Capital centralization and imperialism: A review based on a BERT semantic approach

The relationships between capital centralization, imperialism, and war are the subject of new research and a recent appeal for peace published in the Financial Times and Le Monde. Inspired by such contributions, we apply a computer-assisted textual analysis based on a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers semantic approach to examine publications produced between 1900 and 2025 that investigate the links between ‘capital centralization’ and ‘imperialism’. The review shows that in the network obtained with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and elaborated with a block model, the topic communities related to the terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘capital centralization’ show the lowest level of semantic similarity. Thus, while the pioneering contributions extensively investigated the possible links between these two concepts, the relationship between them remained relatively unexplored in the subsequent period. A review of the relatively few works dedicated to this nexus aims here to evaluate the potentially current aspects worthy of further research. JEL codes: C11, D85, E32, E5, G34