[MUSIC PLAYING] MARK BLYTH: From the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University, this is the Rhodes Center Podcast. I'm the Director of the Center and your host, Mark Blyth. Back in December, the Rhodes Center invited historian Sven Beckert to discuss his new book Capitalism-- A Global History. The title may sound dry, but in the hands of Sven, it's anything but.
The book offers us a globe-trotting, century-spanning tour of this weird, world-shaping economic system that we all inhabit, called capitalism. And in doing so, he tells us a story about capitalism, what it is, and how it works that will likely challenge many assumptions we all share about capitalism's origins, its evolution, what makes it tick, and how it has shaped our world.
This episode was guest hosted by Seth Rockman. He's a professor of American History and Director of Undergraduate Studies in History at Brown, and is also a Rhodes Center affiliate. So, without further ado, I'll hand it over to Seth and Sven.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SETH ROCKMAN: Hi, I'm Seth Rockman from the Brown University Department of History, and I'm here with my colleague and friend Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of the new Capitalism-- A Global History. So welcome, Sven.
SVEN BECKERT: Great to be here, Seth.
SETH ROCKMAN: So to begin with, history of capitalism, over one thousand years, "who does that?" I suppose, is the question. But in all seriousness, what made you decide that this was a book that needed to be written?
SVEN BECKERT: I started thinking about writing this book for, one, because I had kind of thought about parts of the history of capitalism in writing about the history of New York City, by writing about the history of cotton. And it was clear that you could understand important things about capitalism by looking at one place or by looking at one commodity.
But there was a lot about capitalism to be looked at and analyzed that goes beyond the scope of just one place and one city. So it was clear to me that I wanted to do something that was broader and that was about thinking about the entire thing.
But then the second reason for embarking upon writing this book was that we live in a world that is fundamentally structured by capitalism. Many of us think about capitalism. Many of us talk about capitalism. It's one of the most important presences in our lives.
And I felt that in order to understand where we are right now, we need to understand this capitalism. And as a historian, of course, I believe that you can understand capitalism only properly by looking at it from a historical perspective.
So it seemed to me that I wanted to engage the entire thing. I wanted to engage all of capitalism. I wanted to do it from a global perspective, because I believed, when I started this book, that you cannot understand capitalism by looking at it from just one place or one country, but that you needed to look at it from a global perspective.
And then I wanted to tell the entire story of capitalism. But of course, at the very beginning, I didn't quite think that I would go back one thousand years. So this was something that only emerged in the process of researching this book and thinking more about the topic.
SETH ROCKMAN: In the beginning, did you also think that this could be a 300-page book, or it was always going to be one-thousand-page book?
SVEN BECKERT: No, it wasn't. I think I promised my publisher maybe 200,000 words, which is maybe 60% or 65% of what it turned out to be. But look, I learned a lot about capitalism researching and writing about it. And I wanted to write a complete history, and I wanted to write a history that covers the entire world.
And I wrote chapter by chapter. And to be perfectly honest, when I was done, even then, I had no idea how much I had written. It was only when I assembled all of these chapters into one pile of paper that it dawned on me that I had written much more than I was supposed to write.
But then I had a really wonderful editor at Penguin. And he was all for it. He thought this was exactly what it would take to tackle the history of capitalism. And maybe on the positive side, it's all between two covers. It's just a one-volume study, not more of it.
SETH ROCKMAN: This leaves space for a successor to take up the challenge, which the multi-volume account of the global history of capitalism. So one of the things that, of course, any author has to decide is when to begin a book, what its origins are. And one of the things that's distinctive about your book is when you choose to start.
But you also are very clear that capitalism doesn't have a birthday. But I'm wondering if you can explain, is it an evolutionary process, and do you reach a tipping point where you can say there is capitalism in lots of places, but ah, finally, we have capitalism as a global system? And if so, when does that happen?
SVEN BECKERT: When I first thought about the book, I thought I would start around the year Fifteen Hundred. But then it dawned on me that in order to understand the kind of radical nature of the capitalist revolution and to understand its dynamic, it would be helpful to look at a moment in human history in which this particular logic, that is capitalism, was marginal to economic life on planet Earth. We kind of needed to come to an understanding of the world before capitalism in order to better understand what capitalism is.
And I, also, early on understood that I wanted to write an actor-centric history of capitalism. And it dawned on me that merchants are incredibly important to the long history of capitalism. There is a tendency among some scholars who write about capitalism that they start with the Industrial Revolution, and they see the first significant actors within capitalists as the kind of manufacturers that emerge in places such as Manchester.
And that struck me right from the beginning as wrong. I found that merchant and merchant capital and trade were really important to the early history of capitalism, indeed, all the way deep into the 19th century. So I started trying to understand these merchant communities.
And then it became soon obvious that you find these merchant communities also before the year Fifteen Hundred. And indeed, you find a flowering of these merchant communities in the first half of the second millennium, so in the years between One Thousand and Fifteen Hundred.
Of course, there are also some of these merchant communities earlier, but I think they are not perhaps categorically different from the merchant communities that you find emerging in the first half of the second millennium. And you find them, then, emerge in many, many different parts of the world. So I write in some detail about the Port of Aden in Yemen.
But you find these merchant communities also in cities such as Cairo and Baghdad and Guangzhou and on the West Coast of India on both the East and the Western coasts of Africa. And of course, find it in places such as the Italian Peninsula.
So I describe these merchant communities. And what I see in them is that they embody this logic that is central to capitalism, but they live in a world in which their way of organizing economic life is still quite marginal. And indeed, the surrounding societies are often quite hostile to what it is that they do.
And also, once I decided to do this, it became clearer to me that what the book really is about is to chart how this logic that at one point was quite marginal to economic life on Earth, how this becomes a logic that takes over almost everything in our lives today.
So today, we live in a world in which almost all of our lives are, in some way or another, affected by this logic that is capitalism. And the book then, basically is a story of how we got to from a world in which this logic did exist but was quite marginal to a world in which it almost structures everything.
But you were asking about the Big Bang, when did this become like a more important on planet Earth? And I think that is the moment when on a significant scale, the kind of capital that is being invested in commercial undertakings and trade, when this begins to be invested also in productive activities, first in agriculture, but then also in industrial production.
SETH ROCKMAN: So you wouldn't tie the tipping point to say the Columbian Exchange and Europe's expansion at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century as the tipping point.
SVEN BECKERT: I think that is a very important moment in the history of capitalism, but maybe for slightly different reasons than has previously been argued. I think what I see there as particularly important, is that this logic that drives capitalism is a kind of radical departure, as we said, from other forms of economic life. And it encounters enormous resistances.
Many people, both elites and commoners are trying to preserve a world that works along a very, very different kind of logic. And they resist the kind of impositions of this capitalist logic and the spread of this capitalist logic. And sometimes they resist that quite successfully.
Now with the expansion of Europe into the Americas, something particular happens. Namely, for one, the expansion itself only happens because there's a kind of coalition between European merchants and European states. And they become mutually dependent on one another. And that, of course, among other things, gives greater power to merchant communities.
And when they go into the Atlantic world in the 15th century, first to islands off the Coast of West Africa, then into the Caribbean, and South America, and eventually into North America, they now encounter a world in which there are also Indigenous people who are trying to preserve different political structures and different forms of economic life. But unlike that they encounter on the European continent, they are, relatively speaking, much less effective.
And thus this gives now European states and European traders the ability to recreate societies almost from scratch. And they land. They import enslaved workers from Africa. And they build ways of producing agricultural commodities, especially sugar at the beginning, that are now fully subsumed under this capitalist logic.
SETH ROCKMAN: One of the things that seems most important, though, is not merely the integration of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in an Atlantic world, but really the extension of this into the Pacific, making a place like Potosi, actually the node in global capitalism in the early modern period, precisely because it is what connects Europe to China. And finally, we have a global system.
SVEN BECKERT: Yeah, thank you for asking about this, because almost no one has asked me about that part of the story yet. But that Potosi becomes by far the world's most important source of silver. And it is really this silver now that allows Europeans to purchase all the nifty goods that are being produced in Asia and China and India in particular to be exported to Europe.
And this again, I think, emphasizes the importance of a global perspective on this story. And it emphasizes something else, namely, that in the medieval world, trade to Asia is clearly extremely important to the modest world economy that existed at this point.
And European merchants who were on the margins of this world economy for a long time had always aspired-- when it came to long-distance trade, they had always aspired to get access to the goods of Asia, because these were the most advanced manufacturing economies of the first half of the second millennium. And they produced a lot of things that the Europeans did not have and that they were not capable of producing themselves.
So they seek these exchanges with India and with what is now Indonesia for spices and also with China for things such as tea and porcelain. But they have a huge problem, the Europeans namely, between them and the Indian and Chinese merchants. There's another group of merchants, namely these merchants in the Arab world. And they, of course, want to get a cut of that trade. And they make it also difficult for Europeans to trade.
Basically, they are dependent on these merchants in the Arab world as middlemen in the trade between Europe and Asia. So the Europeans, what they are principally seeking is a way to directly trade with the merchants of India and China. And of course, some Spaniards in coalition with Italian merchants then convince themselves if they just set sail and sail West, they will eventually arrive on the Coast of India or China to get kind of around the merchants of the Arab world.
And that's what propels them into the Atlantic in the first instance. So obviously, nobody could know about America, but it's really this effort to link themselves to Asia. And then they have the big problem. Once they find ways to trade with Asia by going around the African continent, they have the big problem that the Europeans wanted a lot that the Asians had to provide.
But the Europeans had not much that Indian merchants or Chinese merchants desired. So they needed to exchange goods for species. So put to sea becomes very, very important. It becomes the kind of huge source of silver to European merchants.
SETH ROCKMAN: And at some point, we could describe Potosi itself as a city that is the most capitalist place on Earth. Can you say more about what that would look like? Because we don't normally narrate capitalism from that particular place.
SVEN BECKERT: No, that's one of the things that the books generally tries to do. It tries to narrate the history of capitalism from unusual perspectives. And the Caribbean islands are one of these places that I look at in some detail. But Potosi is another place that I look at in some detail.
So Potosi was this amazing place, high up in the Andes, far away, not just from the European continent or from Asia, but also far away from the sea, from the next port where these things could be exported. But here, we have a thriving, very large city that emerges and that has eventually things such as opera houses in the stores of Potosi. Very early on, you can buy luxury wares produced in France, or tea sets produced in China, or textiles made in India.
So there is an author who, I think, calls Potosi the first city of global capitalism. And yes, I think there is something-- I don't know if it's the first city, but it becomes certainly an important node in global capitalism, and it becomes a city, that is, again, it's a city like the Island of Barbados, for example, in the Caribbean that becomes organized along this capitalist logic.
SETH ROCKMAN: In terms of narrating capitalism from unusual places, one of the big moves in the scholarship in recent years has, of course, been to think about the slave ship as the most emblematic capitalist site, basically removing places like the Lancashire Mills as the place from which one would theorize capitalism and actually saying, no, it's in the hold of a British slave ship traversing the Atlantic that we see capitalism distilled to its essence, and the blueprint for capitalism that would follow, how do you think about that? And does your history of global capitalism give a particular emphasis to the transatlantic slave trade as a place where we might say, capitalist learning truly took place?
SVEN BECKERT: I think historically, some learning certainly took place in this trade. The slave ship itself is not a major presence in the book. Maybe it should have been more of a presence. I think it probably should have been more of a presence in the book.
But I would be a little careful to seek an understanding of what the essence of capitalism is by focusing on the slave ship, or for that matter, by focusing on the plantation economy or by focusing, for that matter, on the cotton mills in Lancashire, or in the 20th century, the automobile factories of Detroit. I think they all illuminate the dynamics of capitalism at particular moments in time, and they can be very important at particular moments in time.
But I don't think they tell us everything that there is to be known about capitalism. It's a kind of one slice into capitalism's history. But again, I think there is a logic to capitalism that transcends all of its transformations and all of its changes over time. But I'm generally a little suspect to essentialize one particular moment in the history of capitalism as the kind of true moment in the history of capitalism from which we can think about capitalism in all of its aspects and throughout time in all of its places.
People have done this for a long time. They have not looked at the slave ship, but let's say they have looked at the Lancashire cotton industry maybe as one place from which they theorized all of capitalism. And as we learned through the research of the past 20 years, we clearly see that there are huge gaps in such a perspective that we need to theorize capitalism also from, for example, the perspective of the slave ship and also from the perspective of the plantation. So, yes, it's important, but I think there is more to be learned about capitalism than just that
SETH ROCKMAN: In this sense, would you describe the book's approach as almost a pointillist approach to the history of capitalism, or maybe put differently, a series of snapshots, each of which is as good as any other snapshot, in giving us some glimpse of this system in motion?
SVEN BECKERT: No, I don't think so. The book does try often to tell the global story from very local perspectives. And it tries to find places or people or institutions or companies that allow us to understand something about this particular moment in the history of capitalism that we can then generalize from.
But the book does very much try to also make kind of synthetic arguments about capitalism and to look at capitalism also from this global perspective, so to look at capitalism from the perspective of an airplane or a satellite, even to look at what's happening in economic life on planet Earth. So it does both. It tells the history from constantly shifting perspectives. Sometimes they are very small. Sometimes they're even biographical. But sometimes they're also very, very big.
SETH ROCKMAN: So one of the things that follows from that is the question of periodization. There are phases or eras or epochs, and I guess you call them regimes in this book. And one of the things that I was thinking about that brings this in conversation with your second book Empire of Cotton is the way in which certain commodities tend to organize those regimes.
So as I think about the periodization of capitalism in my own teaching and my own writing, for example, I would say, we have a 17th century age of silver, an 18th century age of sugar, a 19th century age of cotton, and a 20th century age of petroleum. Do you think through commodities as organizing frameworks for these different regimes, or are there other ways in which you can mark the transformation from one period and one phase of global capitalism to another?
SVEN BECKERT: Yeah, I think commodities play an important role in this book, unsurprisingly for a book on the history of capitalism in the process of commodification, is one of the processes that I study in all moments in the history of capitalism. And of course, in certain moments, certain kinds of commodities are much more central, and at certain moments, the world is better understood through the history of this particular commodity than at other moments--
To just cite one example, if you want to understand the 19th century, maybe you understand more about the workings of capitalism in the 19th century by focusing on cotton than by focusing on, let's say, tea as another important commodity, but one that probably wouldn't allow you to see quite as much about global capitalism.
So yes, there are certain commodities that are particularly important, either for quantitative reasons, at certain moments in time, or because they allow you to see certain kinds of relationships that otherwise would remain hidden, and relationships that are really important for this particular moment in capitalism.
But I don't think I would structure my dating of various moments in the history of capitalism just around commodities, because I think what I call particularly orders or particular regimes in the long history of capitalism, they are not just about one particular commodity. They can indeed be about very many commodities.
But they are about a particular kind of institutional order, particular territorial organization, a particular way of how international trade works, a particular forms of labor regimes, a particular relationships between entrepreneurs and state power. So I would look more in these spheres of economic life to find something that holds a particular moment in the history of capitalism together and lets us see that as one regime within the long history of capitalism.
SETH ROCKMAN: How do you respond to the long scholarly tradition that has measured these phases through an intellectual history, through a body of thought, where someone usually in a study in Europe is like, oh, I have a new idea? What if we organize society or understood society as organized this way, so a history that runs from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill to John Maynard Keynes? Is there a space for intellectual theorization of capitalism as a marker in different stages or phases?
SVEN BECKERT: Yes, there is-- and I think ideas about economic life can be impactful for the organization of economic life itself. But I would be careful to give too much causal agency to economic theorizing as a kind of inaugurating radical departures in the organization of capitalist economies.
The book has a fair amount on economic theorizing within it, but it does so in a way that's maybe different to how it often has been done. I look at economic theorizing always at the moment at which it emerged, and I try to embed it within an account of the kind of capitalism that the people who wrote about capitalism could see and lived in.
And I don't grapple with them in the sense that I'm making arguments who is better at understanding capitalism, superior in understanding capitalism. But instead, I emphasize the context in which the ideas emerge. And in some ways, I also emphasize the kind of limited horizon of what they were able to see, both in time, because obviously, nobody was able to look into the future.
Adam Smith had no way of even having the faintest idea of the kind of industrial civilization that was about to emerge at his doorsteps. And somebody like Karl Marx had only very, very vague ideas about structures of economic life in very large parts of the world, such as in India and China.
So I see them as important analysts of the world they lived in. And they of course, produced ideas that some of them had enormous staying power and are still very relevant to understanding the contemporary world. But I don't try to adjudicate who is the most powerful analyst of capitalism, because I think all of these ways of thinking about capitalism are always limited by the time and the place in which they were produced.
SETH ROCKMAN: No, this makes sense, so too does the idea that certain ways of talking about capitalism do the work of naturalizing it. And one of the things, as a central claim of this book, is that capitalism is not normal. It's weird, as you say. And you have people constantly like, I'm not going to sell you my labor for hours for a quantum of money. This is weird. And then you have other people saying, no, this is normal.
And it is that process of cultural legitimation, of making arguments to say, no, actually, profit maximization and maximization of utility is normal, not deviant. That's always fascinated me, this idea that, in fact, you need a kind of cultural power to make people come to believe that markets organize the world.
SVEN BECKERT: Yeah. No, that's a really great and really important observation, because it does show how much of a radical departure this capitalist logic is that we now often take to be not just for granted, but we take it almost to be natural. And of course, yes, there needed to be a lot of ideological work done to make it seem as such.
And of course, in each moment in the history of capitalism, we see other forms and ways of seeing capitalism organized. We see a lot of effort, for example, in the 17th and 18th century, to naturalize the exploitation of enslaved workers. And we see, let's say, in the Nineteen Nineties and Two Thousands a lot of efforts to naturalize particular structures of neoliberal markets. So yes, I think that is absolutely true that this comes to play an important role in itself in the history of capitalism.
SETH ROCKMAN: So some of the naturalizers who I think are near and dear to your heart over your long scholarly career are the 19th-century bourgeoisie. And there's an argument to be made that this is the most revolutionary group of people in the history of capitalism.
They come along. They are the beneficiaries of these massive transformations of economic and social life. And they're like, yeah, this is normal. Everyone should be like us. And they perhaps deserve a good deal of credit, or blame, for the naturalization of this system.
One of the moves you make is to tell the story of the rise of the bourgeoisie not from London, not from New York, but from Brazil. Can you say more about what the Brazilian bourgeoisie does for seeing this as a global story?
SVEN BECKERT: Yes, so one of the arguments of approximately the middle of the book, when I come to the 19th century, is that I'm arguing about something that I call the emergence of a capitalist civilization. And this capitalist civilization has all kinds of aspects to it, which we probably can't discuss now.
But one of the aspects of this capitalist civilization is that new forms of social inequality emerge and come to structure entire societies. And also the notion of social class emerges both in lived practice, but also in theorizing about capitalism.
And I tell the story about the kind of formation of one particular social class, namely the economic elite, the bourgeoisie, through, as you mentioned, the history of Rio Janeiro. It could be told through the history of many parts of the world. But I focus on Rio Janeiro.
And what you can see there is, you can see how a distinct bourgeois culture emerges, for example, how they come to eat certain kinds of food, for example, a great preference for French cooks and French cooking. You can see how they organize their social life around social clubs and theaters and the opera. You can see how they become obsessed with their heritage. Genealogy becomes very important, obsession of the Brazilian bourgeoisie by the late 19th century.
So you can observe how they come to see themselves as a social class, how they see themselves as distinct from the rest of Brazilian society, and how they kind of institutionalize that difference through both through their cultural practices, but also then very centrally through the kinds of institutions that they create-- theater, opera, museums, social clubs, and other such things.
SETH ROCKMAN: So let's jump ahead for a century and come to the middle of the 20th century. And again here, too, we have a process of normalization or naturalization, one that truly looms over our current political moment.
Because there is nostalgia for a capitalism once lost, to capitalism that presumably took blue collar jobs and made them a pathway to the middle class in places like the United States, that allowed people whose parents had not gone to college and who themselves may not have gone to college, but who could buy suburban homes, have two-car garages and all this.
And of course, the lament is that something happened. This stopped being available. The American dream ended. But as we think about that period, really from the post-World War II moment to the Nineteen Seventies, as what you call in the book the golden age of capitalism, you make an argument that I think is a very important one, that again, this is not the normal state of capitalism. This is actually a state of exception in our one-thousand-year history, and that this 30-year period that now was understood to be what capitalism was, is absolutely not what capitalism has always been.
SVEN BECKERT: No, absolutely. And you could say that about any moment in the history of capitalism. Any moment in the history of capitalism is just that. It's a particular moment. It's not how capitalism meant to be or how capitalism naturally should be. But it's just a particular historical conjuncture in which capitalism takes on particular kinds of institutional configurations.
And the golden age looms large in our collective memory, of course, because it was a moment in which, for example, social inequality was much less pronounced than it is right now. It was a moment in which there was a thriving American manufacturing sector that employed many millions of Americans at pretty good wages.
It was a moment also in which something happened that is rather rare in the history of capitalism. Namely, it was a moment of relative stability and relative predictability that people who live in a market society are exposed to enormous degree of risk.
And this was a moment in which these risks, for the first time, for industrial workers, seemed to actually be significantly diminished and in which it life took on a certain kind of predictability, not just for your own generation, but there was also the sense that the next generation would enter a world, broadly speaking, similar to the ones that you were living in yourself.
So that was very hard to let go. And it is, I think, very understandable that people would look back to this age. One, of course, also has to say that not all Americans were able to participate in that golden age. And, for example, African-Americans in the South were pretty significantly excluded from the benefits of this particular order. So I think we need to think about the limits of it as much as we think about the promises of that order.
But look, we cannot return to that by our collective will because this was the result of a very particular kind of conjunction in the history of capitalism. It was the end of the World War II when the United States dominated the world economy in ways that few national economies have ever dominated the world.
And now since the Nineteen Seventies, already America found itself living in a world in which there were significant other nodes of industrial capitalism emerged that became competitive on the global scale, such as Western Europe and Japan.
And today, we live in a world in which manufacturing has basically mostly moved to Asia in general and China in particular, and in which the position of the United States in the global economy is just a radically less central than it used to be 60 or now it's probably almost 80 years ago.
So we can't will our return to this order. But I think what we can see when we look at the golden age, we can see the different kinds of inequality regimes under capitalism are possible. We can have a different kind of capitalism. So this doesn't mean we return to where we were. But I think it should widen our horizon of possibility.
SETH ROCKMAN: But it also suggests what an unstable signifier capitalism is. If we could take the Nineteen Fifty-Six Republican Party platform that Dwight D. Eisenhower ran on at the height of the Cold War, when the United States was defending the free enterprise system against the menace of communism.
And you handed that to Marjorie Taylor Greene or some other member of the Republican Party today who would say, this is socialism. If capitalism at the height of the Cold War is today's socialism in the minds of certain political ideologues, how do we make-- I mean, capitalism, then, is vast.
SVEN BECKERT: Capitalism can take on all kinds of institutional forms. Sweden today is a society that is quite different from the United States, but it's also a deeply capitalist society. And I think much of the political talking points on capitalism in the Nineteen Sixties and in the present are perhaps more properly seen as ideology, as an effort to mobilize political outcomes that these people find to be desirable.
But I don't think they're kind of a good guide to a scholarly analysis of capitalism. So we should read them as a form of ideology. But from a more detached perspective, from a more scholarly perspective, I think we can see this great variety within capitalism. And that, of course, also suggests to us that different futures are imaginable.
SETH ROCKMAN: But what this also means is that, for example, if the Trump administration blows up the Fed and there's no longer independent central banking, or the Trump administration demands that the US government owns 10% of Intel, the United States doesn't stop being capitalist at that moment. It just is a different iteration of capitalism.
SVEN BECKERT: Yeah. No, I think partly the responses to some of these current economic policies are informed mostly by the previous order of economic life, in which certain forms of the organization of that economic life were deemed to be almost natural, or at least so highly desirable that the world without them was almost unimaginable.
And now suddenly, what was taken to be just kind of a natural law, or at least a necessity, is being questioned. But then if we look at the-- not that I endorse this, but if we look at the long history of capitalism, of course, for example, protectionism, which creates a lot of debate right now, but the protectionism is a completely run-of-the-mill normal thing of the history of capitalism.
Britain before it industrialized was highly protectionist society. The United States in the late 19th century was a highly protectionist society. So there is nothing particularly radical about these kinds of measures. Not that I endorse them, but I'm just saying, we need to take a deep breath and calm down because this is not totally out of character for capitalism if you look at it in the long historical perspective.
SETH ROCKMAN: Again, further making that period between Nineteen Forty-Five and Nineteen Seventy-Three the exception rather than the rule. Well, so then as we come to the end of our time, let me just ask, what are your hopes for how readers will encounter this book?
Is there a strategy? Is this a book to be read from beginning to end? Is this a book that readers can dip into the middle and pick a moment that they're most interested in? And ultimately, what will make you feel like this book has had the impact on how people think about capitalism in light of the huge investment of time and effort that went into creating this monumental volume?
SVEN BECKERT: Now, what would make me happy if people would think more about capitalism from a historical perspective. What would also I would like to see is that people scream around a lot about capitalism, but that they generally have a better understanding of what it is. I think also that people come to understand that capitalism is not the natural order of things, but that this is a particular moment in human history.
And look, the book can be read in all kinds of ways. I've heard from readers that they enjoy reading it. And I think it can be read from cover to cover. It does tell one story, and that fully comes to the fore if you read the entire thing. And it's long. But we spent a lot of time right now talking in soundbites.
And maybe there's also a moment to calm down a little bit and to think about things with a little bit more time investment and with a little bit more patience. And that, of course, would be necessary in order to read this book. But I think also the book can be read-- you can profitably read just one chapter.
If you're interested, let's say, in the history of the American Civil War, you might read a chapter on what I call the crisis of old order capitalism in the middle of the 19th century. If you're interested in merchant communities in the 16th century, you might read the chapter, which is entitled the Great Connecting. If you're interested in the Great Depression in World War I, you might read that chapter.
And I think each chapter in a way tells one story. There is no-- you can read chapter 14 without having read chapters 1 to 13 to understand the content of chapter 14. But of course, the full story only becomes clear if you read the entire thing.
SETH ROCKMAN: I can confirm to listeners that this is a tremendously readable book. The chapters move quickly. The narrative pace is lovely. The examples range from known characters to completely unknown people. And it is truly a tremendous scholarly accomplishment. So as we close today, let me just say congratulations, Sven. This is a tremendous book.
SVEN BECKERT: Thank you so much, Seth. And thank you for having me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARK BLYTH: This episode was produced by Don Richards. I'm Mark Blyth. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And be sure to subscribe to the show while you're at it. We'll be back soon with another episode of the Rhodes Center Podcast. Thanks for listening.
