Introduction to Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (original) (raw)
Summary of A History of Global Capitalism by Sambit Bhattacharyya
2025
This document is a summary of the book A History of Global Capitalism: Feuding Elites and Imperial Expansion by Sambit Bhattacharyya (2020). The book analyzes the evolution of global capitalism over five centuries, highlighting elite competition as a driving force behind imperial expansion and geopolitical conflicts. Key events such as the Industrial Revolution, European colonialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and the rise of China, India, and Russia in the 21st century are discussed. Furthermore, the book examines the economic, political, and strategic implications of global capitalism, as well as current trends toward a multipolar system.
Review of Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip Menon, eds., Capitalisms. Towards a Global Historyy
The Indian Economic and Social History Review 58, 2021
Book Reviews / 429 organic histories. Such accounts shift the order of pre-eminence from political capitals (such as Delhi) to Gujarat as a site of a deeper history of a community in a unique geography-a 'unique and regional identity'. Narrative Pasts makes an important methodological intervention, where Balachandran critically reads texts deemed 'religious' or 'hagiographic' for their political, historical, and commemorative significance. It is a model for premodern scholarship that takes seriously the ways in which history and memory are equally invested in the making of community. Balachandran joins a group of a stellar new cohort of scholars of history and religion who are rewriting our understanding of the subcontinent through the early modern past: scholars such as Supriya Gandhi, Abhishek Kaicker, Aparna Kapadia, Shankar Nair and Anubhuti Maurya. Reading across these new works necessitates us to not only rethink 'region' but also critically reimagine geographies and the limits of ideas of 'diaspora', 'settler', and 'migrant'. Balachandran's rich study offers new approaches to other histories of mobilities that shape a 'region', for example in the lives and narratives of Jahanian Jahan-Gasht (d. 1384) for Sindh or Guru Nanak (d. 1539) for Punjab. Balachandran opens Narrative Pasts with a visit to a sayyid in Mangrol who had preserved his own family's history, rendered as a shajara back to the Prophet, through his ancestors in Gujarat. As we think alongside Balachandran on the 'making' of Gujarat not as an 'idea' but as a 'embedded' place, we see how Gujarat is knitted together from diverse histories, memories and families of belonging. In Narrative Pasts, we are given a way of conceiving anew such senses of belonging.
Rethinking Capitalist Development
2016
This article is based on a lecture delivered by the author to celebrate Kalyan Sanyal’s memory. It draws upon an email exchange between them on Sanyal’s book Rethinking Capitalist Development. It also dwells on the important issues that Sanyal raised with particular reference to India. I had known Kalyan Sanyal for some years and grown very fond of him, and his untimely demise was a great shock to me. At different points of time (he was much junior to me) he and I had both started our early career in economics in the area of international trade theory, but later we dabbled in other issues in economics. His book Rethinking Capitalist Development is quite a landmark in the relevant literature. A couple of years before his passing away, he and I had some long email exchanges on the theme of the book, spelling out where we agree and where we disagree. In this lecture to celebrate his memory I can try to pay my homage in the only academic way I know, by drawing upon that exchange and pro...
The Journal of Economic History, 2016
Book Reviews 286 opinion, better equipped to understand it. Berry includes as an epigraph the opening lines of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments passage in Theory worldview. The Af uent Society Revisited The Af uent Society into his time machine as he went to save the world, and answers in the negative. Just as Wells's hero would not need The Af uent Society to save the world, readers will not need The Af uent Society Revisited in order to understand it.
Anthropologica, 2022
Y ou are mistaken if you think that only by reading the title of the book you will get a theoretical foundation on capitalism in India. In the subtitle, the author indicates that capitalist dreams and nationalist designs are aimed at a broader audience: as an articulating category for those subjects, and for those who claim they are living in a "capitalist society." The reading I provide in this review seeks less for empirical data and more for the elaboration that sustains it. By outlining her empirical/ethnographic approach to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which took place in Davos, Switzerland, in 2012, the author amplifies the debate: the position of developing countries grants them the space where the future, as opportunities, innovation and imagination are operational to attracting investment and consumers. Making countries "brands of the nation" means, in this sense, "nations packaged and advertised as 'attractive investment destinations' in global markets" (1).
How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
2015
Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told. How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to the dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an examination of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu provide an account of how these diverse events and processes came together to produce capitalism. Table of Contents Introduction The Problem of Eurocentrism Confronting the Problematic of Sociohistorical Difference What is Capitalism? What Is Geopolitics? Chapter 1 The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique Introduction The ‘Commercialization Model’ Revisited: World- Systems Analysis and the Transition to Capitalism The Making of the Modern World- System: The Wallerstein Thesis The Problem of Eurocentrism The Problem of Historical Specificity The Spatio-Temporal Limits of Political Marxism The Brenner Thesis: Explanation and Critique The Geopolitical in the Making of Capitalism The Political Marxist Conception of Capitalism The Problematic of Sociohistorical Difference: Postcolonial Studies Engaging Capital The Eurocentrism of Historicism The Violence of Abstraction The Lacuna of Postcolonial Theory Conclusion Chapter 2 Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism: The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development Introduction The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development: Exposition and Critiques Unevenness Combination Seeing Through a Prism Darkly? Uneven and Combined Development beyond the Eurocentric Gaze Trotsky beyond Trotsky? Uneven and Combined Development before Capitalism More Questions than Answers: Method, Abstraction, and Historicity in Marx’s Thought Modes of Production Versus Uneven and Combined Development? A False Antithesis Conclusion: Towards an ‘Internationalist Historiography’ of Capitalism Chapter 3 The Long Thirteenth Century: Structural Crisis, Conjunctural Catastrophe Introduction Pax Mongolica as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development The Nomadic Mode of Production and Uneven and Combined Development The World-Historical Significance of the Mongol Empire Trade, Commerce, and Socio-Economic Development under the Pax Mongolica Apocalypse Then: The Black Death and the Crisis of Feudalism Class Struggle and the Changing Balance of Class Forces in Europe Peasant Differentiation in the Age of the Black Death Development of the Productive Forces Conclusion Chapter 4 The Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry over the Long 16th Sixteenth Century Introduction Unevenness: A Clash of Social Reproduction Ottoman–European Relations The Tributary and Feudal Modes of Production: Unevenness Combined Ottoman ‘Penalties of Progressiveness’ – European ‘Privileges of Backwardness’ Combination: Pax Ottomana and European Trade The Ottoman ‘Whip of External Necessity’ The Breakdown of Christendom The Ottoman Blockade and the Emergence of the Atlantic The Ottoman Buffer and English Primitive Accumulation Conclusion: The Ottoman Empire as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development Chapter 5 The Atlantic Sources of European Capitalism, Territorial Sovereignty and the Modern Self Introduction Imagining Europe in the Atlantic Mirror: Rethinking the Territorialised Sovereign, Self and Other Tearing Down the Ideological Walls of Christendom: From Sacred to Secular Universalism in the Construction of the European Self and non-European Other Legitimising Colonialism: The Historical Sociological Foundations of Eurocentrism Culture Wars in the Americas The Colonial Origins of the Modern Territorialised States Systems 1492 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development The Smithian Moment: American Treasures and So-Called Primitive Accumulation Sublating the Smithian Moment: From Smith to Marx via ‘the International’ Primitive Accumulation Proper: From ‘Simple’ to ‘Expanded’ Reproduction The Uneven and Combined Development of Plantation Slavery The Sociological Unevenness of the Atlantic Sociological Combination in the Plantation System New World Slavery and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism Contributions to the Sphere of Circulation Contributions to the Sphere of Production Conclusion: Colonies, Merchants and the Transition to Capitalism Chapter 6 The ‘Classical’ Bourgeois Revolutions in the History of Uneven and Combined Development Introduction The Concept of Bourgeois Revolution Reconceptualising Bourgeois Revolutions: A Consequentialist Approach Reconstructing Consequentialism through Uneven and Combined Development The Origins of Capitalism and the Bourgeois Revolution in the Low Countries The Rise of Dutch Capitalism: An International Perspective The Making of the Dutch Revolt The English Revolution in the History of Uneven and Combined Development Rediscovering the British Revolution Social Forces in the Making of the British Revolution 1789 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development Peculiarities of the French Revolution? Capitalism and the Absolutist State in France The Origins of the Capitalist Revolution in France Capitalist Consequences of the French Revolution Conclusion Chapter 7 Combined Encounters: Dutch Colonisation in South-East Asia and the Contradictions of ‘Free Labour’ Introduction The Specificity and Limits of Dutch Capitalism Dutch Institutional Innovations The Limits of Dutch ‘Domestic’ Capitalism Unevenness and Combination in the Pre-Colonial Indian Ocean Littoral The Intersocietal System of the Indian Ocean South Asia beyond the Eurocentric Gaze The Dutch Encounter: A Policy of Combination The Specificities and ‘Success’ of Dutch Strategies of Integration and Domination in South-East Asia The Moluccas The Banda Islands Indian Textiles Conclusion Chapter 8 Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ Introduction Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’: Advances and Impasses in the Revisionist Challenge Points of Agreement: European ‘Backwardness’ and the Role of the Colonies Late and Lucky: Contingences, the Eurasian Homogeneity Thesis, and the Great Divergence Structure and Conjuncture in the ‘Rise of the West’ The Geopolitical Competition Model and Its Limits Feudalism, Merchants, and the European States System in the Transition to Capitalism Unevenness Combined: North-South Interactions in the ‘Rise of the West’ The Conjunctural Moment of ‘Overtaking’: Britain’s Colonisation of India The Significance of India’s Colonisation to the ‘Rise of the West’ The Mughal Empire and the Tributary Mode of Production The Imperial Revenue System and Agricultural Decline in the Mughal Empire European Trade and Colonial Conquest: Towards 1757 Conclusion Conclusion Notes Index