Sven Beckert on the Global History of Capitalism

Pulitzer Prize finalist Sven Beckert joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his new book, Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert describes capitalism as an ongoing process comparable in significance to geological forces; he examines the way it shapes our interactions with the world and notes its presence in every aspect of daily life. He recounts how it has been influenced and defined for the past thousand years by people all over the world, ranging from merchants to CEOs to rebels resisting enslavement. He unpacks capitalism’s devastating global effects as well as its role in technological innovation and revolution. He explains that capitalism is a product of not only cities, but also the countryside. Finally, he addresses the idea that capitalism breeds inequality and argues for more nuance in understanding it as a human-made order that can be changed. He reads from Capitalism.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, MaryClaire Dunagan, Emani Guerin, and Sarah Feldmann.

Sven Beckert

Capitalism: A Global History • Empire of Cotton: A Global History • American Capitalism: New Histories • Global History, Globally: Research and Practice Around the World • The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century • The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896

Others:

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon • Capitalism named one of 100 NYT Notable Books for 2025

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH SVEN BECKERT

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We’ve done a number of episodes on artificial intelligence which has been very much in the discourse lately. Artificial intelligence is, in historical terms, pretty young, but people are forecasting the job losses that will be caused by its popularization. So what can past eras like the one you just read about, tell us about what we might see in our society as AI upends the balance between capital and labor?

Sven Beckert: That is a great question. The book is not in the business of predicting the future—I doubt that anybody can predict the future—but it does illuminate some patterns in the very long history of capitalism that are instructive to thinking about the present. The most important one that we see by looking at 1000 years of history is that capitalism shifted quite drastically over time, and we also see that capitalism is not the natural order of things but it’s a human made order, it’s a society and a form of economic life that is created by by by a whole variety of people in all parts of the world. Throughout the history of capitalism, we have seen amazing gains in productivity that were very much linked to the emergence of new kinds of technologies. We saw the steam engine. We saw the automobile. And now we see the emergence of artificial intelligence.

These new technologies, as I mentioned, have gone along with significant increases in human productivity. In some ways, that’s a great thing because we can produce much more, and we need to put much less labor into its production. But the question is, just, how do we distribute these productivity gains? Who gets to benefit from them? If we look, for example, at the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, there were very significant productivity gains in these decades and these productivity gains were pretty widely distributed within American society, more broadly, including many workers who benefited greatly from these gains in productivity. If we look at the computer revolution of the 2000s, we see already that productivity gains that came out of that were much less evenly distributed. They were captured much more by just a small part of American society. And now, I think the question with artificial intelligence is not so much “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” but the question is more “who gets to benefit from what might be—we are not certain about this—but what might be significant gains in productivity?”

In some ways, that could be a great opportunity for American society. It could make us either work fewer hours because we don’t have to do some of the work we had to do previously, but it also might make us materially better off because we are now much more productive. In the end, this is a political decision but the book should encourage us to think about these various possibilities, these various trajectories. The future is not set in stone. If the book shows one thing it;s that the future is open, and there are various futures possible at any given moment.

Whitney Terrell: I do really like that point. What I got out of the book was looking at periods of concentration of wealth, which we’re experiencing now, that have happened before, and then there have been changes. I noted a line from the middle of the book where it says, “Between 1880 and 1914 the top decile of French, British and Swedish citizens controlled 80 to 90 percent of all the prosperity of their nation.” That was another period of really high wealth concentration that changed later.

SB: Inequality is not an invention of capitalism. Obviously, inequality has existed before capitalism. But within capitalism, the forms that inequality has taken have shifted drastically over time. Inequality has sharpened at certain moments in time, as you mentioned, and has also diminished at other moments in time. In some ways, the inequality regime, the forms of inequality that we live in, are not a fact of nature. Like capitalism, more broadly, it is not a fact of nature, but it’s a human created order that we can also change.

And as you say, we live in a world of almost absurd degrees of social inequality. When we look at the world and think about the impact of artificial intelligence, it sometimes seems that just a few families are going to capture almost all of the gains that come out of this. This is a radical form of inequality. We also see, if we look around the world today and the politics of the world today, that in the end, politically, that kind of inequality is unsustainable within a democratic liberal society.

VVG: I’m realizing as you’re talking that if we are, doomsayers about AI—and I, frankly, have been a doomsayer about AI—one of the things we’re subtly signing on for is a certain form of capitalism, whereas theoretically, it could be something that reshapes capitalism such that extractive labor and the assumption that we’re all going to work ourselves to the bone could actually, in a really widespread manner, theoretically vanish, and we could become a society that’s much more invested in art and culture. I love this vision of the world. That’s actually really great. Even though I have to balance that out with anger at the way that AI has been developed off of, stolen data, etcetera, I’m assuming that one vision of an AI-driven society is a given, whereas it’s actually not.

SB: Again, I think the history of capitalism is very instructive. Stolen data is the kind of dispossession that is constant in the history of capitalism. We discussed that already when we looked at Barbados. The book ends on a somewhat optimistic note because I think sometimes we need to pause in all that talk about how dire things seem and how deeply many Americans feel economic pain. We should sometimes pause and remind ourselves we live in what is probably the richest society in the history of humanity, and that is also a direct outcome of the capitalist revolution. We live in that society, and we can address most of the material problems that we face in society. We can feed everybody. We can provide everybody with an excellent education. We could provide everybody with access to excellent healthcare. This is all within our powers. This sets us apart from other societies, and this also sets us apart from other moments in human history, and that is a great thing. But of course, in a world in which a teeny minority of Americans capture almost all of the proceeds of these gains, we live in a society that becomes ever more unequal, and we are actually not addressing these problems. Sometimes there is a sense that we cannot address these problems but we can. We materially we can. Maybe not politically, but materially, we certainly can.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Sven Beckert by Maurice Weiss.