history of capitalism

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  5/4/2022
  

  The Rent is Too Damn High(ly Central to Modern Economies)

  by Trevor Jackson

  Historian Trevor Jackson reviews Brett Christophers's book on rent, which places the power of the rentier class at the center of the inequality and dysfunction of modern capital and brings Marx's original investigations into the 21st century.

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  4/6/2022
  

  Slavery, Capitalism, and Empire: Conversations in Black Freedom Studies

  Justene Hill Edwards and Daniel Immerwahr discuss the relationship between the global transformations of capital, empire and slavery and the history of freedom and unfreedom. 

• 
• SOURCE: Dissent
  2/9/2021
  

  Focus on the Family? The Problems with Blaming GOP Radicalism on Family Business

  by Paul Heideman

  Is the rise of the privately-held megacorporation the root of the radical conservative movement, or has corporate America long had a right-wing fringe? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  1/4/2022
  

  Private Capital Strangled Our Cities (Review of Destin Jenkins)

  by Samuel Zipp

  Destin Jenkins's new book makes a case that metropolitan segregation and racial inequality trace back to cities' dependence on the bond market. 

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  12/13/2021
  

  Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds

  by Hannah Appel

  "As your work so powerfully shows, the municipal bond market structures racial privilege, entrenches spatial neglect, and distributes wealth and power. American cities are dependent on financiers, rating agencies, and bond markets for nearly everything."

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  11/1/2021
  

  Land of Capital: Jonathan Levy's "Ages of American Capital" Reviewed

  by Steven Hahn

  "Ages of Capitalism" is one of the first synthetic accounts of the relationship of capitalism and American politics and society, and provides an important vocabulary for a developing field of inquiry. It also, oddly, resonates with the older consensus history that assumed capitalism as a core part of American life.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Center for Equitable Growth
  6/24/2021
  

  New Research Shows Slavery’s Central Role in U.S. Economic Growth Leading up to the Civil War

  Historian Sven Beckert and economist Mark Stelzner's collaborative research applies new methods for quantifying how much the labor productivity of enslaved people contributed to economic output, as well as identifying the gap between white households with and without slaves as a driver of inequality. 

• 
• SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor
  

  Capitalism American-Style: A Financial History of the United States

  “Ages of American Capitalism" by Jonathan Levy sheds light on U.S. history as seen through a financial lens. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  6/14/2021
  

  Our Insurance Dystopia

  by Caley Horan

  America's health insurance morass is a result of the replacement of the ideal of mutual, universal risk sharing with the privatization of risk in pursuit of profit. 

• SOURCE: Majority Report with Sam Seder
  4/19/2021
  

  How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America w/ Joshua D. Rothman

  Historian Joshua D. Rothman discusses "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America," a new book linking the internal slave trade to the development of American capitalism. 

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  4/19/2021
  

  Before the Civil War, New Orleans Was the Center of the U.S. Slave Trade (Excerpt)

  by Joshua D. Rothman

  After Congress ended the importation of enslaved people in 1808, domestic traders made New Orleans the center of an increasingly active and lucrative slave trade. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/20/2021
  

  The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business

  by Joshua D. Rothman

  "We still live in the world that Franklin and Armfield’s profits helped build, and with the enduring inequalities that they and their industry entrenched."

• 
• SOURCE: Dissent
  4/6/2021
  

  The End of Development

  by Tim Barker

  "Capitalism’s publicists are experiencing something of what Marxists went through after 1989, with one important difference: capitalism may be increasingly discredited, but it has not disappeared the way state socialism did."

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  3/3/2021
  

  Online Roundtable: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s ‘Race for Profit’

  Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, will sponsor a virtual roundtable on the award-winning "Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" with new essays being released beginning March 8. 

• 
• SOURCE: University of California Press
  2/9/2021
  

  Who Gets to Govern the Global Economy?

  by Christy Thornton

  Johns Hopkins Latin Americanist Christy Thornton describes her book "Revolution In Development" and its contribution to understanding how Mexican officials fought against dismissive treatment from the world's leading economic powers as they sought a voice in shaping the international economic order. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  12/2/2020
  

  The Gadfly of American Plutocracy (Review)

  by Simon Torracinta

  A new biography of the social theorist examines how his approach to understanding a past gilded age can offer lessons for our present one. 

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  10/28/2020
  

  London’s Centuries-Old Insurance Market Investigates Its Slavery Role

  Assessing the current company's financial ties to slavery requires understanding how the entity functioned as a pass-through for buyers and sellers of merchant insurance, rather than as an underwriter or funder of insurance policies. 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  9/21/2020
  

  Eric Williams’ Foundational Work on Slavery, Industry, and Wealth

  by Katie Donington

  Debates over Eric Williams’s work have ebbed and flowed ever since he first published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. His book inspired a body of historiography to which many historians of slavery and abolition have added their voices over the decades.

• 
• SOURCE: David Harvey
  9/3/2020
  

  David Harvey and David Graeber Discuss "Debt" (Video)

  Political theorists David Harvey and David Graeber discuss Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2012. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Economic Historian
  8/3/2020
  

  Capitalism and Slavery: A Discussion with Caitlin Rosenthal, Tom Cutterham, and Eric Hilt

  "Much has been made about how much historians can learn from economists, and I think that this is an area where economists could learn a lot from historians. We are trained to look at things from multiple perspectives and to understand complex contexts."--Caitlin Rosenthal