Extranational

The term marks a position rather than a place, and in Marsh's history of nations it identifies who has held power at each stage. The second age of nations was made of hierarchical trade empires which included a powerful extranational merchant class, and a trade empire is defined as one including such a class and wealthy in large part because of trade. Being outside the national structure is what made that class powerful rather than marginal, since a merchant not bound to any one nation can move between them, arbitrage them and avoid the obligations each imposes on its own people. The third age of nations extends the pattern, being a supranational empire where trade has fully abstracted the relationship between oligarchs and the people they exploit. Abstraction and extranationality are doing the same work there, putting distance between whoever benefits and whoever pays. The word is not automatically negative in her framework, since nations themselves exist across borders and generations and are not the same thing as states, so much of what matters to people is already extranational in the sense of lying outside state structures. What the term identifies is the gap between where power sits and where accountability is organized, which is why she reaches for it when describing merchant classes and oligarchs rather than when describing diaspora communities.

International relations distinguishes transnational, supranational and international actors by how they relate to state authority, and the literature on non-state actors covers corporations, networks and organizations operating across borders. World-systems theory after Immanuel Wallerstein describes a capitalist world economy that has never been contained by any single state. Sociology of elites has documented the transnational capitalist class, and offshore finance research studies the deliberate use of jurisdictional gaps. Marsh's usage overlaps with all of these and is put to a different purpose, since she uses it to periodize, treating the emergence and then the dominance of extranational power as the marker distinguishing one age of nations from the next.