Robbery, Slavery, War – How Capitalism Conquered the Whole World

 

“Historian Sven Beckert tells the thousand-year history of capitalism: coercion and violence have remained common methods of enrichment to this day. In the end, he prophesies a dystopia.

 

The history of global capitalism is booming – also on the German book market. Just two years after Friedrich Lenger's "The Price of the World: A Global History of Capitalism," Sven Beckert's "Capitalism: The History of a World Revolution" is now being published. Both books provide a kind of damage assessment of the otherwise often-told success story and thus correct Werner Plumpe's optimistic interpretation "The Cold Heart: Capitalism: The History of an Ongoing Revolution."

 

It is regrettable, however, that Beckert ignores both competitors and important positions in current research, thus withholding his criticism from the reader. A dialogue with Lenger, in particular, would have been insightful for the reader, as both works break with Eurocentrism and focus on the ecological consequences of modern capitalism.

The Rise to a Globally Dominant Economic System

 

Like Friedrich Lenger, Sven Beckert is clearly on the side of the critics of capitalism. Even more sharply than Lenger, he relativizes the global gains in prosperity associated with the worldwide implementation of this economic model.

 

But the Harvard-based historian has not simply written a mere indictment: He tells the long, in his estimation now thousand-year history of the gradually increasing growth dynamics of globally networked capital.

 

Since at least the late eighteenth century, this economic form has broken out of its former insular, isolated existence on the fringes and in the niches of completely differently structured economic and social orders and, through revolutionary upheavals, developed into the globally dominant economic system.

 

 The opening of the formerly state-socialist countries to global capitalism since the 1980s thus represents the culmination and endpoint of that "world revolution" to which Sven Beckert dedicates his book.

 

It actually ends with the financial crisis of 2008, but in an epilogue, it also takes a look at its destructive consequences and the recent escapist fantasies of libertarian capital owners.

 

This history of the development of capitalism stops just short of the anticipated dystopia of a global destruction of the environment and society.

 

Beckert shares with Marx and Engels a fascination with the unprecedented dynamism of the capitalist mode of production, and like them, Beckert has set himself the goal of exposing the enormous destructive social power of capitalism. But unlike Marx and Engels, war and state oppression are not merely side effects of a supposedly "primitive accumulation," whose horrors and structures were supposedly overcome with industrial capitalism and free wage labor.

 

Robbery, slavery or forced labor, and monopolies, according to Beckert, are methods still used today to acquire and accumulate capital. Accordingly, "war capitalism" plays a significant role in the book, representing the dominant mode in which the capitalist world revolution unfolded between 1450 and 1850.

 

Dependence, exploitation, and violence have always played a role.

 

The intertwining of state power and capital interests is also one of the most important factors for the success of initially transatlantic, and later global, capitalism in this book.

 

Their restless and ruinous competition transformed the European states from the late Middle Ages onward into henchmen and allies of capital owners who made the leap from their islands of long-distance trade capitalism, rose to become the main financiers of the European monarchies, and thus profited from their global expansion. This reciprocal dependence has, for Beckert, become a permanent structural element of modern capitalism. This also explains why strictly market-based interpretations play only a minor role in this book—for example, as typical legitimizing narratives of capitalist relations or, at worst, as blueprints for the implementation of new political and economic arrangements.

 

Throughout the book, Beckert repeatedly draws on Fernand Braudel's trilogy on the global economic history of the early modern period.

 

 Like Braudel, Beckert interprets capitalism as a dynamic process of monopoly formation and the power- or space-based organization of trade and production.

 

Above all, however, Beckert adopts Braudel's method of presentation: the selection of exemplary stories of places and actors of capitalism around the globe and spanning a thousand years. They are connected by the presentation of overarching contexts in light of recent research findings.

Travelogues from the centers and peripheries of capitalism

 

This creates a chain of vivid descriptions of local manifestations of capitalism. At the same time, these local histories act like travelogues from the hotspots of capitalist dynamics.

 

This narrative pattern is particularly well suited to the first almost eight hundred years of Beckert's grand narrative, from 1100 to 1870. He dedicates well over half of his presentation to this long period.

 

The focus is repeatedly on islands, both literally and figuratively, and on networks between distant places and actors: From Aden, the reader travels through the early world of long-distance trade capitalism along the sea and land routes between the Mediterranean and the South China Sea, between sub-Saharan Africa and the northern fringes of Eurasia. The following chapters take the reader to the most important places of early modern capitalism: the centers of the colonial European long-distance trade network or to the Caribbean islands as places of horror of the new Atlantic plantation production.

 

For Beckert, this first world revolution culminates in the "great storm," which, in the second half of the eighteenth century, raised the accumulation of usable capital in the North Atlantic regions to a new level.

 

In the second part of his book, Beckert follows the rise of industrial capitalism to the present day. Here, too, he remains true to his program of focusing on the traces of the triumphal march of this mode of production around the globe, alongside its North Atlantic centers. It is a central concern of the author to refute the thesis of the necessary connection between free wage labor and capitalism and to highlight the role of colonial capitalism well into the twentieth century. He examines the many forms in which capital appropriated the labor force it so desperately needed. In addition to legal means, entrepreneurs also intervened violently in the shaping of labor relations, the organization of work processes, and the way of life of their workers.

Only the state and the workers could curb accumulation.

 

In Beckert's narrative, between 1870 and 1973, two collective actors primarily set limits on the interests of capital accumulation: Firstly, the working class constituted itself as an organized counterforce to resist the demands and exploitative interests of the capital owners. Secondly, the nation-state came into play. It freed itself from the direct control of individual capitalists in order to either pave the way for the capitalist mode of production as an ideal collective capitalist or, with the growing influence of the working class, to tame capitalism and contain it within a welfare state framework.

 

Both counterforces have lost power since 1973, which is why the final section ("The Future of Capitalism?") focuses on the upheavals of neoliberal globalization. It ushers in the most recent era of a now globally dominant industrial capitalism and simultaneously marks the rise of new capitalist centers in the Global South, especially in China.

 

At the end of this major historical work, Beckert prophetically announces the end of capitalism – albeit without venturing into more concrete visions of the future. This is also due to the fact that, while the historian sees the potentially strongest counterforce in the now global class of wage laborers, whose rebellions and reforms have so far been the only thing to halt the self-destructive dynamics of capitalism, he simultaneously observes with dismay that global capitalism has now brought about a world-dominating commodification of goods, people, and the environment that seems to defy any change.

 

 For him, its stubborn accumulation dynamic is closely linked to a chameleon-like adaptability to changing geographical, social, and cultural conditions.

 

Beckert's book tells a global history of development that knows only one governing principle: the unstoppable imperative of capital accumulation.

 

The numerous examples and detailed descriptions are convincing. And yet, the book leaves the reader skeptical, primarily due to its refusal to look beyond the grand narrative of the all-encompassing expansion of capitalism and to search for epoch-specific regularities or process logics, or to question the structural limits of this economic system. The closer the narrative gets to the present day, the more one misses a discussion of research approaches that would be capable of bridging the explanatory gap between the numerous local histories and the global trend.

Sven Beckert: "Capitalism." A History on a World Revolution. Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2025. Translated from the English by Helmut Dierlamm, Werner Roller, Sigrid Schmid and Thomas Stauder. 1280 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €42."

 

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