The Global Origins of Capitalism

A centuries-spanning tour de force that speaks directly to the present, The Global Origins of Capitalism will reshape our understanding of economic history. Democratic market societies are in crisis. Social dislocation, anomie, and global ecological collapse live side-by-side with unimaginable wealth. Alongside real global improvements in health and longevity we find ourselves buffeted by a never-ending cycle of forces beyond our power or understanding. Gradually over a thousand years, and then quickly in the blink of an historical eye, capitalism has taken over human life, transforming our social relations and very consciousness. In The Global Origins of Capitalism, Yochai Benkler describes how this out-of-human-control dynamic evolved to the point where it overwhelmed all opposition, bringing with it both unimaginable prosperity and recurring patterns of inequality and social dislocation, and why all efforts to tame it have, to this point, failed. In doing so, Benkler provides a major reinterpretation of the entire history of modern capitalism, from the founding of Baghdad--the first major proto-capitalist node in a half-globe-spanning network through which institutions and knowledge, technologies and raw materials, people and products flowed--to the present. Innovation, production, trade, and distribution have always involved creation and leveraging of power, yet power is an issue that, over time, the mainstream economics profession came to treat as secondary or even insignificant. For that reason, only a new institutional political economy, one that puts power at the core of our analysis, can help us grasp our condition and point us toward solutions. New technologies created amazing new possibilities for production, but also triggered unemployment, migration, and conflict as new ways of doing things disrupted settled ways of life, making some poor and others rich. The invention of finance made the first capitalist states the most powerful countries in the world, but also introduced the boom-bust cycles that have destabilized modern societies ever since. After charting the entire trajectory of global capitalism through this political-economic prism, Benkler closes with an analysis of our present crisis, in which the system that has governed our lives since the 1970s is collapsing around us. A centuries-spanning tour de force that speaks directly to the present, The Global Origins of Capitalism shows how economic history and political history are really one and the same. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.