Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches the history of the United States in the 19th century and global history. His ‘Capitalism’ is called a ‘monumental book’ by global inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, himself an author of an eariler gargantuan publication back in 2014 called Capital in the 21st century (Piketty’s suggestion then was that he was ‘updating’ Marx’s Capital from the 19th century). Beckert in contrast is not trying to update or critique Marx’s Capital.

Instead, as an economic historian, he aims to paint a broad canvas of the rise of capitalism from its early embryonic origins, that he takes back to 1000 years ago. He does not provide a theoretical analysis of capitalism as Piketty tries in his book. This book is very much more descriptive than analytical.

He delivers a global view of capitalism , not confined what he calls the ‘eurocentric’ approach of others. That is the book’s merit, full of anecdotes and examples of capitalists at work worldwide. But the book’s de-merit is its lack of any systematic understanding of capitalism.

Indeed, it is like the work of Adam Tooze – namely, it is ‘more the how, than the why’. As the blurb says for the book, “Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton , places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia”.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe. And capitalism can only be described as a global phenomenon.

“This book understands capitalism as, above all, a global development whose local articulations can only be understood globally. The economic dynamics of a given place are inescapably shaped by its connections to the outside world. There is no “French capitalism” or “American capitalism”; rather, there is capitalism in France and America, which have contested and complicated relationships with capitalism elsewhere, indeed everywhere “ Beckert makes big claims for the revolutionary nature of capitalism.

“It was a fundamental break in human history not just because it revolutionized economic affairs but because it turned human relations upside down; infiltrated our politics, societies, and cultures; altered the natural environment we inhabit; and made revolution a permanent feature of economic life. The capitalist revolution is the only revolution whose fundamental core is that it is ongoing, that it qualifies as a state of permanent revolution.” But of course, he recognises that capitalism has its faults. “Capitalism is also distinctive for the particular kinds of social inequalities and global hierarchies it creates.” But Beckert does not want to take sides between those authors supporting and those critiquing capitalism.

“On one side, Marx’s writings became sacred texts through which to filter the politics du jour; on the other side, scholars read capitalism’s history through the equally sacralizing lens of Adam Smith’s writings. This book strives to avoid either idolatrous extreme.” Actually, it is not true that Marx did not recognise the great changes that capitalism made to human progress; or that Adam Smith saw no faultlines in market economies. But Beckert resorts to descriptive history rather than economic insight.

As Beckert puts it: “this work is an effort to reclaim capitalism as a territory for historical investigation. This history will show that capitalism is neither a state of nature nor a process whose internal logic determines its eventual outcome in more than the most general way.” So the Marxist materialist conception of history and Marx’s explanation of the internal contradictions in capitalism are to be put aside; as are the views of mainstream neoclassical economists that markets and profit making are an eternal and beneficial feature of human social organisation. Instead, capitalism is a contingent history.

Beckert does not hide the brutal nature of the emergence of capitalism globally. “Although capitalism’s history is often told as a story of contracts, private property, and wage labor—that is, stylized as a history of the realization of human freedom—there is another story, equally important, about vast expropriations, huge mobilizations of c