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

  • WhatAnOddUsername [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This is a book I haven't read, so I guess this is a double-blind recommendation, but it was recommended to me by a friend who was sending me leftist materials to read: The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century. It's more about capitalism within England rather than around the globe, but it might be worth a look.

    From the Amazon description:

    Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.

    Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a privileged ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city’s poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn’s Triple Tree.

    In this new edition Peter Linebaugh reinforces his original arguments with responses to his critics based on an impressive array of historical sources. As the trend of capital punishment intensifies with the spread of global capitalism, The London Hanged also gains in contemporary relevance.

    • ValiumAnarchist [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I actually came into this thread to recommend this book and The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood (Which /u/LibidinalMarx recommended below this) - It’s a brilliant overview of early capitalism and it uses the spread of capital punishment to tell the story of the spread of capital.

      Dickens also has an essay called something like “the history of the modern rich” that illustrates the background of his view of how things came into being and why which I also recommend. I’ll see if I can find a link and add it in.