Capitalism's Thousand-Year Story
Sven Beckert's wide-angle history.
This week: a conversation with Sven Beckert about the long history of capitalism. Find it at our site or wherever you go for podcasts.
The historian Sven Beckert stops by our newest show with a vast historical perspective of capitalism. It’s not just the capitalism of the last few hundred years. Beckert’s story—you can read about it in his new book, Capitalism: A Global History—takes us way back. Something very modern preceded what we think of as the modern world, in specific locations around the globe. Beckert says:
The book starts in the port of Aden in present-day Yemen, and I look at the community of merchants there who are trading horses, spices, textiles, metal wares, between the Arab world and East Africa, Northern Africa, but especially into India . . . And what is striking about these merchants in Aden in the year 1150 is that what they do seems to us strikingly modern.
We immediately understand the logic in which they operate. They buy things to sell them and to make money and to accumulate more capital to then invest it in further voyages to East Africa or to India. And so their activities are strikingly modern.
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