Braudel’s Corollary: Off-Shore Powers and Centered Realism

Fernand Braudel said in his characteristically rhetorical style: “was not the European balance of power a sort of political response by the world-economy?”[1] Indeed, even though the modern capitalist world-economy has always been centered at a leading city – and a strong state can always be found at the center – it is not a world-empire; in the sense t…