{"id":309393,"date":"2025-12-08T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=309393"},"modified":"2025-12-07T19:16:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T19:16:52","slug":"sven-beckerts-chronicle-of-capitalisms-long-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/12\/sven-beckerts-chronicle-of-capitalisms-long-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"Sven Beckert\u2019s Chronicle of Capitalism\u2019s Long Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the archipelago of capital metastasized as island after island \u2014 both in the literal and metaphorical sense \u2014 was added to the mercantile universe: Santo Domingo in 1516; Macau in 1557, Batavia in 1619, Manhattan in 1624, Barbados in 1627. (Heritage Images via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

Review of <\/strong><\/em>Capitalism: A Global History<\/strong> by Sven Beckert (Penguin Press, 2025)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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4 Dec 2025 – Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world, as historian Sven Beckert does in his massive new book, <\/em>Capitalism: A Global History.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sven Beckert\u2019s doorstop of a book<\/a> is supremely ambitious, an insightful and well-illustrated history by the Harvard historian who has been a pioneer in the creation of new narratives exploring how an ever-changing capitalism has been a socially and culturally rooted phenomenon. At well over a thousand pages, Beckert\u2019s volume offers a synthesis and occasional recasting of almost everything we have learned about the history of capitalism, and not just in the closely studied societies bordering the North Atlantic. It is a global history, holds Beckert, because capitalism \u201cwas always a world economy.\u201d Writing within the world-systems schema associated with Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, he probes for the connections, parallelisms, and transformations taking place within an economic and social history stretching back almost a thousand years.Historian Marc Bloch once wrote that carefully observing the world was just as important in understanding history as time spent in the archives. Beckert agrees. His book is a result not just of an immense amount of bookish research but of visits to factories, plantations, warehouses, railroads, docks, mansions, mosques, churches, and merchant homes stretching from Phnom Penh to Senegal, from Samarkand to Amsterdam, and from Turin to Barbados. I can attest to the importance of such travel: twenty years ago when I visited China\u2019s Pearl River Delta, then becoming the workshop of the world, I not only gained crucial insights into how Walmart sourced its supply chain but also came to a more intuitive understanding of what a booming and fissiparous Detroit must have seemed like nearly a century before.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no French capitalism or American capitalism,\u201d writes Beckert, \u201cbut only capitalism in France or America.\u201d And there is also capitalism in Arabia, India, China, Africa, and even among the Aztecs. In his narrative of merchants and traders in the first half of the second millennium, Beckert puts Europe on the margins, offering instead a rich and, except for specialists, unknown account of how the institutions vital to commerce and markets, including credit, accounting, limited partnerships, insurance, and banking flourished, in Aden, Cambay, Mombasa, Guangzhou, Cairo, and Samarkand. These are all \u201cislands of capital,\u201d a recurrent metaphor in Beckert\u2019s book. For example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aden was host to a dense network of merchants who played a pivotal role in the trade between the Arabian world and India. It was a fortified, cosmopolitan city of Jews, Hindu, Muslims, and even a few Christians.<\/p>\n

They were the world\u2019s first capitalists, writes Beckert, who invested money, made profits, and did not travel with their goods, but stayed put and traded at a distance. A typical dhow carried goods that could fit into two modern-day containers, with the round trip from Cairo to India via Aden taking two years. Yet despite differences in scale and speed, Beckert holds that Aden\u2019s merchants inhabited \u201ca strikingly modern world.\u201d Unlike the landed elites of Europe and beyond, they did not achieve wealth through plunder, taxes, or tribute but instead used the market to buy cheap and sell dear. This was true even within the oriental despotisms that Karl Marx thought so hierarchical and claustrophobic.<\/p>\n

Beckert finds plenty of political competition and merchant activism within India\u2019s Mughal Empire. There the sultan and his advisers constituted only a loose layer of authority above the power of local authorities. Beneath the ruling glitter, all the states usually thought of as examples of \u201cOriental despotism\u201d survived by constantly negotiating with various strata of the populace, merchants above all, for the funds and material necessary to wage chronic warfare.<\/p>\n

The merchants are the revolutionaries of Beckert\u2019s history, certainly during the first several centuries. They were \u201ccapitalists without capitalism,\u201d meaning that their profit-making activities were confined to scattered cities. Although connected by trading pathways and sea routes, these islands were largely isolated at the edge of a vast hinterland, \u201cmercantile avant-gardes dispersed around the world.\u201d They were \u201cdroplets in a sea of economic life whose main currents flowed by fundamentally different logics.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Karl Polanyi, Beckert makes clear that the vast majority of the world\u2019s population existed in the countryside where, as Marc Bloch put it, economic life was \u201csubmerged [in] social relationships.\u201d That made the merchants a distinct caste, so that \u201cdespite immense distances and distinct cultures, Cantonese, Gujarati, Adeni, Genoese, Swahili, and Bukharan merchants would have been broadly recognizable to one another.\u201d Perhaps, but in his account of these early centuries, Beckert is searching diligently for similar patterns among these traders and not dwelling on the obvious religious and social divergencies. He is advancing a thesis in which these \u201cislands of capital\u201d will one day burst forth into the larger society and utterly transform all those ancient and customary bonds that continued in force even after the demise of feudalism.<\/p>\n

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