The endgame of capitalism, in his opinion, is a world in which “almost nothing has escaped commodification.” Here Beckert refers to commodities in the broad, colloquial sense of “products that can be bought and sold,” but for the most part he uses the word as a technical term for traded goods, such as grain or copper, that are standardized, interchangeable, and divisible into arbitrary quantities. Capitalism: A Global History is both a history of the commodity and an example of it. Its content is homogeneous, uniform and interchangeable, as if it were squeezed out page after page to satisfy the needs of buyers of any size. Beckert apparently assessed the consumer landscape—the sluggish demand for interpretations of feudalism, the frothy bubble for trends that put capitalism in its place—and bet on product-market fit. He openly presents his own enterprise as a speculative “bet,” a bet that “the history of capitalism—all of it—can be understood, if not entirely contained, between two book covers.”
If his competitors' products are defective, it is because the attempt to link capitalism to “any single-causal explanation, any fragment—an institution, a technology, a nation—explains little.” Beckert believes that capitalism cannot be reduced to a discrete entity. It has neither a fixed source nor a fixed trajectory. It is compatible with diverse forms of political and social life and is never the same from place to place and from moment to moment. It is not the work of individual actors, but the connecting link of all human actions.
One might wonder, Beckert admits, whether a concept that is subject to so much drift is worth preserving. And yet he takes the fact that the word “capitalism” exists as an indication that it must refer to anything. But how do we provide a working definition while “avoiding static, essentializing, overly abstract or presentist approaches”? His solution is to give back with one hand what he took away with the other. Capitalism does not have a transhistorical direction, but, nevertheless, it embodies a “unique logic”: “the tendency to grow, flow and penetrate into all spheres of activity was eternal and was an essential, irresistible quality of capitalism.” Capitalism has no essence, except that in fact its “essence was a worldwide expansion that produced associated diversity.” This is a manifestation of a predatory appetite. Here Beckert illustrates how “capitalism” very often functions in the academic humanities: as a way of showing that the evils of the world—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, inequality, exploitation, extraction, climate change, social media, dating apps, insomnia, a general sense of unrelenting pressure—are not only evil in themselves, but also the privileges of a uniquely evil phenomenon.
Sophisticated social media users who cavalierly blame capitalism—or, more politely, “late capitalism”—for all our problems may nonetheless be hesitant to see their experiences as part of a story that runs through Japan in the eighties, Sweden in the seventies, Detroit in the fifties, Manchester in the nineteenth century, Barbados in the eighteenth century, and Java in the seventeenth century. It's a challenge Beckert is taking on. When he speaks of the “connected diversity” of capitalism, he suggests that any apparent differences are just local manifestations of capitalist cunning.
He notes that the book's prelude to the colonial era predates the coinage of “capitalism” by several hundred years, but its history essentially begins even earlier, with the Yemeni port of Aden in the twelfth century. It was, he writes, “literally a fortified hub of capital, an island of capitalists,” where Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu merchants linked the medieval Arab world with India. Their profession was not production or cultivation, but acquisition and exchange.
Although the trade itself, Beckert admits, was ancient, it was long constrained by the norms and customs of local participants. In pre-capitalist societies, he continues, decent people were apparently content with what they sowed (he believes that “production for self-consumption was eternal”), and elites had the birthright to expropriate any surplus. These chiefs and warlords may have amassed considerable wealth, but Beckert argues that, unlike the workings of capitalism, their “shuffling of resources” was open and transparent. Even genocidal theft, in his view, was carried out in harmony with the prevailing spirit of exploitation: the nomadic conqueror Timur plundered Central Asia, but devoted his plunder to the construction of “magnificent mosques and madrassas,” which made his methods “significantly different from those of the owners of capital.” For Beckert, traders like those in Aden, who used their resources only as a means to capture further resources, were a “categorically different” breed.
