The Long Arc of Capitalism: Coercion, Resistance, and Innovation
- Matt McManus
- 8 hours ago
- 13 min read
Matt McManus on Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History
Introduction
The optimist says this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears the optimist is right. Many view capitalism as here to stay, insisting that we are all the better for it. Others lament that it’s now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Baked into that famous crie de cour is the fatalistic fear, bordering on resignation, that capitalism is the best economic system humans can devise. As economic systems go, it is not especially good, beautiful or true. But, then, what does this say about us, we who created it?
Many of capitalism’s most partisan defenders have assumed not only its immortality, but also its eternity. Even the more thoughtful and occasionally ambivalent fell into the habit. Responding to calls for poor relief in “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity,” the founder of modern conservatism Edmund Burke insisted that we ought not to “supply to the poor, those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to with-hold from them. We, the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.” Why God felt it was so important for the poor to starve while the royal’s property rights to Windsor castle remained hallowed is a mystery too deep for most.
What is remarkable about these longstanding prognoses of capitalism’s eternal life is how strange they would appear to our ancestors who witnessed its birth. While humans have long bartered and traded, capitalism as a mode of production is relatively new.
More savvy apologists better understood the fragility of the capitalist mode of production. In The Fatal Conceit, F.A Hayek stressed how in many ways capitalism actually runs counter to the instincts of human nature. Millennia removed from the stone age, we retain strongly collectivist and tribalistic impulses that generations of evolution towards capital, markets, and, now UberEATS had never entirely overcome. On Hayek’s telling the capitalist free market approximates what Quinn Slobodian in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism characterized as a sublime Kantian object: a transcendent order, never to be properly understood by our tiny human intelligence, that emerged spontaneously through largely unplanned actions over centuries. All we can know is that this order has, by and large, worked benevolently to service our needs. Hayek worried that our collectivist instincts threatened to regress us to the barbarism of a pre-capitalist era. This is why capitalism needed to be defended as a world historical achievement; even against democratic majorities, if it turned out they did not know what was best for them.
Capitalism, an Extraordinarily Statist Form of Economic Life
Sven Beckert’s massive Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin Press, 2025) is a figurative brick intended to shatter these complacent narratives. Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He won notoriety and applause for his 2014 Empire of Cotton, which documented the centrality of the titular crop to the natal world market. Empire of Cotton raised controversy by exhaustively affirming much of Franz Fanon’s famous thesis in The Wretched of the Earth that rich Europe (as well as other developed lands) was the product of the third world. On Beckert’s telling, slavery and the mass exploitation and brutalization of millions were integral to the rise of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism entered the world, to quote Marx in Capital, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with dirt and blood.” Coming into the world with such violence, capitalism has never lost its taste for producing human misery, and this is what largely enabled the takeoff of the Atlantic world.
If Empire of Cotton was the appetizer than Capitalism: A Global History is the main course, dessert, and aperitif at a little over 1,300 pages. It charts the emergence of the capitalist mode of production over roughly a millennium, starting in isolated islands and even “fortresses” of capitalism in the medieval era before becoming a world conquering force.
Structured chronologically, Capitalism paints a vast tapestry. Part I, “Building Capitalism,” chronicles developments over centuries. These range from the consolidation of the nation state, to the rising hegemony of Europe, and of course the colonization of North and South America and beyond. Part II, “The Great Leap,” slows down considerably, dedicating four chapters to the late 18th and early 19th centuries when industrialization allowed capitalism to supplant all rivals. Part III, “Global Reconstructions,” describes capitalism’s roller coaster career from the 1870s to today. This includes years of invincibility, followed by dismal failures and lengthy interregnum between 1918-1973 when a growing chorus of critics either called for capitalism’s extinction or at least serious reform. Part IV speaks to our contemporary woes, with a long chapter on neoliberalism and the ultimate rise of right-wing populism. The book closes by asking two questions: whether capitalism has a future and whether it ought to have a future. Beckert is taciturn—the answer to the first seems to be unfortunately “yes” and to the second, probably “no.”
In Beckert’s telling, in contrast to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and, of course, Edmund Burke, there was nothing inevitable or providential about this ascendancy. Capitalist developments were often resisted by peasants, agrarian workers, local elites, even feudal heads of state, both aggressively and successfully for some time.
Even if its eventual triumph was not part of some providentially prescribed plan, that does not mean capitalism emerged spontaneously through the gradual coordination and consolidation of free individual acts enabled by establishing the rule of law, let alone through the benign process of Wilt Chamberlain, to draw on Robert Nozick’s famous example, collecting through voluntary exchanges quarters from thousands to play a solid game of basketball. Enormous human-driven efforts were required, many of which transformed whole societies. In many cases, capitalist transformations were long and carefully planned by political and social actors who sought to increase the political power of their states by organizing and then profiting from the fruits of (often compelled) wage and slave labor. Beckert is self-consciously drawing on a long tradition, from Marx to Weber and Polanyi, that emphasizes the frequently planned and statist origins of capitalism. But his book is still startling in how emphatically he makes the point, and the sheer volume of evidence provided, so it is worth quoting Beckert at length here:
To understand capitalism as primarily a market society would be akin to understanding feudalism as a godly order--a notion that would have rung true to feudal lords and churchmen of the time but would satisfy few hoping to make sense of the feudal order today. Just as the feudal order was partly maintained by its protagonists’ success on convincing many that it was godly, so, too, is the naturalizing of the market not incidental to capitalism but a condition for its very existence…No noneconomic institution mattered ore than the state, that ensemble of institutions that govern, tax, wage war, regulate society, and adjudicate conflict in myriad ways. Because the state set and enforced rules and allocated resources that helped create novel political economies (and itself emerged from them), it is a fundamental part of my analysis. Capitalism, this book argues, is an extraordinarily statist form of economic life.
Manufacturing Capitalism
Beckert’s history starts in 1150 within the walls of the now little-known city of Aden on the Yemeni coast. This isn’t where capitalism was “born” and from which it spread. Beckert stresses there rarely are such clean beginnings and endings in history. Rather, Aden was an initially isolated island which was experimenting with what was then a novel form of economic life: getting rich through trade and barter rather than agriculture and feudal extraction. Beckert describes how Aden’s port “was a well-oiled machine. Upon arrival, each merchant ship (between seventy and eighty annually during the 1220s) moored just off the coast to be met by mubashshirun (messengers) who, according to Ibn al-Mujawir, would ‘ask him [the captain] where he had come from and [the captain] asks them about the town, who the governor is, and the price of goods.” Into Aden’s port flowed much of the world’s wealth; producing a cityscape “dominated by markets, with most things produced and consumed, bought and sold, as commodities, including food and water.”
The choice of Aden as a Ground Zero for capitalism is not coincidental. Aden was an exception to a general tendency of “structural constraints that elites put on capital owners’ ability to expand their interests and logic” throughout the Middle Ages. Chinese Emperors and the Japanese Shogun cautiously encouraged trade and barter before retreating into isolationism. These longstanding realities reflected deep rooted intuitions which regarded money making ventures with a borderline conspiratorial suspicion. Political elites were willing to make use of merchants and commercial enterprises pragmatically, but rarely allowed them to develop into rival centers of power. The ideologies of the time reflected and naturalized these institutions. Popes and religious authorities issued “prohibitions against trade with the Muslims they called ‘infidels,’ a move motivated by religious and military conflict but one that also had economic effects.” Beckert notes that Christian “religious sentiments were full of injunctions against the logic of capital and its bearers as well.” Aden is also interesting since Beckert stresses that flirtations with early capitalism were hardly unique to the West.
Well into the 18th century it was China, India and often the leading Muslim states that were at the epicenter of a modest world economy; they were the most technologically advanced, cultured, and urbanized societies. Asian and Middle Eastern spices, refined consumer goods, silk, weapons and more were far more heavily prized than Europe’s primitive fare. It was the discovery of new, easily conquered lands to the West that did more than anything to help Europe catch up to the far larger countries during the era of the “Great connecting.” The new European colonies that appeared in Bolivia, Haiti, Jamaica and elsewhere were characterized by enormous brutality. The mountain of Potosi in what is now Bolivia became the “treasury of the world” according to Spanish Emperor Charles V, producing “perhaps 60 percent of the world’s silver.” But Beckert grimly reminds us that this immense increase in wealth for Spanish elites came at enormous price to miners in Potosi. As many as 25% died. This earned Potosi the ominous title “the mountain that ate men.” Where the Europeans landed, slavery also often followed; especially when it was discovered that the islands of the Caribbean were ideal settings for cash crops like sugar and tobacco.
The Take Off
In these spreading “archipelagos” of capital new social relations were also emerging. It became clear that “merchant communities” were gaining political muscle relative to competitors like religious authorities, feudal lords, and subsistence producers. But these empowered merchants were hardly independent of the state; nor did they want to be…unless they wanted to be. Far from it. As their wealth grew, so too did the merchant’s expectation of political influence and power. Early capitalists encouraged the state to intervene on their behalf everywhere; from procuring colonies and “opening” countries to trade, to exterminating rivals and getting rid of dangerous indigenous populations. Beckert refers to this as war capitalism. He speculates that in fact “state power was perhaps the most crucial ingredient in the exceedingly complex project of capitalizing trade, agriculture, and industry. Because capitalism expanded from sharp discontinuities rather than from a natural propensity for trading since time immemorial, it encountered significant resistance from elites and commoners alike, and its expansion rested to a great degree on extra-economic coercion, much of it exerted by the state, including the institutional arrangement that characterized European capitalism abroad: war capitalism.”
It was the Industrial Revolution by which the “meandering river” of germinal world capitalisms became an unstoppable torrent. In the 19th century Europeans were joined by American, Japanese and Ottoman empire builders and capitalists in a race to industrialize to avoid being swept away by greater powers. Oftentimes this was given an unusually autarkic justification. Echoing Marc-William Palen’s recent history Pax Economica: Left Wing Visions of a Free Trade World,Beckert notes how imperialism was seen as a means of securing national independence and self-reliance. If one could turn Africa into a private garden for exploitation, as many European dreamed during the Victorian era, then there would be no need to make yourself dependent on rivals for trade goods. It was this push/pull combination of global ambition and rivalrous insularity that drove those states that could to expand capitalism through imperial power. Often while playing a very active role in cultivating domestic industry and reducing reliance on other powers. The dynamic eventually led capitalism to
spread throughout the world, such that by the 20th century very few societies remained untouched by it.
Mature Capitalism, Immature Successors
Many ideological justifications were developed to applaud and naturalize capitalism while obscuring its vulgar human-all-too-human origins in history. Various economic theories developed by social Darwinians circulated where human beings were conceived not as social but competitive animals locked in a struggle for existence where it was the survival of the fittest. While many of these economic arguments were methodologically individualistic, it didn’t take long for enterprising racists to apply arguments about the struggle for supremacy to collectivities. To grateful readers, academics like Harvard’s Louis Agassiz divided humanity into entirely different and unequal species. Eugenicists declared the vast majority of human beings were inferiors who ought to be grateful for having the opportunity to harvest rubber for King Leopold III.
Quite naturally the imposition of capitalism produced an intense amount of discontent. While Beckert’s is a book about the rise, the rise and fall, and the rise of capitalism, he dedicates an admirable amount of curiosity to examining potential alternatives that emerged; experiments in “postcapitalism” that grew within the new capitalist global order, threatening to do to it what it did to previous modes of production. The most ambitious of these alternatives were socialist, including social democracy. They emerged in the 19th century and variably promised to humanize through reform or the outright overthrow of capitalism. Beckert’s tone throughout the book is by and large critical, but he expresses near open admiration for the “legendary Scandinavian welfare state” that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. This included steep progressive taxes to limit inequality and fund social security while “severely” limiting “the powers of capital” yet protecting the “principle of private ownership and control.” It will be interesting to see if Beckert builds upon this interest, as there is certainly a good book to be written about the way “Nordic socialism” relates to other experimental efforts to progress towards postcapitalism.
The bourgeoning resistance to capitalism in turn provoked counter-offensives from capitalists, spanning the entire 20thcentury. The most vicious and radical capitalist counter-attack was initiated by fascists. In what is sure to be amongst the more controversial parts of the book, Beckert dedicates a considerable amount of time to integrating fascist economies into the broader history of capitalist social forms. He acknowledges that fascist regimes were a “total break from previous liberal regimes, even as these regimes partly embraced similar policies in response to the Depression.” Fascists by and large subordinated an interest in economics to their political ambitions, and could pragmatically gesture at building a corporatist style economy. This would be an economy where social classes and private ownership of the means of production would remain, but the state would play a major role in mediating class conflict in the name of the national welfare.
Despite these qualifications, Beckert makes it clear that “fascism never broke with a fundamentally capitalist organization of economic life.” In fact, he suggests that “capitalism’s basic building blocks—the commodification of inputs, outputs and labor; private property; entrepreneurship; and the accumulation and productive reinvestment of capital—all remained firmly in place.” Moreover, Beckert reminds us that “capital owners played a significant role in mobilizing against democracy and the Weimar constitutional order,” thereby helping put Hitler into power.
This might appear an unusual step for capitalists to take. But after reading Beckert’s book it seems not only more plausible, but inevitable. What Beckert contributes to the long-understood narrative that capitalists cooperated with fascists out of a shared desire to crush communism, is the extent to which the combination of mass industry and nationalism characteristic of fascist economics was in continuity with the broader history of capitalism. He reminds us that from the East India Company to the German Rochling Group there have always been companies that aspired to monopolistic dominion and cooperated with expansionist states to increase their profits through acquiring Lebensraumand cheap labor. The confluence of capitalism and the fascist state reached a radical apex in Nazi Europe where the “war allowed for a return of slavery to the heartland of industrial capitalism” as millions were compelled to forcibly toil for private German firms profiting from the war effort. After the war, a chastened capitalism entered a Golden era where Keynesian demand-side economics and a comparatively left-wing set of governments sought to humanize the system and reduce inequality. Beckert exhibits, undoubtedly, a halcyon streak of nostalgia for this time, yet he labors mightily to acknowledge the warts.
The Golden era came to an end with the ascendency of a neoliberal order that was keen to “insulate markets from political threats” and was “strikingly undogmatic about the political forms it favored.” These could range from liberal democracies like Britain and the United States to theocratic autocracies like Saudi Arabia and repressive dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile. What united neoliberal regimes was their fostering a set of re-intensifying inequalities that readily translated into political inequalities, as has happened so often under capitalism. This confident neoliberal world was shaken in 2008 by the Great Recession, but it did not tumble. It remains unclear what is to come next. Even a historical work as thorough as Capitalism: A Global History can not double as a crystal ball.
Conclusion: Where To Next?
Beckert’s work reads as the culmination of an intensifying process of reflection that has put to pasture anyone who still tries to argue that capitalism came into the world promising and delivering peace, prosperity and KFC Double Downs for all. This process of self-reflection can be seen in books by economists like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century and Daniel Chandler’s Free and Equal each of which shows how the history Beckert describes has resulted in a world many of us no longer want to live in. As John Maynard Keynes once put it, the capitalism we live under is not “intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.” Our failure to fully appreciate and internalize these wise words means that that many of us who have lived through the era of neoliberal retrenchment are thinking, with Marx, first as tragedy, second as farce.
So what must be protected if we try to transition to something better?
Beckert does not have much good to say about liberalism, which he by and large sees as the faithful ideological handmaiden to capital. He says too little about the imaginative efforts of political economists like J.S Mill or Keynes to conceive how liberalism and socialism could be reconciled to bring out the best in one another. We now see it is now easier to imagine an end to the liberal world order than an end to capitalism. Unlike what many on the left might have wanted, liberalisms’ gravediggers do not appear to be the international proletariat or the third world subaltern. Instead, it is billionaire oligarchs and radical nationalists who fantasize about living in a world without liberalism. They stand there, shovels in hand, all the while blissfully dismissing the notion of a world without capitalism as a mere dream. For everyone else, we hope to one day wake up in that better world that preserves and protects the best of each system.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College and the author of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Routledge) and The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism (Zer0 Books) amongst other books. His forthcoming collection What Is Liberal Socialism? (Repeater) releases in July 2026.
