Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
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.Epic… Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know culled from places you have never been… [Readers], including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship and be glad to have a valuable tool of reference on their shelves
- John Kay, Financial Times
<i>Capitalism</i> is a learned, formidable and vivid story. Its grand synthesis will engage not only general readers, but thousands of specialists... Beckert has now proved once and for all the necessity of naming the global beast in order to reveal its vast power, past and present
- Marcus Rediker, The New York Times
A seminal work that explains how capitalism started, evolved, and expanded over the last several hundred years. It’s quotable because the details are so rich and interesting, especially how capitalism started with merchants in a little known area called Aden
Forbes
Tremendously erudite, millennium-spanning <i>tour de force</i> of narrative history… A kaleidoscopic account of capitalism’s past.... Where others drag their feet, Harvard historian Sven Beckert earns pride of place for lucidly defining his subject
- Dominik Leusder, New Statesman
Supremely ambitious, an insightful and well-illustrated history by the Harvard historian who has been a pioneer in the creation of new narratives exploring how an ever-changing capitalism has been a socially and culturally rooted phenomenon... Beckert’s capacious volume provides a new generation of capitalists and anti-capitalists with plenty of precedents for whatever world they come to imagine
Jacobin
Beckert’s bravura new intellectual history sets the record straight… Panoramic… While scholars have illuminated bits and pieces of this immense narrative, Beckert’s massive volume brings it together with impeccable authority and perspicacity… Each chapter offers an abundance of characters and arguments, interpreting the economic and social realities we share, commonalities of revolution and change… An achievement that will endure alongside Tony Judt’s <i>Postwar </i>and Thomas Piketty’s<i> Capital in the 21st Century,</i> whose influence undergirds Beckert’s book
The Boston Globe
Vast in scale, cogent in delivery, accessible enough to accommodate a non-economist like me, [<i>Capitalism</i>] is that rare kind of project that can be described – unironically, no less – as magisterial
NPR.org
An early contender for a Pulitzer, Sven Beckert’s readable, never dull doorstop of how more people came to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism
Chicago Tribune, Fall Books Preview
A clarity that Karl Marx could only long for... Beckert’s agile account marches through the emergence of mercantilism and the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and proceeds through plantation and wage slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism, and a managerial/bureaucratic golden age... A comprehensive and up-to-date history, essential
Kirkus (starred review)
Magisterial in scope and ambition, Sven Beckert’s <i>Capitalism</i> is a dazzling global history of the forces that have shaped – and continue to shape – our world. A true tour de force
- Peter Frankopan, author of <i>The Silk Roads: A New History of the World</i>,
*A New York Times Notable Book * A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
'A learned, formidable and vivid story… Readers around the world will study and ponder this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance, for decades to come' The New York Times
'Epic… Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know culled from places you have never been' Financial Times
A brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years
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, resistance, innovation and ruthless coercion around the world through to the present with the rise of Asian economies, particularly China. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely add up capitalism’s debits and credits in this monumental book, but allows us to think afresh about the past to help us re-imagine the future.