Sven Beckert isn’t here to judge capitalism, even though he just wrote a provocative, ambitious, 1,300-page book on its history. As he writes several times in the book (which this editor has read), he ...

“Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story,” said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. Harvard historian Sven ...

Capitalism is often treated as a timeless backdrop to modern life, a system that simply emerged in Europe and then swept the globe by force of inevitability. A new global history by Harvard historian ...

One of the joys of Capitalism and Its Critics, John Cassidy’s unexpectedly lively romp through the two-and-a-half-century history of capitalism, is its fine sense for dramatic reversals. Nearly a ...

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, which is a finalist for the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School ...

Introduction -- A commercial republic: 1776-1860 -- The two Americas -- The triumph of capitalism: 1865-1914 -- The age of giants -- The revolt against laissez-faire -- The business of America is ...

Economic collapse shattered Germany in the 1930s, allowing fascism to rise from the wreckage. Amid national humiliation and mass unemployment, Hitler exploited the public fear, redirected economic ...

On November 5, 2008—the nadir of that year’s eponymous financial crisis—Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to celebrate the opening of a new building. In a moment that made ...

Socialism cannot mean merely managing capitalism more fairly. It must point toward a society where survival is no longer ...

To understand capitalism, we need to be able to see it. This is difficult. Many people believe we can understand capitalism from our own experiences, which makes sense, considering how powerfully it ...