The Historian Who Wants to Imagine an Alternative to Capitalism

Trevor Jackson traces the “dumb, inhuman logic” of endless growth over hundreds of years, and gestures at a better world.

On November 5, 2008—the nadir of that year’s eponymous financial crisis—Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to celebrate the opening of a new building. In a moment that made headlines around the world, she asked her hosts about the market crash: “Why did no one see it coming?”

To historians, at least, the answer appeared to be that few had been looking. Whereas the study of capitalism had once been the province of some of the profession’s most celebrated practitioners (including Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, to name two), several observers have argued that things shifted in the 1980s. In the outside world, avowedly capitalist politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were on the rise and the Soviet project was collapsing; within the academy, poststructuralism, literary theory, and the so-called “cultural turn” turned would-be scholars of capitalism away from the old study of structures and firms. “At the very time when multinational corporations were reshaping the global economy and nations were embracing neoliberal policies,” the business historian Kenneth Lipartito has written, “the economic found scant space in historical writing.”

The financial crisis changed all that. Newly visible and vulnerable to critique, capitalism once again found its chroniclers. In the United States, a class of scholars began writing what has come to be called “the new history of capitalism” in now-classic works like Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, which linked slavery and empire to the present economic order. An ocean away, a French economist named Thomas Piketty marshaled centuries of data to argue that unchecked capital accumulation invariably yields inequality, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an academic doorstopper that became an unexpected bestseller. Subsequent works convincingly yoked capitalism to the origins of global warming (Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital), the erosion of democracy (Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy), and the surveillance state (Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).

Today, almost a full generation after the turbulence of 2008 and all the scholarship that emerged in its wake, a new cohort of truly massive texts is hitting shelves and straining eyes, synthesizing so much of the literature, old and new. Late last year, Beckert—one of the deans of the field—released Capitalism: A Global History, a formidable, nearly 1,100-page brick of a book, drawing on archival collections from six continents. Beckert’s tome arrived just months after Capitalism and Its Critics, a 624-page contribution from the journalist John Cassidy, narrating the history of capitalism through the lives and works of its strongest detractors. These books, in turn, joined newly released editions of classic syntheses, like Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (640 pages) and a new translation of Marx’s Capital itself (944 pages).

The latest of these grand narratives of economic history is The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World by Trevor Jackson, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley (and a trenchant contributor to the New York Review of Books—his recent pan of Abundance, in particular, is worth reading). Like Beckert and Cassidy, Jackson is a lucid and engaging writer, demonstrating a mastery of this fast-growing field. But unlike his fellow synthesists, Jackson has produced a book that is positively svelte—just over 300 pages.

What truly sets The Insatiable Machine apart from a crowded field, however, is the incisiveness of Jackson’s analysis. Wry, knowing, and with little patience for too-neat explanations or just-so bromides, Jackson darts nimbly from epoch to epoch, crisis to crisis, bringing sense and satisfaction to some five centuries of history. To Jackson, capitalism is neither destiny nor certain doom. Instead, it is “a kind of machine,” obeying “dumb, inhuman logic,” incapable of disregarding the command to expand, even at the risk of consuming the entire planet. Over half a millennium, the operation of this machine has enabled an undeniable, immense increase in average living standards, yet it has done so by burning through countless lives and ways of living and trillions of tons of carbon.

“The world I live in will be destroyed within my lifetime,” Jackson writes. “The question of what kind of world will follow is entirely a question of whether we all manage to kill capitalism or it kills us first.”

There is, of course, the thorny underlying question: What is capitalism? At the macro level, it is an economic system in which, Jackson writes, “individuals can buy and sell the things that produce all other things”—that is, land, labor, machinery, etc.: what Marx and Engels famously called the “means of production.” At the individual level, capitalism is........

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