Gerhard’s Reviews > Capitalism: A Global History > Status Update

'...in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius concluded that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would eventually change the Earth’s climate—just as it ultimately did. The gift wasn’t really free, of course, but when the bills came due a century later, they were largely shouldered by those who had never received the gift in the first place.'

New industries and new technologies (which some scholars have called the Second Industrial Revolution), as well as expanded administrative and military capacities, were not just solvents eating away at old ways of doing things but also dynamic catalysts for economic, social, and political power that allowed protagonists across social hierarchies to imagine a break with the past.

Just as the rebellions of unpropertied workers and rural cultivators led many a bourgeois to wonder about the wisdom of their at times enthusiastic support for their liberal project, European and European-descendant economic elites looked warily at the remaining power of African and Asian economic elites and worked actively to subdue them.

'Altogether, a stunning number of rural cultivators rebelled against the capitalist transformation of the countryside. They were hardly “a sack of potatoes,” as Karl Marx called them. Quite the opposite: Rural cultivators destabilized old-regime capitalism even as it penetrated ever more deeply into the world’s countryside.'

By midcentury, another significant and final sign of the transformation of the archipelago of capital into a distinct civilization emerged: It acquired a label—capitalism. As contemporaries grappled with the radical transformations they encountered, they discerned a set of “special qualities” and gave that complex reality a name.

While the bourgeoisie universally aspired to a world governed by markets, it defined itself by networks, rituals, habits, and manners that were not transacted on markets, a seeming contradiction at the heart of capitalist civilization.

According to the 1825 British Act to Make Further Provisions for the Regulation of Cotton Mills and Factories, and for the better Preservation of the Health of Young Persons Employed Therein, cotton mill workers were allowed a half hour for breakfast between six thirty and ten in the morning and an hour for dinner between eleven o’clock and two in the afternoon.

By midcentury, it had become clearer than ever before that capitalism was an imperial project that abhorred stasis. Capitalism was not, and cannot be, conservative; it has always been and continues to be a state of permanent revolution. Its expansionary drive came from its innermost logic—its continual need to generate more capital.

It is a stunning fact that more African slaves were forced into boats bound for the Americas between 1770 and 1860 than in the previous 270 years combined.

The Irish in the United States often worked on infrastructure projects. In the South, they substituted for slaves in dangerous labor such as building levees: As one Virginian planter put it, “[A] Negro’s life is too valuable to risk.”