The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (Verso, April 2016) “Tony Norfield has provided a strikingly original take on the international financial system by placing it systematically within the world imperialist structure of power. He rejects the currently fashionable path of interpreting the ascent of finance by looking at how the leading financial sector agents, operating by way of banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, and the like, manipulate the political-economic game to increase their own personal wealth, while downplaying any useful economic functions they might be fulfilling. He insists, on the contrary, that finance be understood as a form of power deriving from the economic-cum political capacity to compete at the highest levels of global capitalism, which simultaneously endows a limited group of countries and corporations disproportionate access to the world’s resources and operates as the system’s indispensable nerve center. Norfield’s unusual clarity as
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51