Publication Date:
May 2011
(2011) [1980], Revised ed. with New Prologue. San Francisco: Univ. of California Press.
This book covers the consolidation of the European world-economy during the seventeenth century. The 17th century history was determined by the struggle for the surplus-value between states and classes. States tried to concentrate all the major sources of capitalist profits within their frontiers in order to become the centre (core) state: cereals, textile, metallurgical products, transport infrastructure, entrepots of the Atlantic trade. The core country tried to use other countries as conveyors (semi-peripheries) of the created surplus-value in the peripheries. Within the emerging core state, classes battled among themselves for a major part of this surplus-value.