Global Capitalism: A Roundtable

Sven Beckert's 'Capitalism' is a major new global history of capitalism. No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organise our politics. Sven Beckert situates the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework in this fascinating new book. Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from merchant communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. Then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that would propel them across the oceans. This epic drama corresponded at no point to an idealised dream of free markets. All along, state-backed institutions and imperial expansions shaped its dynamics. Capitalism decentres the European perspective, highlighting agency and resistance.
Alessandro Stanziani's 'Earth Capital' is a major new history of capitalism that takes account of the material and ecological underpinnings of productive activity as well as the social, political and institutional dimensions of economic life. It retraces the history of capitalism over a long time period, giving particular attention to the role of food, agriculture, energy and natural resources, and with an eye to the future, mindful of the need to find solutions to an ecological crisis that threatens to overwhelm us all. Alessandro Stanziani shows that the development of capitalism since the twelfth century has been based on two primary forms of exploitation: of labour, often coerced, and of what he calls 'Earth capital', by which he means both the planet as a whole and its land and natural resources as factors of production. While these two forms of exploitation have gone hand-in-hand, the emphasis has shifted over time: forced labour gradually declined in importance from 1870 to the present, the exploitation of land, fossil fuels and natural resources grew at an unprecedented rate from 1870 to precedented rate, the destructive consequences of which are becoming increasingly apparent today. Looking to the future, Stanziani argues that, in order to deal with the immense challenges we now face, we must be prepared radically to rethink our economic and political systems. He proposes a new social contract that would make democracy, social equality and the environment the three pillars of the world of tomorrow.

About our speakers:

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. His last book, Empire of Cotton, won many prizes, including the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History, shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.

Alessandro Stanziani is a Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He has written extensively on the relationship between serfdom and industry in Russia, the development of capitalism in France, the Inner Asian encounters between expanding Russian, Indian, and Chinese empires, and the development of indenture and various statuses of unfreedom in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic world. Among his books are Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective: Eighteenth to Early 20th Centuries and Bâtisseurs d’Empire: Russie, Inde et Chine à croisée des mondes.

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