Sven Beckert. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Work & Economy

How capitalism came to rule modern life

Sven Beckert’s new history traces complex global evolution of system that continues to shift, disrupt even now

Christy DeSmith

Harvard Staff Writer

December 11, 2025

8 min read

Capitalism is the backbone of 21st-century life, according to Sven Beckert. It determines how most of the world works, eats, and sleeps. It shapes how people pursue love, marriage, and family.

“It has such an important presence,” says Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History, “that we need to understand capitalism better in order to understand ourselves better.”

“Capitalism: A Global History” is Beckert’s doorstop of a new release, tracing in its 1,344 pages how this evolving economic system came to rule the modern experience.

Beckert, whose research seminars more than a decade ago helped instigate the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, starts with the 12th-century traders who opened new avenues for accumulating wealth and power. From there the book revisits the first long-distance trade networks, the cruelties of capitalism under colonialism and slavery, the dawn of the Machine Age, and the East Asian factories that furnish much of today’s international marketplace.

“A lot of people have written about capitalism,” said Beckert, who cites classic works by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber as inspiration. “But this book represents the first sustained effort to think about capitalism from a global perspective throughout its entire history.”

In an interview with the Gazette, edited for length and clarity, Beckert discussed some of what he’s learned about historic centers of innovation and cycles of inequality.

Let’s start with a simple definition. What, exactly, is capitalism?

As a historian, I insist that the best way to understand capitalism is from a historical perspective, because capitalism has changed tremendously over the past 1,000 years. It has also been quite different at the same time in different parts of the world.

“Capitalism is best defined throughout all these changes as an economic logic in which privately owned capital is invested productively, with the primary goal of producing more capital.”

But capitalism is best defined throughout all these changes as an economic logic in which privately owned capital is invested productively, with the primary goal of producing more capital.

This definition explains something else about capitalism. Namely, it’s an expansive way of organizing economic life. That is, we can historically trace how this economic logic has spread into new parts of the world and ever more spheres of our lives.

How is the book related to your last major research title, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist “Empire of Cotton”?

I originally thought “Empire of Cotton” would be mostly a history of cotton. But while I was writing it, the book also became a history of capitalism. It was clear that I had a fair amount to say about the subject. So I decided I could write a history of global capitalism in its entirety.

It turned out to be a slightly insane idea. But I had learned a lot while researching “Empire of Cotton.” I knew how to research in archives around the world, how to make use of their materials, how to integrate multiple local perspectives into a global narrative. Even though it’s a much bigger book, “Capitalism: A Global History” was in some ways easier to write.

And it seemed urgent: We need to understand capitalism to understand the world we live in today.

How far afield did the research take you?

I traveled to Uzbekistan, Brazil, Australia, India, Senegal, to various parts of the United States and Europe. In every chapter, there are at least one or two locations for which I tell a detailed story based on local archival research.

My first research trip was to Barbados. When I write about 17th-century Barbados and the expansion of the slavery-based sugar industry, it makes a difference to have been on the island.

My last trip was Cambodia. But I didn’t look at dusty records while I was there. Instead, I interviewed entrepreneurs. I interviewed workers. I visited all kinds of sites to get a sense of present-day capitalism. The book ends in front of a Cambodian textile factory in 2023.

Where does it begin?

When the story of capitalism is told, it’s usually about Florence, Venice, Genoa. Maybe then Amsterdam, London, Manchester, New York City. But if you think about contemporary capitalism, it’s obvious that you miss much of its dynamism by focusing only on the continent of Europe or only on the United States.

“It starts with a micro-analysis of the merchants of Aden, a city in present-day Yemen, in the year 1150.”

From the moment of inception, capitalism was a global system. The very essence of capitalism is its connectedness. Therefore, the book starts by tracing merchant communities in the first half of the second millennium. It starts with a micro-analysis of the merchants of Aden, a city in present-day Yemen, in the year 1150.

We see these merchant communities emerge not only in the Arab world. They emerge in India, in China, in various parts of Africa. Europe becomes very important. But even at its most Eurocentric moment — let’s say in the 19th century — capitalism remains globally embedded.

When does capitalism really take off?

By the year 1500 approximately, there is a sea change. The capitalist logic is pushed to a significant degree into agrarian production. That’s why I went to Barbados, because I was looking at what was one of the first fully formed capitalist societies. By the 1670s, all inputs and all outputs were commodified. All production was for the market. Of course, it was all built on exploiting enslaved workers.

Around 1800, all these forces come together and something new emerges with the Industrial Revolution. We suddenly see modern machine production, factories. We enter a moment that is recognizably modern.

While tracing this vast expansion, I also show that capitalism represents a radical departure from earlier forms of economic life. For example, from the feudal order or from an economic logic focused on subsistence provision of your household, your family, your village — these were different logics common throughout history.

And because capitalism is such a radical departure, it also encountered enormous resistances. It expands relatively slowly until the 19th century, and then it just explodes like a supernova. It becomes the dominant force of economic life on Earth.

You write that capitalism is a series of regime changes. Can you explain?

In some ways, the history of capitalism is continuous. Every year we produce more things. More people work in factories. People become richer. But there are long moments in time, in which this continuous process is embedded, when a particular institutional order prevails.

“The basic idea is that the history of capitalism is characterized by a number of regimes that are relatively stable for long periods but then shift quite drastically in relatively short moments of time into another institutional arrangement.”

For example, at the time of the merchant communities in Aden, we see what I call “islands of capital” all over the world. And that order remains relatively stable for several centuries. We later see the slavery-based, colonial, very violent moment in the history of capitalism between the years between 1500 and about 1800.

The basic idea is that the history of capitalism is characterized by a number of regimes that are relatively stable for long periods but then shift quite drastically in relatively short moments of time into another institutional arrangement. The latest of these regimes is what I call the neoliberal order. It didn’t last for centuries; it lasted for maybe five decades. Now that it’s possibly coming to end, it’s hard to get our bearings. This was the ground we stood on.

What drives these transitions from one regime to the next?

Things change quite drastically partly because of economic pressures, partly because of technological pressures. Elites reorientate themselves around different goals.

But sometimes things change because people with very little political power, very little economic power, start to rebel. They try to create a different kind of economic life. For example, the end of slavery is clearly an important moment in the global history of capitalism.

But why does the end of slavery come about? In part because the enslaved engage in massive rebellions, from Saint Domingue in the 1790s to Brazil and the United Sates. The American Civil War was read by W.E.B. Du Bois as a kind of general strike of the enslaved.

What do you make of the post-World World War II era, regarded by many as this golden age for U.S. workers and families?

It’s one of these regimes. It’s a moment when the United States is decisively the most powerful nation globally, economically, and politically. It’s a moment when the capitalist world stands in competition with the Soviet Union.

As a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal, it’s a moment when the welfare state vastly expanded. It’s a moment when trade unions became more powerful, and they shape a totally different capitalism. The productivity gains of American industry or European industry are quite broadly distributed.

I think it’s also an instructive moment because it gives you a sense of what is possible. The world we live in doesn’t have to be like it is now. The absurd level of inequality we see is not a fact of nature.