Capitalism’s Latest Critic Ignores Its Secret Sauce

A big subject requires a big book — and few subjects are bigger than global capitalism. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital came to 3,000 pages in three volumes, and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to seven hundred pages. Now along comes Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History at 1,325 pages, reportedly one of the longest books ever produced by Penguin Press.

Beckert’s ambition is as big as his page count. A professor of history at Harvard University, he wants to shake up the historiography of the field. Previous historians have peered at the subject through nationalist or at least Anglo-Saxon spectacles. He wants to provide a global history that pays as much attention to the “periphery” as to the “center.” Just as importantly, he wants to challenge laissez-faire accounts of the rise of capitalism that treat capitalism as synonymous with the free market and regard the propensity to truck, barter and exchange as natural and therefore universal. For him, our global capitalist system is the result of wrenching change and calculated coercion rather than the workings of the hidden hand.