The Harvard professor, who Zooms in to talk luck from his home office in Cambridge, Mass., explained that his new book, Capitalism: A Global Historyis the product of an eight-year odyssey in search of an understanding of the way we actually live our economic lives. “Often, when I teach the history of capitalism here at Harvard, many of my students think that capitalism is a kind of environmental condition.” But that’s just not the case when you look at the historical record, he added.

When pressed to explain what his book did, he said it had two parts: to offer a more global perspective on the history of capitalism and to “denaturalize” the history of any capitalism. Capitalism is not eternal or natural, as Beckert says; it is a human invention that has spread and evolved over centuries through deliberate choices, sometimes extraordinary violence, and incredible institutional change. Capitalism rose from the margins of medieval commerce to dominate modern life, and so it too may, in the future, disappear or be transformed again.

These may be considered bold claims by some who regard the mainstream of capitalism as inevitable, but the book is generally well researched. Although some critics have taken shots at it for being a bit “doorstep,” like Beckert’s previous book, the Pulitzer finalist, award-winning The Cotton Empirethe ambition and the courage to tell this global history are admired by many.

on Boston GlobeHamilton Cain writes that Beckert weaves a sprawling tapestry which “reveals the suspense and intricacy of a detective novel,” whose rise to capitalism reads a bit like a crime story, even a whodunit. Adrian Woolridge of Bloomberg Opinion It was criticized for almost the same thing, saying the book “ignores (the) secret sauce” of innovation, focusing more on its exploitative history than how it created new value. Beckert insists that his book is about the question of how, not why. He tried to chart “how we can get from a world where this logic exists, but it is small, to a world in the year 2025, where (it) almost builds all our economic life – and almost all of our lives.”

From marginal to dominant

Beckert said luck that his research shows traces of capitalist logic can be seen in the historical record since 1,000 years ago, but for hundreds of years it “remained marginal in economic life.” In his book, he speaks many times of “islands” and “knots,” as if the capitalists were initially outsiders, who were considered almost intimidating to people who lived their lives without the constant accumulation of more money to invest. Then, when the tide began to turn and capitalism rose, in the last 500 years, the islands and ridges moved to the barriers from the capitalist way of life, like the peasants of the 20th century.

“The first thing I always say is that capitalism is not synonymous with the existence of markets,” Beckert said. He points out that “economic life” has existed for all of human history, but not the ceaseless accumulation and reinvestment of capital, which some entrepreneurial communities do outside of society. Capitalism “exists in many different parts of the world,” Beckert insists, “but it also spreads slowly and is relatively weak … This kind of capitalist logic that is so important in economic life today, that’s something new.”

Beckert points out in his book that until the fall of the USSR in the late 1980s, like 30% of the world lived in a non-capitalist system, and most of the western world managed to avoid the capitalist way of life by, for example, growing their own food as subsistence farmers. (Tom Lee of Fundstrat recently compared the emergence of artificial intelligence to flash-frozen food in the 1920s, which changed the composition of the economy from 40% subsistence farmers to just 2%.)

The professor highlighted ancient capitalist communities in unexpected places such as the Port of Aden, in Yemen, or Cambay, in modern Gujarat, India. Goods were traded across seas from Aden as early as 1150, he found, while Song-dynasty China invented paper money centuries before Europe; and textiles flourished in the ancient hubs of India before the Industrial Revolution. But these capitalists have been surrounded for hundreds of years by a sea of ​​subsistence farmers and river empires that operate on completely different principles. “The more mundane nature of early entrepreneurial communities, that’s something that I, broadly speaking, have a feeling for,” Beckert said, but had never come together in this way before.

“They were always connected to a state,” Beckert said of the early traders, but they were also freewheeling and completely separate from that state,” he said, that is, until things changed dramatically in the 19th century. Beckert highlighted the troubling case of Hermann Röchlingthe German steel industrialist saw such capitalist opportunities that he closely allied himself with successive German governments and found himself “on trial for war crimes, not just in one war, but in two wars, World War I and World War II, which should be a record in world history.”

How capitalism moved to the center

To illustrate how unnatural capitalist logic was once considered, Beckert’s book highlights the curious case of Robert Keayne, a Puritan merchant in 1639 Boston. Keayne was dragged before a court of church elders almost 400 years ago, but not for theft. Rather it is for the “very bad” practice of selling goods for profit that exceeds community standards. He was about to be excommunicated for behaving in a way that is now considered standard business practice. It took centuries, Beckert argued, for the “greedy” accumulation of wealth to be rebranded as a public good, or in other words, for capitalism to be considered normal.

For his part, Beckert insists that he is not trying to judge capitalism, although some harsh judgments appear in his book. “The ability to write this book is, of course, itself a consequence of the capitalist revolution,” he said luckwhich argues that at this time in the 21st century, the logic of capitalism has brought great improvements in productivity, unprecedented economic growth and made many people richer. He couldn’t fly to Barbados or Cambodia for research without it, he said.

And Beckert traveled far and wide for eight years to dig up what he considered a kind of secret history of the origins of capitalism. From the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh to the archives of India’s Godrej company to the relics of the sugar plantations of Barbados (where he spent 10 days), Beckert threw himself back into what he found.

When the American colonies appear on the scene, for example, more than a third of the way through his account, Beckert points out that the West Indies are more central to global capitalism than the 13 territories that would become the United States. The city of Boston, he said, could be destroyed if it does not know how to become a service center for Barbados, whose sugar plantations generate a lot of income. “That’s also an amazing story,” Beckert agreed. “To us, Barbados was a foreign country and it was far away, but to them (Bostonians in the early 1700s), it was also part of the British empire.

Beckert said he was surprised by his research on the dark past of capitalism. “I know a lot about the history of slavery, but being on this island and then reading the historical records and reading the kind of horrific accounts of what happened on this island in the 1600s, that’s not surprising either, but it’s really shocking, the level of violence that I found in this history.

Can capitalism end?

Beckert said luck that he believes that the world is currently in a “time of transition,” similar to the transition that occurred in the 1970s when the Keynesian order gave way to neoliberalism. One of the biggest surprises of the book is the very conclusion, when he suggests that in the future, capitalism may end. The fact that “it depends on the expanding accumulation of capital” means that somehow, somehow, capital will be exhausted. “In the distant future,” he wrote, historians will return to our times and “find it difficult to understand our ways of thinking, our ways of being.”

Ultimately, Beckert said he envisions his book not as a morality tale with capitalism as the villain, but as an investigation of human agency. By revealing that capitalism was once weak, marginal, and fragile—and that it took centuries of specific political choices, violence, and institutional construction to become dominant—he hopes to show that the future remains unwritten. “It’s not like a machine that kind of unfolds on its own,” Beckert said. “It is a man-made command.”

As the global economy faces new shocks in the mid-2020s, Beckert’s history offers a reminder: The economy is not a force of nature. People have done it, and they can do it again. “The future is open,” he said luck. “People build a word different from the word they were born (and) sometimes the smallest power has made a big difference in the path of the development of capitalism. Therefore, I think it is important to see in the contemporary era.”