Şahan Savaş Karataşlı: Primitive Accumulations, Financial Expansions, and Varieties of Refiguration of the Capitalist World-Economy. [Abstract]

Through macro-historical sociological lenses, this paper examines the interplay between financialization, primitive accumulation, and spatial refigurations in the capitalist world-economy. Challenging the traditional view of primitive accumulation as a singular, localized starting point of capitalist relations in a given region, the article highlights its cyclical and relational dynamics, whereby finance capital from declining economic centres is redirected to emerging ones and fuelled new cycles of capitalist accumulation in a new geography by shifting centres of material expansion of trade from Italian city-states to Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and now China. It emphasizes the transformative role of financial expansions in driving primitive accumulation processes that reshape spatial and socio-economic boundaries and create new forms of global inequalities and new types of core-periphery hierarchies. The paper also addresses a number of novel dynamics in the early 21st century, including East Asia’s emergence as a new centre of material production, dissolution of the core-semiperiphery-periphery hierarchy, ecological limits to capitalist expansion, and the deepening contradictions within the capitalist system.

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