The emergence of the World Trade Organization: another triumph of corporate capitalism?

This chapter considers the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the context of the rise of corporate capitalism and the structural effects of that ascent on the regulatory structure and institutional environment of the international trade regime. The chapter argues that the rise of corporate capitalism can be traced to at least the establishment of the English East India Company in 1600 and its Dutch counterpart, the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) in 1602, and that thereafter it followed a trajectory that linked it irrevocably with the international regulatory strategies of the state that represented, as Giovanni Arrighi (G Arrighi, "The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power & the Origins of Our Times" (Verso, 2002) has argued, the “dominant agency of capitalist accumulation” in the relevant period. Focussing on the current period in which the United States has been the dominant state agency, the chapter traces the significance of the relationship between state strategy and corporate capitalism through to the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and the emergence of the WTO as an intergovernmental institution.