational-choices: financing or adjustment (i.e., a change of economic parameters, such as foreign exchange rates) (2017, 4). Financing is a mechanism used to stay adjustment, and implies a growing debt burden. This debt burden, however, can be managed by the application of economic reason to apply policy instruments such as currency depreciation (lowering the exchange rate), deflation (austerity, reducing spending and imports), or direct controls (limiting imports or exports).

In practice, which of these policies are pursued does not merely influence the rational-choice of economic actors, but is also influenced by the rational-choice of economic actors, particularly those with disproportionately large influence over the formation of politics and policies impacting the economy. We saw earlier that economic actors may not simply be individual consumers or producers on a market, but also be institutions (e.g. Central Banks, the IMF, Bond Rating Agencies etc.) or corporations. It stands to (economic) reason that institutions that already have a seat at the table with political actors and governments, and corporations with vast sums of money available for lobbying activities, will have a greater influence on the policies pursued by state actors (Frieden 1991, 450). Therefore, powerful industries with nation-state specific interests may lobby for decreased international integration of economic and financial resources so as to further their own interests (Frieden 1991, 443), which may in turn have little benefit for many individual economic actors operating in the economy. It may, in fact, reduce the menu of options available to them, thereby stunting their ability to exercise economic reason in making a rational-choice. Power and politics consequently become significant factors influencing economic reason. Indeed, such powerful corporations and institutions often operate for their own self-interest. For instance, during the subprime mortgage bubble preceding the Global Financial Crisis, corporations and institutions (e.g., banks), knowing full well that their interests would not necessarily align with the self-interest of individual economic actors, could reason that, on the one hand, the bubble would not go on forever, and on the other, that they would be bailed out by the state should a crisis be realized (while individuals would be compelled to honor their subprime debt obligations) (Dupuy 2014, 68).

All that said, the above analysis has one assumption in common, which is that the economy is (and should be) organized according to the principles of capitalism. This therefore constitutes the economic reason of that particular system. An economic system, much like the economic actors so far described, demonstrates a propensity for self-interest and has at the center of its economic rationality a will to self-preservation. The 2008 US government bailout of Wall Street was enacted in part because powerful actors on Wall Street threatened to essentially blow up the economic system if the US government did not provide the liquidity (through US Bond Markets) to protect them (Lawrence 2008). There was a conscious effort by the puppet masters of capitalism to protect and sustain the system. What is more interesting, however, is that capitalists pursuing their own interests in the market under conditions of perfect competition are driven towards the pursuit of profit at the expense of surplus-value creation through labor, which in turn threatens the reproduction of the very capitalist class that benefits from the system. Why? Because although this is not necessarily a freely rational act, it is one that is impelled by the very market forces they are engaged in. Thus, the system itself influences capitalist economic reason and in turn generates the potential for crises (Harvey 2017, 34). None of this can be achieved without exploitation, which is precisely what power enables institutions and corporations to do in their self-interest profit rationality.

Alternative economic systems may assume alternative rationalities, but to do so must look beyond, or deeper into the ways in which economic reason is constituted and justified. Marx, in his critique of capital, repeatedly draws our attention to appearances in commodity production and exchange, suggesting that something more is going on, and that our rational understanding of the economic reality is skewed in numerous ways (Marx 1906, 125). Capitalism is systematically generating wants needs and desires in conjunction with the self-interested preferences of a particular class (i.e. capitalists), and therefore commandeering economic reason for its own self-interest at the expense of another class’s (i.e. wage laborers) self interest. What the Frankfurt School would call ‘real interests’ are being obscured behind manufactured interests that serve only a portion of society. This is what we commonly understand as ideology, which for Marx and Engels is an abstraction from the real processes of history, the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas (Williams 2014, 155). Ultimately, we are a long way from Smith’s conception of a socially-beneficial outcome derived from the economic reason of self-interested individuals.

(See Neoliberalism, Variegated Neoliberalism)

Bibliography

Chang, Ha-Joon. Economics: The User’s Guide, Vol. 1. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014.

Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of Money Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy 24, no. 4 (2017): 657-680.

Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith. MSU Press, 2014.

Foley, Duncan K. “Notes on the Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy.” 1999.

Frieden, Jeffry A. “Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance.” International Organization 45, no. 4 (1991): 425-451.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Lawrence, Patrick. “Scholar Robert Meister on a New Model: Using the Financial Markets to Fuel Historical Justice.” Salon.com, July 8, 2018. http://patricklawrence.us/scholar-robert-meister-on-a-new-model-using-the-financial-markets-to-fuel-historical-justice/.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Modern Library. New York, NY, 1906.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 2003 ed. New York: Bantam Dell, 1776.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Mark Howard
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

territory

/ˈterəˌtôrē/

noun

1. an area of land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state.
2. (especially in the US, Canada, or Australia) an organized division of a country that is not yet admitted to the full rights of a state.
3. an area of knowledge, activity, or experience  (Oxford English Dictionary).

Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are terms used to denote the fluidity of spatial, legal, and cultural forms. They illustrate how the strategic disruption of fixed territory (defined above), offers the opportunity to recreate territorial forms with new organizations of power. 

The term ‘territory’, implicit to any definition of deterritorialization and/or reterritorialization (hereafter de/reterritorialization), is essential to interpreting the latter terms’ conceptual meanings. De/reterritorialization, unlike the noun ‘territory’, denote processes that can be rendered in both noun and verb forms (i.e. de/territorialize); they are processes that put territory in motion. 

Furthermore, the definition above reveals at least three interrelated and important dimensions of ‘territory’—space, law, culture—that are illuminated by these processes. Thus de/reterritorialization are processes that can and should be described at spatial-physical, political-juridical, and cultural levels of analysis.

Beginning with the spatial-physical dimension, de/reterritorialization both presume prior territorialization. Extending the definition above gives us the processes of: 1) putting land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state, 2) administering the division of a country that has not been given the full rights of a state, and 3) acquiring and containing an area of knowledge, activity, or experience. There are two obvious processes by which territorialization has historically taken place. The first is through regimes of imperialism and state-formation. Physical regions, along with the populations inhabiting them, have been the subject of conquest and subsequent political administration going back to the earliest records of humankind. Jared Diamond (1998) argues that it is through these processes of forced acquisition that nomadic hunter-gatherer communities developed into sedentary agrarian societies, and eventually formed a prototype of the political unit we today refer to as the state. Such states, again from their earliest documented existence, proceeded with additional acts of territorial conquest giving rise to the most famous empires of history: Roman, Mongol, Han, Ottoman, British, and so on. But there is an argument to be had that territorialization continues today in the perhaps less physical (though nonetheless spatial) form of US-modeled liberal democratization (Hall 2015, 3), which has been relatively unimpeded since the end of the Cold War. This brings into view the relevance that capitalism and its cognate political-economic forces will have on our definitions of de/reterritorialization, and also leads us to the second process by which territorialization is presumed to have taken place: so-called primitive accumulation (cf. Marx 1990, Part Eight). This process, according to Marx and his subscribers, is nothing but the original separation of producers from the means of the production (Tomba 2009, 51). In the history of capitalism, one of the most famous instances of this was seen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century process of English ‘enclosure’: the legal reclassification of common lands into privately owned estates. As with imperial practices, however, such processes are not merely a relic of the past. Max Tomba (2009, 55) reminds us that primitive accumulation and large-scale industry are not bookends to a completed historical process, but are rather complicit with a machinery of state-violence that serves to regulate contemporary forms of capital accumulation. He goes on to argue that given capitalism’s continued dependency on such processes of accumulation (i.e. through labor discipline, knowledge enclosure, etc.) we may in fact speak of the permanence of primitive accumulation under capitalism.

Given these considerations, what then of de/reterritorialization? Deterritorialization is related to, but not synonymous with, globalization. For example, deterritorialization speaks to the diminution of border relevance, whereas globalization speaks more broadly to a process of growing integration among individual, social and political entities across the physical globe. Deterritorialization refers more specifically to a disaggregation—perhaps even displacement—of cultural beings (objects and subjects) from territorial locations. It also speaks to modes of capitalism in which corporations may choose to disaggregate their operations into multiple territories in order to pursue arbitrage opportunities arising from the benefits of, say, innovation in a liberal market economy (LME) such as the US on the one hand, and high-value-added manufacturing in a coordinated market economy (CME) such as Germany on the other (Hall 2015, 5). If deterritorialization speaks of dis-aggregation, then reterritorialization is the process of aggregating cultural beings in ways that both include and go beyond the traditional political forms we associate with international and global affairs. It is often also a process accompanying or following deterritorialization, which makes sense if we consider the opportunities available to economic actors limited by traditional political forms. These actors first deterritorialize to disaggregate the content of closed locations, and then reterritorialize into new  convenient, profitable, and typically postnational forms (Sparke 2005, 89). What de/reterritorialization both also speak to is a qualitative shift in economic relations whereby spatial-physical entities are reconstituted to suit the economic imperatives of capital mobility. Property, for instance, comes to be rendered in terms of rights (claims, privileges, immunities, etc.) rather than as things (Nichols 2018, 250). Thus, arguably, markets become the spatial dimension in de/reterritorialization, while the physical dimension is rendered subordinate and utilized in whatever form is most profitable. Markets become the coeval political economic actors to states under such processes (Hall 2015, 2), and given the prevailing understanding that democracy has no place in market processes (Teubner, 2017, 94) we are seemingly sent back to a kind of imperial imposition—or perhaps even, as some (Nichols, 264) have argued, a new form of enclosure.

Moving on to the political-juridical dimension of de/reterritorialization, it  would appear prudent to begin with political economy’s (seemingly) most definitive legal entity: the nation-state. Arjun Appadurai (as cited in Sparke 2005, 55-56) suggests that key disjunctures—delineated as ethno-scapes, media-scapes, techno-scapes, finance-scapes, and ideo-scapes—between economics, culture, and politics can no longer be contained within the traditional territories of the nation-state. However we cannot simply switch analysis from domestic to international law, for international law is itself superseded by processes of de/reterritorialization. What needs to come into view is, instead, a kind of transnational law that intersects public, private, domestic, and international legal systems (Beckers & Kawakami 2017, 13). Teubner (2017, 90-91) goes as far as to claim that given the transfer of power from public to private (i.e. corporate) organizations as a result of capitalist development, we may now speak of transnational organizations and the laws that they appeal to (e.g. corporate codes of behavior) as the real constitutional authority in global political economy. What is clear is that an autonomous legal system is evolving in-between the cracks; one that—through processes of de/reterritorialization—overdetermines, underdetermines, and even mis-determines existing orders of legal practice (cf. Beckers & Kawakami, 2017: 1). One illustrative way in which this has occurred is through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) arbitration system. For Shawn Nichols, the ISDS functions as the “political-juridical counterpart to disciplinary neoliberalism” (2018, 247). Circumventing domestic judicial systems, and superseding international legal institutions, the ISDS dispute mechanisms offer private arbitration in situations whereby a state’s domestic policies appear to adversely impact transnational investment interests in that state (244). Steeped in the neoliberal conviction that the market is superior to the state in political-economic matters, the ISDS regulates disputes between domestic public and transnational private parties with a bias towards free market enterprise (244). This reflects a relegation of democratic values, as the state’s ability to set policies according to the will of its electorate is vetoed by ISDS mechanisms giving preference to unelected political-economic actors. In one case, the Mexican government was found to be violating its ‘fair and equitable treatment obligation’ by applying a tax to beverages sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) while exempting Mexican cane sugar (262-263)—the problematic reality being that HFCS is associated with numerous health issues not applicable to cane sugar. The rights of the state (and its population) that are suspended in such cases points to the notion of rights articulated in definition 2) of ‘territory’ above, and therefore represents a case of de/reterritorialization to meet global capital interests.

Finally, we come to the cultural dimension of de/reterritorialization. For some, such as Arjun Appadurai, the cultural dimension is the primary dimension. It has already been noted that one way to define de/reterritorialization is as an entropic and negentropic movement of cultural objects (objects and subjects) in relation to locations in space and time. The most obvious way this happens is through population migration, which Hardt and Negri (2001) argue is a primary characteristic of the modern world with its smooth de/reterritorialized capital flows (an immanent whole they dub ‘Empire’). Of course, Marx (1990) defined labor as variable capital, suggesting that for capital to stay in motion, not only money and machinery must move across the globe, but human labor as well. Writing in 2000, Hardt and Negri were on the tidal wave of internet communications technology expansion, a factor that has to some extent negated the need to physically move variable capital (telecommuting technologies are today far more advanced than in 2000, and the cultural values of organizations are shifting towards an acceptance of remote labor through outsourcing, or contingent labor), however even then they were able to recognize the vast deterritorializing significance of changes to spaces of communication. This continuous circulation of signs, they argued, was tantamount to the dissolution of every sovereign relationship (Hardt & Negri 2001, 347), and while history has perhaps shown this claim to be hyperbolic, there is no doubting the cultural dispersion and reformation by revolutions in communications technology as applied to capitalist enterprise. Their underlying claim is that ‘Empire’ has eliminated any territorial center of power, and we might perhaps suggest that the US shift towards economic nationalism is a recoil against the early signs of such deterritorialization. But what is clear is that the smooth space of immaterial labor and communications flows is still subject to the bumpy realities of realpolitik and material state power, and to subsequent modes of material reterritorialization. For a world in flux, it seems hard to envisage a future that is not characterized by the unending oscillation of de/reterritorialization.

(See Empire, Enclave, Enclosure/Border, Geopolitics, Labor Migration, Neocolonialism)

Bibliography

Beckers, Anja, and Makoto T. Kawakami. “Why Domestic Enforcement of Private Regulation Is (Not) the Answer: Making and Questioning the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Codes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 1-13.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. Random House, 1998.

Hall, Peter A. “Varieties of Capitalism.” Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (2015): 1-15.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics, 1990.

Nichols, Stephen. “Expanding Property Rights under Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS): Class Struggle in the Era of Transnational Capital.” Review of International Political Economy 25, no. 2 (2018): 243-269.

Sparke, Matthew. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Vol. 26. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Teubner, Gunther. “Corporate Codes in the Varieties of Capitalism: How Their Enforcement Depends on the Differences Among Production Regimes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 81-97.

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44-65.