What, Exactly, Is Sven Beckertian Capitalism?: WEDNESDAY HISTORIOGRAPHY
"Capitalism" Is Protean: Everywhere Yet Nowhere in Sven Beckert’s World-View
Not Marxian buying labor power in a competitive market for less than the value of labor capitalism; not Braudelian spheres of high finance, high commerce, and production monopolies; not even the interplay of metropolis, fleet, and periphery structured by unequal market exchange that I call thalassocracy. So what is it?
Economists, Marxists, and Braudelians can all recognize pieces of themselves in Beckert, yet none of them can quite recognize his capitalism as their own beast.
It is a puzzlement.
And here is a very nice review of the first half of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History by the very sharp Angus Byelsma:
Angus Byelsma: Cut Adrift <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/cut-adrift>: ‘[Sven] Beckert’[s]… 1086-page tome Capitalism: A Global History… [got] a positive review in the New York Times, and… a prime position in every semi-serious bookstore…. At least one publisher out there believes in the existence of a sufficient public appetite for economic history doorstoppers…. Nonetheless… Beckert’s Capitalism has met a much colder reception amongst people who care about these things….
Beckert—and the ‘New History of Capitalism’ (NHC) school-of-thought, of which he is the most prominent representative—seem to have made the mistake of alienating perhaps the two largest groups of people who care that much about economic history: liberal economists and Marxists. The former are frustrated by the NHC’s neglect of the quantitative literature, in particular the claims made about American slavery and its contribution to the British industrial revolution. The latter dislike the NHC’s sidestepping of the literature on the so-called capitalist transition—and, by extension, all the debates over defining what is capitalism—by keeping the concept amorphous while insisting on finding capitalism nearly everywhere in space and time…. Beckert seems to style his work…on the most venerable ‘third-way’ ever navigated between those two camps: the midcentury ‘Annales School’ of French social history, and in particular its greatest son, Fernand Braudel….
Beckert fail[s] to seriously engage… whether the plantation economy caused the Industrial Revolution…. Invoking Barbara Solow, [he] simply says that ‘perhaps capitalism could have developed differently… but the reality is that it developed based on slavery’; a rather glib dismissal of a serious historical debate…
I would point out that in Bobby Solow’s formulation, this was not an assertion that the counterfactual question did not matter. It was, rather, an assertion that the fact that the triangular trade and Caribbean slavery was not a necessary part of the road to rich modernity did not mean that we should or could ignore it. In Sven Beckert’s formulation, it seems to be a retreat to the bailey having failed to successfuly answer the questions raised when he was at the motte claiming: no Caribbean slavery, no modern capitalist prosperity.
And I would point out that the answer to the question “most associated with the NHC—whether (biological) agricultural technology or increasingly violent slave-driving explains cotton productivity growth in the American South” in not Sven Beckert’s ‘most likely it was both’, but rather that it was
better biotechnology on the one hand,
not increasingly violent slave-driving on the other,
but rather increasingly routinized and systematized “management”.
It is, properly, not a capitalists-are-crueler point, but a dialectic-of-Enlightenment point.
Angus Byelsma: Cut Adrift <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/cut-adrift>: ‘The closest Beckert comes to presenting an overarching theory… is his insistence on the historical importance of the state. This is due to his desire to put the violence back into capitalism…. Beckert’s quintessential example is the early colonial period of 1450-1640; the era, he writes, in which ‘the capitalism that we know originated’… [as] early-modern European states, in concert with elite financiers and merchants, spread capitalism to the world at gunpoint…. But when Beckert moves beyond this era, his argument… becomes much less precise… something like ‘all development is connected to the state’, less a theory than a descriptive fact…. And even in the early colonial period… did it play a critical role in the development of capitalism within the colonial metropole, or did war capitalism mainly just create new ‘nodes of capital’ on the periphery?… ‘War capitalism’ is left stranded, a half-formed argument…
Marxian capitalism—in its various flavors—is this: (1) Possession of wealth allows you to exploit workers who themselves have no access to the means of production. (2) You then use market exchange to turn that surplus value you hav appropriated into more wealth. (3) But you can repeat this only on pain of having to reinvest that wealth in expanding your scale of production. (4) Why? Because ncreasing returns to scale mean that wealth holders who are satisfied with their current scale of production will be out-competed into bankruptcy. (5) Thus the system has a flywheel effect: generating ever greater wealth for society on the one hand, and ever greater immiserization for the working class on the other.
Braudelian capitalism sits on top of “material life” and even on top of the economic life of relatively routinized local markets, trade, and exchange. Braudelian capitalism is a higher level on top of these: an an anti‑competitive market sphere of monopolistic, large‑scale, power‑wielding activity operating at the summit of the economy. It is the world of great merchants, financiers, and large firms, operating in long‑distance trade, high finance, and oligopolistic or monopolistic positions, where information is opaque, power is concentrated, and exceptional profits are made precisely by escaping the discipline of ordinary competition.
What I call Thalassocracy is the functioning of a society-of-domination in which the élite grabs one-third of total production not directly at the point of a spear, but rather by ensuring that property ownership and market terms-of trade-are such that the one-third it grabs flows to it through individual transactions that are voluntary but nonetheless “unequal exchange”. This usually requires a big fleet, and a substantial amount of long-distance waterborne trade in things other than preciosities—hence thalassocracy. This often requires bargains in which the élite of the metropolis offers élites at the periphery deals they find very attractive if they undertake the bulk of the dirty work of enslavement and enserfment, and of subsequent exploitation at the point of a spear. Think of the Early Iron Age Phoenicians, and of Classical Athens.
Sven Beckert’s definition of capitalism is certainly not Marxian capitalism. It is certainly not Braudelian capitalism. His category of “war capitalism” appears to be the peripheral part of Thalassocracy, but it is definitely not the whole of it. But capitalism-in-general? It seems to be something like “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled wealth as an open-ended process which reshapes economies and societies and is fueled by a tight alliance of private capitalists with state power which serves their interests”. But it remains elusive.
Thus I have a very hard time figuring out what I think of Beckertian capitalism, simply because I do not understand what he thinks capitalism is at any satisfactory level.
There is great narrative power here. But it is unbridled by any conceptual discipline. And that means that at the end of the book, there is no answer to the question: “And so…?”
Thalassocracy is a very cool concept!
Are thalassocrats the pirate brethren of stationary bandits? Or is transhipment services special compared to landlordism?
Are Silk Road khanates equestrian cousins to thalassocracies?
This is tangential to your remarks on Beckert, but I think that imperial Britain would qualify as a thalassocracy in your view? It was an empire built on sea-born trade, depending at its base on brutal oppression at the periphery.
In that connection, I liked Duncan Weldon's essay "Abraham Lincoln’s war on King Cotton" https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/abraham-lincolns-war-on-king-cotton/
The teaser in the header and the final paragraph together make a fair summary:
"Secessionists in America's South were convinced that Britain's mills could not survive without their cotton. They had not reckoned with how adaptable an economy under strain can be."
and
"The South learned between 1861 and 1865 that economic weapons can indeed be powerful tools but that predicting the course of any economic war, much like an actual conflict, is fraught with difficulty. Southern cotton was a vital commodity for Britain’s economy when it was widely available and cheap. When those facts changed, the economy changed, too."
This has obvious application to current events in Hormuz (the writers mailing it in again), but I think that the broader lesson is that any "economic weapon", whether blockade, sanction, or "weaponized interdependence" can maintain its edge a very long time while it is just a threat-in-being but is quickly blunted with use.