The growing literature on the "internationalization" of agricultural and food systems has paid too little attention to the way in which the state itself not only sponsors this process, but is changed by it. ln most accounts of internationalization, the state (and state system) is taken as a given. This paper attempts to remedy this by offering a sketch of the world historical character of state-economy relations, across different periods of world capitalism. The goal is to stress that currently the transnationalization of the state is a key to the internationalization of agro-industrial food systems.