Capitalism (2025) by Sven Beckert

 Book Review

Capitalism: A Global History (2025)

by Sven Beckert

  I don't care about money all that much, but I'm obsessed with Capitalism, particularly the history of capitalism.  I'm also a fan of historian Sven Beckert- I really liked his Empire of Cotton, which I read back in 2019.  I also enjoyed his anthology Slavery's Capitalism, which I read in anticipation of the release of this book.   As much as I'm interested in any single subject in world history it is the history of capitalism.  Beckert's effort is laudable and about as good as any book for a general readership which takes in this entire subject in one volume is going to get.

 Much of what Beckert seeks to establish is the global part- recognizing that capitalism is NOT just something that happened during the industrial revolution in northwest Europe.  Beckert identifies an idea of the pre-modern capitalism of "nodes" or islands, of merchant driven capitalism that extend back to the dawn of civilization, in places like Oman, India and Venice.  These were physically small places where capitalism was defined by long-distance trade, and its exponents were merchants. 

 He then moves to what is probably the most important, and least well understood chapter, the era of "War Capitalism" which lay-people know as the colonial period, where western polities (and later, Japan) expanded into the New World and Africa and established a commodity-production model of capitalism that relied heavily on clearing land of indigenous peoples and replacing them with huge, single product plantations powered by slave labor.  Historically, defenders of capitalism sought to distance it from this epoch, but Becker relies on a half-century of scholarship which places War Capitalism and slavery at the center of the world-capitalist experience. 

 The War Capitalist chapter is really the high-point, with Beckert synthesizing a lot of scholarship that may be unfamiliar to a casual reader.  After that, everything gets pretty predictable:  The initial industrial revolution, the second aka "Fordist" industrial revolution, the rise of consumer capitalism, etc.  There wasn't much after the war capitalism chapters that really held my attention but it is hard not to appreciate Beckert's ability to make a dry subject (economic history) come to life for something resembling a general audience.