Books & Audiobooks
Henry Louis Gates Jr. hailed Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History as “certain to become a canonical work of history” and I can think of no better way than that to introduce my sentiments: this book is canonical. Beckert gets right down to the brass tacks of the book quickly, articulating a clear set of questions that he answers through 1000+ pages afterwards: “How did the capitalist revolution begin? How did a form of economic life that was such a breakaway from previous history spread around the world and into more spheres of life? How did we move from a society in which markets were embedded in social relations to one in which social relations are embedded in markets? By what mechanism has capitalism evolved and changed over time? And where are we in its history today?” If those aren’t your questions, this probably isn’t the book for you. Thankfully, they apply to several disciplines and inquiries.
It is impossible to tell the story of capitalism without Europe. Not because of a superiority of application or conception but based on the sheer volume of violent dispossession and enslavement used to create a hierarchy upon which Europe claimed the top spot for itself. Beckert says the quiet part rather loud: Europe was capitalism’s market-focused engine whose motto became marketization or bust. Unfortunately, we are living in the “busted” remains. Industries in British, Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonies are the economies affected by the remains, where they did not have the same opportunity as Europe, to develop industries on their own terms. Beckert writes about their present commodities as a reflection of past development that refused anything other than what served European interests and barons thereof. Would textiles, coal, diamonds, coffee, sugar, rum, gas, and other cornerstone industries be a GDP priority or dominate a country’s trade if “Western”/Global North countries did not foist them upon colonized subjects? The West owes everything it has to uneven development under capitalism through enslavement, largely of Black and Brown people, as well as often historically erased East Asian people, and subsequent plantation logics intermingled with Fordist and Taylorist productivity and efficiency narratives that still dominate today in management and leadership literatures.
I learned, for example, that the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana (CAPL) mortgaged enslaved people to securitize them and that “in 1828, the British merchant bank Baring Brothers bought $1.67 million of CAPL bonds to resell on European securities markets” (p.391). In other words, despite countries outlawing slavery, the generational wealth of aristocratic families across colonizing countries was consolidated through mortgaging enslaved people in the United States on global stock markets. He mic-drop clarifies in this sense and shuts down the hollow arguments some might make that Irish people were also enslaved. Yes, they were, and many others were throughout history, but that is not an argument anyone can use to invalidate the historically distinct, formal, organized, and generational brutality of the Atlantic Slave Trade specifically. Irish people and others were not mortgaged and securitized in their enslavement for global profit, beyond what they produced on English plantations. Beckert reviews far more history than this and with greater detail than I could summarize here. I just could not ignore the centrality of slavery to modern capitalism and the wealth that allows one to participate in politics which shapes policies and social relations for even more generations. It will be impossible to read this book and misunderstand what someone means when they say that the world as we know it was built by enslaved people in the United States.
Beckert reminds readers that labour is a requisite of capitalism; Without it, resource accumulation for production and profit is impossible. The mechanism of enslavement and enclosure as part of this, Capitalism outlines, is not so much a feature of capitalism as central to it. The book helped me think more critically about the ways that capitalism’s aggregation engine roars in the present as it accumulates the ethers, turning humans into a raw material to be extracted. Such a dynamic also helps to explain the purpose behind the rush towards generative artificial intelligence, wherein the standard of living has risen such that low-wage work is increasingly unfeasible for everyone. Generative AI would take the place of an enslaved worker, or an enclosed and coerced one through policies and economics. It supplants the need for equitable working conditions. True, it is still created by and uses resources extracted by humans. However, seeing it as a potential infill mechanism of capitalism for the 1% inferred by the patterns and histories Beckert illuminates was insightful. I better understood the need to platform/app-ify the world for future markets that, alongside AI could sell us back to ourselves with the data gleaned from those apps and platforms in various products: meaning and life purpose, transcendent spiritual experience, and consciousness enhancements through neurobiological feedback. All largely intangible items that seem resource neutral even though they are the furthest thing from it. The furnace of the present (as a friend once remarked of a stressful kind of hellfire day: “why is it so hot, and what’s with this hand basket?”) seems just another form of the deconstruction and reconstruction of human labour under a capitalist economic system on a fragile planet.
Where corporations are deemed people in the eyes of the law, humans are the resources and no longer qualify as even the labour to extract a resource. We are a resource now deemed a thing, rather than just another means of production. It’s at this point that the book became more personally applicable. I suppose that some people just read self-help books, but for nerds or other outliers, Sven Beckert lends a crystalline basis for the development of a sense of self that prioritizes humanity-honoring values buttressing the philosophical “good life” even while immersed in the muck and mire of capitalism. What a reader can do when they see that capitalism was made by humans and that every day, we get to decide what we do about it, with it, and for it, is the stuff that keeps a soul encouraged and capable of kindnesses and everyday dignities. It reminds us that we are more than what we produce, materials, services, data, or otherwise.
In the introduction (which, if you only read one chapter of this book, I would recommend it be that one) Beckert writes that “We are not just subjects of capitalism; we are its architects”. It is the enduring gift of this book for readers. His book is a necessary reminder that capitalism is a concept different from that of an economy. By writing such a richly detailed history he shows readers that as the rivers of time ebb, crest, and flow, capitalism is neither the river or the boat. In other words, he breathes a little more life into the imaginary of alternatives with this incredible work. Beckert writes a quiet hope into the numbing effect of modernity. Disentanglement from the “God trick” of the history of capitalism is, I think, one of the best reasons to read this book. Despite what devout capitalists tell you as they place their faith in the altars of production and accumulation, in the beginning there was not capitalism; And there was light before capitalism and its beneficiaries declared it be on.
Reading Sven Beckert’s book will be a significant investment of time. For those seeking a comprehensive and truly global history of capitalism, however, it is worth every minute of your attention. It will be a definitive volume on its titular subject for at least a decade and perhaps an era, eclipsing the efforts of his genre forebears. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, advocating a market society driven by an invisible hand. Capitalism audits how humanity has fared in its implementation, to give readers grist for the critical thinking mill that asks whether there is no better alternative than our current economic (and supporting political) system. Reviews can only be as good as the books they feature, and luckily for me, Capitalism is a delight. It is a good thing I enjoy endurance sports because reading this book was the ultramarathon of book geekery.