Sven Beckert isn’t here to judge capitalism, even though he just wrote a provocative, ambitious, 1,300-page book on its history. As he writes several times in the book (which this editor has read), he ...

If the senses have a history, as Karl Marx wrote, then that history is inseparable from the development of capitalism, which has both taken advantage of the senses and influenced how sensory ...

One of the joys of Capitalism and Its Critics, John Cassidy’s unexpectedly lively romp through the two-and-a-half-century history of capitalism, is its fine sense for dramatic reversals. Nearly a ...

Historian Sven Beckert on where the capitalist system came from, what keeps it alive, and what it would take to bring it down. The past several decades have been turbulent ones for the world system: ...

On November 5, 2008—the nadir of that year’s eponymous financial crisis—Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to celebrate the opening of a new building. In a moment that made ...

“Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story,” said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. Harvard historian Sven ...

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, which is a finalist for the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School ...

Unlike the propagandists that publish most of the textbooks that we brainwash our children with in the US, reality-based historians have oft observed that the history of civilization is a history of ...

There are at least two things a historian should do in a book billed as an environmental history of capitalism: Center the environment, and demonstrate an understanding of capitalism. In his new book, ...

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue our look at Big Tech and the internet, we’re joined by author Malcolm Harris. He has ...