Global Capitalism: A Roundtable

Join Sven Beckert (Harvard) and Alessandro Stanziani (EHESS) to discuss their new books on the global history of capitalism: ‘Capitalism: A Global History’ and ‘Earth Capital: The Long History of Capitalism’.

Sven Beckert's 'Capitalism' is a major new global history of capitalism. No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organise our politics. Sven Beckert situates the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework in this fascinating new book. Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from merchant communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. Then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that would propel them across the oceans. This epic drama corresponded at no point to an idealised dream of free markets. All along, state-backed institutions and imperial expansions shaped its dynamics. Capitalism decentres the European perspective, highlighting agency and resistance.

Alessandro Stanziani's 'Earth Capital' is a major new history of capitalism that takes account of the material and ecological underpinnings of productive activity as well as the social, political and institutional dimensions of economic life. It retraces the history of capitalism over a long time period, giving particular attention to the role of food, agriculture, energy and natural resources, and with an eye to the future, mindful of the need to find solutions to an ecological crisis that threatens to overwhelm us all. Alessandro Stanziani shows that the development of capitalism since the twelfth century has been based on two primary forms of exploitation: of labour, often coerced, and of what he calls 'Earth capital', by which he means both the planet as a whole and its land and natural resources as factors of production. While these two forms of exploitation have gone hand-in-hand, the emphasis has shifted over time: forced labour gradually declined in importance from 1870 to the present, the exploitation of land, fossil fuels and natural resources grew at an unprecedented rate from 1870 to precedented rate, the destructive consequences of which are becoming increasingly apparent today. Looking to the future, Stanziani argues that, in order to deal with the immense challenges we now face, we must be prepared radically to rethink our economic and political systems. He proposes a new social contract that would make democracy, social equality and the environment the three pillars of the world of tomorrow.

Meet our speakers:

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. His last book, Empire of Cotton, won many prizes, including the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History, shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.

Alessandro Stanziani is a Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He has written extensively on the relationship between serfdom and industry in Russia, the development of capitalism in France, the Inner Asian encounters between expanding Russian, Indian, and Chinese empires, and the development of indenture and various statuses of unfreedom in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic world. Among his books are Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective: Eighteenth to Early 20th Centuries and Bâtisseurs d’Empire: Russie, Inde et Chine à croisée des mondes.

Meet our discussant:

Dina Gusejnova is an Associate Professor of International History at LSE. She has previously been Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Sheffield University and has taught at Queen Mary University of London, UCL, and at the University of Chicago. She is the author of 'European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57' (Cambridge University Press 2016). Her current research concentrates on the longer-term impact of the internment of scholars from continental Europe in Britain during the Second World War, on which she has just published, with Kim Wünschmann, ‘A paralegal institution: tribunals and the place of law in the framework of internment during the Second World War’(2025). Dina is currently working on a contemporary research project called Project 2022, supported by the European Commission, which examines the consequences of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine for research and education in Europe.

Meet our chair:

David Motadel is an Associate Professor of International History at LSE. He works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s global entanglements. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014; translated into nine languages), ranging from North Africa and the Balkans to the Caucasus and the Crimea, and the editor of a volume on Islam in the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014). Among his current projects is a global history of Europe’s empires in the era of the Second World War, 1935-1948, which is under contract with Penguin Press (Allen Lane). Some first results were published in ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt Against Empire’ in the American Historical Review.

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