Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World

"A concise and colorful telling of capitalism's rise to global dominance. Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system we call capitalism, and most people alive have never lived any other way. How did it happen? With an eye for a telling anecdote, UC Berkeley economic historian Trevor Jackson explains where capitalism came from, how it spread around the world, and how it came to be the dominant way of organizing human life. Framing his story from Martin Luther to Vladimir Lenin, Jackson uses each of them-Luther in 1517, Lenin in 1917, and Isaac Newton in the middle in 1717-as examples of how the global economy changed over time. He traces capitalism's development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system, to the creation of banking and finance, the emergence of free wage labor and a new form of slavery in the eighteenth century, the creation of fossil-fuel industrialization, and finally the fully functioning global capitalist system organized and spread by imperialism in the nineteenth century. Along the way readers learn about the surprising role of mulberry trees in China in the 1620s, Dutch agriculture in the 1640s, and whale blubber in the 1780s. Full of memorable characters and lively vignettes as well as sweeping quantitative analysis and historical synthesis, The Insatiable Machine makes clear that "It wasn't always capitalism, it didn't have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn't have to be this way.""--