Capitalism: A Short History by Jürgen Kocka (review)

Capitalism can only be understood as a system which had a beginning and must have an end. Marxist discussion of the history of capitalism in recent times has been founded on Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1946). That work became the foundation of all further Marxist study of capitalist history. Famously it was the jumping-off place for the transition debate which proved to be so critical to both Marxist historiography and theory.

Lately we have seen the publication of two important works in the Marxist vein that deal with the transition question and also later capitalist history. In a novel twist the Indian scholar Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) analyzes capitalist history from the perspective not of accumulation but of global human development. In this light Bagchi’s careful scholarship demonstrates that in both Europe and the rest of the world that capitalism has stunted human development. Bagchi’s account represents a pioneer attempt to study the history of capitalism from the perspective of global humanity rather than from the viewpoint of Europe and capital.

Another theoretically interesting effort to transcend a Eurocentric view is How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, (London: Pluto Press, 2015) by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu. Redeploying Trotsky’s concept of combined and uneven development the authors show that that from capitalism’s inception non-Western societies were intrinsically rather than extrinsically linked to capitalist accumulation.

Among non-Marxists the cultural turn from the 1980s onward led to a loss of interest in economic history. But since the onset of the crisis in 2008 non-Marxists have begun to interest themselves once again in the subject and indeed in the history of capitalism itself. This can be seen in the recent neoliberal Cambridge History of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, a two volume work which takes the reader back to the purported beginnings of capitalism in Babylonia attempting to prove that the repeated failures of a capitalist breakthrough up to 1500 were due to market imperfections. This massive study in anachronism only confirms the sad failure of the still influential neoliberal approach. In contrast there has been the illuminating study of the world history of capitalism through an analysis of one key commodity, namely cotton, in Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 2015).

Jürgen Kocka’s Short History of Capitalism represents an equally important non-Marxist attempt at a synopsis of capitalism’s history. Previously published in German, this work offers a brief and lively overview which is likely to attract a wide readership. Aside from the fact that is based on considerable learning and is occasionally insightful, it represents an important effort at constructing a plausible narrative meant to defend a beleaguered capitalism while fending off the Marxist view of history. Entertaining and informative, it will prove useful and reassuring to many who are troubled by the onset of the capitalist crisis in 2008 but who are still wedded to the system.

In five chapters Kocka offers a synopsis of the long history of capitalism. He begins by defining the concept while offering the views of some of the most important theorists of capitalist development including Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, Polyani, Braudel, Wallerstein, and Arrighi. He then uses this theoretical schema to argue that capitalism long predated modern times rejecting the Marxist view that capitalism exists only when capitalist principles dominate production and organize work. The Marxist transition debate initiated by Dobb is ignored. He then devotes Chapter 2 to trying to substantiate this view by recalling the history of merchant capitalism finding variant forms of this kind of capitalism in Antiquity, China, and the Islamic and Western Middle Ages. Kocka argues that merchant exchange in these epochs was capitalist because of the existence of intense relations to the market, the use of...