Back to issue155•Sept/Oct 2025

NLR 155, September–October 2025

155, Sept Oct 2025

Reviews

, Le monde confisqué. Essai sur le capitalisme de la finitude (XVIe–XXIe siècle)

Éditions Flammarion: Paris 2025

368 pp, 978 2 0804 6657 0

Nicholas Mulder

It has become a truism among Anglophone commentators that the world is in the grip of ‘geoeconomics’, the pursuit of geopolitical ends by economic means. In September 2024, Mario Draghi’s report on the future of the European Union spoke of the need for Brussels to ‘act as one country with a single geoeconomic strategy’. In January 2025, the outgoing Biden Administration’s national security team recommended that the United States prepare itself for a ‘new era of geoeconomic competition’. In July, an essay by the Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett declared the start of ‘the new age of geoeconomics’. When the strategist Edward Luttwak coined the term in *The National Interest *at the end of the Cold War, he expected military conflict between states to ebb away; instead of armed confrontation, countries would compete via their multinationals, vying for market share and technological leadership. Great power clashes would give way to a sublimated commercial rivalry.

But geopolitical conflict has not withered way. From Ethiopia to Myanmar, Ukraine to Gaza, Nagorno-Karabakh to Sudan, open war is proliferating to a degree not seen in decades. The current ‘geoeconomic’ turn entails not the diversion of conflict so much as its expansion into domains hitherto protected from it. Kinetic war and economic war are now advancing side by side. Intensified great power competition has stretched and broken the norms of neoliberal economic policy: the pieties of free-market globalism are being displaced by antagonistic inter-state conduct and an upsurge in coercive economic measures such as sanctions, export controls and tariffs. To be sure, capitalism and its drive to maximize private profit are firmly intact. But states and corporations are pursuing their objectives through ever more assertive political methods. What is novel is that such antagonisms are playing out in a world economy that has reached historically high levels of commercial, financial and technological integration.

Many Western officials describe geoeconomics as a new domain of policy. But since no country has added more instruments to the arsenal of economic coercion than the United States, it must be asked if the proliferation of such practices is not changing the broader structure of international exchange. Washington’s sidelining of the neoliberal architecture of global governance, coupled with the growth of Chinese power and Russian territorial revisionism, suggest that ‘geoeconomics’ is not merely a novel dimension of policy, but the vocabulary through which technocrats are registering a deeper and broader change in the dominant political logic of the world economy. Political leaders and think tankers have rushed to embrace Luttwak’s old rubric to describe a new reality in the international system, one whose emergence they are only partially in control of—private capital is also strongly implicated in it.

Yet besides denoting the vague sense of a paradigm shift, ‘geoeconomics’ is an amorphous term, used in widely varying ways. Little intellectual consensus exists in the commentariat or the academy about how to characterize the ongoing transformation to which it gestures. There are several possibilities. One option, popular among economists such as Daron Acemoglu, is to locate the shift at the level of market organization: a move from economic globalism to economic nationalism. Geoeconomics, on this view, is a rejection of wto-style apolitical commerce and a break with the post-1970 trend towards freer trade: its focus on economic security harkens back to the protectionist projects of the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods. Others, often investors and hedge funds, portray the new dispensation as moving away from laissez-faire and towards interventionist economic policy. This casts geoeconomics as a statist revirement that is superseding neoliberalism, an ideology that itself toppled the post-war Keynesian-developmentalist consensus, which in turn arose on the ruins of an older economic liberalism that had come to grief in the dual catastrophes of 1914 and the Great Depression. Finally, political scientists and lawyers tend to render the shift as a change of ethos and personnel: from cooperative civilian understandings of global exchange to antagonistic weaponizations of such interdependence, as in Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s Underground Empire or Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints.

It is into this conceptual melee that a new book by the French historian and economist Arnaud Orain intervenes with a new, wider-angle formulation. Le monde confisqué is an intellectual history of geoeconomics that examines the cyclical rise, fall and return across the last five centuries of what Orain calls the ‘capitalism of finitude’. This is both a worldview and a real political-economic formation—a Blochian état d’esprit and a set of concrete practices—distinguished by the dominance of the notion that the amount of resources in the world are finite and insufficient to satisfy the needs of all humans and of every state. Orain argues this *mentalité *has been dominant in three discrete periods: from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, during the six tumultuous decades from the 1880s to 1945, and from 2010 until the present.

Orain, who is director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, was born in 1977 and educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon; he defended his doctoral dissertation at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne on the economic thought of the philosopher-abbot Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80). His first monograph, La politique du merveilleux (2018), translated as The Politics of Utopia (2024), is a revisionist interpretation of the Mississippi Bubble, the financial-commercial experiment that destabilized Regency France from 1717 to 1721, as the Scottish economist John Law unified French colonial monopolies, created a modern central bank, introduced a paper currency and nationalized the public debt. La politique du merveilleux is a critique of the prevailing liberal understanding of the Law episode, in which his infamous Compagnie des Indes was a failed Bank of England that might have been. The book challenged conventional portrayals of Law as an economic dictator who held the fate of the Bourbon monarchy in his hands and whose failure scuppered French desires for a central bank for eight decades afterwards.

Instead, Orain argued that Law was merely the best-known figure in a wider landscape of utopian thinkers seeking to transform society through the liberation of finance and commerce under the auspices of an all-powerful, benevolent state that had socialized whole sections of the economy. The Compagnie des Indes was in fact a giant social ‘enterprise of general enrichment that had become the goal of the nation united in a body of a new and daring nature’. Its ambition was to ward off a corrosive liberalism but also to move beyond royal absolutism by elaborating visions of a ‘new Potosí’ of material plenty and sexual liberation in the New World. Orain drew attention to a large ‘carnivalesque literature of state’ that used the self-fulfilling power of expectations to overthrow the entire mindset of the society of orders that characterized the ancien régime.

Orain followed with *Les savoirs perdus de l’économie *(2023), which presented a history of the forgotten intellectual traditions with which modern economics did battle during its rise in the late eighteenth century: the approaches known as commercial science (science du commerce) and economic physics (physique œconomique). Against the abstract and measurable concepts of the économistes that emerged in the 1750s, these alternative systems of knowledge offered more concrete and practical understandings of society and the economy, and also allowed for a better balance between human beings and nature. In some ways, Orain’s first two books provide a historicist critique of mainstream economics by outlining a counter-narrative of its early origins: French reformers were not misunderstood liberals, nor were epistemic quantification and totalization the only way forward for economic theory.

The same interests and intellectual-historical approach mark Orain’s latest book, his most ambitious yet, which he describes as a methodological blend of ‘intellectual history, economic history and contemporary economics’.* Le monde confisqué* argues that ‘finite capitalism’, a worldview and system that prevailed in the early modern period, re-emerged in the era of high imperialism and has returned again today, has been the dominant form of capitalism: it is its opposite—‘infinite capitalism’ (variously described as liberal, free-trade, open or neoliberal capitalism)—that has been limited to two anomalous interludes of roughly 65 years each: the post-Napoleonic pax Britannica that broke down in the 1880s, and the pax Americana that held from the end of the Second World War until the 2008 financial crisis. According to Orain, these eras were distinguished by the prevailing belief that nature and human ingenuity enabled endless growth to the benefit of all. But these timespans were relatively brief and are now firmly behind us.

Finite capitalism, Orain argues, has historically manifested as an extractive expansionism: ‘a vast naval and territorial venture in the monopolization of assets—lands, mines, maritime zones, enslaved people, entrepôts, submarine cables, satellites, quantitative data—conducted by nation-states and private companies with the aim of generating a rentier income outside of commercial competition’. Each of the three epochs in which it dominated has seen harsher and more violent competition, a blurring of the boundary between war and peace, and a distinctively zero-sum mindset take hold among state and business elites. Although Orain sees capital accumulation as undergirding all world history in the last five centuries, he insists that its forms have changed considerably, and done so in a connected way that gives these broader shifts an identifiable systemic quality. But the core of his book is a profoundly revisionist attack on mainstream liberal (as well as many critical) understandings of capitalism as an order desiring openness; Orain insists that historically, capitalism has more often pursued strategies of closure.

Given that modern liberal economics has established its own infinitist outlook as the default, transhistorical constant in the nature of capitalism, Orain spends most of Le monde confisqué describing its more powerful but underrecognized opponent. He identifies six core attributes of finite capitalism, to each of which he devotes one chapter: first, the closure and monopolization of seas and oceans; second, the militarization of maritime commerce; third, the creation of anti-competitive organizations by capitalists; fourth, the carving up of markets and trade networks into politically exclusive silos; fifth, the usurpation of sovereign powers by mercantile interests; and sixth, the conversion of weaker and poorer parts of the Earth into subjugated resource empires for rich and powerful states.

Orain begins with a historical overview of how seas have been an essential realm of capitalist expansion and development since the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas marked the start of European competition for maritime dominance across the world. He argues that under finite capitalism the sea has been the object of two kinds of disputes: one over control of trade flows, the other over control of underwater resource stocks such as seafood and subsea minerals. Early modern disagreements over mare liberum and mare clausum between the jurists Hugo Grotius and John Selden were not just geopolitical; they were strongly driven by efforts to secure the sea’s lucrative fruits such as North Sea herring and Atlantic cod. This effort to cordon off the sea was revived in the later nineteenth century, when naval and maritime treaties and the development of exclusive economic zones turned wide stretches of coastal waters into national possessions. More recently, China’s economic rise has manifested in part through maritime extension: island-building in the South China Sea, as well as the intrusion of its private commercial fishing fleets into the territorial waters surrounding multiple continents.

In his second chapter, on the militarization of maritime commerce, Orain develops an original reading of the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan as a theorist of the ‘dual maritime system’—the need for modern industrial countries to possess both a civilian merchant marine and a military naval force. Since armed fleets serve to protect commerce and to destroy the enemy’s seaborne trade, Orain argues that Mahan has been interpreted too narrowly as a prophet of decisive naval battle. In fact he believed that such military might at sea was only possible if a country had first risen to maritime-commercial pre-eminence—a fundamental precondition for building a world-class battlefleet. Sustaining naval power without underlying maritime power, and the industrial shipbuilding capacity and culture of seamanship that bred it, made little sense. For a late nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon supremacist like Mahan, states could only man their navies if they possessed large, well-populated coastal communities of sailors, merchants and fishermen, which served as patriotic recruitment pools. This reading of Mahan leads Orain to a fascinating judgement on twenty-first-century maritime power politics. For while there are plenty of rising trading powers who choose to exchange their wares under the protection of a naval hegemon that guards the sea lanes, whether Royal Navy cruisers in the nineteenth century or us Navy aircraft carriers since 1945, today the United States has ended up in a historically unique position: it maintains global naval power, but has ceased to be a maritime power of any significance at all. Consider that there are currently 188 us-flagged privately owned ocean-going cargo ships of more than 1,000 tons, against 5,500 Chinese cargo vessels and 57,000 industrial fishing vessels. It is the Chinese, Orain argues, who have ‘understood the lesson of Mahan: any durable naval power must be a maritime power’.

Orain devotes sustained attention to the creation of monopoly power and anti-competitive theories of capitalism in the third and fourth chapters, moving from the age of Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Peter Thiel, the American right-wing venture capitalist who proclaimed in 2014 that ‘in reality, capitalism and competition are opposed’. While economists usually think of trusts and cartels as the main competition-restricting devices, outright legal monopolies have historically been common too, especially in foreign trade. Early modern thinkers as well as nineteenth-century imperialists were great supporters of such anti-competitive structures. As Orain summarizes the choice: ‘Would you like the greatest possible abundance of goods at the best price for your consumers? Then choose free exchange and competition. But would you prefer to create a powerful state through a self-supporting process of development that prioritizes production over consumption? Then avoid it.’ Orain, who is on the editorial board of the storied historical and social-scientific journal Annales, here follows its great exponent Fernand Braudel who, in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (1979), defined early capitalism as an anti-market phenomenon sustained by great merchants and entrepreneurs exercising power at the commanding heights of the economy.

Contrary to liberal narratives that depict the colonial ‘company-state’ as an early modern abomination that had left the historical stage for good by the 1850s, Orain shows that the sovereignty-usurping firm has had considerable staying power. Notably, from the 1880s onwards, Western imperialism in Latin America, Africa and Asia involved the powerful resurgence of chartered companies with de jure or de facto monopolies over particular territories and trades: the us United Fruit Company over agricultural goods from Central America; the British United Africa Company over groundnuts and palm oil from Western Africa. Similar power was held by the Belgian Congo Free State, the German New Guinea and Jaluit Companies in the Pacific, the Portuguese Niassa and Mozambique Companies and British East and South Africa Companies, and many more. Orain’s historical portrait of the capitalism of finitude is dominated not by big industrialists but by the great commercial capitalists—the Dutch and English East India Companies, Jardine Matheson, J. P. Morgan and Cecil Rhodes—and contemporary logistics giants such as Amazon, Walmart, and the Danish and French cargo firms Maersk and cma cgm. He joins Marxist economic historian Jairus Banaji in emphasizing the historical importance of mercantile over industrial capital. In his final chapter, Orain highlights what he sees as the bellicose common ground between finite capitalist projects: the idea that resources must be placed under national control for purposes of strategic competition. He traces the long history of efforts to place overseas acreage at the disposal of metropolitan consumer preferences. In this regard there are parallels between European settler colonies’ attempts to displace indigenous populations and build grain reservoirs for their industrial home countries in the nineteenth century, and present-day land grabs in the developing world by Middle Eastern state capitalists and East Asian governments and corporations, who have acquired vast swathes of African and South Asian farmland to feed their own populations. Orain highlights the recurring tendency to force states in the Global South to specialize in the exploitation of commodities and raw materials for Western consumers, what he calls *primarisation *and reprimarisation. The book ends on a bleak note: ‘the global growth of wealth is out of the question for this pessimistic and belligerent capitalism’.

The principal contribution of Le monde confisqué is its novel periodization of the history of capitalism—one that can now be debated, criticized and refined. By advancing the ontological (‘commercial-intellectual’) categories of finitude and infinity, Orain breaks with economic histories defined by institutional orders (free trading, gold standard, Bretton Woods, floating exchange rate, wto, neo-mercantilist), of growth regimes (pre-modern, early modern, Second Industrial Revolution, post-1970s), accumulation regimes as theorized by the Regulation School (ancien régime, extensive/liberal, intensive/monopoly), and hegemonic cycles (e.g., Giovanni Arrighi’s Genoan-Dutch-British-American progression). Rather than looking for material markers Orain locates the shifts at the level of intellectual paradigms that connect broad-based policy changes in major powers with changes in outlook: is the world considered infinite and are its systemic interactions accordingly a positive-sum affair; or is it inherently limited in its growth potential and hence destined to be ruled by zero-sum competition?

Le monde confisqué is a welcome addition to the small but growing literature—István Hont’s *Jealousy of Trade *(2005), Eric Helleiner’s The Neo-Mercantilists (2021), Marvin Suesse’s The Nationalist Dilemma (2023)—that places the current neo-mercantilist turn in a wider perspective. It is unusual in that it is the product of an early modern historian’s direct engagement with tendencies in twenty-first-century capitalism. This temporal leap is rare: not only are many early modernists hesitant to bridge the gap between their period and the present but their own epoch is often sidelined or ignored by modernists. Important episodes from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries are routinely overlooked by scholars in the post-1940s social sciences, such as political scientists, international relations scholars and economists, many of whom are not well-versed in the longer-term background of the processes they study. As a historian at home in the world of modern economics and political commentary, Orain’s framework, bringing deeper historical insight to bear on contemporary preoccupations, is inherently valuable.

The book not only sheds novel light on the canonical authors in the history of economic thought but also goes beyond them, unearthing the contributions of less appreciated thinkers. Alongside its compelling reinterpretation of Mahan as a theorist of finite capitalism, the book restores the German historical economist Gustav von Schmoller to his rightful place as a hard-nosed realist in political economy. For good reason, many of the most prescient analysts of the role of power in economic life were working in the late nineteenth century, at the onset of the last cycle of capitalist finitude: a period of hyper-imperial competition situated midway between early modern commercial wars and our own era’s neo-mercantilist shift. Orain also delivers an incisive critique of Carl Schmitt, whose vision of a titanic struggle between an unbounded maritime liberalism and its circumscribed terrestrial opponents is exposed as a naïve historical illusion: far from being a space naturally hospitable to liberal politics, the sea has for centuries been an essential object of violent closure and coercive monopolization. The sage of Plettenberg’s diagnosis that a boundary-dissolving Anglo-American liberal behemoth was dominating the early twentieth century was hard to square with the economic realities of what Orain sees as a pre-internationalist America and a declining Britain, marked as they were by a mix of imperial preference, harsh migration restrictions, high tariff walls and entire sectors ruled by trusts and monopolists. But Schmitt’s misdiagnosis was at least based on a vision of the world as a whole; as Orain observes, today’s European far-right nationalists have no serious analysis whatsoever of the challenges presented by global capitalism—unlike their interwar predecessors, for whom weighing in on the failures of liberal economics and envisioning a concrete alternative order was de rigueur. Whereas a more ambitious political right would once have reacted to environmental pressures and demographic decline by formulating a coherent ‘imperial response to the climate crisis’, today’s European nationalists prefer childish denial and self-defeating chauvinism.

Aspects of Le monde confisqué are open to question. One is whether it is sensible to replace previous dichotomies used in economic history—geographical (globalist/nationalist), commercial (free trade/protectionist), monetary (fixed/floating exchange rates) or political (laissez-faire/interventionist)—with a new ontological distinction between worldviews. After all, few philosophical or ideological outlooks ever completely dominate an era; competing, even incompatible perspectives often co-exist, perhaps most noticeably on Orain’s early modern home turf. During the long gestation of capitalism from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, fixed and expansionary understandings of wealth and population were locked into almost continuous ideological struggle. Historians of the early modern era, such as Carl Wennerlind and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson have shown how even at the nadir of seventeenth-century warfare and trade conflict, there were plenty of merchants and ‘intelligencers’ who believed in a future of infinite improvement for mankind; John Shovlin has demonstrated how eighteenth-century political economists and officials time and again responded to conflict by advancing free trade initiatives and neutrality projects that strove to limit the space for strife in the world economy. Philosophical commitments to finitude may simply have been irrelevant to the preferences of early modern elites for, say, preferential tariffs over free ports. Most political debates about development were settled by pragmatic and tactical considerations above all.

But conflicting worldviews and countervailing phenomena also surface in later periods discussed by Orain. Rival philosophies of history with different conceptions of plenitude and scarcity were at play in the interwar period, when the ideological clash between communism and fascism found expression, among other things, in a profound divergence about whether the industrial future could be a paradise of mass-produced plenty or was fundamentally constrained by hard environmental limits. In this regard the three-way ideological competition during the twentieth century between liberalism, communism and fascism was an asymmetrical one: liberals and communists may have fought each other over distributional questions, but both agreed that a world of greater universal wealth was possible and attainable. Only interwar fascists truly believed in the Malthusian premise that, as the historian Victoria de Grazia put it in Irresistible Empire (2005), ‘the table at nature’s feast was overcrowded, and the latecomers, failing to find a place, were cannibalized by their fellow diners.’ Finally, Orain’s focus on the geopolitical plane of capitalism means he does not register the emergence of an influential left-wing strain of finitude thinking in the 1970s: a progressive and conservationist tradition that congealed around the Club of Rome Report The Limits to Growth, inspired new forms of ecological economics and gave rise to the modern degrowth movement.

Orain’s reading of the current iteration of the capitalism of finitude is based on the idea that monopolistic merchant capital is on the ascendant over industrial capital, which is more positively inclined towards competition. But this is disputable on both empirical and structural grounds. Global industrial production has relocated since the 2008 Financial Crisis, but in both value and volume it is by no means diminished, and is now driven by Chinese growth above all. Orain spends much time discussing the undeniably growing power of Amazon and Walmart. Yet these logistics giants are but a small part of the summits of global capital. The three largest firms in the world by market value today are all us producers of hardware and software (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft), while worldwide the provision of vital inputs in electronic devices (tsmc, asml, Samsung, lg) remains a key sector of profit accumulation. Likewise, the power of large platforms like Uber and Airbnb is sustained not by commercial capital, but by the copious funding of finance capital, from asset managers and venture capitalists to private equity and hedge funds. This is ultimately about a surfeit of global wealth chasing returns in a slowing world economy, not a victory of merchants over industry.

Orain’s emphasis on political exclusion as a key hallmark of finite capitalism leads him to overstate the degree to which sovereign merchants actually achieved such closure in reality. He dismisses Adam Smith’s claim that early modern company-states were torn between their state and profit-making functions; they were not, Orain insists, since their essential purpose was to secure political control over resources so as to extract rents. Yet the experience of the Dutch East India Company (voc) shows how difficult this was in practice. Despite its murderous conquest of the Spice Islands of Indonesia, the voc continued to rely heavily on intra-Asian trade in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Far from being a successful violence monopolist, much of its revenue came from being a middleman in the wider Asian economy, shipping Japanese copper to India and Gujarati textiles to Java. In this way, it remained to a large degree a market-maker and merchant enterprise trying to buy cheap and sell dear, often without as much success as it had hoped. Commercial competition from the British East India Company and the growing assertiveness of Ming and Qing forces and the Tokugawa Shogunate, who could defeat the voc in battle and force it to accept less favourable terms of trade, weighed on profits from the intra-Asian trade. From the late seventeenth century onwards this forced the voc headquarters in the United Provinces to send ever larger amounts of bullion to Asia, leading to the company’s slow decline in the following decades; when private trade was allowed in the 1740s this was an admission that monopolization had failed. Likewise, today’s tech giants are not mere ip monopolists, but continue to generate a large share of their revenue by selling advertising space, siphoning hundreds of billions from the retailers that offer goods and services on their platforms.

A final issue is Orain’s philosophy of history: do the fluctuations between finite and infinite capitalist orders follow a progressive logic of development or a pendulum-like pattern? The argument that we are living through a return to the competitive, zero-sum dynamics that characterized the early modern era, or that of high imperialism until the Second World War, flattens the compounding effects of historical change. Does the creation and collapse of liberal hegemonic orders really produce nothing new under the sun? For all their brittleness and failures, both pax Britannica and pax Americana established institutions to overcome the discord of the past and spawned novel projects intended to realize progressive futures. After 1815 the Concert of Europe kept geopolitical strife in check while industrialization proceeded, eventually allowing a free trade movement to emerge in which the interests of industrial and merchant capital fused with the Cobdenites’ millenarian faith in the power of commercial exchange to dissolve empires and inaugurate a global reign of peace and prosperity. By 1848 Karl Marx was in favour too, telling his working-class audience in Brussels that ‘the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution’.

After the 1870s the British free trading system disintegrated in a vicious spiral of imperialism, two world wars and the Depression, which broke the nineteenth-century international division of labour forever. Post-wwii American hegemony addressed some of the flaws in the British imperial order. The Bretton Woods regime created in 1944 repressed international financial flows and endorsed capital controls as necessary interventions to avoid the interwar destruction wrought by competitive devaluations, tariff walls and export market rivalries. But such learning processes were not a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon. That trade wars inspire not just hot wars but also efforts at commercial détente was already apparent in the early eighteenth century. Orain mentions how the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession engendered French proposals for a single giant European Indies Company that would unify British, French, Dutch and other merchants involved in trade in Asia. Orain writes that in 1720, one of the advocates of such a union of the continent’s merchant firms hoped that ‘their mutual aid would render navigation more certain and more convenient; their joint forces guarantee them against the insults to which foreigners are too exposed in faraway countries; the discoveries of some, will help others; the credits which they take out, will multiply their common funds’. Three centuries later, eu officials are negotiating trade deals en bloc with their counterparts in Beijing and New Delhi. Is the continent that once spread mercantilism to every corner of the globe doomed to repeat its past, or might parts of it be committed to the eclipse of ‘jealousy of trade’ in the long run?

In a world marked by a stark if waning us dominance no longer interested in hegemony, it may seem hard to conceive of a conflict-transcending universalist project. But in opposition to the calls to embrace full-spectrum competition there are still plenty of countervailing strains. In fact it appears that elites in the fastest-growing parts of the world economy do not see the global resource base as limited, nor competition as necessarily zero-sum. Xi Jinping’s Fourteenth (2021–25) and Fifteenth (2026–30) Five-Year Plans are based on an explicit gambit that China can overcome demographic headwinds and a real estate slump through the unleashing of ‘new-quality productive forces’, as the ccp calls the semiconductor, ai, renewable energy, automotive, quantum and electric industries into which it is pouring enormous amounts of capital. As Chinese export surpluses smash previous records, the People’s Republic is both stockpiling resources and flooding the world with commodities. Our era remains perched between two forces: a finance-heavy Western economic bloc sunken into quasi-Spenglerian obsession with its own internal crisis and an East Asia-centred supply chain network that is wagering it can outrun its internal problems by continuing to produce more goods for more people at a lower price. This conflict is about more than just competing ontologies of scarcity and abundance; it is about how state capacity and political-economic interests are shaping the future development paths open to global capitalism.