Capitalism is the backbone of 21st-century life, according to Sven Beckert. It determines how most of the world works, eats, and sleeps. It shapes how people pursue love, marriage, and family.

“It has such an important presence,” says Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History, “that we need to understand capitalism better in order to understand ourselves better.”

“Capitalism: A Global History” is Beckert’s doorstop of a new release, tracing in its 1,344 pages how this evolving economic system came to rule the modern experience.

Beckert, whose research seminars more than a decade ago helped instigate the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, starts with the 12th-century traders who opened new avenues for accumulating wealth and power. From there the book revisits the first long-distance trade networks, the cruelties of capitalism under colonialism and slavery, the dawn of the Machine Age, and the East Asian factories that furnish much of today’s international marketplace.

“A lot of people have written about capitalism,” said Beckert, who cites classic works by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber as inspiration. “But this book represents the first sustained effort to think about capitalism from a global perspective throughout its entire history.”

In an interview with the Gazette, edited for length and clarity, Beckert discussed some of what he’s learned about historic centers of innovation and cycles of inequality.