Book Reviews

Phillip W. Magness | 12.29.2025 7:00 AM

Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, Penguin Press, 1,344 pages, $49

Adam Smith, widely considered the first major theorist of capitalism, abhorred the institution of slavery. "Whatever work [a slave] does…can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own," he wrote in 1776. In an earlier lecture, Smith indicted laws that "strengthen the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection." The plantation system at the core of this economy was not a competitive market; planters had secured a state-sanctioned "monopoly against all the rest of the world" and "indemnif[ied] themselves by the exorbitancy of their profites for their expensive and thriftless method of cultivation." Smith singled out the exceptional cruelty found in the British colonies of "Jamaica and Barbadoes, where slaves are numerous and objects of jealousy [and] punishments even for slight offences are very shocking."

Yet in Capitalism: A Global History, Sven Beckert calls colonial Barbados "an almost perfectly Smithian economy, with utility-maximizing individuals creating a newly productive division of labor"—indeed a model of market capitalism. A simple contrast of those two characterizations is enough to raise the question of whether Beckert bothered to consult what Smith actually wrote about West Indian slavery.

In the 19th century, slaveowners and abolitionists alike noted the tensions between the emerging industrial economy and the plantation system. The former depended on freedom of movement and on choice in career and industry. The latter grafted elements of feudal hierarchy and coerced labor onto a fixed model of agrarian mass production. Proslavery theorists such as George Fitzhugh saw the two systems as irreconcilable. "Laissez faire," he argued, was "at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least." Such testimonies complicate Beckert's interpretation of slavery as a fundamentally capitalistic institution.

Beckert's book, a sweeping 1,300-page history, synthesizes bits and pieces of the academic literature to recount the emergence of capitalism over the last millennium, tracing it from the port cities of Yemen in the Middle Ages to the........

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