"To understand capitalism, we need to be able to see it."

Sounds simple, sure. But when Sven Beckert shares this observation, just a few pages into Capitalism: A Global History , the Harvard professor is actually laying out a rather daunting challenge. Today's dominant world order so thoroughly dictates the logic of our day-to-day lives, and operates on a scale so far beyond our personal lived experience — often even beyond our intellectual grasp — that you may as well ask a tuna to see the Pacific Ocean.

Hence Beckert's hefty tome — which, at more than 1,000 pages before footnotes, cannot itself be accused of being difficult to see. In an effort to render capitalism visible, even legible, the decorated scholar traces the arc of this "most consequential revolution in world history" fro

See Full Page