A protest in Berlin demonstrates how capitalism has encountered resistance for generations.JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images
Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, which is a finalist for the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
Sometimes the things we are most familiar with are the hardest to see. We live in capitalism like fish swim in water. Capitalism structures not only how we work and consume but also how we organize the most intimate aspects of our lives. So all-pervasive is this peculiar economic order that we often perceive it as natural, as just how the world is.
In almost a decade spent researching capitalism’s global history, I came to see it with very different eyes. I observed how radical a departure its economic logic really was. I saw how capitalism encountered huge resistance that slowed its expansion for a very long time. I could see how this revolution in human affairs was always global, even when it looked local, and how it produced a world of great heterogeneity while also shifting its shape radically over time.
I came to understand that capitalism must be studied from a historical and global perspective, and that we must grapple with capitalism’s past to navigate our present.
The necessity of tackling capitalism’s history has become even more obvious recently as the neoliberal capitalism that has structured our lives for the past half century has begun to fall apart.
For decades, journalists, politicians and economists have told us that capitalism is about contracts, free trade and a system of sovereign states. Territory did not matter much. Capital’s freedom to roam the globe was paramount.
We are now encountering a world in which these shibboleths are increasingly questioned. Tariffs, industrial policies, governments taking ownership stakes in companies, nationalized commodity chains and even colonialism are again on the agenda. We need oil? Why not just take it? Our industry is not competitive on the global market? Why not exclude others? We are dependent on imports for crucial materials? Why not just capture distant territories to secure these inputs?
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At first glance, this violation of our certainties, if not the universal laws of economic life as such, seems shocking.
Yet the destabilizing and disconcerting present reminds us of something a deep dive into the history of capitalism makes abundantly clear: the market is always a co-production with the state. Capitalism has always been deeply political.
Centuries ago, Chinese, Indian, Arab and European rulers constructed infrastructures to foster trade, enforced increasingly sophisticated legal rules as the very foundations of markets, built monetary regimes, and created and recreated property rights. In the 17th century, we can see the effects of monopoly granted to the East India companies. On the island of Barbados, we see how the British Navy’s ability to capture far-away territories made the sugar revolution possible. Investigation of the 19th-century global economy shows that it was forged by the British government and its currency, the pound. Later, in the wake of the Second World War, the United States took up that sceptre. And, of course, the welfare state that emerged throughout the industrial heartlands and reshaped global capitalism in the 20th century is a direct result of politics. Wherever we look in the history of capitalism, we find the state as a crucial actor.
Of course, while capitalism has been a statist economic order for 500 years, the ways that states and markets interact has shifted drastically. History shows that while the emerging present-day configuration of protectionism, authoritarianism and militarism departs from the prior decades, it takes us back to an earlier moment in capitalism: the first half of the 20th century. Like today, this was an era when colonialism was in vogue, commodity chains were contained within imperial territories, protectionism was fashionable, inequality soared, and a deepening coalition of oligarchs and imperial statesmen ventured into militarism and authoritarianism. Considering what we know about how this moment eventually engulfed the globe in a civilizational catastrophe of deep economic crisis and wars, we should be alarmed.
Taking stock of capitalism’s global past will help us navigate our disconcerting present in a way that chasing the news cycle and breathlessly commenting on the events of the past 24 hours will not. We need to think seriously about the long history of the economic civilization that has shaped our world and will shape our future. While at first the information this offers may seem like a dire warning, it can also help us think about alternative futures. After all, the first thing that digging into the half-millennium-long history of global capitalism shows is that this is a human-made economic civilization. The market is not God. Politics matter. And for all its enormous power and radicalism, capitalism can and has taken on many shapes.
History shows that there are alternatives to sinking into a quagmire of sharpening inequality, environmental destruction, authoritarian rule, and militarized competition. Let’s grasp them.