There is a sense in which the task of expounding the relationship between capitalism and imperialism fell to Marx's successors; for as Ernest Mandel has pointed out in his introduction to Capital Volume Three, Marx never developed a fully articulated account of the place of colonialism and military conquest in the formation of the world market (Marx, 1991: 45). He did however provide a historical account of the relationship between colonialism and mercantile capital which anticipated the debates about the growth of international markets and the acquisition of pre-capitalist milieu that were to become the focus of Marxist theories of imperialism. This argument can be briefly summarized.