History of Capitalism
Professor Sven Beckert
Theoretical Approaches, Conceptual Frameworks
Overviews and Origins
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
2. Karl Marx, Capital (Vol I) (1867/1885/1894)
3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905)
4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944)
5. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962)
6. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967)
7. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975)
8. Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Dependency and Development in Latin America
(1979)
9. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985)
10. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987)
11. Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World System in the Perspective of Latin America
and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93:4 (1988)
12. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990-1992 (1992)
13. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (1997)
14. Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic
World (1999)
15. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (2000)
16. John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (2000)
17. John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (2003)
18. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence (2003)
19. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (2010)
20. Edward Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed through Natural
Resource Exploitation (2011)
21. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (2011)
22. John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America
(2011)
23. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
(2014)
24. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014)
Neoliberalism
25. Peter Winn, Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era (2004)
26. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
27. James Ferguson, “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal
Africa,” American Anthropologist 107:3 (September 2005)
28. Nancy MacLean, "Southern Dominance in Borrowed Language: The Regional Origins of American
Neoliberalism", in New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in
America (2008)
29. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the
Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009)
30. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
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Work and Capitalism
Slavery
31. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)
32. Barrington Moore, “The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution,” in Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966)
33. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972)
34. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900 (1980)
35. Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (1986)
36. Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830
(1988)
37. Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (1989)
38. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (2000)
39. Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (2000)
40. Jeffrey Needell, “The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade in 1850: Historiography, Slave Agency
and Statesmanship.” Journal of Latin American Studies 33, 681-711 (2001)
41. Walter Johnson, "The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question" (2004)
42. Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (2004)
43. Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, “From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of
Jabaquara and the Problem of Citizenship in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” The Hispanic
American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (May 1, 2006): 247-274
44. Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (2011)
45. Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery,
Capitalism, and Personhood,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of
Nineteenth-Century America, Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds. (2012)
46. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013)
47. Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery & the Making of American Capitalism
(2014)
48. Caitlin Rosenthal, “Slavery’s Scientific Management”
Wage Labor
49. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
50. Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, & Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919” AHR (1973)
51. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)
52. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1987)
53. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor
Activism, 1865-1925 (1987)
54. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (1988)
55. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(1991)
56. Cindy Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant
Poverty, 1870-1945 (1997)
57. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American
Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (2003)
58. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (2008)
59. Marcel Van Der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (2008)
60. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009)
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Ecology and Capitalism
Commodifying Landscapes
61. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1947)
62. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)
63. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)
64. Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina
and Canada, 1890-1914 (1994)
65. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995)
66. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (1997)
67. Emilio Kouri, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (2004)
68. Stuart B. Schwartz, Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680
(2004)
69. John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras
and the United States (2006)
70. Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American
Commodity Chains and the Building of the Global Economy, 1500-2000 (2006)
71. James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (2007)
72. Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (2008)
73. Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous
Power in the Southwest Borderlands,” The William and Mary Quarterly 67:2 (2010), 173-208.
74. Edmund Russell et al., “The Nature of Power: Synthesizing the History of Technology and
Environmental History,” Technology and Culture 52:2 (2011), 246-259.
75. W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (2012)
76. Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History
(2013)
Science, Ideology, and the State: Organizing and Managing Knowledge of Nature
77. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and The Scientific Revolution (1980)
78. Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean,
1760-1940 (2002)
79. Bruce J. Schulman, “Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management and the
Development of the American State,” Journal of Policy History, 17 (2005)
80. Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of
Globalization (2006)
81. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
(2007)
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Climate Under Capitalism
82. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
83. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35:2 (2009)
84. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the
Earth (2011)
85. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary
History 43:1 (2012)
86. Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene: Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis”
(2014)
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