Neoliberalism is Over: Enclosure, Empire and the End of the Free Market

A panoramic history of capitalist predation and global trade from the Age of Discovery to the present

Neoliberalism is Over reveals how capitalism repeatedly turns to monopoly, imperialism and coercive accumulation when elites confront limits to growth and resources. In this bold work of economic history, Arnaud Orain argues that capitalism has never followed a single liberal trajectory. Instead, it has oscillated between two regimes. One is the familiar ideal of free trade, competition and boundless expansion. The other, which Orain terms the capitalism of finitude, emerges when ruling classes come to see the world as closed, scarce and fully claimed. In such moments, markets give way to monopolies, commerce is militarized, empires carve up territory and wealth is secured through rents rather than production.

Ranging across five centuries, from early modern mercantilism to twentieth-century imperial blocs, Orain shows that this predatory regime has surfaced again and again. He contends that today’s global order, shaped by trade wars, environmental constraint and renewed great-power rivalry, marks its third major historical return.

Combining economic history, geopolitical analysis and intellectual genealogy, Neoliberalism is Over offers a sweeping reinterpretation of capitalism’s past and present. At a time of resurgent protectionism, it demonstrates that predation and enclosure have been central to capitalism’s development, not historical aberrations but recurrent responses to perceived limits.