Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West Tim Di Muzio and Matt Dow University of Wollongong, Australia and York University, Canada Under Review Abstract: This article offers a critique of Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. We argue that while all historiography features a number of silences, shortcomings or omissions, the omissions in How the West Came to Rule lead to a mistaken view of the emergence of capitalism. There are two main issues to be confronted. First, we argue that Anievas and Nişancioğlu have an inadequate and misleading understanding of ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ that tilts them towards a theoretical stance that comes very close to arguing that everything caused capitalism while at the same time having no clear and convincing definition of ‘capital’ or ‘capitalism’. Second, there are at least three omissions -particular to England/Britain within a geopolitical context – that should be discussed in any attempt to explain the development of capitalism: the financial revolution and the Bank of England, the transition to coal energy and the capitalization of state power as it relates to war, colonialism and slavery. We conclude by calling for a connected histories approach within the framework of capital as power. There is little doubt that ‘any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.’ (Trouillot 1995: 27). These silences are unavoidable in any historiography, not least ones that attempt to account for the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the so-called ‘West’. Such accounts have been perennial in IR/IPE and much is at stake in the present for how we understand and assess these accounts (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2013, 2015; Beaud 2001; Bhambra 2010; Braudel 1983; Brenner 1976, 1977, 1978; Byers 1996; Dimmock 2014; Dobb 1946/1963; Harman 2004, 2006, 2008; Heller 1985, 2011; Hilton 1976a, 1976b, 1976c; Hobson 2004; McNally 1988; Mielants 2007; Nitzan and Bichler 2009; Sweezy 1954; Tawney 1926; Wallerstein 1974; Wood 2002; Zmolek 2013). This is particularly true for Marxists who generally think of capitalism as having hard-wired internal contradictions that will ultimately lead to its self-destruction and the dawn of communism. The aim of this article is to offer a foundational critique of one of the most recent and in many ways masterful Marxist accounts of the transition to capitalism and the ‘rise of the West’: How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu (2015). Our main argument is that while ‘silences’ are inevitable in all