1 “Jumped on the boat of a territorialist organization”. State and Capital at the Origins of Oil Imperialism Francesco Petrini (University of Padova) DRAFT Max Horkheimer wrote at the beginning of his essay The Jews and Europe, first published in 1939, that “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism” 1 . As Alex Callinicos comments: “I think Horkheimer was right about fascism, but his remark could be applied to imperialism: modern imperialism is capitalist imperialism” 2 . Imperialism – intended as a process of territorial expansion, through coercive and/or hegemonic means, of a political entity characterized by asymmetric power relations between a centre and a periphery – dates back to the dawn of political history and it has been driven by a multitude of factors, including human nature and, first and foremost, power politics. Yet there is a specificity of modern imperialism that cannot be ignored: imperialism in the modern era, say at least since the 1870s but we might maybe go back till the XVII century Holland, is understandable only in close connection with the development of capitalism. Such a statement is invariably accompanied by eyebrow‐raising reactions and accusations of “economicism”, that is of reducing a complex reality to the economic motive. This is a risk I acknowledge. I do not intend to deny the importance of the geopolitical factor in understanding imperialism. Yet, at the same time, I am convinced that it is impossible to really understand imperialism – and international relations in general – without considering the interaction of the geopolitical and the economic/social factors. As Callinicos writes: “capitalist imperialism is constituted by the intersection of two forms of competition, namely economic and geopolitical” 3 . In this perspective, the modern era imperialism (capitalist imperialism) is the result of two interacting and mutually influencing logics: on the one hand, it is the continuation of the process of military and territorial competition among the Great Powers that had characterized Europe since the fifteenth century, at least. On the other hand, it is a process driven by a capitalist logic. That is by the inherently expansionary and competitive nature of capitalism which aliments inter‐ capitalist rivalries (horizontal conflicts) and also, maybe in a lesser measure, by the social tensions between the owners of capital and the wage earners (vertical conflicts) that sometimes are diverted into aggressive foreign policies (the phenomenon of social imperialism). 1 https://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/03/20/the‐jews‐and‐europe/ 2 Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 10. 3 Callinicos, p. 15.