Capitalism: A Global History

by Sven Beckert

A New York Times Notable Book • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

"A learned, formidable and vivid story… Readers around the world will study and ponder this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance, for decades to come." — Marcus Rediker, The New York Times

“Epic… Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know culled from places you have never been… [Readers], including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship and be glad to have a valuable tool of reference on their shelves.” –John Kay, Financial Times

A landmark event years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human history

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. 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, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.

Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach.

By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind. Though cloaked in a false timelessness and universality, capitalism is, in reality, a recent human invention. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, Finance, World History, 19th Century

1343 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2025

About the author

The Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, Sven Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. Professor Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the 19th century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political, and transnational dimensions. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my day job, I have spent lots of time discussing firms, their strategies, how they compete with each other, and how they are affected by governments, such as through regulation and antitrust. I have read a lot about capitalism, beginning back when Alfred Chandler was publishing his massive tomes on large industrial firms. So I did not approach Sven Beckert’s new global history of capitalism lightly but rather with high expectations. I first encountered Professor Beckert’s ‘Empire of Cotton’ a few years back and was dazzled by how much a single book could change my view of a topic.

This magnificent and long (1300 pages) book exceeded my expectations and was well worth the effort. I tried to read carefully but found myself amazed at the sheer volume of material, insights, value, and whatever that came out in this book. It is easy to talk about the need for rereadings, but I feel for the students - graduate or undergraduate - who will be called upon to master this book in a class. I also suspect that more than a few dissertations in economic or business history in the next few years are going to have components that challenge or expand upon Becker’s treatments in this book.

The account in the book begins in Aden in 1150. It could have begun earlier and in other places. Much of the book focuses on the heyday of capitalism as being within the past 500 years. This is fitting. Capitalism refers to a number of related ideas/events that popped in a variety of locations at different times and in different conditions. These events started to take hold and persist and the limited nature of the capitalist world became less limited as capitalism as a system took shape and grew. Academics as a rules tend to break up big topics into smaller ones that can be intensively studied. That is part of why so much is written about economics in particular countries at particular times. While that may be promotive of finished dissertations and published papers, it sometimes is not conducive to the effective telling of big stories.

Indeed, Professor Becker’s position in this book is that Capitalism is such a huge shapeshifting topic that its story needs to be told on a global stage over an extended period of time. After finishing the book I have to agree. Towards the end, Becker even makes allusions to Capitalism as the most effective of world religions.

I have no spoilers to offer. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and heartily recommend it, especially if one can spare the time.

[Captain Absurd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating book leaves the reader with hope (at least in my case). We learn what the likely end of capitalism might look like. At one point, the author says that a system based on the power of capital is like an artificial intelligence algorithm that has broken free from our collective control to wreak havoc and inequality across the planet. I think this is a timely, interesting, and compelling comparison.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

an inessential overview

Well, one can't accuse Beckert of not trying to be verbose - a 42 hour mainly historical overview that offers merely anodyne observations. I heard a podcast where he emphasized state capacity yet he doesn't really elaborate on that very much in the book. While I'm sympathetic to most of the views conveyed here, the neoliberal boogeyman looms a bit too large and in the end the author fumbles around for alternatives without coming up with any. For long reads I would much more look to Levy's "Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States" (while it doesn't cover every nook and cranny in the world and you won't get to read a longish passage on the introduction of the typewriter to India, it covers the history of capitalism much better - I'm sure there are many others further back I have yet to read).

[Ryan O'Malley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly what I wanted from a history of Capitalism

[David C Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

A monumental, and very readable survey, basically covering the world’s economy from around 1000 to today. It’s especially good at showing how in the shift from merchant to industrial capitalism slavery/coerced labor was absolutely essential as well as state intervention through what Beckert calls “war capitalism.” It turns out that imperialism wasn’t the highest stage of capitalism (R Luxembourg) but the essential first stage, especially for the Northern European countries. The transitional period gives the lie to the dominant ideological justification, created by the successful, that economic and social success was a result of the “freedom” of individual talent and ambition. What to do about the continued power of that argument (Thatcher, Reagan, the Wall Street Journal) is the question.
I’ll lower the rating to 4.9 because Beckert has the academic’s habit, born of lecturing, of repeating or recapitulating his arguments; and I don’t need to see the term “nodes of capitalism” for a while.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates Jr. hailed Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History as "certain to become a canonical work of history" and I can think of no better way to introduce my sentiments than that: this book is canonical. He gets right down to the brass tax of the book pretty quickly, articulating a clear set of questions that he answers in over 1000 pages afterwards: "How did the capitalist revolution begin? How did a form of economic life that was such a breakaway from previous history spread around the world and into more spheres of life? How did we move from a society in which markets were embedded in social relations to one in which social relations are embedded in markets? By what mechanism has capitalism evolved and changed over time? And where are we in its history today?". If those aren't your questions, this probably isn't the book for you; Thankfully though, they apply to a number of disciplines and inquiries.

It is impossible to tell the story of capitalism without Europe. Not because of a superiority of application or conception, but on the basis of the sheer volume of violent dispossession and enslavement used to create a hierarchy upon which Europe claimed the top spot for itself. Beckert says the quiet part rather loud: Europe was capitalism's market-focused engine whose motto became marketization or bust. Unfortunately we are living in the "busted" remains. Industries in British, Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonies are the economies affected by the remains, where they did not have the same opportunity as Europe, to develop industries on their own terms. Beckert writes about their present commodities as a reflection of past development that refused anything other than what served European interests and barons thereof. Would textiles, coal, diamonds, coffee, sugar, rum, gas, and other cornerstone industries be a GDP priority or dominate a country's trade if "Western"/Global North countries did not foist them upon colonized subjects? The West owes everything it has to the uneven way the world was developed under capitalism through enslavement, largely of Black and Brown people, and subsequent plantation logics intermingled with Fordist and Taylorist productivity and efficiency narratives that still dominate today's wage labours. I learned that the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana (CAPL) mortgaged enslaved people to securitize them and that "in 1828, the British merchant bank Baring Brothers bought $1.67 million of CAPL bonds to resell on European securities markets" (p.391). In other words, despite countries outlawing slavery, the generational wealth of aristocratic families across colonizing countries was consolidated through mortgaging enslaved people in the United States. Beckert reviews far more history than this and with greater detail than I could summarize here. I could not ignore the centrality of slavery to modern capitalism and the wealth that allows one to participate in politics which shapes policies and social relations for even more generations. It will be impossible to read this book and misunderstand what someone means when they say that the world as we know it was built by enslaved people in the United States. It will be equally impossible to read this book and wonder how reparations are a subject of debate rather than a de facto step to repairing historical harms (not something Beckert talks about as such, but there is ample research to demonstrate exploitation that in my opinion, necessitates reparations).

Capitalism departs from similar authoritative delineations by emphasizing that it is an object of human creation; Over and over again for the cheap seats in the back. Beckert writes a historical introduction to capitalism and an accordant prologue to the uneven development that characterizes globalization narratives today. Additionally, he shows (with an admittedly enviable discursive ease), the mechanisms of capitalism that, in other treatments I've read, were never as clear as in his book. Readers will understand the necessity of the state and how the notion of the wealthiest 1% is not a new economic production, but a feature of capitalism that was present in the 1600s through to the 1800s. Capitalism cannot survive if not suctioned to the state vis-a-vis policies and politics protecting the structural interests and subsequent financial interests of its arbiters that allow it to live another day. The only surprise was how relevant this history was to describing where we are in 2026, where the next few decades will likely replicate disordered social relations strewn through emergent means of production (enshittification, and technofeudalism, anyone?) like badly rolled dice across the gameboard of human history. As we try to belch away the remains of capitalist indigestion in social relations, Beckert offers compelling reason to believe that there will likely be uprisings and protests similar to the ones capitalism wrought upon shifts from pastoral to cosmopolitan landscapes. In short, despite the protests characterizing the past decade, we probably "ain't seen nothing yet". It was a relief in a way, to understand that the dumpster fire vibe of the world today isn't new, nor does it make anyone special for sussing it out. The book is an indispensable volume for everyone, but it is especially illuminating and ideological momentum building for those with left-leaning political sentiments. Some folks on the right or those inclined towards capitalism's privileges may argue that it sifts through history, though I would argue that the book excavated it with an unparalleled depth of research.

In the introduction (which, if you only read one chapter of this book, I would recommend it be that one) Beckert writes that "We are not just subjects of capitalism; we are its architects". It is the enduring gift of this book for readers. His book is a necessary reminder that capitalism is a concept different from that of a singular economy. By writing such a richly detailed history he shows readers that as the rivers of time ebb, crest, and flow, capitalism is neither the river or the boat. It's just a steep riverbank we've stopped at in the long arc of human history. In other words, he breathes a little more life into the imaginary of alternatives with this incredible work. Where the meme-friendly sentiment of overthrowing capitalism gets tossed around as a joke, Beckert writes a quiet hope into the numbing effect of modernity. Disentanglement from the "God trick" of the history of capitalism is, I think, one of the best features of the book. Despite what devout capitalists tell you as they place their faith in the altars of production and accumulation, in the beginning there was not capitalism. And there was light before capitalism or its beneficiaries declared it be on.

To read Sven Beckert's book will no doubt be a significant investment of your time. At 1087 pages of book, and about 200 pages of endnotes, it is what Gen Z might call "thicc". For those seeking a comprehensive and truly global history of capitalism, it is worth every minute of your attention. Capitalism will be the definitive volume on its titular subject for at least a decade and perhaps an era, eclipsing the efforts of his genre forebears. Where Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations advocating for an ideological capitalism, Capitalism provides a substantial history of its implementation and logic sufficient to give readers grist for the critical thinking mill that asks whether there is no better alternative. It is a good thing I enjoy endurance sports because reading this book was the ultramarathon of book geekery. I would highly recommend this book!

[WildesKopfkino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kapitalismus – dieses Wort liegt sonst so trocken im Mund wie Kreidestaub. Bei Sven Beckert schmeckt es plötzlich nach Zucker, Schweiß, Geld, Gewalt und Hoffnung zugleich. Dieses Buch fühlt sich nicht an wie Wirtschaftsgeschichte, sondern wie eine Weltreise durch Jahrhunderte, bei der man ständig denkt: Verdammt, genau hier leben wir gerade.

Keine europäische Erfolgsgeschichte mit Siegel und Schleife, sondern ein globales Geflecht aus Kaufleuten, Plantagen, Fabriken, Kanonenbooten und Kontobüchern. Beckert zeigt, wie Kapitalismus nicht einfach „passiert“ ist, sondern gemacht wurde – mit Macht, mit Zwang, mit Ideen und mit Blut. Während man noch über Baumwolle und Zucker stolpert, steht plötzlich die Klimakrise im Raum und schaut einen unangenehm ruhig an.

Besonders stark: die Klarheit. Komplexe Zusammenhänge werden nicht plattgebügelt, sondern entwirrt. Das Buch fordert Aufmerksamkeit, ja, aber es belohnt sie reichlich. Immer wieder diese inneren Momente: kurz innehalten, Kaffee abstellen, hochschauen und denken, wie absurd normal Ausbeutung über Jahrhunderte geworden ist – und wie tief sie bis heute wirkt.

Natürlich ist das kein Wohlfühlbuch. Manche Passagen sind schwer, manche brutal ehrlich, manche fast zornig. Doch genau darin liegt seine Kraft. Beckert rechnet nicht nur ab, er öffnet Denkfenster. Kapitalismus erscheint hier weder als reiner Bösewicht noch als glorreicher Held, sondern als menschengemachtes System mit gewaltigen Folgen – und damit auch mit Verantwortung.

Am Ende bleibt ein leises, unbequemes Gefühl zurück. Eines, das bleibt. Und Bücher, die das schaffen, verdienen Respekt.

[Ryan Mazzola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a seminal text that will live on in academia for GENERATIONS. I don’t know how, but Sven Beckert has produced the most complete account of global economic history, an unfathomable accomplishment. This book depicts the tragedy of capitalism as it unfolded, subsuming an ever expanding scope of noneconomic and social spheres. Slaughtering and dispossessing billions in its wake.

The book ends with a mind boggling note to future historians that look back on our time:

“They might celebrate us for our accomplishments or blame us for the long aftereffects of the world we created. They may struggle to grasp why we made sacrifices to a human-created god that threatened our species very existence. They might ask how we could have allowed an infinitesimal minority of the world's people to control so much of our resources. They might have difficulty understanding how we allowed for deprivation in the midst of unprecedented abundance. If they are truly good historians, however, they will try to grasp us on our own terms. They will bring their readers into the bowels of a truly puzzling past civilization, one ordered around a logic that will no doubt seem strange to these visitors from a far-future world. In finding us puzzling, they will come to better know us and, perhaps, themselves”

[Ethan Glattfelder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three days into 2026 and I’ve already finished my longest book of the year (which I started a month ago). Sven Beckert’s CAPITALISM is a surprisingly readable global history of capitalism that I found compelling and absorbing. The fact that it’s global (Beckert argues that any local, national, or regional view of capitalism is woefully insufficient) can make the book feel like a series of discrete examples of whatever point Beckert is trying to make. The beginning of the book also feels somewhat vague. It wasn’t clear to me at first how Beckert defines capital or capitalism, and the metaphor « islands » of capital is overused to a ludicrous degree. The back half was engaging and flew by, the conclusion spot-on and unbelievably depressing. A great book and what an achievement!

[ernest r. house · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism described and explained

A brilliant history of global capitalism from its beginning, featuring its strengths and weaknesses, including the heavy costs borne by workers.
In Bechert’s account, capitalism has no ethical sensibility. Moral concerns in society must come from elsewhere. Inequality of wealth is unconstrained, unless checked by government or other social forces. Nonetheless, productivity is undeniable. Extremely well written.

[Martin Crouchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible achievement. One of the most important nonfiction books I have read. I’m sure I will reread parts from time to time. Anyone seriously interested in the history of our world must have this book.

[KD]

NY Times, "100 Notable Books of 2025"

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 12/7, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*
Tremendous in both scope and readability.

[Rae Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minuteman. Skimmed. Over 1000 pp.

[Esben · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly recommended piece of literature! it deserves a spot among the great historical theses of history. Beckert covers so much phenomenal fact while maintaining beautiful brevity.

[Seth Petok]

A journey through a millennia of capitalism, from Aden to China, from Africa to Europe — Florence, Genoa, Venice — to the modern day physical and digital realms of trade.

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just combed through three books: Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, Capitalism: A Global History, and The History of Money: A Story of Humanity, which created an odd synthesis of the push-pull or dare I say, the supply-demand of capitalism's evolution.

Coupled with the history of money, it quickly becomes apparent that money and capitalism are profoundly human and as human creations, behave erratically, just like their creators.