Sven Beckert

Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard, has written an epic book about the history of capitalism over roughly a millenium: it’s called Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert believes the only way to understand one’s place in the world is through...

We don’t think about commodities very much. They’re all around us: cotton, sugar, oil, gas, chickens, cattle, and so many other things we take for granted. But a closer look at the history of commodities tells a revealing story about the expansion of...