New Books in Economic and Business History

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin trace the evolution of the international capitalist system over the last century. (Panitch is a professor of political scien...

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing...

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that...

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad's Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China's Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case stud...

I remember clearly the day I was offered my first credit card. It was in Berkeley, CA in 1985. I was walking on Sproul Plaza and I saw a booth manned by two students. They were giving out all kinds of swag, so I walked over to see what was to be had. T-shirts, I think. I asked them if I could get a credit card, sure that the answer had to be “no.” But the answer was an enthusiastic “yes.” I asked...

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’l...