How do we understand Global Capitalism and the World We Live In?
How do we understand Global Capitalism and the World We Live In?
Sven Beckert, Capitalism: a global history, Allen Lane £50.
Review by Dave McCrone
These days, we are used to seeing hot-air books which seek to account for large things, and actually explain nothing much. Here is a book to be taken seriously, not simply because of its subject matter – the history of capitalism – but the depth, scope and intelligence of an author who has written one of the best books on a tricky subject.
True, lots of people have tried writing the history of capitalism, including, bizarrely, David Dimbleby which makes one wonder at his temerity at doing so. Then there is all that parti-pris stuff such as written by Niall Ferguson on the right, and the late Tony Judt on the left. Beckert, who is a German-born historian working at Harvard, is cool in tone, and detached and impersonal in argument.
One can discern through his scholarship that he is European by origin, and, by inference, sozialdemokratisch in his view of the world, but that doesn’t intrude into the story he tells. His book is neither celebratory nor condemnatory, spelling out the logic of capitalism in its pursuit of capital accumulation and the search for profit. The point is not to make capital in order to spend it, but to accumulate it, almost as an end in itself, continuously nosing out new opportunities for so doing.
Telling the Story of Capitalism and Role of Empire and Slavery
Bekert tells the story of the relentless momentum of capitalism, starting with ‘the world’s earliest capitalists’, in Aden in the Yemen in 1150. His book is structured around four themes: building capitalism from 1450 to 1750; its ‘great leap’ from 1760 to 1870; global reconstructions from 1870 to 1973; and his thoughts on the future of capitalism post-1973 to the present and beyond.
His pellucid writing style undoubtedly helps, and the book is built upon a volume of research, amounting to 150 pages of notes (in a very small font!). As is usual among senior academics in the US, there is an army of student researchers beavering away like peons to provide the raw materials. Commendably, Beckert has a liking for seeing where it all happened (past tense, because he is, after all, a historian), so he spent a week looking at former sugar plantations in Barbados, and got a walking tour of Glasgow from Stephen Mullen, historian and impressive researcher on slavery.
Sugar, and slavery, is the point, for these bankrolled capital accumulation to find their way into later processes of industrialisation. Beckert is co-director of a larger project at Harvard, the Program on the Study of Capitalism, which treats capitalism as a global phenomenon from the outset such that slavery was not an unfortunate historical side-effect but central to its accumulation process. A previous book, Empire of Cotton (2014), showed how cotton was not simply an American phenomenon but a global process, driven by slavery as a key mode of production.
What would Marx have said?
These days you can buy a best-selling T-shirt online with a likeness of Karl Marx on the front, with the words: ‘See? I told you this would happen’. So what would Marx have made of Beckert’s book? Remember that Marx made his living as a journalist, when he was not being bailed out by Engels.
I think Marx would have approved of Beckert’s account, providing as it does such rich material, while he would have been critical of the fact that as a theory of capitalism it is more than a bit thin. It’s fair to say that Karl Marx and Adam Smith provide the implicit bulwarks of Beckert’s account of capitalism, with his fellow German, Max Weber, getting a walk-on part for pointing out the importance of the ‘Protestant ethic’ in the emergence of the spirit of capitalism.
Beckert’s account is not Marxist, but rather marxisant in that it focuses on the process of capital accumulation which drives economy, polity, culture and society. Capitalism, after all, is a form of economic life in which owners of capital organise the production of commodities not because they need or want them, but because they desire to produce more capital as an end in itself; hence, the process of relentless accumulation. Beckert is critical of Adam Smith for focusing unduly on ‘markets’, when the point of capitalism is to squeeze out markets as they seek oligopoly, or better still, monopoly, and in any case, non-market forces (like the state) are integral to capitalism. Marx would surely agree, as he would with Joseph Schumpeter’s view in the 1940s that ‘creative destruction’ is built into the process of capital accumulation.
Beckert has an interesting idea about ‘islands’ of capitalism, that its origins lie in bits of the world surrounded by other modes of production; hence, Aden in the Yemen in the 12th century. Gradually, capitalism incorporates the surrounding ‘sea-scapes’ so that no place or people are immune to its charms. It is, though, Beckert’s point that the roots of capitalism lie in the periphery, not the centre; that empire and colony are vital to its progress which permeate the centres whether they like it or not. One of Beckert’s intellectual heroes is the French historian Fernand Braudel whose work focused on ‘civilisation and capitalism’. Surprising, then, that no reference is given to Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of ‘world-systems theory’ (WST) which flourished in the 1970s, and in which Braudel played an important part. One suspects that WST was too ‘sociological’ for Beckert, and played a bit fast-and-loose with historical accounts.
Is capitalism all-powerful?
So is capitalism all-pervasive and all-powerful? It would seem so in terms of its logic, but it comes up against too many human beings who are its fodder rather than its beneficiaries. There are limits to telling the downtrodden that capitalism is in their best interests. Throughout history, it colludes with human beings and doesn’t have it all its own way; from slave revolts, the rise of the working class, and even the state which, while often smoothing out capitalism’s path, is also its obstacle such as during the trente glorieuses from 1945 to 1975, when the ‘welfare state’ became its necessary evil, until it could mount an intellectual and political challenge through the likes of Hayek, Thatcher, Reagan and the rest.
Indeed, the best bits of Beckert’s book is the meat in the middle of the sandwich where he shows how agrarian capitalism morphed into industrial capitalism, and was deconstructed by neo-liberalism, all driven by the relentless search for profit, aided and abetted by its intellectual handmaidens who smoothed out the narrative path.
The bread in this sandwich? – not so much. The early discussion of proto-capitalism (those merchants in 12th century Aden) is bereft of what we might call a theory of capitalism, so that the reader can grasp how ‘trade’ and ‘mercantilism’ were not capitalistic, if proto-so. We are then dunked into the great leap forward (no, not Mao) but the beginning of industrial capitalism in the 18th century.
The best bits of the book relate to the global reconstructions driven by capital accumulation, from slavery, through plantations, industrial factories, and their eventual destruction, all the while finding human resistance to its depredations before it moves on to other and more profitable things. Beckert tries to hold tight to his view that we should be looking for change not at the centre but the periphery.
Understanding the rise of neoliberalism and the future of capitalism
This leads, curiously, to an account of ‘neo-liberalism’ which begins with the Pinochet regime’s coup d’état in Chile in 1973. That is surely odd, while conforming to Beckert’s liking for ‘peripheral’ accounts. The retort might be that the point of the right-wing coup was a militarised overthrow of an elected government (like Franco’s in Spain forty years earlier). To point to the role in Chile of the so-called Chicago Boys school of economics is surely that it all emanated from Chicago, and the USA: hardly the periphery.
And Scotland? It gets a look-in, not simply for Adam Smith, but for playing its discredited part in slavery, helping them to fuel industrial capitalism (which is why Beckert got a tour round Glasgow by Stephen Mullen – all those nods to slavery in its geography). Remember Tom Nairn’s typification of Scotland as a junior partner in British imperialism? Thus, its early impact on imperial industrialism; then as an exemplar of welfare statism, swept away by Thatcherite neo-liberalism. Silicon Glen and North Sea Oil are history, and Beckert’s book tells us why. Still, one of the political effects of post-1970s capitalism was to weaken the state and with it the Union, so we have something to be grateful for. As we are told frequently by today’s oligarchs, the aim is to move quickly and break things, including states.
So does the book work? Up to a point. The oddest thing is that ‘modern’ history, post-the bank crash of 2008 has ushered in Trumpery and populism as a reaction to a crisis of capitalism, and not socialism in its diverse forms. The collapse of Soviet communism did for that, while liberals and centrist social democrats such as Blair, Clinton, Obama and Schroeder sold the pass on globalisation, ushering in the reactionary politics we now have to put up with.
Beckert deals with some of this in an epilogue, but it is too short and desultory – Trump gets one mention – to match his previous chapters. The rise and rise of authoritarian capitalism as in China and associated states gets too short a shrift. Indeed, it looks like he wrote this quite a while before his book was published in 2025. It kind of peters out, disappointingly. Beckert returns to his idea of capitalism requiring intellectual ‘islands’, and makes play with the Barclay brothers inhabitation of a fiefdom in the Channel Islands.
Offshoring surely requires more than that. In an interesting piece in The Financial Times in the dog-days of 2025 (29th December), the point was well-made that Abu Dhabi has become the ‘capital of capital’. A global backwater sixty years ago with a population of 30,000, it now has four million, largely ex-pats who move money around the planet with virtual impunity. Abu Dhabi nowadays has sovereign wealth assets per capital of $1,690, more than Saudi Arabia ($1,062) and similar to Norway ($1,985).
So the capital of capitalism could logically be a place – an ‘island’ – without many people (who only cause them trouble) with life lived indoors because predatory capitalism has destroyed the planet and made the outside unbearable. Maybe that’s the future, at least in its logic. To borrow from TS Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men: ‘this is the way the world ends; more with a bang than a whimper’.
McCrone is being overly polite. The absent ‘theory’ of capitalism is a big problem for such a big book.
Capitalism begins in pure historical contingency, where producer and landlord both attempt to reproduce the status quo in the specifically economic relations within which *both* are dependent. Their mutual (market) dependency thereby unleashes material forces of compulsion, i.e. competition, higher productivity, the division of labour, and accumulation. It begins in contingent relations in which no-one is free, and this is dynamically reproduced. It is necessary to grasp the heteronomy, contingency, and amorality of capitalism.
The initial major symptom, from about the 1580s, is the English ‘clearances’; the dispossession and displacement of the peasantry by this new social relation who simply become a rootless agrarian proletariat, surplus labour, who either survived on the margins, or migrated to the centre of the State (i.e. London). (In France, by comparison, hundreds of years passed before it reached this point).
The first colonial experiment of this new market structure was in Munster. Locals were simply dispossessed (on the fundamental presumption that if you were not adding value to land by improving it, it was not your property), and improver tenants were given competitive leases where the rents would of course constantly increase. So in Munster English colonialists replicated the social relations of the agrarian capitalism of Southern England, and the population either became part of it or were cleared by it.
Capitalism constantly innovates and expands because of the ceaseless imperative of higher productivity and competition. Once it started t had a self-perpetuating dynamic force and spread like a virus. It tore through lowland Scotland so fast no-one thought to even describe it as any kind of social revolution, yet it is primarily a highly specific revolution of social relations, and the entire cottar class vanished on account of it. Landlords themselves were astonished by the sheer ruthlessness of their own tenants, who rack-rented sub-tenants and cottars more harshly than they would ever have thought decent.
Highland clanship was the most distant and last major challenge to it, not least on account of the nature of the soil (not good for arable) but it has been noted again and again that chiefs gradually came to see clan lands in a new social relation, that of ‘estates’ and their legal title as ‘property’.
Agrarian capitalism was overtaken by industrial and then global capitalism, in which human beings as such are defined, measured, and valued in market terms, and are usually complicit in their own objectification and commodification.
The rise and rise of capitalism, which is fairly well charted, but what about resistance to capitalism?
Reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” restores one’s belief in the normal people of America: a constant, painful and almost entirely forgotten struggle against the depredations of the Morgans, the Rockerfellers and the Carnegies and their allies in Congress and the Supreme Court…
Anarchists like Emma Goldman, Socialists like Eugene Debs, and movements like “the Wobblies”, strike after strike, massacre after massacre, prison term after prison term, these people refused to be cowed…it’s an uplifting book in that sense and of course it is all too clear that the USA has never really been a democracy…
On the downside, the legacy of a country built on slavery and genocide, that is, a deeply embedded racism, never really goes away throughout the book, and transcends the left-right axis…
Reading it, I’m afroid Trump doesnt seem so different to other American presidents of the past….
Another interesting book on capitalism is E Michael Jones’ Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labour and Usury (2014), based on the catholic theory of usury, which is essentially surplus value/capital accumulation by another name. It also contains three chapters on Scotland that are by some way the best thing written on the subject this century. Jones’ background is literary criticism and he analyses Walter Scott’s novels about Glasgow and the Jacobites. Jacobitism on his understanding, was the last gasp of catholic social theory against the rising tide of Protestantism financed by the extraction of capitalist surpluses.
Like Beckert, he notes the importance of cotton and clothing for economic development and applies this to modern Africa. Unlike Beckert, Jones’ books are not available on Amazon, though they are in print, which indicates his tendency to say things that powerful people don’t want said.
Fernand Braudel incidentally signed the famous French historians’ condemnation of Faurisson in 1979. The philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze refused to sign it.
He seems to be an American conservative Catholic self-publicist and conspiracy-theorist who rejects criticism, flirts with antisemitism, and interprets history theologically. If he really wrote three chapters on Scotland that are by far the best on capitalism in the 21st century that would be a major achievement about which it would be seriously interesting to hear. What’s so valuable about about them?
They were not the best chapters on capitalism, as I should have made plain, but the best to my knowledge on Scotland. He covers some of the same ground you do in your comment, but incorporates the dispossession of the monasteries and the critique of this by William Cobbett, the critic of “Scotch feelosophy”.
The Jacobites were not, per his account, primarily proto-Scottish nationalists, or clan chiefs exploiting their fellow clansmen in pursuit of power, but catholic counter-revolutionaries who rejected the early capitalist relationships emerging in towns like Glasgow. Thus he sees rejection of capitalism in Scotland (a minority view, at least at times) as a continuous tradition from that era, rather than a post-enlightenment phenomenon of modernity that reached its height in Marx. He rejects racial “anti-semitism” on traditionalist Catholic grounds, but does more than flirt with anti-judaism: his economic analysis is basically that of Marx’s famous 1843 essay on the Jewish question, though as you suggest, economics is for him primarily part of moral philosophy, which as a doctrine of practical reason is subject to the theology of “logos”.
As you suggest, he has the weakness of someone who seeks publicity and self-publishes. It isn’t fair to say he doesn’t engage with his critics – quite the reverse. He’s in his 70s and very widely read, so he tends to introduce his readers to new or overlooked ideas. His best work is probably on aesthetics, but the range of his thinking, if not always its depth, is remarkable. He’s also the main thinker behind the Catholic Right in the USA.
@Stephen Cowley. Yes, for sure, a bit flippant to say he rejects criticism, possibly more accurate to say he thinks academic criticism is institutionally biased. That said, no-one who reads the tough modern scholarship of (eg) MacInnes, Szchechi and Pittock on clanship and Jacobitism is likely to jump to conclusions of academic bias.
The mention of Cobbett is interesting. Cobbett was a Burkean (and somewhat belated ‘man of feeling’, per Henry Mackenzie) involved in a turf war with followers of Smith over the ownership of moral psychology and in rejection of their abstraction, urbanisation and industrialisation. In his context he was a part of the neo-Gothic movement that was made somewhat differently radical as a bourgeois art-revolution in its rejection of the spiritual morbidity descending from the Reformation era, and with it the gross corruption of Englishness, as described by the likes of Ruskin and Morris. By extension, too, this entailed the Catholic revival of such as Pugin, etc., but more to the point and more recently that of G.K. Chesterton who championed his interpretation of enclosure in England that emerged, as I said earlier, firstly in purely contingent conditions, then from the agrarian capitalism of competitive rents, increasing productivity, and a purely economic, mutually dependent, market relation of landlord and producer.
Also, Jacobite rejection of 18th century colonialist Glasgow stemmed from more pressing practical concerns than theology. Should Glasgow have renamed itself then it might best have been called Campbeltown, given the presiding power of the Whigs (the 9th Earl had been beheaded by the Jacobites in 1685). Likewise, case studies of Jacobites don’t support the idea of any desire either to get back to the land or to quibble about money-lending. Clan Innes, to take a random example, were longstanding catholic Jacobites whose chiefs were preposterously indebted due to over a hundred years of casual borrowing, most often for consumption and display. Towards the end of the century they sold their 600 year old charter to a (trusted) Scottish protestant businessman and departed for the south of England without a backward glance. One major Jacobite who did side with Charles Stuart in 1745 was the first recognisable modern economist, Sir James Steuart (author of ‘Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy’), Lord provost of Edinburgh, and an Enlightenment neoCameralist later strongly criticised by Smith and later yet praised (thanks to his labour theory of value) by Karl Marx, and whose Catholicism did not prevent him from becoming a valued employee of the East India company in Bengal. As I say, none of these historical details bear out any thesis of a Jacobite counter-revolution. albeit you mention he is primarily a literary critic, and in any case it is difficult to check without paying him personally for the privilege. Nevertheless, it was very interesting to find out about him and his high profile among the catholic right in the USA.
Yet as early as 1598, the staunchly Catholic Jean Gordon, Countess of Sutherland, played an important role in the genesis of the capitalist economy in the North of Scotland by establishing coal mining and salt pans at Brora.
One problem with writing a history of capitalism is deciding what the word means in the first place. Capitalism presumably has something to do with capital, but what is capital? The word is now applied to a baffling range of phenomena – finance capital, human capital, intellectual capital, social capital, cultural capital, natural capital, and so on and on. Some of these different capitals operate not merely by different logics but by mutually inconsistent logics. Cultural capital is often taken to include values like interpersonal and inter-institutional trust. Such trust is arguably fundamental to any successful capitalist system. Trust can perhaps be exchanged but it can’t be bought and sold and seems to defy marketisation.
In practice, capital is often covertly equated with finance capital, implying the definition of capitalism as the attempt to accumulate money on an indefinite scale. But even this hits problems. In a world of proliferating crypto-currencies, often privately owned and semi-legal, what counts as money? And what is the point of accumulating money indefinitely? Sooner or later money needs to be spent and used. What on, and for whose benefit? In practice (again), money is often used to pursue power and status. But (on this definition) these are non-capitalist goods and governed by non-capitalist logics.
Another possibility is to treat the idea of indefinite accumulation as fundamental (while loosening the link to finance). This has some plausibility: it ties the historical take-off of capitalism (and western imperialism) to the growth of modern (secular) science from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards. But science, viewed as one element in a wider suite of intellectual capital resources, does not fit easily into market models of capitalism.
Many questions, no easy answers.
Interesting review, thank you. But I think you have convinced me to skip this book: it does not sound like it throws much new light on the internal processes of modern capitalism that might help guide the struggle to limit its depredations. Does the contradiction, highlighted by Marx, between the socialisation of labour and the private concentration of profit still stand ? I doubt it, rather: while the private concentration of profit continues apace, leading to vast and unsustainable disparities in wealth, labour, worldwide, seems to be increasingly atomised – and it is risk that has been increasingly socialised. We desperately need an analysis of such processes. This book sounds like it adds to the many explanations of the world ; but will it help change it?
Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University is a bit more critical of the book.
He writes ‘the author has little sense of what he does not understand. Above all else , it is an example of just how insular our institutions of higher learning have become.’
Dave McCrone’s analysis is rather short sighted. He, like so many others, contrasts the period 1945 – 1975 with the period afterwards – to the latter’s disadvantage. Yet the latter period has seen hundreds of millions of people lifted from abject poverty, mainly across Asia; China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Extreme poverty becoming vastly less of a problem across the globe. (With these people, Eliot’s pessimism will not resonate.)
Further the latter period, has also seen a transformation in the material circumstances for most Scots – not all ; far more food available, far more cheap clothing and electrical devices, huge increases in pension and property wealth. Far more employment opportunities for the educated, as Higher Education expanded massively.
Also, the ‘social democratic’ moment was not quite as rosy as Dave McCrone seems to remember. Scotland’s key industries, coal, steel and shipbuilding were all struggling. Intelligent working class people were heading for Australia, Canada etc in huge numbers. The ‘Red Paper’, compiled by Gordon Brown was published in 1975, with input from Robin Cooke, Tom Nairn, Jim Sillars, John McGrath and Vince Cable. All could see that the status quo was unsustainable. At that point, they assumed that a left turn was the way forward.