In the chapter on transitions, Chilcote outlines the major shifts—from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism. The scholarly debate ranges from Paul Sweezy's notion that feudalism was largely a result of the emergence of a merchant class engaged in international trade; to Maurice Dobb's theory that the transition was the result of internal class conversions; to Robert Brenner's argument for the centrality of peasant-based class struggle. The diverse explanations posed by Chilcote highlight the complex reality of transitions and call into question the simplistic and schematic Rostovian stages of growth and Wallersteinian so-called world system approaches.

Chilcote's own approach to political economy is most clearly revealed in his discussion of class analysis perspectives. He recognizes the limitations of “class reductionist” approaches but argues very persuasively for examining the interface of class structure, productive processes, and state institutions in order to understand long-term, large-scale change. An additional benefit is the annotated bibliography at the end of the chapter, which includes many of the major authors in the debate.

In the chapter on the state, Chilcote suspends his class categories and refers to the liberal state and the progressive state. He returns (p. 42) to class categories in assessing the dichotomy, but without elaborating on the distinction between regime and state—a problem endemic among many theorists. Chilcote's summary of theorizing by Philippe C. Schmitter and Bob Jessop would have benefited from the extensive critical literature that highlights the many pitfalls of using the concept of corporatism to describe fascist, social-democratic, and nationalist-populist regimes.

The discussion of neoliberal views on the state accurately describes ideological principles (favoring a minimalist state) but does not analyze neoliberalism's powerful statist thrust: the state role in subsidizing capital, bailing out banks, intervening in civil society to limit the role of labor, and so on. Neoliberal statism is most clearly a very current perspective and requires full exposition.

Chilcote provides a wide-ranging discussion and classification of the rich and sophisticated debates on the state by Marxist scholars. He evaluates and compares the Marxist, institutional, instrumental, regulation, and feminist perspectives. Surprisingly, there is no examination of the imperial state or of what some writers call the globalized state, although these topics are at the cutting edge of debate in the new millennium. The imperial state plays a major role in the world market by establishing new trading rules for expanding the influence of its multinational corporations and by directing international financial institutions to bail out crisis-ridden regimes and impose structural adjustments that facilitate privatization and buyout by Euro-American investors.

Chilcote's exposition of the capitalist-democracy debate provides excellent background on the historical and theoretical disputes between liberals and Marxists. Once again, however, a clear distinction between regime and state would help explain the apparently contradictory position of U.S. policymakers toward democracy in Latin America. In transition from military rule to democracy, the United States supports regime changes when the apparatus remains intact, but it opposes democratic changes when the apparatus is dismantled and replaced by a revolutionary state. The pertinent question is not whether capitalism opposes democracy but whether the transition to democracy entails changes in property relations.

The chapter on theories of imperialism, as distinct from the imperial state, is probably the strongest in the book. Chilcote provides a highly informative comparative-historical discussion of imperialism from Marx, to Schumpter, to those he describes as the contemporary analysts of imperialism, including Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and Eric Hobsbawm. Various schools have focused on issues of unequal trade, foreign investment, and/or the role of multinational corporations, whereas newer schools address the problem of the internationalization of capital (p. 235). Mention is made of globalization theory, but the burgeoning literature in favor of an interdependent world in which stateless corporations govern through international financial institutions is largely ignored. Although globalization theory is the hegemonic perspective, it does not lack for critics, and certainly its claims to have eclipsed the imperial paradigm are short on data and weak in accounting for the unipolar world that emerged after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. This highly informative chapter would have benefited from the inclusion of globalization theory.

The survey of debates and theories and the classification of schools of thought on the major historical changes in the nineteenth and twentieth century provide a useful starting point for developing new theories and approaches to the problem of imperialism. Moving from theory to current policies and structures of the international political economy, one discovers an enormous gap between abstraction and practice. For example, neoliberal or free-market doctrines circulate widely and are formally embraced by Washington and Brussels, but the actions of these imperialist powers more closely resemble mercantilist than genuinely liberal policies. Although the United States demands from its Latin American trading partners the elimination of trade and investment barriers, it upholds and enforces quotas on agricultural commodities, textiles, steel, and a host of others. In addition, it applies antidumping regulations in a very loose and haphazard manner, which leads many countries to suspect that these are a “nontraditional” form of protectionism.

Massive state subsidies to U.S. agriculture and technology ($30 billion in the case of agriculture) allow U.S. multinationals and exporters to capture markets, but the U.S. government pressures the International Monetary Fund to enforce budget cuts in Latin America directed at similar subsidies. The Bush administration's Free Trade Area of the Americas Treaty would consolidate U.S. economic dominance in the hemisphere based on the mercantilist relations currently in place. Neither Samir Amin's Accumulation on a World Scale (1974) nor Immanuel Wallerstein's world system approach provide any empirical or conceptual guidance in understanding the particular forms, policies, or effects of neomercantilistic imperialism. I am suggesting that Chilcote's book would have benefited from testing the various theories of international political economy with some contemporary case studies in order to allow readers to evaluate the explanatory power of the competing theories.

This book is a much needed antidote to conventional political economists who ignore the issues of imperialism, social class, and large-scale, long-term changes. When the next major U.S. military intervention takes place, I hope that the major professional journals will not ignore the imperialism hypothesis, as was the case during the U.S.-Indochina conflict. By broadening our analytical vision and introducing key concepts, Chilcote does a great service to the study of comparative political economy.