Beyond the Shadow
Capitalism: A Global History, Sven Beckert, 2025 (pt.II).
This is part II of my review of Sven Beckert’s ‘Capitalism: A Global History’. You can read part I here.
Historiography has momentum. As much as any social scientists, if not more so, historians are susceptible to allowing the weight of pre-existing literature (the types of historical actors, the key events, and so on, which have been previously emphasised and studied) to drive their interpretation of events. Cloaked under general references to continuity and change, a historian can subtly shift what exactly they are describing without acknowledging the implications of doing so.
As I discussed in part one of this review, Sven Beckert’s focus in the first half of Capitalism: A Global History is overwhelmingly on merchants, states, and colonial expansion. His sketch is of an ‘archipelago of capital’—islands of capitalism in a sea of largely non-commercialised economic activity—which ‘grew’ to encompass an ever-larger portion of the globe during the early-modern era, especially during what Beckert (and others) call the ‘long sixteenth century’. This is very similar to the landscape painted by Fernand Braudel in his famed three volume work Civilisation & Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries. Like Braudel, Beckert avoids following major political events—what Braudel might describe as ephemera—and instead builds his narrative around the changing flavour of commercial activity. And also like Braudel, this narrative is weighted in favour of commerce and the organisation of production, not ‘social history’ in the classic sense of studying everyday lives, work, and consumption.
But when Beckert leaves the direct temporal shadow of Braudel’s Capitalism & Civilisation, roughly halfway through his book, this focus changes abruptly. The distinctly Braudelian flavouring gives way to something perhaps more conventional: a synthesis of political, social, and economic history. While the first half had little to say about events, the second is brimming with them: from the Haitian Revolution and the World Wars to Bretton Woods and the 1973 oil crisis. The individual vignettes are no longer only those of merchants. And the concerns of everyday life—namely consumption habits and labour conditions—take centre stage. One may hope that this change in focus improves the book, freeing Capitalism of the issues it inherited from Braudel. Unfortunately, these flaws are only replaced with new ones; and the book’s core weakness—a fundamental lack of argument—is further inflamed.
That said, there is at least one area where I think Beckert writes well: the major changes in consumption habits since the mid-twentieth century. I do not mean the well-worn-if-important story of the explosion of consumer goods such as refrigerators, radios, and televisions, but the equally dramatic change in the services that wealthy countries consume, of which Beckert highlights two: eating-out and tourism. The latter has been the most globally transformative. Beckert studies a number of poignant and diverse cases. In the Dominican Republic (as in so many places), ‘beaches that had been previously almost worthless rapidly became commoditised’. By the 1980s, an erstwhile plantation economy had been completely reoriented towards satiating the European and American desire to drink cocktails on a beach.
The development of the Yucatán coast of Mexico makes for another dramatic example: one where near-uninhabitable jungle became, in the course of a few decades, one of the world’s biggest destinations.1 Beckert is keen to stress the impact of these transformations on labour: on peasants who became construction labourers, hoteliers, and sex workers. Tying this to the same capitalist development of the global countryside that early-modern slavery participated in, Beckert reminds you of what the New History of Capitalism (NHC) approach does best: interweaving the global histories of labour in the periphery and consumption in the metropole.
Perhaps because of this, I was surprisingly disappointed by Beckert’s analysis of indentured labour after slavery, a topic close to the NHC heart, since it underlines, in an oft-forgotten context, the economic role of violence and the state in global economic development. Here at least we see Beckert delivering an argument: in his view, the resurgence of indentured labour from 1830-1930 had two causes: the difficulties that capitalists had in keeping emancipated slaves (freedpeople) on pre-existing plantations, and their equivalent struggle in turning local peasants into plantation workers in new agricultural frontiers such as Ceylon. The grand point he wishes to make is that ‘colonialism was also a form of labour mobilisation’, even in the twentieth century.
But Beckert overstretches this claim in a way I find difficult to swallow. He rightly points out that, after 1830, over two million indentured labourers were transported around the world (and in particular to Caribbean plantations) by European powers, almost always from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. This flow, while substantial, pales in comparison to the roughly 12 million slaves transported across the Atlantic. However, Beckert claims that the number of indentured labourers transported in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century ‘was greater than the number bought and sold by the Atlantic slave trade’. How does he do this? By supplementing that two million with the 27 million Indian workers ‘sent… [to] power rapidly growing rice, tea, and rubber plantations’ in Burma, Ceylon, and Malaysia.
The problem, however, is that the vast majority of these workers were not indentured. While many experienced coercion, this happened largely after emigration: through debt-traps and abusive contracts; which, while terrible, are very different to the Atlantic slave trade's forced transportation and the formal bondage of indenture. Do not take it on my authority—this is the argument put forward by Ritesh Jaiswal in, bizarrely, one of the very articles Beckert cites for his claims. In Jaiswal’s words,
‘in the historiography on Indian migration there has been a strong tendency to view colonial migration as largely indentured in form, coercive and un-free in nature, stimulated mainly through the agency of Europeans… such an approach completely neglects the multidimensional nature of Indian emigration as it existed in the nineteenth and the twentieth century’.2
Jaiswal also proceeds to demonstrate that, of all the Indian immigrants who went to Burma, the vast majority went into urban labour and not, per Beckert, plantation agriculture. The 1921 census that Jaiswal cites records Indian migrants as 2% of cultivating tenants and 4% of agricultural labourers in Burma. Beckert’s picture is misleading from every angle.
This degree of unexplained conflict between claim and citation is especially frustrating because this is precisely the area where I expect a historian like Beckert to excel. To the best of my knowledge, other NHC-adjacent historians who emphasise labour coercion in modernity, such as Alessandro Stanziani (whom Beckert also cites), do not make such an erroneous conflation between subcontinental emigration and indentured labour, nor use a distorted picture to implicitly equate either to the Atlantic slave trade.3
The deficiencies in this argument are a shame, because the most critical issue in Capitalism remains the lack of serious attempts to delineate the causes of long-run economic change. As in the first half of the book, the closest thing to a continuous thread is Beckert’s stress on the role of the state and its symbiotic relationship to capital. He writes that ‘the state imposes itself on any student of capitalism’s history, and never more so than during the late nineteenth century… the state’s enclosures accelerated capital’s expansion’. ‘Enclosures’ are defined broadly to include European imperial expansions, dissolutions of the commons, new forms of property rights, and, somewhat amusingly, the development of the economics discipline—which was, Beckert writes, decontextualised ‘from history, class, and society at the apex moment of [its] politicisation’ (I can’t help but feel that, whatever one’s thoughts on economics as a discipline, this latter ‘enclosure’ is not quite of the same world-historic magnitude as the others).
The state continues to loom large over Beckert’s account of the postwar period: in the Keynesian/dirigiste revolution in wealthy countries, and in development within the global periphery. Postwar Japan’s industrial system, for example, illustrates for Beckert how ‘capitalism continued to be as much a project of states as of capital owners’. India’s pre- and post-independence entrepreneurs believed that ‘a strong state dedicated to the interests of Indian capital was essential’, as to an extent did those in Nigeria. Korea and Taiwan ‘were pioneers in creating new nodes of capital built upon new nodes of state power’. And where the arc of midcentury development was less than successful, such as in Burkina Faso, it was, among other things, that ‘the only group of people who accumulated significant resources were elites linked to the state’. Beckert reels off these case studies only marginally less breathlessly than I just have: as with so many of the subjects in his book, they are presented in quick succession, and only afforded a couple of pages each. Ambitious scope, even for a book this long, comes at a price.
In sum, although the content of Beckert’s narrative becomes more original as it develops, the core issue remains the same. In the first half, you learn that the state is the pivot of capitalist development because of how it constrains and enables merchants, especially via ‘war capitalism’ abroad. In the second, this broadens: the state expands capitalism through a plethora of ‘enclosures’, but also transforms its own character by behaving as a lever of development. But, for all this, there is little in Beckert that could be considered a theory of the role of the state in capitalist development. Which ‘enclosures’ mattered most, and why? What made some postcolonial states better able to enmesh themselves in global capitalism than others? In the end, all we are again left with is a long list of ways that the state has, to some degree, been involved in historical economic development—not an insight which will transform how anyone understands or explains global capitalism.
As a final reflection on Beckert, I want to address something else which runs through his entire book: eurocentrism. More precisely, I mean Beckert’s insistence that he overcomes it—that Capitalism is a non-eurocentric (perhaps the first non-eurocentric) global history of capitalism. While Beckert certainly includes many well-chosen vignettes from outside Europe in his narrative, I’m not convinced that Capitalism: A Global History isn’t eurocentric. To my mind, avoiding eurocentrism implies more than just reeling off anecdotes from around the world.
This seems apparent even from within the NHC framework. To quote Stanziani, to write history non-eurocentrically means to ‘study Europe itself without presuming that it is the nucleus of modernity’.4 Beckert, however, does the opposite: by abdicating from the responsibility of explaining what he charts, and by leaving the development of capitalism as an amorphous, almost organic process, Europe inevitably becomes this nucleus. On the prospect that European supremacy was not pre-ordained, Beckert only shrugs and says: perhaps capitalism could have developed differently, but the reality is that it developed in Europe. If that isn’t eurocentric, what is?
I look at this topic a little further in the supplemental to this review.
Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal, ‘Ephemeral Mobility: Critical Appraisal of the facets of Indian Migration and the Maistry mediation in Burma 1880-1940’, 2018. Burma represents 15 of Beckert’s 27 million. As Jaiswal points out, the issue isn’t only that these workers were not indentured and worked mainly outside plantation agriculture: they also often left and returned multiple times, and so a substantial portion of the total figure is multiple journeys by the same individual.
Alessandro Stanziani, ‘Labour Regime and Labour Mobility from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,’ 2019.
Alessandro Stanziani, Empires of Labour, 2025.
Are you sure about those numbers? 15 million Indian immigrants in colonial Burma is an absurd figure. The entire population of Burma was around 13 million in 1921.