Below, Sven Beckert shares five key insights from his new book, Capitalism: A Global History.
Sven is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He has written widely on the economic, social, and political history of capitalism. His book Empire of Cotton won the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
What’s the big idea?
Capitalism challenges us to rethink the most important force shaping our lives—capitalism—by looking beyond Western narratives and embracing a truly global perspective, opening new ways to imagine our economic futures.
1. To understand life, we must understand capitalism.
A distinctly capitalist way of organizing economic activity has swept around the world and become the most significant fact in our lives. Capitalism unleashed the world’s most impactful revolution. We simply can’t understand our lives today without understanding capitalism:
- It structures the way we work.
- It creates the design of our cities.
- It enables unprecedented consumption of goods and services.
- It helps shape our most intimate relations.
The important mission of this book is to renew people’s perspective on capitalism by showing its revolutionary impact and constant shapeshifting.
2. The reality of capitalism’s unfolding.
Libraries full of books have been written about the abstract laws of capitalism and its allegedly “essential” characteristics. This book, instead, tells capitalism’s history. This lively story explains how:
- Capitalism emerged among merchant communities on an archipelago of cities in the first half of the second millennium.
- Capitalism spread slowly into the countryside, into agriculture and manufacturing.
- Trade connected far-flung places to one another.
- Modern industry emerged.
- Colonialism and slavery became important building blocks of the new economic world.
- Capitalism overcame the devastating economic crisis of the 1930s.
- Capitalism seeped into almost all spheres of life in the 20th century.
- Capitalism confronts the end of the most recent neoliberal era.
In that story, we learn about how capitalism constantly shifted its shape, having combined and recombined various forms of labor, organizations of capital, and forms of political rule. This book discusses capitalism as it actually unfolded over the past 1,000 years, rather than the ways it should have unfolded according to economics textbooks.
3. Global perspectives tell the full story of capitalism.
The history of capitalism is often told from the vantage of specific cities, but to get the full story, it needs to be told from a planetary perspective. I see capitalism as a global co-production in which many of the world’s people, willingly or unwillingly, came to play a crucial role.
The book begins in the port of the Yemenite city of Aden in 1150 AD and concludes in front of the gates of factories in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, in 2023. Along the way, we touch down in places on all continents:
- We get to know the merchants of 16th-century Surat, India.
- We learn about the enslaved sugar workers of Barbados in the 17th century.
- We follow the dirt-poor weavers of what is now southern Poland.
- We encounter the enormous manufacturing power of early modern China.
- We learn about how French merchants connected the slavery economies of the Caribbean to the expanding European mercantile and manufacturing sectors in the 18th century.
- We encounter how enclosures drive workers into Glasgow’s emerging cotton industry.
- We trace the intensification of indigo agriculture in India.
- We follow the networks of New York’s economic elite in the 19th century.
- We get to know German steel industrialists who were sentenced as war criminals.
- We observe the transformation of sugar labor on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion.
- We recount the strikes of Senegalese railroad workers in 1919.
- We shadow the efforts of Indian industrialists to produce that country’s first typewriter after independence.
- We witness the improving lives of Swedish autoworkers in the 1960s.
- We learn how the neoliberal revolution was forged in Chile.
- We get an impression of the enormous dynamic in the current transformations of Cambodia.
All these developments need to be considered to show the global scope of the capitalist revolution. No moment of capitalism’s history can possibly be understood from a local, national, or European perspective alone. Capitalism was born global, and the condition of its possibility was its very globality.
4. The cast of capitalism’s story needs to be expanded.
This book is not an abstract treatise of the laws of economic development, but an account of how a great variety of people in many different parts of the world built and shaped global capitalism during the past 1000 years. Some characters are more familiar to many of us, such as the Florentine Medici, the Augsburg Fuggers, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford. But many lesser-known entrepreneurs also play critical roles: the Chalebi and Godrej families in India, and the Shens in Guangzhou, China.
Voices that are often silenced in the story of capitalism appear as well: women play a crucial role, peasants in the English countryside, enslaved workers on Saint Domingue, trafficked indentured cultivators in Australia, car workers in Turin, and rebellious entrepreneurs in the United States in the 1970s. These different groups of people struggled over the terms of the capitalist revolution and, as a result, shaped it. Capitalism is a human creation, not a fact of nature. These protagonists played key roles in shaping the specific forms of capitalism as they emerged at particular moments in time.
5. Patterns from the past can inform our path forward.
This history of capitalism enables us to find new ways to navigate our futures. History does not repeat itself, and no one can predict what comes next, but we can learn from the patterns that developed capitalism during the past 1000 years.
“The capitalism of the future will probably look substantially different from capitalism today.”
We can see that capitalism shifted its shape quite dramatically throughout that history. The 18th-century capitalism that combined colonialism and slavery had little to do with the industrial capitalism of the 1870s. The capitalism of the 1960s, with its emphasis on Keynesian economic policies, had little to do with the capitalism of the 1920s. The capitalism of 21st-century Shenzhen had little to do with the capitalism of 1890s Pittsburgh. The enormous flexibility that capitalism has showcased in the past points to its great flexibility in the future, and the likelihood that the neoliberal order will prove just as fleeting as previous orders.
The capitalism of the future will probably look substantially different from capitalism today. Thinking about past shapeshifting can help us discern the mechanisms of shapeshifting in the future. History can also teach us how capitalism continuously relied on the free gifts of nature, and that its current path of rapidly accelerating resource consumption is almost certainly unsustainable. The global perspective of this book also encourages us to think about the future in global terms and the importance of a whole variety of actors. We are all actors in this history, just as much as our forefathers and mothers.
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