Even a "long" century is short, compared to a Dark Age

Giovanni Arrighi: The Long Twentieth Century

From the Preface:

With the advent of the Reagan era, the "financialization" of capital, which had been one of several features of the world economic crisis of the 1970s, became the absolutely predominant feature of the crisis. As had happened eighty years earlier in the course of the demise of the British system, observers and scholars began once more hailing "finance capital" as the latest and highest stage of world capitalism.

Arrighi based his book on Fernand Braudel's interpretive scheme:

In this interpretive scheme, finance capital is not a particular stage of world capitalism, let alone its latest and highest stage. Rather, it is a recurrent phenomenon which has marked the capitalist era from its earliest beginnings in late medieval and early modern Europe. Throughout the capitalist era financial expansions have signalled the transition from one regime of accumulation on a world scale to another. They are integral aspects of the recurrent destruction of "old" regimes and the simultaneous creation of "new" ones.

Arrighi mentions "Braudel's notion of financial expansions as closing phases of major capitalist developments", and refers to

the current financial expansion, in the course of which the structures of the now "old" US regime are being destroyed and those of a "new" regime are presumably being created.

Presumably, he says. In the Epilogue, Arrighi considers "three possible outcomes":

• the old centers may succeed in halting the course of capitalist history
• the old guard may fail to stop the course of capitalist history
• capitalist history would ... come to an end ... by reverting permanently to the systemic chaos from which it began ...

Permanent systemic chaos, of course, is the Dark Age.