Capitalism

A landmark event eight years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human historySven Beckert, founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism, has made a profound impact on his field, including his Bancroft-Prize-winning history, Empire of Cotton. That was merely base camp for the epic achievement of his new book. Capitalism, Beckert argues, was born global. Emerging from interconnected nodes in Asia, Africa, and Europe and at first dominated by Arab traders, capitalism rooted itself gradually, persisting for centuries as a vital but limited circulatory system that left most of the world’s economic life untouched.But then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that propelled them across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and its epicenter was the Caribbean. Europeans violently transformed tropical islands into slave labor camps, built with unparalleled efficiency and brutality to produce the world’s most valuable commodities. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the lift-off for the even more radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Empowered by vast productivity increases, capitalism pulled down old ways of life  and expanded its orbit ever further. Gorging on coal and then oil, it erased earlier traditions and crowned itself the defining force of the modern w
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