history of capitalism

• 
• SOURCE: New Statesman
  5/12/2023
  

  Quinn Slobodian: Can Democracy be Safe from the Market?

  A new history of capitalist policy initiatives focuses on the "zone," a territory of radical deregulation where capital is free from constraint by democracy. A reviewer asks whether there can be a zone where democracy is insulated against the market. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  5/4/2023
  

  Can Capitalism Exist Without Excess?

  by Trevor Jackson

  The pandemic supply chain disruptions have focused attention on shortages, but the problem of gluts—of food being destroyed when it can't be profitably sold–reflects a deeper problem with global capitalism. 

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  4/4/2023
  

  Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross See the Car as a Machine for Unfreedom

  The automobile is an object made to symbolize freedom that actually physically embodies a host of coercive relationships to work, debt, surveillance and policing, and the basic right of free movement, according to the authors of a new study. 

• 
• SOURCE: Dissent
  2/17/2023
  

  Clara Mattei on the History of Austerity Politics

  A decade before the Great Depression, capital responded to a serious crisis of legitimacy by adopting measures that punished a restive working class through scarcity, argues a new economic history; maintaining hierarchy, not growing the economy, is the objective.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  1/27/2023
  

  Review: New Book Worships the False Idol of the Responsible Corporation

  The idea of corporate social responsibility is an artifact of the domination of society by big business, a domination so powerful as to make alternatives exceedingly difficult to imagine. A new book internalizes that difficulty. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  7/5/2022
  

  The Crisis Historian Has Bad News About the Crisis

  "Wherever our current catastrophe is headed, it has been good to Adam Tooze, he tells me with some bewilderment."

• 
• SOURCE: The Drift
  6/9/2022
  

  The Dark Underside of the "Family-Like" Business

  by Erik Baker

  The history of businesses cloaking their labor practices in paternalism is long; the most recent chapter dates back to the spiritual explorations of the 1960s counterculture and the surveillance practices of Henry Ford. 

• 
• 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."