This chapter offers three historical accounts from the post-World War II flows of manufactured products and raw materials, but also the machinery of such flows, i.e., marine transport, focusing on the role that four international organisations played in these processes. The three histories are: liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials, and the mass logging of tropical forests. The chapter argues that these three histories, but also the broader history of international organisations since the mid-nineteenth century, embeds impersonal struggles between two modes of organizing capitalist social relations: laissez-faire and state capitalism. While the former is grounded in de-territorialised capitalist expansion, the latter is geared towards territorially confined regimes of accumulation – itself a reaction to the peripheralising effects of laissez-faire capitalism.

In Chapter 4, I address humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes. The narrowing of political economy by nineteenth-century classical economists was challenged on two fronts. Some economists fought to maintain a broad social and moral perspective, but some economists turned the narrowing theory of classical economists into a stinging rebuke of capitalism itself. I begin by discussing the rising influence of humanism in the twentieth century. Next, I discuss the Hungarian-Austrian political economist Karl Polanyi and his critique of capitalism based on humanism. Although he was initially attracted to Marx’s moral critique, Polanyi eventually rejected Marxism on similar grounds as Tawney. In his search for a moral foundation for capitalism, Polanyi rediscovered the moral theory behind Adam Smith’s writings. I then discuss the British political economist John Maynard Keynes. Similar to Polanyi, Keynes rejected the narrow utilitarianism of both Marx and the classical economists in forming his moral foundation for capitalism based on responsibility and duty. This sets up a discussion of humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism based on Polanyi’s and Keynes’s seminal works.