I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
I always saw Arrighi's description of the Italian led non-territorialized networks of exchange as the valuable seed that was planted in the fertile soils of the competitive English leasing market described by Wood
But I think both of them got a little too wrapped up in the historical realities of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they miss the crucial mutation that transformed capitalism post-1730, not only in terms of technology but also the super-profits generated by the intensification of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade
End of the day I think Marx was dead on in his description of the evolution of industrial capitalism in relation to its previous iterations
We need a substantial treatment on not only the historical origin of capitalism, but also on the invisible second origin embodied by industrial capitalism
Yeah I think as works of history Woods and Arrighi both have great cases, and can totally complement each other if the terms are changed a bit for each. Would absolutely love to read that kind of substantial treatment on industrial capitalism, if only it existed... this kind of long duree history on capitalism is few and far between.
A while ago I found a useful historical outline to formulate the treatment, but it's limited to only tracking the technological spatial diffusion of early steam engines, but I still think it's a decent map if it was paired to the concurrent developments of capital and labor markets during this time-period
The crucial years for understanding the development of modern industrial capitalism are 1700-1803, the trick is to find all the puzzle pieces shattered around academia, pieces that deal individually with slavery, technology, war, trade, history of labor and generate a work similar to Arrighi's or Wood's
It's pretty telling that something like that hasn't been attempted, we always have to remember even historians are politically minded and politically sensitive, or in the infamous case of Walter Johnson in his treatment of Marx's writings on slavery about this same time-period, outright intellectually dishonest