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Chapter 1 formulates a transnational approach to the Korea question and embeds it in the larger historical and theoretical inquiry into modern sovereignty, the crisis of capitalism, and the temporality of historical change.

This chapter introduces a “neo-Polanyian” conception of capitalist crisis, by drawing from and engaging with Karl Polanyi's framework. Polanyi had described a “double movement” by which societies typically correct for the predations inflicted by unregulated markets (and thus secure their future). Government is crucial to providing social insurance, education, food or health support, and other benefits. Social movements are crucial to producing government action (and also, often concessions from businesses). But these are not simply class or labor struggles. Nor does the double movement imply overcoming capitalism; it can be a push for “repurposing” capitalist wealth as well as for simple redistribution.

This chapter introduces the post-2008 historical context of crisis and restructuring, where communications have become a new epicenter of political-economy transformation and a crosscutting tool for economic recovery and industrial upgrades. It also introduces the themes of this book, that is, the centrality of communications to Chinese-style capitalism, the state’s constitutive role in the evolving networked economy, and, lastly, the relationship between the state-dominated communications system and the global digital economy.

This chapter documents the culture of extreme risk-taking that became business as usual in this era of “financialization.” It suggests that the crisis of 2008 was a more or less conventional capitalist crisis and that it can potentially be met by a more or less conventional, largely Keynesian government response. But it was also a panic, a product of social psychology, and the chapter closes by asking what happens when such a panic coincides with deeper capitalist crises and long-term technological cycles. We face a choice of possible futures: serious reforms (which seem increasingly unlikely as anxiety about a deep depression subsides), muddling through and leaving in place the sources of future crises (most likely), and an even greater crisis produced not by economic failure but by political madness or war.

This book returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States (1833-65) to address a longstanding trouble in the field of empire studies—the relationship between slavery and empire within capitalism. During this age of global capital, U.S. slavery exploded to a vastness hitherto unseen, propelled forward by the outrush of slavery-produced commodities to Britain, to continental Europe, and beyond. Britain waxed fat from this outflow and helped finance U.S. slavery while looking toward its empire to meet the bar U.S. slavery set. As slavery-produced commodities poured out of the United States, U.S. slaveholders transformed their profits into slavery expansion. U.S. slavery provided the raw material for metropolitan Britain’s explosive manufacturing growth and inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root from the Atlantic world to Asia and the Pacific.