“Thick” States and “Thin” States, in a New Era of Merchant Power

Abstract

Merchant capitalism has returned to the world stage. First apparent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchant capitalism is a form of market exchange, primarily in commodities, in which traders, shippers, merchants, and financiers play key roles over and above the commodity producers themselves or the nascent manufacturers of their time. It was superseded during the late nineteenth century by industrial capitalism, which became associated with strong states, powerful manufacturing enterprises, and then in the twentieth century with big unions, economic regulation, and the entire political culture that characterizes social democracy. But the big-box anchored supply chains of recent decades have ushered in a new era of commodity exchange whose global reach, political agenda, and labor relations bulwark the conservative, neo-liberal turn that has shifted politics and culture to the right throughout those North Atlantic nation-states which once seemed so firmly on the road to social democracy. This chapter historicizes neo-liberal globalization by demonstrating that its material and structural roots lie in the resurgent merchant capitalism of our time.