What Does “Capitalism” Really Mean, Anyway?
The endgame of capitalism, in his account, is a world where “almost nothing escaped commodification.” Beckert here refers to commodities in the loose, colloquial sense of “products that can be bought and sold,” but for the most part he uses the word as the technical term for a tradable good, like grain or copper, that is standardized, fungible, and divisible into arbitrary quantities. “Capitalism: A Global History” is both a history of the commodity and an example of one. Its substance is homogenous, uniform, and interchangeable, as if it had been extruded page by page to meet the needs of procurers at any scale. Beckert has evidently assessed the consumer landscape—a sluggish demand for exegeses of feudalism, a frothy bubble for tracts that put capitalism in its place—and banked on product-market fit. He explicitly frames his own enterprise as a speculative “wager,” a bet that capitalism’s “history—all of it—might be understood, if not wholly contained, between two book covers.”
If his competitors’ merchandise is defective, it is because the attempt to tie capitalism to “any monocausal explanation, any fragment—an institution, a technology, a nation—does not explain much.” Beckert believes that capitalism cannot be reduced to a discrete essence. It has neither a fixed origin nor a fixed trajectory. It is compatible with a variety of forms of political and social life, and it is never the same from place to place or moment to moment. It is not the work of single actors but the nexus of all human action.
One might wonder, Beckert allows, whether it’s worth retaining a concept subject to so much drift. And yet he takes the fact that the word “capitalism” exists as an indication that it must refer to something. But how to provide a working definition while “eschewing static, essentializing, excessively abstract, or presentist approaches”? His solution is to return with one hand what he has taken away with the other. Capitalism has no transhistorical direction, but it nevertheless embodies a “unique logic”: the “tendency to grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity was age-old, an essential, irreducible quality of capitalism.” Capitalism has no essence, except, actually, its “essence was a globe-spanning creep that produced a connected diversity.” It is the manifestation of ravenous appetite. What Beckert exemplifies here is how “capitalism” very often functions in the academic humanities: as a way to show that the world’s evils—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, inequality, exploitation, extraction, climate change, social media, dating apps, insomnia, a general feeling of unremitting pressure—are not only evil in their own right but the franchises of a singularly evil phenomenon.
Social-media sophisticates who offhandedly blame capitalism—or, more urbanely, “late capitalism”—for all that ails us might nevertheless hesitate to take their experience as a part of a story that runs through nineteen-eighties Japan, nineteen-seventies Sweden, nineteen-fifties Detroit, nineteenth-century Manchester, eighteenth-century Barbados, and seventeenth-century Java. That’s a challenge Beckert takes up. When he speaks of capitalism’s “connected diversity,” he is suggesting that any apparent differences are merely the local epiphenomena of capitalist cunning.
The book’s colonial-era prelude, he notes, precedes the coinage of “capitalism” by a few hundred years, but his story properly begins even earlier, with the twelfth-century Yemeni port of Aden. It was, he writes, “quite literally, a fortified node of capital, an island of capitalists” where Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu merchants linked the medieval Arab world with India. Their métier was neither production nor cultivation but acquisition and exchange.
Although trade itself, Beckert grants, was ancient, it had long been reined in by the norms and customs of local participants. In pre-capitalist societies, he continues, decent folk were apparently content to reap what they had sown—he reckons that “producing for one’s own use was timeless”—and it was the birthright of élites to expropriate any surplus. Considerable wealth may have accrued to these chieftains and warlords, but Beckert argues that, in contrast with the workings of capitalism, their “reshuffling of resources” was candid and legible. Even genocidal larceny, in his account, was carried out in harmony with the prevailing ethos of use: the nomadic conqueror Timur ransacked Central Asia, but he devoted his plunder to the construction of “magnificent mosques and madrassas,” making his methods “essentially different from capital owners.” For Beckert, merchants like those of Aden, who used their resources only as a means to capture further resources, were a “categorically different” breed.
