This wide-ranging, scholarly, and politically engaged study comprises four well-researched and carefully interwoven sets of historically specific and relevant arguments in one broadly coherent book.

The first set offers an extended, grounded critique of the intellectual origins and explanatory poverty of leading mainstream and heterodox approaches to international relations. It recovers the lost history of some approaches, shows their historical role in shaping politics and policies over extended periods and in critical conjunctures in the “long nineteenth century” (1789–1914), in the Thirty Years’ Crisis in interstate relations (1914–45), and in subsequent geopolitical developments and academic debates. Alexander Anievas is particularly critical of the mainstream tendency to separate capitalism and war, which promotes the treatment of capitalism as inherently peaceful and of war as resulting from atavistic legacies.

Relatedly, the second set elaborates an alternative geopolitical and sociological account of the differential articulation of capital, the state, and war. This account is based on Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development and more recent work in this tradition. Here, Anievas emphasizes that, while uneven development is a transhistorical phenomenon, it acquires a historically specific form and dynamic with the emergence of a tendentially unified capitalist world market, combined with a continuing plurality of territorial states that engage in political—military as well as economic competition. In this context, he also provides a critique of “political Marxism,” that is, an approach that explores the co-evolution of property relations and interstate relations.

On this basis, third, Anievas presents an extended historical analysis of the complex, overdetermined geopolitical conjunctures in which political leaders and their allies made strategic decisions that led in two quite different conjunctures to two world wars fought between rival states. Here, he emphasizes the multiaxial, multispatial, and multitemporal character of these strategies and their roots in different economic, political, and hegemonic projects. The three main axes (or vectors) explored in this context, each of which has its own logic, are 1) a “West—East” plane of unevenness in European industrialization in the long nineteenth century, 2) a contradictory “Transatlantic” nexus of North American and European economies further complicated by links within the British Empire, and 3) a variegated “North—South” constellation formed by multiethnic empires from central Europe to the Asia Pacific tied asymmetrically to the capitalist-industrial powers. This provides a basis for analyzing the interplay among imperial rivalries, social revolution, and anticolonial struggles.

The fourth, more limited, set of arguments, inserted between the historical analyses of the two world wars, explores the geopolitical and class significance of the Versailles system of interstate relations (including the League of Nations). Special attention is paid here to Woodrow Wilson, who was both an idealist, even utopian, international relations theorist and, as U.S. president, a ruthless practitioner of geopolitics defending American interests in the post-1918 capitalist order more generally.

These four themes receive unevenly combined treatment in and across the six main chapters in the book. After the usual introduction that outlines key arguments, Chapter 1 reviews some general theories about the origins of war and of the Great War in particular. Chapter 2 initiates the direct critique of IR theories and introduces the author’s preferred alternative based on the concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD). Chapter 3 focuses on the objective overdetermination and contingent necessities of the outbreak of the Great War in the context of a period of interconnected economic and political rivalries linked to competing geopolitical, often imperial, blocs in the last 40 years of the long nineteenth century. Crucial here is the impact of uneven industrial development, especially among latecomers, and its destabilizing effects on domestic politics and the international balance of forces. Given the attention paid to this topic, the Great War provides a critical test case for the author’s alternative approach. His secondary analysis of research highlights the general structural constraints rooted in uneven development and its implications for geopolitical rivalries and alliances and, in this context, the specific political conjuncture in which the war was eventually launched. Chapter 4 deconstructs Woodrow Wilson’s approach to diplomacy, which provides one pole of realist—idealist debates that remains influential in the United States, and highlights the geopolitical stakes in the negotiation of the Versailles Treaty and international order, especially its role in blocking the consolidation and westward expansion of Bolshevism. Chapter 5 applies the same approach to the rise of Nazism and change and continuity in German foreign policy in the interwar years, treading some familiar ground in exploring the origins of the World War II. Chapter 6 offers a brief summary of some of the main arguments and sketches a future research agenda.

Anievas highlights three themes in his U&CD theory: 1) the whip of external necessity, which obliges late-comer societies to industrialize in response to the pressures of interstate economic and military competition; 2) the privilege of historical backwardness, which enables latecomers to leap stages of development; and 3) the destabilizing and disorienting impact of rapid, compressed development. These themes can be seen as part of a contested revival of historical materialism in the field of international relations. Thus, alongside its relentless critique of realism and liberalism with their complementary forms of state centrism, Capital, the State and War also savages political Marxism, with its tendency to separate the economic and political moments of class rule and geopolitical domination. In this context, Anievas highlights the role of competing power blocs and alliances that combine politicians, financiers, industrialists, and military interests as they seek both to manage domestic politics and to pursue broader strategic interests in a changing global context.

Overall, this is an impressive contribution to the renewal of historical materialism in geopolitical analysis, with major critical implications for the discipline of international relations. It is accessibly written and skilfully marshals both theoretical and historical arguments and, in doing so, transcends the stale dichotomies that characterize the intellectual battles inside the ivory towers in academe and replaces them with a more problem-oriented transdisciplinary approach that draws on the materialist conception of history and the work of theoretically grounded political activists who had a strong interest in conjunctural analysis. It reveals the necessarily variegated and multiaxial, multiscalar, and multi-temporal nature of sociohistorical development and its complex role in how states (analyzed in sociological or relational terms, rather than as rational subjects) seek to manage the economic and geopolitical tensions rooted in a global system of production and finance and interstate rivalries that may lead to war, whether this occurs intentionally (perhaps to bring forward a conflict before enemies become even stronger) or by accident and inadvertence.

Another strength of the book is its systematic approach to the spatiotemporal complexities of periodization and conjunctural analysis, distinguishing general crisis tendencies from particular conjunctures. Thus, Anievas treats conjunctures not as arbitrary, mechanical combinations of different sociopolitical factors but as a distinctive theoretical object with its own emergent, contingent properties that calls for a specific kind of analysis. Building on this point, he argues that forces that are identified in abstract-theoretical terms only “operate” in concrete-historical contexts, which thereby overdetermine them and provide them with their specific force in particular conjunctures. At the same time, Anievas treats crisis conjunctures as objectively overdetermined but subjectively indeterminate—which provides a solid basis for combining the structural and strategic analyses that are elaborated throughout his text.

This said, I end with three more critical comments on a provocative text. First, for this reader, it remains unclear whether uneven and combined development is an abstract law specific to the capitalist epoch, a tendency with countertendencies, or a heuristic principle that guides more detailed concrete-historical analysis. Second, while correctly rejecting simplified accounts of the state and its interests as these are posited in realist and liberal accounts of the state, Anievas works with an impoverished account of the state as a specific field of political and geopolitical relations with its own logic in the interstate system. This may be due to hostility to political Marxism but could be rectified through closer attention to the work of political activists such as Antonio Gramsci or relational state theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas. And third, the arguments in studies such as this that rely on secondary analysis tend toward plausibilization of the author’s preferred position, rather than rigorous evaluation of alternative accounts. This is perfectly intelligible, given their scope and theoretical ambition, and makes it all the more important that this approach also be tested in new primary studies inspired by Anievas’s own work.