Uneven and combined development and the geopolitics of capitalist money

Abstract

Global monetary hierarchies have recently been posed by Kai Koddenbrock as a challenge to the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) and its corollary of societal multiplicity and interactivity, suggesting that this approach obscures transnational or global-systemic dynamics. International money and finance represent an arguably autonomous and theoretically unaccounted for dynamic within the UCD framework that escapes the frame of multiplicity. Although international finance and money have not been wholly absent from UCD accounts of the dynamics of capitalist globalisation and its geopolitics, these have tended to be conceptualised as an outgrowth of the processes of industrialisation that are seen to be the primary driver of UCD. Does this represent a theoretical challenge or a lacuna? Money and finance were central to some of the earliest critical attempts to make sense of the conflagrations of the early twentieth century as products of capitalist development. I argue that clarifying and expanding the role of money and finance provides necessary foundations for a critical theory of international relations grounded in UCD.