Cut Adrift

Capitalism: A Global History, Sven Beckert, 2025 (pt.I).

The Uncertainty of the Poet, Giorgio de Chirico, 1913.

In 2014, Sven Beckert published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, an attempt to tell the history of capitalism through cotton. Perhaps because it leveraged the somewhat perplexing affection for the ‘history of a thing’ genre in popular history-writing (think Mark Kurlansky’s long-run histories of salt, cod and milk), it is fair to say that Empire of Cotton was a hit. But Beckert was trying to do more than write the history of a commodity: he wanted to both ‘reintroduce’ the study of capitalism into history and reframe the programme of research around slavery and the state in global perspective.

In November of last year, Beckert followed up with what is surely intended to be his magnum opus: the 1086-page tome Capitalism: A Global History, a vista through global economic history from the middle ages to the present. With a positive review in the New York Times, and at least as far as I can tell, a prime position in every semi-serious bookstore, it is heartwarming to believe that at least one publisher out there believes in the existence of a sufficient public appetite for economic history doorstoppers like this.

Nonetheless, just like Empire of Cotton, Beckert’s Capitalism has met a much colder reception amongst people who care about these things. This is unsurprising. Beckert—and the ‘New History of Capitalism’ (NHC) school-of-thought, of which he is the most prominent representative—seem to have made the mistake of alienating perhaps the two largest groups of people who care that much about economic history: liberal economists and Marxists. The former are frustrated by the NHC’s neglect of the quantitative literature, in particular the claims made about American slavery and its contribution to the British industrial revolution. The latter dislike the NHC’s sidestepping of the literature on the so-called capitalist transition—and, by extension, all the debates over defining what is capitalism—by keeping the concept amorphous while insisting on finding capitalism nearly everywhere in space and time.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Beckert seems to style his work so closely on the most venerable ‘third-way’ ever navigated between those two camps: the midcentury ‘Annales School’ of French social history, and in particular its greatest son, Fernand Braudel (whose three-volume epic, Civilisation & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, I reviewed back in 2024). Braudel was also inclined to take a flexible view of capitalism. Famously, his early-modern capitalism was amorphously identified with merchants, finance, and long-distance: it was, as Braudel put it, the ‘zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates’. Beckert takes explicit inspiration from Braudel (the ‘one author who has most influenced my thinking about the history of capitalism’), invoking him explicitly at least ten times while trying, if not necessarily succeeding, to infuse his narrative with the sort of thickly-lathered poetic imagery so distinctive of Braudel.

Despite its impressive length, Capitalism is actually much tighter and more succinct than Civilisation & Capitalism, which covers a shorter time period (only the 15th-18th centuries) in substantially more words, and is, I don’t think it’s unfair to say, perhaps a little bloated. While Braudel’s three volumes can often struggle to speak to each other—the first volume’s description of early-modern Chinese culinary stagnation¹ does not exactly slot cleanly alongside the third volume’s take on the consequences of Dutch financialisation—Beckert’s book is more focussed, which is all the more impressive because Capitalism is also genuinely more global. I was especially pleased to see the Geniza merchants of mediaeval Egypt discussed, and they are just one of the many scattered merchant communities which Beckert stitches effortlessly into his narrative. While this global span can be a little superficial, as Beckert sometimes descends into reeling off, in quick succession, one geographically-disparate reference after another, it stands in contrast to Braudel’s more unbalanced account, which frequently only compared Europe with China.

Furthermore, as one might perhaps expect from a New History of Capitalism historian, Beckert’s treatment of the early-modern Caribbean economy and plantation slavery is superior to Braudel’s. This is only natural, as for Beckert the development of the Caribbean economy is really the central component of capitalism’s history; a confluence through which almost all subsequent processes and transformations can be traced. While I am more sympathetic to this perspective than many economic historians are, I was nonetheless slightly disappointed to see Beckert fail to seriously engage with the disputes about the long-run role of Caribbean (and US) plantation slavery which followed Empire of Cotton. On the question of whether the plantation economy caused the Industrial Revolution, Beckert, invoking Barbara Solow, simply says that ‘perhaps capitalism could have developed differently… but the reality is that it developed based on slavery’; a rather glib dismissal of a serious historical debate. Similarly, when it comes to the question most associated with the NHC—whether (biological) agricultural technology or increasingly violent slave-driving explains cotton productivity growth in the American South—Beckert declares, anticlimactically, that ‘most likely it was both’. While this evasiveness is indeed unfortunate, Beckert’s multifaceted description of the plantation economy is excellent, both richer and more cohesive than Braudel’s.

But there are aspects of Capitalism that are painfully and unambiguously inferior to Civilisation & Capitalism. One is the prose. Braudel was certainly prone to overwrought metaphors, but they were original, rarely-repeated, and usually meaningful. Beckert’s choice metaphors, on the other hand, have a Braudelian aesthetic—insofar as they border on the grandiloquent—but are, upon inspection, conceptually incoherent. The worst offender in this regard is the recurring motif of Capitalism—Beckert’s characterisation of the world as constituted by ‘archipelagos of capital’. The world archipelago appears eighty-seven times in this book, almost always in the context of this metaphor. The archipelagos ‘expand’ and ‘burgeon’ while merchants fashion ‘islands’ and ‘nodes’ within. The archipelagos are ‘hemmed in by walls’, until capitalists and states ‘pursue a breakout strategy’. At one point, Beckert even tells us that the ‘expansion of the global archipelago of capital… was the soil from which capitalism sprang’—a turn of phrase that may make even those accustomed to mixed metaphors wince.²

This gripe may seem petty, or merely stylistic, but I believe that it illustrates a deeper problem with Capitalism: Beckert’s consistent failure to grapple with why change occurs, to theorise seriously about much at all. The archipelago metaphor has a clear spatial implication, but no dynamic. After all, leaving aside the random eruption of volcanos and the slow work of tectonic forces—all glacial phenomena, poorly suited to economic metaphor—how does an archipelago grow? No wonder Beckert is compelled to invoke tortured mixed metaphors. For someone so keen on critiquing the simplifications of economists—who, Beckert repeatedly argues, fail to ‘denaturalise’ capitalism by recognising its historical contingency—it is ironic that his most essential conceit is so static. Thinking of early-modern capitalism as an archipelago suggests nothing about the drivers of its long-run development.

This absence of explanation pervades the whole book. Capitalism is restricted to an archipelago of towns, until it isn’t. Merchants are unable or unwilling to enter industry and the countryside, until they are. More often than not, Beckert observes history rather than explaining it. This is in stark contrast to Braudel, who made a much stronger attempt at explaining the developments he charted, even if his explanations may seem quixotic or misguided today. In fact, Capitalism & Civilisation is filled with explanations; theories which try and grasp everything from the decline of China and the rise of the Dutch to the determinants of technological change and the ascendancy of shops over market stalls. Braudel does occasionally indulge in meandering description, especially in the first volume of Capitalism & Civilisation. But ultimately he makes a sincere effort to explain the long-run development he charts.

The closest Beckert comes to presenting an overarching theory of economic change is his insistence on the historical importance of the state. This is due to his desire to put the violence back into capitalism—to show that coercion and the exercise of political power cannot be separated from the expansion of the global market. Beckert’s quintessential example is the early colonial period of 1450-1640; the era, he writes, in which ‘the capitalism that we know originated’. A ‘peculiar intersection’ then existed, between merchants eager to break out of their ‘islands’ and states aiming to ‘escape the crisis of feudal rule’, the consequence of which would be a ‘spreading [of] the archipelago of capital’ via the formation of ‘novel islands’ (hopefully, you can start to glimpse why I find that metaphor more than a little over-strained). Here we have the makings of an argument, albeit one anticipated by Braudel: that early-modern European states, in concert with elite financiers and merchants, spread capitalism to the world at gunpoint. While you hardly need to be a committed Brennerite to object to this view, it is a thesis you can at least pin down.

But when Beckert moves beyond this era, his argument about how the state matters becomes much less precise. While he continues to argue that the state is everywhere intertwined with capitalism, exactly how—and with what consequence—is not clearly or consistently expressed. His claim falls back to something like ‘all development is connected to the state’, less a theory than a descriptive fact, and one which I doubt anyone would object to. And even in the early colonial period—the era of ‘war capitalism’, Beckert’s neologism carried over from Empire of Cotton—the implications of the collaboration between the state and elite groups of merchants are not well explained. Did it play a critical role in the development of capitalism within the colonial metropole, or did war capitalism mainly just create new ‘nodes of capital’ on the periphery? And how does any of this relate to the unevenness of modern development? It is not that there are no plausible answers to these questions, but that Beckert does not seriously interrogate them. ‘War capitalism’ is left stranded, a half-formed argument cut adrift in an archipelago of facts.

When I heard Beckert present this book back in March, I was struck by a particular remark he made, one which also appears in the introduction to Capitalism—that ‘there is no French capitalism or American capitalism; rather, there is capitalism in France and America’. I found it amusing when, later in his talk, Beckert explicitly contradicted this, stressing the nuances which separate ‘Brazilian capitalism’ from ‘American capitalism’. I was curious to see if this slip-up would find its way into the book itself, but it doesn’t. Beckert is, at least in print, consistent in his view that the development of capitalism needs to be understood as a global, historical process—whatever one thinks that means.

In this way and in others, Capitalism exceeded my expectations. These may have been low, in light of both the notoriety of the author’s previous work and the second-hand impressions I have been unable to fully tune out. But while I found the book’s central arguments (or lack thereof) frustrating, I also found Capitalism more coherent, tasteful, and historiographically aware than I had anticipated. In the second half of my review, I will consider Beckert’s escape from Braudel’s shadow: the less-discussed part of Capitalism handling the nineteenth century to the present, which is strikingly—jarringly—different to Beckert’s landscape of the early-modern capitalist archipelago.

Supplemental: Cut Adrift

1. Obviously an eyebrow-raising claim, but one Braudel actually makes in The Structures of Everyday Life. I’m not Chinese Cooking Demystified though, so I don’t feel qualified to verify/refute it.

2. You might also observe that this line also sits awkwardly with Beckert’s insistence that the pre-modern archipelago of capital is capitalism. The soil from which capitalism sprung is… capitalism?