*Capitalism: A Global History*, by Sven Beckert

This 1103 pp. book reflects a great deal of learning, and it is often interesting to read.  It is well-written.  So virtually everyone can absorb interesting things from it.  In that sense I am happy to recommend it.

The book has two major problems however.

First, is “capitalism” the right way of centering a book topic across centuries and 1103 pages?  What exactly ties all the different discussions together?  And how many of them succeed in making original contributions to the areas they cover?  There is a kind of “replacement level” left-wing series of cliches running throughout the narrative, but what else is unifying this story?  I would rather read a book on any single one of the covered topics.  And in too many cases the coverage seems only OK.  For instance, the discussions of Pinochet’s Chile, and neoliberalism, in the book’s final chapter are not above the quality of basic media coverage, as you might find in the NYT.

Second, the author does not know what “capitalism” is.  I am not going to insist on my pet definition, but consider a simple example.

Birkerts (p.180) is keen to describe mid-17th century Barbados as capitalism, indeed as a kind of extreme or ideal capitalism.  Well, in some regards.  Yes there were markets.  But King Charles I gave all the land to the Earl of Carlisle to distribute, and of course land was a centrally important asset back then.  Might that be called…heaven forbid…statism?  There was slavery too, at various stages of development, depending which years one is looking at.  Is that really “an almost perfectly Smithian economy”?  Smith hated slavery, and also considered it economically inefficient.  The Navigation Act of 1651 limited trade with the Dutch, and could be considered a further deviation from Barbadian capitalism.  The whole system was mercantilism built on land theft and slavery, and none of that is synonymous with capitalism.  Nor are these distinctions clearly unpacked in the discussion.

Or look to the book’s epilogue.  Cambodia is held up as the embodiment of current capitalism.  Really?  Not Poland or Ireland or Singapore?  Or even the Dominican Republic?  Better yet, how about multiple contrasting examples to conclude the book?  Cambodia was ruled by vicious communists, suffered under a major murderous holocaust, still has an absolute dictator, ranks 98th in the Heritage index of economic freedom (“mostly unfree“), and lies in the thrall of Chinese domination, economic, political, and otherwise.  I do understand there is now more FDI there, but this is hardly the proper representation of contemporary capitalism or its future, as the title of the final chapter seems to indicate.

The main problem is that the author has very little sense of what he does not understand.  Above all else, it is an example of just how insular our institutions of elite higher education have become.