Imperialism in a Full World: Neomercantilism and the Return of the Zero-Sum Game

August 17, 2026
Alberto Garzón
In September 2010, a Chinese fishing vessel was detained by the Japanese Coast Guard near the disputed Senkaku Islands. China’s unofficial response was to halt rare-earth exports to Japan—a country whose entire electronics industry depended on them. The dispute was brief: Japan released the captain, and China never formally acknowledged the embargo. But that episode became a geopolitical watershed, exposing the enormous dependence of the developed world on a single country’s monopoly over the minerals that are indispensable for the energy and digital transitions. Interdependence, once praised as a virtue of globalization, had become a weapon and a vulnerability.1

Dora Weiland (1892-?) from Wietze uses a hand scoop to fill barrels with oil that has run together in pits. By Unknown author - Deutsches Erdölmuseum Wietze (Erdoel Museum), CC BY 2.5, Link.

This incident was a symptom of a structural transformation that is remaking the world order: the return of zero-sum geopolitics in an era of planetary ecological crisis. The language of free trade, which for decades promised mutual prosperity, is being displaced by the language of national security, resource control, and economic warfare. Tariff wars, export bans on critical minerals, massive industrial subsidies—the Inflation Reduction Act, the European Green Deal Industrial Plan, and Made in China 2025—are the new normal of the world economy. They signal that the material foundations upon which the positive-sum imaginary of global neoliberal capitalism was built have been exhausted.
The vision of international trade as a positive-sum game—a vision that has dominated economic thought from David Ricardo to the World Trade Organization—was only possible under historically specific conditions: abundant fossil energy, colonial expropriation of resources, and the systematic externalization of ecological costs to the periphery. As those conditions erode, the zero-sum logic of early mercantilism returns, not as an anachronism, as some liberal thinkers have argued, but as a rational response to what ecological economist Herman Daly called a “full world.”2 The neomercantilism of the twenty-first century, far from being a departure from imperialism, is its current shape. What follows traces the intellectual and material genealogy of this transformation, from the mercantilist debates of seventeenth-century England to the scramble for critical minerals in the twenty-first, in order to show that the present crisis is not a rupture but a return.
 
Two Ontologies of Wealth
The historiography of mercantilism has long suffered from the caricature drawn by Adam Smith, who portrayed it as a confused doctrine that mistook money for wealth. In reality, mercantilist thought was neither a unified school nor a simple set of errors. It was a heterogeneous body of practices and discourses deployed by emerging nation-states over three centuries, united by a shared preoccupation: how to secure power through wealth and wealth through power.3
Within this heterogeneity, the economic historian Steve Pincus has identified a bifurcation of lasting consequence.4 Centering his analysis on seventeenth-century England, Pincus interprets the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the moment that crystallized a long-standing debate within mercantilist thought—a debate between those who conceived of trade as a zero-sum game anchored in landed wealth and those who believed that substantial economic growth created by human labor was both possible and desirable. Although there was broad agreement on the need for state intervention, profound disagreements persisted over the means by which England could become wealthier, and these divisions increasingly aligned along partisan lines, most notably between the Tories and the Whigs.
On one side stood a conservative tradition, associated with Tory ideology, which conceived wealth as fundamentally finite. Since land and the raw materials derived from it were the ultimate measure of wealth, and since these were limited by nature, the prosperity of one nation could only come at the expense of another. Gold and silver were considered the most desirable, indeed the only, form of wealth. Trade was therefore a zero-sum game, and the role of the state was to accumulate resources through monopolies, territorial expansion, and military force. Pincus traces this outlook concretely in the imperial policy pursued under King James II, whose principal adviser, Josiah Child, conceived of wealth as territorial and finite, and viewed external trade as a fierce international competition over limited resources.
This approach was not mere ideology: it was a reasonably accurate description of the material constraints facing agrarian societies, what we now call “the Malthusian trap.” E. A. Wrigley has provided the most rigorous demonstration of this point.5 Pre-industrial economies were organic economies, constrained by the annual cycle of photosynthesis. Most of the energy used by humans ultimately rested on muscular force, which in turn depended on the availability of food and the productive capacity of a finite land surface. In such a world, the Tory intuition that wealth was ultimately limited was more an empirical observation than a theoretical error. Wealth, power, and territory were inextricably linked, and the struggle over resources was, by material necessity, close to a zero-sum game.
On the other side, a distinct Whig tradition gradually took shape, arguing that wealth could be generated through human labor and industry. From the early seventeenth century onward, England’s trans-Atlantic colonial network was already providing substantial economic impetus, particularly through the expanding markets created for English manufacturers. This colonial connection enabled England to ease “Malthusian” constraints by accessing labor and land overseas. At the same time, the contrast between Spain—awash with colonial silver yet economically stagnant—and the United Provinces and Venice, resource-poor but prosperous through manufacturing, seemed to demonstrate that human industry, rather than nature alone, could be the primary source of wealth. Thus, manufactured products, rather than land, came to be seen as the primary source of wealth and power, implying the possibility of virtually unlimited economic growth.6
The deeper implication was that if industry could create value beyond what land alone provided, then trade need not be a zero-sum game. The triumph of this Whig ontology was later consolidated in classical political economy, underpinned by John Locke’s argument that most wealth was created by labor rather than by nature. Although classical authors continued to recognize certain natural constraints (notably John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Ricardo), this insight remained central to the tradition.7 Within this framework, manufacturing acquired a distinctive role due to its association with increasing returns to scale: that is, doubling inputs—such as capital or labor—could yield more than a proportional increase in output. This transformed manufacturing into an apparently autonomous source of wealth, despite its underlying dependence on the extraction of natural resources from elsewhere. As a result, it became the cornerstone of development thinking and the intellectual precursor of the broader developmentalist tradition.8
Yet this change was not merely a philosophical choice—it was made plausible by a material transformation. As Wrigley has argued, the Industrial Revolution was fundamentally a transition from the organic economy to a fossil economy drawing on millennia of stored solar energy. What historically invalidated the “Malthusian” prediction was not a theoretical error, but an event that could not have been foreseen at the onset of the Industrial Revolution: massive access to fossil energy stocks accumulated over geological eras. The Industrial Revolution appeared to break the resource constraint through a double substitution: from organic materials to mineral materials, and from solar energy flows to fossil energy stocks.9 In 1800, Britain consumed so much coal that replacing it with wood would have required over a third of England’s entire surface for timber; by 1827, more than 150 percent.10
Kenneth Pomeranz has shown, through a meticulous comparison of England with the Yangtze Delta, that without coal and colonial “ghost acreages”—lands physically outside a country but contributing to its economy as if they were part of it—Britain would have remained trapped in the same ecological constraints as China by 1800.11 Consequently, the Whig promise of infinite growth was underwritten by fossil energy and colonial resource extraction, conditions that classical and neoclassical economics would subsequently take for granted, and that the twenty-first century can no longer assume.
What this historical reconstruction suggests is that the apparent transition from a zero-sum to a positive-sum conception of wealth was not simply a theoretical advance, but the expression of a temporary material configuration. The question, then, is how this configuration became naturalized in economic theory—and what happens when its material foundations are no longer in place.
 
The Fossil Assumption and the Positive-Sum Illusion
The consolidation of this Whig ontology into formal economic theory took its most influential form in Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, formulated in 1817: the decisive theoretical move that transformed the zero-sum mercantilism of the Tory tradition into the positive-sum liberalism that would dominate the following two centuries.12 Even less developed nations, Ricardo argued, could benefit from trade if they specialized in goods in which they held a relative efficiency advantage. Trade thus ceased to be a battlefield and came to be understood as a cooperative game. Within this framework, the distinction between different types of economic activity disappeared—despite having been a core assumption of the mercantilist tradition and, later, of developmental thought.
It is not accidental that this Ricardian theory emerged precisely when Britain had consolidated an industrial superiority without historical precedent, resting on three interlinked pillars: the technological advantage conferred by the Industrial Revolution and the mass exploitation of fossil fuels; maritime supremacy guaranteed by the Royal Navy; and control over the global commercial networks that structured the new world economy.13 By 1815, Britain no longer needed economic protection for its industries. In that context, the previous mercantilist institutions were no longer necessary, and the British Empire began to dismantle them: the Indian trade monopoly was terminated in 1813 and the China monopoly in 1833, while in the late 1840s the Navigation Acts and the Corn Laws were repealed, paving the way for the free-trade era.14
The critical historiography of the British Empire has long exposed the coercive underbelly of this liberal order. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, in their landmark 1953 essay, demonstrated that the Empire’s violence did not disappear with the abolition of colonial monopolies but reconfigured itself: forced market openings, financial control, unequal treaties, and commercial dependency replaced the old trading companies.15 The Opium Wars against China (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), the destruction of India’s textile industry, and the imposition of “free trade” treaties on Brazil, Persia, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire all illustrated that liberal commerce operated through force as much as through persuasion. As John Bellamy Foster has argued, it makes no sense to draw a distinction between formal and informal imperialism; the crucial point is that imperialism has been inherent to capitalism from the outset, and that imperial states—with big business behind them—have exercised informal control whenever possible and formal control when necessary.16
However, the entire framework of trade as positive-sum rested on what we may call a non-explicit fossil assumption: the presumption that energy and materials were so abundant as to be effectively unlimited. Britain could obtain all the raw materials needed for domestic production because it had built an enormous colonial network, formal and informal, around the world. Other countries lacked such advantages. In fact, not all followed free trade prescriptions: the United States, Japan, and Germany pursued neomercantilist strategies that proved effective in developing their economies during the Second Industrial Revolution.17 When these rising powers began to compete for resources in the late nineteenth century, rivalries gave rise to what classical Marxists termed “New Imperialism.” In both cases—free trade and neomercantilist—economic power was understood to derive from the development of the manufacturing sector, which in turn depended on the ability to expropriate raw materials from other territories.
Yet the increasing returns to scale that the manufacturing sector appeared to enjoy—systematized by Nicholas Kaldor in his celebrated growth laws and extended to international trade by Anthony Thirlwall’s balance-of-payments-constrained growth model—are not an intrinsic property of human industry.18 They are a historically contingent phenomenon, made possible by the large-scale incorporation of fossil fuels into the productive process, and therefore tied to something finite. The entire manufacturing sector rests on the appropriation of raw materials as inputs, regardless of whether these are obtained through market mechanisms or military means. This links the level of economic development to the ability to capture energy and natural resources from elsewhere—a connection that underpins unequal ecological exchange. As Alf Hornborg has argued, the common neglect of this point leads to a fetishism of the machine: the attribution to technology of productive powers that in fact derive from asymmetric resource flows.19
The implications are far-reaching for the developmental imaginary. If the industrialization that produced the “great divergence” between rich and poor countries depended not on superior institutions or entrepreneurial culture but on access to exceptional energy sources and on the violent expropriation of colonial territories, then the model is not reproducible. The positive-sum vision of trade, therefore, did not emerge in a vacuum. It was underwritten by a historically specific regime of energy and imperial expropriation. Once this is recognized, the persistence of global inequalities appears as a structural feature of the system itself.
 
Imperialism and Unequal Ecological Exchange
If the positive-sum promise of industrialization depended on the expropriation of resources from outside, then international trade was never the neutral exchange that Ricardian theory imagined. It was, from the outset, a mechanism of asymmetric transfer—a structure through which energy, materials, and ecological carrying capacity flowed systematically from the periphery to the core. The tradition of unequal exchange, from its classical formulations to its contemporary ecological extensions, has made this visible.
The connection between industrial capitalism and imperialism was the central concern of the classical Marxist analyses of V. I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Nikolai Bukharin. As Foster has noted, these analyses were a response to a period of international instability marked by the decline of Britain as the hegemonic power and the rise of rival nations, especially Germany and the United States, leading to the struggles that culminated in the two World Wars.20 What the classical Marxist tradition grasped, and what mainstream economics systematically ignored, was that the expansion of capitalism was inseparable from the expropriation of peripheral resources and labor.
Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange (1969) provided the theoretical mechanism: international trade reproduces a systematic transfer of value from low-wage to high-wage economies, not despite the market but through it.21 The global division of labor is not a happy equilibrium of comparative advantages, as Ricardo imagined, but a structure of exploitation embedded in the price system itself. Emmanuel showed that “equal exchange” in the sense of equivalent labor times is violated precisely because wages in the periphery are held far below those in the center, while capital mobility tends to equalize profit rates. The result is that peripheral countries transfer surplus to the center with every transaction.
But Emmanuel’s analysis, for all its power, remained within the domain of value measured in labor time, and the ecological dimension of imperialism was largely absent from these classical formulations. Two theoretical developments would prove decisive in closing this gap. The first was Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s demonstration, in The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), that economic activity is fundamentally a transformation of low-entropy resources into high-entropy waste—an irreversible process governed by the second law of thermodynamics.22 Georgescu-Roegen showed that the standard economic treatment of natural resources as substitutable inputs was a profound error: matter and energy, once degraded, cannot be reconstituted. This meant that the material throughput of the economy was subject to absolute biophysical limits—limits that the price system, oriented toward exchange value, was structurally incapable of registering.
The second was Foster’s recovery of Karl Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, which integrated ecology into the Marxist theory of imperialism.23 Marx had observed that the industrial separation of town and country disrupted the nutrient cycle of the soil: food was transported from rural areas to cities, consumed, and its waste discharged into rivers rather than returned to the land. Foster generalized this insight: capitalism systematically generates metabolic rifts between human society and the Earth System, and these rifts are not accidental byproducts but necessary conditions for the accumulation process. The “new imperialism of globalized monopoly-finance capital,” as Foster has termed it, operates precisely through the expropriation of nature at the periphery and the externalization of ecological costs.24
Together, these two lines of analysis—the thermodynamic and the Marxist-ecological—make it possible to reframe unequal exchange not merely as a transfer of value in labor time but as a transfer of biophysical wealth: energy, materials, and ecological space. Following the pioneering work of Stephen Bunker on the ecological impacts of resource extraction, a substantial body of research has developed under the concept of unequal ecological exchange. Indeed, Hornborg has argued that the technological efficiency of the world’s core economic areas is ultimately dependent on net imports of embodied resources from extractive peripheries. Joan Martínez Alier, developing the concept of the “environmentalism of the poor,” has shown how ecological conflicts in the Global South are inseparable from these asymmetric material flows.25 Peripheral countries export embodied energy and labor in raw materials; they import manufactured goods whose ecological costs have been offloaded elsewhere.
Recent empirical work has quantified the scale of this drain. Jason Hickel and colleagues have estimated that approximately $242 trillion (in constant 2010 dollars) was appropriated from the Global South through unequal exchange between 1990 and 2015 alone.26 The North’s prosperity is not merely built on exploitation in the classical Marxist sense; it is built on ecological plunder—on what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have called the imperial mode of living: a pattern of production and consumption in the Global North that is structurally dependent on the disproportionate appropriation of nature, labor, and ecological sinks elsewhere.27 The non-explicit fossil assumption that underwrote the positive-sum imaginary thus turns out to have been, all along, an assumption of imperial expropriation.
 
The Full World and the Return of the Zero-Sum Game
The shift from a positive-sum to a zero-sum dynamic can be understood through a simple but often overlooked mechanism. As biophysical limits tighten—through resource depletion, sink saturation, and ecological degradation—the marginal cost of expanding material throughput increases. Under these conditions, continued growth in one region increasingly depends on the expropriation of resources, energy, and ecological space from elsewhere. What appears as cooperation under conditions of abundance becomes competition under conditions of constraint. States, in turn, respond by securing access to strategic resources, reorganizing production, and, where necessary, deploying coercive power. The return of geopolitics is thus a systemic adjustment to material limits.
The tradition of unequal ecological exchange reveals that the prosperity of the core has always depended on the externalization of ecological costs. But what happens when there is no longer an “outside,” to which those costs can be displaced? Daly’s distinction between an “empty world” and a “full world” provides the conceptual key.28 In the empty world—the world of the long nineteenth century and of the fossil-fueled expansion of capital—humanity was small relative to the biosphere. Resources, space, and sinks were abundant, and the main limiting factors were internal: scarcity of capital, labor, and technical knowledge. In such a world, the Whig vision of wealth creation through industry had a plausible material basis. The zero-sum logic of the Tory mercantilists appeared to be a relic of pre-industrial scarcity.
But we now live in a full world. The scale of human metabolism has outstripped the biosphere’s capacity for regeneration and absorption. Of the nine planetary boundaries identified by Johan Rockström and colleagues, seven—climate change, loss of biological integrity, ocean acidification, disruption of biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), land-system change, freshwater change, and novel entities—have been transgressed.29 In such a world, each new unit of growth comes at the cost of increased pressure on natural systems already at the edge of collapse. The limits are no longer internal to the economy but external, biophysical, and absolute. As Wrigley himself has observed, the fossil-fueled escape from the organic economy was not a permanent transcendence of material limits but a temporary reprieve, a drawdown of geological stocks that, once exhausted, returns us to a condition structurally analogous to the pre-industrial world, though on an impoverished Earth.30
The clearest expression of this transition is the scramble for critical minerals. These minerals—lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, rare earths, and neodymium—are the material foundation of the energy and digital transitions. Without them, there are no solar panels, no wind turbines, no electric vehicles, no smartphones, and no semiconductors. Their geological distribution is staggeringly concentrated: the Democratic Republic of Congo provides 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, China controls 60 percent of rare earths, and Indonesia supplies 40 percent of nickel. At the processing stage, concentration becomes truly monopolistic: China processes 90 percent of rare earths and over 60 percent of lithium and cobalt.31 The International Energy Agency projects that by 2030, demand for each of the five main critical minerals will be three to fourteen times higher than in 2021.32
We have returned, in other words, to a world that the first mercantilists would have recognized: a world of finite, geographically concentrated resources over which great powers compete with every instrument at their disposal, including force. Just as sixteenth-century Spain, Portugal, England, and others fought over the gold, silver, spices, and territory of the colonial world, today’s great powers fight over lithium in Latin America, cobalt in Congo, rare earths in China, and the Arctic’s untapped mineral wealth. The proposed U.S. acquisition of Greenland—dismissed by liberal commentators as Trumpian absurdity—is in fact a perfectly rational move within this neo-imperial logic: the Arctic, with its accelerating ice melt and vast mineral reserves, is the new colonial frontier.
 
Neomercantilism as Imperialism: The Ontology of Donald Trump
It would be a mistake to see Trump’s trade wars as an irrational aberration. They represent a conscious return to the Alexander Hamilton and Henry Carey tradition of American neomercantilism—a tradition that predates liberal hegemony and that underpinned U.S. industrialization throughout the nineteenth century.33 Hamilton’s system of high tariffs, Carey’s social mercantilism, and Friedrich List’s infant-industry protection: all were strategies deployed by rising powers to build their industrial base behind walls of protectionism. Only when U.S. industry became globally dominant—after the Second World War—did Washington convert to free trade, just as Britain had done a century earlier.34
What is novel about Trump’s neomercantilism is that it operates within the full-world conditions described by Daly. It is not a rising power protecting infant industries; it is a declining hegemon defending its access to the material basis of its mode of living. The U.S. grand strategy perceives China as its most important competitor—a country that has emerged as the world’s manufacturing center, rising from 6 percent of global industrial capacity in 2000 to a projected 45 percent by 2030—and, crucially, has secured control over the critical mineral supply chains that the energy transition requires.35
The “Make America Great Again” project is thus not merely protectionist; it is imperial in a specific and historically resonant sense. Its ontology—its foundational assumptions about how the world works—is closer to that of sixteenth-century colonial mercantilism than to the liberal internationalism of the postwar order. It sees the world as a finite space in which resources must be seized, not shared; in which trade is a zero-sum struggle, not a cooperative game; and in which military power is the ultimate guarantor of economic prosperity. The rhetoric of “America First” is a reversion to the earliest and most brutal form of the imperial tradition.
As I argued in La guerra por la energía, this reaction can be understood, in the context of ecological crisis, as an attempt to preserve privileged access to the strategic resources that have historically sustained U.S. hegemony.36 What is at stake is not merely a commercial or technological dispute, nor a clash between two models of development. It is a struggle over who will have access—and on what terms—to the flows of materials, energy, and finance that sustain the modern economic metabolism. The conflict between great powers expresses a struggle over the global distribution of scarce resources on a planet whose biocapacity has already been widely exceeded.
The political right understands this with considerable clarity. It may deny climate science, but it grasps the geopolitical implications of ecological crisis. It knows that maintaining the Western mode of living requires continuous inflows of natural resources from other countries. It also knows that environmental degradation and conflict will keep sending desperate human beings to the doors of the rich world. What the right offers is an antidemocratic, anti-human rights response; one that is entirely consistent with social Darwinism filtered through ultraliberal economic discourse: the fortress country, border militarization, mass deportation, and the conviction that those left behind deserve their fate.
While the United States represents a particularly explicit articulation of this neomercantilist turn, it is not alone. China’s strategy of securing upstream control over critical minerals and downstream dominance in manufacturing, as well as the European Union’s push for “strategic autonomy,” reflect similar structural pressures. In all cases, the reorganization of global production is increasingly shaped by the imperative to secure material inputs in a context of tightening ecological constraints.
 
Beyond the Fortress: Ecosocialism
This trajectory points to a single, inescapable conclusion: the positive-sum game is over. The material conditions that made it possible—abundant fossil energy, colonial ghost acreages, and unsaturated planetary sinks—have been exhausted. The zero-sum logic of the first mercantilists has returned, not because their worldview was correct in some timeless sense, but because the biophysical conditions of the twenty-first century resemble those of the pre-industrial world more than those of the fossil-fueled anomaly that separated them. As Wrigley has insisted, the escape from the organic economy was a unique and unrepeatable event in human history, not a permanent condition.37
But this does not mean that the only possible response is the fortress. The neomercantilist turn of the great powers is a class response, the response of capital and the states that serve it, to a crisis that demands a radically different answer. What Foster has called “planned degrowth” points toward the alternative: not more growth, but a deliberate reduction of material throughput in the wealthy countries; not more accumulation, but redistribution of the energy, materials, and ecological space that remain.38 This requires nothing less than a reorganization of the social metabolism: a transformation in which the material basis of production and consumption is brought into alignment with the regenerative capacities of the Earth System. Such a transformation cannot be achieved by market mechanisms alone, because the price system is structurally incapable of registering biophysical limits; it requires democratic planning at every scale, from the local to the planetary.
The choice, then, is not between growth and degrowth, or between democracy and authoritarianism in the abstract. It is between two modes of managing the full world. The first is the mode of exploitation, expropriation, exclusion, and fortification—the mode of Trump, of Elon Musk, and of the imperial right—which leads to what the Global Scenario Group has called the fortress world: an authoritarian response to ecological crisis, in which elites manage decline with violence while majorities are consigned to the wasteland of a degraded planet. The second is a mode of redistribution, democratic planning, and ecological restoration. This is what we may call ecosocialism: a society that organizes its metabolism within the limits of the Earth System, distributing the remaining material wealth according to human need rather than the logic of accumulation. In the international arena, this means genuine South-South cooperation, a radical renegotiation of the terms of ecological exchange, and the recognition that the planet’s finite resources must be shared in ways that guarantee material human rights for all rather than reproducing the unsustainable consumption patterns of the Global North.
The great transition we need is not a moral or cultural turn disconnected from material conditions. It must be a radical transformation of the power relations that organize the distribution of energy, territory, and time. It is, ultimately, a matter of deciding whether we will organize ourselves to guarantee life or to fortify privilege. Because if we do not collectively confront the logic of the fortress, what awaits us is not an unmanaged collapse, but a future carefully administered by barbarism.
 
Notes
1.↩ This account of the 2010 rare earth embargo draws on Keith Bradsher, “Amid Tension, China Blocks Vital Exports to Japan,” New York Times, September 22, 2010; Sophia Kalantzakos, “Between Rocks and Hard Places: Geopolitics of Net Zero Futures and the Tech Imperium,” in Critical Minerals, the Climate Crisis and the Tech Imperium, ed. Sophia Kalantzakos (Cham: Springer, 2023), 3–25.
2.↩ Herman Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
3.↩ Lars Magnusson, The Political Economy of Mercantilism (London: Routledge, 2015); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
4.↩ Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 3–34; Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2011). Within the Marxist tradition, the origins of capitalism are often located in seventeenth-century England, particularly in the emergence of capitalist labor relations in the agrarian sector. See Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present 70 (1976): 30–75; Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
5.↩ E. A. Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Also see E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
6.↩ The case of Spain was central to early mercantilist thought. As Erik Reinert and Sophus Reinert have argued, the failure of Spain demonstrated that “wealth left nations producing raw materials, even if the raw materials were gold and silver, and accumulated in nations housing a diversified manufacturing sector”: Erik S. Reinert and Sophus Reinert, “Mercantilism and Economic Development,” in K. S. Jomo and Erik S. Reinert, The Origins of Development Economics (London: Zed Books, 2005), 1–23. This is something even Spanish economists bitterly complained about. In 1558, Luis Ortiz lamented that foreigners “treat us worse than Indians” because European countries bring manufactured goods to Spain while Spaniards export raw materials—wool, silk, and similar products: Luis Ortiz, Memorial del contador Luis Ortiz a Felipe II (Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas, 2020).
7.↩ Classical political economists acknowledged key natural constraints: the scarcity of land as a finite factor of production; diminishing returns in agriculture as cultivation extends to less fertile soils; and, particularly, in John Stuart Mill, the prospect of a stationary state in which capital accumulation slows and economic growth eventually stabilizes. Despite this, they generally treated manufacturing as qualitatively distinct from agriculture, associating it with increasing returns and regarding it as the primary engine of sustained economic expansion. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962 [1817]); John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Indiana: Liberty Fund Inc., 2006 [1848]).
8.↩ Reinert and Reinert, “Mercantilism and Economic Development.”
9.↩ Kozo Mayumi, “Temporary Emancipation from Land: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Time,” Ecological Economics 4, no. 1 (1991): 35–56.
10.↩ Enric Tello-Aragay and Gabriel Jover-Avellà, “Economic History and the Environment,” in Mauro Agnoletti and Simone Neri Serneri, eds., The Basic Environmental History, vol. 4 (New York: Springer, 2014), 31–78.
11.↩ Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021 [2000]).
12.↩ Nat Dyer, Ricardo’s Dream (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2025); Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
13.↩ Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem Press, 2002).
14.↩ Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
15.↩ John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15.
16.↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Introduction,” in Harry Magdoff, Imperialism Without Colonies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), 1–15.
17.↩ Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder.
18.↩ Nicholas Kaldor, Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth of the United Kingdom (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Anthony P. Thirlwall, Economic Growth in an Open Developing Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013).
19.↩ Alf Hornborg, The Magic of Technology: The Machine as a Transformation of Slavery (London: Routledge, 2023).
20.↩ John Bellamy Foster, “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital,” Monthly Review 67, no. 3 (July–August 2015): 1–22.
21.↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025 [1972]).
22.↩ Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).
23.↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
24.↩ Foster, “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital.”
25.↩ Hornborg, The Magic of Technology; Joan Martínez Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003).
26.↩ Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi, “Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015,” Global Environmental Change 73 (2022).
27.↩ Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living (London: Verso, 2021).
28.↩ Daly, Beyond Growth.
29.↩ Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009); “Planetary Boundaries,” Stockholm Resilience Centre, stockholmresilience.org.
30.↩ Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth.
31.↩ International Energy Agency (IEA), Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 (Paris: IEA, 2025).
32.↩ IEA, Energy Technology Perspectives 2023 (Paris: IEA, 2023), 130–45.
33.↩ Eric Helleiner, “Varieties of American Neomercantilism,” European Review of International Studies 6, no. 3 (2019): 7–29.
34.↩ Erik S. Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (London: Constable, 2007).
35.↩ Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Jasa Veselinovic, and Naná de Graaf, Trump and the Remaking of American Grand Strategy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); Zeno Leoni, American Grand Strategy from Obama to Trump (New York: Springer, 2021); United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Trade and Development Report 2023 (Geneva: UNCTAD, 2023).
36.↩ Alberto Garzón, La guerra por la energía: Poder, imperios y crisis ecológica (Madrid: Península, 2025 [2nd ed.]).
37.↩ Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth.
38.↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review 75, no. 3 (July–August 2023): 1–29.