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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE HISTORIAN WHO WANTS TO IMAGINE AN ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM  
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Scott W. Stern
April 9, 2026
The New Republic
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_ Trevor Jackson traces the “dumb, inhuman logic” of endless
growth over hundreds of years, and gestures at a better world. _

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The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the WorldTrevor
JacksonW.W. Norton & CompanyISBN: 978-1-324-10687-6 

On November 5, 2008—the nadir of that year’s eponymous financial
crisis—Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to
celebrate the opening of a new building. In a moment that made
headlines around the world, she asked her hosts about the market
crash: “Why did no one see it coming?”

 
To historians, at least, the answer appeared to be that few had been
looking. Whereas the study of capitalism had once been the province of
some of the profession’s most celebrated practitioners (including
Eric Hobsbawm
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and E.P. Thompson
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to name two), several [[link removed]]
observers
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argued that things shifted in the 1980s. In the outside world,
avowedly capitalist politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher were on the rise and the Soviet project was collapsing;
within the academy, poststructuralism, literary theory, and the
so-called “cultural turn” turned would-be scholars of capitalism
away from the old study of structures and firms. “At the very time
when multinational corporations were reshaping the global economy and
nations were embracing neoliberal policies,” the business historian
Kenneth Lipartito has written, “the economic found scant space in
historical writing.”

 

 

The financial crisis changed
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all that. Newly visible and vulnerable to critique, capitalism once
again found its chroniclers. In the United States, a class of scholars
began writing what has come to be called “the new history of
capitalism” in now-classic works like Sven Beckert’s _Empire of
Cotton_
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Edward Baptist’s _The Half Has Never Been Told_
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and Walter Johnson’s _River of Dark Dreams_
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slavery and empire to the present economic order. An ocean away, a
French economist named Thomas Piketty marshaled centuries of data to
argue that unchecked capital accumulation invariably yields
inequality, in _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_
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an academic doorstopper that became an unexpected bestseller.
Subsequent works convincingly yoked capitalism to the origins of
global warming (Andreas Malm’s _Fossil Capital_
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the erosion of democracy (Timothy Mitchell’s _Carbon Democracy_
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and the surveillance state (Shoshana Zuboff’s_ __The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism_
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Today, almost a full generation after the turbulence of 2008 and all
the scholarship that emerged in its wake, a new cohort of truly
massive texts is hitting shelves and straining eyes, synthesizing so
much of the literature, old and new. Late last year, Beckert—one of
the deans of the field—released _Capitalism: A Global History_
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a formidable, nearly 1,100-page brick of a book, drawing on archival
collections from six continents. Beckert’s tome arrived just months
after _Capitalism and Its Critics_
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a 624-page contribution from the journalist John Cassidy, narrating
the history of capitalism through the lives and works of its strongest
detractors. These books, in turn, joined newly released editions of
classic syntheses, like Ernest Mandel’s _Late Capitalism_
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and a new translation of Marx’s _Capital_
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itself (944 pages).

The latest of these grand narratives of economic history is _The
Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World_
[[link removed]] by Trevor Jackson, an
economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley (and a
trenchant contributor
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York Review of Books_—his recent pan
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of _Abundance, _in particular, is worth reading). Like Beckert and
Cassidy, Jackson is a lucid and engaging writer, demonstrating a
mastery of this fast-growing field. But unlike his fellow synthesists,
Jackson has produced a book that is positively svelte—just over 300
pages.

 
 

What truly sets _The Insatiable Machine _apart from a crowded field,
however, is the incisiveness of Jackson’s analysis. Wry, knowing,
and with little patience for too-neat explanations or just-so
bromides, Jackson darts nimbly from epoch to epoch, crisis to crisis,
bringing sense and satisfaction to some five centuries of history. To
Jackson, capitalism is neither destiny nor certain doom. Instead, it
is “a kind of machine,” obeying “dumb, inhuman logic,”
incapable of disregarding the command to expand, even at the risk of
consuming the entire planet. Over half a millennium, the operation of
this machine has enabled an undeniable, immense increase in average
living standards, yet it has done so by burning through countless
lives and ways of living and trillions of tons of carbon.

“The world I live in will be destroyed within my lifetime,”
Jackson writes. “The question of what kind of world will follow is
entirely a question of whether we all manage to kill capitalism or it
kills us first.”

 
There is, of course, the thorny underlying question: What is
capitalism? At the macro level, it is an economic system in which,
Jackson writes, “individuals can buy and sell the things that
produce all other things”—that is, land, labor, machinery, etc.:
what Marx and Engels famously called the “means of production.” At
the individual level, capitalism is not merely the pursuit of profit
but rather the reinvestment of profits in pursuit of ever greater
profits. It’s about using “money in order to turn it into more
money,” as the historian Steven Stoll put it in his 2017 book _Ramp
Hollow_ [[link removed]]. In
other words, capitalism is not commerce, not the kinds of exchange
that have existed since time immemorial; capitalism is growth,
relentless, limitless_ _growth.

 

 

“It wasn’t always this way,” Jackson opens _The Insatiable
Machine. _In the early 1500s, capitalism as such did not yet exist.
Most of the world’s inhabitants were rural, agricultural workers;
poverty was severe but stable; unfree labor was common but rarely
permanent or heritable; wage-work was atypical; trade was mostly
small-scale; communities functioned on “mutual indebtedness,” as
“many people seldom used money at all”; the market was “a
literal, physical space.” There was significant inequality within
societies but relative equality _among _societies. Even as late as the
early 1800s, Jackson notes, Britain and the Netherlands (the world’s
richest countries) were just three to five times richer than the
world’s poorest countries: “Today the gap is more than a hundred
to one.”

Everything began to change during what schoolchildren now
euphemistically call the “Age of Exploration.” European sailors
ventured west and south, founding colonies and commencing the
extraction of first gold and then silver via various forms of free and
unfree labor. All of this new metal started circulating globally,
which led to a worldwide monetary system based on Spanish silver, the
consequent standardization of currency, an increase in global trade,
and recurrent cycles of inflation and deflation. As prices rose, many
began abandoning traditional subsistence lifestyles and tentatively
entering “the market,” bartering away their labor on rest days to
pocket some “extra cash.” A new class of merchants benefited
immensely, winning money and influence in the New World mining economy
and seizing power in increasingly autonomous New World colonies.

By this point—the early seventeenth century—the merchants were
capitalists, but neither the era nor the state was yet capitalist,
Jackson argues. He compares the situation to the modern U.S., in which
there are certainly communists and anarchists but not communism or
anarchism.

 

 

The money that emerged from colonial mines was a precondition for the
global spread of capitalism (and also for wars of conquest), but it
was banks, corporations, and the stock market that “solidified and
expanded capitalism.” Such innovations originated in the
Netherlands, a state unusual within Europe for its highly capitalized
farms and the big cities that the export of agriculture enabled, and
matured in England, which carried primitive capitalist institutions to
its swelling sac of colonies.

New forms of labor emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. As the burgeoning European capitalist class enclosed
farmlands that had once been held in common, displaced agricultural
laborers decamped for the cities or for the New World, where many
began working for the promise of land. When these laborers proved
insufficient to facilitate the desired degree of colonial expansion,
the capitalists began relying on slavery—which transformed into a
racialized, fixed, and heritable system. This development escalated
the seizure of Indigenous lands and led to the creation of massive,
monoculture plantations, further alienating people from traditional
models of farming.

Slavery soon became “the engine that powered the entire Atlantic
capitalist system,” and not without contestation, Jackson argues.
Indeed, the first New World slave revolt was launched by Muslims from
Senegambia brought to sugar plantations on Hispaniola, “which alerts
us to the fact that Muslims were in the New World not only before
English Protestantism but before the existence of Protestantism
itself.” Such uprisings terrified the capitalists. Late in the
1600s, as colonial officials and plantation owners began to fear that
white settlers and indentured laborers might ally with free and
enslaved Africans, they created slave codes that designated Black
people—and Black people alone—as chattel. “For this reason,”
Jackson notes, “some scholars argue that capitalism itself invented
modern racism.”

 

 

As the European imperial powers—soon joined by the fast-growing
United States—claimed more and more of the globe, they took the
tactic of enclosure with them, turning former common lands into
“private property.” Displaced farmers cast about for other ways to
support themselves, and the ranks of those doing labor in exchange for
wages (a historically novel arrangement) swelled. So did the workdays.
According to one estimate cited by Jackson, medieval peasants worked
150 days per year, while the average laborer in 1800 worked more than
300 days per year; workdays grew from four or six hours (outside of
harvest or planting seasons) to 10 or 12 hours. One reason for this
sea change—what Akira Hayami
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Vries
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have labeled the “industrious revolution”—was coercion, with an
increasingly muscular state compelling commoners to abandon ancestral
fishing, forestry, and grazing rights for work in the fast-growing
cities. Another was that people needed money to be able to purchase
all the new consumer goods on the market.

“Wage labor was a weird thing to invent,” Jackson writes, “but
it became the global norm, and it still is today.” Hence the
decidedly uncomfortable system under which workers are free to quit
their jobs but not free enough “to _not _sell their labor for
wages,” the specter of poverty generally being sufficient to compel
us into grinding, undemocratic acquiescence. “That strange and
anxious condition of being both free and not is the distinctive
experience of life under capitalism.”

 
Late in the eighteenth century, a great many of the new wageworkers
arrived at their terminal workplace: the factory. This was the dawn of
the industrial revolution, the inflection point in the history of
capitalism. Instead of one skilled shoemaker making one pair of shoes
per day, Jackson notes, suddenly there was “an underpaid teenager
run[ning] a conveyor belt powered by fossil fuels, continually
producing thousands of shoes every day.” And not just teenagers:
children as young as 5 years old began working in the mines or the
mills.

 

 

The factory owners, seeking the ability to easily fire troublesome
workers, jettisoned older labor models like apprenticeships,
indentured servitude, or bondage. Paradoxically, however, such freedom
cost workers their autonomy, as artisans and farmers and proprietors
of household manufactories were shoved en masse into routinized,
boss-surveilled jobs. “People _hated _it,” Jackson writes. They
resisted, most flamboyantly by breaking machines, a practice
immortalized in mythic figures like Ned Ludd and Captain Swing.

The factories kept producing, and their output was truly
revolutionary. By the 1830s, Jackson notes, a single spinning mill
could produce enough thread in one 12-hour shift to circumnavigate the
earth _twice._ The sheer profusion of stuff, and the speed with which
it was fabricated, and the increasing distances it could travel,
enabled tremendous advances in consumption and nutrition. As a result,
the planet’s population has ballooned from about one billion people
in 1800 to more than eight billion today—“most of them living
longer, healthier, richer lives than the one billion did.”

 

But the industrial revolution also reoriented our species’s
relationship to the earth. Human population centers encroached on more
and more land and habitat and became cloaked in suffocating smoke,
saturated with stinking effluent, and assaulted by black snow and
“acid rain,” a term coined in Manchester in 1872. Perhaps most
pivotally, the industrial revolution entailed the widespread adoption
of fossil fuels, which led directly to the present climate crisis.

 

 

It cannot be said—as _The New Yorker_’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus
recently did
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of Beckert’s new history of capitalism—that Jackson “minimizes
the role of technology.” He fluidly covers the advances in coal and
steam power that enabled industrialization; such advances were
themselves responsive to widespread deforestation in England, which
had reduced the utility of wood as a fuel source. Yet he also notes
the consequences of technological innovation. “Coal did not mean the
end of deforestation,” Jackson observes, “but rather its
intensification.”

By the second half of the nineteenth century, he continues, capitalism
had become “the dominant form of economic life on the planet.” The
machine, never sated, whirred even faster. The corporations and
factories grew bigger and more complex, with management and workers
increasingly separated from ownership; the most powerful capitalist
states (Britain, the United States, Japan) became even more so, with
much of the world (especially below the equator) becoming a site of
extraction of labor and raw materials. The logic of the market now
demanded growth for the sake of growth, which, the essayist Edward
Abbey once wrote
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“is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Resistance likewise metastasized. The workers grew more combative, as
strikes proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century (Jackson
notes French mass strikes in 1890, 1899, 1900, 1904, and 1906), and
states dispatched armed forces to battle the unionized workers in the
streets. Anarchists bombed Wall Street and assassinated the Russian
tsar, the French president, the Spanish prime minister, and U.S.
President William McKinley. For decades, Jackson notes, “elites
feared anarchist violence more than socialist revolution, and
certainly more than they fear terrorism today.”

 

 

Still, the revolutionaries were on the march, and anti-capitalists
overthrew the government of Russia in 1917, later followed by
Mongolia, China, and several states in the Balkans. Similar attempts
almost succeeded in Germany, Hungary, and many other countries.
“Between 1917 and 1933, capitalism faced its greatest crisis and
came the closest it ever has to being destroyed,” Jackson writes.
Indeed, at the start of the 1920s, “it appeared very likely that
some form of communism or socialism would spread throughout Europe and
perhaps the world.”

The capitalists struck back. The Americans, Japanese, and several
European nations sent troops to contain (and seek to bring down) the
new Soviet state, and many of these countries embarked on domestic
“red scares” to crush left-wing organizations and parties. Jackson
echoes canonical
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Marxist
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analyses
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in situating the rise of Hitler in 1933 within a broader global
crackdown against anti-capitalist forces. (In brief, scholars from
Trotsky to Mandel have argued that the Nazis in Germany were not
unique but rather were one manifestation of a worldwide offensive
against revolutionary and workers’ movements that had arisen from
the dislocation of World War I and the Depression. The Nazis “came
for the Communists” before they came for other groups, as Martin
Niemöller famously wrote
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as did the fascists in Italy, the militarists in Japan, the
red-baiters in the United States, and European imperialists across the
colonized world.)

And then, abruptly, _The Insatiable Machine _ends. Because “there
has never again been a serious, credible threat that global capitalism
would be overthrown and replaced by another economic system,”
Jackson’s history concludes there. Indeed, even his foray into the
twentieth century is a very brief one: The Cold War, the modern
military-industrial complex, neoliberalism, and the internet are all
absent. Such framing necessarily leaves unexplored what many have
taken to calling capitalism’s “late” stage, an era of permanent
and ubiquitous crisis and the accelerating commodification of just
about everything. This is, obviously, Jackson’s prerogative, and
it’s hardly fair to critique a book by asking for it to be a
different book. But _The Insatiable Machine _is the rare volume that
could stand to be 50 or even 100 pages longer.

 

 

 
On November 4, 2008—the day before Queen Elizabeth visited
LSE—Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election. Famously, his
campaign had promised “change”—but not, of course, the kind of
fundamental change that Jackson rightly describes as unimaginable for
most of the last century. “I believe that our free market has been
the engine of America’s great progress,” Obama declared
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weeks before the election. “But the American economy has worked in
large part because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a
higher principle,” which is to say, mild governmental regulation.

To many [[link removed]]
observers [[link removed]],
Obama’s victory seemed to mark the realization of what the political
scientist Francis Fukuyama had called the “end of history
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triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over its competitors. With
McDonalds populating
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the former Soviet Union, and with the arrival of the Olympics to
Beijing heralding international cooperation in and from China (that
Games’s motto: “One World, One Dream
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the future of capitalism seemed bright.

 

Things haven’t quite worked out that way. In the United States, a
rapidly shrinking
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share of the populace views capitalism favorably, while young people
prefer socialism by a widening margin. Such trends have analogues
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around the world, and a loss of faith in the prevailing economic order
appears to have contributed
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global rise of far-right movements. Capitalism has thus far proven
unable to meaningfully slow, much less reverse, global warming, and
indeed about a quarter
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of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humans since the dawn of the
industrial revolution has been produced since 2008 alone. Capitalism
has long promised dynamism and innovation, but a recent report in
_Nature _suggests [[link removed]]
that “progress is slowing in several major fields,” while the only
apparent technological paradigm shift since 2008—the rise of
generative AI—could constitute
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one-seventh of all carbon dioxide emissions by 2040 and, in any event,
sure looks like a bubble
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Alarmingly, much of the U.S. economy now depends
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on that bubble not bursting anytime soon.

 

 

“Even a cursory look at the world around us gives the clear
impression that things can’t stay this way forever,” Jackson
writes early in _The Insatiable Machine_. “An economy predicated on
infinite accumulation, mass consumption, and fossil-fueled
industrialization is not reconcilable with a finite planet.”

His project, therefore, is to make clear that the world wasn’t
always this way, and to thereby help readers imagine a different
world. Remarkably, given the bleakness of the foregoing account,
Jackson appears to retain hope in the power of history: “Learning
that nothing about the world around us is natural, permanent, or
inevitable” is “a radical, emancipatory, imaginative act.”
Capitalism is, after all, a relatively recent invention; it can yet be
transformed, perhaps even unmade.

Scott W. Stern [[link removed]]

Scott W. Stern is the author, most recently, of _There Is a Deep
Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the
People Who Fought It, From Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou_.

* capitalism
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* History of capitalism
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* world history
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* global economy
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