The well known expert of world system analysis reveals a lot about the object of his decades long research. Arrighi explains hegemonies and their transfer – in the course of capital accumulation – by cyclical financial expansions following real economy ones. Change in hegemony occurs, when the spatial determination of capital changes its setting, moving into a new level: from a city state to a national state and so forth. Anyhow, there is no higher level of a continent wide hegemony. Where are capital and its representative the hegemony of the bourgeoisie heading to in the sharpening competition and crises of world economy?
Th eoriginal article is Giovanni Arrighi: The winding paths of capital Interview by David Harvey. New Left Review 56, March April 2009.