I ran across this passage a few weeks ago and forgot about how much I dig it, even if he sounds a little populist at times ("lazy annuitants") and even if, contra Arrighi (who seems almost wholly inspired by the paragraph below), it's a mistake to reduce the history of capitalism to the rise and fall of empires.
^^^^^ CB; Marx's theory of the history of capitalism is, of course , in the penultimate chapter of _Capital_, "The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation".