The Unfinished History of the Indebted Nation-State

This book traces the genesis of the indebtedness of the nation-state in the West, arguing that it is a phenomenon which preceded the emergence of capitalism. Even prior to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the ruling class of feudal landowners in the West were dependent on credit, and had to repay the loans provided by their international creditors. Those monetary loans were unavoidable, both for the defence of the emergent territorial state against its rivals and for its expansion in the struggle against them. However autonomous the early Western nation-states may appear to have been, in reality they were all dependent on the transnational creditors of the time, while the latter in their turn depended on them for the extraction of surplus value from the geographically widening circle of their subject populations. In the modern world of international capitalism, the various nationalisms are still inseparable from the international framework of financial institutions which struggle to sustain the global regime for the perpetual extraction of surplus value.

Jonathan Hall is an Honorary Research Fellow at Sheffield University, UK and a former Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Hong Kong.