'A magnum opus an accessible and genuinely global history ... This is a book for today and
tomorrow' Financial TimesCapitalist enterprise has existed in some form since ancient times
but the globalization and dominance of capitalism as a system began in the 1860s when in
different forms and supported by different political forces states all over the world
developed their modern political frameworks: the unifications of Italy and Germany the
establishment of a republic in France the elimination of slavery in the American south the
Meiji Restoration in Japan the emancipation of the serfs in Tsarist Russia. This book
magnificently explores how after the upheavals of industrialisation a truly global capitalism
followed. For the first time in the history of humanity there was a social system able to
provide a high level of consumption for the majority of those who lived within its bounds.
Today capitalism dominates the world.With wide-ranging scholarship Donald Sassoon analyses
the impact of capitalism on the histories of many different states and how it creates winners
and losers by constantly innovating. This chronic instability he writes 'is the foundation of
its advance not a fault in the system or an incidental by-product'. And it is this instability
this constant churn which produces the anxious triumph of his title. To control or alleviate
such anxieties it was necessary to create a national community if necessary with colonial
adventures to develop a welfare state to intervene in the market economy and to protect it
from foreign competition. Capitalists needed a state to discipline them to nurture them and
to sacrifice a few to save the rest: a state overseeing the war of all against all.Vigorous
argumentative surprising and constantly stimulating The Anxious Triumph gives a fresh
perspective on all these questions and on its era. It is a masterpiece by one of Britain's most
engaging and wide-ranging historians.
