Sven Beckert on the global history of capitalism

Cutting-edge research from the Department of Economic History, LSE. Cutting-edge research from the Department of Economic History, LSE. Sven Beckert’s latest book,Capitalism,is a global history challenging the conventional account of capitalism’s origins in eighteenth-century Europe. Instead he traces its emergence across Asia, Africa, and Europe for over a millennium. Following his book launch at LSE in March, the Economic History Blog sat down with Beckert to discuss some key questions. EH Blog: What motivated you to take on a project of such scale, and was there a central misconception about capitalism you were hoping to challenge? Beckert:I wrote the book for two reasons. One, I take the advent and expansion of capitalism to be the most important process taking place on planet earth during the past millennium. To understand our history we need to come to terms with capitalism. And second, we cannot help but notice that capitalism structures our lives today in fundamental ways. To navigate our present we need to have a better understanding of that capitalism. Depending on which conversations you listen to, there are very many misunderstandings about capitalism. Some see it as a universal, even “natural” economic logic. It is not. Some see it as a development purely about Europe. It is not. Some see it as a story of a sphere of life apart from the state. It is not. Some see its history as solely about “inclusive institutions,” wage labour, and contracts. It’s so much more. Many look at capitalism with doctrinaire eyes, while to me one of capitalism’s most enduring traits is its ability to shapeshift, to be undogmatic. EH Blog: Economic historians often analyse markets, institutions, labour systems, and growth, but less often treat “capitalism” itself as the central analytical object. What do you believe economic historians lose, analytically, when we study the historical economy without capitalism as an organising concept? Beckert:Well, economic life comes in very many different forms and shapes and all of it deserves to be studied. I agree with that. But by flattening all of economic life on planet earth into one logic, we miss the specificities of each logic and in the end we fail to understand all of them. We miss, for example, how revolutionary a departure the capitalist logic of economic life is from other forms. Just think of the extraordinary economic growth, technical innovation and productivity gains that went hand in hand with the capitalist revolution. You will not find that in societies that organise their economic lives along different lines. To understand “the economy” we need to be specific of how that economy is organized, and we need to be cognisant of the political, social, and cultural organisation of society in which that is embedded. There is a big difference between an economy organised around a feudal lord exploiting the peasants, or an economy that is focused on the provision of subsistence, and an economy in which privately owned capital is productively invested with the principal goal of further production of such capital. Capitalism, my book shows, is a specific moment in the history of economic life, and we can show empirically how that weird, strange and novel logic emerged and spread. It is, at its heart, a historical problem. EH Blog: One of the claims of the book is that capitalism was “born global”, emerging across Asia, Africa, and Europe rather than originating in a single region. How does this perspective change how we should understand familiar milestones such as the Industrial Revolution or European imperial expansion? Beckert:Yes, the book shows that capitalism can only be understood from a global perspective. Generations of scholars, from a variety of methodological and political vantage points, have aimed to uncover capitalism’s origins in very specific places and even to identify a rough “birthday” of capitalism. They looked for the one seed from which capitalism sprouted. All these efforts are bound to fail, because capitalism emerged from a networked process that stretched across many centuries and across many places. The logic that is at the core of capitalism can be observed already a millennium ago in the communities of long-distance merchants that you can find in many regions of the world. At this point, these islands of capital were exotic and weak in a sea of economic life that unfolded along very different kinds of logics. It was a world in which there were already capitalists, but capitalism still was far into the future. I observe empirically how this logic then spread—a process that took many centuries. In some ways one can observe the emergence of capitalism even in today’s world. Of course, at a certain point Europe came to play a crucial role in the history of capitalism. There was a divergence in development. And we need to explain that. But even during its most eurocentric moments, capitalism was always global and can only be understood from a global perspective. Just think of the Industrial Revolution itself, certainly one of the most important events in human history. On the one hand, this was a deeply local story—the advent of new forms of machine production in England and Scotland. But it was at the same time very global: the taste for cotton fabrics had come from the centuries old import of Indian manufactured textiles. Some of the technology to produce such textiles had also come from India. The cotton itself that was spun in Lancashire came from the Americas, where it was grown by enslaved workers from Africa. And of course, the markets for these products were to be found all over the world. This is an excellent example for how a very local moment can only be understood from a global perspective. In my book I aim to keep that global perspective all the way to the present, a moment in which no one would even consider understanding capitalism from a purely Eurocentric perspective. EH Blog: You spent years researching for this book in archives and collections across the world. Was there a particular archive, source, or historical episode that genuinely surprised you or forced you to rethink your understanding of capitalism? Beckert:I travelled to all continents to research the book, partly because I always aimed to tell the global history of capitalism also from very local perspectives. Certainly, my research on Barbados opened up a disconcerting window on the shocking violence of the capitalist transformation of the Barbadian countryside in the 17thcentury. My research in the Godrej archives in Mumbai gave me a fascinating view of the intersection of politics and business in 1940s India, with the Godrej family both long-term political activists fighting for India’s independence and also one of the most successful Indian industrialists of the twentieth century. I was fortunate enough to discover a story that allowed me to tell that history—namely how the Godrej family began producing typewriters in India in the 1940s. This ability to produce typewriters was of course a sign of the technical sophistication of the company, but the typewriter itself became also a crucial tool of state building in India. The book is full of such stories emerging from the archives featuring a wide variety of characters—from the railroad workers in early twentieth century Dakar to the FIAT engineers in Turin of the 1920s, from the enslaved workers on La Reunion in the 1840s to Bordeaux merchant Jean Jacques Bethman. EH Blog: A central theme in your work is that capitalism has always been deeply entangled with political power, state violence, and empire. Why do you think the idea of capitalism as a “free market” system remains so persistent? Beckert:Very good question. I see capitalism as a state-centric economic civilization. Of course, the ways how the state and capitalism related changed drastically over time, but on the most general level we can observe that the capitalist economic logic and the scale an