Sven Beckert isn’t here to judge capitalism, even though he just wrote a provocative, ambitious, 1,300-page book on its history. As he writes several times in the book (which this editor has read), he’s not even sure what it is. He’s trying to understand it.
The Harvard professor, who Zoomed in to talk to Fortune from his home office in Cambridge, Mass., explained that his new book, Capitalism: A Global History, is the product of an eight-year odyssey to seek understanding of the way we actually live out our economic lives. “Often, when I teach the history of capitalism here at Harvard, many of my students think that capitalism is kind of the state of nature.” But that’s just not the case when you look at the historical record, he added.
When pressed to explain what his book accomplishes, he said it’s two-pronged: to offer a more global perspective on the history of capitalism and to “denaturalize” the history of whatever capitalism is. Capitalism is neither eternal nor natural, in Beckert’s telling; itʼs a human invention that spread and evolved over centuries through deliberate choices, sometimes extraordinary violence, and incredible institutional innovation. Capitalism rose from the margins of medieval trade to dominate modern life, and so it could also, someday, fade or transform again.
