Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Sven Beckert
Produced by Finbar Anderson
Listen to and follow The Lede
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube | Podbean
What links Abbasid Baghdad, the Chinese city of Guangzhou, Yemen’s port city of Aden, and Venice? According to the historian Sven Beckert, they were crucial to the development of modern capitalism, as he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede.
Many studies of capitalism focus on figures and cities from European history, leading, as Beckert says, to a “very Eurocentric accounting of the story of capitalism.” In reality, he argues, capitalism was significantly influenced by major global events beyond the European continent.
“It’s pretty certain that we are not going to continue where we left off a few years ago.”
With his book “Capitalism: A Global History,” Beckert sets out to correct the record, attempting to understand capitalism as a “global process” with no fixed start or end point.
A proper understanding of capitalism should be an imperative for everyone, Beckert argues, not only because it affects everyone on the planet, but also because we shape this fundamentally important process. “Capitalism is not just an impersonal system that works itself out without human intervention,” he says. “We are the shapers of this form of economic life, and capitalism has shifted drastically over time.”
Beckert and Al Yafai discuss the development of capitalism — starting in the thriving ancient cities such as Aden, Cairo and Guangzhou that fostered its early development — and the intriguing elements of Islamic trade that encouraged its transition to a more modern form.
In Beckert’s view, the spread of Islam, as well as the urban bias of Islamic civilization, were major contributing factors to the development of capitalism, with extensive trade networks and legal systems enabling more ambitious investment in the capitalist process over a wider geographical area.
Capitalism is a political chameleon, Beckert says. “If we look at the long history of capitalism, it has thrived perfectly well under monarchical rule, in empire’s colonial rule, it has thrived under forms of authoritarian, even fascist rule,” he argues. “From a long historical perspective, we must see that capitalism is generally undogmatic, and it’s also undogmatic in terms of the form of political rule in which it is embedded.”
The exact form of capitalism changes over time, Beckert says, and we may well be in the middle of such a shift. “It’s not determined where we’re going to go next,” Beckert says, “but I think it’s pretty certain that we are not going to continue where we left off a few years ago.”