Best Historical Literature Capitalism

[lelick1234]

  Can any of you make any suggestions about building up my knowledge of capitalism in modern world history?  My specialty is U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East, but I am interested in all type of historical literature related to the history of capitalism.  

[Klonoa]

I'm not a well read historian yet, but I found Robert Marks's The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (World Social Change) very interesting. It is more of an overview rather than a deep read of how different races and cultures became interlocked economically through trade and the creation of modern capitalism from a non-Eurocentric lens. He does a great quick analysis of globalization towards the end.

[lelick1234]

I'm not a well read historian yet, but I found Robert Marks's The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (World Social Change) very interesting. It is more of an overview rather than a deep read of how different races and cultures became interlocked economically through trade and the creation of modern capitalism from a non-Eurocentric lens. He does a great quick analysis of globalization towards the end.

Neither am I, but this does look like a good start. I have begun to read Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction.  Like the rest of the series, it has been an easy, but thought-provoking introduction to the topic. I think your suggestion will complement it perfectly. 

[ExponentialDecay]

I'm not sure about the discipline of economic history, but I know something about the history of economic thought, so maybe you will find this helpful.

 

If you're looking for introductory works, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers is a good introduction to the history of economic thought starting with Adam Smith (ideally, you should start with Aristotle's treatises on how to run a household [oikonomia] and progress onto the medieval philosophers like Aquinas to get a fuller appreciation of where the 18th century porto-economic philosophers were coming from). It's light reading aimed at laymen that contextualizes developments in economic thought in a historical background, so although I wouldn't cite it in a paper, but it's great for when you're just dipping your feet into the discipline. I haven't read other works by Heilbroner, but he has written in more detail on capitalism, communism, and theoretical themes in economics, and potentially those works could also be good.

 

Also, Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is informative (I wouldn't be put off by the title - debt is one of the necessary mechanisms of a capitalist economy).

 

If you care for primary sources, here's a syllabus for a history of economic thought class at Harvard that lists most of the important stuff you should read. If you don't have economic training/don't care about the discipline of economics, I would pay most attention to Mun, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Malthus, Mill, Marx, Hayek (not the essay mentioned there - I would read The Use of Knowledge in Society, which talks about a fundamental economic principle that differentiates capitalism from communism), Sen. If you're interested in why economics is as it is, Walras, Ricardo, Friedman, Keynes, I would argue Veblen are necessary reading. Most of these should be free on IDEAS and similar, if that's important to you.

 

Though perhaps more relevant to economists than historians, Mark Blaug's Economic History and the History of Economics (with special attention to No History of Ideas) is a good brain-cleaner. He also wrote on Keynes, Ricardo, Marxian economics I believe, and two books on the great economists.

Edited August 7, 2015 by ExponentialDecay

[lelick1234]

I'm not sure about the discipline of economic history, but I know something about the history of economic thought, so maybe you will find this helpful.

 

If you're looking for introductory works, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers is a good introduction to the history of economic thought starting with Adam Smith (ideally, you should start with Aristotle's treatises on how to run a household [oikonomia] and progress onto the medieval philosophers like Aquinas to get a fuller appreciation of where the 18th century porto-economic philosophers were coming from). It's light reading aimed at laymen that contextualizes developments in economic thought in a historical background, so although I wouldn't cite it in a paper, but it's great for when you're just dipping your feet into the discipline. I haven't read other works by Heilbroner, but he has written in more detail on capitalism, communism, and theoretical themes in economics, and potentially those works could also be good.

 

Also, Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is informative (I wouldn't be put off by the title - debt is one of the necessary mechanisms of a capitalist economy).

 

If you care for primary sources, here's a syllabus for a history of economic thought class at Harvard that lists most of the important stuff you should read. If you don't have economic training/don't care about the discipline of economics, I would pay most attention to Mun, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Malthus, Mill, Marx, Hayek (not the essay mentioned there - I would read The Use of Knowledge in Society, which talks about a fundamental economic principle that differentiates capitalism from communism), Sen. If you're interested in why economics is as it is, Walras, Ricardo, Friedman, Keynes, I would argue Veblen are necessary reading. Most of these should be free on IDEAS and similar, if that's important to you.

 

Though perhaps more relevant to economists than historians, Mark Blaug's Economic History and the History of Economics (with special attention to No History of Ideas) is a good brain-cleaner. He also wrote on Keynes, Ricardo, Marxian economics I believe, and two books on the great economists.

Cool, this is should keep me busy. 

[RevolutionBlues]

I'd second everything that ExponentialDecay said IF you're interested in a history of economic thought or ideas about capitalism. But there is a big split between histories of economic thought, economic history as done by economists looking at historical data sets, and economic history as done by historians investigating things economic. Most that try to blend the different approaches I think fall fairly flat, with a few notable exceptions. However, I am very enthusiastic about the potential of the new History of Capitalism movement. In short, what elements of the history of capitalism are you particularly interested in and do you think you might be interested in works rooted more in the methodology of historians, economists, or intellectual historians?—bearing in mind, of course, that the best works will seamlessly blend all of the above.

[ExponentialDecay]

If OP's not coming back, I would like RevolutionBlues to expand on economic history from a history department's perspective and to name the notable exceptions. Pretty please

[lelick1234]

I'd second everything that ExponentialDecay said IF you're interested in a history of economic thought or ideas about capitalism. But there is a big split between histories of economic thought, economic history as done by economists looking at historical data sets, and economic history as done by historians investigating things economic. Most that try to blend the different approaches I think fall fairly flat, with a few notable exceptions. However, I am very enthusiastic about the potential of the new History of Capitalism movement. In short, what elements of the history of capitalism are you particularly interested in and do you think you might be interested in works rooted more in the methodology of historians, economists, or intellectual historians?—bearing in mind, of course, that the best works will seamlessly blend all of the above.

 Honestly, I am reading Daniel J. Sargent's A Superpower Transformed and I stumbled upon a seemingly extremely important part of his thesis that I felt like I only understood on a very superficial level.

"With the implosion of the Cold War order, international trade and financial globalization resurged, reaching levels not seen since the late nineteenth century. The relationship of US economic power to the world economy also shifted. The United States in the era of the Cold War was a dynamo of production, an industrial hub, from which resources flowed outward to allies and clients. By the 1970s, this role could not be sustained. “Americans are moving into an era when we are going to be dependent on the outside world,” explained one former official in 1973. “American self-sufficiency is over.” In the 1970s, the US economy became dependent on external inputs, which made the United States a beneficiary of globalization , as it had been in the late nineteenth century. The United States in 1971 ran its first trade deficit since 1893. It became in the mid-1980s dependent on foreigners’ savings to sustain domestic consumption and to finance what Fox defined as the superpower’s hallmark— its worldwide military reach. The US government, meanwhile, began to cede the responsibility for managing the world economic order that it had exercised since the 1940s— not to foreign American military power did not retreat from the world in the 1970s, but the locus of its exercise shifted from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, which became a primary zone of US engagement, alongside Europe and Northeast Asia. Having delegated responsibility for regional security to allies and clients, the United States came in the late 1970s to accept a permanent military role in the Persian Gulf. This reorientation hinged on economic changes, which the oil crises of the 1970s made manifest. The world’s dominant oil producer until the late 1960s, the United States became in the 1970s an oil importer. In 1977, Americans imported more than half the oil they consumed. In energy, as in other sectors, the advantages that once made the United States the powerhouse of the world economy were narrowing; as the margins of superiority closed, Americans imported more oil, more goods, and more capital, and the superpower became dependent upon the resources that an integrating world economy furnished."

 

If I am only understanding the bare minimum of this paragraph, then I feel that I would not necessarily understand the data or the basic sources that he uses to base this assessment.  I feel that I might also need to take some basic economic courses online or read an undergraduate macroeconomics terms. Maybe some of these terms will contain deep meaning to me after I increase my economic knowledge.  

As far as it goes with the history of economic thought, I guess I feel it is one of my duties as an aspiring intellectual to have a more than basic knowledge of critical theory, especially economic theories.  I have always wanted to read Marx's Capital with understanding, but I doubt I would be able without a basic knowledge of economics first, then at least a basic knowledge of prior economic thinkers and their philosophies.  

This is at least what I think.  Are there are any other ideas about this issue?  

 

 

 

[RevolutionBlues]

lelick1234— There was a discussion published in the September 2014 JAH called "Interchange: The History of Capitalism" that might be of interest to you. One of the things some of the contributors call for in it is the development of at least a basic—i.e. neoclassical—economic literacy among historians, given that in the general turn against "Marxist" histories in the '80s and '90s anything that referenced the economy was suspect. It's an important, but difficult, task because historians of capitalism also need to be savvy in foreign languages, cultural analysis, social history, etc. I would totally agree that such literacy allows a much deeper understanding of key theorists like Marx. My own thought is that for the quotation you referenced reading an intro to macroeconomics textbook, MOOC, or audited course could be sufficient, although I might expect a similar study of microeconomics to be beneficial as well. 

 

In terms of a few books to help build general knowledge of economic history, Ivan Berend has two survey texts on the economic history of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries that might be a good starting point, and I'm sure there are similar texts for American and Middle Eastern History. Check Cambridge University Press since they seem to publish the most economic history of the major university presses. You might also look at Joyce Appleby's Relentless Revolution as a general history of capitalism. In terms of works that consciously identify as being "History of Capitalism," Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton and Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told are good recent and popular works in this burgeoning field. If you're interested in historiography for the approach, look through the lists on http://www.historyofcapitalism.net/Readings-historiog.html Also check out the syllabi on http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu Finally, Cornell runs a history of capitalism boot camp in the summer to get historians up to speed on basic economic methods. 

 

 

ExponentialDecay—I tend to think that what differentiates economic history as done by economists and economic history as done by historians is methodology and sources, questions asked, and basic assumptions about humanity. Over the last several decades "economic history" has become dominated by economists asking questions about incentives and behaviour in the past, testing them empirically with primarily econometric methods, and rooted in the discipline's assumptions about rational choice. Nobel laureate Douglass North's institutional histories would be a good example of this. Historians, on the other hand, tend to situate economic behaviour within a broader set of questions about society, the environment, etc. The New Social History of the 1960s and '70s, i.e. Charles Tilly and EP Thompson, used the economy as the first step in a materialist path to understanding politics. Bill Cronon's Nature's Metropolis is an incredible example of economic history as done by historians. But this also reveals a very different definition of capitalism and understanding of human action, as visible in comparing History of Capitalism authors like Beckert and Baptist—who see capitalism as a complex and historically contingent development that interweaves economic factors within a broader social, political, environmental, and cultural milieu—with the contributors to The Cambridge History of Capitalism—which defines capitalism as rational economic behaviour and so sees it as universal in the human experience ever since Friday joined Crusoe and homo economicus was born.

 

Generally I'm disappointed with those who try to bridge the gap, with Beckert's and Baptist's economics being really, really basic, while Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtue and Joel Mokyr's Enlightened Economy are similarly weak on modern historical methodology. However, some notable exceptions include Kenneth Pommeranz's Great Divergence, Jan de Vries's Industrious Revolution, and Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction. I'm currently reading Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune and have only read parts of Alexia Yates's upcoming Selling Paris, but both also seem to do well at bridging the gap, although still certainly from more of a historical background.

Edited August 9, 2015 by RevolutionBlues

[knp]

So you're mostly positive on Empire of Cotton, except that its economics are too basic? I'd love to hear more about what you think about it, since I'm interested but haven't read it myself. I was scared away from reading the longer version because the excerpt that appeared in the Atlantic was so wrong-headed. Its fundamental argument, as I read it, was that before the American Civil War, American cotton and American slavery were foundational to a huge part of the world economy. Then because of the disruption during and after the American Civil War, the production of cotton expanded globally into other areas where there was a lot of (free) labor available. The fundamental effect of the Civil War, then, was to globalize cotton and remove the connection between slavery and cotton, which would from then forward only be produced by free labor.

 

The section of Beckert's argument about the new production of non-slave cotton is very lazy, however, which is unfortunate. The first half of his argument seems right, that disruption from the Civil War caused globalization of this industry, but his argument that now cotton was produced by "free" labor is vague at best. A thoughtful account might have analyzed what happened next, rather than lumping it all together as "free." Most cotton production ended up coming from India, followed by Egypt. What does "free" mean in those two contexts? Those were both under some form of British control - what were the implications of that? Was this a result of conscious British policy? Etc. If he'd talked about that, or does so in the book, my skepticism fades away. It feels like he got close to a really interesting and complete argument about how the Civil War changed cotton production globally, but by not examining what happened after the Civil War, he stuck the landing.

 

Whether because of that laziness or some other cause, though, the facts Beckert produces in the Atlantic article are wrong. Beckert makes a big deal about how beginning during the Civil War (1861-1865), cotton was no longer produced by slaves: instead, it was produced by free laborers in India, Egypt, and Brazil. The same Brazil that abolished slavery in 1888? Sure, now slavery was a much smaller part of the base of labor for production than it had been in the United States, but you just can't say that cotton from Brazil in 1860 was "non-slave cotton," which he does. There are some small factual errors that really are small; there are others which make the reader doubt the entire piece, and a reference to "non-slave cotton [produced] in Brazil" in the 1860s is one of the latter.

[RevolutionBlues]

lelick1234—Another good textbook for the history of economic thought is EK Hunt's History of Economic Thought. The original edition is certainly slanted towards Marxism, but is really good, although I have not read the newer revised and coauthored edition.

 

 

KNP—If you're on the fence, I would certainly read Empire of Cotton. It is fairly long, but its written for a mass market and so it's actually a quick and enjoyable read. To clarify, the reason I really like this book is primarily methodological. As a new subfield only recently recognised by the AHA, the History of Capitalism is still in an experimental phase trying to discover itself and figure out how to be written. Sven Beckert is at the forefront of the push for this approach, and this work reflects his interest in defining capitalism as a distinctive and global phase in history. Key to this is intertwining political and economic (and some social) developments into a comprehensive narrative.

 

That being said, it certainly has some drawbacks. For me the biggest problem is that it's somewhat of a history from above, focusing on capitalists and especially politicians ("War Capitalism" as a corrective to laissez-faire myths) without extending that same sense of agency to workers, whether "doubly free" or enslaved. The issue you raise is really important, but it is much more apparent in the article than in the book. I think the general argument he was making was that two hundred years of capitalism being based largely on a system of slavery was relatively quickly replaced by two hundred years of capitalism being based largely on wage labor. But he is very clear in the book that this transition from slavery to wage labor in places like Guiana and Brazil and from serfdom to wage labor in places like England, Egypt, and India were rooted in the coercive power of the state being bent to capitalist interests. In this sense, he is not so much pointing to a radical break as to a transition in the outward manifestation of the same underlying logic of capitalism. I think you're right that he may make this transition seem much more sudden than it really was and he certainly underemphasises the "weapons of the weak" in effecting this change. However, I would still totally recommend this book, if more for the overarching narrative and approach he's advocating than for the specific arguments.

[RevolutionBlues]

Here's a really good essay by Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy covering the relationship between the fields of history and economics in regards to capitalism (it even begins with a Braudel quote!): http://m.chronicle.com/article/The-FallRise-of-Economic/150247

If that link doesn't work, here is the [the beginning of the] full text:

"Irritated, one shoos it out the door, and almost immediately it climbs in through the window." Without the concept of capitalism, the late French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote, it was impossible to study economic history. But the reverse is equally true: We can't understand capitalism without economic history.

Once a mainstay of history departments, economic history was, with historians' complicity, seized in the mid-20th century by economists who sucked the culture and chronology out of it and turned it into an obscure province of mathematical formulas. There it languished. The field became increasingly uncool. By the 1990s, to be a materialist in the age of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu was to be "deterministic"--in other words, a dinosaur. So economic history further retreated to economics departments, where many self-described economic historians had already been gathering under the banner of the "new economic history."

The past decade has exposed some fundamental problems with that division of disciplinary labor. The now-old "new" economic history either fizzled or has become so technical, so unrecognizable to anyone who cannot wield its finely tuned analytics, that few historians can engage with it. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer economics departments now consider history--including the history of economics itself--a relevant domain of disciplinary inquiry, with many of the top departments having eliminated economic history from their programs altogether.

~~~~~~~~

By JEREMY ADELMAN and JONATHAN LEVY

Jeremy Adelman is a professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at Princeton. His forthcoming book, Latin America: A Global History, will be published by Princeton University Press. Jonathan Levy is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and the author of the forthcoming book Ages of American Capitalism, to be published by Random House.

Edited August 16, 2015 by rising_star
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