A recent local Fox News television segment focused on “socialist attacks on profits,” and Donald Trump called socialism and perhaps even communism the “biggest threat to our country since its founding.” Freakouts about recent democratic-socialist electoral gains aside, capitalism is as dominant as ever. Massive investments are flowing into Big Tech, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the top five U.S. banks had garnered record revenues. Yet JPMorgan Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimon expressed uncertainty: “It’s getting close to as good as it gets. We just don’t know how long it’s going to last.”
You might think that tens of billions of dollars in bank revenues and a massive tech buildout would spur unbridled confidence, but uncertainty about the future is a key driver in capitalism. Big Tech’s private AI investment surpassed $285 billion last year, compared with China’s $12 billion, yet Chinese government-backed AI research is closing the capability gap, causing Silicon Valley to panic. Titanic investments in AI require data centers that suck up energy, land and clean cold water, setting off political backlashes and legislative moratoriums. Does AI portend massive job losses or job gains?
So much is riding on AI investment that even the head of JPMorgan is not entirely sure things will work out. “Will it, in total, pay off? Probably, just like the Internet did,” Dimon told a financial podcast. “Will it pay off the way you expect in the timetable you expect? Definitely not.”
British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote about uncertainty and time, in which the future can never be fully reduced to a mathematical formula. Past performance is not indicative of future results, goes the cliché, but future expectations play a huge role in determining present projections and the confidence of those deploying future capital flows.
If two centuries seems like a long time to get born, the point is that capitalism is a process, and by the 19th century, capitalism had changed the world “drastically.”
The future is uncertain, and so is the past. Capitalism: A Global History by Harvard professor Sven Beckert is the latest sweeping economic history arguing capitalism contains distinct epochs and transitions defined by its global reach. The book calls capitalism’s birthdate during a “great connecting” sometime in the “long sixteenth century,” roughly 1450 to 1640. If two centuries seems like a long time to get born, the point is that capitalism is a process, and by the 19th century, capitalism had changed the world “drastically.” Beckert, a historian, spends hundreds of pages on early traders and merchants and asserts that capitalism was a global phenomenon before it had a name. These chapters are interesting enough but can be a slog. In his June 2026 review The Nation, writer Corey Robin picks apart Beckert’s language and phrasing to argue that he can be imprecise and unclear. For example, there’s a school of thought that puts capitalism’s origins in the British countryside “during medieval and early modern eras” as landlords enclosed formerly communal lands, and leased this land to tenant farmers. Robin agreed with Beckert’s distinguishing capitalism’s epochs, at least in economic terms, but he believes that the book undercuts its own distinctions by noting that all relied on coercive states, forced labor and land dispossessions.
The enterprise really gets rolling with the fusion of European states and empires with merchant economic power. Burgeoning European empires needed merchant taxes to fund armies and armadas. The merchants expected new market access, trade-route protections and, most importantly, profits. The European empires expected fidelity, but did not always get it. “Capital was fungible, and its loyalty to particular rulers and particular states was weak: Capital that accumulated in Italian city-states like Florence and Genoa, for example, was crucial to Iberian explorations along the coast of West Africa, the early slave trade, and the Spanish and Portuguese push into the Americas.” The Industrial Revolution differentiated itself with the intensification of machinery/industry, fossil-fuel use, and “global commodity” production propelled by wage labor and slavery.
Instability is a subtle but persistent theme in Capitalism: A Global History, as capitalism is prone to economic downturns and uncertainty. The Long Depression (1873-1896) was marked by mass unemployment, railroad failures, debt crises and sociopolitical turmoil. It would take another economic downturn, the Great Depression of 1929 and the 1930s, to shake orthodox beliefs that the solution to economic crisis was in “the self-directed working of the market alone.”
Capitalism’s final chapters detail the catastrophe of two world wars and the social-democratic aftermath. While New Deal Keynesian spending distinguished Depression-era and postwar and Western Europe and the U.S., the book recalls that this was not the typical response in other countries. “Economic nationalism, including moves towards autarky, was the most prominent policy response to the Depression,” and many of these right-wing nationalist regimes overturned European social democracies. Authoritarian and fascistic regimes gained power in Spain, Italy, Hungary and Albania, and, of course, in Austria and Germany. While each regime was uniquely awful, economic nationalism was defined by critiques of liberalism, individualism and markets, and an embrace of corporatism which attempted to fuse the state, business and subordinated labor into national agreements though love of country. Fascism never broke with capitalism.
Capitalism documents another transition – when the Bretton Woods system of international capital controls and semifixed currency exchange rates collapsed, and neoliberalism (1973 to 2008) opened the door to global investment to spread to every nook and cranny. Capital crosses borders at will, looking for the highest returns. Trade deals allowed Western manufacturing concerns to offshore production to Asia and Latin America to exploit cheaper labor and then import finished goods to U.S. big-box stores. The tradeoff is growing internal U.S. inequality and environmental degradation, including global warming. However, Beckert’s book dedicates just one chapter to the 2008 financial crisis.
If neoliberalism didn’t end, the Great Recession at least shook capitalism’s foundations enough for people to wonder, what next? Tariff-slapping and immigrant-bashing right-wing economic nationalism are in vogue, but perhaps so is nascent sewer socialism, which promises more public goods and affordable services. Time will tell.
Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert
Penguin Press 2025
1,087 pages
