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- [00:03]
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Professor Sven Beckert
So good, so good, so good.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Today.
- [00:53]
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Professor Sven Beckert
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Hello everyone. So today we have Professor Sven Beckwood with us. Professor Svenbecker is the Laird Bell professor of History at Harvard University and one of the most influential historians of capitalism working today. His research explores the history of capitalism from a global perspective, with particular attention to its economic, social, political and imperial dimensions. He's also the co chair of the Program of the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University and the co chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. Professor Beckert has recently written a new book, a book called Capitalism A Global History. And that is something that we'll be speaking to him about today. So thank you, Professor Beckert, for joining.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Great to be here.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yes. So my first question, I guess while reading this particular book, I was wondering about your previous work on the Empire of Cotton.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Right.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
So I was wondering, how did you come to write this particular book, Capitalism or Global History, from let's say the previous book that you wrote? So what kind of questions did sort of remain from that particular book that you sort of wanted to pursue through this? What sort of dissatisfactions you had from that project that made you feel like, no, this is something that I need to write?
- [02:49]
Professor Sven Beckert
Yeah, that is a wonderful question and I think it is a good starting point to think about. My new book on capitalism and global history. And basically, when I started writing Empire of Cotton, I was primarily interested in the history of cotton and the cotton industry. I was primarily interested in placing the history of the United States into a more global perspective. But as I wrote this book, as I wrote Empire of Cotton, As I researched Empire of Cotton, it became increasingly clear to me that the history of cotton also tells us something very important about the history of capitalism. And so the book became not just the history of cotton, but it became, in some ways, also a way to think about the history of capitalism, Especially in the kind of long 19th century, from the 1750s, let's say, to the 1920s. When I was done with that, it was clear to me that there is a really important way of rethinking the history of capitalism and to rethink it from a fundamentally global perspective. So this is basically something I learned during Empire of Cotton. And it was also clear, though, that cotton is very important to the history of capitalism, Especially when it comes to the 19th century. But there is more to the history of capitalism than just the history of cotton. And there's more to it in various ways. For one, the history of capitalism is a kind of longer history than the history that I mostly feature in Empire of Cotton. You have to go back with some care and with some attention to the history of the last 500 years, but maybe even more so the last 700 or 1000 years. And then, of course, the history of cotton is quite global, but it also is not a history that is about everywhere. It's a history that features primarily places such as the continent of Europe, India, Egypt, the United States, Brazil, maybe the Caribbean. But there are many parts of the world that it doesn't feature crucially, because cotton just wasn't so important to those parts of the world, but they also clearly matter to the history of capitalism. So I wanted to engage with these parts of the world as well. And then, last but not least, but really quite crucially, there is capitalism, in my telling, is a state of permanent revolution. There's constant change within capitalism. And of course, one of the things that does change constantly is that there are various industries that are kind of at the core of global capitalism at particular moments in time. For the 19th century, cotton and cotton industrialization was very, very important. But, for example, for the 20th century, why, it's still a very big industry, why it still is significant in some parts of the world, but it is not at the core of global capitalism in the 20th century. So there was so much more to say about Global capitalism. And then maybe last but not least, what I should also emphasize is that when I wrote Empire of Cotton, when I published Empire of Cotton, I noticed that there was a lot of public hunger to understand capitalism, to think anew about capitalism, to think anew about capitalism from a historical perspective, and to think anew about capitalism from a global perspective. And I noticed that most people think about capitalism in one way or another. Most people have strong opinions about capitalism. And I think I had the sense that we need to kind of think afresh about this capitalism and that there would be an audience interested in thinking afresh about capitalism. And that's how I came to write the new book, Capitalism A Global History. Yeah.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
And one of the striking features of this book that I think is the range of interlocutors you engage with, like, from 19th century political economists like Adam Smith to, let's say, the critique, the most famous critique of political economy being Karl Marx himself. Then there are obviously thinkers like Veblen Sombert to more contemporary figures like Piketty and Adam Toose. And I was also trying to follow the citations, and there's sort of a deep conversation that is going on with historians. I mean, Broadhel, you do mention him, he has been an inspiration, but also historians like Emmanuel Wallerstein, Jairus Banaji and so on.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Right.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
So how did you sort of bring these different traditions into conversation? And what does this do to the narrative that you're trying to tell us over here?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yes, that is a great observation. And yes, all of this, there's a very rich thinking about capitalism, both from a kind of abstract perspective. And then, of course, also there's a distinguished tradition about writing the history of capitalism, sometimes the entire thing, such as in Braudel, but sometimes there's thousands of books that illuminate particular parts of the history of capitalism. What I decided right at the beginning, when I started, was thinking about this book, was that I wanted to write a historical account. I didn't want to write kind of an abstract, heavily theoretical mediation on how to best understand capitalism. I did not want to adjudicate between the various theoretical traditions that have looked at the history of capitalism in a kind of abstract way. I wanted to tell a narrative. I wanted to tell the history of capitalism, or what I called capitalism, capitalism in action, how it actually unfolded in history. And as you also noticed, which is wonderful, yes, the book is embedded within these very ancient conversations that go back more than 200 years. But I do not prominently feature them in the text because I felt that people who are really interested in the ins and outs of these conversations will know them already pretty well, and they don't need my explicit guidance as to how to tackle these traditions. And many other readers who are really interested in capitalism and want to understand how we came to live in the world that we live in today are not so much interested in the infightings of sometimes kind of smallish conversations that have unfolded over the past 200 years. But the history of ideas, the history of the thinking about capitalism is, of course, important to the history of capitalism itself. And in that way, it is featured in the book. But what I'm trying to do, instead of adjudicating who is right and who is wrong, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to introduce these important thinkers like Smith and Marx and Weber and Keynes and feminist economics and all kinds of other traditions of thinking about capitalism. But I try to introduce them in the text at the moment, moment, at the historical moment in which they wrote, and to see them also as important contributors to understanding capitalism. Abstractly, yes. But I also see them as speaking from a particular vantage point, from a particular vantage point in time and from a particular vantage point in space. And so they become themselves part of the unfolding of the history of capitalism without, you know, separating them out into their own, you know, kind of separate chapter. I mean, often books start with a kind of long theoretical discussion of what everybody has said about this topic. I don't do that. I just bring them in at the moment in which they wrote.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
So in this book, you also sort of talk about merchant. I mean, your narrative starts from merchant capital.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Right?
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
I mean, that is long before the capitalism that we know today. That is primarily, I guess, the dominant form of capitalism that began in the 19th century. There is industrial capitalism. So your narrative sort of begins with merchant figures and trading institutions, which are all over the place across the world, from Aden Surat in basically Gujarat, then there's Florence in Italy. And you say that they develop practices that would sort of later become central to the capitalist life that we know today. But you also, as you said that you are resisting the linearity that people previously have seen or sort of have understood capitalism through. Right. So I was wondering, how do you hold the idea of continuity and also at the same time, the idea of rupture together in telling us this global history of capitalism?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yes. So I think, as I said earlier, capitalism is a state of constant revolution. Capitalism is the opposite of conservative. Capitalism is the opposite of stability. And capitalism shifts its shape drastically over the past 500 or even more so over the past 800 years. And the book, since it's a historical account of capitalism, it's not an effort to kind of uncover the very essence of capitalism. It's an effort to tell the history of capitalism. It puts a lot of emphasis on how this capitalism has changed over time and also how it can be very different in the different parts of the world at the same moment. But of course, it also has something in common across all of these differences, across all of these changes over time, and that is that it's driven by a particular. What I call a particular economic logic. It's a particular form of. Of economic life. It's not natural. It's a logic that is introduced to economic life that is actually a radical departure of how much economic life on planet Earth unfolded in the long past in human history. And that logic, to put it in a. To summarize it very simply, I think this logic is basically a form of economic life which is driven by the productive investment of capital with the goal to produce more capital. That's, I think, the fundamental logic of what characterizes the capitalist civilization. And that is a logic that you find among the merchants of seurat in the 16th century, that you find on the island of Barbados in the 17th century, that you find in the cotton textile mills of Manchester in the 19th century, that you find in the car manufacturing industry of Detroit in the 20th century, and that you find in Silicon Valley or Guang shu in the 21st century. So this is something that holds all of that story together. And again, this is a radical departure in how economic life on planet Earth was organized throughout most of human history.
- [13:59]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right. And through that I also sort of see. And this is also coming from my reading of your book. Your book has stakes in primarily two debates. One is basically the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And there's the other debate about the great divergence. Right. So I was. I mean, and you also say in response to one of my previous questions that you do not want to engage in these debates in a very abstract way. You want us to tell a story. So I was wondering then, what does this do to, let's say, the debates? What does your story do to these debates?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yeah, no, I think a lot. I think it makes actually. The book actually makes very strong arguments within these debates. And when it comes to the question of the origins of capitalism, which is, of course, central to any kind of tackling of the understanding of capitalism, I mean, I make a very basic point, but nonetheless a very important one. Namely, that capitalism is not the natural way of organizing economic. As I said before, it's a drastic departure from other logics of organizing economic activity. I mean, so much of our thinking about capitalism, especially in American society, is driven by this idea that people were always capitalists. But this book disagrees with that very essentially. The second important point that the book makes about the question of the origins of capitalism is that the idea. The idea that capitalism is a story about something emerging in the soil of Europe and then spreading to the rest of the world is fundamentally mistaken. And that was a notion, as you know, that was shared both by Adam Smith but also by Karl Marx. So it crossed the political spectrum. But this kind of Eurocentric vision of the history of capitalism, I think, is totally untenable in the 21st century when we clearly see that today the most dynamic parts of global capitalism are to be found in Europe, in Asia, and not on the European continent. Argues for the global origins of capitalism. And then it also argues within this debate, there has been a long tradition of seeking kind of one place and one date where and when capitalism emerged. So the kind of birthday and birthplace of capitalism. And people have found that, as you just mentioned, they have found that in the city of Florence, or they have found it in Amsterdam, or they have found it in the southern English countryside, or they have found it in Manchester. There are various parts of the efforts to identify the place and time, precise place and precise time, when capitalism emerged. And I think that's also mistaken. I think capitalism does not have a birthday. Capitalism is kind of an ongoing process. And in some ways, you can even see today the transition to capitalism in some parts of the world or in some spheres of our lives. So it's an ongoing process. But of course, this process accelerates at certain moments in time, but it's an ongoing process that cannot be dated. And it can also not be placed in the sense that there's just one part of the world from where this kernel then eventually spreads all across the globe. Instead, I'm arguing that capitalism was. Is a process, the emergence of capitalism is a process. And that capitalism was born global right from the very beginning. And what I do, as you also remarked, is I put great emphasis on the importance of merchant capital and on merchants. So merchants are absolutely central actors in the first third of the book. Because what I was looking for is who carries this strange, weird, radical, revolutionary new economic logic, who carries that into economic life on planet Earth? And it strikes me that the people who impersonated that kind of economic logic at first were largely long distance traders. And they, I very much agree with the arguments that Fernand Braudel has made some time ago about the importance of merchants to the history of capitalism. Or Jairus Banerjee makes very similar arguments about that today as well. And in a way, what the book shows is that this peculiar logic, this peculiar way of organizing economic life emerges in merchant communities in very many different parts of the world. I tell that story largely through the community of merchants in the port of Aden in present day Yemen, in the Arab world. But you can tell that story also by looking at merchants on the western coast of India. You can look at China, you can look at east and West Africa, and you can of course, also look at Europe. So you see this logic emerging in very many different parts of the world. And the book then, in some ways is an analysis of how this logic that once upon a time was spread widely but was marginal to economic life on planet Earth. How this kind of came to bring us to a world in which almost all aspects of economic life are structured along this logic, namely today. So this is the problem of the book. How did we get from it being very marginal to being at the center of economic life? So this is, I think, my contribution to the debate on the origins of capitalism. The question of the Great Divergence is also, as you say, is very crucial to the book. And the Great Divergence is basically the question of why did Europe become so central to global capitalism at a particular moment in time. The first thing that needs to be said about that is that the European moment, the European prominence in the history of capitalism, is actually a very short moment from a long historical perspective. It's really about the years between 1750 and 19, 1950 or maybe a little later. It's like a little more than 200 years. And this comes into much sharper relief today as economic power is shifting in the world again. But why did Europe come to play such an important role? And I'm indebted in that conversation. I'm definitely indebted to some of the insights that come from Ken Pomeranz, who has argued that there has been kind of an overestimation of the divergence for the pre 18th century moment, and who has also argued for the importance of kind of the global embeddedness of the European economy to explain its divergence. So its access that he specifically argued for the importance of the access to colonies and the access to cheap supplies of fossil fuels, namely to coal. And I think that's all very much true. And I very much agree with that. I do situate the process of the Great Divergence within a kind of global analysis. But I think there is something else in the Great Divergence which I do emphasize and which is slightly different from the arguments that Ken Pomerantz is making. Namely, I think capitalism is a product of capitalists of the logic of capital, but it's also a project of the state. And it's particularly a project of this kind of conjuncture of the power of entrepreneurs and the power of the state. And here I think there is a European divergence that is taking place much earlier than the divergence that Ken Palmerns talks about. Namely at some point in the late 15th, in the early 16th century, there is something emerging. There's a kind of coalition emerging between state power and the power of traders, the powers of entrepreneurs, the power of capital that sets the European trajectory, that sets Europe on a different trajectory than, let's say, contemporary South Asia or China or other parts of the world.
- [21:56]
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, thank you for bringing up the point about the state. And that was going to be my follow up question is basically, I mean as I said and as you said that capitalism is mutating, right? That's what your book is also trying to tell trying to tell us basically in terms of from merchant capital to industrial capitalism and to the present moment since the neoliberal age, right? The new liberal moment of the 1970s and 80s. So I was wondering, as much as capital has mutated, has the state also mutated? And is this something that you're trying to address in this book in terms of the state that we saw in the age of merchant capital versus the state that we saw in the 19th.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Century.
- [23:43]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
When England was industrializing and then America was industrializing. And the state that we sort of now experience since I guess the 1970s and 80s, the new liberal state. So I was wondering, do you see there are difference or do you see this again, a continuity over here in this story as well?
- [24:00]
Professor Sven Beckert
I think it's both. There is great difference, clearly, and there's also some continuity. And maybe I should just start with the continuity. And the continuity is that what I mentioned earlier, that capitalism is a state centric economic civilization? This might be counterintuitive to some of your listeners, but because we often think of capitalism and the state kind of being opposing forces. And the more capitalism, the less state, and the less capitalism, the more state. But I think historically this is wrong. And my book really does show, I think in great empirical detail that at every moment in the history of capitalism, the state is absolutely crucial. The state from creating a kind of legal framework in which trade activities happen, from building infrastructures, from military interventions, from regulations in a million different ways. The state had matter to every moment in the history of capitalism. And we cannot think about the economy without thinking about the state. Capitalism is a state centric economic civilization. Okay? That's what is the case throughout the history of capitalism. Of course, as you say, the state itself changes drastically in the past 500 years. As we all know, on the most basic level, the share of economic output that is controlled by the state escalates tremendously in the past 200 or 300 years. It's not uncommon in many parts of the world that the state controls about 40 to 50% of economic output, takes it in in forms of taxation, and then spends it on whatever it decides to spend it on. That is of course much, much more than was the case let' in the 1850s or in the 1750s. So in merely quantitative aspects, the state becomes much more important. The state also becomes much more important in the scope of what it does. It involves itself in ever more spheres of life and in ever more spheres of economic life. And again, that is an important change through the history of capitalism. There seems to be something in capitalism, in the logic of this capitalism that demands ever greater involvement of the state in ever more things. And then of course, so this is the second form how the state changes quite drastically in the course of the history of capitalism. And then of course, what also changes is the way how the state itself is organized and in what kind of political regimes constitute these Changing forms of state. And here we see in the history of capitalism, we see, of course, that the first kind of inklings of capitalism that we see emerge in these merchant communities that they trace throughout the world in the first half of the second millennium. This is still embedded within a form of tributary political rule, which is partly why it is so marginal to this particular moment in the history of economic life. At later points, it's embedded within monarchical states that organize large but loosely formed empires. We see kind of liberal states emerge in the late 18th century and then especially in the 19th century, which is again a very different form of political rule. We see also capitalism embedded within forms of authoritarian rule. We see capitalism then in the 20th century also embedded within fascist rule. So there is a whole diversity of political regimes in which capitalism is embedded. And in this way, there I disagree with one's fashionable modernization theory, which predicted that capitalism is basically going by necessity along with an expansion of liberal democratic regimes. It is not. We can find many historical examples in which this was not the case. Capitalism unfolded also in moments of large territory states. It unfolded in moments of large empires. It unfolded in moments in which city important roles. So the territorial organization of state power also changes. So maybe that's the fourth way of how states really change drastically in the history of capitalism. So there is no stability, there's no continuity, except in one way, and that is whatever moment we are looking at, we find that state power is quite crucial to the history of capitalism, which is why the book is not just the history of entrepreneurs. It's not just the history of. Of the logic of capital. It's very much also a political history. To understand how this capitalism unfolded as it did through history.
- [29:20]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right. And apart from the state and capitalists, be it industrial capitalists or merchant capitalists, I was wondering, what do you have to tell about capitalism when it is looked through the eyes of who labor within it? And that's a story also that you're interested in, right? You're interested in wage workers, you're interested in sharecroppers. You're interested the slave plantations, the enslaved people. So I was wondering then, how do you sort of see the story from their eyes? How does centering these laboring subjects change how we understand capitalism transformation over time?
- [29:58]
Professor Sven Beckert
Yes. So maybe that's a third contribution of the book. You don't just. I mean, to understand capitalism, you need to understand the history of capital and capitalists and business history. And I write a lot about that sometimes through very specific stories that I tell. For example, you might Remember the story I tell about the Goderich Company in Mumbai? So this is clearly important to the history of capitalism. What is also clearly important in the history of capitalism is what we just discussed. Namely, you need to understand the state, you need to understand politics. You need to embed capitalism into the understanding of capitalism. You need to understand it as a form of political economy. And third, I also very much emphasize the importance of labor in the history of capitalism. And I do so in a variety of ways. I mean, for one, I really make an effort to bring in the history and also the voices of people, of laboring people, from the enslaved to peasants, to sharecroppers, to industrial workers in 19th century Scottish cotton factories, to workers in 21st century Factories in Cambodia. And I try to recover the voices of people who probably have never made it into any history of capitalism. When we think about capitalism, we often think about the Medicis or maybe the Godridges or the Jack Moss or Bill Gates of the world today. But it was important for me to name names of people who worked on plantations, who worked in factories, who worked on railroad lines, because they also built the world in which we find ourselves today. Conceptually, then, I argue that capitalism goes along with a great variety of forms of labor. I mean, often there is this thinking that capitalism, capitalism is about wage labor. And indeed, basically you need to find wage labor to find capitalism. What I think I show is that capitalism has gone hand in hand with a great variety of labor regimes. And I see that. And that ranges of course, from wage labor, which is now predominant in capitalism in the world today. But it includes also enserved workers in Eastern Europe. It includes enslaved workers on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. It includes sharecroppers in, let's say, the 19th century United States. It includes also kind of petty entrepreneurship, let's say, in present day India or Nigeria or elsewhere. So I see that as one characteristic of capitalism. And again, this emphasizes to me the undogmatic nature of capitalism. The capitalist expansion, the capitalist revolution connects to a huge variety of labor regimes as time went by. Okay, so then beyond just emphasizing the variety of labor regimes and beyond emphasizing the importance of workers to forging the history of capitalism, I also give workers an important role in what I call the shape shifting of capitalism, the kind of fundamental rethinking of capitalism at particular historical moments in time. As you might remember, I talk a fair amount about the rebellious workers in the Bengal country. Saw it, the indigo growing countryside. I talk a fair amount about rebellious enslaved workers. And not only do I Describe their rebellions. Not only do I talk about how they engage with state power, but also with entrepreneurs, but what I also argue is that even though these people were often or typically dirt poor, they were often or typically not well educated. They had very few access to political resources or educational resources. But their collective act and the individual actions have often made a huge difference to the history of capitalism. So, for example, in 1750, most Europeans would have maybe been not great advocates, wouldn't have liked the institution of slavery, but they would have kind of agreed that slavery was very important to the global economy, was very important to global capitalism by the 19th century, slavery, plantation slavery, is basically done with. By the late 19th century, it becomes very marginal to global capitalism. But why is this so? It's so because the enslaved workers staged major rebellions against the institution of slavery. And so the capitalism of 1890 is also fundamentally different from the capitalism of 1750 because of this collective action of enslaved workers. The same if you see the European welfare state, I mean, the European capitalism or American capitalism looks very different in 1815, 1860, than it looked in, in 1880 or 1890. And that has a lot to do with the collective action of workers organizing in trade unions and political parties to kind of reshape capitalism. So labor, I don't think you can even begin to understand much about capitalism without putting labor also at the center of that story.
- [35:34]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right. Moving on. What I also sort of wanted to ask you is about the role science and technology plays in your narrative in terms of, be it, let's say, invention of, let's say, a certain kind of machinery that helps with cotton spinning, or let's say, broader scientific knowledge that has come to shape the world that we live in today, particularly since the 20th century, I guess, or even before that, I guess, technology, particularly in terms of, let's say, how the artisans sort of made those inventions.
- [36:14]
Professor Sven Beckert
Right.
- [36:14]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
That is something that you talk about. It's not necessarily experts bringing in knowledge, but artisans themselves responding to practical problems. And that sort of is leading to sort of innovation. So my question is then, how do these sort of techniques or scientific knowledge shape the contours of capitalism? Or let's say, how it is mutating over time.
- [36:35]
Professor Sven Beckert
Right. So one result of this economic logic that is at the core of capitalism investing capital productively to produce more capital. One of the results of that is, of course, that there's a constant search for producing new things and also producing them more efficiently with less labor input. So this is a kind of fundamental characteristic of. Of economic life. Under capitalism that you find at any moment in the history of capitalism. And so the search for new ways of making things, for making them more efficiently, is a kind of basic structure and tendency within the capitalist revolution at any moment in time. Of course, the level of technology is quite different between the 1750s and the 2025s, but the basic impetus is exactly the same. And importantly, and this is a core argument in the book, I hold that to be the offspring of capitalism and not the origins of capitalism. Because sometimes people think of the origins of capitalism to be in machine production. In the Industrial Revolution, many people start telling the history of capitalism with the British Industrial Revolution, I'm arguing the opposite. I'm arguing that the British Industrial Revolution and all other moments of rapid technological change that come after the British Industrial Revolution are the offspring of capitalism and not the origins of capitalism. Of course, science and technology, as you mentioned, come to how exactly and precisely they come to play a role is of course shifting drastically over time. So at the one moment of rapid technological change or the beginnings of rapid economic technological change is of course, the Industrial Revolution as it unfolds in the late 18th and 19th century. And as you say, the technology for that comes partly from the ancient technological innovations that come out of the, the Indian cotton manufacturing sector. It comes also from British artisans facing certain kinds of problems in production and facing tough competition from India who are trying to come up with machinery that makes the spinning of cotton more efficient. These are people without university degrees, these are people without theoretical knowledge of science. These are skilled workers who come up with new ways of organizing the spinning of cotton. And, and that has drastic implications because the machinery that they develop is about 200 times more productive than spinning cotton by hand. And that then spreads to other industries as well. The book then describes when it comes to technical innovation. It describes how in the later parts of the 19th century, this innovation moves, becomes much more linked to theoretical science, to university based science. And it traces like in the electrical machinery industry, in the chemical industry, but also in steel making, how universities, how universally trained experts, how scientists now come to play a much larger role in innovation within capitalism. Which again, that brings us also back to the discussion of the state, because of course, the state has a very large role in creating these kinds of educational systems that produce that kind of science and funding this kind of science. So the state becomes extremely important to innovation as well.
- [40:30]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right? If we talk about 19th century, you tell us that that is the moment when industrial capitalism consolidates. But you also tell us this is the Moment, if we look at at least the second half of the 19th century, the nation state as a form is sort of becoming a dominant political form. That sort of then sort of takes over the entire world after decolonization, when sort of empires break away. Right. But this is also when. When the nation state is sort of becoming a dominant political form. This is also when we are starting to see economic nationalism as an idea sort of again taking shape. So I was wondering, what do you have to say about this particular period, this particular idea of economic nationalism? How does this sort of then shape the capitalism ever since the 19th century? Because, I mean, the ideas of Dadapa and Naoruji, they sort of have. They echo lots of ideas that we see today in the present world. Right. When somebody says, like, make America great again.
- [41:35]
Professor Sven Beckert
Right.
- [41:36]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
So I was wondering if. What do you have to say about that?
- [41:38]
Professor Sven Beckert
Yes. I mean, Roji is obviously a very interesting thinker regard, because he does live again. He lives in this particular moment in the history of capitalism, which is both the industrial capitalism of the late 19th century, but it's also the colonial capitalism that he observes in India. And he develops his political thinking and his political strategy exactly out of these particular forms of capitalism that he sees all around him in the late 19th century, early 20s, 20s to 20th century.
- [42:16]
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- [42:46]
Professor Sven Beckert
Edu.
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Professor Sven Beckert
I am freaking out right now.
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I think I just peed a little.
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Professor Sven Beckert
What last time?
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- [43:19]
Professor Sven Beckert
If I, you know, the history of capitalism is long. If I would have had to divide the book into two parts, if there would have to be two volumes instead of one, I think I would have divided the book not at the moment of the Industrial Revolution, which would be kind of the traditional way of doing that. But I would have divided the book in the 1870s, 1880s, so in the later part of the 19th century, because I think there is a fundamentally different kind of capitalism emerging at this particular moment in time. I call the earlier moment of capitalism old regime capitalism, in which the capitalism is often merchant. Capital is absolutely central to that moment in the history of capitalism. It is largely still embedded in forms of state power in states that are still largely dominated by the power of landed elites. It is a moment in which much industrial production is small scale and investments in factories are. Are really quite small. It's a moment in which heavily coercive labor relations are still very important. For example, slavery in the Americas. And this particular form of capitalism comes into a crisis. And I have a whole chapter that is dedicated to this crisis of old order capitalism in the mid 19th century that stretches around the world. And a new kind of capitalism is emerging in which there are now much heavier capital investments in industry. There's a completely new scale of industrial production. We don't have like 100 or 200 workers in a factory, but we have 8,000 workers in factories. Production becomes much more science intensive, Production becomes much more capital intensive, and it becomes linked in new ways to the state. And that now goes back to your question. It becomes linked to the state partly because these are now massive investments in spatially fixed assets. So if you are a merchant with the East India Company in 1700, and trade to that port in Asia is not working out too well, you can move your capital pretty rapidly to some other port. But if you are a steel industrialist in Pittsburgh in 1880, and you have sunk a lot of capital into this steel mill, it is hard not to say it's impossible to move that capital rapidly elsewhere. So there's a new relationship now between territorial nation states and massive investments of capital. And that makes entrepreneurs now also, for a range of other reasons that I don't want to go into now, makes them very dependent on the nation state. And of course, at the same time, the nation state becomes crucially important. This heavy capital investment becomes crucially important to the nation state because it produces the kinds of things that nation states think they need in order to fight wars with one another. The kind of heavy industry, the chemical industry, the steel industry, that becomes very important to modern warfare. And so there's a totally new relationship between industry and capital emerging. And that produces, for example, also the desire to now nationalize commodity chains, to not buy things on global markets, but instead to source raw materials or inputs for industrial production within their own national, national territories. And this becomes very sharp, very relevant in the kind of increasing tensions on the European continent in the early 20th century that eventually lead to World War I. But as you say, and that's, I think, a very good observation, it does also become important to kind of a critique of colonialism because at this point, any reader of any economic treatise on the European continent sees this emphasis on the merging of capital and state power. And of course, anyone observing the situation in the colonial world, which is much of the world at this point, sees that this connection between the local capital and state power there is absent because there is local capital. I think that's the. Often people who look back at this have missed the importance of local capital like capital in China or India or elsewhere. There is local sources of capital, there are local sources of entrepreneurial talent, they're local sources of labor, and all of that that does exist. But what does not exist is this link between a state responsive to this local capital and this local capital. And I think one of the fundamental insights of anti colonial thinkers at this moment in time that and also very much propelled the anti colonial rebellions of the mid 20th century, is we need to create a state that is responsive to our indigenous nodes of capital. And so that's exactly what happened once independence comes about. There is, for example, there is now a powerful Indian state that is oriented towards the interests of Indian entrepreneurs and not so much anymore the entrepreneurs of Lancashire. And that, I think, sets. That builds the groundwork for what is now clearly one of the most important, maybe the most important economic development of the 20th century. Namely the economic development that comes out of the moment of decolonization. Yes, in 1960, in 1970, when people looked at the decolonizing states, they often saw failure. They thought there was still abject poverty, the development was far behind of then contemporary United States or Europe. But I think now we see much clearer that this laid the groundwork for the kind of spectacular economic development that we see in the decolonized world today.
- [49:29]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right. My next question is basically on a particular line that you have written in this book about capitalism history not being simply cyclical. That is something I do agree with. If we look at capitalism in its particularities, if we look at capitalism in India, if we look at capitalism in France, capitalism in US and so on, so forth, or let's say capitalism across time, because it definitely has mutated. And that is something that you are telling us. Us as well.
- [50:04]
Professor Sven Beckert
Right.
- [50:05]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
But what do you have to say about capitalism as this abstract world which also you are Talking about capitalism being this spirit, this zeitgeist of our times ever since merchant capital. Right. I was wondering then, how does your statement about capitalism, history not being simply cyclical, hold up to this, this abstract idea of capitalism, which you're also trying to articulate, which does have patterns. Right. In terms of, let's say, if we just. We just talked about Dadabai Naoroji's idea of, let's say, economic nationalism and how that sort of has echoes in the present as well, or let's say the crises in capitalism that we, at least, because I studied 19th century and I do see similarities between, let's say, what happened in the 19th century and the similar, and let's say, our present conditions in some ways. Right, right. The fact that I'm able to make those connections. What do you think about then, this zeitgeist that is capitalism, the sort of patterns that we see over there, and the particularities where you say, and I agree, that it's not cyclical, it's mutating, it's changing.
- [51:16]
Professor Sven Beckert
Right. Really great questions. And of course, yes, when we look at the history of capitalism, we often find things that strike us as almost contemporary, or at least very relevant to understanding the contemporary moment. And thus what we learn from that is that while capitalism shifts drastically over time, also there are things that are recognizable in its past, about the present. So, for example, we see now a kind of re emergence of the importance of trading, merchants, merchant houses. When we think about the world of capitalism today, most of us do not think first and foremost about people who build giant factories and employ 100,000 workers in this factory, such as Henry Ford. But we think about these kind of coordinators of production and these, of course, investors or allocators of capital. And that is of course, absolutely no surprise for anybody who has studied the early modern period. And where we find also the East India Company in a way, was a giant coordinator of production on another continent in South Asia. And the kind of allocation of capital through the Amsterdam merchants in some ways also reminds us of what is happening today. So there are certain things that strike us as familiar also, as you point out. So. Well, if you think about the kinds of economic nationalism that you encounter in public discourse today in a country such as the United States, people often in the United States, they are very disoriented when they hear that, because it seems just such a radical shift from where we were just a few years ago, from the neoliberal liberal era. And. And I think they perceive this as almost kind of an earthquake, that the world on which they stand, the ground on which they stand, becomes suddenly unstable. But if you look at history, obviously that kind of economic nationalism, let's say tariffs are just totally unexceptionable. If you think about Britain in the 18th century, one of the reasons how Britain industrialized in cotton textiles was through protective. They tried to keep Indian textiles out of the British market. You see high protectionism in the United States in the late 19th century, and so on and so on. So in a way, there's nothing new under the sun. It's just like things that also. When you think about the shift of economic power through the world now, many Americans are very. They seem shell shocked that their economic power is moving to other parts of the world, away from the United States. But of course, if you look at the history of capitalism over the past 500 years, you can see shifts happening in various moments in time over and over again. Okay, so this, I think, all speaks for your argument, but I think it doesn't make it cyclical because too many things change at the same time. So let's say there is now a return to economic nationalism, which I think there is. Is. But of course, this economic nationalism, now let's say in the United States, it was one thing in 1890 when the United States was kind of the up and coming global economic power versus today, when we live in a world in which economic power is increasingly concentrated in places such as China or India or elsewhere. So. So it doesn't. I don't think we can kind of look at history and say, okay, this is broadly similar. People had high protectionism in the 1890s, so we'll be returning to this moment for the better or for the worse. There is, on the right in the United States, there is a sense, okay, if we only embrace these kinds of policies, we're going to return to our former economic glory. Or on the left, there's the sense if we return to these policies, we are going to return to the devastations of the first half of the 20th century. And I think both is problematic because we cannot return. The word shifts along so many different dimensions that it combines these things in new ways. But all of that said, I think looking at history is absolutely crucial to understand our contemporary moment because exactly, it does allow us to think in certain ways about the present. We live in a world of capitalism today. Capitalism structures almost every aspect of our lives today. We cannot understand at all the world in which we live in today without also understanding capitalism. And capitalism we can only understand from a historical Perspective. It allows us to think about the present as kind of one moment in a long history. And I think this is urgently, urgently necessary. Even the book is pretty long, as you know, and it's kind of counterintuitive. In a moment when people just seem to be communicating mostly by sending short messages out into the word that are like a paragraph long at the most, it seems kind of counterintuitive. But I think all this noise, in a way, can be disconcerting and disorienting. Sometimes we just need to sit down and assimilate the whole thing and take some time to assimilate the whole thing in order to understand where we find ourselves today.
- [57:17]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Absolutely. And this brings us to the last question that I want to ask is basically if you are to sit down and think about capitalism, because in this book you. I mean, gradually over time, the argument that you are making throughout the chapters is that how capitalism as a form engulfs all of our social life, just not economic life. Right. So I was wondering, do you still see spaces that are outside the commodity form?
- [57:49]
Professor Sven Beckert
Right.
- [57:49]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
And is that something that historians should think about without obviously romanticizing them or treating them as mere residues? I was wondering, what do you have to say about that?
- [57:59]
Professor Sven Beckert
No, no, absolutely we should think about that. I mean, capitalism is kind of expansionary, as we discussed in great detail. It does capture ever more geographic spaces and it has captured ever more spheres of our social lives. More broadly speaking, that is true, but it has never captured the everything. There have always been spaces outside of capitalism. Just think about the family life is still organized largely outside the logic of capitalism. Just think about the vast expansion of spheres outside the market. For example, the welfare state, which is a major presence in many of the world's economies, which is not working primarily along the lines of the logic of the market. So this is important, and I agree with a scholar, Nancy Fraser, who has argued that this is actually constitutive of capitalism, that we cannot even think about capitalism without having this fear outside the logic of the market as well. Yes, I think we should think about that because. Branko Milanovic wrote a great book which is called Capitalism Alone, which basically the title suggests that capitalism kind of encompasses absolutely everything of life on earth. And I think, even though I do emphasize in the book the great importance of capitalism to understanding contemporary life and life in history, but I would say that maybe this is a little bit overdone. There is a sphere outside the logic of the market.
- [59:43]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Thank you so much, Professor Beckhardt. This was hopefully a great conversation from your side. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I enjoyed reading your book. And I hope more people pick up this book over time and grasp basically what you have to say in the thousand pages or so. This is a wonderful book, I guess, and this is something that hopefully more academics will not only themselves read to think about work, but will teach to their students. Right. Because this is a great text, I guess, for teaching as well. So thank you so much. Thank you so much.
- [60:16]
Professor Sven Beckert
Thank you. And thank you so much for engaging so deeply with the content of the book. I really, really appreciate that.
- [60:22]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
That absolutely.