Financial expansion reliably signals the late autumn of each hegemonic power.

Evidence

The rise of financial capital is a recurring pattern within capitalism, according to Fernand Braudel in Civilization and Capitalism, as financial expansion is a symptom of the maturity of a capitalist hegemon. Venice in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, the Genoese regime of Italian city states in the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries, the Dutch regime in the late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, and the British regime from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century all demonstrate this pattern. Though Braudel was writing in the 1970s, before the American regime had fully reached its zenith, it too fits the pattern. The “rise” of finance capital in a particular capitalist development is merely its “rebirth” within the larger capitalist system. As Braudel summarizes, “every capitalist development of this order seems, by reaching the stage of financial expansion, to have in some sense announced its maturity: it [is] a sign of autumn.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 71

Categorization

• QUESTION: If finance’s rise is cyclical ‘autumn’ of hegemony, what does America’s financialized media consolidation predict about the post-hegemon transition? Worth checking Braudel’s own evidence across the four regimes.
• XREF: Echoes the classical decline-of-empire thesis conversation in work like Mann’s social power theory and Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing.