What Caused Capitalism?
Since the future seems up for grabs, so is the past. Chances are, if a historian’s narrative of the European miracle and the rise of capitalism is upbeat, the prognosis for the West will be good, whereas if the tale is not so triumphal, the forecast will be more ominous. A recent spate of books about the history of global capitalism gives readers the spectrum.
.. Only a few in the periphery, such as Japan, got the mimicry right
.. Mokyr, for instance, has championed the view that capitalism owes its existence to the cognitive, cultural, and intellectual breakthrough that came about as the scientific revolution swept Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
.. “A successful economy . . . needs not only rules that determine how the economic game is played, it needs rules to change the rules if necessary in a way that is as costless as possible. In other words, it needs meta-institutions that change the institutions, and whose changes will be accepted even by those who stand to lose from these changes.
.. The internalist narrative has long been shadowed by an externalist rival, which sees Europe’s leap forward as dependent on relations with places beyond Europe. Externalists summon a different battery of action verbs. Instead of “coordinating” or “interacting,” the system favored “exploiting” and “submitting.”
.. After the American Civil War, King Cotton fell on hard times, because Brazilian, Egyptian, and Indian estates could hire displaced peasants more cheaply than freed slaves.
.. His description of the American Civil War as “an acid test for the entire industrial order” is a brilliant example of how global historians might tackle events—as opposed to focusing on structures, processes, and networks—because he shows how the crisis of the U.S. cotton economy reverberated in Brazil, Egypt, and India. The scale of what Beckert has accomplished is astonishing.