A new book on capitalism

A review here at the New York Times on the kind of book by an academic that sounds interesting, but which I can tell would take too much devotion to read in full:  "Capitalism: a Global History". 

A couple of extracts:

Previous histories have usually treated capitalism as a European invention, but Beckert, as ambitious as he is erudite, shows how capitalism arose as a global phenomenon, the peculiar behavior of a few merchants in places as far apart as Cairo and Changzhou.

By mapping the diverse origins of capitalism, Beckert reveals its protean and resilient character. Over hundreds of years, merchants created small enclaves of capital within port cities and elaborate networks of trust that stretched over long distances. Such connections, Beckert observes, helped them outflank and survive resistance from above, by landed aristocrats who thought “making money from money seemed closer to sin, sorcery or plain theft,” and from below, by “cultivators and craftspeople” who were loath to give up their local conceptions of prices set by “a shared sense of morality.” 

So far, sounds like it supports the generally conservative idea that capitalism is a more-or-less natural evolution arising out of how groups of people like to manage their lives.  But there are wrinkles, to put it mildly:

In these remote corners of the world European investors conducted a kind of civil experiment, extending the logic of the market to all aspects of life. Everything, especially human labor, was commodified and could be bought and sold for money.

And:

He offers an especially devastating critique of earlier mythologies of capitalism, showing how the “invisible hand” of the market does not peacefully guide world affairs, and how the development of capitalism was in no sense “natural.”

Like many books before it, “Capitalism” is not only a history but a moral indictment. The metaphor of monstrosity runs throughout Beckert’s pages. In his telling, the hand of capital is visible, cold, hard and vicious, and capitalism is a promiscuous creature, drawing on different kinds of labor, from enslaved to free and many in between, within various political frameworks, from democracy to dictatorship.

Two leading thinkers of the 18th century, the French philosopher Montesquieu and the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, argued that world trade promoted peace and harmony because it advanced mutual interest and interdependency.

What actually happened, and indeed was happening during the lifetimes of both men, was that trade was often militarized and violent. Armed fleets pointed their cannons at harbors to open markets for trade, and kings relied on bankers, when they weren’t trying to rein them in, to raise silver to outfit soldiers with guns and swords. Montesquieu was born in 1689. As Beckert points out, “between 1689 and 1815, Britain and France were at war for 64 years.”