Sven Beckett Although he has just written a provocative and ambitious 1,300-page book on the history of capitalism, he is not here to judge it. As he wrote several times in the book (which this editor has read), he wasn’t even sure what it was. He’s trying to understand it.
Harvard professor, zoom in to chat with him wealth He explains from his home office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that his new book, Capitalism: A Global Historyis the product of an eight-year quest to understand how we actually live economically. “Typically, when I teach the history of capitalism at Harvard, many of my students think capitalism is a state of nature.” But when you look at the historical record, he adds, that’s not the case.
When asked to explain the achievement of his book, he said it was two-pronged: providing a more global perspective on the history of capitalism and “denaturalizing” the history of capitalism. In Beckett’s terms, capitalism is neither eternal nor natural. It is a human invention that spread and developed over the centuries through deliberate choices, sometimes extraordinary violence, and mind-boggling institutional innovation. Capitalism emerged from the fringes of medieval trade to dominate modern life, so it too may one day decline or transform again.
These may be considered bold claims by some who believe that the primacy of capitalism is inevitable, but the book has been generally well received. Although some critics criticized it for being a bit of a “doorstop”, like Beckett’s previous book, Pulitzer finalist, Award-winning cotton empireThis global history was universally praised for its ambition and narrative audacity.
exist boston globewrites Hamilton Kane, Beckett weaves a vast tapestry It “unfolds with the suspense and intricacies of a detective story,” and the rise of capitalism reads a bit like a crime story or even a detective story. Adrian Woolridge Bloomberg View Critics of it do much the same thing, saying that the book “ignores the secret sauce of innovation” and focuses more on its history of exploitation than on how it creates new value. Beckett insists that his book is primarily about questions of “how” rather than “why.” He attempts to chart “how we go from a world where this logic exists, but it’s peripheral, to a world in 2025 where it structures almost all of our economic life—almost all of our lives.”
From marginality to dominance
beckett told wealth His research shows that traces of capitalist logic can be seen in historical records as far back as 1,000 years ago, but it “remained marginal to economic life” for hundreds of years. In his book, he talks a lot about “islands” and “nodes” because capitalists are initially outsiders, seen almost as monstrous by those who live without constantly accumulating more money to invest. Then, when the tide began to turn and capitalism was ascendant, over the last 500 years the islands and nodes shifted to the resisters of the capitalist way of life, just like the farmers of the 20th century.
“The first thing I always say is that capitalism is not the same thing as markets,” Beckett said. He pointed out that there has been “economic life” in human history, but there has not been the continuous accumulation and reinvestment of capital practiced by a small group of businessmen on the margins of society. Capitalism, Beckett insists, “already exists in many different parts of the world, but its spread is also quite thin and weak… This capitalist logic, so central to today’s economic life, is relatively new.”
Beckett points out in the book that until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, about 30% of the world’s people lived in a non-capitalist system, and that many rural areas in the West were able to avoid capitalist lifestyles by, for example, subsistence farmers growing food. (Tom Lee of Fundstrat The advent of artificial intelligence has recently been compared to frozen food in the 1920s, which changed the composition of the economy from 40% subsistence farmers to just 2%. )
The professor highlighted ancient capitalist business communities in unexpected places, such as the port of Aden in Yemen or Cambay in the modern Indian state of Gujarat. He found that goods were being traded across the sea from Aden as early as 1150, that Song Dynasty China invented paper money centuries before Europe, and that the textile industry was flourishing in the heart of ancient India long before the Industrial Revolution. But these capitalists had been surrounded for centuries by subsistence farmers and tributary empires that operated on entirely different principles. “Broadly speaking, I did feel the extremely global nature of the early business community,” Beckett said, but it had never been integrated in this way before.
“They were always connected to a country, but they were also very freewheeling and somewhat detached from that country,” Beckett said of early merchants. Things changed dramatically in the 19th century. Beckett highlights disturbing cases Hermann RöschlingSeeing an opportunity in capitalism, the German steel industrialist aligned himself closely with successive German governments and found himself “on trial for war crimes, not just in one war, but in two wars, World War I and World War II, which must be a world-historical record.”
How Capitalism Moves to the Center
To illustrate how unnatural the logic of capitalism was once thought to be, Beckett’s book focuses on the curious case of Robert Keayne, a Puritan merchant in Boston in 1639. Nearly 400 years ago, Kane was brought before courts and church elders, but not for stealing. Rather, it’s because of the “very evil” practice of selling merchandise for profits that exceed community standards. He was nearly excommunicated for behaving in a way that is now considered an essential function of business. Beckett argued that it would take centuries for the “greedy” accumulation of wealth to be repurposed as a public good, or in other words, for capitalism to be seen as normal.
For his part, Beckett insists that he is not trying to judge capitalism, even though there are some harsh judgments in his book. “Of course, being able to write this book was itself a result of the capitalist revolution,” he told me. wealthIt is argued that at this juncture in the 21st century, the logic of capitalism has brought about huge productivity gains, unprecedented economic growth, and made many people richer. He admitted that without it he would not have been able to fly to Barbados or Cambodia to conduct research.
Beckett literally traveled around the world for eight years, unearthing what he believed to be the secret history of the origins of capitalism. From the dusty suburbs of Phnom Penh, to the archives of the Indian company Godrej, to the remains of a sugar plantation in Barbados (where he spent 10 days), Beckett was surprised again and again by what he discovered.
For example, when the American colonies appear in more than a third of his narrative, Beckett notes that the West Indies were far more central to global capitalism than the 13 territories that would become the United States. He noted that the city of Boston might perish if it did not figure out how to become a service center for Barbados, whose sugar plantations generate huge amounts of revenue. “It’s an amazing story, too,” Beckett agreed. “To us, Barbados was a foreign country and far away, but to them (Bostonians in the early 1700s) it was also part of the British Empire. And then it…was kind of like a suburb of Boston and vice versa. They were very much integrated into each other.”
Beckett said he was surprised by what his research uncovered about the darkness of capitalism’s past. “I did know a lot about the history of slavery, but coming to this island and then reading the historical records and reading about the horrific events that happened on this island in the 1600s, it wasn’t surprising, but the level of violence that I found in that history was really quite shocking.”
Will capitalism end?
beckett told wealth He believes the world is currently in a “transitional moment,” similar to the shift that occurred when the Keynesian order gave way to neoliberalism in the 1970s. One of the book’s biggest surprises lies in its conclusion, when he suggests that one day, capitalism may end. The fact that it depends on ever-expanding accumulation of capital means that, no matter what, capital will be exhausted. “In the distant future, historians looking back on our time will find it difficult to understand our way of thinking, our way of being,” he wrote.
Ultimately, Beckett said he saw the book not as a morality tale with capitalism as the villain, but rather as an investigation of human agency. By revealing that capitalism was once fragile, marginal, and weak—that it required centuries of concrete political choices, violence, and institution-building to take hold—he hopes to show that the future remains unwritten. “It’s not like a machine that unfolds itself,” Beckett said. “This is an order created by humans.”
In the mid-2020s, the global economy is facing new shocks. Beckett’s history reminds us: The economy is not a force of nature. It is created by people and can be re-created by people. “The future is open,” he told wealth. “People create words that are different from the words they were born with, and sometimes the least powerful words have had a huge impact on the trajectory of capitalism. So, I think that’s important to see in the current moment.”