Can Capitalism Be Historicized?

The Challenge of Writing a Global History That Avoids Moralism, Economism, and Myth

Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History is, in my view, the most consequential work of history written in English in the past decade—and also one of the most frustrating.

Its ambition is breathtaking: Beckert attempts nothing less than a five-century, planet-spanning narrative of how capitalism remade the modern world. But for all its sweep and power, the book largely avoids the very questions that animate the social sciences—the causal puzzles, institutional dynamics, and mechanisms of change that economists, sociologists, and political scientists consider essential. The result is a history that dazzles as narrative but falters as explanation.

How much did slavery actually contribute to Europe’s economic ascent? Why did the Industrial Revolution ignite in Britain rather than China or India? What triggered the Great Depression—and why did nations facing the same shock take radically different paths? These are the hard questions a global history of capitalism must confront. Beckert, for all his sweep, leaves them largely untouched.

At its heart, Beckert’s 1,300-page saga revolves around one master process: the commodification of everything. More than empire, more than finance, more than technology, commodification becomes the gravitational force in his narrative—the engine through which capitalism spreads, mutates, and reproduces itself.

It’s a powerful frame. It’s also a distorting one.

Because once commodification becomes the master key, everything starts to look the same. Violence and innovation blur together. Coercion and growth collapse into a single storyline. What disappears are the very mechanisms—technological, institutional, demographic, cultural—that actually explain why capitalism emerged, why it accelerated, and why it took such divergent forms across the globe.

That is the kind of history we still lack—and the stakes are high enough that this essay takes its time. The issues are too consequential, and the questions too large, for anything shorter or simpler.

Commodification as Capitalism’s Engine

For Beckert, capitalism isn’t just a system of production or exchange. It’s a way of organizing the world that turns more and more aspects of life—land, labor, relationships, even time—into things that can be bought and sold.

Drawing on Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi but applying their ideas globally, he shows how capitalism expands by making previously nonmarket activities subject to market rules: land becomes private property, enslaved people become assets, artisans become wage workers, time becomes measurable and monetizable, and social life becomes organized around contracts and prices.

In Beckert’s account, this process is never peaceful. Commodification requires force—slavery, conquest, debt peonage. It requires new laws—property rights, contract enforcement. It depends on state power to make dispossession stick. And it relies on cultural shifts that teach people to see market dependence as normal. The spread of commodification becomes the map of capitalist expansion.

Read chapter by chapter, the theme grows steadily more encompassing. Beckert moves from land to labor to finance to commodities to bodies to emotions to data. At each stage, more of life gets pulled into the market and separated from the people who once controlled it. His narrative is designed to show how communities were disrupted and daily routines redefined as market logic expanded.

Commodification becomes Beckert’s master framework—his way of linking Genoese bankers, Barbadian plantations, Lancashire mills, gig workers, and modern biometric surveillance into a single, continuous story.

What Commodification Reveals—and What It Hides

As an organizing idea, commodification is enormously useful. It helps explain how capitalism spread beyond Europe, why market expansion so often involved violence, how different labor systems were linked across continents, and how older social arrangements were broken apart and replaced by new ones.

But the same theme also flattens important differences. If every development is described as commodification, then the distinctions between a mercantilist empire and an industrial economy start to disappear. Technological change is marginalized. Plantation slavery and factory wage labor look like minor variations of the same system.

Capitalism becomes everywhere and always, rather than something that arose under very specific historical conditions. The Industrial Revolution stops being a puzzle to solve and becomes simply another chapter in a moral narrative.

Commodification gives Beckert a powerful narrative through-line, but it weakens his ability to explain how things actually changed. Capitalism starts to resemble what Gideon Lewis-Kraus calls an “atmospheric force”—something diffuse, totalizing, and hard to pin down—rather than a concrete system with identifiable mechanisms.

It’s easy to see why Beckert leans on this theme. Today’s gig economy commodifies time, social media commodifies attention, AI commodifies cognition, the climate crisis stems from commodifying nature, and platform surveillance commodifies behavior. Beckert essentially offers a five-century backstory for the world we now inhabit.

But commodification explains capitalism’s destructive tendencies far better than its creative ones. It cannot fully account for how sustained economic growth began, why capitalism emerged in some places and not others, how certain societies built more inclusive institutions, why technological innovation accelerated, or how capitalism produced not only exploitation but also unprecedented improvements in material well-being.

The Lewis-Kraus Critique

Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s highly critical New Yorker review captures one major weakness. In his view, Beckert’s capitalism isn’t an economic system or a social formation but a kind of metaphysical essence—a universal solvent that dissolves all distinctions and carries the moral charge of original sin. And the culprit, in Beckert’s telling, is always the same: commodification.

Beckert insists capitalism has no fixed essence or single institutional form. Yet he repeatedly describes it as if it were a living force that “grows,” “flows,” and “permeates,” driven by its relentless push to turn everything—land, labor, time, desire, even information—into commodities. This allows him to jump from medieval Yemeni merchants to Barbadian plantations to Tinder hookups as if all are iterations of one expanding logic.

Commodification is supposed to tie all these cases together, but the links often turn out to be metaphors rather than concrete causal mechanisms.

The result is a narrative whose range widens as its explanatory power contracts. Capitalism becomes an atmosphere, not a historically bounded system. Every moment of exchange becomes part of the same story.

Lewis-Kraus even compares Beckert to Werner Sombart, whose 1902 Modern Capitalism was similarly sweeping, moralizing, and conceptually diffuse—a return to a style of civilizational storytelling that historians abandoned for good reason.

The Deeper Problem: Growth Without Explanation

There is a deeper issue that becomes visible once you step back from Beckert’s sweeping story. His definition of capitalism is so broad—stretching from medieval Genoese financiers to Peruvian silver mines, from Ottoman trade networks to Manchester’s factories—that it can’t easily account for the central question of global economic history: Why did industrial capitalism first take off in Britain in the late 18th century, rather than in China, India, the Ottoman Empire, or even the Caribbean and Brazil, all of which were deeply tied into global trade, imperial expansion, and enslaved labor?

Beckert gives us a powerful account of global extraction—how European empires used conquest, colonization, and slavery to reorganize the world economy. This perspective is indispensable. The profits from Caribbean sugar, the scale of the Atlantic slave trade, and the forced integration of Indigenous lands into global markets all shaped Europe’s rise.

But even with these connections in place, the question remains: Why did only some parts of this interconnected world generate sustained, compounding economic growth? Why Manchester and not Havana or Bahia, which were far richer in the 18th century? Why Britain rather than the Yangtze Delta, which had comparable commercial development?

Economic historians would say this is where Beckert’s approach runs into trouble. If all these arrangements count as “capitalism,” the concept loses the sharpness needed to explain differences in outcomes.

They would point to factors Beckert downplays:

▪ Britain’s unusual access to cheap, accessible coal near major cities.

▪ High wages relative to the cost of capital (Robert Allen’s argument).

▪ A scientific culture and “Republic of Letters” that supported experimentation (Joel Mokyr),

▪ Political fragmentation and competition that limited centralized regulation and created space for experimentation.

▪ Patent systems that rewarded innovation,

▪ Financial institutions that lowered risk and mobilized investment.

These elements don’t replace the importance of colonization and slavery—they interact with them. Profits from the Atlantic economy helped fund British industry. Colonial markets created demand for textiles. But the presence of slavery and colonial wealth alone didn’t produce modern, innovation-driven growth. If they had, the most profitable slave economies in the world—the Caribbean—would have industrialized first.

Coercion and extraction are crucial to capitalism’s history, but they cannot by themselves explain the emergence of sustained per capita growth—the feature that distinguishes modern capitalism from all earlier economic systems.

Plantations produced enormous wealth but little cumulative innovation. They were highly productive but not dynamic. Without a clearer account of the institutional and technological changes that generated modern growth, Beckert’s model can describe how capitalism exploited people and resources—but not how, or why, capitalism eventually transformed the material world.

Nine Conceptual Challenges

These critiques point to deeper problems that confront any attempt to write a global history of capitalism. Here are nine of them.

1. Is Capitalism an Actual System—or Just a Convenient Label?

Any history of capitalism has to start with a basic question: What exactly are we talking about?

Is capitalism a market economy? A social order based on wage labor? A cultural mindset about calculation and improvement? A set of institutions? A mode of production?

Treat capitalism as a single coherent “force” and it starts to look like a secular deity—an entity with its own “logic” and intentions. Define it too loosely, and it becomes indistinguishable from commerce in general, which has existed for millennia.

Beckert leans toward the first risk: capitalism becomes something that “grows,” “flows,” and “permeates”—as if it had agency. But the opposite risk is equally real. Capitalism does create systemic pressures—competition, cost-cutting, innovation—that shape behavior even for people who might prefer otherwise.

The challenge is to describe capitalism as both a historically created, changeable set of institutions and as an emergent system with real constraints and feedback loops.

Failing to hold these two ideas together leads to confusion.

2. When Did Capitalism Actually Begin?

Markets are ancient. Market society is not.

Karl Polanyi argued that capitalism arose when land, labor, and money became commodities—pulled out of social relationships and handed over to the market.

But historians disagree sharply about when this transformation occurred. Some date capitalism to medieval commercial networks; others to the 16th-century Atlantic world; others to the Industrial Revolution; still others to the 19th-century bourgeois order.

Each starting point tells a different story—and implies a different politics.

Beckert is vague here. He wants to locate capitalism’s origins in particular moments, but he also traces a “logic of acquisition” back to medieval merchants. This lets him tell a sweeping story, but it makes it difficult for him to answer the key question of divergence: Why did industrialization begin in Britain and not in China or India?

A clearer framework would separate: market exchange (as old as civilization), merchant capitalism (long-distance trade and finance), and industrial capitalism (production reorganized around accumulation and innovation).

Without these distinctions, it’s impossible to explain why modern economic growth emerged where and when it did.

3. Western Invention—or Global Co-Creation?

Beckert’s strongest contribution is showing that capitalism was never purely European. It was built through global connections—colonial conquest, the slave trade, long-distance commerce, resource extraction, and coercive labor systems.

Kenneth Pomeranz and others have shown that in 1750 the most advanced Chinese regions were as economically developed as Britain. Britain pulled ahead not because of inherent superiority but because of contingent advantages—nearby coal, political fragmentation, and access to New World land and labor.

But this global framing creates its own problem: if capitalism is everywhere, then why did industrialization first take off in Britain rather than in the Yangtze Delta or Mughal India?

A global history can avoid Eurocentrism without dissolving all meaningful distinctions. A persuasive account needs to explain variation and divergence—not simply describe interconnectedness.

4. The State: Villain, Midwife, or Co-Author?

No serious historian sees capitalism as something that “emerged naturally” from free exchange. States made capitalism possible—by enforcing property rights, enclosing common lands, creating stable currencies, building ports and canals, and developing financial systems.

But states played different roles in different places:

▪ Britain fostered markets, protected innovators, and eventually constrained predatory elites.

▪ The Qing Empire limited mercantile expansion and kept markets embedded in social hierarchies.

▪ Tokugawa Japan restricted external trade while fostering internal specialization and proto-industrialization.

▪ The Dutch Republic created extremely sophisticated financial institutions but did not industrialize.

These aren’t minor variations—they shaped radically different development paths.

Beckert often portrays the state primarily as capitalism’s instrument. But to explain why some societies built growth-promoting institutions while others didn’t, we need a more nuanced taxonomy of state forms and their relationships to markets.

5. Technology: Driver, Side Effect, or Something Else Entirely?

A serious history of capitalism has to explain why technological innovation suddenly accelerated after 1750. Beckert’s account sidelines this question by treating technology as largely downstream of global coercion and capital flows.

Most economic historians disagree. They argue that technology isn’t just a byproduct of capitalism—it’s one of the main engines that made modern growth possible.

The key questions are straightforward: Why did the steam engine emerge in Britain and not in the Yangtze Delta or Mughal India? Why did mechanized cotton spinning appear in Lancashire rather than Bengal, which had better-trained textile workers? Why did innovation take off so quickly if capitalism, in some form, had existed for centuries?

Beckert doesn’t provide satisfying answers because his narrative flattens these discontinuities into a single storyline. He explains extraction very well, but not why capitalism suddenly began generating sustained, cumulative innovation—the feature that distinguishes modern economic life from everything that came before it.

6. Do Ideas and Culture Matter—or Are They Just Noise?

Another challenge: how to think about culture. Beckert focuses on material processes—land, labor, coercion. But capitalism didn’t spread only through force; it also spread through changes in values, worldviews, and expectations.

Economic historians like Deirdre McCloskey and Joel Mokyr point to cultural shifts: the rise of bourgeois values, new attitudes toward risk, Enlightenment science, the idea that knowledge could systematically improve human life.

All of this mattered. Innovation requires not just incentives, but curiosity, optimism, and a belief that improvement is possible. Markets don’t explain that. Culture does.

Ignoring cultural shifts makes it hard to explain why invention and experimentation gained momentum in some societies and stalled in others. A global history of capitalism needs to integrate both the material and the cultural—otherwise the causal story remains thin.

7. One Capitalism—or Many?

“Capitalism” is often used as if it describes a single thing. But in reality, there have been many different capitalisms:

▪ Merchant capitalism, focused on trade and arbitrage.

▪ Plantation capitalism, based on slavery and monocrops.

▪ Industrial capitalism, organized around factories and wage labor.

▪ Developmental capitalism, directed by strong states in East Asia.

▪ Financialized capitalism, driven by shareholder value and global capital flows.

These aren’t minor variations. They’re fundamentally different institutional structures with different incentives, power relations, and outcomes.

Lumping them all together under one heading—“capitalism”—makes it difficult to explain why some societies experienced sustained growth, why some achieved greater equality while others didn’t, and why institutional reforms succeed in some contexts and fail in others.

Without distinguishing among different capitalist trajectories, global history becomes too general to be useful.

8. Where to Draw the Line: Capitalism vs. Mercantilism

A related issue is how to distinguish capitalism from earlier systems like feudalism, mercantilism, or coerced plantation labor.

Beckert often treats all forms of economic exploitation as “capitalist,” which blurs important distinctions.

Mercantilism—state monopolies, guild restrictions, precious metal hoarding—was in many ways the opposite of what later became industrial capitalism. Plantations generated immense profits but didn’t create self-sustaining innovation. And Spain’s plunder of the New World didn’t produce modern economic growth.

Counterfactuals matter here: If slavery and trade were enough to generate capitalism, why didn’t Spain industrialize? Why not the Dutch? Why not the Caribbean?

By collapsing too many systems into one category, Beckert loses the ability to explain why some paths led to industrial growth and others didn’t.

9. Primitive Accumulation: One-Time Shock or an Ongoing Process?

Marx introduced the idea of “primitive accumulation”—the violent separation of people from the means of production—as capitalism’s starting point. David Harvey later argued it’s a permanent feature, always recurring as capitalism expands.

Beckert leans toward the “permanent” view: dispossession everywhere, at all times. But that raises problems.

If primitive accumulation never ends, then capitalism has no beginning—and no internal dynamics. Everything becomes extraction all the way down. And if that’s the case, it becomes hard to explain why sustained economic growth occurred only once in human history, beginning in 18th-century Britain.

A more nuanced approach would separate moments when coercion drives expansion (enclosure, conquest, slavery) and moments when innovation drives expansion (steam, electricity, digital networks).

Both matter, but they aren’t the same. Without distinguishing them, we’re left with a history that explains capitalism’s brutality but not its transformative power.

The Counterfactual Test

Economic historians rely on counterfactual reasoning to test causal claims—and Beckert’s framework falters under that scrutiny.

If empire and slavery were enough to generate industrial capitalism, why didn’t Spain’s vast early empire industrialize? If global trade and coercion drive growth, why didn’t the Dutch Republic—with the most advanced commercial and financial system in Europe—industrialize? If plantation slavery was central, why didn’t Brazil or the U.S. South develop their own industrial economies?

These aren’t trick questions. They expose what a coercion-first model can’t explain. Spain had colonial extraction. The Dutch had global trade and sophisticated finance. Brazil had plantations and commodity exports. But none developed the institutional and technological conditions that made Britain different.

Counterfactuals highlight the missing pieces. What if Britain hadn’t had coal close to major population centers? What if high wages hadn’t incentivized labor-saving invention? What if the Republic of Letters and a vibrant scientific culture hadn’t produced “useful knowledge”? What if property rights, patent laws, and capital markets hadn’t rewarded innovation? What if political competition hadn’t constrained predatory state power?

Without tools like these, coercion becomes an all-purpose explanation—broad enough to describe exploitation everywhere, but too vague to explain why sustained economic growth emerged in one place and not another.

Why This Matters

How we narrate capitalism’s past shapes what political futures seem plausible—and what analytical tools we bring to contemporary economic challenges.

Take China’s economic rise after 1978. A narrative focused mainly on coercion and extraction would miss the institutional reforms that mattered most: special economic zones, greater security for property rights, integration into global supply chains, massive infrastructure investment, and large-scale human-capital development.

Or consider why some resource-rich countries remain poor while resource-poor countries thrive. A history that treats all forms of capitalism as fundamentally the same—that views capitalism primarily as extraction—cannot explain why Singapore succeeded while Nigeria struggled; why South Korea industrialized while Argentina deindustrialized; why Botswana achieved sustained growth while the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite immense mineral wealth, remained trapped in poverty.

If capitalism is a single, unified system with one underlying logic, these divergences remain inexplicable. But if capitalisms are multiple—each shaped by distinct institutions, state capacities, technological choices, and political coalitions—these different outcomes become intelligible.

The stakes are political as well as analytical. If violence and coercion are intrinsic and unchanging features of capitalism, reform looks futile and only rupture seems possible. But if capitalism’s coercive dimensions vary historically and geographically, political struggle can curb abuses, expand freedom, and redirect accumulation in more equitable directions.

How we tell this history is inseparable from what we believe can be changed.

What Beckert Gets Right—and What He Misses

Beckert has written a sweeping indictment of capitalism’s disruptions, inequalities, and violent origins. His achievement is substantial: he forces us to confront coercion and extraction as foundational, not incidental, to capitalism’s rise. He de-centers Europe and shows capitalism as a global, entangled process. His account of slavery, colonial dispossession, and land enclosure is devastating and indispensable. It is the most ambitious narrative we have.

But it is also, unmistakably, a moral history—capitalism as an ever-expanding reservoir of human suffering, defined more by what it harms than by how it works.

It is not a history for developmental economists, who ask how societies raise living standards. Nor for economic historians, who look for causal mechanisms and divergent paths. Nor for sociologists, who study how capitalist institutions operate in specific societies. Nor for political scientists, who examine how states structure markets and mediate development.

What Beckert offers is a vivid moral narrative—compelling, often haunting, but largely disconnected from the analytical questions that drive the social sciences.

We get capitalism as domination, not as a complex, evolving system of incentives, institutions, innovations, and conflicts. More diagnosis than explanation. More moral cartography than analytical model.

What both Beckert and Lewis-Kraus overlook is the challenge T. S. Ashton underscored in his classic 1948 The Industrial Revolution: Britain faced an unforgiving problem—how to feed, clothe, and employ populations far larger than any earlier society had sustained. Without new technologies and new forms of industrial organization, tens of millions would have remained trapped in Malthusian poverty.

The honest question is not whether capitalism caused suffering. It did—massively and systematically. The honest question is what life would have looked like without the transformations capitalism made possible. There is a world of difference between acknowledging that capitalism’s birth was soaked in blood—which is true—and suggesting that capitalism produced nothing but blood—which is false.

A history that cannot account for both sides of this ledger—why billions now live longer, healthier, more materially secure lives and the violence, exploitation, and environmental destruction that underwrote those gains—is incomplete. We need a synthesis that can hold these truths together without collapsing into either celebration or demonization.

Any serious global history must keep both facts in view: the atrocities of primitive accumulation and dispossession, and the unprecedented rise in life expectancy, material comfort, and human possibility that industrialization unleashed.

The History of Capitalism We Need Next

We need a synthesis that combines Beckert’s global sweep and moral seriousness with the kind of analytical clarity social scientists rely on.

Mechanisms: By this I mean concrete cause-and-effect links—how high wages pushed firms toward labor-saving machines; how secure property rights encouraged long-term investment; how cheap cotton imports let British mills scale; how patent laws rewarded inventors.

Instead of treating capitalism as a force that simply “grows” or “permeates,” we need to show how it actually operated. What incentives did markets, property rights, wage labor, and capital accumulation create? How did those incentives shape everyday decisions? And how did those individual decisions accumulate into the larger outcomes we see?

If we argue that “cotton capitalism” helped launch industrialization, we need to specify the causal chain. Did plantation profits finance British factories? Did skilled labor shortages or consumer demand spur mechanization? Did plantation management techniques influence factory discipline? Each possibility involves a different mechanism—and each requires different evidence.

Institutions: It’s not enough to list institutions; we have to explain where they came from and what they did. Why did Britain develop strong property rights and limits on arbitrary state power while Qing China didn’t? Why did some states build credibility and encourage long-term investment while others stayed trapped in predatory politics?

Technology: Technology can’t be treated as a byproduct of coercion or global trade. We need to explain why certain societies generated cumulative innovation: why the steam engine emerges in Britain and not Bengal; why innovation accelerates after 1750 even though forms of capitalism existed earlier. That means taking scientific culture, skill formation, wages, and incentives seriously.

Variation: We also have to distinguish among different kinds of capitalism—merchant, plantation, industrial, developmental, financialized. These aren’t minor variations; they’re different institutional worlds with different logics. Japan’s developmental state didn’t industrialize the way Britain did. South Korea didn’t follow the British path either. A history that treats all capitalism as the same can’t explain these differences.

Counterfactuals: Counterfactual reasoning matters. What would Britain’s trajectory have looked like without coal near major cities? Without New World resources? Without the scientific revolution? Without secure property rights after the Glorious Revolution? These “what if” questions clarify which factors really made a difference.

Growth: We also need an explanation for sustained productivity growth—not just extraction. That’s the real historical break. A serious account has to show how innovation compounded over generations, how living standards rose, and how societies escaped Malthusian limits. You can acknowledge capitalism’s violence without ignoring its extraordinary generative power.

State–Market Relations: States shaped capitalism in very different ways. The British state that protected property rights wasn’t the same as the Prussian state that directed industrialization, or the Japanese state that built developmental capacity, or the Chinese state managing market reforms. These distinctions matter.

Culture and Ideas: Finally, culture and ideas need to be integrated into the story, not treated as afterthoughts. Bourgeois values, Enlightenment rationality, consumer desires, and religious beliefs—all shaped what forms of capitalism were acceptable, imaginable, or legitimate. Culture doesn’t just reflect economic structures; it helps constitute them.

The Path Forward

Beckert has written an extraordinary book—a sweeping moral reckoning with capitalism’s violence, extraction, and systemic cruelty. His achievement is substantial. He shows with overwhelming evidence how coercion, slavery, colonial dispossession, and enclosure were not side stories but central to capitalism’s rise. He demonstrates how capitalism was globally made, not a purely European creation.

His insight about commodification is especially powerful. Capitalism does work by turning more and more of life—land, labor, time, nature, attention, even data—into things that can be priced and exchanged. That process reshaped communities, reorganized everyday life, and opened ever-new frontiers for profit.

But commodification alone cannot explain the full story. It helps us understand capitalism’s destructive side, but it can’t account for the Industrial Revolution, for divergent development paths, for sustained technological change, or for the huge productivity gains that reshaped material life. A narrative focused almost entirely on capitalism’s harms cannot illuminate how capitalism also produced institutional innovations, new technologies, and sustained economic growth.

What we need next is a different kind of synthesis: a global history that keeps Beckert’s moral seriousness but adds the analytical rigor social scientists require. A history that explains how capitalism worked, not just what it destroyed. A history with clear causal arguments, institutional analysis, comparisons across regions, and explicit engagement with puzzles of development, divergence, and technological change.

This matters because the challenge Ashton highlighted still confronts us: how to feed, clothe, employ, and secure decent lives for billions. Meeting that challenge requires understanding capitalism’s generative capacities as well as its violence—its ability to innovate, to reorganize production, to mobilize capital, and to lift societies out of Malthusian poverty.

The same institutions that enabled imperial conquest also connected isolated communities. The same factory system that exhausted workers also expanded material possibilities. The same financial networks that fueled speculation also funded new industries. Coercion and creativity, oppression and innovation—these are not separate stories. They unfolded together.

What we need is a history that can hold these tensions in view—a history that treats capitalism not as miracle or monstrosity, but as a complicated, evolving system shaped by people, institutions, and political struggle. A history that shows how growth actually happened, how institutions were built and remade, how societies escaped poverty, and how political action has repeatedly reshaped capitalism’s trajectory.

Such a history would help us see today’s arrangements—platform capitalism, algorithmic management, surveillance economies—not as technological inevitabilities but as political constructions that can be contested and redesigned.

This is the history our moment demands: morally serious, analytically rigorous, globally attuned, and politically relevant. Beckert gives us half of that synthesis—the moral vision. The next historians must supply the other half: the mechanisms, the institutions, the comparisons, the explanations.

Because how we understand capitalism’s past shapes what futures we can imagine—and what futures we can build.

Only a history that takes capitalism’s brutality and creativity equally seriously can help us grasp the world we inhabit and participate in creating one that is more just.