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

A seemingly small technical innovation had an outsize impact on this radical project of enclosure: barbed wire. In 1857, John Grinning, an iron foundry worker from Austin, Texas, was the first person to incorporate barbed wire into fencing by attaching sharp metal pieces to wire.

A new kind of capitalism had emerged by the early twentieth century, arising from the ashes of the old regime. These global reconstructions responded not only to the rebellions of industrial workers, rural cultivators, and capital owners but also to economic crisis and the technical and administrative possibilities of the age.

As work was reconstructed, a new intensity of manufacturing labor became ever more common: Workers spent most of their waking hours in the factory. Until 1918, the standard workday in Germany (and elsewhere) was twelve hours. And even that was not a given.

As chains and lashes faded as symbols of capital owners’ power, debt came to the fore, a contractual relationship that ordered new forms of dependence and new kinds of coercion. Fettering workers to their employers to extract their labor inexpensively and durably, the reconstruction of agricultural labor created a countryside filled with toilers working primarily to pay off their debts.

capitalism was, and continues to be, a state-driven project

'...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.