In the June issue of The Nation, I have a review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a long review, in part because it’s a long book. While I wound up being quite critical of the book, I’m more than mindful of what it takes to write such a book. I thought I owed the book, and Beckert, the courtesy of giving it its due. Hence the length.

The review may be behind the paywall, so if you cannot access it, you can sign up for a subscription to the magazine or email me, and I can send you a pdf.

Many thanks to readers of earlier drafts of the review, particularly Lucas Pinheiro, Joan Scott, Greg Grandin, Laura Brahm, Kay Brahm-Robin, David Bell, and Francesca Trivellato. Many thanks to expert fact checker Matthew Vickers. Above all, thanks to David Marcus, my editor at The Nation, for commissioning the review, working through multiple drafts with me, and giving me the length to say what needed to be said.

In the meantime, here are some excerpts from the review.

From the first part:

They were, Beckert tells us, “the world’s first capitalists.”

By using this nomenclature, Beckert makes three claims. Two look backward, one looks forward, and none of them stands up to scrutiny. First, he writes that these merchants pioneered a new form of economic being. They “led economic lives based upon a truly exotic principle: They deployed capital to produce more capital. The accumulation of capital was the linchpin of their worldly endeavors.” But that principle was neither novel nor exotic, and Beckert’s merchants were not the first to act on it. Aristotle saw it lurking in any form of money-based, long-distance trade, and he was sufficiently concerned about its currency among the merchants of his day that he devoted several pages of his Politics to denouncing it and them.

Second, Beckert claims that these merchants forged a “global connectedness.” It’s not clear what he means here, as he allows that this connectedness did not extend to the Americas. He can’t mean that the merchants connected three of the world’s seven continents, unless he attaches a special, and undisclosed, meaning to continents—or to the number three. He might mean the connections forged across vast distances: Beckert regularly toggles between “long-distance trade,” “long-distance merchants,” and “capitalist,” and writes that “capitalism’s mainspring was its capacity to connect distant places.” But this also was not new: Ancient trading routes in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea spanned distances that were equivalent to those separating Javanese merchants from the Banda Islands or Khmer merchants from China, two instances of global connectedness that Beckert cites. And if what matters to him are the connections forged across social or cultural differences—he often resorts to the phrase “connected diversity”—we would do well to recall that Plato was so alarmed by the cosmopolitan effects of trade on his ideal city that he insisted on siting its port miles away from its people.

Last, though Beckert is careful to say that these merchants were “capitalists without capitalism,” he insists that they built “islands of capital” upon which “capitalism originated.” Beckert’s merchants were the “vanguard,” the “avant-garde,” the “central actors,” “seedlings,” “sprouts,” and “harbingers” of the “capitalist revolution” to come. As the slippage from vanguard to harbinger suggests, Beckert never settles on, much less sustains, a specific historical claim about these merchants, whose “revolutionary importance,” he allows, may be “visible only in retrospect.” Even so, Beckert flies the flag of a school of scholars who assign a causal pride of place to the medieval merchants of the Muslim world.

Beckert distinguishes this origin story from that of a competing school of scholars who situate the beginnings of capitalism in the struggles between landlords and tenant farmers in Britain during the late medieval and early modern eras, and he argues that these scholars mistakenly see capitalism originating in “one place” rather than “in the connections between various places.” But that only returns us to the question of what Beckert has in mind when he speaks of connections, distances, and places. Why are the connections between merchants in Cairo and Canton, who Beckert says “would have been broadly recognizable to one another” and whose “ways of conducting business would have been familiar across geographic and cultural divides,” more connective than those joining a landlord doling out leases to a farmer laboring in his fields in Norfolk? Beckert doesn’t say.

From the second part of the review:

Beckert acknowledges that his claim about the state is nothing new. More than a century ago, Max Weber coined the phrase “political capitalism” to describe what he called “that memorable alliance between the rising states” of Europe and “the sought-after and privileged capitalist powers.” What Beckert does provide is a wealth of carefully plotted detail showing how these alliances were made and unmade, across four centuries, in place after place: from men on the Italian peninsula to states on the Iberian peninsula that pushed the forces of political capitalism down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, and into the Americas; in the Dutch Republic, which pushed those forces into the Baltic Sea, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia; and in England, which pushed them everywhere.

Beckert also acknowledges that the owners of capital transformed agricultural production, turning agricultural labor into a commodity and creating a vast market in labor in the countryside. The “radical innovation” of the capitalist was to seize or control labor “as the primary source of value in trade.” Though Beckert’s language couldn’t be clearer—the transformation of agricultural production, with its identification of labor as a key source of value, is the “foundry” of capitalism—he doesn’t appear to recognize its significance for the other claims he makes throughout the book or make any attempt to reconcile them. Contrary to what Beckert sometimes says, his book shows that capitalism does not begin with trade and long-distance connection. It does not arise from merchants behaving like merchants. It does not follow from accumulations of wealth. It begins with capital’s taking control of production and unlocking workers’ highly prized and protected capacity for labor.

From the third part:

Hobsbawm’s dual revolution set off a centuries-long contest between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. Beckert, by contrast, largely narrates a story of unfolding continuity in which the “war capitalism” that spawned plantation slavery in the 16th century matures into the “industrial capitalism,” imperialism, and fascism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Beckert may claim that the Haitian Revolution “dealt a massive blow to the slavery system” and “set in motion a century of political upheaval.” He may discuss the struggles of workers, free and enslaved, and anticolonial nationalists that the Haitian Revolution heralded. He may write that “there was a world before the Industrial Revolution and an entirely different one after it.” But as we learned long ago: Trust the tale, not the teller.

From the last part:

As a historian, Beckert is blessed with gifts. Not only has he amassed an enormous archive of material, but he also mines it to maximal effect. He zooms in and out of the microscopic and the macroscopic with great ease. Every chapter opens with a set piece of such variousness and detail—the merchant city of Surat in western India, the island of Barbados in 1646, La Réunion after 1848, the linen industry in southwestern Poland, the Röchling family in Germany, a strike of Senegalese railway workers in 1919, the Fiat factory in Turin, the typewriter in postwar India—that it almost carries the reader past the analytical confusion he sows along the way. Like his merchants, Beckert is a wonderful maker of lists; each item pops off the page. Centuries of the past and places of the present, which among other scholars of capitalism can merge into a blur, remain as distinct as the different grades of school are to a student and as singular as a neighborhood block is to a walker in the city.

As a writer, Beckert is less blessed.

You can read the whole essay here. I hope you will!