[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to a thousand natural shocks about a funny podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our host Gabe Dunn, and this week on the show, we are diving deep into the history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we are doing so with Sven Beckert, who is a professor at Harvard of History and Economics.

[SPEAKER_00]: And his book, Capitalism, a Global History, is [SPEAKER_00]: exploration of capitalism all the way back from when it first started out of Yemen and uh in the Puritan age in the U.S.

up until now.

[SPEAKER_00]: And though that may seem daunting, Sven is a very articulate and smart person who has distilled all of this down into, as he says, it's not for his history colleagues, it's not for his economics colleagues, it's not even for his students or for policymakers.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is a book for us, the average person to understand capitalism as a global phenomenon and not something that is just happening [SPEAKER_00]: places, and even on this show, we tend to focus on the U.S.

specifically, and I wanted to get into the topic on a more worldwide scale.

[SPEAKER_00]: So please enjoy this interview.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's very philosophical.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's full of a lot of history that I think can be used to...

how should I put this?

[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of lights are bad at cheap renders They're called you when they got you to believe in Thumb and finger held to the forehead and an hell show Trapped any cover on the sales game Let's fight back in now She talks about class in the mass across The disaster's blocked fresh It's not spanked to box It's a thousand natural shocks A bad with money podcasts Hello and welcome to a thousand natural shocks A bad with money podcasts I'm your host Gabe Eston [SPEAKER_00]: And with me today, do you want to tell my audience who you are and what you do because you have a very wide scope?

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm Sven Beckert.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's good to be here with you.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I teach history at Harvard University.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I write about economic history, social history, political history.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've written books on the history of the economic elite of New York City in the late 19th century.

[SPEAKER_01]: cotton and I just finished writing a book on the global history of capitalism during the one past one thousand years.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just a little research.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where are you from?

[SPEAKER_01]: Germany.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because like, I love the idea of taking this at a global level, because I think a lot of stuff is very U.S.

based, including this show.

[SPEAKER_00]: But can you talk about, like, how this is like a global in what ways this capitalism global?

[SPEAKER_01]: Look so much of the history of capitalism, when we think about capitalism, most people, if they think about it historically, think about places such as Florence, Genoa, Venice, maybe Amsterdam, maybe the city of London, maybe Manchester for its early industrialization, and then maybe New York City for its finance industry and other such things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But almost all of the world and almost all of the world's people are completely ignored within this story.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the basic argument of the book and the basic idea of the book is that we need to globalize the history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: That capitalism was global from the get go.

[SPEAKER_01]: I argue that capitalism was one global and that we can only understand anything about capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we look at it from a global perspective, and this is strikingly obvious when we think about the world today, because if you think about capitalism in the year 2025, it would certainly be [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, incomplete, if you wouldn't also be thinking about places like China, if you wouldn't be thinking about places like Nigeria, if you wouldn't be thinking about places like India, but this is the case, not just for understanding the present-day word, but it's important understanding the history of capitalism since it's very beginning.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so just to give you an example.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm one of the key arguments of this book is that capitalism begins to emerge [SPEAKER_01]: on what I call islands of capital, namely places where the very earliest capitalists gather and these are cities and these are people who engage in trade.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I start that story in a place that many people have never heard of, namely, I start in the port of Eden in modern day Yemen.

[SPEAKER_01]: and I trace the history of the merchant community there and I tell the history of very particular kinds of merchants who engage in long distance trade in the year 1150.

[SPEAKER_01]: So almost 900 years ago and who trade with the West Africa with East Africa but also across the Indian Ocean into the western coast of South Asia.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a kind of strikingly modern community of merchants.

[SPEAKER_01]: I argue that in those kinds of communities capitalism began to emerge [SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, the merchants of Aiden were not Europeans.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is to show that, you know, to understand even the very beginnings of the history of capitalism, it is not sufficient to just look at European history.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I'm wondering the, the parsing out of people trading and engaging in capitalism, and the, [SPEAKER_00]: next level up, which I guess would be identifying as a capitalist and, instead of just the instinct to do it, the idea of, oh, this is something we should be actively engaging in.

[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that makes a lot of sense and looks so much of our thinking about capitalism, among scholars, but also among almost everyone, is a kind of thinking that capitalism, you know, the economic logic of capitalism is almost like the air we breathe.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that is natural that the world always was organized along these principles.

[SPEAKER_01]: the foundational argument of capitalism and global history is not just that this is a global story, but also to very much argue that capitalism is not a state of nature, that we can trace its emergence and thus we can trace its history.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I argue that capitalism is actually a revolutionary departure from [SPEAKER_01]: other ways of organizing economic life in human history.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I also show that the logic of capitalism emerged only very slowly.

[SPEAKER_01]: It encountered huge resistances.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's really only in the present day that it has spread into almost all, [SPEAKER_01]: places on planet Earth and it has spread into almost all spheres of our lives today, but this is very, very recent.

[SPEAKER_01]: For a long time, the logic, the capitalist logic was limited to a few places and to a very small segment of the human population with almost everybody else on planet Earth organizing the economic lives along very different kinds of projects.

[SPEAKER_00]: What were those logics and how did it become?

[SPEAKER_00]: Was it greed, was it power, hoarding?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, how did I assume it's colonialism has a big part of it?

[SPEAKER_00]: But how did it go from whatever those logics were if you could say what they were?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then get to capitalism is actually the one.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so most people on planet most of human history organized the economic lives in principally two ways.

[SPEAKER_01]: Most people just grew their own food, the engaged in subsistence agriculture, and they produced the things that they needed like clothing, shoes, parts, things like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But they produced them mostly in their households, [SPEAKER_01]: And if they traded them, they traded them, maybe with their neighbors or with the village down the river.

[SPEAKER_01]: But they certainly did not produce primarily to multiply their wealth or to accumulate capital or anything like this.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then there were other people who became very rich, but they became rich in a way that was distinctly not capitalist, namely they just plundered their neighbors.

[SPEAKER_01]: you know, their dependence to work for them.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, if you ever have traveled in Europe and you see all these beautiful houses, these were certainly signs of great wealth.

[SPEAKER_01]: So some people had accumulated significant wealth, but that was was not, [SPEAKER_01]: gained through capitalist means, but it was gained through just coercing the peasant to to part with whatever surplus they produced.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is kind of the typical logic of economic life, you know, very broadly speaking, on planet Earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the logic that that I identifies, the capitalist logic and that whose history I tell in the book, [SPEAKER_01]: is a logic in which capital is invested in productive undertakings with the goal of producing more capital.

[SPEAKER_01]: And in order to be able to do so, the person who owns that capital needs to be able to buy the things that are needed to organize trade or production on markets, so they need to be commodified.

[SPEAKER_01]: and they also need to be able to sell the things that they produce or trade, they need to sell them on markets, and so that needs to be commodified as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: To be able to engage in that production, they also need to have access to labor power and so they need to be able to purchase that labor power on markets either by paying wages or by enslaving the worker or other such things.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a very particular kind of [SPEAKER_01]: logic, and that logic is first embodied by these very early communities of long-distant merchants that evolved on the Arabian Peninsula as we discussed, but also in West Africa, also in India, also in China, also in the European continent, even in Central and South America.

[SPEAKER_01]: And at first it focused mostly on trade, so people engage in long-distant trade, but much [SPEAKER_01]: the production of things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that slowly becomes more important, especially after the year 1500.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then we can kind of trace if we look at the next 500 years in the history of capitalism from about the year 1500 today, we can see how this capital is infused into production.

[SPEAKER_01]: First into agrarian production, like the plantation economy of the Caribbean, for example, or the wine growing [SPEAKER_01]: And later, it is also a much later, it is also infusing manufacturing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I like the idea of it not being a natural state, though that is sad to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the sense that we immediately became able to communicate with people, [SPEAKER_00]: in different areas outside of our, let's say villages.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then the first thing we did was say, okay, we're going to actually take your labor and we're going to exploit.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: But but you know, sometimes these exchanges were not just, you know, these context were not just commercial.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, people also exchange ideas and they exchange poetry and [SPEAKER_01]: artisanal works and other such things.

[SPEAKER_01]: Of course also, you know, the merchants in South, in India, for example, had certain things to offer that the people on the Arabian Peninsula desired and people in India decides things that the people on the Arabian Peninsula produce.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it was not necessarily an all instances kind of an exploitative relationship.

[SPEAKER_01]: And indeed, I think even that at first, much of that activity is focused on long distance straight, it's not so much focused on production, and that really comes only on a significant scale comes only later in the 15th century.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think it became the default?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because you said it's not in our nature, but then it kind of seems inevitable.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if we look at this history now, it seems almost that we had to end up where we are right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, that is always the problem of any kind of history because we only know where we are right now and we can't really imagine or even less so explain that we could have gone down a very very different kind of road.

[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, for a very long time, this kind of economic logic, as I said, was very marginal to economic life on planet earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: and many people resisted it, they didn't want to be part of it because they saw that this logic threatened the order way of organizing the economic loss.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this was the case for the subsistence farmers that I mentioned earlier, but this was also the case for these elites, because they wanted to continue exploit the person, they wanted to continue coerced the person, they wanted to continue to take the surplus from the person, so they were not interested [SPEAKER_01]: But then, what are three things that explain the kind of, at first, slow, but then rapid expansion of the logic of capital?

[SPEAKER_01]: For one, there was a logic in capital itself that focused on its expansion, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because the basic logic of capitalism is to invest capital in order to produce more capital.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that was, kind of, [SPEAKER_01]: expansive process, both in terms in what parts of human life were affected by the capitalist logic, but also in geographic terms.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that was something that was embedded with in capitalism itself.

[SPEAKER_01]: Capitalism was from the ghetto expansive in a way that other forms of economic life were not necessarily expensive.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's was the logic of capital itself.

[SPEAKER_01]: And second, what happened in the 15th century, especially in the after, is that the owners of capital, [SPEAKER_01]: and the consolidating and states, especially of Europe.

[SPEAKER_01]: built it kind of coalition.

[SPEAKER_01]: They find one another and they support one another.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so in that process, then these European states gain a lot of power from the expansion of European capital, but the European capitalists also gained a lot of power from the expansion of European state.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so there was another reason of why this the capitalist logic expanded.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, [SPEAKER_01]: That didn't happen right away.

[SPEAKER_01]: That took a long time and was many centuries later, but eventually this way of organizing economic activity, of course, enabled us to produce so much more.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was just this huge increase in the output of things that people wanted to have and so that certainly was important to the expansion of capitalism as well, especially after the [SPEAKER_00]: So when you talk about the expansion, there's also like flexibility and adaptation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we're talking about capitalism as a term, but it's that the same as what it would be defined as now.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what would you define it as now in opposition to what it was?

[SPEAKER_01]: So, I think capitalism is best seen as the most revolutionary economic order ever.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, many people think of capitalism as kind of conservative.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think if we look at its history, we see it as an [SPEAKER_01]: is a state of permanent revolution, things constantly change.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they don't just become more in the sense of we produce more things, which we also do, but they also change because the way how we organize that production and the way how capitalism is organized also changes drastically over time.

[SPEAKER_01]: When you think, if you ever have taken a course on economics in college, if you ever have taken, if you ever read an economics textbook, [SPEAKER_01]: There is a kind of essence to capitalism and we can understand capitalism primarily on a on a very abstract level like a kind of certain forms of The certain laws that that that that explained the capitalist logic and it can be described so the capitalism can be described to the analysis of these laws I disagree with that very much and instead [SPEAKER_01]: I think we can understand capitalism only from a historical perspective.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what we'd see then, and this goes back to your question, what we see then is that capitalism changed drastically as time went by.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the capitalism we just described of the merchants in aid and in the year 1150, which was basically a bunch of rich people who organized long distance trade, was very different, let's say, from the capitalism of the 1650s, [SPEAKER_01]: English merchants invested in plantation agriculture on the island of Barbados, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: When they they dominate production, they organize production and they organize it in a radically new way.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is again totally different from the capitalism of the Manchester cotton mills of the 1820s, where there is now no slave labor, but there is.

[SPEAKER_01]: wage labor where the focus of investments is not on the agrarian production, but it's on the industrial production where the focus is again on cities and not on the countryside.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is again totally different from the kind of heavy industry that would emerge in the 20th century in a city like Detroit, like there, like a hundred thousand workers working in the same factory producing [SPEAKER_01]: a company like Nike, for example, produces almost nothing.

[SPEAKER_01]: It just organizes the production of people in all corners of the world, but it's self.

[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't really own any or very much production or for that matter, Apple.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or if you think about the big investment firms today, this is, again, a very different kind of form of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you can see that capitalism is a kind of state of constant revolution, things, constantly change.

[SPEAKER_01]: In some ways, I think characterised best is a very undochematic form of organizing economic life.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, unlike most people who write about capitalism, who tend to be more automatic, I think capitalism itself is quite undochematic.

[SPEAKER_01]: For reasons we can perhaps discuss later.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that might be its problem.

[SPEAKER_00]: in terms of like the system so you're talking about like plantations and things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: How did these initial rich people get rich and then like, you know, people say, you can't be a billionaire ethically.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can't do any of this without exploiting people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so how did these people get rich initially and then is there an inherent exploitation [SPEAKER_00]: in the beginnings of capitalism or now into the creation of the billionaire.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting to hear you talk about how Nike and Apple don't produce anything, because I'm thinking of a lot of entrepreneurs, I know, where they, or I know of, that they create something initially, and then their business becomes about taking the money from that creation and just investing, investing, investing.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I think you're right, the basic logic of capitalism is not so much to be attached to making a particular thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: or not even necessarily to fill a particular human need, but the basic impetus of capitalism is that you have capital and you invested capital to grow more capital.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is the goal of investment and capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, it does lead also to more production and more consumption and on of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you think about how people became rich originally, [SPEAKER_01]: you know, there were all kinds of ways to these riches.

[SPEAKER_01]: So many people became strikingly wealthy by organizing the kind of trade that we just discussed, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so, but they were organizing the wealth, how were they initially able to do that, like to get the wealth and become what we know as wealthy?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, some people [SPEAKER_01]: probably enjoyed, you know, some privileges in the societies in which they came from that were kind of outside the capitalist logic and so they had some words that they then could invest.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, many people have started out with not great words, you know, with very modest words.

[SPEAKER_01]: But [SPEAKER_01]: but engaging in long distance trade could be spectacularly successful because you might bring some spices from the East Indies and you can sell them for 50 times or 100 times as much as you acquired them for.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm just saying this is one way of how people generated capital and became wealthy.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then as I said earlier, [SPEAKER_01]: people with capital began to invest into production, into making more of the things that they wanted to trade.

[SPEAKER_01]: And at that moment, they kind of begin to organize the process of production itself.

[SPEAKER_01]: And one significant moment in the organization of production is certainly when in the...

[SPEAKER_01]: in the late 15th century, but then especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, when European capital goes into the organization of production in the countryside, which is where most people lived at this point and where most production took place.

[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't like modern industry, but it was an agrarian production.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this was not easy to invest your capital into that because the countryside was dominated by these feudal rulers, by these laws, by these monasteries, by these churches that didn't really want the influx of capital into their way of making, living and accumulating worse.

[SPEAKER_01]: And one way how European merchants and European capital owners were able to infuse their capital now into production [SPEAKER_01]: almost to the other side of the world, namely by making the jump into the Americas.

[SPEAKER_01]: And in the Americas, the situation was now very different, because they didn't encounter powerful social structures that were able to resist their logic effectively.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were able to just take the land.

[SPEAKER_01]: Often the indigenous people who inhabited those lands died of diseases or of warfare they were killed and at the same time they now had a way to bring in all that labor because they just decided to buy workers on the Western coast of Africa and slate them and then shipped them to the Americas and so there we see now for the first time [SPEAKER_01]: that follow a capitalist logic, begin to emerge.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I, one of the arguments that I'm making is that the island of Barbados, which becomes the most important sugar island in the 17th century, and which basically becomes a place where there's nothing but the production of sugar by enslaved Africans for European markets, I'm arguing that this becomes a kind of first [SPEAKER_01]: perfectly capitalist society because here now we have you know European capital combined with enslaved African labor combined with land dispossessed from the indigenous people and all inputs, all outputs are being bought and sold on markets.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a kind of capitalist society that existed nowhere as on earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I wonder in terms of again like people who are billionaires, [SPEAKER_00]: like you talk a lot on the show about like wealth inequality.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I mean, inherently that system, anything from that, let's say people who are like, oh, well, you know, my grandpa worked really hard and that's why whatever it is, like that can't really be ethical and it probably bleeds into practices of today less obviously, although maybe they are obvious, isn't there just like no way for that to not be like at a human cost?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that is something one probably would have to look at carefully, but look, the inequality has existed in all human societies.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is not an invention of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: So at the same time, capitalist societies, broadly speaking, if we look around the world and if we look about a few hundred years of history, capitalist societies [SPEAKER_01]: social mobility.

[SPEAKER_01]: When you were the in-serve present of a feudal lord somewhere in France, it was almost 100% certain that you would be born as such an in-serve present and you would die as one, and it was almost a certain that your children, grandchildren, and grandchildren would be in exactly the same position.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we just have to [SPEAKER_01]: you know, acknowledge that under capitalism now, there is a possibility of leaving behind the word in which you have been born.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying this is typical.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying like almost everybody experiences that I'm not saying that at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just saying conceptually and also in reality, in historical reality, there are people who experience true social mobility.

[SPEAKER_01]: So days, for example, a story in my book about [SPEAKER_01]: about a worker in a Swiss cotton factory in the early 19th century who, you know, operate spinning machinery and has literally nothing, but is somehow able to, you know, somehow he has a lot of technical expertise and so he becomes kind of a shareholder and a small company and to this all expands by the end when he dies, he owns like three cotton spinning knows.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is possible in a capitalist society, but it's not possible in a few [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously capitalism has produced spectacular inequality as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: It has produced spectacular inequality within society.

[SPEAKER_01]: So just look at the United States today, which is characterized by almost unprecedented inequality.

[SPEAKER_01]: But also look at the world more broadly.

[SPEAKER_01]: You see that [SPEAKER_01]: by 1900, let's say, you know, European society on average is just a hell of a lot wealthier than China or India at such places.

[SPEAKER_01]: So both globally and within domestic societies, capitalism has created spectacular inequalities.

[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, [SPEAKER_01]: The idea of social mobility, as I said, is conceptually important to capitalism, is historically important to capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's also rather exceptional.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that most people experience great social mobility.

[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed scholars have shown that most people don't experience much social mobility in capitalist society.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in some ways, [SPEAKER_01]: status and wealth and capital are also inherited from one generation to the next.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you're born into a wealthy family, it is way more likely that you will also be kind of a successful capital owner and become even richer in the future than if you're born into a family of working-class people who have almost no capital at their disposal.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is all [SPEAKER_01]: Pretty clear, then I think it also need to recognize that the patterns of inequality can be very different in different times and in different capital societies.

[SPEAKER_01]: So as you said at the beginning and I think that's exactly true.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're now living in a society of extreme social inequality and of quite limited social mobility.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if you think about American society in the 1950s or 1960s, you have much greater social mobility and you have much diminished inequality.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, again, this speaks to my idea of capitalism being a rather undockmatic form of organizing economic life.

[SPEAKER_01]: A society capitalism can be organized in ways that it still generates inequality, but too much lesser degree than American society today.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or if you look at the country of Sweden today, for example, it is [SPEAKER_01]: characterized by much less social inequality than the United States or the United Kingdom.

[SPEAKER_01]: So even within capitalism, economic activity, society, as part of this can be organized in different ways that also lead to different kinds of outcomes when it comes to the question of social inequality.

[SPEAKER_00]: How do you see the relationship of the state and like government and then also family race, gender like there's this idea of, oh well, you know, that's the market and it's just going to be the market and it's not so as simple as that.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's not that simple as that clearly not.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is a lot of mystifying.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the market has always taken on kind of religious dimensions that people think it's almost like a guard.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like something I think.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we pray to it and we make it also.

[SPEAKER_01]: The market becomes kind of an actor, almost like a person.

[SPEAKER_01]: The market can do things or even better.

[SPEAKER_01]: The market can force us to do certain things, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because the market tells us something we must, for example, have that degree of inequality.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, equality, the book tries to really show that this is not true and that we are kind of praying to a forest God here.

[SPEAKER_01]: The market is like capitalism or broadly, is a human construction.

[SPEAKER_01]: We build the market.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the market can only exist as an institution that is created not just through private actors, but very much also through the state.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the very condition for the existence of the market is the state.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the book, I think, shows in great detail how the state matters in different ways, but it always matters to capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: And indeed, I think that you cannot even conceive of capitalism without sinking at the same time [SPEAKER_01]: political economy of the state by thinking about politics because the state place and overwhelmingly important role is the most important institution under capitalism and it plays an enormously important role in constructing the market and building certain kinds.

[SPEAKER_01]: of forms of organizing capitalist economic life.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I argue somewhere along the line, I say capitalism is the most statused economic civilization, which is of course, most people think somehow the state and the market are opposing one another, and the more state, the more we less capitalism, the more capitalism, I think this is just total bogus.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean historically the state and capitalism construct one another.

[SPEAKER_01]: The state of course also draws a lot of strengths from the capitalist revolution itself.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then second, you bring up the argument about gender hierarchies and racial hierarchies and age hierarchies and other kinds of hierarchies, and that is, of course, very important to the history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: could be imaginable and, you know, any economics textbook would basically suggest that could be imaginable as an order that is completely gender blind and race blind and it just doesn't make a difference, the gender race and other such things, but, you know, that's the market, it's the market.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is now why I think this purely conceptual viewpoint that we discussed earlier is not sufficient.

[SPEAKER_01]: We need to look at capitalism historically.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when we look at capitalism historically, then we can undoubtedly say that capitalism has always been based upon and embedded within gender and racial hierarchies.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think you're right about this idea that the market is this mystical magical thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then, you know, somehow the president is responsible for it, which is true.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's it's so based on us where you say, oh, the pandemic is starting, everyone's going [SPEAKER_00]: the whole game stop situation where we decided that game stop was worth money.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is into the US or like, oh, Trump is going to be good for the market and things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's your right and idealistic way of looking at it because it takes the human element of [SPEAKER_00]: being our fault basically.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think it does give a power to the market as a kind of historical act.

[SPEAKER_01]: There is a power greater than our selves that we decided what's in it public option.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?

[SPEAKER_00]: Companies go public like we decide.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's so exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: So so I think this is Thoroughly analysis.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is actually not just important in order to get the history right, but it's really awesome.

[SPEAKER_01]: institution that determines our choices and leaves us basically without choices, you know, then we, you know, our political imagination is going to be quite, quite limited.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we see the market though, it's something that is constructed by humans and also it's shape and form and institutional embeddedness can change drastically over time, then we, you know, we can also approach our politics today and our thinking about our futures, [SPEAKER_01]: in very different ways, but to get back to the question of gender and racial hierarchies.

[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a kind of strange thing about capitalism because on the one hand, as we say, the logic of the market is being spread into evermore spheres of social life.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, including things that are not really related to economic activities, but the logic is still capturing these spheres of life, and it's also spreading into ever more territories on planet Earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time, [SPEAKER_01]: It preserves and rests upon spheres of life that are not organized along the logic of the market.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so for example, racial hierarchies or gender hierarchies and they are not, you know, [SPEAKER_01]: coming from ancient traditions and therefore has not been fully adjusted by the capitalist revolution.

[SPEAKER_01]: But capitalism rests in very essential ways on these non-market relationships.

[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, you know, you need a lot of labor, but how is this labor produced, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: This labor is largely produced within households, it's law and women have taken historically an enormous name, Gordon Brown.

[SPEAKER_01]: in producing this labor, and obviously that has never followed a capitalist logic, and the labor itself has been unpaid.

[SPEAKER_01]: So there is something about capitalism that it rests also on its outside.

[SPEAKER_01]: It rests on something that does not follow its own logic, and as far as we know, we have never seen a society that would completely be organized along the capitalist logic.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a really great point.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think too, there's this throwing our hands up thing in the US where I'm deeply involved in learning more about what companies are in, ETFs, what companies are in various mutual funds.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's this sort of, [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm going to throw my hands up and I'm not going to take my money out of any of this as investments or as like retirement because then everyone else is just going to get ahead and what is my moralizing going to do and I would rather just gain all this money and then donate it back or this kind of idea a historical idea that that boycotts and strikes don't work.

[SPEAKER_00]: and but it would require getting everyone on board, but I do sense now talking to people my age.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm in my mid 30s that it's just well, I'm not going to sacrifice myself for x, y, and z because that's just the way the market is when politically we can control the market.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, right, but but I guess, [SPEAKER_01]: I agree with you, but of course the problem is, you know, is a consumer, there's only so much influence that you're going to have.

[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's true throughout history, consumer boycotts have made a difference.

[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, in the 19th century, I've read about these British women who do not want to consume slave-grown sugar.

[SPEAKER_01]: and they create these stores in which they sell sugar that is not produced by enslaved workers and you know while I don't think the end of slavery is best explained by referring just to these women but but they did make a difference in the trajectory of slavery and of course this is a kind of politics that has been around for since ever since then continues to be around [SPEAKER_01]: Today, you know, many of these promises, if you think about global warming, for example, which is kind of the mega problem, you know, the biggest problem of them are, of course it helps if you keep your car in the garage and you just walk or you just take public transportation that that is definitely a useful thing to do, but but the problems of such a scale and so huge and so global.

[SPEAKER_01]: that in the end what it does take is a kind of political intervention.

[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, you know, this political intervention is also possible.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, the book is, as I said, it's not a kind of book about abstract economic laws.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's very much an actor-centric history.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I write about people who kind of constructed and reconstructed and read it, this capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: and of course the people we've talked about so far are mostly people like merchants or industrialists like people who you would think of when you think about capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the basic points that I'm making is that they are not the only ones who matter to shaping capitalism as we live in it today or as we lived in it in the past.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I talk a lot about, for example, you know, the industrial workers of the 19th and 20th century who build trade unions who engaged in strikes and they have created a world of labor and some parts of the world that is drastically better than it used to be.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they actually made a huge difference in the trajectory of the history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: or if you think about some of the most powerless people in the world illiterate dirt poor like the enslaved workers in on the coffee plantations on the sugar plantations on the indigo plantations on the island of Saint Domain, which was the most important French island in the Caribbean in this modern day Haiti, they staged revolution in the 1790s.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they were really among the poorest, least educated, you know, most oppressed people in the world, but they did stage a revolution.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this made a huge difference to the directory of the history of capitalism, because this was the beginning of the end of plantation slavery.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, it is really important to see that, in this history, that so often privileges, a tie, you know, the energy, you know, the Henry Ford's of this world or the Bill Gates of this world today, [SPEAKER_01]: It privileges these actors and they are certainly influential and they are certainly powerful But we shouldn't just be thinking about them.

[SPEAKER_01]: We should also be thinking about other groups of people who have made a huge difference in what capitalism looks like today What did those revolutions entail and what?

[SPEAKER_00]: would you say in terms of the future could be revolutions now?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you think about the revolutions among the enslaved, [SPEAKER_01]: As we also discussed earlier, slavery was quite important to the early history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of European investments went into the slave plantations of the Caribbean and South America, and later the United States, the things that were produced on these plantations mattered greatly to European economic developments.

[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, are the cotton for the industry of the Industrial Revolution, [SPEAKER_01]: from enslaved workers in the United States, so slavery, this whole plantation slavery complex was very, very important to the early history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: This came to an end in the 19th century, and it came to an end, partly because the enslaved workers of San Domain, [SPEAKER_01]: engaged in, you know, this revolution of the 1790s.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, a lot of other enslaved people on other islands in later years, you know, the first half of the 19th century, engaged in these kinds of rebellions as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: And WED boys was one of the, you know, most interesting observers of this moment in the history of the United States.

[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, has argued that the American Civil War was really kind of general strike of the enslaved workers [SPEAKER_01]: this kind of collective politics of enslaved people made a difference and it eventually it created the capitalism that did not feature plantation economies and I mean did the future of plantation economies but not based on the work of enslaved people.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is one of the most radical changes in the history of capitalism that I can think of.

[SPEAKER_01]: The welfare state would the, you know, the improvement of working conditions in American factories and elsewhere.

[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, it's very much related to the efforts of the American labor movement trade unions, but also the kind of politics that eventually brought us the new deal and brought us kind of the beginnings of the American.

[SPEAKER_01]: American welfare states so so this has really the the capitalism we live in today is also the result of the politics of these enslaved workers on Haiti and it's also the result of the of the of the workers in in in in you know in the Pittsburgh Steel industry or in the coal mines of Western Virginia or on the or in the [SPEAKER_01]: 1930s and and and and and 40s and that of course tells you you know that such a politics it might also be possible in the future most likely is possible in the future as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: These revolutions I mean striking going on strike as an enslaved person obviously you're going to be facing a lot of violence for that it has to be like mass striking and then these revolutions and [SPEAKER_00]: They were inherently right like the overthrowing of the plantations and stuff in Haiti and in the US, it required violence.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, I mean, it was the Union Army, you know, the Army of the United States that defeated the slaveholders of the American South, and certainly the American Civil War was an extremely violent affair.

[SPEAKER_01]: But not all of it was necessarily violent in that particular way, I mean, if you think about the large strikes of railroad workers in the 19th century, [SPEAKER_01]: They were not necessarily violent, and I don't think the result of them was principally the result of any kind of violence that occurred within them.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, this was, I mean, capitalism is based upon, at this point, you know, capitalism is based on wage labor.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if all these people don't show up at work, that obviously does have a significant impact.

[SPEAKER_00]: it's interesting because we talk about slave labor and I'm involved in the anti-ice activism down here and these detention centers and private prisons are slave labor.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're almost expanding slave labor and I think there's an idea that people and Americans think that it's inevitable.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think the bigger picture here is that coercion plays a significant role [SPEAKER_01]: throughout many, many centuries.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that actually goes against the notion that the market is kind of a peaceful, just a kind of peaceful interaction of utility maximizing individuals, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of coercion on various levels.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, including the household level that we discussed earlier, there's also kind of a degree of coercion within that relationship.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think what is important also to see, [SPEAKER_01]: is that certain forms, that this also is historical, that changes over time.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there is something particular and peculiar about plantation slavery, that I think is actually very different from forms of coercion today.

[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't make it any better what happens today, but I think it's important to recognize that things don't always stay the same.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they do change quite significantly.

[SPEAKER_01]: something else.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm interested in the initial production part of capitalism and of entrepreneurship and then now sort of turning to building wealth upon wealth upon wealth without really producing anything of significance or help to society.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very interested in the part to about environmentalism, where [SPEAKER_00]: there is in a finite resource, you know, water is a finite resource, trees are finite resource.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so can you talk about the mix of environmentalism with capitalism and how maybe we're not tying the two together enough?

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, I very much tried to tell in the book also the kind of environmental history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, this start at the earliest moments or just to go back to where we have been before.

[SPEAKER_01]: The plantation in Columbia, the Caribbean, you know, the island of Barbados is almost completely forested when Europeans arrived there.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it has a very rich, [SPEAKER_01]: life of animals and fish and birds and you know all kinds of things with the sugar revolution the trees almost completely disappear indeed if you visit the island of Barbados today you are you there's only a very few trees left and everything that the island is completely dedicated to sugar agriculture and that air of course has very significant environmental impacts [SPEAKER_01]: And then going back to our discussion about gender, we then said that capitalism rests on kind of relationships, but also resources that are outside of it itself.

[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously nature is one of these resources.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's incredibly important.

[SPEAKER_01]: But nature itself is obviously not produced on the market.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's something that exists outside the market, but it's drawn into the market, is exploited for the market.

[SPEAKER_01]: And is certainly an extremely, the ability of humans to exploit that nature is certainly an extremely important fact in the kind of economic growth that is being produced by the capitalist revolution.

[SPEAKER_01]: We see that most drastically today in terms of global warming, and what you can see there is that since 1800 approximately or maybe 1850 latest, [SPEAKER_01]: economic growth basically parallels pretty much exactly the use of fossil fuels so we live since 1850 we live in a fossil fuel civilization and much of the ways that we produce is not just our genius but though this matters too but but it's also related on the on the unrelenting and ever escalating exploitation of of of natural resources and including the burning of fossil fuels and [SPEAKER_01]: And this is accelerating.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that I think many people don't understand it.

[SPEAKER_01]: This has a long history.

[SPEAKER_01]: It goes back to a hundred years.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's accelerating at a speed that is totally unprecedented.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we have burned more than half of all fossil fuels that we have ever burned.

[SPEAKER_01]: We burned since 1990 or 1995, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And there of course.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the basic animating impulse of a capitalist economy as we have discussed before is [SPEAKER_01]: more rapid growth of capital, if that ever more rapid growth of capital rests on the use of an exploitation of natural resources, then we basically have two dynamics.

[SPEAKER_01]: We have that ever accelerating growth of capital on the one side and on the other side, we have the finite resources of kind of earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think we know really how to reconcil the one with the other.

[SPEAKER_00]: My final question is, you know, desentering Europe.

[SPEAKER_00]: How important is contemporary China?

[SPEAKER_00]: And what, you know, we always talk about, oh, they're gonna overtake Europe or the US.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so can you talk a little bit about, you know, the desentering of Europe and how important it is to consider China?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so as I mentioned, I think any moment in the history of capitalism, you can only understand from a global perspective.

[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the moments when the word is very, very unequal, like a 1900, you know, much of manufacturing takes place in a very small parts of the word and much of the rest of the word remains very agrarian and remains dirt poor.

[SPEAKER_01]: But in the course of the 20th century, especially then in the first decades of the 21st century, that began to shift.

[SPEAKER_01]: And today, clearly, the most dynamic part of the global capitalist economy is not to be found in the United States.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not to be found in Europe, but it's found principally in Asia and especially in a place like China, but also India, but also places in Africa, let's say Nigeria, in parts of Latin America.

[SPEAKER_01]: This whole capitalist revolution kind of has moved on to a different part of the world at a standing speed.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, China in 1950 was one of the very poorest places on planet earths, and now it's still not the richest, but it's either the largest economy today or the second largest economy today.

[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, this I think changes almost everything about capitalism because for the past, [SPEAKER_01]: almost for the past hundred years the united states was clearly at the center of the global capitalist economy it was the most productive economy it had the the largest output in many different things and it of course also took on especially after 1945 it kind of took on the position of regulating the global economy it kind of took charge of the global economy.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is now, this ability of the United States to dominate the global economy is clearly very much diminished.

[SPEAKER_01]: And other parts of the world have become both more productive, have just produced many more things, but also have become significantly more powerful.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, of course, a very big transition.

[SPEAKER_01]: for the history of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we have seen this before, let's say, you know, in 1850, the United Kingdom was by far the most important economy in the world.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the United States was really rather marginal.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the United States is just by it because they grew that cotton that fet British cotton factories.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: All of the years later, Britain was quite marginal if I may say so, and the United States was clearly at the center of the global economy.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think we are going through one of these moments of transition today, and I think it's very hard for most Americans to wrap their minds around how this word is actually changing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, but in order to understand China, it's not enough to just think about [SPEAKER_01]: You know, what is happening in the last 10 years?

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is why we need a long history.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why we need also global history from the get go.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because of course, some of the things that are happening in China are not so surprising.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you remember that in the year 1750, China already once was the world's most important manufacturing power.

[SPEAKER_01]: China had very dynamic merchant communities.

[SPEAKER_01]: China had a lot of technical innovation.

[SPEAKER_01]: China had a high quality educational system.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in some ways, [SPEAKER_01]: You know, by telling these very Eurocentric histories for so long, we are extremely ill-prepared to understand the word today and we need to break through these histories, we need to globalize these histories, also not just to understand the history, but but in all it understand our present word better.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that was very well put.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like you wrote a book.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to tell my audience where to find you and your book and any other works that you want to promote?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean you will find capitalism a global history in bookstores near you beginning on November 25 there is also going to be an audio [SPEAKER_01]: book version in case you prefer to listen to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a book that is, you know, ideas with a very large topic.

[SPEAKER_01]: It deals with a very long time period and it deals with very many places under the sun.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I've tried to write it in a way that is accessible to anyone.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't write a book for my colleagues in the economics department.

[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't write a book for even for my colleagues in the history department.

[SPEAKER_01]: I tried to write a book that is accessible.

[SPEAKER_01]: do anyone who has an interest in these topics because I really believe that in order to navigate the word we live in today, we need to come to an understanding of capitalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't matter if you hate it or you love it, you need to understand it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what the book is trying to do.

[SPEAKER_01]: And again, you can purchase it, you can also just listen to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you can also find me on the [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Gabe.

[SPEAKER_00]: Great to be here.