Description
PRE-ORDER NOW - Published: 26/12/2025
A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms highlights how, since the recent financial crises, the expression `liberal reform' has entered common parlance as an evocative image of austerity and economic malaise, especially for the working classes and a segment of the middle class. But what exactly does `liberal reform' refer to? The research analyzes the historical origins of liberal-capitalist reformism using a critical approach, starting with the origins of the Industrial Revolution. The book demonstrates that the chief purpose of such reforms was to integrate semi-peripheral states into the capitalist world-economy by imposing, both directly and indirectly, the adoption of rules, institutions, attitudes, and procedures amenable to economic and political interests of capitalist ?lites and hegemonic states - Britain first, the United States later - between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. As such, the reforms became an active tool used to promote social-economical-financial institutions, norms, and lifestyles typical of a liberal-capitalist economic order which locates some of its founding values in capital accumulation, profit-seeking, and social transformation. This book will be of significant interest to readers on capitalism, political economy, the history of the global economy, and British history.Binding: Paperback / softback