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In this paper, I combine two theoretical prisms in order to offer a socio-historical approach to the 2007 financial crisis. Firstly, I understand each element of the crisis as an actant within a network that, when understood as a totality, was the financial crisis. Secondly, I envision each one of those elements as embedded within partially autonomous activity spheres that together comprise the totality of the capitalist world-system. Therefore, I will be drawing heavily from Bruno Latour and David Harvey to illustrate how envisioning the crisis non-economistically can open up our understanding of the inter-relationality of its causes. Beginning with a focus on capitalism's longue duree and ending with an examination of the local imbrications of globally transmitted risk-cultures, I connect macro-structural accounts of the crisis of global capitalism with micro-agentic accounts of localized decision making practices. In the process, I put into dialogue several disciplines and synthesize previous work done on financialization, the housing bubble, and the social geographies of culture and knowledge. Additionally, I attempt to understand racially discriminatory predatory lending practices through a Marxian lens in order to show the practical and theoretical intersectionality that exists between racism and capitalism as social systems. I come to the conclusion that, when conceptualized in this socio-historical way, the crisis is far more intelligible, and less the result of nebulous passions, innate proclivities, or ephemeral instabilities, than many economistic analyses would lead us to believe.
