Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story. In “Capitalism,” the Harvard historian Sven Beckert delivers on that promise with an epic 1,300-page account of the global leviathan that created the world in which we live.
During the Cold War, capitalism was the global force that dared not speak its name. It seemed the “natural” state of affairs, as mainstream American historians scribbled endlessly about “the economy” without specifying what kind of economy it was. Worse, they disparaged and marginalized those who used the concept “capitalism.” To this day, most of Beckert’s fellow historians rarely link their local, regional or even national histories to the larger system of which they are a part. Beckert has now proved once and for all the necessity of naming the global beast in order to reveal its vast power, past and present.
Never before has so much qualitative and quantitative evidence been brought to bear on so broad a reinterpretation of this story. Previous histories have usually treated capitalism as a European invention, but Beckert, as ambitious as he is erudite, shows how capitalism arose as a global phenomenon, the peculiar behavior of a few merchants in places as far apart as Cairo and Changzhou.
By mapping the diverse origins of capitalism, Beckert reveals its protean and resilient character. Over hundreds of years, merchants created small enclaves of capital within port cities and elaborate networks of trust that stretched over long distances. Such connections, Beckert observes, helped them outflank and survive resistance from above, by landed aristocrats who thought “making money from money seemed closer to sin, sorcery or plain theft,” and from below, by “cultivators and craftspeople” who were loath to give up their local conceptions of prices set by “a shared sense of morality.”
In the 17th century, the sugar-producing island of Barbados became one of the first capitalist societies, and silver-producing Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) became one of the first capitalist cities. As many as a quarter of the people who descended into Potosí’s mines died in them, Beckert writes, but “wealthy Potosíans could buy Ceylonese diamonds, Neapolitan stockings, Venetian crystal and Chinese porcelain.”
In these remote corners of the world European investors conducted a kind of civil experiment, extending the logic of the market to all aspects of life. Everything, especially human labor, was commodified and could be bought and sold for money.
Many histories of capitalism are abstract, structural and narrowly economic, but Beckert enriches his story by recreating for the reader the places where his subjects made their fortunes — the medieval merchant hubs of Central Asia, the sugar plantations of the Indian Ocean and the “production floors of 20th-century industrial behemoths” that pumped out cars in Detroit. He travels to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he interviews a textile worker at the factory gate and then weaves her experiences into his epilogue.
Beckert also humanizes his history by anchoring it in the lives of specific capitalists like the Godrej family in British India. Committed nationalists, the Godrejs began manufacturing everyday goods like locks and safes at the turn of the 20th century and helped to finance the Indian independence movement. They turned a big profit on the decline of the British Empire in the late 1940s, when their early support for the future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru helped them win a contract to make typewriters for the post-colonial bureaucracy.
Beckert’s book arrives on a crowded and bloody battlefield, where intellectual, cultural and geopolitical war has been waged for more than two centuries about what capitalism is and what the story of its rise might tell us. He offers an especially devastating critique of earlier mythologies of capitalism, showing how the “invisible hand” of the market does not peacefully guide world affairs, and how the development of capitalism was in no sense “natural.”
Like many books before it, “Capitalism” is not only a history but a moral indictment. The metaphor of monstrosity runs throughout Beckert’s pages. In his telling, the hand of capital is visible, cold, hard and vicious, and capitalism is a promiscuous creature, drawing on different kinds of labor, from enslaved to free and many in between, within various political frameworks, from democracy to dictatorship.
