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Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism

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Edited by Devin Fergus, Louis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, and Julia Ott

Capitalism has served as an engine of growth, a source of inequality, and a catalyst for conflict in American history. While remaking our material world, capitalism’s myriad forms have altered—and been shaped by—our most fundamental experiences of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship. This series takes the full measure of the complexity and significance of capitalism, placing it squarely back at the center of the American experience. By drawing insight and inspiration from a range of disciplines and alloying novel methods of social and cultural analysis with the traditions of labor and business history, our authors take history “from the bottom up” all the way to the top.

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Devin Fergus is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies at University of Missouri. His research focuses on the historical mechanisms driving contemporary inequality. His first book, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980 (Georgia, 2009) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Fergus is finishing his second book, Land of the Fee , which examines the rise of consumer finance fees and its impact on the wealth gap in America since the 1970s. Fergus is also guest editor of “Banking without Borders: Culture and Credit in the New Financial World” for Kalfou, a journal published by Temple University Press. This special issue examines the impact four decades of financial deregulation have had on race, gender, immigration, culture, and class. He received his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University.

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A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

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Faith in Markets

Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic

Joseph P. Slaughter

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Women in the American Office, 1960–1990

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How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement

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How Labor Movements Changed New York

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The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina

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The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939

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Histories of Racial Capitalism

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Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

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How the Suburbs Were Segregated

Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960

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Threatening Property

Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods

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Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal

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Capital of Capital

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Capitalism In Global History *

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Andrew David Edwards, Peter Hill, Juan Neves-Sarriegui, Capitalism In Global History, Past & Present , Volume 249, Issue 1, November 2020, Pages e1–e32, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa044

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This virtual issue affirms the relevance of global history to the history of capitalism, and the relevance of capitalism to global history. Neither proposition is self-evident. ‘Global history’ emerged in the early 1990s, in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union and an apparently triumphant New World Order of ‘globalization’, as well as the peak of the linguistic-cultural turn across the academic humanities and social sciences. The problems and the vocabulary of ‘capitalism’, along with much else of Marxist inspiration, seemed increasingly irrelevant, as historians and others struck out to explore global interconnections and comparisons. 1 The ‘new history of capitalism’, on the other hand, came to prominence following the financial crash of 2008, as the globalized international order entered upon a series of deep crises, economic and political, which are far from over. ‘Capitalism’ was back on the agenda, but this renewed focus potentially came with a narrowing of geographical horizons, to emphasize national or regional frames. The most coherent accounts of capitalism’s history centred on developments in north-west Europe or north-east North America. 2 Meanwhile, ‘global history’ continued to extend its domain, but also entered a phase of doubt and self-questioning. Some asked whether it had not been too quick in finding connectedness or assuming comparability, projecting too unified an image of a world of enduring rifts or emerging unevenness; others, whether it could account for the presence of the local in the global. 3

The present virtual issue grows out of a sense that, in separating out their concerns, both global history and the history of capitalism had overlooked an earlier set of discussions which brought many of these concerns together. These discussions spanned roughly the 1950s to the 1980s, and brought together concerns from historical sociology, development economics and anthropology as well as history. In retrospect, they can appear dominated by idioms and problems which later came to seem unwieldy and outdated: modernization theory, structuralist Marxism, theories of dependency and world-systems. Yet these debates, conducted in a shared conceptual currency of largely Marxist derivation, crossed national as well as disciplinary borders with apparent ease. 4 Moreover, the Global South not only formed a major focus of these discussions, but also — if we think of the work of Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Ruy Mauro Marini or Hamza Alavi — the source of central theoretical contributions. 5 Neither the later ‘global history’ nor the ‘new history of capitalism’, in their most recognizable forms, showed much interest in revisiting or reviving these debates, yet they can be seen as bringing together questions which would form much of the agenda of both fields. How should we conceive of interconnection between societies? What scale — global, regional, local — is appropriate to the analysis of different phenomena? How wide a variety of economic or political forms can be fitted within a single conceptual construct, such as capitalism or another mode of production?

This perception of the neglect and the relevance of an earlier historiographical moment was the initial stimulus for the collaborative discussion project out of which this virtual issue grows. Under the title first of the ‘Modes of Production Reading Group’, and then of ‘Political Economy and Culture in Global History’, a small group of Oxford-based scholars — mainly historians, and mainly early in our academic careers — set out to rediscover and re-evaluate debates on world-systems, dependency and the ‘articulation’ of modes of production. This initiative was motivated by our dissatisfaction both with global histories which overlooked macro-scale concepts of political economy, and with histories of capitalism which neglected global interactions in favour of internal or diffusionist narratives centred on Europe or North America. Our discussions soon moved beyond a simple revisiting of the debates of the 1950s–80s to take in other strands of scholarship which addressed some of the questions those debates had posed, as well as challenging some of the terms in which they had been conducted. 6 One focus was anthropological notions of the cultural construction of knowledge and value, which cast doubt on the adequacy of a single, European-derived framework for world history — whether based on capitalism or not. Another was ecological frameworks for understanding capitalism as a system drawing ‘cheap’ resources from beyond its own limits.

This virtual issue offers a partial dividend from our discussions. Through a selection of articles from the Past and Present archive, from 1954 to 2010, we suggest a set of overlapping ways of thinking through, and questioning, assumptions that have defined the history of capitalism on one hand, and global history on the other. The articles we have selected here constitute, in large part, a time-capsule of discussions which had their heyday between the 1950s and the 1980s, and whose very eclecticism offers a range of important resources. The fact that rather few women or people of colour were then members of the Western historical profession is reflected in many of these debates’ gendered and Eurocentric assumptions about capitalism and global history. The whole area of gender difference and ‘social reproduction’ finds little place in our sampling; the same is true for theorizations of race, although the level of engagement with theory originating in the Global South is often impressive by later standards. Materials for an engagement with raced and gendered perspectives were certainly available at the time: other contemporaries were posing these questions alongside those of global political economy. 7 A still more conspicuous absence from the perspective of 2020, perhaps, is that of ecological thinking; here too, others in the 1950s–80s were pursuing an engagement with questions of capitalism and global history. 8 A full accounting of connections made and missed during that period remains to be made, but all three of these dimensions are surely relevant to any present-day effort to resituate capitalism within global history. We aim, nonetheless, to contribute to such an effort in this introduction by pointing out problems and debates shared between the history of capitalism and global history, which have been obscured by later divergences. We hope thus to contribute to the reconstruction of a history of capitalism placed within its full global setting, and of a global history which engages centrally with questions of political economy. Before offering our reading of the articles we have selected, we examine a little more closely the divergent strands of the ‘new’ history of capitalism and global history.

histories of capitalism — old and new

The ‘new’ history of capitalism, in the Euro-American context, arose out of two urges. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, historians became increasingly vocal about the significance of money and finance to any critical history of capitalism. At the same time, many younger scholars were increasingly uneasy with existing accounts of capitalism’s role in the history of slavery, concerned that histories of capitalism that ignored slavery obscured a fundamental connection between them.

As it turned out, the two critiques were linked. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, scholars in Past and Present and elsewhere drew on Marxist literature to create an account of the transition to capitalism in Europe which focused on the industrial revolution and the rise of wage labour. At the same time, in the United States, historians drew on these analyses to create fundamentally bifurcated accounts of the first few decades of US expansion across North America. 9 These contrasted a pre-capitalist South, where enslaved labourers of African descent grew cash crops for the Atlantic market, with the dynamic, capitalist, industrializing North where wage labour in cash-crop agriculture and manufacturing became dominant in the early nineteenth century. Much of this work was powerful and methodologically cohesive because it deployed an unambiguous definition of capitalism drawn from European debates that associated capitalism with wage labour. Thus, the North was clearly capitalist because of its free labour workforce, the South pre-capitalist — or even anticapitalist — in large measure because its workers were unfree. There was no doubt that the economy of enslaved labour was connected with capitalism, even necessary to its development. Nevertheless, it was distinct. The focus, for historians of both regions, was on the material organization of everyday life, history from below, and all but precluded critical investigations of links between slavery and a capitalist culture defined as both hostile and alien to it. 10

To a new generation of scholars raised on poststructuralist, postcolonial and critical theories of the 1980s and 1990s, however, the distinctions that appeared so powerful to previous generations began to break down. Scholars investigating the antebellum slave market, the rise of wage labour in the cities of the Upper South — where many wage-earning workers were enslaved — and antebellum America’s emergent financial centres, which rose to prominence on the profits of human trafficking and the market for slave-produced southern staples, all troubled the easy dichotomy between a free North and an enslaved South. Contrasts came to be overwhelmed by dense and disconcerting cultural and economic connections. 11

Those connections were often financial in nature and global in scale. Shared understandings of racial difference, money and value linked slave-camp landings along the Mississippi and cotton-clogged wharves in New Orleans and New York City with Hamburg, Manchester, Calcutta and Shanghai, leading a growing number of scholars to draw on Cedric Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism to argue that capitalism’s habits of mind applied as much to persons as to things. Everywhere, this culture was dominated by the core process of commodification: the idea that things, including human bodies, were most intelligible and manageable when reduced to their value in trade. In cotton fields commodification turned labouring people into ‘hands’. In banks and counting houses it turned enslaved bodies into bonds, mortgages and tradeable financial instruments. This was evidently capitalism, particularly in the sense that the bodies of enslaved people were literally capitalized: commodified according to type, valued and securitized as income-generating assets. But this was not the capitalism of free wage labour, or, in any obvious way, that of the transition to capitalism in the ‘core’ societies of Western Europe. It was instead, an influential group of scholars has recently argued, ‘slavery’s capitalism’. 12

But, almost of necessity, this new history of capitalism presented a definitional conundrum. In rejecting the idea of capitalism that undergirded much of the best mid-century scholarship, historians did not replace it with a new one. Instead, historians of the new capitalism agreed to live with an ambiguity about its central term. The process of discovering the history of capitalism, Harvard historians Sven Beckert and Christine Desan wrote, would be inductive rather than deductive. Scholars could agree that the United States, Germany, France and England were capitalist, even if they could not agree on what capitalism was. 13 The problem grew more difficult, however, when the same loose approach was tried elsewhere. Without an understanding of what capitalism was, it might be anything or nothing — a misnomer for what was, in fact, the necessary economic correlative for political modernity, or, as the financial historian Larry Neal suggested in his introduction to the Cambridge History of Capitalism , the latest iteration of fundamentals necessary for any lasting, prosperous human society.

The Cambridge History , though, merely restated the accepted wisdom of many globally-minded economic historians, who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were increasingly likely to see the rise of capitalism as natural and inevitable if the right conditions were in place. Over the previous forty years, their work had expanded the meaning of capitalism in an attempt, widely hailed at the time, to decentre it from Europe, and instead to see varieties of capitalism, in potentia , everywhere. But this expansion had the effect of eliminating anything distinctive about the term. For these historians, capitalism could be usefully defined as ‘a system within which markets operate effectively to create price signals that can be observed and responded to’, or as merely one set of institutions — private property rights, enforceable contracts and amenable government, along with ‘markets with responsive prices’ — for mobilizing large sums of capital. 14 This was a definition broad enough to embrace the globe and the distant past. But its universality had the effect of making capitalism all but unintelligible as a distinct system, leaving global historians of capitalism, old and new, seemingly without a subject. The result was a disconnect within the history of capitalism. Within nation states, capitalism was still seen as disruptive, distinct and contingent, while in transnational histories it was largely seen as diffuse, universal and inevitable. 15

global histories connected and compared

Meanwhile, global historians, with a few prominent exceptions, have remained indifferent to the history of capitalism. 16 This may be partly explained by the sway of cultural theory in the historical discipline since the 1980s and an increasing suspicion of ‘grand narratives’. 17 By the moment of the field’s emergence in the 1990s, for a historical profession in the midst of its cultural turn and under the apparent hegemony of neoliberalism, ‘capitalism’ was invisible. One effect of that invisibility was to untwine the strands of earlier organizing categories such as ‘mode of production’, which had (for all their faults) kept the economic, political and cultural related, within a notion of social totality. 18

As a result, global history has gone down two separate tracks: one deploying comparison as its critical lens, the other, connection. 19 Comparison has long been in the toolkit of the historian, used to study large geographical areas and imperial formations, to grasp the parallel development of societies and to systematize the identification of both similarities and differences between them. 20 Since the 1990s, globally-minded economic historians and economic sociologists have continued to expand their comparative project, culminating in a series of highly influential debates contrasting early modern China with early modern Europe and Britain, which attempted to explain and locate the ‘Great Divergence’ underlying Europe’s explosively imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century. 21 These accounts took over the categories developed in debates over the transition to capitalism and applied them comparatively, allowing a more precise understanding of the singularities of European and Asian economic trajectories. 22 Such comparative examination of supra-national entities and composite regions has done much to challenge commonly-held views and to foster fruitful dialogues between discrete historiographies. At the same time, however, their accounts tended to isolate regions such as the British Midlands, the Ganges Plain and Jiangnan at precisely the moments when, historically, they were becoming even more densely interconnected. Moreover, they failed to account for that connectedness as anything more than incidental precisely when it became consequential. Connectedness was the vector through which the competition for national productive and military capacity implied by the comparative framework became meaningful, as connection bred imitation and rivalry. 23

Connective history has become perhaps the most distinctive form of global history, challenging scholars’ comfort zones by deconstructing the institutional and societal blocs — empires, nations or economies — which were taken for granted by comparative history. 24 Inspired by postcolonial and microhistorical approaches, this approach rejected as essentialist and teleological many of the categories which the comparative historians had adopted. It dissented, particularly, from a historiographical model defined by the nation state, seeking to overcome narratives that had assumed the structures, identities and units of analysis put in place by national formations. 25 From this standpoint, the history of capitalism was twice damned: first by its association with Eurocentric accounts of its origins in the Western world, intrinsically bounded by histories of the nation; 26 and second by its deployment in comparative histories of economic development or modernization that played one nation state off another. Connective historians took aim, particularly, at Wallerstein-style world-systems theory for slotting non-European societies into pre-existing stages and positions such as core and periphery that always positioned Europe as the norm. 27 Moreover, they read global accounts of capitalism as proposing a narrow conception of economics as a prime mover. 28 Globalization, that key term of the 1990s, seemed to offer a more promising paradigm than capitalism to think about global interconnectedness and integration within. 29

Accordingly, the connective version of global history set out to explore the fine-grained connections between societies and, furthermore, the reciprocity of their connectedness, often coinciding with an emphasis on subaltern agency. 30 In doing so, it made visible important processes that took place in the interaction between societies beneath the surface of formalized practices. 31 For instance, it exposed the ways in which governance between imperial officials and their subjects was negotiated on the ground; the effects of frequently unacknowledged mutual influence and cultural tensions in colonial encounters; and the extent of the circulation of material culture and ideas. 32 Above all, the focus on transnational and trans-imperial connections helped to unravel notions of the unidirectional impact of ‘cores’ on ‘peripheries’ and challenge nation-based essentialisms. At the same time, however, such accounts tended to overlook the way that connections between societies in the long run could become unequal, leaving power and, in some measure, causality outside global interconnectedness. Overstressing connection and continuity downplayed disruption and disjointedness, and made it increasingly difficult to explain how we got from a thinly connected world to an increasingly interdependent but unequal one. 33

Historians of the global were left with two powerful, generative methodologies that seemed to be at odds with each other, and hence incomplete. Connective global history has succeeded in demonstrating that the world is not a mere juxtaposition of blocs — but in doing so, it has also blurred the importance of centres of political, economic and military power. Similarly, histories insisting on the non-European world’s material contribution to capitalism in Europe have tended to understate the degree to which non-Europeans could be seen as actors in the story of capitalism’s extension and development. Overreliance on metaphors of ‘networks’ and polycentric conceptions of power have not done justice to the social hierarchies that affect the life of ordinary people. In reality, neither the connective nor the comparative approach accounts for the development of connections that are at the same time power-relations. It becomes necessary to find ways to bridge this divide between histories of connection where power is seemingly not involved, and histories of disconnected entities vying for power.

capitalism and global history in past and present: a narrative reappraisal

Over the course of our conversations, it became clear to us that the history of capitalism’s struggle to define its subject and global history’s difficulties in coming to grips with power and causality shared common roots. They suggested three related hypotheses for further investigation. The first is that the history of capitalism will not be able to meaningfully corral its subject until it grapples with the way that capitalism itself moves beyond the bounds of the nation state, as a connective, disruptive force. Second, that the antinomy between comparative and connective global histories suggests that global history, of the modern era at least, has a capitalism-shaped hole in it. But to fill that hole, we need to develop a concept of capitalism that — unlike those found in many versions of the history of capitalism — accounts for both global interconnection and unevenness. Third, just as importantly, a useful definition of capitalism within global history (rather than as global history) will need to extend the toolkit of comparison and connection, to enable scholars to draw new contrasts between that which is capitalism and that which is not.

What needs to be explained is why and how global human society came to be organized the way it is. How did we get from a thinly connected world to an increasingly interdependent but unequal one? Why are the centres of power located where they are, why did they thrive, decline and relocate elsewhere? Why have politics and the state been transformed so much in the process? Such questions are scarcely new, as a reading of the Past and Present archive shows. The ways previous historians tried to answer them help illuminate the challenges we now face in bringing together the concerns of global history with that of the history of capitalism.

Eric Hobsbawm, in his 1954 article ‘The Crisis of the 17 th Century — II’, was able to make two major assumptions: that the development of capitalism was inevitable, and that it was both a world-historical process and one that necessarily passed through the focal point of Europe — more specifically, England, and still more specifically, Manchester. 34 These assumptions were supported by an intellectual climate dominated by stagist conceptions of historical change. Orthodox Marxism, in the era of Stalinism, presumed all societies would necessarily pass through a linear series of increasingly advanced modes of production: ancient, feudal, capitalist and then (of course) socialist. 35 Modernization theory avoided socialism, and offered a still simpler succession based on the transition from traditional to modern society. 36

It was in this context that Hobsbawm posed, in the article we include here, the question of how capitalist development inside Europe (or England) reached a stage from which it could go on to ‘revolutionize (by degrees) the rest of the world’. 37 The terms of this problem had been set to a considerable extent by the prior debate around Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946). Dobb had argued that European feudalism declined rapidly from the fourteenth century due to its own internal tensions — the struggle over rent between lords and peasants — opening the way for capitalism. The British Marxist historians Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, along with Hobsbawm, accepted this, and accordingly rejected the tentative challenge of the American Marxist Paul Sweezy, who had emphasized forces external to feudalism, and potentially to Europe: the growth of towns and long-distance trade. 38 They were left with the challenge of explaining why, if feudalism fell apart around 1500, capitalism did not take root until two centuries later. The ‘internalist’ resolution of the earlier debate, as well as their own interests, pointed towards a Europe- and England-focused answer. 39

The version of this that Hobsbawm offered in ‘Crisis of the 17 th Century — II’ was far from parochial: he brought in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman empire (in passing), and most importantly the plantation colonies of the Caribbean. But the function of all these was to provide markets for Manchester-type industrial development. This was powerfully influenced by his second major assumption: that capitalist development along these industrial lines was inevitable. 40 To explain why it failed to happen more quickly, he pointed to ‘obstacles’ posed by political and cultural as much as economic conditions. The ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ he posited as a great sweeping-away of these obstacles, with ramifications across the whole of European society.

These ramifications formed the object of the subsequent ‘general crisis debate’ conducted in the pages of Past and Present . Covering a wide range of political and cultural as well as economic areas and interpretations, this debate remained — as the title of the resulting edited collection suggests — about a Crisis in Europe . 41 A rare attempt to widen its scope was made a full twenty years after Hobsbawm had opened the debate, in the article we include here by Jonathan Israel on ‘Mexico and the “General Crisis” ’. 42 Israel placed the struggle of royal bureaucracy and creole elites in seventeenth-century Mexico over the control of Indian labour alongside the wars and revolutions then racking Europe. He argued that Mexico showed features identified by all the major interpretations of the seventeenth-century European crisis, including Hobsbawm’s (creole elites wished to eliminate obstacles to the development of capitalism). 43 Equally importantly, he did not see these parallels as the result of diffusion from a European centre, but instead of a ‘two-way process’, whereby Mexican problems exacerbated those in Spain, and hence the rest of Europe, as much as the reverse. 44

The third instalment of the ‘transition debate’ opened, again in Past and Present , with Robert Brenner’s 1976 article ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, reproduced here. 45 Brenner took aim not only at the then-orthodox model of capitalist development being driven by demographic shifts (as put forward by M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie), but more generally at models based only on ‘ “objective” economic forces’. 46 Instead, he argued forcefully for the centrality of class structure and class struggle to historical change. 47

This re-centring of political struggle led Brenner, perhaps inevitably, to a comparative mode of argument, contrasting the ‘divergent socio-economic paths’ of Eastern and Western Europe, and, within Western Europe, England and France. 48 Specific class conflicts had led to different balances of power between lords, peasants and states — and only one, in England, had resulted in capitalist development. For Hobsbawm’s telos of industrial Manchester, Brenner substituted England’s class structure of landlords, capitalist tenant farmers and wage labourers; this enabled capitalist agriculture and, later, industrialization. 49

Brenner’s ‘political Marxism’ thus acquired a simple, categorical distinction between capitalism and other modes of production — the presence of wage labour instead of ‘extra-economic’ coercion — as well as a resistance to Hobsbawm’s economistic assumption of the inevitability of capitalism. 50 But this resolution required an ‘internalism’ stricter than Hobsbawm’s or even Dobb’s, hermetically sealing off each ‘divergent path’ from the others. This strictness put ‘political Marxism’ at odds with new theories of global interconnectedness which had emerged since the 1950s. Rostowian modernization theory and stagist Marxism had been comprehensively challenged by theories of dependency, the ‘articulation’ of modes of production and world-systems. 51 This broad paradigm traced different ‘levels’ of development not to factors internal to distinct societies, but to these societies’ unequal connection, by capitalism and imperialism. 52 Brenner, writing in the wake of the crystallization of this paradigm, roundly rejected the suggestion that intensified serfdom in Eastern Europe resulted from ‘ “dependence” upon trade in primary products to the West’: ‘it would be more correct to state that dependence upon grain exports was a result of backwardness’. 53

One riposte to Brenner, argued precisely along the lines of unequal development though still within a European framework, is found in Guy Bois’ article ‘Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy’ (1978). Bois joined Brenner — as his title suggests — in attacking the ‘neo-Malthusian’ demographic model of capitalist development. Yet he also took serious issue with Brenner’s dogmatism in isolating class struggle as the single explanatory factor: instead, he insisted on the broader concept of mode of production, to be studied in a way that integrated the insights of historical demography. 54 Equally, he critiqued Brenner’s isolation of individual countries or regions, and his treatment of their ‘paths’ in terms of internal factors alone. For Bois, the problem of the transition to capitalism must be posed ‘on the scale of the European development of feudalism as a whole’, and also of ‘the inequality of development in this whole’. 55 He argued that a proper explanation of the transition problem — and of the ‘divergence’ of France and England, eastern and western Europe — required the analysis of socio-economic and political systems on a supra-national scale.

The ‘transition’ and Brenner debates, like the economic side of the ‘general crisis’ debate, had centred tightly on the origins of capitalism within Europe. The next five articles in our selection cover a much wider range of geographical areas, time periods and themes, and are in dialogue with a similarly broad variety of work, in social sciences, economics and anthropology as well as history. They reveal the implications of different ways of thinking of capitalism for how we think about a range of non-capitalist societies, from the Roman and Aztec empires to Melanesia, as well as what our understandings of those societies might imply for our definitions of capitalism. They also suggest how accounts of the complexities of contact and connection between capitalist and non-capitalist societies and logics relate to the problematic of ‘transition’.

Frank Perlin, in ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’ (1983), offered a proposal for a comparative study of the development of capitalism which exceeded that of Bois in scale and scope. It responded to the vogue, then at its height, for discussion of early modern ‘protoindustrialization’: the growth in rural, export-oriented handicrafts which historians such as Hans Medick offered as a stage in the transition from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism. 56 Perlin welcomed the debate around these proposals, but saw them as isolating ‘the family production unit’ of proto-industry from its wider context of commercial networks, and then slotting it into ‘an arbitrary evolutionist schema’. 57 This combination of isolation and evolutionism, in Perlin’s view, mirrored both the ‘substantivist’ anthropology of Marshall Sahlins, which emphasized the distinctive economic rationalities of ‘simple’ societies, and the tendency of historians to see South Asia and other ‘third world’ regions as static and ‘traditional’ before the transformative arrival of colonial powers. 58

As an alternative, Perlin set out to show, in a remarkably detailed reconstruction, the close ties that linked South Asia with Europe and a wider world — East and West Africa, Central Asia, the Persian Gulf — before European colonialism. 59 This connected South Asia, Perlin argued, showed the same dynamic characteristics — thriving manufacturing industries, complex and extensive systems of trade and finance — as those generally taken, in the Europe of the same period, to prefigure capitalism. He thus rejected Immanuel Wallerstein’s thesis that capitalism originated uniquely in Europe, in favour of the parallel emergence of local proto-capitalisms ‘within a common international theatre of societal and commercial changes’. 60 It was only subsequently that European imperial hegemony unpicked these connections, leading to deindustrialization and the mirage of a ‘traditional’ non-European world. 61 Anticipating later views of a connected early modern world of industrious revolutions, Perlin offered a compelling challenge to the Eurocentric assumptions of the ‘transition to capitalism’ debate. The price he paid lay in stretching the notion of capitalism to an extent that calls its usefulness into question. 62 Capitalism’s distinctiveness risks dissolving into narratives of commerce as an omnipresent driver of history, or of increasing technological or productive dynamism — both notions which would go on to be influential. From the 1990s, historians of the California School, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Roy Bin Wong, strove to prove empirically that much of Eurasia was on a par in terms of wealth, productive capacity and technological capability until the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 63

A different way into the question of defining capitalism is suggested by attempts to characterize non-capitalist economic systems. For Chris Wickham, this is most convincingly done by the concept of ‘mode of production’. In his 1984 article ‘The Other Transition’, Wickham set out to reaffirm the value of this central Marxist concept for historians, casting the classic problem of the ‘fall of Rome’ in terms of a transition from the domination of one mode to that of another. Wickham recognized that many attempts at defining modes of production could look like mere ‘butterfly-collecting’, as the anthropologist Edmund Leach called it: an exercise in fitting societies into pre-existing, static taxonomies. But as Wickham saw it, getting these definitions right was of crucial importance to historians: modes of production offered a key to causal relationships and thus a way of explaining not just how but why major historical transformations took place. 64 Such an exercise, though, had to confront complexities such as the coexistence of more than one mode of production within a single ‘social formation’. 65 In the Roman empire, as Wickham saw it, the feudal mode of production, based on rent-extraction by local lords, certainly existed; but the society as a whole was dominated by the ancient mode of production, based on the taxation of the city-centred Roman state. The ‘fall of Rome’ was not, Wickham concluded in ‘The Other Transition’, the appearance of a new mode, but a shift from the domination of the ancient mode to that of the feudal, by way of the disintegration of the Roman state and its tax system. 66 The specificity of this change in western Europe was illuminated by its non-occurrence in the eastern Roman empire: ‘the change was not inevitable, for it did not happen in the east’. 67

A closer engagement with Eurasian comparisons, as well as a reconsideration of Europe, would later lead Wickham to revise his conclusions. In Framing the Middle Ages , he accepted John Haldon’s argument that rent-based and tax-based systems were both variants of a single, broader mode (which he calls ‘feudal’ and Haldon ‘tributary’), since both were based on the coercive extraction of surplus from peasant producers. 68 He also now saw the collapse of the Roman empire as giving way to a more complex situation, in which a ‘peasant mode of production’, which left peasants relatively free from lords’ coercion, contended with local rent-based feudal modes. 69 In a forthcoming Past and Present article, Wickham defines the economic logic of this feudal mode of production, with direct consequences for the ‘transition debate’. He draws on the same substantivist tradition in anthropology which had attracted Perlin’s ire to argue that feudalism’s economic logic radically differed from that of capitalism, based as it was on the coercive extraction of peasants’ surplus production by lords or states. Widespread commercialization and ‘protoindustrialization’ across medieval and early modern Eurasia remained subject to this logic, which explains why it did not — except in the unusual case of north-west Europe — result in capitalism. An internalist account of feudalism, in this way, complements the internalist account of capitalism offered by ‘political Marxism’: the two modes are separated by a sharp, qualitative distinction. 70

Such categorizations could be difficult to maintain, though, for historians trying to explain capitalism’s extension into, and domination of, other kinds of society. Robert Patch, in ‘Imperial Politics and Local Economy in Colonial Central America, 1670–1770’ (1994), addressed, like Wickham, the juncture between the state and the production of material life. In the colonial order which emerged from the seventeenth-century struggles that Israel had described in his 1974 article, the ‘servants of the state’ — Spanish colonial officials — ‘served as essential intermediaries between European capital and American peasants and landowners’. 71 Not market forces alone, but the repartimiento system of coercive indebtedness integrated Indian peasant communities into the world economy, enabling the extraction of surplus and capital accumulation by the Spanish. 72 This system was tolerated by the Spanish Crown, despite its official illegality, not only because it provided cheap administration but also because it operated as ‘a commercial system integrating the provinces of the kingdom of Guatemala’. 73 It ‘worked so well because it took advantage of an already existing sexual division of labour’ in Indian communities, and ‘already existing structures of production’. 74 It also relied upon, and tied together, the varied ecologies of Central America. 75 Political structures were used for personal gain, while the commercial opportunities they offered depended on pre-existing Indian societies, their social and productive organization, and the natural resources of the land. Indian forms of production and communal life were often preserved, rather than destroyed, by their incorporation into ‘the Europe-dominated world economy’. 76 Already from the seventeenth century, Patch suggested, capitalism was a system on a world scale, integrating market exchanges with state-licensed coercion, and incorporating a variety of distinctive local labour regimes. This was precisely the conundrum that had sparked ideas of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ in the first place. It was clear that Latin American societies were linked in to centres of capital accumulation, but equally clear that they were not undergoing a ‘transition’ — even by way of ‘proto-industry’ — to the industrial or wage-labour-based capitalism found in Europe.

In his account of indentured labourers on Australian sugar plantations, ‘Truck and Gifts: Melanesian Immigrants and the Trade Box System in Colonial Queensland’ (1983), Adrian Graves confronted a similar problem. In answering it, he moved closer than Patch to anthropological accounts of substantially different economies. What appears most interesting about capitalism, in his account, is the intercourse between it and a quite distinct value-system, and the ways each stretched to accommodate the other. As his title indicates, Graves focused on ‘truck’, a system of payment in goods or, later, credit to be spent in plantation or urban stores. Melanesian sugar cane workers would collect truck goods in specific boxes to take home at the end of their contract period. In particular, they valued tools and weaponry that they could either use or exchange profitably at home. 77 For Queensland employers and storekeepers, truck offered an opportunity to further enrich themselves at the expense of Melanesian labourers: as monopoly suppliers they could place what value they wished on the goods involved. 78 But for the employees the system also had advantages. They received goods that were extremely valuable in their home communities and circulated readily within an existing Melanesian system of gift exchange. A well-filled truck box could bring a young man the opportunity to acquire bridewealth and marry, or to ‘pay off debts to patrons and to establish clientage relationships’, and so advance himself in his clan’s hierarchy. 79

What then is capitalism in Graves’ account? On the one hand he reproduced a familiar view of a European, quasi-universal system that ‘co-opted mechanisms in the pre-capitalist economy to its service’, much as Patch’s world-economy had ‘integrated’ Mesoamerican production and society. 80 On the other, though, capitalism appeared as a system by which the contract workers’ system of valuation — rooted in the military, productive or cultural valuation of their home villages — was translated into and made commensurable with an alternative, self-consciously western system of commodity production for a presumably global market: less a mode of production than a mode of co-optation. In Graves’ account, moreover, the introduction of reforms which were intended to ensure that workers received their wages in money — in order to prevent their being cheated — in fact introduced new forms of exploitation. Melanesian workers were forced to navigate a foreign system of value on their own, or with the help of labour ‘agents’ who did the work of translation for them — for a price. 81

Other historians, meanwhile, were drawing on other anthropological resources to intervene against the idea that capitalism was either universal or inevitable. Inga Clendinnen’s 1985 article, ‘The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’, adapted Clifford Geertz’s effort to interpret the radically different sets of meanings encoded in distinct cultures, to offer a densely textured account of the Aztec empire at the height of its power. Through her account, Clendinnen repeatedly pushed back against the notion that the symbolic and material elements of Aztec culture can meaningfully be reduced to economic or social categories drawn from European experience. 82 Rather, she argued that Indigenous cultures must be understood in terms of their own concepts of value, time, life, cost and benefit. The Aztec warriors’ ‘long[ing] for the flowery death by the obsidian knife’ was underpinned by a system of signification equating maize and human flesh, water and blood, which pervaded Aztec culture. 83 This symbolism, tied directly to the cycle of floating cultivation that had allowed early settlers to build a powerful empire in what had been a marginal region on the borders of Lake Texcoco, was at the centre of an alternative system of valuation, and ‘cost’, that, for its practitioners, needed no translation. 84 It comprised its own social science. Through her rich account, Clendinnen subtly suggested that the translation work performed by materially-minded scholars is imprisoned within the categories of capitalist culture. While substantivist-inspired historians and anthropologists had argued only that other societies (medieval European, Polynesian) were governed by economic logics radically different from that of capitalism, Clendinnen hinted that categories such as ‘economics’, ‘politics’ or ‘production’ are thoroughly inadequate to describe them. 85

With Maxine Berg’s 2004 article ‘In Pursuit of Luxury’, we both rejoin the central themes of the ‘transition debate’ and confront the question of how non-Europeans’ alternative systems of value may have affected the development of European capitalism itself. By the time Berg was writing, the history of capitalism in Europe had taken several distinct turns. A series of historians investigating what had been seen as capitalism’s central transformative moment — the industrial revolution — had contested the notion that it could be extended much further back than the last few decades of the eighteenth century. That, in turn, challenged the historiography established by the transition debates, which had located the decisive transformations within Europe at least a century earlier, in the seventeenth century (or, for Brenner, in the agricultural transformations of the fifteenth). This led to a search for an alternative account for what, precisely, was transformational about Europe’s economic development in the early modern period. Two possible answers arrived at almost the same moment. One was the ‘industrious revolution’, a successor to the notion of protoindustrialization — the idea that what changed in northern European hubs such as the Netherlands and Great Britain, in particular, was increased worker productivity rather than new mechanical means of production. The reason for the timing of the industrious revolution, a group of emerging scholars argued, was a concurrent ‘consumer revolution’ — the increasing and widespread growth in consumption of what had previously been luxury goods, especially previous exotics like tea and sugar. 86

It was at this point that the problem of European specificity was thrown into sharp relief by ‘California School’ historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Roy Bin Wong, who argued that western Europe and China had broadly similar levels of economic development until the nineteenth century, which saw a ‘Great Divergence’ of their (separate) trajectories. Maxine Berg brought this question together with the commercial-industrious revolution argument to contend that Asian luxury goods, and the effort required to ‘commodify’ or mass-market and then to imitate them, significantly reshaped European capitalism. Berg thus made an important intervention in the history of capitalism generally. For Hobsbawm and Brenner, capitalism was something developed in Europe and then unleashed on the rest of the world. Other regions, particularly the colonial slave economies of the Americas and the Caribbean, contributed to that development, but they did not fundamentally reshape it. Asian luxury goods, on the other hand, did, Berg argued. 87 This conclusion may suggest further possibilities for accounts of capitalism as something developed in relation with and arising out of Europe’s engagement with the world, where Europe is, perhaps, acted upon as much as acting. Such an approach had been foreshadowed by Marshall Sahlins in a 1989 essay, ‘Cosmologies of Capitalism’, an ethnohistorical critique of world-systems theory arguing that local categories play a crucial role in shaping global and social relations. 88

But if capitalism arose, as Berg suggested, in dialectical relationships with non-capitalistic, non-European actors such as those described by Graves and Patch, this still leaves the problem of how to account for the inequality of those relationships, especially as they hardened globally over the course of Europe’s imperial nineteenth and twentieth centuries. William Sewell’s analysis of the rise of luxury consumption in pre-Revolutionary France offers one possible line for further development. 89 In his 2010 article, ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Sewell was concerned with the way that labour and consumer desire are both ‘subsumed’ under capital: harnessed for the production of profit or surplus value. Sewell’s article was a self-conscious rejoinder to Berg: he went out of his way to re-centre capitalist dynamics within Europe itself. 90 He was also explicitly concerned, like ‘political Marxism’, with the distinctive nature of capitalism, rejecting accounts of it in the quantitative terms of ‘sustained economic growth’. 91 At the same time, his insights could be applied far more broadly, to the extension of capitalism beyond Europe. He emphasized ‘the sheer diversity and flexibility of forms of production and distribution that developed’ in eighteenth-century France and its colonies, encompassing everything from ‘large manufactories’ and ‘putting-out networks’ to slave plantations, fashionable new shops to street hawkers. The later, industrial capitalist system was based, Sewell conceded, on what Marx termed ‘real’ subsumption, in which labour is directly subordinated to capital via the wage. But this was preceded, he suggested, by an earlier phase dominated by what Marx called ‘formal’ subsumption: pre-existing labour processes were not transformed into wage labour, but harnessed to capital’s needs via ‘mercantile’ methods. 92 This distinction may suggest a way of reconciling a picture of the full variety of societies and production regimes which participated in the history of capitalism with an emphasis on the qualitative difference between capitalism and other social logics.

Sewell’s ‘subsumption of desire’ invites us to think, too, about the harnessing of pre-existing modes of valuing and consuming to capitalist ends. 93 To put Graves’s account into Sewell’s terms, the move from ‘truck’ to money wages was a shift from ‘formal’ towards ‘real’ subsumption of labour. But ‘truck’ and its circulation could also be seen as involving the subsumption of Melanesian desires and gift-exchange networks under sugar-producing capitalism. Capitalism’s extension and intensification, then, might be conceived of in terms of these two processes: the ‘formal’ harnessing of diverse alternative ways of both producing and valuing, and the shift to intensified ‘real’ subsumption chronicled by the transition debates.

capitalism in global history

The newest iteration of the global history of capitalism has returned to the question that drove Hobsbawm and Brenner’s theoretical excursions. Yet some of the conclusions that recent historians have drawn about the nature and development of (especially North American) capitalism fall into similar conceptual traps. Capitalism became about wage labour, they argue, but only after passing through a stage where it was, essentially, about slavery. But that reconfiguration, however promising and generative in some senses, fails to account for the observation that capitalistic productive complexes often combined the two and still do. The need, we suggest, is for a history of capitalism that is less about places, connected or compared, and more about the system of connection itself. Examining this critically, in a way that grounds capitalism in history and contingency, would, in part, require a re-engagement with what might be termed ‘edge concepts’ of Marxian theory, such as primitive accumulation and subsumption, which indicate where capitalism rubs up against, responds to and contrasts with other systems. 94 More especially, though, it would require a more substantive re-engagement with the history of relations between capitalist and non-capitalist societies, geographically and synchronically. It would then need to trace how that system of connection, contrast, contradiction and co-optation, and the inequality it structured, changed over time, both altering class and productive relations in specific places, and establishing and transforming the relationships between those places.

Recent criticisms of global history have voiced concerns about the field’s difficulties in making use of theoretical frameworks and in articulating the relevance of the local to global processes. 95 In the face of these challenges, debates within the history of capitalism present an opportunity to re-examine the ways in which global history tackles core questions of scale, circulation and exchange. Concepts drawn from both political economy and anthropology potentially offer historians of the global powerful explanatory tools capable of detecting the nuances of power while maintaining the decentralization of historical narratives. Such an approach might enable analysis of the practices that mediate interactions both within and between societies, revealing the structures that make them mutually interdependent. But capitalism also represents a historical problem for global historians in its own right, because it can only be fully understood as a border-crossing phenomenon. The difficulties of defining capitalism stem, at least in part, from the fact that it is not discrete and self-contained. At any identifiable moment in time, the logics of capitalism connect social entities on regional, national and international scales, and depend in turn on these same, connected, societies — even if these societies are themselves dominated by contrasting logics. Capitalism has been unique in the extent to which it has integrated far-flung societies, becoming the dominant form of organizing the economy and social relations in the contemporary world. The process leading to that outcome was not preordained: it was the result of complex non-linearities, qualitative differences and changing combinations. Precisely because the success of capitalism as a global system was not inevitable, it needs to be explained, and from a perspective that looks to processes, exchanges and agents which cross frontiers: something global historians are uniquely equipped to deliver.

The selection from the Past and Present archive we present in this virtual issue offers a window — necessarily a partial one — into how historians have previously attempted to work through concerns now associated with global history, and ones associated with the history of capitalism, within the same intellectual space. We hope, in this way, to contribute to a convergence between the history of capitalism and global history — a convergence towards which, we would suggest, much recent work is now moving. Contributions from historical sociology, commodity and labour histories, and histories of globalization have all recently posed the problems of interconnection and unevenness, and of power and causation, which animated earlier debates on ‘transition’ and ‘modes of production’. 96 If the answers suggested by participants in those debates sometimes now seem narrow or schematic, the questions they posed have hardly gone away.

We would like to thank Joanna Innes, Chihab El Khachab and Simon Schaffer for their comments on drafts of this introduction, and the members of the Political Economy and Culture reading group and the Global History of Capitalism Project at Oxford generally for the debates which generated it.

As evidenced by Patrick O’Brien’s manifesto for the new Journal of Global History , structured around the contrast between closed ‘mercantilist’ models of history (including Marxism) and open, globally ‘free-trading’ ones: Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal of Global History , i, no. 1 (2006).

Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective (London, 2011); Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (eds.), Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2012); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York, 2015); Sven Beckert and Christine Desan (eds.), American Capitalism: New Histories (New York, 2018); Jeffrey Sklansky, ‘The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism’, Modern Intellectual History , ix, no. 1 (2012); Kenneth Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism’, American Historical Review , cxxi, no. 1 (2016); Seth Rockman, ‘What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?’,  Journal of the Early Republic , xxxiv, no. 3 (2014). For the European transition debate, much of which took place in the pages of Past and Present , see below.

See Richard Drayton and David Motadel, with responses by David Bell and Jeremy Adelman, ‘Discussion: The Futures of Global History’, Journal of Global History , xiii, no. 1 (2018); Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), ch. 10, ‘Global History for Whom? The Politics of Global History’; Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (London, 2018), editors’ intro.; John-Paul Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian’, in John-Paul Ghobrial (ed.), Global History and Microhistory (Past and Present Supplement no. 19, Oxford, 2019).

See also the reflections of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life , new edn (Princeton and Oxford, 2011), xxiv.

For example, Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (Hassocks, 1976); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, 1972); Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialéctica de la dependencia (Mexico City, 1973); Hamza Alavi, Capitalism and Colonial Production (London, 1982). For overviews of parts of the debate, see Aidan Foster-Carter, ‘The Modes of Production Controversy’, New Left Review , cvii (1978); Ian Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment (Basingstoke and London, 1979); Eric R. Wolf, ‘Bibliographic Notes’, in Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, 1982); Cristóbal Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (London, 1989).

For more information on our group, see the website: < https://politicaleconomyculture.wordpress.com/ >.

See, for example, Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London, 1986); Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, 1983).

One strand of this was the anthropological engagement between ‘cultural ecology’ and Marxism: see Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Richmond, Calif., 1979); Maurice Godelier, ‘Ecosystems and Social Systems’ and ‘Territory and Property’, in The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy and Society (London, 1986); Eric R. Wolf, Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (Berkeley, 2001), 4–7, 55–60. A convergent strand is found in Raymond Williams’s ecological work: see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973); Raymond Williams, ‘Socialism and Ecology’, New Socialist , 9 Dec. 2018 [first published 1982], available at < https://newsocialist.org.uk/socialism-and-ecology/ >.

Canonical contributions to the American ‘transition’ debate include: Christopher Clark, ‘Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860’, Journal of Social History , xiii, no. 2 (1979); James A. Henretta, ‘Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America’, William and Mary Quarterly , xxxv, no. 1 (1978); Michael Merrill, ‘Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States’, Radical History Review , xiii (1977); Winifred B. Rothenberg, ‘The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855’, Journal of Economic History , xli, no. 2 (1981); Joyce Appleby, ‘Commercial Farming and the “Agrarian Myth” in the Early Republic’, Journal of American History , lxviii, no. 4 (1982); Michael Merrill, ‘Putting Capitalism in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature’, William and Mary Quarterly , lii, no. 2 (1995); Gordon S. Wood, ‘The Enemy Is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic , xvi, no. 2 (1996).

For example, Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and The Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984); Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1994).

Stephanie Smallwood, ‘Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic , xxiv, no. 2 (2004); Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2010); Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoise, 1850–1896 (Cambridge, 2003); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).

Robinson, Black Marxism , 39; Bonnie Martin, ‘Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property’, Journal of Southern History , lxxvi, no. 4 (2010); Stephen Mihm, ‘Follow the Money: The Return of Finance in the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic , xxxvi, no. 4 (2016); Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War’, American Historical Review , cix, no. 5 (2004); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (eds.), Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 2016).

Joyce Appleby, ‘The Cultural Roots of Capitalism’, Historically Speaking , xii, no. 5 (2011); Beckert and Desan (eds.), American Capitalism .

Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson, (eds.) The Cambridge History of Capitalism , 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2014), i, 1–6.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), 4. For a good critical overview of the modern ‘definition’ problem see Gareth Austin, ‘The Return of Capitalism as a Concept’, in Jürgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Historical Concept (Oxford, 2016). For a prominent example of global economic history eschewing ‘capitalism’ and substituting ‘property rights’, see Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation’, American Economic Review , xci, no. 5 (2001). For a recent effort to move beyond the ‘shoots of capitalism’ view of global economic history, see Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Economic History (London, 2010).

Exceptions include: Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Oakland, Calif., 2014); Andreas Eckert, ‘Capitalism and Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Kocka and van der Linden (eds.), Capitalism .

Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991); Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London, 1998).

This may be why landmark historical accounts of capitalism with a global view have been largely overlooked, although they represent early instances of global history before the current field began to emerge. For instance, Wolf, Europe and the People without History ; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15 th –18 th Century , 3 vols. (New York, 1981–4).

Maxine Berg (ed.), Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2013), 6–11; James Belich et al. (eds.), The Prospect of Global History (Oxford, 2016), 10–21.

For older instances, see Marc Bloch, ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, Revue de synthèse historique , xlvi (1928); William H. Sewell Jr, ‘Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History’, History and Theory , vi, no. 2 (1967). More recently, J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 (London, 2008); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830 , 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2010–12).

On global economic history see Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke, ‘The Economist and Global History’, in Belich et al. (eds.), Prospect of Global History .

Pomeranz, Great Divergence ; Prasannan Parthasarathi,  Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850  (New York, 2011). 

Jeremy Adelman, ‘Mimesis and Rivalry: European Empires and Global Regimes’, Journal of Global History , x, no. 1 (2015). Parthasarathi is a partial exception, explaining the divergence between England and South Asia as partly arising from competitive dynamics connecting the two. Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich , esp. 13.

The locus classicus is Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies , xxxi, no. 3 (1997). Subrahmanyam developed this approach further in Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (New Delhi, 2005). Connected history has also been closely related to ‘entangled history’: Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory , xlv, no. 1 (2006); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (ed.), Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830 (Philadelphia, 2018).

For recent appraisals of global history see Beckert and Sachsenmaier (eds.), Global History, Globally ; Matthias Middell (ed.), The Practice of Global History: European Perspectives (London, 2019).

See O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’.

A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002). This was despite the anti-stagist orientation of world-systems theory and its connections with Global South-derived dependency theories, noted above.

John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review , new series, vi, no. 1 (1953); D. C. M. Platt, ‘Economic Factors in British Policy during the “New Imperialism” ’, Past and Present , no. 39 (Apr. 1968). The most recent contribution is the debate around ‘gentlemanly capitalism’: P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London, 2016 [1993]); Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London, 1999); Shigeru Akita (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism, Imperialism and Global History (Basingstoke, 2002).

Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2014), 44–77.

See, for instance, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic , rev. edn (London, 2002); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); Nancy E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham, NC, 2015).

Global historians have been skilful at identifying transnational subjects such as the histories of slavery, migration and commodities: Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, 2012); Wang Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migrations (Boulder, Col., 1997); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014). Sidney W. Mintz’s pioneering Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985) remains a model for global commodity history.

Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds.), The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London, 2016).

For critiques along these lines, and a response, see Jeremy Adelman, ‘What is Global History Now?’, Aeon , 2 Mar. 2017, available at < https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment >; David A. Bell, ‘This Is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network’, The New Republic , 26 Oct. 2013, available at < https://newrepublic.com/article/114709/world-connecting-reviewed-historians-overuse-network-metaphor >; Drayton and Motadel, ‘Discussion: The Futures of Global History’.

E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Crisis of the 17 th Century — II’, Past and Present , no. 6 (Nov. 1954), 45 (Manchester).

‘All peoples travel what is basically the same path […] The development of society proceeds through the consecutive replacement, according to definite laws, of one socio-economic formation by another’. Otto Wille Kuusinen, Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (London, 1961), 153, cited in Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Marx on Pre-Capitalist Formations’, in How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (London, 2011), 435, n. 65. This essay formed Hobsbawm’s introduction to the first English translation of Marx’s Grundrisse in 1964, a decade after ‘Crisis of the 17 th Century — II’: in it he distanced himself (and Marx) from Kuusinen’s simplistic stagism. One aspect of this distancing was a renewal of attention to Marx’s ‘Asiatic mode of production’, which failed to fit the straightforward succession of stages: see Wolf, Europe and the People without History , 402–3.

The classic statement would be W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1960).

Hobsbawm, ‘Crisis of the 17 th Century — II’, 54. This global process of revolutionizing would of course form the subject of Hobsbawm’s major trilogy on the long nineteenth century: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (London, 1962); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London, 1975); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London, 1987).

This ‘transition debate’ took place in Science and Society in 1950–3 and was later published in Rodney Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976). Sweezy was drawing on older non-Marxist historiography (Henri Pirenne), which made him easier to dismiss: see Hilton’s ‘Comment’, ibid .

Hilton would give an account of the crisis of feudalism resulting from lord–peasant conflict in Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1977). Hill would address the English Revolution of the 1640s from a great variety of angles over his career; Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revoluti o n (London, 1967), argued in Hobsbawmian fashion that England, unlike other European countries, resolved the seventeenth-century crisis in a way that permitted capitalist development.

He conceded, revealingly, that ‘Had the English Revolution failed, […] it is entirely possible that economic development might have been long retarded’ — but never suggested it could have been stopped : Hobsbawm, ‘Crisis of the 17 th Century — II’, 46.

Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660: Essays from Past and Present (London, 1969).

J. I. Israel, ‘Mexico and the “General Crisis” of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present , no. 63 (May 1974).

Ibid ., 49, 51, 55–6.

Ibid ., 35. Israel’s notion of crisis as the result of imperial competition straddling the Atlantic and perhaps other continents foreshadowed later accounts of the ‘age of revolutions’ of c .1750–1850. For later, demographic and ecological, explanations of a seventeenth-century crisis now taken to be global in scope, see Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 1991); Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013).

Robert Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, Past and Present , no. 70 (Feb. 1976).

Ibid ., 30. See Rodney Hilton, ‘Introduction’, in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).

This gave rise both to the ‘Brenner debate’ with a number of European historians and to an influential school of ‘political Marxism’. See Aston and Philpin (eds.), Brenner Debate ; and resources at < https://politicalmarxism.wordpress.com/ >. The debate between demographic explanations, now reinforced by ecological ones, has continued and widened in scope: see, for instance, Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London, 2016).

Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, 56 (‘paths’); 39–40, 46–47, 53.

Ibid ., 63, describing the outcome as ‘England’s uniquely successful overall economic development’.

Ibid ., 35, 44; see also Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Contradiction: Only in Capitalism?’, Socialist Register , xxxviii (2009), 285–6; Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review , civ (1977), 48, 66; Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader , ed. Larry Patriquin (Leiden and Boston, 2012), 39–41.

See Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment .

Key landmarks in the run-up to Brenner’s 1976 article had been: Andre Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment (Boston, 1966); Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York, 1969); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina: ensayo de interpretación sociológica (Mexico City, 1970), and the English language edition Dependency and Development in Latin America , trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley, 1979); Pierre-Philippe Rey, Les alliances de classes (Paris, 1973); Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York, 1974); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974).

Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, 60. He would critique the paradigm more comprehensively in ‘Origins of Capitalist Development’.

Guy Bois, ‘Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy’, Past and Present , no. 79 (May 1978), 62–3, 68–9.

Ibid ., 66.

For an overview, see Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Protoindustrialization’, in Steven Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics , 2nd edn (London, 2008).

Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past and Present , no. 98 (Feb. 1983), 34–8 (quotations at 37, 38).

Ibid ., 38, 42, 30–2. For a concise account of the debate between ‘substantivist’ and ‘formalist’ positions, see Chris Hann and Keith Hart, Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 4, ‘The Golden Age of Economic Anthropology’.

‘Well before the colonial conquests of the early nineteenth century, Indian history, company history and the history of a growing international commerce have become inextricably entangled, even fused’. Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, 88.

Ibid ., 90, 33.

Ibid ., 90, 79.

Thus he concluded his essay by demanding ‘an open frontier of relevance’ in the search for new capitalisms: ibid ., 95. But a completely open frontier presumably risks engulfing the whole world.

For instance, R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, 1997); Pomeranz, Great Divergence . For rejoinders from two very different perspectives, see: Patrick O’Brien, ‘Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence’, Reviews in History (review no. 1008, 2010), available at < https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1008 >; Rebecca E. Karl, The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Durham, NC, 2017). See also contributions to the conference ‘Convergence/Divergence: New Approaches to the Global History of Capitalism’, Brasenose College, Oxford, 28–29 September 2019, available as podcasts at < https://globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk/event/conference-convergencedivergence-new-approaches-global-history-capitalism >. More recently, Jairus Banaji has put forward a provocative account of global economic history from the twelfth to the late nineteenth century as dominated by ‘commercial capitalism’: Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Chicago, 2020).

Chris Wickham, ‘The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism’, Past and Present , no. 103 (May 1984), 3–4. He rebuked some Marxists, too, such as Perry Anderson, for failing to recognise this and getting sidetracked into ‘superstructural’ issues.

Wickham, ‘Other Transition’, 7–8. He drew here on work inspired by Louis Althusser: Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , trans. Timothy O’Hagan (London, 1974).

Wickham, ‘Other Transition’, 6–7, 9, 22–3.

Ibid ., 24.

See John Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London and New York, 1993); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), 60.

Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages , 535–547.

Chris Wickham, ‘How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies’, forthcoming in Past and Present , no. 251 (May 2021).

Robert W. Patch, ‘Imperial Politics and Local Economy in Colonial Central America, 1670–1770’, Past and Present , no. 143 (May 1994), 80.

Ibid ., 94–6, 104.

Ibid ., 101–2.

Ibid ., 104–5.

Ibid ., 93–5.

Ibid ., 105–6.

Adrian Graves, ‘Truck and Gifts: Melanesian Immigrants and the Trade Box System in Colonial Queensland’, Past and Present , no. 101 (Nov. 1983), 92–6.

Ibid ., 118–9.

Ibid ., 97–9, 102–6.

Ibid ., 123.

Ibid ., 110–18.

Inga Clendinnen, ‘The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’, Past and Present , no. 107 (May 1985), 52, 55, 62, 65, 89. For a contemporary analysis and critique of the Geertzian approach, see Giovanni Levi, ‘I pericoli del Geertzismo’, Quaderni Storici , xx, no. 58 (1) (1985).

Clendinnen, ‘Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’, 88, 79.

Ibid ., 76–8, 45, 89.

See also Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1991), 5, 84–9, 96–7, 109–17, 241, 343; and her account of the Maya: Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 , 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003), 146–9, 152–3. She suggested, though, that some political or economic categories may have greater transcultural validity than others: Aztecs , 116–7; Ambivalent Conquests , 143–4, 150 (‘double legitimacy’ of lordship); ‘Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’, 48 (‘vertical integration’). And, like other interpreters of radical cultural difference, she relied in fact on another set of categories — ‘meaning’, ‘ritual’, ‘the sacred’ — which are presumably open to similar charges of ethnocentricity.

Literature on the industrious and consumer revolutions is voluminous. For representative examples, see Mintz, Sweetness and Power ; Jan De Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History , liv, no. 2 (1994); Michael Kwass, ‘Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects in Eighteenth-Century France’, Representations , lxxxii, no. 1 (2003); T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004).

‘Eric Hobsbawm once termed foreign trade the “spark” which lit the Industrial Revolution; his argument, much disputed since, was based on Britain’s exports and re-exports. But it was Europe's imports from Asia, and imports especially of manufactured consumer goods, which were to provide the vital turning point’. Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’,  Past and Present , no. 182 (Feb. 2004), 86.

Marshall Sahlins, ‘Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of “The World System” ’,  Proceedings of the British Academy , lxxiv (1989).

Sewell’s account built on his longer project of a theory of historical capitalism, in dialogue with the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and the philosopher Moishe Postone: see William H. Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005); William H. Sewell Jr, ‘In Memoriam: Remembering Moishe Postone’, Critical Historical Studies , v, no. 2 (2018). Postone’s work focused on the commodity as a relation in the development of capitalism as a system of understanding the world, what he called ‘a system of abstract, impersonal domination’: Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1995), 125.

‘The new French silks and cottons were, in a sense, domestic substitutes for exotic luxuries, but the French producers quickly moved beyond mere imitation to create their own distinctive designs’. William H. Sewell Jr, ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’,  Past and Present , no. 206 (Feb. 2010), 86, citing Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury’ (n. 9).

Sewell, ‘Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, 84.

Ibid ., 85–6. Jairus Banaji draws on Sewell’s article in his account of the long-term importance of such a mercantile capitalism: Banaji, Brief History of Commercial Capitalism , 93–5. On subsumption, see Ann Stoler, ‘Sumatran Transitions: Colonial Capitalism and Theories of Subsumption’, International Social Science Journal , cxiv (1987); also available as ‘Transitions à Sumatra: capitalisme colonial et théories de la subsomption’, in Maurice Godelier (ed.), Transitions et subordinations au capitalisme (Paris, 2017).

Berg notes, for instance, that ‘the slave trade was fostered’ by ‘African consumerism’: ‘In Pursuit of Luxury’, 139.

See, for instance, David Harvey, ‘The Spatial Fix — Hegel, Von Thünen, and Marx’, Antipode , xiii, no. 3 (1981); Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London, 2015), 17–18, 220; Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Forms of Unfree Labor: Primitive Accumulation, History or Prehistory of Capitalism?’, Viewpoint Magazine , 1 Feb. 2018, available at < https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/forms-unfree-labor-primitive-accumulation-history-prehistory-capitalism/ >.

Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Global History and Historical Sociology’, in Belich et al. (eds.), Prospect of Global History ; Beckert and Sachsenmaier (eds.), Global History, Globally , editors’ intro; Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian’.

Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule ; Sven Beckert, ‘Cotton and the Global Origins of Capitalism’, Journal of World History , xxviii, no. 1 (2017); Andreas Eckert (ed.), Global Histories of Work (Berlin and Boston, 2016); Vanessa Ogle, ‘Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s’, American Historical Review , cxviii, no. 5 (2013); Andrew Liu, ‘Notes Toward a More Global History of Capitalism: Reading Marx’s Capital in India and China’, Spectre , 6 July 2020, available at < https://spectrejournal.com/notes-toward-a-more-global-history-of-capitalism/ >.

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It Came in the First Ships: Capitalism in America

"Capitalism came in the first ships." —Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past

No nation has been more market-oriented in its origins and subsequent history than the United States of America. The very settling of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and onward to Alaska and Hawaii, was one long entrepreneurial adventure. Even down to the present day, more Americans have probably made fortunes from the appreciation of real estate values than from any other source. But land is only the starting place for the epochal drama of American capitalism. That story, in comparison with the long-term business histories of all other large countries, has been one of intense and incessant competition. Americans have persistently shown themselves willing to follow market forces with relatively little hesitation.

In the early years, Americans' ravenous appetite for land was born of European deprivation confronting New World opportunity. Demand, which had been pent up for centuries, suddenly encountered plentiful supply. The settlers' hunger for more and more territory thrust them relentlessly westward, where they could establish farms and ranches that they themselves could own. This was the American Dream in its earliest form, and for the people living the dream, it had an aura of double-edged incredulity. There was disbelief not only at their own good fortune, but also at the backbreaking work required to capitalize on it.

From the colonial period through the early national years, and on into the nineteenth century, everything seemed up for grabs in the new country. Vast, apparently unlimited tracts of land were given away by the government or sold at irresistibly low prices. To get the best land, neither the first colonists nor the pioneers pressing across the frontier had much compunction about dispossessing Native Americans or each other. Sometimes they resorted to outright murder. The movement west constituted a great epic, but in its details was not a pretty story.

Land was available in prodigal abundance in early American history, but it is only one of the classic economic "factors of production." The others are labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. As the earlier chapters of this book have shown, modern capitalism fuses these four factors into operational systems for the conduct of economic life, most notably through the ingenious device of the business corporation.

There are several million corporations in the United States today, and a handful existed at the nation's official birth in 1776. The device became integral to the American economy only in the middle nineteenth century, but it was actually present at the creation 250 years earlier. In 1607, the settlers at Jamestown arrived under the charter of the Virginia Company of London. Puritans founded Boston in 1630 under the auspices of another English corporation, the Massachusetts Bay Company.

The proprietors of the Virginia Company soon were interested primarily in revenues from tobacco. Those of the Massachusetts Bay Company cared less about profit than about setting up what their leader John Winthrop called a "City upon a Hill." They wanted to demonstrate for all humanity the virtues of clean Christian living. If some of the Puritan merchants among them became moderately wealthy, then that might be a sign of God's grace, so long as customers were not cheated or overcharged. The line between virtuous profit and damnable avarice was blurry then, as it remains today. But the Puritans had an unmistakably capitalist turn of mind.

So did William Penn and his community of Friends. Persecuted in England for their religious beliefs, they acquired in 1681 a royal grant of land in America, and proceeded to develop their new colony on both religious and commercial principles. The Quaker merchants of Pennsylvania become prosperous international traders. Like the Puritan merchants of New England, they used their familial and religious connections to form a tight network of trustworthy relationships stretching over long distances. This kind of system for making credible business commitments is one of the essential conditions of strong economic development. In most capitalist economies today, it is embedded in the intricate law of contracts enforced by governments through courts.

Still another English corporation instrumental in populating the New World was the Royal African Company. Chartered in 1672, this company proceeded to take a significant though not dominant part in the slave trade. For the profit of shareholders, it brought to the western hemisphere masses of men and women who had been taken from Africa against their will. Eventually, many thousands of white merchants and seamen on both sides of the Atlantic participated in this commerce, including several hundred from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The total number of Africans transported to the New World was about 10 million. Their destination was usually Brazil or one of the Caribbean sugar islands, but some 596,000, or about one of every 17, went to areas that became part of the United States.

In 1776, the 13 colonies that made up the original United States declared their independence after almost 170 years of British colonial status. Even at that early date, the new country's population of 2.5 million included plentiful examples of capitalism's many faces. Then as now, capitalism could serve despicable ends, noble ones, or some mixture of the two.

In between the oppressed slaves on the one hand and free yeoman farmers and entrepreneurs on the other stood a large number of whites who had come to America as indentured servants. Between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants before the Revolution arrived under these terms. They flocked to America mainly from England, but also from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. (Germans tended to come in family groups, the others as single adults.) A few were abducted and taken aboard ship by force, but most made the trip voluntarily. They exchanged four to seven years' labor for passage to the New World.

So capitalism did come in the first ships, and in many different forms: legitimate commerce, legal cover for religious freedom, the slave trade, and individuals' exchange of labor for a ticket to America. Yet none of these examples represented modern capitalism. Few had much to do with the First Industrial Revolution, let alone the Second or Third. Each concerned farming, commerce, and trading, not technology and manufacturing. But all contained powerful elements of capitalism, and that proved to be momentous for the nation's future.

Editor's note : Thomas McCraw died inn 2012.

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What Is Capitalism?

Understanding capitalism, capitalism and the profit motive, precursors to capitalism: feudalism and mercantilism.

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What Is Capitalism: Varieties, History, Pros & Cons, Socialism

Daniel Liberto is a journalist with over 10 years of experience working with publications such as the Financial Times, The Independent, and Investors Chronicle.

Pete Rathburn is a copy editor and fact-checker with expertise in economics and personal finance and over twenty years of experience in the classroom.

Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals or businesses own capital goods. At the same time, business owners employ workers who receive only wages; labor doesn't own the means of production but instead uses them on behalf of the owners of capital.

The production of goods and services under capitalism is based on supply and demand in the general market, also known as the market economy . This is in contrast to a planned economy or a command economy , in which prices are set through central planning.

The purest form of capitalism is free-market or laissez-faire capitalism. Here, private individuals are unrestrained. They may determine where to invest, what to produce or sell, and at which prices to exchange goods and services. The laissez-faire marketplace operates without checks or controls. Today, most countries practice a mixed capitalist system that includes some degree of government regulation of business and some extent of public ownership of select industries.

Key Takeaways

• Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, with labor solely paid wages.
• Capitalism depends on the enforcement of private property rights, which provide incentives for investment in and productive use of capital.
• Capitalism developed out of feudalism and mercantilism in Europe and dramatically expanded industrialization and the large-scale availability of mass-market consumer goods.
• Pure capitalism can be contrasted with pure socialism, in which all means of production are collective or state-owned.

Capitalism is one type of system of economic production and resource distribution. Instead of planning economic decisions through centralized political methods, as with socialism or feudalism, economic planning under capitalism occurs via decentralized, competitive, and voluntary decisions.

Capitalism is essentially an economic system in which the means of production—factories, tools, machines, raw materials, etc—are organized by one or more business owners, also known as capitalists. Capitalists then hire workers to operate the means of production in return for wages. Workers have no claim on the means of production or on the profits generated from their labor; these belong to the capitalists.

As such, private property rights are fundamental to capitalism. Most modern concepts of private property stem from John Locke's theory of homesteading, in which human beings claim ownership by mixing their labor with unclaimed resources. Once owned, the only legitimate means of transferring property are through voluntary exchange, gifts, inheritance , or the re-homesteading of abandoned property.

Private property promotes efficiency by giving the owner of resources an incentive to maximize the value of their property. The more valuable a resource is, the more trading power it provides the owner. In a capitalist system, the person who owns the property is entitled to any value associated with that property.

Why Private Property Rights Matter for Capitalism

For individuals or businesses to deploy their capital goods confidently, a system must exist that protects their legal right to own or transfer private property. A capitalist society relies on the use of contracts, fair dealing, and tort law to facilitate and enforce these private property rights.

When property isn't privately owned but rather is shared by the public, a problem known as the tragedy of the commons can emerge. With a common pool resource—which all people can use and none can limit access to—all individuals have an incentive to extract as much use-value as they can and no incentive to conserve or reinvest in the resource. Privatizing the resource is one possible solution to this problem, along with various voluntary or involuntary collective action approaches.  

Under capitalist production, the business owners retain ownership of the goods being produced. If a worker in a shoe factory were to take home a pair of shoes that they made, it would be theft. This concept is known as the alienation of workers from their labor.

Profits are closely associated with the concept of private property. By definition, an individual only enters into a voluntary exchange of private property when they believe the exchange benefits them in some psychic or material way. In such trades, each party gains extra subjective value, or profit, from the transaction.

The profit motive , or the desire to earn profits from business activity, is the driving force of capitalism. It creates a competitive environment in which businesses compete to be the low-cost producer of a certain good in order to gain market share. If it is more profitable to produce a different type of good, then a business is incentivized to switch.

Voluntary trade is another, related mechanism that drives activity in a capitalist system. The owners of resources compete with one another over consumers, who, in turn, compete with other consumers over goods and services. All this activity is built into the price system, which balances supply and demand to coordinate the distribution of resources.

A capitalist earns the highest profit by using capital goods such as machinery and tools most efficiently while producing the highest-value good or service. By contrast, the capitalist suffers losses when capital resources aren't used efficiently and instead create less-valuable outputs.

Capitalism vs. Markets

Capitalism is a system of economic production. Markets are systems of distribution and allocation of goods already produced. While they often go hand-in-hand, capitalism and free markets refer to two distinct systems.

Capitalism is a relatively new type of social arrangement for producing goods in an economy. It arose largely along with the advent of the Industrial Revolution , some time in the late 17th century. Before capitalism, other systems of production and social organization were prevalent.

Feudalism and the Roots of Capitalism

Capitalism grew out of European feudalism. Up until the 12th century, a very small percentage of the population of Europe lived in towns. Skilled workers lived in the city but received their keep from feudal lords rather than a real wage, and most workers were serfs for landed nobles. However, by the late Middle Ages, rising urbanism, with cities as centers of industry and trade, became more and more economically important.

Under feudalism, society was segmented into social classes based on birth or family lineage. Lords (nobility) were the landowners, while serfs (peasants and laborers) didn't own land but were under the employ of the landed nobility.

The advent of industrialization revolutionized the trades and encouraged more people to move into towns where they could earn more money working in a factory than existing at a subsistence level in exchange for labor.

Mercantilism

Mercantilism gradually replaced the feudal economic system in Western Europe and became the primary economic system of commerce during the 16th to 18th centuries. Mercantilism started as trade between towns, but it wasn't necessarily competitive trade. Initially, each town had vastly different products and services that were slowly homogenized over time by demand.

After the homogenization of goods, trade was carried out in broader and broader circles: town to town, county to county, province to province, and, finally, nation to nation. When too many nations were offering similar goods for trade, the trade took on a competitive edge that was sharpened by strong feelings of nationalism on a continent that was constantly embroiled in wars.

Colonialism flourished alongside mercantilism, but the nations seeding the world with settlements weren't trying to increase trade. Most colonies were set up with an economic system that smacked of feudalism, with their raw goods going back to the motherland and, in the case of the British colonies in North America, being forced to repurchase the finished product with a pseudo- currency that prevented them from trading with other nations.

It was economist Adam Smith who noticed that mercantilism was a regressive system that was creating trade imbalances between nations and keeping them from advancing. His ideas for a free market opened the world to capitalism.

The Growth of Industry

Adam Smith's ideas were well-timed, as the Industrial Revolution was starting to cause tremors that would soon shake the Western world. The (often-literal) gold mine of colonialism had brought new wealth and new demand for the products of domestic industries, which drove the expansion and mechanization of production.

As technology leaped ahead and factories no longer had to be built near waterways or windmills to function, industrialists began building in the cities where there were now thousands of people to supply labor.

Capitalism involved reorganizing society into social classes based not on ownership of land, but ownership of capital (in other words, businesses). Capitalists were able to earn profits from the surplus labor of the working class, who earned only wages. Thus, the two social classes defined by capitalism are the capitalists and the laboring classes.

Industrial tycoons were the first people to amass wealth, often outstripping both the landed nobles and many of the money-lending/banking families. For the first time in history, common people could have hopes of becoming wealthy. The new money crowd built more factories that required more labor, while also producing more goods for people to purchase.

During this period, the term "capitalism"—originating from the Latin word " capitalis ," which means "head of cattle"—rose to prominence. In 1850, French socialist Louis Blanc used the term to signify a system of exclusive ownership of industrial means of production by private individuals rather than shared ownership.

Pros and Cons of Capitalism

More efficient allocation of capital resources

Competition leads to lower consumer prices

Wages and general standards of living rise overall

Spurs innovation and invention

Creates inherent class conflict between capital and labor

Generates enormous wealth disparities and social inequalities

Can incentivize corruption and crony capitalism in the pursuit of profit

Produces negative effects such as pollution

Pros Explained

More efficient allocation of capital resources : Labor and means of production follow capital in this system because supply follows demand.

Competition leads to lower consumer prices : Capitalists are in competition against one another, and so will seek to increase their profits by cutting costs, including labor and materials costs. Mass production also usually benefits consumers.

Wages and general standards of living rise overall : Wages under capitalism increased, helped by the formation of unions. More and better goods became cheaply accessible to wide populations, raising standards of living in previously unthinkable ways.

Spurs innovation and invention : In capitalism, inequality is the driving force that encourages innovation, which then pushes economic development.

Cons Explained

Creates inherent class conflict between capital and labor : While capitalists enjoy the potential for high profits, workers may be exploited for their labor, with wages always kept lower than the true value of the work being done.

Generates enormous wealth disparities and social inequalities : Capitalism has created an immense gap between the wealthy and the poor, as well as social inequalities.

Can incentivize corruption and crony capitalism in the pursuit of profit : Capitalism can provide incentives for corruption emerging from favoritism and close relationships between business people and the state.

Produces negative effects such as pollution : Capitalism often leads to a host of negative externalities , such as air and noise pollution, and these costs paid for by society, rather than the producer of the effect.

In terms of political economy , capitalism is often contrasted with socialism . The fundamental difference between the two is the ownership and control of the means of production.

In a capitalist economy, property and businesses are owned and controlled by individuals. In a socialist economy, the state owns and manages the vital means of production. However, other differences also exist in the form of equity, efficiency, and employment.

The capitalist economy is unconcerned about equitable arrangements. The primary concern of the socialist model is the redistribution of wealth and resources from the rich to the poor, out of fairness, and to ensure equality in opportunity and equality of outcome. Equality is valued above high achievement, and the collective good is viewed above the opportunity for individuals to advance.

The capitalist argument is that the profit incentive drives corporations to develop innovative new products desired by the consumer and in demand in the marketplace. It is argued that the state ownership of the means of production leads to inefficiency because, without the motivation to earn more money, management, workers, and developers are less likely to put forth the extra effort to push new ideas or products.

In a capitalist economy, the state doesn't directly employ the workforce. This lack of government-run employment can lead to unemployment during economic recessions and depressions .

In a socialist economy, the state is the primary employer. During times of economic hardship, the socialist state can order hiring, so there is full employment. Also, there tends to be a stronger "safety net" in socialist systems for workers who are injured or permanently disabled. Those who can no longer work have fewer options available to help them in capitalist societies.

Karl Marx, Capitalism, and Socialism

Philosopher Karl Marx was famously critical of the capitalist system of production because he saw it as an engine for creating social ills, massive inequalities, and self-destructive tendencies. Marx argued that , over time, capitalist businesses would drive one another out of business through fierce competition, while, at the same time, the laboring class would swell and begin to resent their unfair conditions. His solution was socialism, through which the means of production would be handed over to the laboring class in an egalitarian fashion.

Varieties of Capitalism

Today, many countries operate with capitalist production, but this also exists along a spectrum . In reality, there are elements of pure capitalism that operate alongside otherwise-socialist institutions.

The standard spectrum of economic systems places laissez-faire capitalism at one extreme and a complete planned economy—such as communism —at the other. Everything in between could be said to be a mixed economy. The mixed economy has elements of both central planning and unplanned private business. By this definition, nearly every country in the world has a mixed economy.

Mixed Capitalism

When the government owns some but not all the means of production and may legally circumvent, replace, limit, or otherwise regulate private economic interests, it is said to be a mixed economy or mixed economic system . A mixed economy respects property rights, but places limits on them.

Property owners are restricted as to how they exchange with one another. These restrictions come in many forms, such as minimum wage laws, tariffs, quotas, windfall taxes, license restrictions, prohibited products or contracts, direct public expropriation , antitrust legislation, legal tender laws, subsidies, and eminent domain . Governments in mixed economies also fully or partly own and operate certain industries, especially those considered public goods .

Anarcho-Capitalism

In contrast, with pure capitalism, also known as laissez-faire capitalism or anarcho-capitalism , all industries are left up to private ownership and operation, including public goods, and no central government authority provides regulation or supervision of economic activity in general.

What Is an Example of Capitalism?

An example of capitalist production would be if an entrepreneur starts a new widget company and opens a factory. This individual uses available capital that they own or from outside investors and buys the land, builds the factory, orders the machinery, and sources the raw materials. Workers are then hired by the entrepreneur to operate the machines and produce widgets. Note that the workers don't own the machines they use or the widgets that they produce. Instead, they receive only wages in exchange for their labor. These wages represent a small fraction of what the entrepreneur earns from the venture.

Who Benefits From Capitalism?

Capitalism tends to benefit capitalists the most. These include business owners, investors, and other owners of capital. While capitalism has been praised for improving the standard of living for many people across the board, it has by far benefited those at the top.

Why Is Capitalism Harmful?

Because of how it is structured, capitalism will always pit business owners and investors against the working class. Capitalists are also in competition against one another, and so will seek to increase their profits by cutting costs, including labor costs. At the same time, workers seek higher wages, fairer treatment, and better working conditions. These two incentives are fundamentally at odds, which creates class conflict.

Is Capitalism the Same as Free Enterprise?

Capitalism and free enterprise are often seen as synonymous. In truth, they are closely related yet distinct terms with overlapping features. It is possible to have a capitalist economy without complete free enterprise, and a free market without capitalism. Any economy is capitalist as long as private individuals control the factors of production . However, a capitalist system can still be regulated by government laws, and the profits of capitalist endeavors can still be taxed heavily. "Free enterprise" can roughly be understood to mean economic exchanges free of coercive government influence.

Capitalism is an economic and political system where trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. Its core principles are accumulation, ownership, and profiting from capital. In its purest form, capitalism works best when these private owners have assurances that the wealth they generate will be kept in their own pocket, which is often a controversial proposition.

Capitalism is the dominant world economic system, although it often isn’t pure in form. In many countries, interventions from the state, a core trait of socialism, are frequent. Businesses are able to chase profit but within the boundaries set by the government. Most political theorists and nearly all economists argue that capitalism is the most efficient and productive system of exchange.

International Monetary Fund. " What Is Capitalism ?"

Nelson, Peter Lothian. " To Homestead a Nature Preserve: A Response to Block and Edelstein, 'Popsicle Sticks and Homesteading Land for Nature Preserves '. "  Review of Social and Economic Issues , vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 71+. (Subscription required.)

Harvard Business School. " Tragedy of the Commons: What It Is and 5 Examples ."

Lester C. Thurow. " Profits ."

Michael Sonenscher. " Capitalism: The Word and the Thing ."

Laura LaHaye. " Mercantilism ."

Trinity University. " Adam Smith on Money, Mercantilism, and the System of Natural Liberty ."

Milios, John. " Social Classes in Classical and Marxist Political Economy ," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 59, no. 2 (April 2000), pp. 283-302. (Subscription required.)

Cambridge University Press. " Cries of Pain: The Word 'Capitalism' ."

Columbia College. " Karl Marx ."

New World Encyclopedia. " Anarcho-Capitalism ."

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248 Capitalism Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for capitalism essay topics? The economic system considered the most advanced and effective is worth exploring!

• 💸 Research Questions
• 🏆 Best Topic Ideas & Essay Examples
• 👍 A+ Essay Examples
• 🎓 Interesting Essay Topics
• 📌 Hot Topics to Write about

💡 Most Interesting Capitalism Topics to Write about

✍️ capitalism essay topics for college.

• ❓ Research Paper Topics

In your capitalism essay, you might want to focus on its key features or history. Another idea is to talk about the pros and cons of capitalism, discussing why it is good or bad. One more option is to compare capitalism and socialism. Whether you are assigned to write an argumentative essay, research paper, or thesis on capitalism, this article will be helpful. Here you’ll find everything you might need to write an A+ paper! Capitalism research questions, prompts, and title ideas are collected below. Best capitalism essay examples are also added to inspire you even more.

💸 Research Questions about Capitalism

• How did capitalism in its modern form appear?
• What are the key ideas of mercantilism?
• What is the relationship between capitalism and democracy?
• How did globalization help capitalism spread worldwide?
• Is inequality inevitable in a capitalist economy?
• What are the key characteristics of modern capitalism?
• What are the ways to ensure fair competition in a capitalist economy?
• What is the role of wage labor in capitalism?
• How to protect private property in capitalist economy?
• What are the disadvantages of capitalism?

🏆 Best Capitalism Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• Marx vs. Weber on Capitalism Besides, this time was the period of the close attention of the sociologists to the bourgeois society and the development of capitalism.”The debate over the relationship between Marx’s political economy and Max Weber’s interpretative sociology, […]
• Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber in his book the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism sought to explain the emergence of the modern capitalism and the origin of the modern secular and industrial society.
• Similarities Between Capitalism and Socialism. Compare & Contrast In this system, the government manages the overall means of production but the members have the duty of choosing the best setting for the production, the amount to produce and which product should be produced.
• “The State in Capitalist Society” by Ralph Miliband According to Anonymous, this book has played a major role in the renewal of both “state theory and Marxist political thought”.”The state in capitalist society” is a piece of work that has remained to be […]
• What Is the Relationship Between Capitalism and Democracy? The importance of the roles played by the stock market in the capitalistic economy is related considerably to the aspects of democracy and free market.
• Communism and Capitalism Through the History In this system, the means of product and service production is mainly carried out and owned by the individuals instead of the government while communism also known as fascism is contrary to this where production […]
• Capitalism and Globalization Effects However, according to an article by Anderson, in free market capitalism, initial wealth is created, which then spreads; it then leads to the social and political change due to the increase of power in the […]
• Nationalism Versus Capitalism: Compare & Contrast According to Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, the main disadvantage of capitalism is prosperity that seduces workers with the items of comfort and makes them forget their primarily aim of overthrowing the capitalism.
• Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism They were enslaved by the bourgeoisie and machinery hence, they became a majority and were empowered in the light of the competitive bourgeoisie class, which created commercial conflicts and fluctuated the earning of the working […]
• Lenin on Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin, in his analysis on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, stated that the integration of bank capital with the industrial capital facilitates the creation of financial oligarchy.
• “What Is Capitalism?” Article by Jahan and Mahmud Its main idea is based on the discussion of capitalism characteristics and its impact on the modern economy. On the other hand, inequality provokes controversies and questions the effectiveness of capitalism.
• H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” as Critique of Capitalism In the reality of the world that the book inhabits, the Eloi, who live above ground, represent the upper class, and the Morlocks, who live below ground, represent the lower class.
• Arguments Against Capitalism This is in the sense that capitalistic economies are influenced by free markets where the effects of pull and push of the demand, versus the supply affects the prices that are in the market.
• Capitalism and Colonialism These features are: divergence in wealth and technology of the West and the “Rest”, “transformation” of trade relations between colonies and empires and the very nature of this trade, appearance of new “settler-monopoly” and creation […]
• British Capitalism: Nature and Characteristics It discusses the nature and characteristics of Britain’s capitalism by outlining its history and how the principal city, London, plays a critical role in the spread of capitalism.
• Social Inequality, Capitalism, and Globalization It replaces slavery of antiquity and negatively affects almost all aspects of society, from the inequality of men and women to the sphere of science and education.
• Christians in Communism and Capitalism After viewing the video “The Cold War in Context,” the role of Christians in analyzing the war and the concepts of capitalism and communism can be clarified.
• Work Ethics in a Capitalist American Society This is unlike the employees at the restaurant who wanted to get rid of customers as fast as they could and had the contempt to the extent of provoking customers to seek management’s intervention.
• Capitalism, Democracy and the Treaty of Waitangi are Three Ways Through Which We in Aotearoa ‘Organise’ Ourselves The treaty gave the sovereignty of the New Zealand to Britain which was supposed to oversee the government and protection of the rights of the Maori people, especially to protect them from unfair land deals.
• Weber’s Ideal Type of the Spirit of Capitalism This Weber’s form of capitalism is the one prevalent in the United States America today. People are primitively accumulating wealth and the best thing they can do with it is to feast their eyes on […]
• Adam Smith’s Understanding of Capitalism Therefore, according to Adam Smith’s understanding, capitalism is a system that encompasses the following sets of behavior: “market which is characterized by commodity production”; “private possession of factors of production”; “large section of population that […]
• Can Capitalism Be Ethical? In my opinion, one of the most serious ethical objections to capitalism is its unjustness that leads to the exploitation of workers by robbing them of the products of their labor.
• Compare of Capitalism and Socialism In light of this definition and description, one would argue that this is the most convenient system of economic governance because individuals have the freedom to conduct business in a manner that best meets their […]
• Robert Brenner on the Development of Capitalism The development of capitalism has often been discussed by historians who focus on the factors that could lead to the decline of the feudal society and emergence of the new socio-economic system.
• Varieties of Capitalism in China The field deals with the relationship between the labor market and investors within a country and the dynamics that govern them.
• Chapters 4-6 of “After Capitalism” by D. Schweickart Also, the act of democracy does not seem to have any place in such a system since individuals who are wealthy take over the control of every process.
• The Effects of Capitalism on People’s Diet Food capitalism has brought about new changes in the human diet and has changed the nutritional value of foods eaten by human beings.
• Labor in Capitalism System The revenues from the entities are mainly for the owners and little is used to pay wages to workers.”In this system therefore production is done by the employees who use their employer, producing commodities which […]
• Economic Principles and Theories of Adam Smith: A Case for Free Markets and Capitalism The author seeks to determine the relevance of Adam Smith to the spectrum of economic thinking. The statement is: An analysis of theories and principles of Adam Smith reveals that he is still relevant to […]
• Differences Between Capitalism and Socialism In capitalist economic models, the rate of employment is determined by the pressures of demand and supply in the labor markets.
• Alienation and Capitalism The idea of alienation was developed by Karl Marx and it can be used to analyze the nature of human interaction in the current world.
• Rhetorical Analysis of Socialism vs. Capitalism by Thompson In order to convey this message, the author uses several rhetorical devices, the discussion of which is part of this analysis.
• The Theory of Capitalism and Its Current Context One of the main acknowledgments correlating with the Scottish philosopher is the establishment of the notion and foundation of the “free market”, the system in which supply and demand shape prices.
• Infrastructure in Capitalism and Socialism Systems The Garden City concept, based on building around the decentralized plant, does not reduce the pressure on the central part of the city and the growing population of the modern world.

👍 A+ Capitalism Essay Examples

• The Capitalism Development in Russia In the book The Communist Manifesto, the authors view capitalism as a brief economic form destined to fail to lead to a rise in the communist system. Capitalism was attributed to the harsh inequalities of […]
• Capitalism: Definition and History Further, this system indeed considers the needs and interests of private actors to be of vital importance and does not allow the authorities to control the trade and industry of the country.
• Discussion of Racial Capitalism Issue on Modern Society This stance contributes to the idea of the significance of political processes in the worsening of the situation for individuals who are likely to be exploited by the system.
• Discussion: Ecology and Capitalism The four laws of ecology include ‘everything is connected to everything else,’ ‘everything must go somewhere,’ ‘nature knows best,’ and ‘nothing comes from nothing.’ The four laws of capitalism are ‘the only lasting connection between […]
• Jamaica and the Modern Capitalism Countries in Western Europe and Australia, and North American countries belong to the group of core countries. On the contrary, periphery countries in most of Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe tend to have relatively […]
• Capitalism and Racism in Past and Present Racism includes social and economic inequalities due to racial identity and is represented through dispossession, colonialism, and slavery in the past and lynching, criminalization, and incarceration in the present.
• Surveillance Capitalism on Digital Platforms The appearance of capitalism was associated with the formation of the working class and affluent owners of production, but the new surveillance capitalism altered the classic perception of this system.
• Capitalism Is Not a Good Governance Solution in the Pandemic The capitalist flow of goods and services across the world and the role of governments in this was a major setback in the fight against the pandemic.
• Capitalism Development & Racial Issues in Rochester Hence, the authors show the importance of the topics about race through the extensive description of the development of the work culture in one city.
• Varieties of Capitalism and Employee Relations In providing the comparison for employee relations, the VoC approach has the strength of drawing attention to sectoral, national, and social responses to the crisis and the globalization challenges.
• Potency of Free Speech in Capitalist Society The rapid change in technology, discovery and rediscovery of the previous history, and the process of actively redefining what it means to be human, all contribute to the general diversification of the world.
• Capitalism as an Economic System: Op-Ed The main point of the letter to the editor. The letter I have chosen to respond to concerns the topic of capitalism.
• Capitalism, Black Marxism and Social Balance Thus, capitalism and racism developed as a consequence of the evolution of Western society, while Black radicalism was a response to this process.
• Abstract Dynamics of Capitalism and Daily Experiences of Business and Society Crucial historical transformations such as the back-rolling of capitalist west welfare states, decline or crucial metamorphosis of party states which were bureaucratic in the communist East, and weakening of the economic sovereignty of nation-states have […]
• Capitalism Approach: Attributes and Disadvantages It also offers theoretical and analytical methods to recognize the commonalities and dissimilarities between countries and groups of nations in the region.
• Flint Water Crisis: Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism The Flint crisis is a result of the neoliberal approach of the local state as opposed to the typical factors of environmental injustice; a polluter or a reckless emitter cutting costs. The two main factors […]
• Modern Capitalism in Great Britain This leads to the emergence of social classes in society, with the elites who own most business enterprises at the top of the hierarchy.
• Is There an Ethical Case for Capitalism? The most essential feature of capitalism is the incentive to make a profit based on the canonical principles, including private property, self-interest, competition, market mechanism, freedom of choice, and the limited role of the state.
• Financial Markets as an Element of the Capitalist Economy Model The story demonstrates various use of the financial market by involved stakeholders such as Credit Suisse, Archegos, investors and lenders for the Archegos, as well as shareholders of Credit Suisse.
• The Supply of Money in the Capitalist Economy In the capitalist economy that the world is currently based on, the supply of money plays a significant role in not only affecting salaries and prices but also the growth of the economy.
• “Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist” by R. Lowenstein The book provides an avenue for Investors and businessmen to learn a lot from the thoughts of Warren Buffett on issues pertaining to business and the methods he applies when making investments.
• Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism I agree with the statement because people with different cultures have different ways of doing things and architecture is one of the crucial tools used to express the culture of the people.
• Shared Value: Business Organizations and Capitalism Systems The intention of the review, authors and the title of the article: This paper will review the views presented by the authors on business organizations and capitalism systems to draw informed and objective conclusion.
• The Various Aspects of Capitalism Communism is a sociopolitical faction whereby the means of production, such as land, labor, and machinery, are possessed and managed by “the state”, and individuals control only a small portion of the means of production.
• Edward Luttwak’s Turbo-Capitalism: Danger or Blessing? And these are some of the reasons to read his book and agree or disagree with the writer’s points of view on the present and future world economy. The main points of the author lie […]
• Saving Capitalism: Video and the Articles Analysis The video and the articles analyzed in the paper allow for a comprehensive understanding of current issues, with the increasing income inequality that undermines the virtues of capitalism being the major challenge.
• Stages of History, Capitalism, Class Conflict, and Labor Theory in Adam Smith’s Writings The stages of history in Adam Smith’s writing, as reiterated by Paganelli, are the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture, and the age of commerce.
• Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery and the Rise of the Modern Capitalist World System The reading provides an extensive background of the historical rise and fall of the African nations. The reading gives a detailed account of the Civil War and the color line within its context.
• Triumph of Capitalism and Liberalism in Kagan’s “The Jungle Grows Back” In this situation, Kagan argues that it is not rational for the US “to mind its own business and let the rest of the world manage its problems”. It is to demonstrate the need to […]
• “Capitalism in America: The History” by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge Such books are now divided into the synchronic and diachronic ones, where the latter ones examine the economics in the context of history, and the first focus on modern development. Hence, the major value of […]
• Capitalism: Contemporary Political Culture Various theories and ideologies have been introduced to try to establish awareness of the socio-economic and political nature of the life of various people in different societies.
• Anti-Capitalism: Social Phenomenon Thus, the younger generations are most likely to be polarized by the ideology of anti-capitalism, which is a divisive issue, since they are opposed to the idea of a few individuals in society controlling trade […]
• The Relations Between Capitalism and Socialism On the other hand, Marx defined socialism as a principle that ensures the most of these production factors are owned and controlled by the society or the state for the benefit of the whole community […]
• Phenomenon of the Capitalism and Socialism The system values private ownership with the price system as the system of determining the rate of exchange of goods and services.

🎓 Interesting Capitalism Essay Topics

• Capitalism in America in 1865-1930’s The capitalist economy of the US between the 1865 and 1930 laid a framework for the present American economic system. The objective of the union was to protect the rights of the workers, who were […]
• Capitalism vs. Communism: Economic Ideologies Clash A positive example of this mix is Israel, where socialism is dominant in the rural areas and capitalism, is dominant in the urban areas, this has led to an increase in the welfare of the […]
• Oligarchic Capitalism and Russia’s Global Resurgence The governments in many oligarchic societies are mainly focused on protecting and perpetuating the interests of the oligarchs while neglecting the economic growth and development that is vital in the prosperity of the country masses.
• Jonathan Prude: Capitalism, Industrialization, Factory The aspects of historical industrialization were based on rural capitalism of the North-West regions and the co-existence of nonprofit factories along with private properties makes it difficult to understand the milieu of the factory of […]
• Slave Trade and Rise of Capitalism Others consider the presence of capitalism to be the root of the slave trade as humans were in the earlier times viewed as factors of production similar to the current labor factor but different in […]
• The American Capitalism and Technological Progress So, the first reason for the American Revolution to begin was a very strict policy of the British Empire towards colonies, particularly, the restriction of commerce to the limits of internal trade; the colonies should […]
• Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” Documentary The results of the research are deplorable, because the rate of unemployed people increases every day, people have nothing to pay for their homes, insurances, and education. Is it possible to make fortune in the […]
• “Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy” by E. Luttwak Consequently, the thesis of the book may be formulated in the following way: human society should beware of the present state of capitalism, turbo-capitalism, which can bring very harmful results of its existence that will […]
• Capitalism History: Ancient and Modern Capitalism During the 1st century, the double currency was stable and towards the end of 2nd century, the denars equivalent to gold started to rise.
• Capitalism and Industrialization in the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx In fact, the Communist Manifesto is clear in indicating that industrialization was a process that led to the overall improvement of society in doing away with the hardships of the majority of the population.
• How Best To Ensure US-Style Global Capitalism This research work aims to analyze the peculiarities of global capitalism and the impact that the United States has on other nations.
• Boltanski and Chapello: New Spirit of Capitalism Analysis For example, in their book, Boltanski and Chapello describe the new paradigm of production to be one of the forms of workers’ exploitation.
• Human Rights in the Disaster Capitalism Context By the word human rights, it is generally meant to be the protection of individual rights against the encroachment by the state and it also means the basic rights and freedom of individuals.
• The Concept of Capitalism in China In actual by capitalist state Chinese dreamt of living a life style free of bureaucracy so that they may be able to offend their sense of pride and demean the life-style of the workers’ families.
• Capitalism and Industrialization as a Cause of AIDS Spread Population growth rates are the highest in most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America due to the high degree of fertility and the dramatic decrease in mortality following World War II.
• Capitalism: Competitional Free Trade This essay will try to highlight the first problem area of Competition and Free Trade, what some of the known authors had to say about the effect of capitalism on it, and finally the overall […]
• The Synergy Between Capitalism and Democracy Democracy and its success: Democracy refers to a political system in which the political part of the government is elected through adult suffrage.
• Great War & Liberal Capitalism in Russia, Germany, Italy The history of capitalism has for long term highlighted the basis of reference on the impact of material prosperity and the overall view on the economy in the context of time and region.
• Capitalism, Individualism, and Social Responsibility This has largely been attributed to the regulation of modern societies by the state, the localization of the life-worlds, and the crisis of the subject in the post modernist culture of intellectuals.
• Capitalist System in America The market forces of demand and supply determine the prices of goods and services without the interference of the government. The capitalist argues that the government must protect its citizens who are the production units […]
• Capitalism Characteristics and American Identity The aim of colonization was occupation of new lands and new ways of wealth accumulation for France and Britain. The plantation was an instrument in the growth of trade and industrial development, and can be […]
• Does American Capitalism Allow Social Mobility? Sometimes, this process is called the distribution of talent, even though ratio can not be perfect, the more close it is to the ideal, the better principle of justice is applied in the society.
• The Result of Western Capitalism Fueling Communism The paper starts with the history of China and elucidates the entry of western capitalism into China in different stages, including the historic opium wars.
• Financial System, Financial Markets and Understanding of Capitalism in Germany and the U.S. The reason for this has been primarily identified as to the experiences and the events the countries have had to face in the past century.
• A. Smith and K. Marx: Contrasting Views of Capitalism One important aspect of society that helps balance the needs and wants of the people is Economics, the social science that deals with goods and services.
• Canada as a Liberal Capitalist Democracy It includes also the re-organization of the enterprises in order to make a profit, for instance, changing management of the enterprise or adding new departments in the organization.
• Urban Democracy and Capitalism For example, surveys show that people increasingly identify with the planetary scale, the local scale, and a whole series of spaces in between.
• Supermarkets. The Machinery of Capitalism Even the meat, which is placed in the market, seems to be losing the imprints of nature, as it is boneless and entirely processed out of human hands.
• Capitalist Modernity After Feudal Mode The division of labor contributed immensely to the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. Both lords and peasants sought to participate in the trade as a way of accessing markets for their products.
• Environmental Sociology. Capitalism and the Environment Some evident examples of remarkable economic development in modern capitalism encompass the enormous industrial development of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the outstanding development levels of Western Europe, the emergence of East Asian […]
• Population Pressure, Surplus Population, Nature, and Capitalist Development While a section of the society has more than they can consume in several generations, others are starving because of a system that favours only a section of the society.
• American Individualism vs. Capitalism Norms However, a large number of people would agree that the possibility to satisfy one’s basic needs is one of the constituents of contentment.
• Reciprocity in the Capitalist Workforce Thirdly, the majority of companies have failed to implement the policy of employee engagement despite the fact that the requirements are quite common and easy to follow.[1] All of these factors separately or in a […]
• Profit and Capitalism on the Facebook Example Milton and Friedman’s school of thought discusses the power of the market in the sense that the majority of economic fallacies are driven by the lack of attention to simple insight and the tendency to […]

📌 Hot Capitalism Topics to Write about

• Race and Ethnicity: Capitalism, Law, and Biology Stemming from the bigoted perspective that the colonialist thinking provided, legal regulations and biological theories have aggravated the quality of relationships between members of different racial and ethnic groups, creating the scenario in which the […]
• Capitalism and Its Influence on the Environment The characteristic will be determined by both benefits to the environment and the overall result for the company, as companies should implement the changes willingly. The results are expected to be a set of suggestions […]
• “The People’s Republic of Capitalism” Documentary The central themes of The People’s Republic of Capitalism are the intricacies of the Chinese experiment with capitalism restrained by the authoritarian government and interdependence of American and Chinese economies.
• Economics: Socialism vs. Liberal Capitalism Karl Marx, a great proponent of socialism, refers to the ethical, economic, and political contribution of socialism to the welfare of the society in asserting his position on the debate of the best economic model.
• Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch” and Capitalism The main thesis of the book is multilayered and addresses the development of capitalism and the role women, as well as violence, played in the process.
• Weber’s “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” Much of the book focuses on the concept of capitalism as witnessed in northern Europe and the United States of America due to the influence of the Protestants.
• David Harvey’s Movie “Crises of Capitalism?” According to the opinion of the expert, the problem is that every system has some risks and the crises that society is experiencing today are the result of how the conflicts were managed and mitigated […]
• 2008 Global Financial Crisis: Crises of Capitalism? Although I had an idea of the possible catalysts of the 2008 global financial meltdown before watching the video, Harvey presented a clear report of the events that occurred before the crisis and put them […]
• Karl Polanyi’s Theory: Market Systems Critique In the meantime, while Keynes simply rejects the potential of the invisible hand of the market, Polanyi develops this idea and comes to a conclusion that the liberalistic attempt to establish the self-regulating market system […]
• Keynes vs Hayek: Debating Economic Stability The pivot point of the Hayek’s theory is the consideration of those factors that illustrate the market’s failure to coordinate human’s actions in an appropriate manner and the consequences of this failure such as unemployment.
• Astrology in Socialist, Capitalist, Psychological Views The fact that many people overlook what astrologers do or say has resulted in the unavailability of information in the area of study.
• The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber At the time of producing the document, society expected its people to believe in something. The sociologist used the concept of Ascetic Protestantism to investigate the origin and nature of capitalism.
• Chapters 1-3 of “After Capitalism” by Schweickart According to the author, moral and pragmatic failures of capitalism are vividly evident in the modern world. In order to comprehend these lessons, it is necessary to compare and contrast socialism both in the 20th […]
• Economy of Capitalism, Communism, Fascism and Socialism Government structure: the structure of the government in the two countries, involves federal governments that are led by the political elites in the countries. The government has the duty of formulating policies that regulate the […]
• “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman In turn, the competition will be one of the factors that can improve the quality of education. Moreover, the increased competition can make school administrators more responsive to the suggestions and critique of parents who […]
• “State Capitalism Comes of Age” by Ian Bremmer Thus, Bremmer concentrates on the discussion of the opposition of the models realized in such countries as Russia, China, Brazil, and India with basing on the principles of state capitalism and the model of free […]
• Labor Market, Social Organizations and Wages in Capitalism Therefore, employers are forced to pay efficiency wages to increase work intensity and the cost of job loss. The intention is to reduce wages as employees are pressurized to work harder and to the extreme.
• Socialist vs. Capitalist Approach to Social Issues Capitalism also refers to a system where the economy is independent of the state. In a Socialist economy, the intellectual property belongs to the government.
• “Redeeming Capitalism” by Kenneth J. Barnes With such gaps, the central thesis of the text is that there is a need for the global society to combine aspects of morality and ethics with modern capitalism and ensure that it meets the […]
• Capitalism in Poland and Its Transitional Stage The decades of socialism had a significant impact on the transition countries and resulted in the lack of institutions involved in the provision of the functioning of a market economy.
• Stakeholder and Shareholder Capitalism Models In the shareholder capitalism model, shareholder interests are the main concern, while in stakeholder model shareholder interest is on equal ground with concerns and interests of other stakeholders, such as the community, the employees, the […]
• Protestantism, Capitalism, and Predestination Calvinism and Predestination are central to the book because Weber considers the actions and beliefs of Calvinists as two of the major factors in the development of capitalism.
• Saving Capitalism: Its Role in Modern World This type of economic structure is called capitalistic, and one of its central conditions is the right to private property and free trade within the limits of the norms established by the law.
• Capitalism in Flux: Reevaluating Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand In the meantime, the latest change in the economic trends shows that the economist’s expectations were inflated as well as the potential that he assigned to the free market turned out to be exaggerated.
• The Destructive Nature of Capitalism The author emphasizes the tendency in the modern popular culture to humanize the technological aspects of our lives, probably in order to compensate for the exacerbated violence and a lack of compassion that human beings […]
• Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism Poverty is a word that has always been a part of people’s lives at different stages of the development of human society. Relative poverty is often defined as the lack of material resources needed to […]
• The Dutch Republic and Capitalism The production of silk brought by merchants from China to Italy and Turkey is an excellent example of the influence that merchants had during that time period.
• Capitalism in Milanovic’s and Ferguson’s Views Other economists establish that there is a need for the government to intervene to avoid the risk of monopolies. The question of wages in labor also calls for the intervention of the government to make […]
• Nature, Technology, Society, and Capitalism For the majority of human history, the approach towards the relationship between Humanity and Nature was perceived through the lens of binary interactions.
• Division of Labor: Aspects of Capitalism The paper then focuses on the differences between the social division of labor and the detailed division of labor. It is important to look at the difference between the social division of labor and the […]
• Capitalism in Marx’s, Weber’s, Durkheim’s Theories Conceptualizing change as a feature of social modernity using analogies such as growth, cyclical renewal, progress, modernity, development, and evolution gives us presuppositions for understanding the world and the concept of individual, society, and culture. […]
• Russia’s Transition to Capitalism First, lack of a robust system of property rights was the greatest drawback to the successful implementation of the transition policies. Russia experienced the assassination of famous economists and lawyers that advocated the transition from […]
• The Development of Capitalism in Canada To begin with, Pentland states that by the middle of the nineteenth century there were a plenty of signs indicating that the changes of the course of the economy “had gone too far to be […]
• Society, Culture, Economy in “Capitalism” Mini-Series While certain points, such as the historical, sociological, and anthropological grounds for the Smith’s work are persuasive and present a solid basis for further inquiry, some of the conclusions, such as the inherent malevolence of […]
• Capitalism and Its Influence on Globalization
• “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Weber
• Capitalism in Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s Views
• Globalization, Art and Capitalism
• Karl Marx: Critique of Capitalism
• Varieties of Capitalism – Comparative Advantages
• Shared Value Capitalism by Porter and Kramer
• Capitalism and Just Eat It Documentaries Contrast
• Evolution of Capitalism: Concept, Origin and Development
• Capitalism in the US: Criticism and Alternative
• Globalization and Its Impact on Capitalism
• Documentaries – Capitalism: A Love Story by Michael Moore
• Capitalism Spirit and the Protestant Ethic
• Capitalism in Canadian Society
• History Fukuzawa Yukishi: From Samurai to Capitalist
• Capitalism Versus Environmental Sustainability
• Capitalism Critique: Revisiting Joan Robinson’s Economic Theories
• Marxist Critique of Capitalism: Expropriation of Surplus Value
• Clean Capitalism in Organizations
• Weber and the Rise of Capitalism
• Natural Capitalism in Economic
• Relationship Between Capitalism and a Logically Formal Rational Legal System
• Marxist Critiques of Capitalism: Theory of Surplus Value
• Socialist Market Economy of China Shift Toward Capitalism
• Biggart and Swedberg Views on Capitalist Development
• The Transition of Russia to Capitalism
• Capitalism: Theoretical and Operational Limitations
• The Role of Capitalism and the Life of Workers: XX Century
• Corporate Social Responsibility: Socialist and Capitalist Perspective
• Global Capitalism and Its Discontent
• An Invisible Hand of Capitalism in the Business
• Market Structure during Post-Mao China: Capitalism or Socialism?
• Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Dynamic Capitalism
• Marxists’ Critique of Crises With the Capitalist System
• Climate Change: Is Capitalism the Problem or the Solution?
• Taxes, Capitalism, and Democracy: Karl Marx vs. Plato
• Racial Capitalism and Colonialism
• Racial Capitalism and Colonialism in African Diasporic Culture and Western Culture
• Capitalist Societies Economic Disparities
• How Is Today’s Capitalism Society Changed by the “New Left?”
• Video Report “China’s Capitalist Revolution”
• Capitalism in Modern Societies
• The Political and Economic Spheres in Capitalist Societies
• The Global Financial Crisis and Capitalism for the Elite Rich
• David Harvey About Capitalism
• Understanding Economics: The Nature and Logic of Capitalism
• Richard Sennett’s Account of the ‘New Capitalism’ in Relation to Current Organizations
• “New Capitalism” by Peston
• Capitalism and World Inequality
• Weber’s Conception of the Capitalist Entrepreneur and the Modern Bureaucrat
• Capitalism Concept Evolution
• British Capitalism Development
• Capitalist Economy Support
• John Gray: Fast Capitalism and the End of Management
• Running Economies: Capitalism and Socialism
• Capitalist Economies in the US
• Scholars on the Effects of Capitalism
• Political Ideologies: Capitalism vs. Socialism
• Capitalism and Its Role in Commodity Exchange and Value
• Capitalism Versus Communism
• Capitalism and Poverty
• Karl Marx: From Feudal Society to Modern Capitalism
• Capitalism: A Love Story: A Reflective Paper
• Development of the Atlantic Trade Triangle a Colonial Capitalism (Mercantilism)
• How Capitalism Beat Communism/Socialism
• Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Weber
• US Economic Success: Rise of Capitalism
• Capitalism: Exploitation of the Poor and Resource Monopoly
• Forced Labor and Free Enterprise on Sugar Plantations Created a Feudal and Capitalism Society

❓ Capitalism Research Paper Topics

• Why Has Liberal Capitalism Failed To Stimulate a Democratic Culture in Africa?
• What Is the Connection Between Capitalism and Modern Culture?
• How Government Policies Affected Global Capitalism?
• What Are the Positive and Negative Outcomes of Market Capitalism?
• How Does Capitalism Differ From Socialism?
• What Is the Connection Between Slavery, the Rise of Capitalism, and Colonization?
• What Is the Relationship Between Race and Capitalism?
• How Does Modern Capitalism Looks Like?
• Will Global Capitalism Fall Again?
• What Is the Relationship Between Capitalism and Democracy?
• How Capitalism Contributes Towards Unemployment?
• What Is the Difference and Similarity Between Socialism and Capitalism?
• How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK?
• Why Doesn’t Capitalism Flow to Poor Countries?
• How Does Capitalism Affect Population Growth?
• Did the New Deal Strengthen or Weakened the USA Capitalism?
• How Has the Rise of Capitalism Contributed to the Persistent Gender Inequity?
• How Can Capitalism Take Control of People’s Lives?
• What Is the Conflict Between Socialism and Capitalism?
• What Can Marx’s Work on Capitalism Tell Us About Modernity?
• How Does the Spirit of Capitalism Affect Stock Market Prices?
• How Capitalism and the Bourgeois Virtues Transformed and Humanized the Family?
• Who Are Capitalists and What Is Capitalism?
• How Does the Capitalism Influence the Debt of Developing Countries?
• Why Does Market Capitalism Fail To Deliver a Sustainable Environment and Greater Equality of Incomes?
• How Can Capitalism Save American Healthcare?
• How Slavery Shifted the Economy Towards Capitalism?
• How Has the Internet Changed Modern-Day Capitalism?
• Why China Chose the Socialism Instead of Capitalism as the Country Political System When Prc Was Established?
• How Capitalism Thwarts Creativity?
• Feudalism Titles
• Colonialism Essay Ideas
• Democracy Titles
• Fascism Questions
• Nazism Topics
• Socialism Ideas
• Totalitarianism Questions
• Marxism Essay Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Capitalism Has Become An Ideology In Today's America. Here's How It Happened

Rund Abdelfatah

Ramtin Arablouei

Capitalism: What Is It?

A demonstrator holds a sign reading "I love capitalism" during a protest against California's stay-at-home order in 2020. Capitalism started as an economic system; it has become an ideology in the modern United States. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A demonstrator holds a sign reading "I love capitalism" during a protest against California's stay-at-home order in 2020. Capitalism started as an economic system; it has become an ideology in the modern United States.

The Throughline team has been thinking about capitalism a lot these days. It's hard not to when so many people are struggling just to get by.

Capitalism is an economic system, but it's also so much more than that. It's become a sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules over our lives and our minds. It might seem like it's an inevitable force, but really, it's a construction project that took hundreds of years and no part of it is natural or just left to chance.

So here's what we did. First, we wanted to look at what makes American capitalism distinct, if it is even distinct ? Is it uniquely individual, uniquely efficient, uniquely cutthroat? Like, these are all the things that we've been thinking about a lot.

A young girl interacts with an employee maintaining one of tanks at New Jersey SEA LIFE Aquarium inside the American Dream mall in East Rutherford. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images hide caption

A young girl interacts with an employee maintaining one of tanks at New Jersey SEA LIFE Aquarium inside the American Dream mall in East Rutherford.

And so we brought together three REALLY DIFFERENT experts who come at these questions from REALLY DIFFERENT points of view.

Bryan Caplan's an economist and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, Vivek Chibber studies Marxist theory and historical sociology, and Kristen Ghodsee is an expert in what happened after the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe.

And we had a conversational round of analysis that led us from colonial times, through waves of innovation and American development to the American Dream Mall in New Jersey.

We compared the happiness index in countries to see crazy things like how much happier people in Denmark report that they are, compared to Americans.

But that's not all. We wanted to dive deeper into the dominance of Capitalism in the 20th century American mindset .

What's the role of government in society? What do we mean when we talk about individual responsibility? What makes us free? 'Neoliberalism' might feel like a term that's hard to define and understand. But it's the dominant socio-economic ideology of both major American political parties — Republican and Democrats — no matter how much partisan rhetoric might be geared towards absolute division.

And this ideology, this belief in free markets, deregulation, and privatization can be traced back — pretty directly — to a group of men meeting in the Swiss Alps.

On April 10, 1947, a group of 39 economists, historians and sociologists gathered in a conference room of a posh ski resort at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland. Glasses clinked. Cigars burned. A mission statement was written.

And from that meeting, they would start an organization called The Mont Pelerin Society, MPS. The ideas discussed in that room more than 70 years ago would evolve and warp and, this is no exaggeration, come to shape the world we live in. Those ideas have dominated our economic system for decades. In the name of free market fundamentals, the forces behind neoliberalism act like an invisible hand, shaping almost every aspect of our lives.

From the TV advertisements we all grew up watching to the way the internet is understood today.

Capitalism: What Makes Us Free?

That's not all. We're also dropping a third episode on Capitalism this coming Thursday, July 8. For that episode, we explore how religion and capitalism joined forces to change the way we think about our work, our society, and ourselves — the Prosperity Gospel.

To receive it when it drops subscribe here in Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your pods.

Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Political Economy — Capitalism

Essays on Capitalism

Capitalism and socialism essay topics and outline examples.

• The Evolution of Capitalism: From Its Origins to Modern Day
• Capitalism and Its Role in Promoting Innovation and Technology
• The Ethics of Capitalism: Exploring Moral Considerations in Free Markets
• Global Capitalism: Its Impact on Developing Economies
• The Relationship Between Capitalism and Environmental Sustainability
• Consumer Culture in Capitalist Societies: Implications and Critiques
• The Role of Government Regulation in Capitalist Economies
• Capitalism in the USA 1900-1940: A Historical Overview
• Capitalism vs. Socialism: Impact on Income Inequality
• The Impact of Capitalism on Underdevelopment in the Global South

Essay Title 1: Capitalism vs. Socialism: A Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems and Their Impacts

Thesis Statement: This argumentative essay critically evaluates capitalism and socialism as economic systems, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and societal consequences, and seeks to determine which system provides a more equitable and sustainable future.

• Introduction
• Capitalism: Market-Based Economy, Private Ownership, and Competition
• Socialism: Collective Ownership, Wealth Redistribution, and Government Control
• Economic Inequality: Wealth Disparities in Capitalist Societies
• Social Safety Nets: Welfare Programs and Social Services in Socialist Societies
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Capitalism's Role in Technological Advancements
• Environmental Sustainability: Examining the Impact of Both Systems on the Planet
• Conclusion: Striving for a Balanced Economic System that Addresses Inequities

Essay Title 2: The Role of Capitalism and Socialism in Modern Societies: Achieving Economic Prosperity and Social Equity

Thesis Statement: This argumentative essay explores the coexistence of capitalism and socialism within modern societies, emphasizing the potential benefits of a mixed economic system that combines market forces with social welfare measures to achieve economic prosperity and social equity.

• Mixed Economy: Combining Capitalist and Socialist Elements
• Income Redistribution: Progressive Taxation and Social Programs
• Healthcare and Education: Ensuring Universal Access and Quality
• Worker Rights: Labor Unions and Employment Protections
• Regulation and Competition: Balancing Market Dynamics and Consumer Protection
• Global Perspectives: Comparing Economic Systems in Different Countries
• Conclusion: Advancing Economic Prosperity and Social Equity Through a Balanced Approach

Essay Title 3: Capitalism, Socialism, and the Future of Economic Systems: Toward a More Equitable and Sustainable World

Thesis Statement: This argumentative essay envisions the future of economic systems, proposing the development of innovative models that incorporate the best aspects of both capitalism and socialism to create a more equitable, sustainable, and just global economy.

• Hybrid Models: Exploring Economic Systems That Promote Equity and Innovation
• Environmental Responsibility: Addressing Climate Change and Resource Conservation
• Global Wealth Distribution: Reducing Income Disparities Across Nations
• Education and Healthcare: Ensuring Access and Quality Worldwide
• Technology and Automation: Adapting to the Changing Nature of Work
• Collaborative Governance: International Cooperation for Economic Reform
• Conclusion: Striving for a New Economic Paradigm for a Better World

Mercantilism Vs Capitalism

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The Key Characteristics of The Free Enterprise System

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Pros and Cons of How Capitalism and Consumerism Play Role in One’s Destiny

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The Solution to Poverty in India: Socialism Or Capitalism

The concept of alienation, the concept of social class in capitalist reality, a theme of global capitalism in vermeer’s hat by timothy brook and slave ship by marcus rediker, marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, new europe: the case of the city in smith’s view, what is pink capitalism and its representation in giovanni’s room, capitalism in sherwood anderson’s "mother", "capitalism: a love story": summary, comparison of free enterprise and communism, racism and capitalism in japan, depiction of industrial capitalism in the film modern times, the concept of alienation in the works of karl marx, why hawaii is not quite paradise, jay gould: one of the robber barons and captains of industry, the complex relationship between capitalism and poverty, socialism vs. capitalism: a comparative analysis, socialism and capitalism, how the columbian exchange benefited europe and north america, why is capitalism better than communism.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.

Main types of capitalism include advanced capitalism, corporate capitalism, finance capitalism, free-market capitalism, mercantilism, social capitalism, state capitalism and welfare capitalism. Other variants of capitalism include anarcho-capitalism, community capitalism, humanistic capitalism, neo-capitalism, state monopoly capitalism, and technocapitalism.

Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Estonia, Canada, Denmark, etc.

Capitalism is driven by the law of supply and demand. In a capitalist society people have more freedom to choose their career paths. Countries that have capitalist economies today are not 100% capitalist. This is because they all have some form of government regulation to guide business.

Relevant topics

• Penny Debate
• Unemployment
• Universal Basic Income
• Supply and Demand
• American Dream
• Minimum Wage
• Real Estate
• Cosmetology

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Capitalism in the USA 1900 to 1940

How did the Great Depression in the USA bring about a crisis of capitalism?

Background and focus

It is important to understand that the focus of THIS section is almost in direct contrast to the previous topic.

Previously, learners were required to understand how the USSR had developed. WE now look at Capitalism and

its development in the US. Learners MUST understand that this topic, along with the previous one, will set them

up for studying the bipolar nature of the globe in Grade 12. So, pay attention, and make notes for next year.

Having looked at socialism (and the USSR) in the previous topic, we now investigate capitalism as it developed

in the USA.

We study the crisis of capitalism that occurred as a result of the Great Depression. At the time of conception,

Roosevelt’s New Deal was criticised by some for bringing in socialism. Learners must analyse these criticisms,

which relate to the New Deal Programmes that were set up to bring about relief, recovery and reform.

Could Roosevelt’s form of state intervention to create jobs, as well as the welfare system he set up, be

considered socialist reform, and did he thereby undermine the capitalist system in the USA?

There was a list of conditions that existed in 4 phases:

1.     The growth of Capitalism during the 19 and 20 centuries in the US.

2.     The conditions that led to the Great Depression.

3.     The policies that attempted to address the Great Depression.

4.     The criticisms of the New Deal.

This section includes the following:

-· the nature of capitalism in the USA

Online Resource:

http://www.newhistory.org/CH07.htm [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8723692-american-colossus [Accessed:10/02/2015]

 - entrepreneurial and competitive; with rugged individualism; free market; and with minimal state control over business;

”¢ the American dream of individual possibilities - ‘rags to riches’;

Online Resources:

http://www.publicagenda.org/press-releases/hard-work-is-essential-for-achieving-the-american-dream-but-is-it-enough-americans-are-divided-according-to-a-new-survey [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvJ8YDma7Wk [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

Ӣ capitalist boom of the 1920s: strengths and weaknesses in the US economy;

Ӣ USA society in the 1920s;

Source: http://rationalrevolution.net/images/income_1918_1929.png [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

Ӣ Wall Street crash of 1929: reasons for and economic and social impact;

Black Tuesday – 29 October 1929

Source: http://rationalrevolution.net/images/income_1929_1932.png [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/76/economics/wall-street-crash-1929/ [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression.htm [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

Causes of the Great Depression

1.Credit boom

2.Buying on the margin

3.Irrational exuberance

4.Mismatch between production and consumption

5.Agricultural recession

6.Weaknesses in the Banking Sector

Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/76/economics/wall-street-crash-1929/

Source : http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40459000/gif/_40459863_wall_street_boom_gra416.gif                          [ Accessed: 10/02/2015]

http://history-world.org/great_depression.htm [ Accessed: 10/02/2015]

Ӣ E lection of Roosevelt: offering a New Deal;

Source : http://image.slidesharecdn.com/usdepthstudy1-140929100512-phpapp01/95/usa-depth-study-new-deal-62-638.jpg?cb=1412003186 [ Accessed: 10/02/2015]

The New Deal...as proposed by Franklin D Roosevelt encompassed the following:

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/franklin-d-roosevelt-and-the-first-new-deal-the-first-100-days.html [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/the-second-new-deal-social-programs-and-their-resistance.html [Accessed: 10/02/2015]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X60Nei2560w [ Accessed: 10/02/2015]

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