The empire of capital and the remaking of centre–periphery relations

Abstract

Through most of the second half of the 20th century the idea of ‘development’ served as a key conceptual marker for understanding global hierarchies of wealth and power. The development initiative acquired epochal significance at the intersection of three world-historical processes: the transition in the regulation of economic activity from laissez-faire to nationally managed economies; the dismantling of colonial empires and the emergence of a Third World; and the shift in the locus of hegemony from Britain to the USA, and the parallel cold war bifurcation of the world order. The promise and optimism generated by development was unevenly sustained during the long postwar boom, although the subsequent downturn altered many of the co-ordinates within which development was conceived, but outside which it could not survive. In this context, neoliberal globalisation has emerged as a new, albeit tenuous, framework for articulating global hierarchies. By historicising the development framework, and its links to the making and unmaking of the Third World, this article provides one plausible vantage point from which to survey the current dynamics between power and plenty.