"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.""
"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."
Capitalism emerged through centuries of deliberate decisions, institutional invention, and organized violence, expanding from medieval trading margins to modern global dominance. The system developed unevenly across regions through political power, coercive labor regimes, legal change, and market experimentation. Capitalism's institutions—property rules, markets, credit systems, and firms—were created and reworked rather than arising naturally. Recognizing capitalism's historicity reframes common assumptions that treat it as inevitable or a state of nature. Comparative, global analysis and attention to institutional formation and coercion are essential to understanding past transformations and the possibility of future change or reinvention.
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