history of capitalism

Quinn Slobodian: Can Democracy be Safe from the Market?

A new history of capitalist policy initiatives focuses on the "zone," a territory of radical deregulation where capital is free from constraint by democracy. A reviewer asks whether there can be a zone where democracy is insulated against the market. 

Can Capitalism Exist Without Excess?

by Trevor Jackson

The pandemic supply chain disruptions have focused attention on shortages, but the problem of gluts—of food being destroyed when it can't be profitably sold–reflects a deeper problem with global capitalism. 

Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross See the Car as a Machine for Unfreedom

The automobile is an object made to symbolize freedom that actually physically embodies a host of coercive relationships to work, debt, surveillance and policing, and the basic right of free movement, according to the authors of a new study. 

Clara Mattei on the History of Austerity Politics

A decade before the Great Depression, capital responded to a serious crisis of legitimacy by adopting measures that punished a restive working class through scarcity, argues a new economic history; maintaining hierarchy, not growing the economy, is the objective.

Review: New Book Worships the False Idol of the Responsible Corporation

The idea of corporate social responsibility is an artifact of the domination of society by big business, a domination so powerful as to make alternatives exceedingly difficult to imagine. A new book internalizes that difficulty. 

The Crisis Historian Has Bad News About the Crisis

"Wherever our current catastrophe is headed, it has been good to Adam Tooze, he tells me with some bewilderment."

The Dark Underside of the "Family-Like" Business

by Erik Baker

The history of businesses cloaking their labor practices in paternalism is long; the most recent chapter dates back to the spiritual explorations of the 1960s counterculture and the surveillance practices of Henry Ford. 

The Rent is Too Damn High(ly Central to Modern Economies)

by Trevor Jackson

Historian Trevor Jackson reviews Brett Christophers's book on rent, which places the power of the rentier class at the center of the inequality and dysfunction of modern capital and brings Marx's original investigations into the 21st century.

Slavery, Capitalism, and Empire: Conversations in Black Freedom Studies

Justene Hill Edwards and Daniel Immerwahr discuss the relationship between the global transformations of capital, empire and slavery and the history of freedom and unfreedom. 

Focus on the Family? The Problems with Blaming GOP Radicalism on Family Business

by Paul Heideman

Is the rise of the privately-held megacorporation the root of the radical conservative movement, or has corporate America long had a right-wing fringe? 

Private Capital Strangled Our Cities (Review of Destin Jenkins)

by Samuel Zipp

Destin Jenkins's new book makes a case that metropolitan segregation and racial inequality trace back to cities' dependence on the bond market. 

Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds

by Hannah Appel

"As your work so powerfully shows, the municipal bond market structures racial privilege, entrenches spatial neglect, and distributes wealth and power. American cities are dependent on financiers, rating agencies, and bond markets for nearly everything."

Land of Capital: Jonathan Levy's "Ages of American Capital" Reviewed

by Steven Hahn

"Ages of Capitalism" is one of the first synthetic accounts of the relationship of capitalism and American politics and society, and provides an important vocabulary for a developing field of inquiry. It also, oddly, resonates with the older consensus history that assumed capitalism as a core part of American life.

New Research Shows Slavery’s Central Role in U.S. Economic Growth Leading up to the Civil War

Historian Sven Beckert and economist Mark Stelzner's collaborative research applies new methods for quantifying how much the labor productivity of enslaved people contributed to economic output, as well as identifying the gap between white households with and without slaves as a driver of inequality. 

Capitalism American-Style: A Financial History of the United States

“Ages of American Capitalism" by Jonathan Levy sheds light on U.S. history as seen through a financial lens. 

Our Insurance Dystopia

by Caley Horan

America's health insurance morass is a result of the replacement of the ideal of mutual, universal risk sharing with the privatization of risk in pursuit of profit. 

How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America w/ Joshua D. Rothman

Historian Joshua D. Rothman discusses "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America," a new book linking the internal slave trade to the development of American capitalism. 

Before the Civil War, New Orleans Was the Center of the U.S. Slave Trade (Excerpt)

by Joshua D. Rothman

After Congress ended the importation of enslaved people in 1808, domestic traders made New Orleans the center of an increasingly active and lucrative slave trade. 

The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business

by Joshua D. Rothman

"We still live in the world that Franklin and Armfield’s profits helped build, and with the enduring inequalities that they and their industry entrenched."

The End of Development

by Tim Barker

"Capitalism’s publicists are experiencing something of what Marxists went through after 1989, with one important difference: capitalism may be increasingly discredited, but it has not disappeared the way state socialism did."