Sven Beckert’s Chronicle of Capitalism’s Long Rise

Sven Beckert’s doorstop of a book is supremely ambitious, an insightful and well-illustrated history by the Harvard historian who has been a pioneer in the creation of new narratives exploring how an ever-changing capitalism has been a socially and culturally rooted phenomenon. At well over a thousand pages, Beckert’s volume offers a synthesis and occasional recasting of almost everything we have learned about the history of capitalism, and not just in the closely studied societies bordering the North Atlantic. It is a global history, holds Beckert, because capitalism “was always a world economy.” Writing within the world-systems schema associated with Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, he probes for the connections, parallelisms, and transformations taking place within an economic and social history stretching back almost a thousand years.