One Thousand Years of Capitalism

In this episode, guest host Senthil Nathan interviews Sven Beckert about the major developments in history and expansion of capitalism. Almost all of life is organized around capitalist logic, says Beckert, and the capitalist model has changed and evolved over more than one thousand years.

Capitalism’s history begins with merchant communities eight hundred or so years ago, long-distance traders who connected various small cities. The drive to expand and create more capital led to the large-scale production of agriculture in the countryside and development of extraction industries such as silver in Potosí, Bolivia.

Europeans took advantage of power differentials in other parts of the world to recast production in profound ways, including mobilizing labor in the practice of slavery, which quickly expanded production into the countryside. Sugar, cotton, oil, and rubber are all commodities that emerged via the forces that drove the capitalist expansion—particularly in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

The book ends in the year 2023, and Beckert remarks on the responsibilities humans have to acknowledge the consequences of capitalism’s expansion, such as slavery and environmental degradation. He notes the purpose of the book is not to make judgments about whether or not capitalism is a net benefit or harm to humanity but to understand how we arrived at the present moment. Beckert also speculates on how quickly capitalism will change and adapt in the future.

This is a joint production with the Business and Society podcast by Senthil Nathan. Nathan is a visiting fellow with the Weatherhead’s Scholar’s Program and joins us as a guest host.

Guest

Sven Beckert, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History. Laird Bell Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.

Host

Senthil Nathan, Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program. CEO, Fairtrade Australia/New Zealand; Board Member, Australian Council for International Development; Host, Business and Society podcast.

Producer/Director

Michelle Nicholasen, Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Related Links

• Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert (Penguin Random House, 2025)
• Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert (Penguin Random House, 2015)
• Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History, coauthored by Sven Beckert
• "War, Work, and the Fragile Ladder of Dignity," by Senthil Nathan
• Business and Society Podcast

Music 

“African Moon” by John Bartmann. Source: Free Music Archive
(CC0 1.0 Universal License) 

Transcript

SENTHIL NATHAN: Welcome to the Epicenter podcast from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your guest host today, Senthil Nathan, a Fellow of Practice in residence at the Center and also the host of the Business and Society podcast. In this co-produced episode, I interview Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard. He's the author of a new book, Capitalism, A Global History, that analyzes the long history of capitalism over a millennium. That's right, a millennium of capitalism in one book, interrogating the good, the bad, and the future. It is a seminal achievement, and I'm going to ask him about the discoveries he has made in the process of traveling the world to research the book. Let's get started.

SENTHIL NATHAN: What an extraordinary book you have written, Sven. I read a bit about capitalism, but I cannot recollect any other book that spans the past millennium and tells the whole story. The story we often hear is part of capitalism, but your book opened up the world in new ways. Let's talk about it in a minute.

But I was traveling to New York City last week on Amtrak. There was a lady sitting next to me, so she saw me reading this book, and she looked at me and said, how do you like the book? I said, it's great. Then she said, my husband is reading this now. So I was curious. I asked her, what is your husband doing? So she said, he's a banker. So I'm just wondering, are they your target audience? I'm sure the banker is not going to be very happy reading your book.

SVEN BECKERT: Who knows? Maybe the banker is happy because I think the banker, like everybody else, needs to understand capitalism in order to live in it and in order to work in it. And capitalism is such an overwhelming fact in our lives today. And I think it's hard to navigate the world we live in in any way, shape, or form, without understanding capitalism. And in order to understand capitalism, I think you need to understand it from a historical perspective.

So think your friend on the train and her husband, I think it's quite relevant because you learn a couple of things, I think, reading this book that are perhaps not obvious to many people. For one, you understand that capitalism is a particular logic to economic life. It's not the universal logic to economic life. And it's not something that existed forever. But it's something that has a beginning, and we can trace empirically how it's spread in space and how it's spread in society. So it's a fundamentally historical process.

And then we can see, of course, in the book that you can understand capitalism only from a global perspective. That's perfectly understandable. We live our lives in fairly local ways, even if we travel a lot. But still, we are rooted in a particular part of the world. And we can see only so much from the perspective of the place we live in.

And also we can see only so much from our own lives’ perspective, from a biographical perspective. And therefore, I think the book teaches you that capitalism is a very global system. It organizes economic life around the world. And any local parts of that history can only be understood from a global perspective. And so I think you learn that from the book as well.

And then third, you learn from that book, there are so many efforts to distill the essence of capitalism to come up with ever finer definitions of capitalism, which I do in the book as well. But in the end, what I think is true is that capitalism changes drastically over time. It takes on very many different forms in different places at the same time. It is fundamentally undogmatic.

And therefore, if you think about the world today, you need to understand also that the capitalist civilization in which we live in has shifted its shape drastically over time and is probably going to continue shifting its shape into the future. So I think these are three insights that this book provides that are extremely relevant to navigating the contemporary world as well.

SENTHIL NATHAN: Interesting. Let's start with the first one, globalization. So I grew up in India. And this was 1990s, when they opened up the economy, liberalized. The school of thought where we grew up with is globalization just started. And obviously, it delivered some growth and development to India. Reading your book opened my eyes in new ways in that the story of capitalism seems to be a story of globalization since the beginning. Tell us where it started.

SVEN BECKERT: No, absolutely. I think capitalism was never just local. It was never just regional. And that's one thing, that it does set it apart from other economic logics. If you think about subsistence farming, which was very prevalent in many parts of the world, that is an intensely local form of the organization of economic life. Even if you think about all these tributary rulers that populated the world for many centuries, their economic worlds were also rather local, or at the most, regional.

So what sets the capitalist civilization apart is really its global scope. And I think I show in the book that capitalism starts within the world economy. While it does create the world economy, capitalism was born global. And throughout its history, it can only be understood from this global perspective. And since you mentioned India, India has been deeply connected to the global economy for very many centuries. And indeed, the book starts not with a group of South Asian merchants, but it starts with a group of merchants in the Arab world, in the city of Aden, in present day Yemen.

And one of the things that these merchants in Aden did principally, was they traded with South Asia. So here we're talking about the 11th and 12th centuries, so 800, 900 years in the past. And these people sent ships to South Asia, for example, transporting the dates, for example, products of the Arab world to South Asia. And in return, they brought back textiles. They brought back brass, all kinds of-- they brought back spices, the products of South Asia or even beyond.

Here you see, so these were among the world's first-- what I call the world's first entrepreneurs, the world's first capitalists. And they engaged in long-distance trade, connecting the Arab world, but also East Africa, then the Middle East, but also Europe and South Asia to one another. And this is 800 years ago. And so I think capitalism is born in the process of connecting various parts of the world to one another. It is born within the world economy. And it does create the world economy.

And so what is striking about these merchant communities, these early merchant communities that you find, not just in the Arab world, but you find them also, obviously, in South Asia-- you find them in China. You find them in East Africa. You find them in Europe and elsewhere. We have some of their letters. We have some documentation that was left behind. And so we can read how they practiced their economic lives, how they ran their businesses. They are strikingly modern, these letters, because basically these merchants did what people do today as well. Namely, they productively invest their capital for the purposes of creating more capital. And this is what animates the capitalist economy to this day.

But at the time that they lived, they were totally marginal to economic life on planet Earth because almost everybody else on planet Earth organized their economic lives in very different ways. Namely, they either were tributary rulers who forced their peasants to give up some of their surplus. They forced them. They coerced them by violence to give up some of their surplus in order to accumulate wealth. Or they were subsistence farmers, as existed all over the world, who tried to organize production so that their families could live, and their offspring could live, and maybe the community that they were part of could live. So they were kind of exotic. These merchants were kind of exotic in the world that was organized along very, very different lines.

And then the book ends in the year 2023, and it ends in the country of Cambodia. And that is to show that today we live in a world in which almost all economic life is organized along this capitalist logic around the world. And the problem that this book basically asks and the story that it tells is, how do we get from a world in which that logic existed-- let's say in Aden in the year 1150, to a world, such as today, in the year 2023, when it structures almost all economic life on planet Earth. That is the puzzle that the book engages with. And that's what the book tries to explain.

SENTHIL NATHAN: Interesting. So 800 years ago, it started between Aden, the modern day Aden, and South Asia and Africa. What's happening in the West and the Americas?

SVEN BECKERT: Yes. So these, what I call-- I call these merchant communities that existed many hundreds of years ago, I call them islands of capital. They were usually long-distance merchants. They lived in cities. And they connected various cities with one another across often very, very large distances. These communities-- and this is well known-- existed on the European continent as well.

So I'm not arguing that capitalism emerged in the city of Aden in the year 1150, by far not. It's just one example for talking about these kinds of more merchant communities. But they existed elsewhere, as we mentioned. And they also existed on the continent of Europe. And just think of the city of Florence. You can think about the Medici. You can think about Venice, you can think about Genoa. These were other nodes of capital. These were other nodes in which long-distance merchants congregated. And they, of course, also became very consequential to the history of capitalism.

So, so in order to understand the longer history of capitalism, we have to see that, first, the logic that is capitalism, namely the productive investment of privately owned capital for the purposes of the future production of capital, that logic existed largely in the sphere of trade. And it existed in these urban places. But since the fundamental logic of capitalism is expansion and growth, these merchants, of course, tried to move that logic into other spheres of life and other kinds of economic activities.

And the world's most important economic activity until very recently was in agriculture and in the countryside. People-- 95%, 98% of the world population engaged in agriculture and lived in the countryside for much of human history. And what these merchants then try to do is they try to invest capital in agrarian production. And they do that, for example, in China with the production of tea. They do that in the Arab world with the production of flax. And they, of course, do it also in the European world. And the book describes that process.

Then, and this is-- as such, this is something that is peculiarly European. But what is eventually peculiarly European is that the Europeans discover a part of the world in which there is a grave imbalance between their power, the power of European imperial states and European entrepreneurs, and the local population. And in those parts of the world, they radically recast production in a way that is impossible for these merchant communities anywhere else in the world, including for merchant communities on the European continent itself.

And this is the moment, for example, when the massive mining emerges in the Americas. And no place is more important here than Potosi in today's Bolivia. Or then also as plantation agriculture emerges, especially the production of sugar, there is a complete recasting of economic life in some parts of the Caribbean and in some parts of South and North America. And here we see now the logic of capital on a massive scale, entering the global countryside.

SENTHIL NATHAN: So you talked about power imbalance. What do you mean by that? What power are you talking about?

SVEN BECKERT: Yes. Military power is certainly important. The problem for these capital owners, for these entrepreneurs in the first half of the second millennium, was that because their logic to economic life was so radically different from the logic of economic life that other people embraced, they encountered tremendous resistances.

So, for example, all these feudal lords in the European countryside, they were not particularly eager to share their ability to exploit the local peasants with upstart merchants who might come from the city and might want to encourage these peasants to engage in commercial production because the feudal lords lived off pressing the surplus out of these peasant communities. So they resisted the spread of urban capital.

And then there were all these subsistence farmers who were also resisting the spread of the logic of urban capital And because they encountered these tremendous resistances, it was actually very difficult to recast the economic life beyond the sphere of long-distance trade. It was very difficult because they resisted, because local communities resisted so much.

But in the Americas, as we just discussed, it was different, yes. In the Americas, partly local populations were very susceptible to the diseases that Europeans brought with them to the Americas. And many of them, huge percentages of them died. But there was also a very unbalanced military power. So in a way, Europeans could dominate these societies in ways that they couldn't even dominate their own societies. Namely, the societies in Europe itself, they certainly gained, in the 16th, 17th centuries, they gained some presence and some influence also on the continent of Africa and also on South Asia, and throughout Asia, they gained a presence.

But they really also lacked the power to really dominate local societies. They were dependent on local capital owners, on local merchants, let's say South Asian merchants or African merchants. They interacted with them. They traded with them. But they didn't dominate these societies. That came much, much later. That came only, really, in the 19th century. But in the Americas, that was different.

And now, this-- so why did Europeans do this? This is obviously a crucial question because I'm advocating-- I'm telling a very global history of capitalism. But of course, we must explain why Europe came to play this peculiar role in the history of capitalism beginning in the 16th century. And so why was that? And I think in a weird way, this was a function of the relative weakness of European merchant communities and European states, compared to their Asian counterparts.

European merchants were very eager to access the goods that came out of Asia, the world center for manufacturing. It produced the highest quality textiles. It produced porcelain. It produced all kinds of things that the Europeans really wanted to have. But the Europeans didn't produce very much that the Asians wanted to have. And so it was a position of relative weakness in which the Europeans inserted themselves into the global economy.

And they also encountered-- when they traded with South Asia, for example, their goods had to be transferred through the Muslim world, through what is now the Middle East. And there they also encountered powerful merchant communities who were not always welcoming of a European presence. At the very least, they had to share their profits with these local Arab merchants.

And so these European merchants, because they were relatively disadvantaged in their relationship to Asia, they sought a way to get more direct access to Asia, to get around these Arab merchants. And that propelled them into the Atlantic, because as you know, Europeans believed, at a certain point, if they would just travel west, they would reach India, which turned out to be not the case. But it did propel them in the Americas.

At the same time, though, European states were in a state of constant warfare. There were many states on the European continent. They fought with one another. Warfare was very expensive. It weakened those states. And those states became dependent on merchants because merchants were a source of capital that could allow them to buy the weaponry and hire the soldiers that they needed to fight one another.

So European states, for example, compared to the Chinese state, were also relatively weak. And this brought, now, states and merchants together because they needed one another. The merchants needed the state in order to project their power into the larger world. And the state needed the merchants because they needed the capital in order to fight the war.

And this is actually what brought them to the Americas, because it was-- and the best example for that is Christopher Columbus, who was himself a merchant. He came from the Italian city of Genoa. And he combined with the Spanish crown to find a passage to India by traveling West. So there you see the merging of state power and entrepreneurs in a unique way. I think this happens nowhere else in the world, this kind of merging of state power. And that propels them then by accident. This is a complete historical accident. This is a contingent development. They find the Americas. And there they find themselves now in this prominent position that we already discussed.

SENTHIL NATHAN: I quote what you wrote, "Capitalism was thus a co-production between states and capitalists." That's fascinating because, as I said, I have roots in India. And in our textbooks, we studied a lot about British colony. And we always thought it was the empire that ruled India. And trust me, before 10 years, I learned that it's not the empire, but it's a corporation. So you can imagine. What are the implications of this nexus between states and capitalists?

SVEN BECKERT: Yes. So one of the core arguments of the book is that capitalism is a heavily state-centric economic civilization. Indeed, I argue, it's the most state-centric economic civilization outside of Soviet communism. And that, of course, comes as a surprise, because often, people think of as just the opposite of the logic of state power. And people believe that the more we have the state, the less we have capitalism, and the less we have the state, the more we have capitalism.

But historically, I think this is wrong. You can see when you look at the long history of capitalism that the state is almost everywhere in that history and that capitalism is as much constructed by state power as it is constructed by the power of capital owners, by the power of entrepreneurs. Every aspect of capitalism is structured by the state.

Of course, we can think about big things, such as-- military power is obviously very important to the history of capitalism. You mentioned the East India Company, which is an organization of private merchants, true. But that institution get monopoly power granted by the Crown, and it is deeply connected to the English state. You see that when you think about in more modern times. You see that when you think about infrastructures, educational systems, even the welfare state. The state is everywhere.

But you see that also when you look at one of the most fundamental institutions of the capitalism, namely the market, the market in itself is an institution that is structured by state power. And if you think about a very simple market, like the markets that you find even today on the European continent, when local peasants sell their goods at a market around the central church in town, this seems like, on the one hand, the perfect Smithian market. There are lots of very small producers selling things. And then there are all these urban inhabitants of the city who try to purchase these things. So many sellers, many purchasers, are perfectly Smithian market.

But this market is also deeply politically structured because some authority, may it be the church in medieval times, or may it be the municipal government in more modern times, it tells you where the market is, when the market opens, what happens if you disagree on something? Who is allowed to sell there? What are they allowed to sell there? All that is heavily regulated. So even in a very primitive market, such as this, the state plays an exceedingly important role.

And I think we need to understand capitalism. And the book, I think, shows that empirically we need to think about the state as well. And we need to write a kind of political economy of capitalism. Obviously, much of economics before the 19th century did exactly that. all economists were quite aware before the 19th century that we need to look at politics, we need to look at the state, in order to understand economic life. It was really only just something that happened in the late 19th century, that somehow the state was written out of our thinking about economic life.

SENTHIL NATHAN: You talked about the countryside. I want to quote another line from your book. "Capitalism emerged in cities, but capitalism was born in the countryside." That's again, one of the wow moments when I read your book. So by countryside, I think, or I assume, it's more about commodities and as well as slavery. Let's start with commodities. Tell us a bit about commodities, like cotton, indigo, sugar, and how it transformed capitalism.

SVEN BECKERT: Yes. Just to go back to capitalists emerged in cities, and capitalism, in the countryside, we talked already about capitalists emerging in cities. We talked about all these islands of capital that we found all around the world. But then, as we also discussed, there was an effort to spread this logic of capitalism. And as most people lived in the countryside, it was spread into the countryside. And so there we see now the emergence of fully-fledged capitalist societies for the first time.

And yes, I tell that through the history of commodities, all kinds of commodities. Obviously, sugar plays a very important role in the early history of capitalism. But I also talk about tea. I talk a lot about cotton. I talk about coffee and about the production of wheat as well. And what you can see by focusing on these commodities, I think it does allow you to understand a lot about capitalism.

You see how capital gets inserted into the countryside and how agrarian production becomes more commercial, becomes more oriented towards markets, and not to serving the needs of local feudal lords or serving the needs of local subsistence communities. And you can then also sometimes see-- so, for example, in the case of cotton, you can see how this transformation of the countryside, how the commercialization of the countryside, how the production of cotton for markets in the countryside is linked then to also processes within cities.

So in the case of cotton, you see, on the one hand, you see, of course, that many merchant communities begin to specialize in the financing of the cotton crop. They begin to specialize in the trade in raw cotton. And that strengthens these urban nodes of capital, but in cotton in particular. And therefore, cotton is just so superbly important to the history of capitalism. In cotton, you see how it is linked now to a complete rethinking of manufacturing.

The cotton industry is ancient. It's probably 4,000 years old. But in the late 18th century, a couple of artisans in England developed new kinds of machinery that allowed them to produce, to spin cotton in ways that was about 100 times more productive than spinning it by hand. And this is, of course, as we know, the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

So here you see how the transformation of the countryside, how agrarian capitalism also has a real significance to and impact on what I think is capitalism's most important offspring, namely the Industrial Revolution, because this is the moment when this kind of world of ever greater productivity increases of rapid economic growth, is really born, in the late 18th century.

SENTHIL NATHAN: Tell us a bit about slavery, Sven.

SVEN BECKERT: Yes. So what we see when urban capital comes into the countryside, it, of course, needs to mobilize land. But it also needs to mobilize labor. In the Americas, there was a lot of land that European imperial powers and European merchants came to control quite rapidly.

But the land, of course, was completely worthless without finding people who would work this land. And so, this is one of the core processes of capitalism, is how to mobilize labor, how to make labor power available on markets. And in the Americas, one of the most important, significant, and consequential ways in which labor was mobilized was by enslaving Africans, transporting them to the Americas, and forcing them to work on plantations or in mines under the conditions of slavery.

As a result, this is a very profitable system. It enables, now, the Europeans to make productive these territories that they came to control in the Americas. It enables them to produce vast quantities of commodities, such as sugar, cotton, coffee, and others that become very important also to European economic development. And by 1800, more enslaved Africans had traveled across the Atlantic than white Europeans.

SENTHIL NATHAN: I want you to specifically talk about one story. You write, "Capitalism has just one history, a world history, with one of its key sparks in the forest barrens and swamps of Caribbean islands and American mainland." Why do you say that? Slavery was everywhere, particularly Africa. But it seems you're very particular about Caribbean.

SVEN BECKERT: Yes, slavery-- you're absolutely right. Slavery was not an invention of capitalism, just as much as wage labor was not an invention of capitalism. That already existed in Roman times as well. But what is different about plantation slavery in the Americas is-- for one, the form of enslavement is somewhat different in the sense that there was really no way out of slavery for the enslaved in the Americas. And that was often slightly different in Africa.

But in the Americas-- and this is the only way how I'm interested in slavery in the context of the book. In the Americas, slavery becomes crucial to the insertion of capital into the countryside. It becomes crucial to making commercially useful these vast territories in the Americas and to integrate them into a global capitalist economy. And this is not the case in Africa or-- in Asia there was slavery as well. It's not the case in those parts of the world, or at the very least, it's not the case in those parts of the world on a scale that is even remotely comparable to what is happening in the Americas.

But of course, you're absolutely right. Slavery did exist on the African continent. It existed in many different parts of Asia. So again-- I think this is actually a great way to also clarify that capitalism is a radically new form of the organization of economic life.

But it emerges from a world in which all kinds of things already existed. And of course, capitalism does connect to these existing institutions or to these existing ways, for example, of mobilizing labor. And what are the most important systems of labor under capitalism? It's wage labor, clearly. It's things like indentured servitude. It's tenant farming. And it's also slavery.

All of these ways of organizing human labor, all of these ways of mobilizing human labor, have a history that goes back much before the advent of capitalism. But the capitalist revolution kind of connects to all of these things that already pre-existed and rearranged them and recombined them. And one of the core arguments about this in the book is that it shows that capitalism is fundamentally undogmatic. It is not rooted, for example, in just one particular way of mobilizing human labor. But it can coexist perfectly well with the whole range of different ways of mobilizing human labor.

SENTHIL NATHAN: Reading the history of capitalism, it seems like there's no one moral code. It basically just evolves and adapts to the society.

SVEN BECKERT: I think this is also why capitalism, it has such enormous staying power and such an ongoing dynamic because it's undogmatic. There are always new ways of mobilizing labor, and then also it can live in a world in which there are different forms of the mobilization of labor at the same time. Just think about the cotton industry that we talked about earlier. Here we see a massive expansion of wage labor. This is what traditionally is understood to be the labor of capitalism. But at the same time, we see a massive expansion of slave labor to grow all that cotton that feeds European factories. So this is exactly what I mean with the undogmatic nature of capitalism.

SENTHIL NATHAN: Well, that is this grave history of capitalism. But one cannot deny the fact that capital and globalization brought a lot of benefits to human societies. Take my own example. My parents are smallholder farmers in a small village in Southern India. And it is the liberalization policy of Indian government in the 1990s that opened markets, capital flowed in, companies opened up, which basically transformed my life from farms to study jobs and eventually just a career pathway. I'm keen to hear your thoughts. How do you see the benefits capitalism brought to human societies?

SVEN BECKERT: What sets capitalism apart from other forms of the organization of economic life, there are many. But one of them is certainly that for the first time in human history, we see significant economic growth. There have been moments in the past where there was some economic growth. But it was very, very minor. And they were often moments of somewhat significant economic growth, followed by long periods of economic stagnation.

Under capitalism, that begins to change radically. We see that not only are there moments in which there is very significant economic growth. But economic growth becomes continuous. If you plot the economic output of people on planet Earth, you see a pretty flat line for many centuries, until about 1750. And then you see a pretty radical acceleration of economic growth. So of course, that is the precondition of everything that characterizes our modern world.

And one of the reasons of why you see that kind of economic growth is that capitalism also produces-- unlike, as far as I can tell, most other economic civilizations, it produces a constant technical change, accelerating technical change, which leads to significant increases in human productivity.

We already talked about the cotton industry, the spinning jenny and the water frame increasing productivity approximately by a factor of 100. And this is, of course, the kind of precondition for that. And I think this is not just incidental to the capitalist revolution, but this is causally related to the logic of economic life under capitalism. And that, of course, brings all kinds of things with it. It brings with it that the world is now capable of feeding a much larger human population than ever before in human history. It also brings with it that, on average, we are living much longer because we are healthier, which is also partly related to nutrition.

The kind of panoply of things that we consume has vastly increased over the past few hundred years. Of course, these are all averages, and there is still abject poverty in the world. There's still many, many people who are not really beneficiaries of that kind of productivity revolution. But on balance, the capitalist revolution has created everything about the world in which we live right now and has made the most unlikely biographies possible as well.

In feudal Europe or maybe in India in the 19th or even 20th century, you were born a peasant, and you remained a peasant. There was no great likelihood that you would leave the position of your parents behind. Of course, in capitalism, that is also not totally unknown. Many people don't leave the position they were born in behind. But there is also the possibility of the most stunning social mobility. And this is certainly related to the logic of the capitalist revolution as such.

SENTHIL NATHAN: So you acknowledge capitalism has also benefited societies. Now, looking back at your scholarship of capitalism, and if you want to reimagine the capitalism or future, looking back the learnings from history, what are one or two things you would recommend that should be changed or refined?

SVEN BECKERT: Look, let me just say that the book is not so much to drawing up a balance sheet about what good capitalism do and what bad things came out of capitalism. I don't make that a central theme of the book because I truly believe that what we need to do is we need to understand it. And the book is meant to help us understand how we got to the moment in which we find ourselves right now. And I leave it up to the reader to decide how to think about this problem. But you cannot even start thinking about this problem if you don't understand what capitalism is and how it emerged historically. And you were asking, what can we do better? Is that the question?

SENTHIL NATHAN: That's the question.

SVEN BECKERT: There are a lot of things we can do better, I think. That is-- and in a way, looking at the long history of capitalism does help you think productively about this problem as well because what you see when you look at the long history of capitalism is that capitalism changed drastically over time.

We talked a lot about slavery. And slavery was really quite crucial to global capitalism, let's say, in the year 1750. But of course, it was done away with. And this was partly because people, both in the centers of urban capital in Europe, but especially the enslaved themselves in the Americas, mobilized politically, socially, against the institution of slavery. So change in capitalism is definitely possible, even of institutions that seem, at any one given moment, to be quite crucial and quite central to global capitalism.

So if you think about patterns of social inequality in Europe or the United States, in what was called the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s, you immediately see that the patterns of inequality at this moment are very different from the patterns of inequality in Europe and especially the United States today. So you see, different kinds of inequality regimes are possible within capitalism.

If you think about the distribution of economic power throughout the world, you see that, for a long time, if the world economy had a center, it was definitely more tilted towards Asia than it was towards Europe. Then the center of the global economy for a while, for 200 years or so, moved to the continent of Europe. Now, it's probably returning to the continent of Asia. So again, there are all kinds of regional variations possible within this capitalism.

But what I think, if you ask me what I wish for-- this is kind of inconsequential. What do I wish for? It makes no great difference to the world. But what I think what we really have to focus on is how do we distribute the productivity gains within a capitalist economy? And here we see, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the country like the United States, there were very significant productivity advances, actually more so than today. And they were distributed relatively broadly in American societies.

This was the moment when the emergence of the middle class. Many industrial workers in the United States gained significant wage increases. They gained very many better benefits, better working conditions, and all of that. So that changed drastically after the 1970s, when productivity gains were increasingly captured by ever smaller groups of people.

So I think the question of social inequality and what kind of regime of social inequality do we have is certainly crucial. And I think we can do drastically better in reducing social inequality. I think also there is a tension in the capitalist civilization. Namely, as we discussed, it's enormously dynamic. And because it's so dynamic, it draws upon ever more natural resources.

But nature, of course, is not as dynamic as capitalism. Namely, there are limits to nature. And so the development of capitalism pressures increasingly against the boundaries, the natural boundaries of planet Earth, which, of course, potentially, could undermine the very conditions that make life and also economic life possible on planet Earth. So I wish we would pay much greater attention to this.

And then I think also, I would like us to think about the present in a slightly different way than we often do. Often we think about the world we live in as a world of scarcity. But we actually live in a world in which in the first time in human history, we have the capacity, and we have the technologies, and we have the productive abilities to produce enough things so that everybody on planet Earth can live a decent life, to have decent housing, access to sufficient food, to have access to decent education, to have access to decent health care. We have the technical capacity to do this. But we don't do this.

So I think this is a political question. And I think we could solve many of these problems.

And the book shows that capitalism is a human-made civilization. It's not like something that fell out of the heavens. It's not something that is driven by God issued economic laws about which we can't do anything. No, it's a human-made civilization. And we can make that economic civilization also serve the needs of everybody on planet Earth. There is no technical reason or economic reason why we wouldn't be able to do so. So the problem is mostly of a political nature.

And so in a way, I know that this is not very common at a moment such as this, but I would like the reader of the book also to come away with a sense of optimism, that we can actually make a difference in the world. And partly, we can make that difference in the world because of the enormous economic growth and the enormous productivity gains of the past couple of hundred years.

SENTHIL NATHAN: Great. You have been relentlessly writing about slavery in supply chains, regions that is not your home, that's Asia or Caribbean, South America. And I also learned that you're also the instigator behind Harvard's Legacy of Slavery Initiative.

I'm just wondering, what drives you? Why do you do these things? What are you aiming to achieve in the world?

SVEN BECKERT: I think what I'm mostly aiming to achieve is I have certain skills as a scholar. I can produce historical work. And I would like us to be able to understand better the world we live in. And capitalism is a very major fact of the world that we live in. And since I'm trained as a scholar of capitalism, I hope that my work is going to help people understand the world we live in order to make a difference in that world.

So that, I think, is what animates me the most. I also, of course, if I look at history, I see a lot of really terrible things that happened in the past. We need to confront these histories. We need to engage with these histories. And we need to understand that these histories have legacies in the present. So, for example, in the United States, there is a striking connection between contemporary patterns of inequality in the United States and the history of enslavement. So this is not just history. This is something that is also very much about our present. The history is not dead. It still lives, in some ways, within the societies that we inhabit.

And even though my work is extremely global, and I think about many places under the sun, and I believe that history cannot be understood except from a global perspective, I also think we have certain responsibilities for the places in which we find ourselves. And this is what motivated me to think about my own home institution, Harvard University, and to think about how Harvard University was connected to some of these very large processes that I describe.

And thanks to the research that my students did, we found that Harvard was in many, many different ways, connected to and implicated in the institution of slavery. And I did believe, and we did eventually do acknowledge that history in that we carry certain responsibilities because we are inheritors of this past as well.

So this doesn't make any of us responsible for that kind of history because this is obviously way before our lifetimes. But I think we do have a responsibility to acknowledge that history, to see also what kind of implications that history has for the present, and then to address that history to the best of our abilities. I think this is just a part of our responsibility of being a citizen of a particular part of the world or just the responsibility of being human.

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SENTHIL NATHAN: That was Sven Beckert, taking us on a sweeping journey through the global history of capitalism, from its early roots to the forces shaping our world today. If there is one takeaway, it's this-- capitalism is not fixed. It evolves. And understanding its past is essential to shaping more equitable and sustainable future. This is Senthil Nathan, signing off from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. If you'd like to hear more thought-provoking discussions like this one, please subscribe to the Epicenter podcast on your favorite listening platform. Thanks for joining us today.