business

This Harvard professor spent 8 years traveling the world researching the secret history of capitalism and how ‘marginal’ and ‘weak’ it used to be

Fortune
byNick Lichtenberg
Sunday, January 18, 2026 at 01:30 PM
This Harvard professor spent 8 years traveling the world researching the secret history of capitalism and how ‘marginal’ and ‘weak’ it used to be

Sven Beckert has spent nearly a decade trying to understand the 1,000-year-old thing that capitalism is. "This is a human-created order."

Sven Beckert isnt here to judge capitalism, even though he just wrote a provocative, ambitious, 1,300-page book on its history. As he writes several times in the book (which this editor has read), he… [+9427 chars]
Language

eng

Source

Fortune

Category

business

Added

1d ago