“While the classical theories of imperialism could have been corrected, elaborated, developed and updated, their summary displacement was certainly an intellectual step backward. … In what follows, I first review three Long Ends of the First World War. While two, in their different ways, put it at the end of the Second World War, the third, Eric Hobsbawm’s (1989 and 1994) is a longer, open-ended and prescient one. I go on to introduce the new conception of the dynamics of the capitalist world order I recently proposed, geopolitical economy (Desai 2013 and further elaborated in Desai 2015, 2016a and 2016b). It permits us to link the classical accounts of imperialism and the related concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to contemporary multipolarity. I also dwell on the intellectual shifts that have made it difficult for this to be more widely appreciated.
