The BungaBunga podcast had me on to discuss my Nation review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global history. It was an excellent conversation. Both interviewers, Alex Gourevitch and Alex Hochuli, pushed me to think beyond what I had written. Among the issues we discovered in our discussion:

• What’s absent, not just from Beckert’s book but from a lot of the New History of Capitalism, is class struggle. Without it, it’s hard to understand a great many of the changes within capitalism, and it might explain why, despite Beckert’s being a book of history, it is in many ways anti- and transhistorical.
• Beckert’s strangely irenic portrait (covering the first 100 pages or so) of medieval Muslim and Arab traders, whose doux commerce looks a lot like the more conservative accounts of capitalism that you find among libertarians and scholars like Deidre McCloskey.
• What Beckert does really well and should stick to in his writing of history.

Anyway, you can listen to it here or below.