Capitalism: A Global History

Capitalism: A Global History
Detailed TOC

• Preface — PDF pp. 8–12

  • Capitalism as a world-making historical force
  • Markets, wage labor, consumption, finance, and global interdependence
  • Why capitalism appears natural despite its historical novelty
  • Capitalism as a relatively recent and geographically uneven order
  • The need for a millennium-scale history
  • Capitalism as a global rather than national phenomenon

• Introduction — PDF pp. 13–38

  • Robert Keayne and the historical novelty of profit maximization
  • From morally embedded markets to accumulation as legitimate behavior
  • Capitalism as an ongoing historical revolution
  • Competing narratives: productivity and abundance versus exploitation and dispossession
  • Why capitalism must be “denaturalized”
  • Markets, commodification, wage labor, capital reinvestment, and accumulation
  • Why industrialization cannot be equated with the origin of capitalism
  • Capitalism as a global system of connections rather than a European invention
  • Critique of Eurocentric histories
  • Countryside, commodity frontiers, and ecological appropriation
  • Merchant capital as an active force in production
  • States, labor regimes, territory, technology, and social conflict
  • Capitalism as historically contingent rather than governed by a single deterministic logic

• Chapter 1. Islands of Capital — PDF pp. 39–83

  • Capitalism begins as scattered nodes rather than a complete system
  • Long-distance merchants and early capital accumulation
  • Islamic cities as early centers of global commercial life
  • Merchant law, credit, finance, partnership, and commercial institutions
  • South Asian merchant networks and Indian Ocean commerce
  • Swahili trading cities and African hinterland connections
  • China as a manufacturing and commercial pole
  • Paper money, credit instruments, and sophisticated exchange
  • European merchant communities as relatively late entrants
  • Mediterranean commercial centers and European financial innovation
  • Trans-Saharan trade and West African merchant cities
  • A global “archipelago” of capital embedded in predominantly noncapitalist societies

• Chapter 2. Capitalists Without Capitalism — PDF pp. 84–116

  • Merchants connecting distant producers and consumers
  • Bills, credit, partnership arrangements, and risk sharing
  • Diasporic, religious, caste, and kinship commercial networks
  • Commercial institutions capable of moving capital over long distances
  • Why sophisticated markets did not automatically generate capitalism
  • Peasant subsistence and resistance to commodity production
  • Political rulers limiting merchant autonomy
  • Religious and ethical restraints on accumulation
  • Community norms governing legitimate prices and profits
  • Capital owners as powerful actors still enclosed within noncapitalist social orders
  • The distinction between capitalists existing and capitalism organizing society

Part I — Building Capitalism

• Chapter 3. The Great Connecting, 1450–1650 — PDF pp. 118–190

  • Surat and the intensification of Eurasian and Indian Ocean commerce
  • European entry into established Asian and African trading networks
  • Genoese capital and Portuguese maritime power
  • Merchant–state alliances and the financing of territorial expansion
  • Atlantic Africa and the establishment of European trading stations
  • Conquest, coercion, and commercial expansion
  • American silver and the Potosí production complex
  • Silver as a carrier connecting the Americas, Europe, and Asia
  • Atlantic slavery and the forced mobilization of labor
  • Chartered companies and delegated state violence
  • Why European merchants became unusually important to resource-hungry states
  • Growing fusion of commercial capital, military power, and territorial control
  • Transformation from disconnected commercial islands toward a genuinely global system

• Chapter 4. Transforming the Countryside, 1550–1750 — PDF pp. 191–258

  • Capital moving beyond trading cities into land and production
  • Barbados and the plantation as a new productive machine
  • Sugar, land, labor, food, and inputs converted into commodities
  • Plantation profitability and highly coordinated production
  • Atlantic slavery as a mechanism of labor mobilization
  • Dutch capital and eastern European grain production
  • Merchant capital penetrating forests, farms, and rural commodity systems
  • Colonial dispossession in the Americas
  • Commodity frontiers built through violence and land seizure
  • Serfdom, slavery, tenancy, and wage labor as alternative labor architectures
  • Expansion of wage labor without its immediate universalization
  • State power determining which commodity systems could develop
  • Taiwan versus Saint-Domingue as contrasting political-production systems
  • Countryside transformation as indispensable to capitalist expansion

• Chapter 5. Intensifying Industry, 1600–1750 — PDF pp. 259–297

  • Proto-industrialization before mechanized factories
  • Rural weaving and dispersed manufacturing
  • Merchant control over raw materials, credit, marketing, and output
  • Putting-out systems and household production
  • Indian textile production and global markets
  • Chinese cotton and silk manufacturing
  • Ottoman textile networks
  • European linen, wool, and textile districts
  • Cities as coordinating nodes for rural manufacturing
  • Manchester and other industrializing commercial centers
  • Mining, metallurgy, weapons, and capital-intensive production
  • Growing scale of industrial enterprises
  • State encouragement of manufacturing and technical skill
  • Increasing competitive pressure among distant production systems
  • Industrial intensification without yet producing full industrial capitalism

• Chapter 6. The Perfect Storm — PDF pp. 298–339

  • Atlantic port cities and rapidly concentrating merchant wealth
  • Commercial expansion feeding manufacturing expansion
  • Global competition forcing quality and productivity improvements
  • European imitation of Asian manufactured goods
  • Consumption growth and widening commodity markets
  • Colonial resources relieving ecological and material constraints
  • Slavery-backed accumulation and Atlantic wealth
  • Plantation commodity systems supplying industrializing economies
  • Capital accumulation feeding finance and production
  • Increasing state responsiveness to capital owners
  • Warfare, taxation, debt, and the state’s need for economic growth
  • Trade + countryside transformation + industrial intensification + state capacity
  • The combined conditions that make the industrial break possible

Part II — The Great Leap

• Chapter 7. The Rise of Industrial Capitalism, 1760–1850 — PDF pp. 341–391

  • British cotton as the initial industrial breakthrough
  • Mechanization and explosive increases in textile output
  • Why technical innovation alone did not constitute an industrial revolution
  • Coal and the escape from organic-energy constraints
  • Steam power
  • Railroads as a system-transforming infrastructure
  • Transport, market enlargement, and accelerating circulation
  • Industrialization spreading to continental Europe and the United States
  • The importance of capable and interventionist states
  • Protection, infrastructure, law, and industrial policy
  • The emergence of a new international productive hierarchy
  • Factory organization
  • Large-scale wage labor
  • Fossil-energy dependence
  • Factory + wage labor + fossil fuel as the core industrial configuration
  • Sustained economic growth becoming structurally reproducible

• Chapter 8. Capturing the Hinterland, 1780–1860 — PDF pp. 392–462

  • Haitian revolution as a crisis for plantation capitalism
  • Industrialization’s enormous appetite for agricultural commodities
  • Cotton, coffee, sugar, food, and other raw-material frontiers
  • Attempts to create commodity production without slavery
  • Senegalese experiments with alternative labor systems
  • British efforts to reorganize Indian cotton production
  • Resistance of cultivators to market-directed production
  • Why supposedly “free” labor repeatedly failed to satisfy capital owners
  • Intensification rather than immediate decline of Atlantic slavery
  • Expansion of slavery after the Industrial Revolution
  • US cotton and industrial Britain
  • Brazilian coffee and slave labor
  • Industrial capitalism externalizing coercion into distant hinterlands
  • Industrial heartlands and coerced commodity frontiers as one integrated system

• Chapter 9. A Capitalist Civilization, 1830–1880 — PDF pp. 463–530

  • Capitalism becoming a social order rather than a collection of sectors
  • Commodification of ordinary life
  • Wage dependence and household dependence on markets
  • Industrial cities and the new discipline of time
  • Factory clocks, schedules, supervision, and regularized labor
  • Emergence of metropolitan bourgeois elites
  • Concentrated wealth in New York, Rio, Lima, and other cities
  • Bourgeois consumption, clubs, architecture, education, and culture
  • Paris and other centers as global status models
  • Faith in progress, technology, and economic growth
  • Urban proletarianization
  • Manchester as an extreme expression of industrial civilization
  • Migration and the creation of differentiated working classes
  • Race, ethnicity, religion, and gender as mechanisms of labor segmentation
  • Marx and Engels as interpreters of the newly visible capitalist system
  • International financial crises as proof of global economic interdependence
  • Capitalism becoming recognizable as a world system

• Chapter 10. Rebellions: The Crisis of Old-Regime Capitalism, 1830–1870 — PDF pp. 531–586

  • Market expansion generating resistance alongside accumulation
  • Factory riots, strikes, machine breaking, and struggles over working time
  • Skilled workers retaining bargaining power through productive knowledge
  • Early worker organization
  • Peasant resistance against commercialization
  • Bengal indigo rebellion
  • Conflict over property rights, rents, debt, and commodity production
  • Slave uprisings in Cuba and the Caribbean
  • Haitian emancipation as a continuing revolutionary precedent
  • US Civil War as a mass slave-labor revolt as well as interstate conflict
  • Brazilian slave resistance
  • Rural rebellion in Java and other colonial regions
  • Resistance to corvée labor and taxation
  • 1848 and bourgeois challenges to old political structures
  • Early anticolonial economic critique
  • Dadabhai Naoroji and the critique of colonial extraction
  • Collapse of key institutions of “old-regime capitalism”
  • Pressure for a reconstruction of capital, labor, and the state

Part III — Global Reconstructions

• Chapter 11. Reconstructing Capital, 1870–1914 — PDF pp. 588–633

  • Heavy industry replacing merchant capital at the commanding heights
  • Steel, coal, railways, electricity, oil, and chemicals
  • Machinery used to produce increasingly sophisticated machinery
  • Huge fixed-capital requirements
  • Rise of professional managerial hierarchies
  • Shareholder corporations and new ownership forms
  • Industrial and financial capital becoming tightly interconnected
  • Vertical integration
  • Horizontal concentration, cartels, and control of markets
  • Firms seeking control over entire commodity chains
  • National markets replacing some older cosmopolitan merchant structures
  • Business elites becoming increasingly nationalist
  • States and large corporations becoming mutually dependent
  • The United States as a rapidly rising industrial power
  • A “Second Great Divergence” within the industrial world
  • Modern big business as a new institutional form of capital

• Chapter 12. Reconstructing Labor, 1870–1920 — PDF pp. 634–710

  • Emancipation creating a labor-control crisis for landowners
  • Reconstruction of plantation labor after slavery
  • Sharecropping and tenant farming
  • Indentured migration across empires
  • Agricultural wage labor
  • Limits of genuinely free labor markets
  • Debt, mobility restrictions, and legal coercion
  • Race as an institutional technology for differentiating labor
  • Convict labor and other forms of forced work
  • Continued coercion in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas
  • Industrial wage labor combined with paternalism and employer control
  • Worker resistance inside reconstructed labor systems
  • Growth of trade unions
  • Transformation from spontaneous revolt to durable organization
  • Socialist and labor parties
  • Working-class institutions becoming political forces

• Chapter 13. Enclosures — PDF pp. 711–770

  • Reconstruction of the state as the “institution of institutions”
  • Capital’s need for larger territorially integrated economic spaces
  • National markets and imperial economic territories
  • The United States as a model of continental economic integration
  • European and Japanese territorial expansion
  • Partition and “capture” of the African interior
  • Colonial bureaucracies extending property, taxation, and policing
  • Land surveys and formalized ownership
  • Monetary taxation forcing subsistence producers into markets
  • Infrastructure binding hinterlands to national and imperial centers
  • Indigenous land dispossession
  • Resistance to territorial enclosure
  • Standardization of time, measurement, administration, and law
  • Meiji Japan and the construction of a modern national economic state
  • Economics itself becoming increasingly enclosed as an autonomous discipline
  • Marginalism, utility, price, and mathematical abstraction
  • Capitalism acquiring territorial as well as conceptual boundaries

• Chapter 14. A Time of Monsters: Industrial Capitalism, 1918–1945 — PDF pp. 771–853

  • Post–World War I labor unrest
  • Mass production and the Fordist factory
  • Automobiles and the reorganization of industrial production
  • Productivity growth without universal purchasing power
  • The limits of mass consumption
  • Persistent colonial and racial hierarchies
  • The Great Depression as a systemic crisis
  • Collapse of world trade and financial integration
  • Economic nationalism
  • Protection, exchange controls, and autarkic ambitions
  • Imperial blocs as attempted self-contained economic systems
  • Fascism as one response to capitalist crisis
  • Corporatism and the political suppression of class conflict
  • Expanded state administration and economic planning
  • Public expenditure becoming structurally important
  • Competing capitalist, fascist, social-democratic, and socialist models
  • World War II and extreme state mobilization of industrial capacity

• Chapter 15. Insurgents — PDF pp. 854–921

  • Colonial capitalism generating its own nationalist capitalist challengers
  • Indigenous merchants moving into manufacturing
  • Indian industrial capital
  • Tata and the creation of nationally controlled heavy industry
  • Indian capitalists aligning economic development with political independence
  • The Bombay Plan
  • Planning, public investment, and selective nationalization
  • Industrial development as an anticolonial project
  • Postcolonial states attempting to manufacture national capitalist classes
  • Egypt and state-centered development
  • Nigeria and “indigenization”
  • Senegal and the persistence of foreign capital
  • Weak domestic capital as a constraint on independence
  • Infrastructure, education, finance, and industrial capability
  • Five-year plans and developmental states
  • The difficulty of transforming formal sovereignty into economic autonomy
  • Dependency and underdevelopment as critiques of colonial capitalism
  • Global South thinkers recentering power, hierarchy, and extraction in economic analysis

• Chapter 16. Taming Industrial Capitalism, 1945–1973 — PDF pp. 922–1009

  • The “thirty glorious years” / golden age
  • Rapid productivity and output growth
  • Mass consumer capitalism
  • Household appliances, automobiles, housing, and rising material living standards
  • Higher wages and strengthened collective bargaining
  • Welfare-state construction
  • Health, pensions, education, family benefits, and paid vacations
  • Stronger labor movements
  • Progressive taxation and redistribution
  • Corporate investment in research and technical capability
  • Mass expansion of higher education
  • Japanese manufacturing ascent
  • Government planning and industrial policy
  • Public ownership and regulation
  • Bretton Woods and managed international capitalism
  • GATT and controlled trade liberalization
  • Decolonization interacting with the postwar economic order
  • Tourism as a new commodity frontier
  • Industrialization of food preparation and services
  • Commodification penetrating household activities
  • Persistent gender hierarchy beneath egalitarian economic outcomes
  • Persistent racial and colonial inequality
  • Environmental cost of the “great acceleration”
  • Social rebellions over gender, race, environment, and authority
  • Business organization against regulation and organized labor
  • Intellectual foundations of the coming neoliberal counterrevolution
  • Breakdown of the postwar settlement by the early 1970s

Part IV — The Future of Capitalism?

• Chapter 17. Riding the Tiger: A Neoliberal Age, 1973–2008 — PDF pp. 1011–1096

  • Chile as an early laboratory of applied neoliberalism
  • Destruction of organized labor under military rule
  • Privatization, austerity, tariff reduction, and market liberalization
  • Technocratic economics and the political construction of “free” markets
  • Thatcherism, Reaganism, and the internationalization of neoliberal policy
  • New capitalist nodes in the Global South
  • Export-oriented industrialization
  • China’s special economic zones
  • Shenzhen and the relocation of global manufacturing
  • Massive new proletarianization
  • Rise of Chinese, Indian, Korean, and other non-Western capital
  • Computers, just-in-time production, and new supply-chain architectures
  • Deindustrialization in older industrial regions
  • Global production networks replacing nationally integrated production
  • Labor arbitrage and capital mobility
  • Decline of unions and working-class institutions
  • Privatization of state assets
  • Neoliberal institutions, think tanks, business schools, and policy networks
  • Structural adjustment in the Global South
  • China’s hybrid of planning and markets
  • Welfare states weakened but not eliminated
  • Wage shares falling and inequality widening
  • Consumption maintained despite redistribution toward capital
  • Intensified commodification and the idea of individuals as “human capital”
  • Global consumption growth
  • Accelerating ecological extraction and carbon emissions
  • Capitalism achieving unprecedented geographic and social penetration

• Epilogue. The Possibilities of an Island and the Future of Capitalism — PDF pp. 1097–1137

  • Cambodia as a contemporary commodity frontier
  • Global apparel production and subcontracted labor
  • Chinese investment and special economic zones
  • Tourism, gambling, factories, and urban development
  • Land speculation and large-scale dispossession
  • Continuing proletarianization
  • Capitalism still expanding spatially and socially
  • Contemporary inequality
  • Land acquisition and enclosure in the Global South
  • Intellectual-property and knowledge enclosure
  • Nature as an increasingly exhausted unpriced input
  • Material extraction beyond ecological carrying capacity
  • Climate and biodiversity pressures
  • Geographic shift of capitalist dynamism toward Asia
  • Declining centrality of traditional industrial capital
  • Return of merchant-like, financial, coordinating, and asset-light forms of capital
  • Global brands separating control from direct production
  • Capitalism's extraordinary adaptability
  • Accumulation as an expansionary imperative
  • Whether capitalism can reproduce itself under ecological and social limits
  • Historical contingency and the possibility of alternative futures

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