No one agrees on when, where, or how capitalism began, or whether it had a beginning at all, but everyone agrees that capitalism, the word, first appeared in the 19th century. Capital and capitalist slipped into use, unnoticed and unremarked, in the 13th and 17th centuries. Capitalism burst through the barricades of political argument in the 1830s, announcing immediately the hostility of its user. “Long live capital!” cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.” As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker—as a worker, a radical, a hater.
If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else. Blanc described it as an act, the taking of collective wealth and turning it into individual or private profit. Proudhon claimed it was a citadel, casting medieval and military shadows across the land. Despite his obvious interest and extensive writing on the subject, Marx steered clear of the term.
A 19th-century dictionary usefully notes that “ism” words are “systemative,” and a system might have been the one thing that everybody agreed capitalism was. But a system of what? The economy was hardly a concept at the time, and even if it had been, was capitalism only an economic system? Was it not also a “social system,” as the conservative German economist Johann Karl Rodbertus claimed, or a political system, as the subtitle of Marx’s Capital and Adam Smith’s discussion of “the system of natural liberty” had suggested? If it was a system of property and production, finance and labor, how could one distinguish where the economic dimensions ended and the political and social dimensions began?
This uncertainty over domains and their differentiation indicates a deeper anxiety. Whatever kind of system capitalism was, it had a tendency to blur, to ooze and spread across distinctions. As early as the 18th century, observers like Montesquieu had noted that merchants drew “their livelihood from the whole universe.” In the plantation economies of the Caribbean, the Abbé Raynal thought he had detected a “rapid movement which stirs the Universe.” By the time it acquired its name, capitalism was already spinning and spanning the globe, drawing from and drawing close the different parts of the earth. Capitalism sucked in other worlds too, engulfing religion, law, the family, even the psyche. We can never know the inner life of another person, the economist William Stanley Jevons claimed, nor can we know the contour of their appetites or the character of their aversions, but we can know their push and pull by the “oscillations…minutely registered in the price lists of the market.”
No matter how one defines capitalism, the concept has served its critics well. Capitalism named an enemy, gave it a shape, and showed that it was on the march, threatening everything in its path. It still does. Scholars, by contrast, have often blanched at the term, dismissing it as political or polemical. While a subset of historians never gave it up, only recently has the historical profession come around to the position of the German scholar Jürgen Kocka: that as “a concept of historical synthesis,” capitalism is “unsurpassed.” Since the financial crisis of 2008, an entire subfield has been dedicated to “the new history of capitalism.” Its practitioners have rewritten the history of slavery, debt, accounting, real estate, prisons, finance, sex, insurance, and more.
Now these scholars face a challenge that the opponents of capitalism have long understood: Capitalism and its opponents depend on difference. Capitalism works at the margins, colonizing or cultivating systems and spheres that are not capitalist. Capitalism’s opponents also work at the margins. They work at the margins of time, reminding people of a time before capitalism and promising a time after it. They work at the margins of space, defending social spheres and geographic regions not yet overtaken by capitalism. Whenever capitalism triumphs, that fugitive space grows smaller, that alternative future grows dimmer. As that future disappears, it becomes harder to imagine or to posit a time, including a past, when capitalism did not exist. Everything—past, present, and future—becomes capitalism or is on its way to it.
The polemical elements of the word, the fact that partisans deployed it to mark the perimeter of what they were protecting from the forces they were opposing, once made capitalism a fruitful source of historical distinction and narrative. But when the polemic subsides and the perimeter disappears, when capitalism triumphs and is simply the way of the world, the job of the historian becomes infinitely more challenging and fraught with failure.
Enter Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard.
Beckert is a pioneer of the new history of capitalism, and like the ism he studies, his remit is always expanding. His first book was The Monied Metropolis, an illuminating if contained history of the making of the ruling class of 19th-century New York City. In Empire of Cotton, he told “the history of capitalism” through “the biography of one product.” Now, in Capitalism: A Global History, Beckert has freed himself from the shackles of the specific. Citing Nehru’s dictum that it is no longer possible to write history “in terms of any one nation or country or patch of territory,” that we must “think of the world as a whole,” Beckert claims that capitalism “can only be understood globally.” Capitalism, he maintains, did not become global; it “was born global.”
Beckert begins in the year 1150, not with capital or capitalism but with the merchants of Aden, a port city at the tip of southern Yemen. These merchants were Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and maybe Christian, but they worked and wrote mostly in Arabic. Over the course of several hundred years, they connected with other merchants as well as farmers, miners, and manufacturers from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. They traded an astonishing variety of goods: pepper, sugar, ivory, sandalwood, iron, copper, lead, carpets, glass, porcelain, and more. (One merchant in Cairo dealt in 83 different commodities.) In addition to buying low and selling high, the merchants crafted legal partnerships, instruments of debt, currency exchanges, and early forms of insurance to finance trading expeditions that could take as long as two years and go wrong in any number of ways. Instead of accompanying their goods on their journeys, they relied on the financial instruments they created, the diversity of their portfolios, and the trust of their families and networks to see their profits through. They were, Beckert tells us, “the world’s first capitalists.”
By using this nomenclature, Beckert makes three claims. Two look backward, one looks forward, and none of them stands up to scrutiny. First, he writes that these merchants pioneered a new form of economic being. They “led economic lives based upon a truly exotic principle: They deployed capital to produce more capital. The accumulation of capital was the linchpin of their worldly endeavors.” But that principle was neither novel nor exotic, and Beckert’s merchants were not the first to act on it. Aristotle saw it lurking in any form of money-based, long-distance trade, and he was sufficiently concerned about its currency among the merchants of his day that he devoted several pages of his Politics to denouncing it and them.
Second, Beckert claims that these merchants forged a “global connectedness.” It’s not clear what he means here, as he allows that this connectedness did not extend to the Americas. He can’t mean that the merchants connected three of the world’s seven continents, unless he attaches a special, and undisclosed, meaning to continents—or to the number three. He might mean the connections forged across vast distances: Beckert regularly toggles between “long-distance trade,” “long-distance merchants,” and “capitalist,” and writes that “capitalism’s mainspring was its capacity to connect distant places.” But this also was not new: Ancient trading routes in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea spanned distances that were equivalent to those separating Javanese merchants from the Banda Islands or Khmer merchants from China, two instances of global connectedness that Beckert cites. And if what matters to him are the connections forged across social or cultural differences—he often resorts to the phrase “connected diversity”—we would do well to recall that Plato was so alarmed by the cosmopolitan effects of trade on his ideal city that he insisted on siting its port miles away from its people.
Last, though Beckert is careful to say that these merchants were “capitalists without capitalism,” he insists that they built “islands of capital” upon which “capitalism originated.” Beckert’s merchants were the “vanguard,” the “avant-garde,” the “central actors,” “seedlings,” “sprouts,” and “harbingers” of the “capitalist revolution” to come. As the slippage from vanguard to harbinger suggests, Beckert never settles on, much less sustains, a specific historical claim about these merchants, whose “revolutionary importance,” he allows, may be “visible only in retrospect.” Even so, Beckert flies the flag of a school of scholars who assign a causal pride of place to the medieval merchants of the Muslim world.
Beckert distinguishes this origin story from that of a competing school of scholars who situate the beginnings of capitalism in the struggles between landlords and tenant farmers in Britain during the late medieval and early modern eras, and he argues that these scholars mistakenly see capitalism originating in “one place” rather than “in the connections between various places.” But that only returns us to the question of what Beckert has in mind when he speaks of connections, distances, and places. Why are the connections between merchants in Cairo and Canton, who Beckert says “would have been broadly recognizable to one another” and whose “ways of conducting business would have been familiar across geographic and cultural divides,” more connective than those joining a landlord doling out leases to a farmer laboring in his fields in Norfolk? Beckert doesn’t say.
Like the city of Aden, which was buttressed by high walls of rock to protect it from threats that might roll in from the sea, Beckert hedges his claims about these “first capitalists” in anticipation of attack. Instead of fortifying his case, his mitigations threaten to send it sliding into the sea. Aware that some of his distinctions between medieval merchants and ancient traders cannot be sustained, Beckert admits that there were “islands of capitalists and capital before the year 1000” and that a “very small niche” of specialized merchants accumulated vast wealth through “long-distance trade.” Even so, he insists on his larger point: that “something new emerged around the turn of the millennium.” As it turns out, this was not a different type of merchant or an increase in the number of merchants. It was not even the conversion of an island of capital—or capitalists—into an archipelago of capital or capitalists. By Beckert’s own report, this “something new” consisted of changes in tax and property regimes, the resistance of peasant farmers to both, and new techniques in agriculture that led to increases in productivity and output—precisely the sorts of causes that several other generations of scholars of capitalism have foregrounded elsewhere.
As Beckert steps into the modern world, his argument gains traction, though it leaves his earlier claims behind and the reader wondering why he ventured them in the first place. Merchants still matter, but it’s the merchants of 15th-century Genoa who are the vanguard, or at least one of the vanguards. Though Beckert discusses previous centuries of merchants in Genoa as well as in Florence, it’s not until the Genoese and their sponsors move into the Atlantic and circumnavigate the African continent that they achieve their vanguard status.
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Whatever Beckert may say about mindset and milieu, distance and connection, it’s clear from his account that two less tractable factors turned merchants, as well as landowners and financiers, into something new and distinctly capitalist. The first was the newly formed states of Western Europe; the second was the capital owners’ seizure or increasing control of production, particularly in agriculture and the countryside—not just the products of agricultural laborers, but also how they labored. The combination of these two elements forced a “departure from all previous ways of organizing economic life,” creating a world “fundamentally different from any that had shaped human affairs before.” Far more than a system of long-distance connection or trade, European capitalists and states forged great chains of global being—with new forms of command and control over the laborers of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas—that siphoned wealth, resources, and people from all parts of the globe to benefit the capitalists and states of Europe.
Relative to other parts of the world, particularly China, the fledgling states of Europe were weak. They competed over territory and resources in a region smaller than China, putting them in a state of constant conflict; they also lacked the taxing power they needed to finance and conduct their wars against one another. These difficulties were capital’s opportunities. Desperate for money, states looked to merchants and bankers for loans and to commerce—particularly the trade in grain—for revenue. (Taxes on trade eventually provided the British state with 80 percent of its revenue.) Competition between states for financing enabled capital to extract better terms for its loans. As states grew more dependent on capitalists, capitalists increased their power within states and their leverage over them. Though the state benefited more from capital than capital did from the state, capital did extract one form of critical help from this arrangement. Since antiquity, merchants had sought to diminish the risks of long-distance trade by securing a monopoly over their routes and returns. Protected by Europe’s growing navies, merchant monopolies financed expeditions up and down and eventually around the coast of Africa, gaining the direct trade routes to Asia they had previously been denied and, ultimately, the biggest prize of all: the Americas.
Beckert acknowledges that his claim about the state is nothing new. More than a century ago, Max Weber coined the phrase “political capitalism” to describe what he called “that memorable alliance between the rising states” of Europe and “the sought-after and privileged capitalist powers.” What Beckert does provide is a wealth of carefully plotted detail showing how these alliances were made and unmade, across four centuries, in place after place: from men on the Italian peninsula to states on the Iberian peninsula that pushed the forces of political capitalism down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, and into the Americas; in the Dutch Republic, which pushed those forces into the Baltic Sea, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia; and in England, which pushed them everywhere.
Beckert also acknowledges that the owners of capital transformed agricultural production, turning agricultural labor into a commodity and creating a vast market in labor in the countryside. The “radical innovation” of the capitalist was to seize or control labor “as the primary source of value in trade.” Though Beckert’s language couldn’t be clearer—the transformation of agricultural production, with its identification of labor as a key source of value, is the “foundry” of capitalism—he doesn’t appear to recognize its significance for the other claims he makes throughout the book or make any attempt to reconcile them. Contrary to what Beckert sometimes says, his book shows that capitalism does not begin with trade and long-distance connection. It does not arise from merchants behaving like merchants. It does not follow from accumulations of wealth. It begins with capital’s taking control of production and unlocking workers’ highly prized and protected capacity for labor.
Instead of the English countryside, Beckert lights upon a Genoese merchant’s discovery, backed by the Portuguese state, of Cape Verde in 1460. Completely uninhabited and unclaimed, thrust a few hundred miles into the Atlantic, the islands of Cape Verde offered merchants, settlers, and financiers a different kind of distance than the one Beckert routinely invokes. With essentially free arable land, isolation from competing social groups, and an absence of political scrutiny and opposition, they could put enslaved laborers, bought and sold in Africa, to the most punishing forms of work producing sugar and cotton. Cape Verde would be the first of many such capitalist utopias, repeated on São Tomé, in the mining city of Potosí in the Andes, on Barbados, and elsewhere. Wherever land and labor could be stripped of any consideration other than profit and accumulation, capitalists were free to use both without interference from above or below.
Across the chasm of three centuries, from the discovery of Cape Verde to the Industrial Revolution, Beckert hews closely to this path of capital’s taking control of production. Owners of capital made agriculture more efficient and productive, supplying ever more demanding markets not just in nearby cities but in other countries as well. Given Beckert’s previous scholarship, it’s not surprising that his step is surest when he walks us through how merchants turned into capitalists by purchasing enslaved people in Africa and land in the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean, and then becoming mass producers of cotton and other commodities. Between Africa and the Americas, he says, capital pioneered new forms of labor control and surveillance that only came to Europe two centuries later. Nowhere in Europe, Asia, or Africa could capital owners remake production as quickly or as dramatically as they did on the plantations of the New World. The Americas “unlocked the radical potential of urban capital to transform the countryside,” he writes, “and with it, the world economy.”
Standing at the precipice of the 19th century, Beckert launches the longest discussion of his book, some 600 pages that take us from 1760 to 1973. This is roughly the same distance that Eric Hobsbawm traveled in his Age of tetralogy, give or take two decades at either end. Hobsbawm claimed that a “dual revolution” in the late 18th century unleashed capitalist civilization upon the world. The Industrial Revolution, led by textile manufacturers in England, was less technological than economic: With a few inventions and the state’s control of international markets, industrialists learned to increase profits by investing in machines and reducing labor costs. New machines required new sources of energy, like coal, which spurred new forms of transportation, like railroads, which spurred yet more industries, like iron production, creating what seemed to be an ever-increasing economy of growth. The French Revolution, led by the citizens of France, inspired new forms of popular politics and gave previously disenfranchised classes a taste of political power. After consummating its stormy marriage of the economic and the political, this dual revolution gave birth to a bourgeois Cain and a proletarian Abel, whose struggle unto death—over liberalism, democracy, the state, capitalism, socialism, imperialism, communism, fascism, and decolonization—would shape the fate of the globe.
Beckert locates one half of his own dual revolution in the same industry and in roughly the same place as Hobsbawm: the textile mills of Glasgow. With profits from sugar and tobacco plantations in the Americas, Scottish merchants took over the manufacturing of cotton textiles, replacing water mills with steam engines. Once again, the state mattered: It imposed tariffs to prevent imports from India, whose thriving textiles industry—far more advanced than Britain’s—needed to be suppressed. It monopolized trade routes to and from Africa and the Americas, where slaves produced the cotton that got shipped to Glasgow, and Glasgow produced the textiles that got shipped to Africa and the Americas. It seized Scottish lands held in common and used by small farmers, forcing them into the cities and the mills that became factories, where they got a wage for their work. Hobsbawm’s readers will recognize the emergent picture: Capitalists created “production in factories, employing wageworkers to operate sophisticated machinery.” The “cutting edge” of capitalism moved “from commerce and agriculture to industry.”
The other half of Beckert’s dual revolution, like Hobsbawm’s, speaks French, only this revolution happens in Haiti. Whereas Hobsbawm saw in the French Revolution a political story—an event that would seed the militant armies and parties of workers, trade unionists, and socialists who sought to wrest control of the economy from capitalists—Beckert is less interested in the politics of the Haitian Revolution than in its economic fallout. In his hands, the revolution becomes more adjunct than antagonist to the Industrial Revolution.
Industrialists needed cotton for factories, sugar for workers, and coffee for themselves and their families. The Haitian Revolution put a near stop to the production of all three. “The most important producer of a crucial set of goods had gone off-line,” Beckert writes, “a move akin to modern Saudi Arabia ending its oil exports at the very moment that the demand for its products rose rapidly.” The repercussions were felt everywhere. Sugar production shifted to Cuba and Asia, cotton production to the American South, coffee production to Brazil, while wheat production exploded across the Midwestern and Western United States, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Capital now did to the global countryside what it had done in Cape Verde, Britain, and the Americas, only faster and more intensively. What once had taken centuries was now accomplished in decades.
Hobsbawm’s dual revolution set off a centuries-long contest between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. Beckert, by contrast, largely narrates a story of unfolding continuity in which the “war capitalism” that spawned plantation slavery in the 16th century matures into the “industrial capitalism,” imperialism, and fascism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Beckert may claim that the Haitian Revolution “dealt a massive blow to the slavery system” and “set in motion a century of political upheaval.” He may discuss the struggles of workers, free and enslaved, and anticolonial nationalists that the Haitian Revolution heralded. He may write that “there was a world before the Industrial Revolution and an entirely different one after it.” But as we learned long ago: Trust the tale, not the teller.
Take the question of labor and production. In keeping with a common story about capitalism, Beckert claims that wage labor is the “most consequential…form of labor mobilization” in “the history of capitalism.” He claims that wherever “coercion and violence” were deployed to increase the pace and productivity of labor, it “reveals the relative weakness of capital owners.” Forced labor persisted in Africa because “capital’s penetration of the continent remained weak.” (How this causal relationship between the weakness of capital and the power of slave labor fits with his earlier arguments about the capitalist utopias of Cape Verde and the like, Beckert doesn’t say.)
In keeping with a common story about the Industrial Revolution, Beckert tells us that one of its “key innovations” was “the recruitment of millions of wageworkers.” As “industry intensified, wage labor spread.” The Industrial Revolution created “a radical break in human history,” with workers, for the first time, on a mass scale, selling their labor on the market and dependent on the market for all their needs. It was “a social change of staggering radicalism” that “came to define capitalist civilization.” Slavery, by contrast, played virtually no role in “mobilizing industrial labor,” and no “industrial revolution emerged in regions of the world dominated by plantation slavery.” So far, so familiar.
Yet the further Beckert wades into the 19th century, the clearer it becomes that his story is not the rise of wage labor and a new civilization of markets but the persistence, even the creation and expansion, of slavery in response to markets. With the Industrial Revolution, he says, enslaved workers “produced many of the core commodities of the global economy.” They, not wage workers, transformed “the global countryside.” Enslavement continued for decades and, indeed, got worse. By the middle of the 19th century, Beckert reports, 1.1 million wage workers labored in Europe’s coal mines and textile industries. The more significant number comes next: Three times as many enslaved or bonded workers were producing coffee, sugar, cotton, and indigo. So important are these statistics to Beckert’s story—or so lax the editing of his book—that he states them twice.
Even production in the factory, which Beckert insists was removed from—though linked to—slavery, does not comport with the story he claims to tell. The Haitian Revolution sent the sugar industry to Cuba, which imported nearly 800,000 African slaves between 1791 and 1867. Owners adopted numerous technological innovations, including vacuum evaporators, centrifuges, and steam engines, inside their sugar-processing plants. Though one observer notes that the “necessity” of “slaves in a mill” was “diminished to a considerable extent” by machines, slaves still worked in those mills.
According to Beckert, the entire sugar plantation was “planned like a factory,” with railroads (built in Cuba, 10 years before they came to Spain) transporting processed sugar from plantation to port, where ships were waiting to speed it off to Europe and elsewhere. One visitor compared the plantations to “those beautiful European manufacturing towns.” Beckert writes that plantations in other countries adopted the same “formula” of “matching cutting-edge technology with one of the oldest and most violent labor systems.” A combination of “enslaved workers and machines” produced the world’s most “vital commodities.”
Even if they employed wage labor after the abolition of slavery, capitalists and their allies in the increasingly imperialist states of Europe, North America, and Asia resorted to extraordinary coercion and unimaginable violence, as well as heavy servings of racism, to force workers into their factories of the field and to stay there. The French deployed a combination of coercion, violence, wages, and racism in Senegal and Madagascar. The Portuguese did it in Mozambique, the British in South Asia and Southeast Asia, the Liberians in Liberia, the Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere, and the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria. The Belgians did it in Congo, causing the deaths of some five to 10 million Congolese laborers. So strained does the distinction between wage labor and forced labor grow in Beckert’s story that eventually it collapses. “Wage labor could be forced,” he writes, “and forced workers could be paid wages.”
Beckert’s distinction between “war capitalism,” which frames his first three centuries of capitalism, and the “industrial capitalism” of the two centuries that followed is equally blurry. Beckert claims that industrial capitalism was a “radical departure” from war capitalism. As a purely economic story, that claim holds up: Instead of merchant capital organizing agriculture or small manufacturing in the countryside, large family firms and corporations created new industries in steel, electricity, chemicals, transportation, and communication. Instead of producing commodities for manufacturing, enterprises produced machines for production. Instead of organizing production through the buying and selling of commodities, they brought entire lines of production, from soup to nuts, under the aegis of one company. As before, it is the global reach of these enterprises, the ways in which they leap across distance, compressing time and space, that grabs Beckert’s attention—and ours. These are some of the best passages in his book, where he is fully at home with the material and organizes it with fluency and command.
As a political story, however, Beckert’s claim that industrial capitalism was a radical departure from war capitalism gets fuzzy fast. Beckert says that war capitalism was “built on imperial expansion” and the “violent domination of labor.” It “rested to a great degree on extra-economic coercion, much of it exerted by the state.” While it created pockets of “contract, wage labor, private property, and the rule of law,” war capitalism was far too dependent upon the “vast dispossession of collective resources,” upon “huge territories in which property, both human and landed, was for the taking,” to allow those pockets to stretch beyond their seam. Yet Beckert’s industrial capitalism, as we’ve already seen, contains these very same elements: a coercive state, forced labor, and the violent conquest of land.
In his early pages on industrial capitalism, Beckert tries to rescue his claim of a dramatic break by writing that this new order dispensed with the politics of laissez-faire, with free markets and free trade. While that politics supposedly created what is often called the “nightwatchman state,” surely there must have been moments when that particular form of the state appeared in the light of day. Aside from the briefest mention in Chapter 10, however, it hardly makes a showing in Beckert’s text. Whether it was Britain in the 18th century, the European states of the Napoleonic Wars, or the United States in the 19th century, governments actively suppressed trade, Beckert asserts, whenever and wherever they needed to, to seed or support different movements of goods and people in other moments and regions.
The pacesetter of Beckert’s industrial capitalism is the United States. John C. Calhoun—no stranger to state coercion, forced labor, and the violent conquest of land—is its prophet. “Let us conquer space,” Calhoun declares in 1817, and that is what the American state does. Calhoun’s credo carries Beckert across the finish line of the long 19th century. With increasing investment in massive plants that could not be moved, American capitalists imagined a “continental industrialization” that would sweep across the plains and mountains of North America. Having conquered those regions with guns, telegraphs, and trains, they would take resources from the West and feed them to factories and workers in the East. Like the British under war capitalism, the Americans under industrial capitalism connected markets and raw materials across great distances—only instead of crossing seas, those markets crossed land, with no small amount of supportive violence from the state.
It was just a matter of time before the states of Europe and Asia would see what the Americans were doing and copy their model. Comparing the island of Ezo to California, the Japanese government brought in American advisers from the government of Ulysses S. Grant to create Japan’s first settler colony on what it would eventually call Hokkaido. A colonial commission surveyed the land, moved the indigenous Ainu people to reservations, seized the island’s fisheries, created property rights, built telegraph lines, and imported convict laborers, indentured workers, and settler farmers to work the land and the mines. The entire operation began feeding the industries, people, and, eventually, the imperial state and war machine of Japan.
In many parts of the globe, the forced labor of the countryside was replicated in the factories of the cities. Indeed, one of the recurrent themes of Beckert’s analysis of the factory is the extent to which it reproduced the mass scale and coercive surveillance of the slave plantation. Insisting on the total integration of their production lines, European industrialists demanded resources like coal, rubber, and iron, located far away from their factories, often in other countries and on other continents. They demanded an assembly-line movement of these resources into their factories, like the ships that brought enslaved workers to the plantations of Cuba and the trains that took the sugar back to the ships. Inevitably, those demands for more resources and their movement led to calls for territorial expansion. “Colonial policy is the daughter of industrial policy,” declared Jules Ferry, a prominent French politician. We are now on the verge, conceptually and chronologically, of the First World War.
When Beckert cites the claim of an Italian Fascist that the “problem of economic space” was born in the 20th century or discusses how a German engineer hoped to create a transcontinental railroad, like America’s, from Berlin to Cape Town, it’s hard not to think back to Calhoun’s declaration more than 100 years earlier. When Beckert writes that 43 percent of the workers in the Nazi empire were enslaved or forced, adding that this “stunning number” was “historically only outdone by the plantation colonies of the Caribbean,” or when he tells us that war “allowed for a return of slavery to the heartland of industrial capitalism,” not just in Europe but also in Asia, we know that we have been on the verge—conceptually if not always chronologically—of the Second World War for a long time.
Social democracy and decolonization are the two parentheses in Beckert’s narrative. Though he devotes considerable discussion to both topics, they are—at least in his story—just that: parentheses. The three decades following the Second World War are an exception. The neoliberal order of the 1970s, which Beckert claims we are still living with, opens in Pinochet’s Chile, moves to Reagan’s crushing of the air-traffic controllers’ strike and Thatcher’s crushing of the coal miners’ strike, makes a pit stop in authoritarian China, and winds up in the sex trade of children in Cambodia. The through line of two of war capitalism’s core elements—state coercion and forced labor—persists. The major innovation of the era we live in today is that, whereas the owners of capital in the past looked outward, hoping to conquer and connect islands of capital, they are now beating a retreat to their fortresses, if not in Aden then elsewhere. “Capitalism—the book—ends as it began: with islands,” Beckert says. “Some real, some metaphorical.”
As a historian, Beckert is blessed with gifts. Not only has he amassed an enormous archive of material, but he also mines it to maximal effect. He zooms in and out of the microscopic and the macroscopic with great ease. Every chapter opens with a set piece of such variousness and detail—the merchant city of Surat in western India, the island of Barbados in 1646, La Réunion after 1848, the linen industry in southwestern Poland, the Röchling family in Germany, a strike of Senegalese railway workers in 1919, the Fiat factory in Turin, the typewriter in postwar India—that it almost carries the reader past the analytical confusion he sows along the way. Like his merchants, Beckert is a wonderful maker of lists; each item pops off the page. Centuries of the past and places of the present, which among other scholars of capitalism can merge into a blur, remain as distinct as the different grades of school are to a student and as singular as a neighborhood block is to a walker in the city.
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As a writer, Beckert is less blessed. If the task of the historian is to describe continuity and change, structure and agency, surely the profession has supplied its practitioners with a stock of metaphors more ample than this: “The first springs fed into rivulets that over time became meandering and ever more powerful streams.” “Rivulets dried out; brooks met sandbanks and evaporated; and even the mightiest streams encountered mountain ranges that stopped their flow.” “The premodern state defined the riverbed, however improvised, in which trade flowed.” “The growing reservoir of global capital, with skillful, inventive, often ruthless capitalists ready to unleash and direct its floodwaters, presaged the fundamental conditions necessary to the emergence of capitalism.” “They built a layer of economic life fundamentally different from the ocean in which their reservoirs of capital found themselves.”
Given the scope and scale of Capitalism, not to mention the energy, work, and stamina required to write it, one might forgive such listlessness of style. Unfortunately, it reflects a more general laziness of thought. Beckert uses catch phrases, like “the great connecting,” as if they were concepts, and employs concepts as if they were catch phrases. “Enclosure,” in his book, can mean medieval landowners’ seizing pastures held in common in Europe—that is, denying ordinary people resources and experiences. But it can also mean public education and state pensions—that is, providing ordinary people with resources and experiences. “Commodity frontier,” which is occasionally swapped out for “plantation frontier” or “capital frontier,” is never defined. Though I think it refers to the work of capitalists seizing and clearing land, settled and unsettled, to force or pay workers to plant monocrops that would then be sold to distributors on the global market, it is sometimes an actor in its own right, as when “plantation frontiers compete with one another for labor.” Words and phrases introduced as stock descriptions—“islands of capital,” “archipelagos of capital,” “nodes,” “networks,” and “perfect storms”—morph into causes and agents, without Beckert giving the slightest sense that he’s given any of these formulations more than a moment’s thought. The greats of history and theory—Smith, Braudel, Marx, and Weber—are claimed as inspirations, without their presence materializing on the page, while the manifold contributions of lesser-known scholars and graduate students are buried in footnotes and acknowledgments.
If the flaws in Capitalism: A Global History were Beckert’s alone, there would be little point in writing about them. But they’re not. Some portion of the book’s confusion about capitalism, and its author’s refusal or inability to stand by its claims about capitalism, is symptomatic and shared. In 2014, Seth Rockman, one of Beckert’s colleagues in the new history of capitalism, announced that the field had “minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism.” That was a virtue, Rockman claimed, not a vice. If they “let capitalism float as a placeholder,” scholars would be freed to do “the empirical work of discovery” and find “ground-level evidence of a system in operation.” Twelve years—and 1,325 pages—later, free time is over, and judging by the results in hand, scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began. What went wrong?
At the dawn of the Cold War, the British historian R.H. Tawney published an instructive review of the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism. Like many schooled in the first generations of Marxism, Dobb narrowly defined capitalism as a system of production in which waged workers produced surplus value for the owners of the means of production. While Tawney acknowledged and appreciated the gains in analytical precision and subtlety offered by Dobb’s approach, he also worried about the losses to history it threatened. Too many features of commercial and financial capitalism disappeared from Dobb’s account, as did the infinitesimal gradations between waged and coerced labor, simply because “these varieties” did not “fall within the four corners of a nineteenth-century definition” of capitalism. “To hit the mean between too wide and too narrow an interpretation is always difficult,” Tawney allowed, but “has not the restricted sense which [Dobb] favours, however natural two generations ago, ceased to be the usage most convenient for the purposes of history?”
Despite their disagreements, Tawney, a Christian socialist who taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and Dobb, a member of the Communist Party who taught at Cambridge, fell roughly on the same side of the divide between politics and scholarship. Both men began thinking about capitalism at a moment when the possibility of its elimination was still live. More than anything, it was the struggle between capitalism and socialism that defined capitalism for each of them as a system limited in time and space. If Tawney pushed for a definition “too wide” and Dobb for one “too narrow,” it was because both men could assume they were describing a system of limited extent.
If Dobb was the counterpart to Tawney in 1950, Beckert’s counterpart in 2025 is the Serbian left economist Branko Milanović, whose gloomy premonitions frame Beckert’s conclusion and elucidate his context: “The domination of capitalism…seems absolute”; the “entire globe now operates according to the same economic principles.” More than Beckert’s limitations as a writer and thinker, it is this sense of capitalism’s dominion, total and complete, that explains the fuzziness of his thinking and the blurriness of his writing. When capitalism is no longer the polemical term that understands the system as having a beginning and an end, it ceases to serve as a term of historical consciousness. It becomes the medium of exposition only, the setting of any and every story, about as historically situated as “Once upon a time…”
Where Tawney and Dobb could argue over England because they thought that capitalism’s origin might be limited to one place, Beckert writes, without a hint of irony or unease, that “I focus on the whole globe because it is the space where capitalism emerged and developed.” Where Tawney and Dobb, like many of their generation, could argue about the transition to capitalism in the late medieval and early modern eras, on the assumption that capitalism’s origin might be limited in time, Beckert writes, again without a hint of irony or unease, that “the ‘transition to capitalism’ happened not in one moment but every day, ongoingly.” It is this final collapse of time and space that makes not only politics but history itself such a difficult task at this moment.
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