Past Imperfect Episode 29: Sven Beckert on capitalism’s global odyssey

Past Imperfect Episode 29 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Capitalism: A Global History. “A radical departure and discontinuity in human affairs”: this is how Beckert describes capitalism. Capitalism: A Global History spans centuries and continents to piece together a continuous revolution in economic affairs, one which has involved slaves and plutocrats, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, and communists and committed neoliberals. Consciously avoiding the Eurocentrism of earlier histories, Beckert takes us to early Islamic hubs of capitalists like twelfth-century Aden and visits textile production centers in modern Cambodia. Along the way, he stresses how none of this would have been possible without the state. The free market, in Beckert’s telling, is fiction. It was through state power that a loose, marginal network of capitalists turned into the juggernaut that is modern capitalism.