Guy Dauncey has fashioned a short guide for radicals from the work of a non-radical economics heavyweight.
Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert: Penguin, November 2025
This book is quite astonishing. Over the past ten years I have read some 600 books on economics and economic history, and Sven Beckert’s book stands head and shoulders above them all. For Thomas Picketty, it’s “monumental, a must read.” Yes, it is 1,100 pages long, quite possibly Penguin’s longest book ever, but they are worth every hour engaged with them, instead of similar hours spent doomscrolling through the detritus of a despairing world.
His story begins a thousand years ago in ‘islands of capital’, the geographically tiny trading cities that connected merchants globally from Cordoba to Guangzhou – merchants who had, as one tenth century source described them, “a passion for the accumulation of capital.” He calls these cities islands because they were so distinct from their non-commercial hinterlands. Cairo at this time was “the centre of the world’s commerce … the treasure house of the West, the emporium of the East.” The merchant Ibn ‘Awkal, with trading connections in Persia, Iraq, North Africa, Spain and Sicily, dealt in 83 different commodities, including indigo, brazilwood, lacquer, pepper, spices, sugar, flax, and goods from China.
So what is capitalism, in Beckert’s understanding? It is a global process in which economic life is fundamentally driven by the relentless accumulation of privately controlled capital. Structured by the state, it propels the ever-expanding commodification of inputs and outputs, including labor. It can only be understood through an analysis that is embedded in people, politics, nature, power, cultures, and institutions. It is “a form of economic life in which the owners of capital organize the production of commodities not because they need or want them, but because they hope to produce more capital.”
It is a story of human agency exercised by creative and powerful people who were – and are – determinedly self-interested, people who have historically been willing to enslave, kill, and seize land and resources to advance their goals, ignoring and abusing both humans, and nature.
It is not simply a market economy in which businesspeople trade with each other. Nor is it a system that somehow possesses its own agency, expressing an historical inevitability. It is above all else made by people, both by its protagonists – its merchants, entrepreneurs and financiers – and its antagonists, the workers, peasants, slaves and visionaries who fought – and are still fighting – its advances. It is at its foundation a cultural system, driven by values of individual selfishness and greed.
Yes, it is a story of adventurous investments and daring innovations which (thanks to science and technology) increased the productivity of labour a thousandfold, enabling wealth and comfort to spread around the world. But it is also the story of “vast expropriations, huge mobilisations of coerced labor, brutality in factories and on plantations, fierce destruction of non-capitalist economies, and massive extraction of resources for private gain.”
It is a story of human agency exercised by creative and powerful people who were – and are – determinedly self-interested, people who have historically been willing to enslave, kill, and seize land and resources to advance their goals, ignoring and abusing both humans, and nature.
Beckert’s emphasis on the human agency of individual capitalists creates an unbridgeable distance from the Marxist portrayal of capitalism as an impersonal process guided by the invisible hand of historical determinism. His global history, stretching from China to Peru, makes any limited European telling of capitalism like that of the blind men trying to fathom the nature of an elephant. By sitting astride the elephant, Beckert tells the whole story. Capitalism’s centre of gravity is not ‘market forces’, ‘the laws of economics’, or the exploitation of surplus labour value. It is selfish individuals seeking to maximize their capital gains. Those other theories to explain capitalism are like Ptolemy’s, as he struggled to explain the workings of the solar system.
In Beckert’s telling, several patterns can be seen within capitalism. One is the interconnectedness of the capitalists, from the 11th century merchants to today’s billionaires and fund managers. A second is the extended familial connections, forging bonds that created trust and financial stability through inheritances. In America, in the 1890s, the list of Newport’s summer residents named 517 self-segregated families, including the Astors, the Morgans, and the Vanderbilts, whose children played together and went to college together.
Capitalists are constantly flexible. They can make any system work for them, whether it is feudal, liberal, fascist, Nazi, neoliberal, or social democratic.
A third pattern, contrary to the way some claim capitalism should be ordered, is its total dependency on the state. “Capitalism, this book argues, is an extraordinarily statist form of economic life.” The state provided not just the foundations of enforceable laws, contracts, property rights, and banking privileges, but also the violence of punishment needed to control slaves and repress striking workers, and the violence of war and massacre to impose the demands of capitalists on other countries, and to give legitimacy to the seizure and privatization of lands from farmers and Indigenous people.
In 1851, when there were 17,700 wageworkers in Manchester’s textiles industry, there were 76,000 enslaved workers in the Mississippi delta, growing cotton for those mills. Sugar, cotton, and coffee, in which 19th century capitalists were so heavily invested, depended entirely on slaves to generate a 15% annual return for the shareholders who lived so comfortably in Lisbon, Paris, London, and New York.
When it comes to the political order under which capitalism could best flourish, however, there is no pattern. Capitalists are constantly flexible. They can make any system work for them, whether it is feudal, liberal, fascist, Nazi, neoliberal, or social democratic. “From its very beginning,” Beckert writes, “capitalism was dogmatic only about profits.” When a regime changed they simply adjusted their goals and built new relationships. Indeed, capitalism’s most successful project has taken place under state communism, in China. Capitalism is, as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe says, “the only religion without taboos.” Anything can be commodified, if it will increase the accumulation of capital.
Beckert gives neoclassical economics a thorough dressing down, both as a late 19th century endeavour to whitewash power and class struggle out of economic history, and in its fraudulent claim that because economics follows natural ‘laws’, governments should not interfere.
I am disappointed by Beckert’s failure to state the obvious when it comes to the climate crisis.
I do note a few absences. The first is the absence of any discussion of the role of central banks in preventing capitalism’s collapse. Writing about the 2008 financial collapse, Beckert notes that the US, China, Japan, and Germany spent $1.45 trillion to support their economies, “confirming once more that the very condition for capitalism’s survival was an ever-escalating involvement with the state,” but he fails to mention that most of this money was created out of thin air by central banks and given to struggling banks and corporations, creating the morally hazardous expectation that banks that were “too big to fail” could be assured of a future bail-out. Without such support, capitalism’s Jenga-like tower of debt might have collapsed in 2008, and might yet collapse tomorrow. Given this, central banking deserves a bigger role in capitalism’s global history.
I am also disappointed by Beckert’s failure to state the obvious when it comes to the climate crisis – the connection between the single-minded goal of fossil-fuel and livestock capitalists to accumulate capital and the climate and ecological catastrophes, which are the direct result of their obsessive greed.
In his magisterial global history, however, these are minor quibbles. Do not let them deny you the joy of his amazing 1,100-pages, and their abundance of stories.
In his final pages, when Beckert asks, “What next?”, he suggests that capitalism might end the way it began, with an expansion out from islands of innovation that create a new kind of economy. Such islands already exist, he writes, in non-commodified spaces such as public housing and libraries, but his one page should have been a whole chapter, telling the history of cooperatives, social enterprises, public enterprises, and the crucial role of democracy and governments in taming and potentially ending capitalism. In Barcelona, there are over 5,000 social purpose economic organizations. In Quebec, there are 11,200. In the Kudumbashree initiative, in Kerala, there are 317,400 groups where women are determining the future of their village and neighbourhood economies, rather than capitalist investors. In Mondragon, Spain, the Basque people have built an entire network of cooperatives, many in manufacturing, employing some 80,000 people.
None of these initiatives is capitalist, even though they exist in a capitalist economy. They have been created by people who derive their purpose from an ethic of cooperation and kindness, rather than selfishness and greed. Beckert ends his incredible book by referencing the sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1947-2019), who believed that capitalism would be first eroded and then potentially ended by the emergence of alternative logics within it that slowly expand, just as its original islands did.
Beckert has here what could have been the most powerful argument, but he lets it slip through his fingers. The alternative to the capitalism of selfishness is the economics of ordinary kindness, expressed in a cooperative economy. For the sake of our children, nature, the climate, and the wellbeing of all, we need to make it happen now, not in a hundred years.
