This combination of functions was reinforced when capitalism developed a formal economic doctrine in the ideology of “Free Trade.” This complex of ideas is as much a geopolitical as an economic ideology: it has served as a rationale for war from the time of the First Opium War, and continues to do so to this day. Its advocates see no contradiction between their belief in the absolute autonomy of free markets and their embrace of state intervention in the form of war. Capitalism is, and has always been, a war economy, repeatedly rescued from collapse by geopolitical conflagrations, as was the
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