The neoliberal phase in the history of global capitalism is too often understood in terms of a simplistic binary division between state and market. In reality, the neoliberal counterrevolution spearheaded by figures like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was not characterized by states vacating the economic field.

Neoliberal ideologues such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises never wanted the regulatory state to be eliminated. Instead, they sought to reconfigure it as a tool of uninhibited class war from above, waged on behalf of the rich and powerful through various means, including the hollowing out of public services and the dispossession of the working masses.

Neoliberal globalization in Pakistan exemplifies a form of militarized, postcolonial capitalism to be found across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, under which the state stands front and center in multiple processes of capital accumulation. To make sense of the dialectic of state and capital that has animated Pakistani neoliberalism, we must begin by looking at its roots in the period of British colonial rule before 1947.