Salvatore Gozzo, Peplos, Evros, Greece, November 27, 2014
If we want to understand our contemporary world, we need to come to terms with capitalism. But our thinking about capitalism urgently needs the contributions of historians. Sven Beckert introduces us to the history of capitalism using the special commodity of cotton as a lens through which we can observe the development of the modern world itself; his narrative forces us to look beyond national boundaries, describing the connections forged between events and developments in distant areas of the world, in different regimens of labor, and in different kinds of states. The historical perspective that emerges encourages us to bring state, politics, and power back into the context of the shifting shape of global connections, allowing us to see how they are an integral part of local, regional, and national histories. The proposal of this non-Eurocentric narrative, in describing processes of appropriation and dispossession rooted as much in violent conquests as in institutional and technical innovations, brings social history beyond the nation state into global history, showing how the shape of capitalism and thus the modern world are very much related to social conflict and its global nature.
