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In this authoritative and accessible book, one of the world's most renowned historians provides a concise and comprehensive history of capitalism within a global perspective from its medieval origins to the 2008 financial crisis and beyond. From early commercial capitalism in the Arab world, China, and Europe, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization, to today's globalized financial capitalism, Jürgen Kocka offers an unmatched account of capitalism, one that weighs its great achievements against its great costs, crises, and failures. Based on intensive research, the book puts the rise of capitalist economies in social, political, and cultural context, and shows how their current problems and foreseeable future are connected to a long history.
About the author
Jürgen Kocka
Summary
A comprehensive and concise history of capitalism from its origins to today
In this authoritative and accessible book, one of the world's most renowned historians provides a concise and comprehensive history of capitalism within a global perspective from its medieval origins to the 2008 financial crisis and beyond. From early commercial capitalism in the Arab world, China, and Europe, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization, to today’s globalized financial capitalism, Jürgen Kocka offers an unmatched account of capitalism, one that weighs its great achievements against its great costs, crises, and failures. Based on intensive research, the book puts the rise of capitalist economies in social, political, and cultural context, and shows how their current problems and foreseeable future are connected to a long history.
Sweeping in scope, the book describes how capitalist expansion was connected to colonialism; how industrialism brought unprecedented innovation, growth, and prosperity but also increasing inequality; and how managerialism, financialization, and globalization later changed the face of capitalism. The book also addresses the idea of capitalism in the work of thinkers such as Marx, Weber, and Schumpeter, and chronicles how criticism of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself, fed by its persistent contradictions and recurrent emergencies.
Authoritative and accessible, Capitalism is an enlightening account of a force that has shaped the modern world like few others.
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"[Kocka’s] new book offers an invaluable overview of debates about the definition and history of capitalism, with conclusions that are generally well documented, well grounded argumentatively, and in that sense convincing and authoritative."---Harold James, Journal of Modern History
Report
"Capitalism' is a commonly used term that resists simple definition or straightforward history. Kocka adds lucidity and erudition in this excellent overview. . . . [B]road in its intellectual sweep, covering a range of social science disciplines; and well informed by the literature in both economic and social history. . . . [Capitalism] provides a paradigm of what a short history of an important concept should accomplish."--Choice
