A New York Times Notable Book • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year " A learned
formidable and vivid story… Readers around the world will study and ponder this monumental work
of history agreeing and arguing with it all the while affirming its generational importance
for decades to come." — Marcus Rediker The New York Times “Epic… Read this book and you will
learn innumerable things you did not previously know culled from places you have never been…
[Readers] including me will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship
and be glad to have a valuable tool of reference on their shelves.” –John Kay Financial Times
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.
