By Sven Beckert - Penguin Press 2025
A review by Steve Halpern
Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He has written an important 1,325 page book on the overall global history of the capitalist system. Beckert travelled the world researching this project. Harvard University and the Ford Foundation were among the organizations that funded his research.
Most history books are biographies, or national histories, or histories of events. Beckert's book is unique in that he looks at the entire history of the political economic system we know as capitalism.
President Donald Trump, like all Presidents, claims to represent people who live in the United States. His famous slogan is "Make America Great Again." Certainly there were outstanding moments in the history of this country. However, I don't believe there was ever a period in the history of this country that we can label as great.
Another problem with this slogan is Beckert's compelling argument that capitalism has always been a global system. In fact, the world learned something from Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio (Bad Bunny) in the recent Super Bowl game. His performance made clear that "America" consists of the entire hemisphere of North, South, Central America and the Caribbean.
When we look at the vast history of capitalism, there has been a recurring and persistent problem. Throughout its history, capitalism has bounced from one unimaginable disaster to another like a wrecking ball. A summary of the events in Beckert's book will underscore that conclusion.
Seeds of capitalism: 1150 AD and the trade in the Indian Ocean
Much of the history students learn in this country has been criticized for being "Eurocentric." Clearly there is a lot that can be learned from the history of that continent. However, Europe is only one of seven continents of the world.
Sven Beckert gives the evidence that the seeds of capitalism sprang from trade across the Indian Ocean. Beckert used the word "archipelago" to describe the islands of merchant trade in a sea of feudal societies. The center of that trade was the city of Aden in Yemen. Aden connected merchant trade from West Africa to India, and China.
So, for hundreds of years Europe was the relatively underdeveloped section of the world. There were two events that began to change this reality.
First, the bubonic plague caused the deaths of about thirty percent of the European population. At that time royal families were dependent on peasants for their income. The plague killed many peasants and decreased the revenue of the royal families. The response was to rely more on income the royal families received from merchants.
The other event was the contact with the Americas. Before that contact, there was international trade that included the enslavement of human beings. With the contact of an entire hemisphere, that trade exploded and European powers began to play a more dominant role in the world. Other areas of the world continued to rely on entrenched feudal regimes.
Single crop economies replace self sustaining economies
In the feudal system most people were peasants who farmed the land. A portion of their crops went to the feudal lords. In other words, the feudal manors were largely self-sustaining communities.
The tribal societies in the Americas had different levels of development. Some tribes were nomadic and travelled from place to place in order to sustain themselves. Other native tribes had a more stationary lifestyle. While there was trade between tribes, Native American societies were also largely self-sufficient. With capitalism this changed.
Before European contact with the Western Hemisphere, there had been trade in sugar and other commodities. Human beings, including many from Europe, were viewed as commodities that merchants bought and sold.
With the European contact of the Americas, this trade exploded. Instead of creating self-sustaining manors, single crop economies were the new source of wealth.
Feudal lords realized that they could enrich themselves by forcing peasants off the manors. In order for that to happen, the lords needed to rely on the government to enforce this effective theft of land. Merchants then used that land to gouge out profits.
Then in a process that took hundreds of years, most peasants were effectively forced into cities where many worked in factories. The lands taken from the peasants were called "enclosures." Marx argued that peasants were then "free." Because they lost everything, they were free of possessions and coerced to toil under horrendous conditions in factories.
In the Americas settlers carried out a series of wars over hundreds of years that effectively stole the entire hemisphere from the native inhabitants. Initially colonial settlers centered their economies on gold and silver mines in Mexico and Bolivia. Then they organized the extremely lucrative sugar trade. Then cotton supplied the factories of Europe that produced cloth. The unimaginably horrendous conditions on enslaved plantations and in the first textile factories gave birth to the political economic system of capitalism.
Capitalism is born drenched in blood
Karl Marx was highly critical of the theories of Adam Smith who was an ardent supporter of capitalism. However, there was one issue that Marx and Smith agreed on. They both argued that capitalism was a more advanced system from feudalism. In fact, one of the reasons for the revolution of the thirteen colonies was was the pervasive desire to a break with feudal property relations.
Saying that, I also support the argument of Frederick Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that the state was born with capitalism as a "special instrument of repression." Some of the first actions of the United States government consisted of a genocide against Native Americans, support for chattel slavery, and an armed repression of Shay's Rebellion. That rebellion consisted of veterans of the revolution who were starving and demanded the means to live.
Sven Beckert labelled much of the history of capitalism as a history of the British styled "enclosures." These enclosures consisted of forced or voluntary world wide migrations, unimaginably horrendous working conditions, and theft of land from indigenous inhabitants.
First we see how people from all over the world came to Bolivian city of Potosi in search of riches derived from the mining of silver. Native Americans did most of the mining and that work produced the silver that became a foundation of capitalism.
Then there was the forced kidnapping and transport of African slaves under unimaginably horrendous conditions. This was to derive wealth from the production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton.
Clearly one of the primary reasons for the Civil War in the United States was the tenacious desire to abolish the system of chattel slavery. However, up until that war, slavery had been the primary way of securing wealth in the United States. As a result, before the Civil War, the U.S. government was dominated by supporters of the system of chattel slavery.
About 350,000 Union soldiers died defeating the army of slave owners in the Civil War. Then the government adopted the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery except in cases of penal servitude.
President Andrew Johnson has been labelled as the worst president in the history of the United States. He attempted to implement his "Black Codes" to effectively reintroduce slavery by another name. The government responded with the 14th and 15th Amendments that were supposed to guarantee "equal protection" and "voting rights" for all men who were citizens in this country.
Mother Jones was a leader of the labor movement in this country and an organizer for the United Mine Workers Union. She was also a leader of the movement to abolish child labor. Mother Jones ridiculed those who argued that slavery had been abolished in this country. Paraphrasing her words, They used to sell children on the auction block. Now they sell children on the installment plan.
Sven Beckert quoted Willemina Klusterboer's book Involuntary Labor Since the Abolition of Slavery. She argued, It was this novel combination of the "pistol and pen" that brought many cultivators into commodity production, mobilizing workers in order to immobilize them, blocking their escape with a web of debt, contracts, laws, and taxes just at the time when global rebellions had brought plantation slavery to an end. Yes, capitalism has proven to be a tricky and ruthless customer.
Enclosures erected around the world
After the Civil War, the United States government worked to create an effective enclosure in the western half of the country. General Philip Henry Sheridan outlined the first step in this process. He argued that, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." This insidious statement might be taken in the context of the over 100 year hot war by the United States government against the indigenous people of this part of the world.
In those years, much of the economy of the United States came from mining, manufacture, agriculture, railroads, and manufacturing in the western part of the country. This effective enclosure inspired Japanese capitalists to create their own enclosure.
The northern island of Japan is called Hokkaido. In the early 19th century that island was relatively undeveloped and populated by indigenous inhabitants. Japanese capitalists hired a planner from the United States to learn how to develop Hokkaido. They were inspired by the enormous wealth derived from the westward expansion in the United States.
Japan then worked to subjugate the indigenous people of Hokkaido. They mobilized Japanese nationals to develop the Island and constructed railroads to facilitate trade. Because of this success Japan then colonized Korea, Taiwan, and the northeast of China that they called Manchukuo.
French capitalists also wanted their own enclosure. They decided on the continent of Africa. The French needed to share their enclosure with the nations of Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. As a result, millions of Africans died as a result of these effective enclosures that became colonies.
The capitalist drive to dominate the world was driven by the need of capitalist enterprises to continually grow. Henry Ford profited from this need of capitalism with his automotive assembly plant. Workers produced thousands of automotive parts that other workers put together on the assembly line.
The owner of Italian corporation Fiat was inspired by Ford's operation. Workers who toiled for Fiat built an assembly plant in Turin, Italy. This plant was modeled on the Ford assembly process.
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a central leader of the Russian Revolution, was aware of the capitalist attempt to dominate the world. He was also aware of globalized cartels that competed for access to the world's natural resources. Analyzing this atmosphere in 1917, Lenin concluded that the underlying reasons for the First World War were about global competition of imperialist powers.
In other words, the First World War didn't happen because of mistakes in judgement by powerful people. No, Lenin argued that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism and that led to the inevitability of two world wars that cost the lives of perhaps 80 million people.
Keynesian economics, and the Communist Manifesto
When we look at the history of capitalism, one continuous feature of this system is war. Capitalist politicians don't like to talk about the financial or human costs of war. Those costs were one of the reasons for the global depression of the 1930s.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto in 1848. In that document they explained why depressions like the one in the 1930s are inevitable.
"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war, of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much commerce."
John Maynard Keynes studied economics and was aware of the Communist Manifesto. He was also aware of the possibility that depressions like the one in the 1930s could be the undoing of capitalism. However, instead of learning from Marx and Engels, he was indifferent to their arguments. Keynes believed that depressions might be avoided through regulations of capitalist enterprises.
After the Second World War there was an upturn for capitalism and many nations adopted Keynesian economics. Under those conditions workers organized in unions and went on strikes demanding higher wages and better working conditions. For most workers in the United States and Europe there was a significant improvement in the standard of living.
However, something else happened after the Second World War. As Lenin argued, the state was invented for capitalism as a "special instrument of repression." After WWII that instrument of repression was unleashed with a vengeance.
Before the end of WWII, the United States invited representatives of capitalists in 44 nations to a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. There the United States government effectively announced that it would be the new world's superpower replacing Britain. The U.S. dollar would be the new international currency. Then the United States Air Force showed the world what would happen as a punishment for non-compliance with the dictates of Washington and Wall Street.
Air Force General Curtis LeMay organized the fire-bombing of about 67 of Japan's largest cities. That bombing campaign destroyed large parts of those cities. At the end of this campaign, the Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
General LeMay was also involved in the near total destruction of northern Korea during the U.S. invasion of that country. In Vietnam General LeMay summarized the massive bombing campaign of that country with the following words. He argued that he wanted to bomb Vietnam "back into the stone age." LeMay also favored using atomic bombs against the sovereign nation of Cuba.
We might also consider that during most of the economic upturn after WWII the government consistently violated the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. All branches of the government supported the infamous Jim Crow laws that stripped Black people of citizenship rights here.
Only because of the civil rights and Black power movements did the government concede to give Black people citizenship rights they were denied. However, the massive demonstrations in 2020 protesting murders by the police of Black people is clear evidence that institutionalized discrimination in this country continues.
Also during the period of capitalist upturn many women were segregated into jobs as nurses, secretaries, or housekeepers. Many were prohibited from wearing pants at work. They weren't allowed to have credit cards in their own name, and sexual harassment was routine. Women did not have the right to decide if and when they became mothers. This all began to change with government concessions prompted by the Second Wave of Feminism in the early 1970s.
Neoliberalism
In the early 1970s Paul Volcker informed President Nixon that the United States didn't have the money to pay for the war against Vietnam. Volcker convinced Nixon to take the dollar off the gold standard. This action eventually prompted the government to drastically increase interest rates.
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both studied economics and were aware of the Communist Manifesto. Like John Maynard Keynes they were both either indifferent of hostile to its arguments.
Hayek and Friedman were also hostile to the regulatory policies of Keynes. They believed in a complex economic formula that in essence mirrored capitalist economic policy before the depression of the 1930s. Instead of favoring government regulation their neoliberal policies favored deregulation of capitalist enterprises. Their system is known as neoliberalism.
Up until the 1970s manufacturing enterprises in the United States were the driving force of the economy. Then banks became the dominant force. Banks invested huge amounts of money all over the world searching for places where wages were the lowest.
Sven Beckert presented the event that gave birth to neoliberalism. This was the military overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende. The military murdered thousands of Chileans so the economy would be deregulated.
As a result, a minority of the Chilean population grew wealthy while the vast majority saw their standard of living collapse. Wall Street investors celebrated, while Chileans needed to wear gas masks on their way to work in Santiago because of the intense pollution in the city. This was caused by eliminating pollution controls in favor of free market economics.
I worked in two automotive factories in Philadelphia for twenty-one years. Those factories were among the hundreds of factories that closed in the Delaware Valley due to the free market economics of neoliberalism.
We can see where much of that work went by reading the labels on our clothing. Workers from all over the world produce the clothing we wear at wages that hover around two dollars per day. These conditions explain why the United Nations estimates that about 15,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases.
We might consider that both Hayek and Friedman, the architects of neoliberalism, received Nobel Prizes for the unimaginable horror their theories inflicted on the world. Then, after the economic crash of 2008 another Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, argued that the neoliberal experiment had "in every aspect failed."
Apparently Stiglitz is also indifferent to the arguments in the Communist Manifesto. Had he taken a serious look at those arguments, he would have understood that both the arguments of Keynes and neoliberalism were doomed from the start. The problem isn't a question of economic strategy in capitalism, but the inherent contradictions of the political economic system of capitalism.
1948 and the establishment of South Africa and Israel
As the United States capitalist government asserted itself in the world after the Second World War, they decided to manage things differently from British colonial imperialism. In most cases, instead of using colonial authorities to manage entire nations, they used the economic incentives and punishments to enforce their will.
Up until 1948 South Africa and Israel were colonies of Britain. Then the largely European immigrants of those countries imitated colonial policy in the world and erected colonial settler regimes.
In South Africa the ruling powers established the apartheid laws. These laws mirrored the Jim Crow laws of the United States that prohibited any form of equality between the indigenous Black habitants and the descendants of the European immigrants.
Because of anti-apartheid struggles in South African and the support they received from around the world, the apartheid laws were abolished in the early 1990s. Then the people of South Africa elected Nelson Mandela, who had been incarcerated for 27 years, to be their President.
In British Palestine the indigenous Palestinian people were the large majority. There was a minority Jewish community who lived in this area continuously and they usually spoke the predominant language that was Arabic. Before the establishment of Israel Jewish people had been living in the Arabic speaking countries for centuries.
Then Jews who were escaping vicious persecution in Europe immigrated to British Palestine. Most of those immigrants supported the political ideas of Zionism. Zionism argued for an exclusively Jewish nation where Jews would dominate the politics and economics of the country.
Then in the 1940s the Zionist organizations of the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang (Lehi) carried out a series of terrorist actions against the British, the Palestinians, as well as against Jews who opposed their actions.
The goal of these terrorist organizations was clear. They were about creating a majority Jewish community in the nation that became Israel. In order to do this the majority of the Palestinians were forced out of their homeland without compensation. Millions of those Palestinians have lived in territories occupied by Israel. There they are denied equal rights to the descendants of immigrants who came to Palestine.
Since 1948 Palestinians used every form of protest to gain equal rights in their homeland. They even agreed to establishing a nation on 22% of the land occupied by Israel. The Israeli government adamantly refused even this modest concession.
This is the background to the Hamas organized raid on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. While the Israeli government worked diligently in preventing the world from finding out what happened on that day, we can make a few conclusions.
There were civilians who the Hamas insurgents murdered or kidnapped. Successful revolutionary movements from around the world have made it clear that they were adamantly opposed to the murder of civilians.
An exception was the written order by General George Washington to General Sullivan. Today we can see how Washington gave the order to murder and kidnap Iroquois civilians during the revolution of the thirteen colonies.
After October 7 the Israeli government went on a genocidal campaign of mass murder, mutilation, and starvation of Palestinians. The Gaza Strip is about the same size as the city of Philadelphia where I live. About 80% of all the buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed by the so-called Israeli Defense Force.
Immigration, a necessary creation of capitalism
When we look at the history of capitalism, we see that either forced or voluntary immigration or migration has been a consistent feature. The unimaginably horrendous conditions endured by kidnapped Africans transported to the Americas was the first step of international capitalism. British nationals convicted of insignificant crimes served their sentences as indentured servants in the Americas.
I'm 73-years-old and during my entire life I've attended school and worked with people who were born outside of this country. These immigrants came here from every part of the world.
When we look at the astronomical economic growth in China, we see that this growth wouldn't have happened were it not for the migration of perhaps 300 million people from the Chinese countryside to the cities. Because of the Hukou laws, these Chinese nationals, who were born in the countryside, do not have the same rights to education, health care, and housing as Chinese nationals who were born in cities.
It isn't a secret as to why people come here from other countries. The United Nations estimates that about 13,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases. Sven Beckert reported on the underlying reasons for this state of affairs. "almost half of the world's people—46.4 percent, or a total of 3.6 billion—still live on $6.85 or less a day."
It isn't a secret as to who those people are who live on $6.85 or less. All we need to do is to look at the labels on the clothes we wear every day. Then we can think about the coffee we drink and the cars most people ride in. Most of the commodities we use are made outside of this country by people who receive nearly starvation wages.
Therefore capitalists profit from commodities made in other countries as well as goods and services produced here by immigrants. Today we see how the government is on an all out drive to kidnap people who live here because they were born in other countries.
The excuse the government gives for these horrendous crimes is that about twelve million immigrants who live here don't have the documents that would make them legal. Well, forcing Africans to come here to be enslaved was legal. Forcing the Cherokee off their land in the trail of tears in violation of a treaty was legal. Refusing to give 937 Jewish refugees on the ship the MS St, Louis refuge from Nazi Germany was legal. About 250 of those passengers would be murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. Increasing the prison population in the United States from about 300,000 to two million, that was also legal.
There is another explanation for why the United States government gave Israel $20 billion for their genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Then they voted to spend $75 billion to fund the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). They did this in their effort to kidnap brutalize working people all over the world. This has been the history of capitalism.
Conclusion
Today growing numbers of people see that there are profound and worsening problems all over the world. We've seen this in the massive international demonstrations protesting Israeli organized genocide. Then there were the massive No Kings demonstrations protesting the move to totalitarian rule in this country. Numerous groups are organizing to defend our immigrant sisters and brothers from kidnapping, warehousing, and deportations.
When I look at the news everyday it appears that we have reached a clear flash point in the history of the capitalist system. Keynesian economics and neoliberalism have been pushed aside. For many years successive Presidential Administrations have been taking more and more power.
After the Second World War the United States manufactured about 60% of the commodities in the world. Now Asia manufactures about 50% of the commodities in the world, while the United States' share is about 16%. There is no force in the world that can bring the capitalists in the United States back to their dominance after WWII.
The Administration of Donald Trump seeks to dominate the world through naked coercion. He has sued corporate law firms and universities. He has issued tariffs on any nation that refuses to bow to his will. He ordered the military to murder people on the high seas and has defended ICE agents who murdered U.S. citizens for taking photos.
Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro refused to bow to the will of Washington. Trump responded by ordering the military to kidnap him as well as his wife Cilia Flores. We might consider that the U.S. government has a long history of organizing to overthrow elected leaders.
Ever since the 1959 Cuban Revolution the U.S. government used considerable resources to overthrow the Cuban government. Those efforts included an onerous trade embargo.
Now the Trump Administration has declared a "National Emergency" in its efforts to overturn the Cuba Revolution. He is using the full force of the United States to block oil shipments to the island. Those efforts are aimed at the Cuban people who continue to support their government that makes a priority of human life over the drive to maximize profits.
Cuba has shown the world that a completely different kind of world is possible. Cuba not only has twice the numbers of doctors per capita as the United States, they send their doctors all over the world to treat people who lack medical care. They also have trained thousands of people to become doctors. Their priorities have been to ensure that all Cubans have the necessities of life as well as whatever support they can give to people in the world who are in need.
The capitalist government of the United States understands that the existence of the Cuban government is an obstacle to their tenacious drive to control the markets of the world. While the U.S. government succeeded in overturning governments all over the world, since 1959 they have failed in all their efforts to overthrow the Cuban government.
Sven Beckert gave us and important global history of capitalism. However, he doesn't appear to be an advocate for socialism, or a workers government that would make human needs and not profits the priority. If he had that perspective it is unlikely that he would have received funding from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation.
Another limitation in Beckert's book is that he paid little attention to the tenacious movements that challenged the horrors of capitalism throughout its history. We can think about the hundreds of years of wars where Native Americans did everything in their power to defend themselves from the theft of their land and culture. Then there were the rebellions against slavery, legalized discrimination, institutionalized discrimination, and murders by the police.
The labor movement in the United States has been battling ever since the rail strike of 1877. Women engaged in two waves of feminism in their struggle to be treated with dignity and not as sexual objects.
There have been socialist inspired revolutions in the world. Supporters of capitalism are quick to argue that these revolutions evolved into disasters.
In fact the Russian Revolution was betrayed by Joseph Stalin and his supporters. Stalin then became a dictator who used capitalist methods to run the Soviet Union. Today Vladimir Putin openly castigates Lenin who was the central leader of the Russian Revolution.
In China we also see how the government has bowed to capitalism. Banks invested heavily in China for a few reasons. During the 1980s China had some of the lowest wages in the world. Unlike India, China made massive investments to modernize their transportation system. Because there has been a significant improvement in the standard of living, China is now outsourcing work just as the United States outsourced work in the past.
We can imagine the possibilities for a future world where there is genuine democracy and the needs of all humanity become the priority. We all need and want food, clothing, housing, transportation, communication, health care, education, and exposure to culture.
However, in the capitalist system there are many enterprises that add no value to those goods and services, yet the costs of those enterprises are included in the prices we pay. These include corporate profits, interest, insurance, advertising, rents, corporate law, as well as the military.
What we need today is the vision and organization to create an international movement aimed at transforming the world. That is the only way humanity can escape from the long history of the horrors of capitalism. When we look at the history of the resistance to this system, we can conclude that we indeed have the potential to transform the world and rebuild it using completely new foundations.
