This book intervenes in the contemporary debates on globalization by asking what it means to conceptualize the global economy. Demonstrating the inadequacy of nation-state-based or international-centric responses to this question, it makes a case for conceptualizing globalization as a historically novel form of transnational capitalism. World capitalism, William Robinson argues, has undergone an “epochal change” involving not just a quantitative intensification but also a qualitative reconfiguration of economic, political, and social processes that were hitherto largely international. Taking advantage of technological developments and organizational innovations, capital has liberated itself from the social and political constraints imposed on it by nation-states and reorganized—fragmented and decentralized—the production process on a transnational basis. This reorganization of the productive base has gone hand in hand with the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), a transnational state apparatus, and a transnational ideological project.

Elaborating on this thesis, Robinson discusses quite insightfully, in Chapters 2 and 3, the analytical boundaries and empirical indicators of the emerging transnational capitalist class and the transnational state apparatus. He conceptualizes the transnational bourgeoisie as the class that owns “the major productive resources of the world” (p. 47) and is “involved in globalized production and manage[ment] [of the] globalized circuits of accumulation” (p. 100). Though comprised of capitalists from different parts of the world, the TCC is presented as increasingly detached from nation-state-oriented political and social projects. But the TCC's detachment from national political and social projects does not necessarily imply a lack of access to the authority of the state form itself. The TCC asserts its political authority globally through a historically new transnational state form—a “multilayered” and “multicentered” network of transformed national states, supranational institutions, and global economic and political forums. The ideological agenda that the TCC seeks to institutionalize through the transnational state apparatus involves, among other things, the spread of neoliberal economies and polyarchic polities. It is these that allow the world to be both made “available to capital” and also “safe for capital” (p. 81).

This book fulfills its major goal of offering a succinct and accessible theory of globalization based on a distinctive “global capitalism” approach. Starting from the centrality of the organization of the social relations of production, Robinson cogently develops and describes the social and political implications that flow from a historic change in these relations. Drawing upon, but also carefully differentiating his theory from, other closely related ones—most prominently those of world-systems theory and neo-Gramscian international relations—he consistently foregrounds the transnational or the global dimension of globalization. This allows him to connect insightfully the different changes in the global economy to changes in global society and global governance.

Notwithstanding these strengths, the capacity of A Theory of Global Capitalism to force the reader to rigorously theorize the global is weakest on the dimension of the cultural. Robinson's theory is nuanced enough to acknowledge the importance of culture (e.g., pp. 83–84). But his conceptualization of the cultural does not approach it in its historically and geographically global dimension: as the culture of capitalist and colonial modernity. In seeing culture primarily as a “component of the transnational project,” Robinson reduces it to an agglomeration of “consumerism, individualism and competition” (p. 84). This is a puzzling limitation in a book that is in conversation with some of the foremost historical and contemporary theorists of modernity (Max Weber, Karl Marx, David Harvey, and John Tomlinson).

A theory of globalization that neglects the theme of capitalist and colonial modernity cannot account adequately for many crucial features of the contemporary global economy. I will limit myself to two that are of immediate relevance: the rapid spread of outsourcing and the consensual dimension of hegemony.

Explaining the change from Fordist to flexible regimes of accumulation, Robinson traces it to capital's application of new technologies and organizational innovations such as outsourcing (pp. 16–22). What facilitates this application, according to the author, is the emergence of a new relationship between capital and labor. But the “historical analysis” that he offers does not really explain what makes this new relationship possible: What is the source of capital's increased social power over labor? Ruling out any “technological determinism” to explain this critical change, Robinson focuses on the competitive drive and class struggle embedded in capital itself. It is this drive that forces capital to constantly look for new ways to increase profits by lowering its costs. But this resolution only substitutes the “determinism of capital” for that of technology. Moreover, we still do not know why outsourcing takes the specific transnational form that it does. That is, how is it that one of the most advanced sectors in the global economy is able to find its most skilled and technologically competent (not just inexpensive) workers from the poorer and “developing” social formations in the world? The theory of globalization that Robinson offers cannot grasp the dynamics of colonial and capitalist modernity that lead to the mass production of skilled software engineers in Third World countries in quality and quantity sufficient to make capital's relative power over national labor possible. It is in this realm that an attention to the cultural and thus necessarily to the heterogeneity and difference of the Other can be analytically productive in explaining globalization.

Additionally, and more briefly, an adequate conceptualization of the cultural would enrich the relatively underspecified dimension of ideological hegemony in the author's analysis. Although Robinson recognizes that hegemony involves a coercive and consensual element, he relies on asserting rather than demonstrating the “hegemonic” nature of the TCC. He is convincing when he argues that hegemony is in the interests of the TCC. But he is not very compelling in showing how these particular interests of the TCC are made universal and persuasive to various subordinate others. A richer conceptualization of the cultural as the modern, in its multifarious forms, would make for a stronger theory of globalization.