This chapter considers the relationship between change and continuity in the English Reformations through a close study of historical writing. It situates Protestant historical writing during the Tudor Reformations in its polemical context: the need to defend Protestantism from charges of novelty and heresy, and explain away the apparent glory of the Catholic Church over the previous 1,500 years, which were captured in the phrase, ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’ It shows that in answering that question, Protestant writers used traditional practices and modes of historical writing – apocalypticism, providence and prophesy – and employed traditional media (ballads and prophetic images) alongside the new technology of print. It argues that this apparent continuity with the medieval past was vital to Protestant experience and expression of the Reformations as a jolt to historical consciousness. Because they were teleological, these types of historical writing defined the Reformation as a seismic and defining change in history: the last days which would see the culmination of human history and the purification of the Church. Articulating the importance of the presence necessitated the past being remembered and redefined. In this way, memory was crucial to the process of Reformation.

Having established the argument for a necessarily historical materialist moment in understanding ‘the international’ (Chapter 1) and discussed the related implications for the issue of agency and structure (Chapter 2) and the material structure of ideology (Chapter 3), we are now in a position to develop the thematic basis for understanding Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis from a historical materialist perspective. In this chapter, our focus is on debates about the historical emergence of the international states system and the rise of capitalism. The first section contains an excursus on what we regard as several false starts on the origins of capitalist development through the approaches of Barrington Moore on the making of the modern world, Immanuel Wallerstein on the modern world system and Giovanni Arrighi on the origins of our times linked to the analysis of capitalist and territorialist logics. In the subsequent section, we develop our own understanding of the emergence of capitalism. Following Robert Brenner's social property relations approach, we emphasise how capitalism became initially organised around wage labour and the private ownership of the means of production in England and the Netherlands. In turn, capitalism was propelled outward within an already existing interstate system (see Lacher, 2006; Teschke, 2003) along lines of uneven and combined development as a structuring principle of ‘the international’ (see Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2015). In the third section, a more detailed focus on and appreciation of the theory of uneven and combined development is presented, going beyond the assumption that it is a ‘rather fragmentary and undeveloped conception’ in the work of Leon Trotsky (Romagnolo, 1975: 8 n.2). Specific emphasis is placed on addressing the charge of Eurocentrism against the social property relations approach.

The fourth section of this chapter seeks to address three lines of criticism in the literature around uneven and combined development. First, there is no fully reconstructed theory within the original approach to uneven and combined development and, by extension, contemporary approaches to uneven and combined development have not been adequate in ‘accounting for both the spatio-temporal dynamics of capitalist development and the causal effects of socio-political multiplicity’ (Rioux, 2015: 494, original emphasis).

The phenomenon of the rise of the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has been discussed since 2001. ‘Problematising it as related to the decline of American dominance and the rise of global China (and other emerging markets), a Goldman Sachs team selected some useful “non-Western others” and narrated them as being low risk with high growth potential’ (Sum and Jessop, 2013: 443). It was alleged that the economic core of the global political economy was slowly but steadily moving from the traditional industrialised countries in Europe, Japan and North America towards rapidly industrialising and developing emerging markets elsewhere in the world. In this chapter, we assess the significance of these changes in the global political economy through a historical materialist analysis based on the philosophy of internal relations. This will help us to grasp the internal relations between changes in global capitalism with the dynamics of geopolitical rivalry parsing the ways in which the rise of the BRICS within global capitalism is of a piece with processes of state transformation engendering potential new forms of geopolitical tension. ‘Much of the discussion about the rise of the BRICS is actually really a discussion about one BRICS country, that of China’ (Kiely, 2015: 10). Our focus in this chapter is, therefore, on China. In line with the postholing method, introduced in Chapter 1, this allows us to capture some of the empirical richness of capitalist transformation in detail, while understanding at the same time the broader sweep of historical forces.

Many mainstream attempts have been made to analyse the ‘rise’ of China in the global political economy. Neorealists stress the potential rivalry especially between the United States and China. China's recent New Silk Roads or One Belt, One Road strategy – a cluster of large infrastructure projects linking China with Europe, for example – is discussed in terms of a ‘defensive’ or ‘offensive’ grand strategy along these lines (Leverett and Bingbing, 2016: 110–11). John Mearsheimer, in turn, who identifies the United States as a regional hegemon in the Americas, concludes that ‘my theory says that the ideal situation for any great power is to be the only regional hegemon in the world’ (Mearsheimer, 2006: 161).

The argument of this chapter is that an approach drawing from sources within historical materialism is most adept in appreciating the internal relations, expressed within the notion of the material structure of ideology, between the ideational and material realms as mediators of configurations of class forces. This approach is intrinsic to the argument of this book in its attempts to assess the conditions of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis thematically in Part II and empirically focused in Part III.

Similar to the relation between structure and agency discussed in Chapter 2, the conceptualisation of the role of ideas within international relations (ir) and international political economy (ipe) has become increasingly important over recent years. Neorealism and liberal institutionalism generally treat ideas as exogenous to states’ interest formation and interaction. It has been pointed out, however, that such approaches cannot answer important ‘questions of which economic theories and beliefs are most likely to shape the definition of interests in international relations and why and how it is that particular sets of ideas prevail in the international arena’ (Woods, 1995: 161; see also Jacobsen, 2003: 41). A first set of attempts to deal with this problem resulted in an amendment to these approaches by simply adding an additional focus on ideas (e.g. Adler and Haas, 1992; Goldstein and Keohane, 1993; Haas, 1992). For example, some scholars have tried to identify institutional and/or actorcentred causal mechanisms. Ideas acquire causal relevance, it is argued, when they become embedded as organisational rules and procedures in institutions (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 20–4; Yee, 1996: 88–92). These approaches are based on a positivist understanding of social science, which involves a separation of subject and object and the search for clear cause–effect relationships.

A problem befalling this literature, however, is that while ideas are still treated as causes, as possible additional explanatory variables, this leaves no space for understanding ideas as partly constituting the wider social totality. Ideas are merely seen as commodities, as objects which influence other objects. This ‘reinforces the notion that “ideas” are distinct from interests and that their role, in practice, is limited to manipulation; and it obscures the constitutive function of “ideas”’ (Laffey and Weldes, 1997: 207).