States chose power expansion to protect foreign investment rather than sacrifice accumulated wealth

Evidence

The state expanded its power because, given the choice between greater losses than the economic body of any country could sustain and greater gains than any people left to its own devices would have dreamed of, it could only choose the latter. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 370

Categorization

• XREF: This forced-choice logic of capital expansion connects to necropolitics literature on how state violence is rationalized as defending economic structures. — connects to: State governments collude with polluters to secure continued foreign investment — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 979