Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's long-awaited The Making of Global Capitalism, said to be ten years or more in the making, is ‘about globalisation and the state’.[1]  More precisely, Panitch and Gindin use its 450 pages to provide an important, informative, and well-written account of the predisposing factors, emergence, expansion and transformations, of global capitalism, as seen through the lens of the strategic actions of the US federal government.

The roots of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade, lie in the 1980 military coup, which took place with the support of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) immediately after the revolution in Iran in 1979. As in Pakistan, the coup brutalised Turkish society and led to increased Saudisation of society and culture, with increasing crackdowns on the struggles of the Left, workers, intellectuals, students and Kurds.

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s masterly ‘political economy of American empire’ stands out among other recent books on the topic, not only in the detailed and meticulously researched history it provides, but also with respect to its interpretation of US imperialism as ‘superintending capitalism on a worldwide plane’.[1] Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Empire of Capital (2003) for instance also, at least implicitly, sees the US state as a key author of globalisation (indeed she equates globalisation with the ‘new imperialism’),[2] but she does not

The central theme of our book, The Making of Global Capitalism, is the role of states in the making of global capitalism, and especially the role of the American state as an informal empire in that making—and in superintending it to this day.