This chapter argues that Edward Said wrongly neglected the resources of Marxist political economy. Whereas Said saw the war in Iraq, for example, as the result of centuries-old Orientalist dogma about the Middle East and the cynical self-interest of Bush administration “oil men,” the work of the late Giovanni Arrighi explains in detail the links between the resurgent imperialism of the “war on terror” and the strategic goals of the US-centered capitalist world-system. My conclusion is that political economy allows postcolonial scholarship to make visible the inseparability of empire from capital, and the susceptibility of both to critique and practical transformation.