From the National to the Global: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864–2014

Many scholars today treat globalization as a new form of imperialism, in which the global political economy remains constituted by competing national capitals and their respective nation-states. This view is shared by many Canadian political economists who, carrying on a longstanding debate, continue to argue that Canada should be understood as either a secondary imperialist power or a dependency of the American empire. In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary theories of imperialism and dependency neglect a number of qualitative changes to the global political economy over the last 40 years that challenge the conceptual framework on which they are based. Through a comparative-historical analysis of the changing assemblages of territory, authority, and rights that have sustained the Royal Bank of Canada's activities from 1864 to 2014, I argue that we should instead treat globalization as a novel epoch constituted by a centrifugal organizing dynamic that is moving the rights of capital and the authority over those rights to the transnational level. I claim that this process is transforming the nation-state from a capability to grow and develop national capitals into a capability for globalizing capitals as a result of new rights that restrict the ability of the nation-state to legislate against corporate interests. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on what this means for the future of Canadian liberal democracy and the struggle against global capitalism.