"weapons-grade wealth" (j.f.)
Capitalism by Sven Beckert review â an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives
The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account
"Fredric Jameson famously said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. At times during these 1,100 pages, I found it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism."
âNo religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the economic logic of capitalism,â Beckert claims, defining it as âthe ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capitalâ. Accounting for it therefore feels like explaining water to fish. Adam Smith, âthe hero of capitalismâs triumphant self-remembranceâ, attributed it to benign self-interest. Beckert, however, calls it a revolution, centuries in the making, which depended on things that Smith downplayed: âpower, violence, the stateâ. Far from natural or inevitable, it has always been âunstable and contestedâ, proceeding by jolts.
The word âcapitalismâoriginated in France in the 1840s, around the same time as its antagonists âsocialismâ, âcommunismâ and âanarchismâ, but the system was much older. âCapitalism is a process,â Beckert writes, ânot a discrete historical event with a beginning and an endâ. He begins tracking the process in the port of Aden in 1150. This vibrant trade hub between Asia and the Middle East, in what is now Yemen, was one of several âislands of capitalâ which formed a âcapitalist archipelagoâ. Inventing new trades like accountancy and insurance, its âstrikingly modernâ residents were in the vanguard of a global insurgency. But their accumulation of profit for its own sake was regarded with suspicion by rulers, religions and ordinary people alike. They enjoyed wealth without power or prestige: âcapitalists without capitalismâ.
READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives
<>one never sees the Invisible Hand of the marketplace pick up the check<>
"There are three primary failures of most free market theories: externalities, tragedy of the commons, and information asymmetry. The great irony of modern conservatives is that Adam Smith, the man they cherish, adore, and idolize, talked about all these things in his book and other writings. He was clear on the concept that the theory of the Invisible Hand would not work if companies were able to externalize their costs by dumping on society. But yetâŚitâs still bandied about as if it was solid as a rock, and informs conservative policy creation to this day. Why?"
READ MORE https://inspiredeconomist.com/articles/the-invisible-hand-never-picks-up-the-check/
Sven Beckertâs Chronicle of Capitalismâs Long Rise
"The growth, ambition, and conflict among all states, but especially those of Europe, advanced merchant power and influence. This happened in two ways. First, the chronic warfare of the long sixteenth century required enormous sums, and those came from the merchants and bankers whose influence consequently grew within royal courts. As states made war, war made states, enhancing merchant power in the process. And second, trade and empire were insolubly linked. Indeed, it was often difficult to distinguish the traders from the warriors and governors. The East India Companies of both the Dutch and the English were practically states unto themselves. With their thousands of soldiers and hundreds of ships, Beckert compares these monopolies to those quasistate purveyors of violence in our own time: Americaâs Blackwater and Russiaâs Wagner Group."
âWherever we look,â writes Beckert, âwarfare was almost the default mode of the great connecting.â He calls this an era of âwar capitalism.â
As Beckert makes clear again and again, coerced labor was everywhere and at almost every time central to capitalist growth and profitability. European traders transported 4.38 million enslaved Africans to the New World before 1760, twice the number of European migrants who arrived in the Americas in the same period. Roughly 1.73 million enslaved cultivators, artisans, and miners labored on sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton plantations and in the silver mines in the Americas at a time when the entire working population of England was only 2.9 million people. About one-third of the capital assets owned in the British Empire in 1788 consisted of slaves, and when that system was abolished, the government borrowed 20 million pounds sterling, 40 percent of its entire budget, to compensate slaveholders for the emancipation of their human property.
...two themes ever present in Beckertâs book. First, capitalism has the capacity to exist under virtually any kind of political regime, save that of outright Bolshevism. And second, every time a new modality becomes manifest in the long history of capitalism, the state is sure to play a major role, more often murderous than benign.
READ MORE https://jacobin.com/2025/12/beckert-capitalism-global-history-review
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