I listened to a cushvlog recently where Matt was talking about capitalism emerging pretty concretely from England out of the puritanical revolution (?) and then spreading through the world via colonialism. Anyone have any book recs talking about this subject? Would love if it took it even further into areas of how capitalism started shaping social relations/institutions once becoming a real global force
Eric Hobsbawm has a nice book (trilogy actually), “The Age of Revolution” (+ 2 more “Age of [something]”s) on the dual revolutions of England and France and their contribution to the underpinnings of capitalism. It was a good, fairly broad, historical overview for a real American dumb dumb like me
Giovanni Arrighi has a book, “The Long Twentieth Century”, on the evolution of capitalism, following Ventian -> Genoese -> Dutch -> English -> US as hegemonic leaders really determining the “character” of capitalism in a given period. Super interesting, I have like one last chapter. Arrighi is “world systems” adjacent
Gerald Horne is mostly focused on the extraction of surplus via (settler) colonialism, that both fueled and coexisted alongside industrialization, and has a ton of books. But the one I’m listening to now is “Dawning of the Apocalypse”. I’m not super far into it, but it’s tying together trends happening in settler colonies vs in the home countries, in a very dialectical way.