Any book about capitalism that begins nearly 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new history. in Capitalism: a global history (Capitalism: a global history), Harvard historian Sven Beckert This promise is delivered with an epic 1,300-page story about the global giant who created the world we live in.
During the Cold War, capitalism was the global power that did not dare speak for itself. It seemed like the “normal” situation, as American historians wrote ceaselessly about “the economy” without specifying what kind of economy it was. Worse still, they belittled and marginalized those who used the concept of “capitalism.” To this day, most of the author’s fellow historians rarely connect their local, regional, or even national histories to the larger system of which they are a part. Beckert He proved once and for all the need for appointment Universal monster To reveal her enormous power in the past and present.
Never before has so much qualitative and quantitative evidence been provided for a broad reinterpretation of this story. Previous stories treated capitalism as a European invention, however BeckertIt is as ambitious as it is erudite, showing how capitalism emerged as a global phenomenon, and the strange behavior of a few merchants in places as far away as Cairo and Changzhou.
By mapping the diverse origins of capitalism, Beckert It reveals its protein and elastic character. Over centuries, merchants created small pockets of capital within coastal cities and created networks of trust that extended across great distances. These links, note BeckertIt helped them overcome and survive resistance from above, by landowning aristocrats who believed that “to make money with money seemed akin to sin, witchcraft, or petty theft,” and from below, by “farmers and artisans” who were reluctant to abandon their local notions of prices, determined by a “common sense of morality.”
In the 17th century, the sugar island of Barbados became one of the first capitalist societies, and Potosi (present-day Bolivia), a silver producer, became one of the first capitalist cities. He writes that up to a quarter of those who descended into the mines of Potosi died there BeckertBut “the rich could buy Ceylon diamonds, Neapolitan stockings, Venetian crystal, and Chinese porcelain.”
In these remote corners of the world, European investors conducted a kind of urban experiment, extending the logic of the market to all aspects of life. Everything, especially human labor, became a commodity and could be bought and sold for money.
Many histories of capitalism are abstract, structural, and purely economic, however Beckert He enriches his story by recreating for the reader the places where his heroes made their fortunes: medieval trading centers in Central Asia, sugar plantations in the Indian Ocean, and the production plants of twentieth-century industrial giants who made automobiles in Detroit. He travels to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, where he interviews a female textile worker at the entrance to a factory and then weaves her experience into his conclusion.
Beckert He also humanizes his story by relating it to the lives of specific capitalists, such as a family Godrej British India. Committed nationalists Godrej They began manufacturing everyday goods such as locks and safes in the early 1900s and helped finance the Indian independence movement. They benefited greatly from the decline of the British Empire in the late 1940s, when their early support for future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru enabled them to obtain a contract to manufacture typewriters for the post-colonial bureaucracy.
book Beckert It arrives on a turbulent and bloody battlefield, where an intellectual, cultural and geopolitical war has been raging for more than two centuries over what capitalism is and what the history of its rise might reveal to us. He offers a particularly devastating critique of pre-capitalist myths, showing how the “invisible hand” of the market does not peacefully guide world affairs and how the development of capitalism has been by no means “natural.”
Like many previous books Capitalism It is not just a story, but a moral criticism. The metaphor of brutality runs through the pages Beckert. In his story, the hand of capital is visible, cold, cruel and cruel, and capitalism is an illegitimate creature that feeds on different types of labor, from slaves to free, and many other types, within different political frameworks, from democracy to dictatorship.
Two prominent eighteenth-century thinkers, the French philosopher Montesquieu and the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, argued that global trade promotes peace and harmony because it promotes mutual interests and interdependence.
What did happen, and was already happening during the lives of both men, was that trade often became militaristic and violent. Armed fleets directed their cannons at the ports to open markets for trade, and kings relied on bankers, when they were not trying to control them, to collect silver with which to supply weapons and swords to soldiers. Montesquieu was born in 1689. As he points out Beckert“Between 1689 and 1815, Great Britain and France were at war for 64 years.”
Beckert He emphasizes how capitalism, at every stage of its development, has relied on the military power of the modern state and, all too often, on practices of extreme violence, such as the blatant terrorism necessary to build the system of Atlantic slavery. Incorporating a key theme from his award-winning 2014 book, Cotton empireIt shows how Atlantic slavery, and the market logic that fueled it, fueled the Industrial Revolution.
Although Beckert He pays much attention to technological developments such as the steam engine and railways, and says very little about European sailing ships, the machine that fueled the conquest of the world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, and he does not even talk about the sailors whose labors made the creation of the world market possible. Across years and oceans, goods and people often seem to move around the world as if by magic. The book is essentially Terracentric.
However, workers and labor history more generally play a central role in “capitalism.” Farm and factory workers exercised collective power, often through acts of rebellion and resistance, especially during the Haitian Revolution and various phases of the Industrial Revolution.
Its main effect was to halt the advance of capital and create more humanistic characteristics within it, such as a welfare state. However, these movements against capital do not have the same human face as the actors who have promoted their cause around the world. The book is more a study of political economy than a history from below.
However, Capitalism It is an erudite, formidable and lively story. Its great composition will captivate not only the general reader, but thousands of specialists, many of whom will object to this or that interpretation or omission. That’s how it should be. Readers around the world will study, ponder, approve of, and debate this monumental work of history, emphasizing its importance to generations for decades to come.
Source: New York Times
(Photos: Infobae Archive)