The greatest obstacles facing the elevation of sustainability to a transcendent level are the untrammeled power of capitalist consumption and the imperative felt by national populaces and their leaders to avoid sacrificing national interests at all – or perhaps, almost all, costs.

status of technocrats in the 1920s proved to the Kōjin Club leaders that the domestic political terrain was no fertile ground for technocracy politics. They turned their attention to a frontier abroad: Manchuria.

We need the weak exclusivity of premodern or early modern histories if only because national societies are now increasingly unable to exclusively manage the escalating crises generated by the ‘counter-finalities’ of modern nations.66

Thus, not only did European state-building depend heavily on resources and technologies – such as silver, textiles, tea, spices and gunpowder – from the rest of the world, but also these discursive practices contributed to state formation and sovereign territoriality in Europe. Territorial states and modern imperial power emerged from the competiti