Capitalism: A Global History

by Sven Beckert

Overview

A landmark event years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human history

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.

Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach. 

By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind. Though cloaked in a false timelessness and universality, capitalism is, in reality, a recent human invention. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780735220843
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/25/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1344

About the Author

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. Holding a PhD from Columbia 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. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Preface xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Islands of Capital 29
Chapter 2. Capitalists Without Capitalism 73

Part I
BUILDING CAPITALISM
Chapter 3. The Great Connecting, 1450–1650 107
Chapter 4. Transforming the Countryside, 1550–1750 177
Chapter 5. Intensifying Industry, 1600–1750 245
Chapter 6. The Perfect Storm 283

Part II
THE GREAT LEAP
Chapter 7. The Rise of Industrial Capitalism, 1760–1850 327
Chapter 8. Capturing the Hinterland, 1780–1860 377
Chapter 9. A Capitalist Civilization, 1830–1880 445
Chapter 10. Rebellions: The Crisis of Old-Regime Capitalism, 1830–1870 509

Part III
GLOBAL RECONSTRUCTIONS
Chapter 11. Reconstructing Capital, 1870–1914 565
Chapter 12. Reconstructing Labor, 1870–1920 609
Chapter 13. Enclosures 681
Chapter 14. A Time of Monsters: Industrial Capitalism, 1918–1945 737
Chapter 15. Insurgents 815
Chapter 16. Taming Industrial Capitalism, 1945–1973 879

Part IV
THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM?
Chapter 17. Riding the Tiger: A Neoliberal Age, 1973–2008 963
Epilogue: The Possibilities of an Island and the Future of Capitalism 1047

Acknowledgments 1089
Notes 1099
Illustration Credits 1255
Index 1267

Editorial Reviews

A clarity that Karl Marx could only long for . . . Beckert’s agile account marches through the emergence of mercantilism and the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and proceeds through plantation and wage slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism, and a managerial/bureaucratic golden age . . . A comprehensive and up-to-date history, essential.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Sven Beckert is one of the world’s preeminent scholars on the history of capitalism, and in this monumentally important single-volume global history, simply titled Capitalism, he upends the deeply embedded notion that capitalism was born as a purely Western phenomenon. Instead, he powerfully demonstrates how its ascendancy over the last six centuries depended both on the genius and vibrancy of interconnected communities and on brutally exploitative systems, including slavery. Drawing on astonishing research across multiple continents, Beckert’s new book is a landmark achievement that reorients our understanding of capitalism as an evolving, ever-contested human creation. It is certain to become a canonical work of history.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“It’s hard to think of any other contemporary historian who could have written a new history of capitalism of such global scope and impressive scale. Capitalism promises to be an instant classic that will last.” —Isabella Weber, author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy

“Sven Beckert has written what will surely become a key reference on the global history of modern capitalism. A monumental book, a must-read.” —Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“In this magnificent history of capitalism, Sven Beckert presents an exceptionally illuminating account of the thousand years of what he calls (correctly, I think) ‘the most impactful revolution the world has ever seen.’ Beginning with the rapid expansion of trade and capital around the port of Aden in the twelfth century, the gripping history comes all the way to our time, telling us about commerce, technology and innovations, but also about people’s lives, worries and questions. One of the striking features of this splendid book is the avoidance of Eurocentrism in telling the story of capitalism. The global history, in this case, is truly global.” —Amartya Sen, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

From the Publisher

★ 2025-07-17
A sprawling history of an ever-protean economic system.

Harvard historian Beckert asks and answers a chicken-and-egg question: whether capitalists preceded capitalism, or the other way around. The answer is that there were capitalists long before there was a coordinated economic system that encompassed them, one that today kneels at the altar of “a human-created god called ‘the economy.’” Beckert’s vast book addresses this precapitalist state with a clarity that Karl Marx could only long for, ranging from ancient trading routes between Asia and Europe to a Puritan who confessed that by chasing profit (“That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can”) he was committing a grave sin. Capitalism, Beckert holds, is a “quintessentially global economic order,” dependent on external markets, resources, and labor; it is thus no surprise that modern capitalism began to take shape during the European age of exploration, with its “mutually reinforcing connections between islands of capital and the often violent transfer of resources (including human beings) from many corners of the world.” Beckert’s agile account marches through the emergence of mercantilism and the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and proceeds through plantation and wage slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism, and a managerial/bureaucratic golden age. Always evolving—and, while dependent on the state, largely indifferent to what kind of state that is, authoritarian or democratic—capitalism is now defined by the extreme inequality it produces, as well as the appalling cost to the environment in the quest for the wealth of a few. But, Beckert closes, some other capitalism is likely to arise that may well alleviate the injustice of this inequality, “confirming that it will remain undogmatic and generate ever new combinations of capital, labor, technology, state power, territorial order, and forms of political rule.”

A comprehensive and up-to-date history, essential for students of world systems.

Kirkus Reviews