Early modern bourgeoisies saw their world as competing states, not one system
Evidence
The class that is so consistently identified with the appearance of industrial capitalism was inextricably associated with specific “rational” structures—a relationship that profoundly influenced bourgeois imaginations and realizations. Political economies, that is national economies, enclosed them, and thus the bourgeoisie perceived what later analysis argues in retrospect is the beginnings of a world system as something quite different: an international system. The bourgeoisies of early modern capitalism were attempting to destroy or dominate each other. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 184
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Complicates world-systems theory (Wallerstein et al.): contemporaries of early capitalism saw no world system, only rival states.
Related
- Early capitalism enclosed bourgeoisies within rival national economies rather than a world system. (similarity 0.93)
- Marx’s early theory concealed unresolved tensions between rival views of bourgeois society (similarity 0.80)
- Modern capitalism emerged only within the framework of the evolving western state (similarity 0.80)
- Marx’s world-historical vision of the bourgeoisie contradicted its national-territorial development (similarity 0.80)
- European capitalism emerged from particular national states, not an universal sequential order (similarity 0.79)
- Three Worlds Theory subordinated mass movements to national-bourgeois states (similarity 0.79)
- Fourteenth-century catastrophes shaped which European bourgeoisies built the world system (similarity 0.79)
- European egalitarianism myths were maintained by hierarchies that divided peoples for domination (similarity 0.79)
- Early socialism did not negate capitalist society (similarity 0.78)
- Marxist theory viewed nations as instruments of the bourgeoisie. (similarity 0.78)