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Workshop "Writing the Global History of Capitalism"
On 27 May 2024, the Europainsitut welcomed Sven Beckert (Laird Bell Professor of History, Harvard University) who led a workshop on "Writing the Global History of Capitalism". Together with 20 participants, including Corey Ross, Ralph Weber, Susanna Burghartz, as well as many early-career researchers and doctoral students from Basel and beyond, Beckert explored the phenomenon of capitalism from a historian’s perspective.
The lively discussion centred on parts of his forthcoming book "Writing the Global History of Capitalism", which follows the evolution of capitalism from small "islands" of capitalist logic more than a thousand years ago, to their expansion into modern "capitalist civilization". It is the undogmatic and adaptive nature of capitalism, its power to create highly stratified societies, abundant wealth, abject poverty, and to reshape environments, that continues to fascinate Beckert. Looking past principally ideological notions of capitalism, Beckert approached it as a revolutionary historical phenomenon that has fundamentally restructured societies over the last centuries, integrated much of the global countryside, and has become so dominant that capitalism and its attached logic have become quasi-natural. Beckert’s book aims to historicize capitalism, to show “how we got here”, not because of some inherent teleology, but because of historical contingency and human agency.
In the course of the discussion, Beckert shared his experiences with researching and writing on a subject as all-encompassing as capitalism, with complex schools of thought, a burgeoning body of theory, and a vast scholarly literature. The debate touched on various theoretical and methodological questions, ultimately revolving around the issue of how to write truly global histories. Beckert particularly embraced two conjoined maxims: prioritizing human actors over abstract entities and forces, and studying the global in local case studies. He maintained that capitalism can only be understood by wedding the local and the global, and held purely national or Eurocentric approaches to be deeply misplaced; an approach reflected in many of his book’s case studies.
Beckert’s visit to the Europainstitut was a much-appreciated opportunity for enriching discussion and scholarly exchange. His book "Capitalism. A Global History" will be published with Penguin Books in 2025.
The report was written by Paul Blickle, Assistant for European and Global History.
Sven Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He just published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. The book won the Bancroft Award, The Philip Taft Award, the Cundill Recognition for Excellence and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times named it one of the ten most important books of 2015. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy, on global history and on the connections between slavery and capitalism. Currently, he is at work on a history of capitalism. Beckert teaches courses on the political economy of modern capitalism, the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, labor history, global capitalism and the history of European capitalism. Together with a group of students he has also worked on the historical connections between Harvard and slavery and published Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History.