Capitalism

Epic… Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know culled from places you have never been… [Readers], including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship and be glad to have a valuable tool of reference on their shelves – John Kay * Financial Times *Capitalism is a learned, formidable and vivid story. Its grand synthesis will engage not only general readers, but thousands of specialists… Beckert has now proved once and for all the necessity of naming the global beast in order to reveal its vast power, past and present – Marcus Rediker * The New York Times *A seminal work that explains how capitalism started, evolved, and expanded over the last several hundred years. It’s quotable because the details are so rich and interesting, especially how capitalism started with merchants in a little known area called Aden * Forbes *Tremendously erudite, millennium-spanning tour de force of narrative history… A kaleidoscopic account of capitalism’s past…. Where others drag their feet, Harvard historian Sven Beckert earns pride of place for lucidly defining his subject – Dominik Leusder * New Statesman *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… Beckert’s capacious volume provides a new generation of capitalists and anti-capitalists with plenty of precedents for whatever world they come to imagine * Jacobin *Beckert’s bravura new intellectual history sets the record straight… Panoramic… While scholars have illuminated bits and pieces of this immense narrative, Beckert’s massive volume brings it together with impeccable authority and perspicacity… Each chapter offers an abundance of characters and arguments, interpreting the economic and social realities we share, commonalities of revolution and change… An achievement that will endure alongside Tony Judt’s Postwar and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, whose influence undergirds Beckert’s book * The Boston Globe *Vast in scale, cogent in delivery, accessible enough to accommodate a non-economist like me, [Capitalism] is that rare kind of project that can be described – unironically, no less – as magisterial * NPR.org *An early contender for a Pulitzer, Sven Beckert’s readable, never dull doorstop of how more people came to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism * Chicago Tribune, Fall Books Preview *A clarity that Karl Marx could only long for… Beckert’s agile account marches through the emergence of mercantilism and the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and proceeds through plantation and wage slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism, and a managerial/bureaucratic golden age… A comprehensive and up-to-date history, essential * Kirkus (starred review) *Magisterial in scope and ambition, Sven Beckert’s Capitalism is a dazzling global history of the forces that have shaped – and continue to shape – our world. A true tour de force – Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. His last book, Empire of Cotton, won many prizes, including the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History, shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.