In light of Jacobin’s emergence as an exciting site for rethinking Left interpretations of the world and new possibilities for radical change, we are especially grateful for this forum on our book. The comments that have been solicited are very generous, but they also raise important points of difference.

Göran Therborn challenges us to more precisely define and date global capitalism and suggests that doing this implies a deeper engagement with world systems theory. Though world systems theory is rich in so many ways, its 500-year sweep suffers from what we referred in an earlier article as the ‘myopia of the macro’ – it misses the unique specifics of capitalism as a social system. As we tried to make clear in the opening pages of the book, we do indeed see capitalist globalization as a long historical process but the instantiation of capitalist social relations had not, other than in the case of Britain, advanced very far until the second half of the 19 century. Furthermore, though capitalism exhibited an intrinsic dynamic towards expanding internationally, this process came across many barriers, including growing inter-imperial rivalries and spheres of influence. In fact, for most of the first half of the 20 century, with two world wars and communist revolution punctuated by the Great Depression’s interruption of international trade, a universal space for capitalist accumulation actually seemed impossible. It is in this context that we stress the qualitative changes that led to the realization of a global capitalism through a long process stretching from World War II to the beginning of the 21 century.

Therborn suggests that our concentration on the central role of the US in this process amounts to a narrative about ‘globalization in one country’. But we repeatedly emphasize that the initiative did not necessarily come solely from the US but also from state elites and capitalist classes who facilitated the making of global capitalism within their own societies via integration with the informal American empire (‘imperialism by invitation’). Henry Farrell, for his part, insists that the ‘the EU’s economic and monetary union was a product less of encouragement by the US hegemon than of European fears of what that hegemon implied for them’. But that is precisely our point: the new American empire involved sovereign states making their own decisions, but their options were nevertheless heavily structured by the American state and the choices made were generally consistent with the American project of making an open world capitalism.