The Insatiable Machine:
How Capitalism Conquered the World
by Trevor Jackson (W. W. Norton)
This is a history of capitalism, which is to say that it is a global history, as told through the social and technological developments of a set of European countries, mostly England and the Netherlands. It is much more history than sociology or economics, and more material history with a (fiscal) technology chaser than social history. This alone sets it apart as a history of an idea told through stuff.
And the emphasis is frequently on the stuff, or those were the points I flagged the most in my notes as new ideas to me. When we discuss something like the gold standard, we either treat it as natural law, arising obviously, or as a sort of capital I-Idea that then was made flesh (flash?). But as much as it plays out like the Golgafrinchans, someone had to sit down and do it, and the doing of it happened out of as causal series of events that arise out of things like material conditions and immediate politics.
The author deeply irritated me in the introduction, asserting that economics could not discuss capitalism because it was too inimitable to it. This is a bit like saying that you cannot see yellow until you have the word for yellow (you have an argument but it is neither useful nor strong), and I was thoroughly expecting a much worse, or at least much more axe-grindy book. Instead, it is the author getting at one of my persisting themes. The most useful thing to study is the invisible architecture of the world. So much more is possible than we confess.
And far from polemic this book is aggressively mild in its assertions. Colonialism, slavery, and environmental exploitation are frequently positioned with respect to capitalism, either as necessary prerequisites to or as functional opposites bested by. The author’s view is looking at them as force multipliers. There is a unique set of things going on that develop on their own, but when in the context of other conditions, they develop an oversized effect.
Likewise, the book endears itself to me by its blowing up of any East/West or North/South division. The world is always connected, and the sort of way of telling history is much bound up in Nationalist or racist projects when the whole thing is a big mix always. As such, I will let slide the weird, slightly incorrect, pro tariff bit.
Contender for favorite book of the year already and rather surprised by that. It is a fun history, and even discarding all the actual theory of it, a great read on that account. I feel like it has the potential to make no one happy, but it speaks to all the things that I find interesting about scholarship in general.
My thanks to the author, Trevor Jackson, for writing the book, and to the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 