Capitalism: A Global History

A New York Times Notable Book and Financial Times Best Book of the Year, this global history traces capitalism across the past thousand years and around the world. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, argues that no other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism, which structures how we live, work, and organize politically. Beckert contends that capitalism was born global, emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe before gradually taking root. Its modern form accelerated through an alliance between European states and merchants, with one epicenter in the Caribbean slave labor camps that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on archives from six continents, the book examines capitalism's development through merchant businesses in Aden, car factories in Turin, sugar plantations in Barbados, and textile factories in Cambodia. The narrative shows how state-backed institutions and imperial expansion shaped capitalism's rise, contradicting idealized notions of free markets. Beckert identifies modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and coercion across the world, from heads of state to rural cultivators. He demonstrates that despite capitalism's expansion, areas of human life remain outside its reach, and that capitalism itself is a recent invention rather than a natural or timeless system.