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SVEN BECKERT’S CHRONICLE OF CAPITALISM’S LONG RISE  
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Nelson Lichtenstein
December 4, 2025
Jacobin
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_ 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, Capitalism: A Global
History. _

The archipelago of capital metastasized as island after island —
both in the literal and metaphorical sense — 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

 

Review of _Capitalism: A Global History_ by Sven Beckert (Penguin
Press, 2025)

Sven Beckert’s doorstop of a book
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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’s 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
“was always a world economy.” 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’s
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.

“There is no French capitalism or American capitalism,” writes
Beckert, “but only capitalism in France or America.” 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 “islands of capital,” a recurrent metaphor in Beckert’s
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.

They were the world’s 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’s merchants inhabited “a
strikingly modern world.” 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.

Beckert finds plenty of political competition and merchant activism
within India’s 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 “Oriental despotism” survived by
constantly negotiating with various strata of the populace, merchants
above all, for the funds and material necessary to wage chronic
warfare.

The merchants are the revolutionaries of Beckert’s history,
certainly during the first several centuries. They were “capitalists
without capitalism,” 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, “mercantile avant-gardes dispersed around
the world.” They were “droplets in a sea of economic life whose
main currents flowed by fundamentally different logics.”

With Karl Polanyi, Beckert makes clear that the vast majority of the
world’s population existed in the countryside where, as Marc Bloch
put it, economic life was “submerged [in] social relationships.”
That made the merchants a distinct caste, so that “despite immense
distances and distinct cultures, Cantonese, Gujarati, Adeni, Genoese,
Swahili, and Bukharan merchants would have been broadly recognizable
to one another.” 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 “islands of
capital” 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.

A radical transformation of how commodities were produced in the
hinterland was essential to the triumph of capitalism on a world
scale.

Beckert is therefore taking issue with historian Robert Brenner, who
touched off the  “Brenner debate” of the 1970s and ’80s, by
arguing that capitalism — at least in England — had its roots not
among the urban merchant class but in the countryside, where
acquisitive landowners waged class war against peasants and yeomen
whose livelihoods depended on such traditions as access to a hunting,
pasturing, and wood-gathering commons. They rented land at a customary
price from the local lord and expected that markets were constrained
by the regional limit of trade in the commodities essential to keep
starvation at bay. Luxury goods did travel widely, but they were
bought and sold by a thin elite stratum. Marx therefore saw merchants
as having a purely external relationship to the feudal mode of
production, while Maurice Dobb, writing in the 1930s, saw merchants as
“parasites on the old economic order,” a “conservative rather
than revolutionary force.” Brenner thought them an integral part of
feudal society and therefore hardly disruptive.

The thrust of Beckert’s book stands in agreement with Brenner that a
radical transformation of how commodities were produced in the
hinterland was essential to the triumph of capitalism on a world
scale. He offers two very long chapters on the transformation and
capture of the countryside from the early modern enclosures to the
rise of factory-like sugar plantations and on to the home-based
proto-industrialization that became prevalent in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. But the motive force for all these upheavals was
not acquisitive landlords enclosing the commons and thereby generating
a surplus population destined for wage labor in urban centers, but
instead ambitious merchants who had the capital — and backing of the
state — that gave them the leverage to begin the dispossessions and
enclosures that brought market relations to the rural hinterland.

Beckert’s history also stands at partial odds with that of Jonathan
Levy, whose 2021 book, _Ages of American Capitalism_, was, at over
nine hundred pages, almost as long. Levy held that the “liquidity
preference” of most capitalists in most times and places has always
been in tension with the investment function that trends toward the
immobility and illiquidity of some of the most important capital
assets. So Levy’s work is more attentive to the speculative,
financializing aspects of North Atlantic capitalism, at least from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward. Beckert, on the other
hand, sidelines this psychological-cum-economic set of cross currents,
although he does write eloquently of the panics, booms, and busts that
became a characteristic of world capitalism from the early nineteenth
century through our own time. But the expansion of trade and
production remains at the heart of his book, even when he narrates the
origins and fate of our recent neoliberal era.

The Great Connecting

An explosive growth of merchant capitalism came with the “great
connecting” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The discovery
of the New World was most important but not the only way in which a
global market was engendered. Historians have long known that Ottoman
conquest of Constantinople blocked easy access toward India and the
Far East, even as feudalism’s decay motivated rulers to search for
new sources of tribute and taxation to pay for near-constant warfare.
So merchants and their royal patrons looked west.

In another instance of Beckert decentering the traditional narrative,
he offers far more discussion of the Genoese and Portuguese
exploration and exploitation of the West African coast than he does to
the New World discoveries of one Christopher Columbus. Although those
explorers of Africa were propelled down the coast and around the Cape
of Good Hope in the expectation that they could circumvent Arab
intermediaries, European control of the Atlantic and the New World
turned out to be the force that gave the capitalist revolution its
Eurocentric flavor.

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: America’s
Blackwater and Russia’s Wagner Group.

“Wherever we look,” writes Beckert, “warfare was almost the
default mode of the great connecting.” He calls this an era of
“war capitalism.”

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the archipelago of
capital metastasized as island after island — both in the literal
and metaphorical sense — was added to the mercantile universe: Santo
Domingo in 1516; Macau in 1557, Batavia in 1619, Manhattan in 1624,
Barbados in 1627. Among these many imperial gambits, Beckert profiles
two new “islands” whose revenues dwarfed anything attempted by
earlier merchant endeavors.

By 1600, Potosí had become the biggest city in the Americas, more
populous than London, Milan, or Seville. There, 160,000 Andean,
African, and European inhabitants mined 60 percent of the world’s
silver. And like virtually every other New World island of capital,
Potosí could only thrive on coerced labor, a murderous form of
slavery that killed thousands of miners each year, often poisoned by
the mercury that was essential to the profitable processing of large
amounts of low-grade ore. Because the city sustained Spanish power,
Emperor Charles V labeled Potosí the “treasury of the world,” but
others called it “the mountain that eats men.”

Barbados was another astounding yet brutal generator of mercantile
wealth and political power. By the 1660s, the West Indian island was
sending England sugar with a value twice the annual income of that
nation’s government. Because the island had been virtually
unpopulated, planters there had a warrant to create a productive
regime unfettered by the customary obligations that retarded
capitalist transformation of the countryside in the old country. There
were no meddlesome feudal lords, rebellious peasants, or
obstructionist states. With their emphasis on labor discipline, tight
workforce organization, and a relentless focus on productivity and
time control, these plantations were the first example of modern,
large-scale industry.

‘Wherever we look,’ writes Beckert, ‘warfare was almost the
default mode of the great connecting.’ He calls this an era of
‘war capitalism.’

A truly new world was therefore to be found in the West Indies, not on
the eastern edge of the North American continent. More Europeans
migrated to the Caribbean than English America in the years between
1630 and 1700, making Boston and the rest of New England mere
subordinate links in a global supply chain, utterly dwarfed by the
dynamism of these capitalist exemplars. Like an early
twentieth-century assembly line relentlessly focused on churning out a
single product, these monocrop plantations were the prototype for a
new stage of production where labor, capital, and global trade were
seamlessly intertwined.

A slave market in Algiers, 1684. (Jan Luyken / Amsterdam Historic
Museum)

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.

Beckert is here following in the footsteps of once neglected Caribbean
intellectuals like Eric Williams and C. L. R. James, whose pioneering
work emphasized the role that violence and slavery played in putting
these West Indian islands at the center of world capitalism’s
phoenix-like rise.

“Free Labor”

The coercion of labor did not end with the abolition of slavery or the
institution of wage labor. Truly “free labor” is hard to find in
the Beckert narrative, and if it has ever existed in the form Smithian
economists have fantasized, its presence has been a historically
episodic and fleeting one. Thus after slavery’s formal abolition in
the mid nineteenth century, a diabolically clever host of labor
regimes were put in its place.

In his 2014 book, _Empire of Cotton_, Beckert offered the testimony of
numerous journalists and officials to the effect that without slavery,
the booming cotton economy linking the American South with Great
Britain and the rest of Europe would collapse. Those observers were
essentially correct, and it would require new forms of slave-like
coercion to recruit and retain laborers in the agricultural
hinterland, not just for cotton but also rubber, tea, rice and other
commodities. We’ve long known about sharecropping, tenant farming,
and debt peonage in the post-emancipation American South, but in Asia
and Africa, tens of millions of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century agricultural laborers were contractually indentured,
living in slave-like barracks and subject to floggings and other forms
of physical coercion.

In the century after 1839, European colonial powers transported more
than two million such workers to the Caribbean, South Africa, and
Latin America. But all that paled beside the twenty-seven million
South Asian workers recruited by Indian labor brokers to Burma,
Ceylon, and Malaysia to power rice, tea, and rubber plantations — a
larger number than in the three-century Atlantic slave trade.

Nor did wage labor mean truly free labor in the new factories. That
was a nineteenth-century conceit designed to distinguish the
proletarian labor of the industrial heartland from slave labor
elsewhere. Whatever the difficulties of agricultural labor or
proto-industrial home production, few workers, and certainly not adult
males, were eager for employment in the new factories where close
supervision and unrelenting work requirements created a prison-like
environment. That was one reason that a huge proportion of those so
employed were women and children. One landowner spoke of factory
villages as a “convenient asylum” for those displaced from their
farms when enclosures snuffed out their rural livelihood. Meanwhile,
in the cities, vagrancy laws targeted the “idle and disorderly
poor,” while Britain’s Master and Servant Act of 1823 made workers
criminally liable if they left their employer before the contractual
end of their service. In Prussia, workers who left work without
permission could be punished with a fine or fortnight’s
imprisonment.

Coerced labor was everywhere and at almost every time central to
capitalist growth and profitability.

Beckert calls this world of cotton factories, coerced plantation
labor, royal governance, and merchant power “old-regime
capitalism,” in which landed elites still held much power and
business enterprises were often state-backed monopolies. But it all
tottered on preindustrial foundations. One shock to this system were
the revolutions, thwarted or actual, of the mid-nineteenth century.
The bourgeoisie did not quite come to full power, but the repeal of
the Corn Laws in Great Britain, the continental insurgencies of 1848,
the American Civil War, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan all
mobilized owners of capital to press against the boundaries of
established politics and weaken the grasp on state power of the landed
elites.

Illustration of power loom weaving in Britain, 1835. (Illustrator: T.
Allom, engraver J. Tingle / History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great
Britain by Sir Edward Baines)

More decisive, writes Beckert, was the emergence in the last decades
of the nineteenth century of giant, integrated enterprises linked to
new technologies in iron and steel, electricity, chemistry, transport,
and communications. Beckert calls those years “the most monumental
turning point in the global history of capitalism.” This was the era
in which the merchants were finally displaced by the industrial
barons, “a fundamental breaking point in the 500 plus year history
of capitalism.”

Beckert’s prime example is not Andrew Carnegie, whose billion-dollar
creation of US Steel climaxed the merger movement in the United
States, but Carl Rochling, a German banker and coal trader who built
an empire of steel in the Saar and, when opportunity arose, extended
it into any lands the German Army might conquer. Like Carnegie,
Rochling hated the market, which is why vertical integration, trusts,
and cartels came to characterize the structure and governance of giant
industry at the turn of the twentieth century. Workforces were equally
large, upward of ten thousand in each mill and factory, which meant
that these sites of industrial production finally matched the number
of workers on a Caribbean plantation.

And this was the moment when we can legitimately take a Eurocentric
— or at least a North Atlantic–centric — appraisal of the world
economy, now growing in stupendous fashion. Railroads tripled their
already considerable mileage, world trade quadrupled, and between 70
and 80 percent of all the world’s manufacturing took place in the
United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the United States. It was a
fleeting moment, less than a century. But while it lasted, it stamped
the worldview of generations, including their perception of
capitalism.

Enter “Capitalism”

Indeed, these were the years when the word “capitalism” finally
came into common usage. Beginning in 1837, panics and recessions
periodically created society-wide disturbances at least once each
generation, even as society became divided into those with great
wealth and those without. Some name was necessary to encompass the new
social and economic reality. There had been self-described capitalists
since the sixteenth century, meaning a person commanding funds for
investment or lending. In Geneva, there were “messieurs les
capitalist,” indicating a group of people capable and interested in
purchasing public bonds, and Adam Smith wrote of “commercial
countries” as distinct from “pastoral countries.”

Despite calling his most famous book _Das Kapital_, Marx deployed the
term “political economy” in almost all of his writings. Although
the Académie Royale de Lyon classified capitalism as a “new word”
in 1842, socialists in Britain gave it more widespread circulation in
the 1850s. The Fabians used it in the 1880s, after which the word
migrated from left to center, with the president of the American
Economic Association defining the United States in 1900 “as a
society of competitive capitalism.” In the United States, the word
remained largely on the Left, with businessmen and -women preferring
“free enterprise.” But once _Forbes _magazine began describing
itself as a “capitalist tool” in the 1970s, right-of-center
politicians and entrepreneurs began to proudly declare themselves and
their nation a capitalist country.

Antonio Gramsci called the twentieth century’s interwar era “a
time of monsters,” and Beckert concurs, asserting that the
twenty-seven years between 1918 and 1945 were the most tumultuous in
the entire five-hundred-year history of capitalism. The Bolshevik
revolution was not the only upheaval that brought into question the
industrial capitalism that had seemed so sturdy in the decades before
1914. Beckert puts on the same few pages Dublin’s Irish rising of
1916, the revolutionary metalworker strikes in Petrograd, a railroad
stoppage in Senegal, the Seattle general strike
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of 1919, the April 1919 Amritsar massacre in British India, the
_biennio rosso_ (“two red years”) in postwar Northern Italy, South
Africa’s Rand Rebellion of 1922, and the formation in Barbados of a
chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.

No revolution came in the 1920s. In _Recasting Bourgeois Europe_,
historian Charles Maier emphasized the degree to which a corporatist
compromise between capital and labor legitimized for a time a European
society traumatized by war and revolt. Beckert slights that gambit, at
least until the post–World War II era, and instead emphasizes the
Fordist triumph, which brought scores of European industrialists and
production experts to the River Rouge and Highland Park where Henry
Ford himself was happy to share the astoundingly productive mass
production techniques his engineers had deployed. Fiat’s Giovanni
Agnelli was one of those visitors, so Beckert offers a deep dive
exploring the degree to which Agnelli was able to emulate Ford’s
entire production ethos, including the effort to build Europe’s
largest postwar factory in Turin, produce thousands of inexpensive
cars, marginalize and deradicalize skilled labor, and create a species
of welfare capitalism for his employees.

Machining of aluminum pistons at the Ford Motor Company’s Cleveland
engine plant through automated equipment, 1955. (Bettmann / Getty
Images)

But America’s economic success also bred some monsters. By 1900, the
United States was a manufacturing colossus, easily outproducing
Germany and the United Kingdom in virtually every important industrial
and agriculture commodity. Fearful of the power that a continental
market and the rise of mass production gave to the United States,
Europeans saw an “American danger” that could be countered only by
imperial access to an equally large territory of the sort that the
United States had acquired nearly a century before.

“The right way to look at Africa,” editorialized a British journal
in 1905, “is to regard it as another America, lying fallow and ready
to yield rich harvests.” Africa is an “America at our
doorsteps,” agreed a French paper, with Algeria the “America of
France.”

Commodity chains would be nationalized and militarized in a new
synthesis of state power and economic hegemony. Comparing the need for
German expansion in Eastern Europe to the US conquest of the
Trans-Mississippi West, Adolf Hitler demanded “territory and
Fordism” if a new Germany were to counter both the Bolsheviks and
the Americans.

Such was the context for the autarky, economic nationalism, and
trading blocs engendered by the Great Depression. To many, capitalism
seemed to have reached a dead end, which may well have encouraged the
wide range of statist responses now possible in the crisis. As Beckert
has emphasized again and again in his history, capitalism can coexist
with a wide variety of political regimes. During the Depression,
fascism, rearmament, and imperial expansion were one solution, often
endorsed by capitalists like the Rochlings who became enthusiasts of
the Nazi regime. The suppression of labor radicalism and the
acquisition through conquest of new markets and cheap supply chain
inputs fulfilled many of Völklingen Steel’s longstanding ambitions.

Industrial modernism of this sort was accompanied during the war by
the reappearance of slave labor in the heart of Europe. Well over 40
percent of all workers in the wartime Nazi empire toiled under duress
— a stunning number historically outdone only by the plantation
colonies of the Caribbean. The Rochling mill in the Saar took an
equivalent share; likewise, huge numbers of workers were imported and
enslaved at BMW, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, Hugo Boss, Krupp, Leica
Camera, Lufthansa, and other famous companies.

Capitalism can coexist with a wide variety of political regimes.

Sweden and the United States were also statist but adopted a socially
liberal reformism. Both could be described as democratic corporatism.
In Sweden, the “Cow Deal” of 1933 established the basis for an
increasingly elaborate welfare state, forged when social democrats and
agriculturalists reached a concordance that also laid the basis for
the nation’s aggressive export drive. Corporatism, albeit of a
rather fragmented sort, came to the United States as well, embodying
both a high degree of market regulation and state support for a
resurgence of organized labor and the elaboration of a racially coded
welfare state. In the Global South, Turkey, and Mexico insulated their
economies and raised living standards through a program of high
tariffs and import-substitution industrial production.

Depression-era statism combined with the traumas of the war may well
have offered the capitalist West an ideological and state-building
predicate for the “Trente Glorieuses” decades of the early postwar
era. Although Beckert offers few new historiographic or theoretical
insights about an era characterized by rising real wages, increased
productivity, and more consumer spending, his survey of life in
Sweden, Australia, and France puts it all in a newish light.

For example, he rightly cites the growth of world tourism, a genuinely
new mass phenomenon — and perhaps the world’s largest
“industry” — facilitated by the economic architecture
blueprinted at Bretton Woods. That economic settlement allowed two
seemingly contradictory things to happen simultaneously. A system of
semifixed exchange rates boosted free trade, while the persistence of
state control over most key currencies protected the ability of
nations to maintain and improve their own welfare states. This was
“embedded liberalism,” what one economist called “Keynes at home
and Smith abroad.”

It couldn’t last. In his discussion of the rise of neoliberalism,
Beckert pretty much skips over the oil price turmoil of the 1970s, the
Volcker shock of 1979, and Levy’s emphasis on the propensity of
capital to migrate from production to speculative finance. Instead, he
offers as a kind of overture, a longish account of Augusto
Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973 and the complicity and
support offered by the American embassy to the repression and
austerity that followed.

This is altogether fitting, because it exemplifies two themes ever
present in Beckert’s 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. Neoliberalism was
therefore always more than a mere celebration of the market; it saw
itself as a particular statist order in which the regime’s job was
to create a self-reinforcing framework that entrenched and safeguarded
market functions. In some cases, the state in question was
supranational, as with the International Monetary Fund’s enforcement
of a “Washington Consensus” that straitjacketed economic policy,
largely in the Global South.

The tenth anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup on
September 11, 1983, in Santiago, Chile. (Ila Agencia / Gamma-Rapho via
Getty Images)

Labor was hit hard. In Chile, the junta imprisoned and disappeared its
enemies on the Left and in the unions. From the US embassy in
Santiago, there was hardly a protest, where even before the coup, an
official there favored a “trade-off” of “democracy against sound
economic measures.” With the advice of the “Chicago boys,” often
students of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the unions were
decimated, real wages fell, and unemployment leaped upward. Writes
Beckert: “Pinochet was the Lenin of neoliberalism.”

“The middle class and the upper class suddenly found themselves in
heaven,” observed one American official. The US embassy reported
that since the labor movement had been crippled and the right to
strike suspended, “major means which those who might oppose those
income policies can use to protest have been eliminated.” Of the
opposition, said the embassy, “being able to rule by decree is a big
help in this respect.”

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.

If cheap labor in Chile came with a military coup, cheaper labor on a
global scale was also the product of a series of state policies and
transformations. The demise of the Soviet bloc put tens of millions of
new workers into a wage-making equation highly favorable to capital.
But even more important was China’s appearance as a manufacturing
superpower and giant source of labor that was free in only the most
attenuated sense. This has shifted capitalism’s twenty-first-century
tectonic plates.

Deindustrialization in the countries bordering the North Atlantic has
been more than compensated by manufacturing growth in East Asia during
the most rapid era of industrialization in world history. The mass
proletarianization within China has been stupendous and unprecedented.
Shenzhen in the Pearl River Delta, for a time the fastest-growing
large city on the planet, is the true heir of nineteenth-century
Manchester and twentieth-century Detroit. In a replay of some of that
history, merchant capitalists are now once again in the saddle, with
retailers like Walmart and Amazon and brands like Apple and Nike far
more potent than any single manufacturing enterprise. And not only
that: as in the early nineteenth century, young women are the backbone
of this new wave of industrial proletarianism, with upward of 90
percent of all workers female migrants from the countryside in
Shenzhen’s light manufacturing sector.

Like any social phenomenon, Beckert thinks the history of capitalism
has a finite end, but that demise is unlikely to come with a
revolutionary bang. Instead, he returns to his island metaphor,
finding on the one hand the rise of libertarian moguls like Peter
Thiel, seeking literal islands on which to park their wealth and
secede from the rest of us. On a brighter note, Beckert hopes for the
emergence in a post-neoliberal world of polities that are governed by
ecologically sustainable, nonmarket relationships. That seems
uncharacteristically Pollyannaish given the brutalities that have
always accompanied each new iteration of capitalist society. But
whatever its fate, Beckert’s capacious volume provides a new
generation of capitalists and anti-capitalists with plenty of
precedents for whatever world they come to imagine.

_NELSON LICHTENSTEIN is a research professor at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book is __A Fabulous
Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American
Capitalism__._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
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