When stock markets crash, banks default, speculative bubbles burst, and unemployment accelerates, calls for state intervention against the brutality of unfettered markets invariably follow. This was particularly true between 1914 and 1945, a period marked by the collapse of the international financial system, a “thirty years war” of sorts between the great powers, a deep global depression, and rolling waves of labor and social unrest. It would be, as Karl Polanyi eloquently argued, an epoch where widespread social and economic unrest eventually led political authorities to shelter their citizens from highly competitive and destabilizing market forces. In rich, core areas of the world economy this led to corporatism at home and the pursuit of colonial monopolies abroad.

What was possible for the core states that Polanyi was writing about was rarely feasible, however, in poorer zones of the world economy. In these areas neither territorial conquest nor the state expenditures necessary to incorporate wide social strata was possible. Indeed, core states' ability to respond to the interwar crisis rested in no small part on their ability to block political and economic initiatives in peripheral, particularly colonial, zones and impose their own self-protective policies and programs. State formation in one zone and state deformation elsewhere was again the rule: as core states expanded their powers in the battle for hegemony, racialized, colonial control was extended and intensified elsewhere—especially by rising powers Germany, Japan, and the United States.