The capitalism that governs much of modern economic life is not a natural expression of human behaviour but a historical system that emerged in particular places and gradually expanded across societies, according to historian Sven Beckert. In an interview with El País, Beckert argues that the system’s defining principle is the continual accumulation of capital, a logic that has transformed not only production and trade but increasingly the way people organise their lives, experiences and desires.
Beckert, a German-American historian and professor of American History at Harvard University, develops the argument in Capitalism. A Global History, a 1,400-page work published in English in 2025 and now translated into Spanish by Crítica. The volume, including roughly 400 pages of notes, draws on historical research and material gathered during Beckert’s travels through places including Barbados, China and Europe. He begins with an episode from Puritan Boston in 1639, when a merchant named Robert Keyne was brought before the General Court of Massachusetts for attempting to sell at the highest possible price and buy at the lowest possible price, placing his profits above the interests of the community. The court fined him £200 for an “extremely wicked and corrupt” practice and for embracing “false principles” — principles that Beckert says now appear entirely natural and structure everyday life.
Beckert does not date the emergence of capitalist societies to the year 1000. Instead, he places their appearance at roughly 500 years ago, while tracing what he calls the distinctive capitalist logic back to about the year 1000. At that time, he argues, small merchant communities in the Islamic world, China, India, Europe and Africa were organising economic life differently from most societies, where subsistence agriculture or tribute systems predominated. “The logic of capitalist life of these merchants was then very marginal, but today it structures our entire existence,” he says. Earlier commercial activity existed among societies such as the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, but Beckert begins his historical account around 1000 because merchant communities became increasingly significant and the new economic logic gradually encountered societies organised according to very different principles.
Its expansion was neither immediate nor uncontested. Feudal lords and religious authorities resisted merchants, while peasants sought to protect subsistence and family economies. Beckert describes capitalism as a “radical rupture” and a “genuine and drastic revolution” that developed slowly because of these competing interests. He identifies the sugar plantations of 16th-century Barbados as among the earliest societies that were distinctly capitalist. Merchants took control of land, imported enslaved labour from Africa and transformed production so that inputs and outputs were fully commercialised and production was directed towards the market.
For Beckert, the central feature of capitalism is the productive investment of privately owned capital to generate more capital, turning inputs and products into commodities. This underlying logic, he argues, can connect otherwise very different historical settings, from Barbados in the 16th century and Catalan textile production in the 19th century to Detroit in 1950 and Shenzhen in 2026. He rejects a purely European interpretation of the system, noting that the greatest dynamism of contemporary capitalism is now found in Asia rather than Europe or North America.
He also argues that capitalism should not be equated automatically with liberalism, democracy or conservatism. Liberalism became closely associated with capitalism during the 17th and 18th centuries, he says, but capitalism existed before liberalism. Historically, the system has operated under monarchies, empires, democratic governments and fascist regimes. Beckert points to the emergence of highly dynamic capitalist societies under deeply authoritarian governments as evidence of its political adaptability.
That adaptability is also visible in the changing institutional form of capitalism. Beckert says the post-war Keynesian order remained relatively stable until the 1970s, when neoliberalism gained prominence. He argues that neoliberalism is now approaching its end, citing “absurd levels of inequality”, the effects of the 2008 crisis and political pressures from both the left and, particularly, right-wing populist movements. He points to the return of tariffs and protectionism as evidence of a significant departure from the assumptions that previously linked capitalism with free trade. The idea of nationalising supply chains, he says, would have been far removed from the neoliberal model.
Yet Beckert does not predict the disappearance of capitalism. He expects a new institutional order to emerge within capitalism, while stressing that the system has repeatedly adapted to crises, including the economic catastrophe of 1929. “I cannot predict the future,” he says, but adds that capitalism is a historical process and therefore “has to end someday, as long as we survive to see it”.
The tension he identifies is increasingly connected to the natural world. Perpetual growth and accumulation, he argues, are not accidental effects but central to capitalism, while nature operates through limits rather than perpetual expansion. “Here there is a collision, and it is very worrying,” he says.
Beckert also sees commercialisation expanding into areas once considered outside ordinary markets. Data has become a new frontier, while experiences, culture, food, housing and personal activities can increasingly acquire commercial value. A private car can become an Uber and a private home an Airbnb; even videos of cats watched online can generate economic value. “Almost everything is commodified,” he says.
For Beckert, this helps explain why capitalism can appear invisible while connecting distant places and activities. The silver extracted from Cerro Rico in the 17th century, where one in four miners died and which was known as the “man-eating mountain”, helped pay for Ceylonese diamonds and Venetian glass enjoyed by elites in Potosí. The same system of distant economic connections exists today. His historical argument is that capitalism’s power lies precisely in its ability to make such relationships appear ordinary — even though, as he puts it, “capitalism is not something natural; it is in fact something very strange”.
