et us get the clichés out of the way. Capitalism is the water we swim in. It defines, in some form, almost every part of our lives. And swimming in it has become so second nature, so ubiquitous, so all-pervasive, that we forget capitalism has a history. It had a beginning. It has changed over time. It is man-made. And so, like good scientists or engineers, we ought to take it apart — to analyse and interpret and understand it, to think through its rules and norms, its ideas and institutions, to find out where it came from, how it works, and how and why it conquered the world.

This is, in many ways, the biggest and strangest story I have told. There are so many moments, so many places to visit, so many people to meet. But what fascinates me about it is that it is a good story. In fact, one of the historians I draw on most heavily, Joyce Appleby, opens her history of capitalism like a detective novel. The history of capitalism begins with a puzzle — one that historians have pored over for decades, if not centuries, in one form or another. It is a puzzle that changes over time. It is the question of how, where, from whom, and why this thing we call capitalism developed. Because unlike, say, communism or fascism, or even something like physics or chemistry, you cannot neatly point to a tradition of thinkers — a Marx, a Mussolini, a Newton, an Einstein — who drew out and delineated the framework of an ideology. Instead, capitalism bubbled up, surrounded by other material, from a number of different components, out of what are, by historical standards, rather murky depths. And it did so very quickly. So let us try to develop a better understanding of capitalism. But first — who are the parties we will need to define?

To crack the case of this detective story, we will travel across the world — from Spain to Italy, from the Dutch Republic to England, from England to America — across different time periods. We will meet a diverse cast of characters, and we will watch the story traverse many different locations and ideas: from the feudal estates of Europe to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, then Germany, then America; down to the Southern slavery plantations; back up to the Chicago meatpacking district; then on to Wall Street, financial crashes, and even the apocalyptic trenches of the First World War.

Capitalism famously booms and busts. It moves through phases and ages. It has changed and morphed across its history. But one thing is undeniable: love it or hate it, the speed and ferocity with which it transformed the entire world was astonishing. Here is just one figure I find personally staggering. In 1760 — before the Industrial Revolution had truly taken hold — Britain was processing around 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton to make clothing and other goods. After just a generation or two, by 1840, that figure had grown to a staggering 366 million pounds. Consider the scope of that change. Not doubled. Not tripled. Not four percent annual growth. That is an explosion by a factor of one hundred and sixty. And that is just one example from a landscape of similarly extraordinary figures across almost every sphere of life.

But I want to try, at least, to move away from abstract numbers as much as possible and think instead about lives, realities, flesh, emotions, and possibilities — about what we have inherited from this history. I want to think about what one hundred and sixty times more available clothing, building materials, tools, transport, and food actually means for ordinary people. What it means when it matters. What happens when a peasant is a little warmer, a little better fed, a little healthier, a little freer? What happens when you can for the first time travel by train across the country, or buy a car, or stop worrying about surviving the winter? And what happens to the rest of the world when one part of it becomes immeasurably richer and more powerful? What happens when warships, tanks, and guns can be rolled out like clockwork on an industrial scale?

It is a story of what some historians have called the conquering bourgeoisie. The historian Eric Hobsbawm called it a world revolution. Another historian I will draw on frequently, David Landes, called it Prometheus Unbound — this image of Prometheus as a kind of god who stole something, a figure with a Janus face, the image of fire and steel and oil and power and energy conquering the world. A kind of Frankenstein that we created and that sometimes does things we never anticipated. These metaphors — going forth, going west, venturing into the unknown, drawing on some great new power, conquering the world — are images I will return to often, because I think they are very useful ones.

And it is important to keep in mind how historically recent all of this is. The term "Industrial Revolution," for example, was not used until the late nineteenth century. "Capitalism" as a widespread term did not come into common use until the twentieth century. The subject matter itself changes as we follow it: it changes as it evolves, grows, and comes to terms with its contradictions. From small factories and handicrafts to slavery and cotton mills; from rudimentary steam engines to vast railway networks, cars, and warships; from small businesses to global supply chains. Some of the things we now consider integral to capitalism — consumer culture, mass advertising, mass persuasion, catalogues, then online shopping, shopping malls — all of them enter the picture much later on. We have to understand why and how capitalism moves and transforms itself into different forms.

Analysing capitalism, telling this story, is a bit like deconstructing a fast car while you are speeding along inside it. And that is what we will have to do. We will carefully unscrew a few nuts and bolts. We will find out where the rubber comes from. We will peel back the paintwork, drain the oil, examine the shopping on the back seat, and trace this thing back to Ford's factory floor. And then I had better drive this metaphor off a cliff before the engine falls out. But enough of that. Let us begin.

Chapter One: The Feudal Order

Capitalism is the water we swim in. It feels entirely natural to us. As we will see, it is actually very unusual in historical terms — it just takes getting out of the water to recognise that. In fact, in a strange way, I think feudalism would feel more natural. I want to try to make us genuinely feel how normal it would have been to be an ordinary feudal person in the Middle Ages — to really situate us, to take us back to that feudal world, to try and imagine the mental landscape of a feudal peasant. Only then, I think, can we begin to understand the transformation in mentalities and outlooks that eventually took place.

It is genuinely difficult to imagine being an average person in the Middle Ages, because it was mainly the grand events that were recorded — who was king, religious controversies, and so on. The mundane realities of work, play, crops, trade, village life — precisely the things that interest us when thinking about how capitalism developed — were considered beneath the dignity of the historical record. Most obviously and importantly, the vast majority of the world was rural. The global population around 1600 was roughly 500 million, but approximately ninety-four percent of people lived agricultural lives, and eighty percent of these were peasants of some form. That figure — eighty to ninety-four percent — comes up again and again. It is perhaps the most important figure we will encounter. It took eighty percent of the population to produce enough food for everyone. And try to guess, incidentally, what that number is today.

Most of these people were serfs, peasants, slaves, or members of castes with specific roles and positions they were born into — certain obligations, certain expectations, certain things they could and could not do. It was a very closed system. Most practised a form of polyculture — cultivating multiple plants and animals — and spent their entire lives on small plots, growing various vegetables, tending to livestock, repairing their clothes, their fences, their homes. Market day might come once a week, but it was a long walk to the nearest town, so many did not bother unless absolutely necessary. You were, for the most part, directly producing the means of your own subsistence — and likely giving a portion of it to your lord. As the historian Peter McPhee notes in Liberty or Death, the countryside would actually seem very crowded to us today.

Appleby writes: "Whether in ancient Egypt or Greece, Babylonia or Mongolia, it took the labour of upwards of eighty percent of the people to produce enough food to feed the whole population. And because farmers often did not even succeed in doing that, there were famines." What is striking is how little changed for the vast majority of human beings throughout most of history. Even a skilled labourer in sixteenth-century England would be doing very similar work, for very similar pay, living very similar lives to their ancestors under the Romans fifteen hundred years before. That is a remarkably static, unchanging set of routines, ideas, practices, and ways of living.

Of course I am generalising. The ways peasants lived, their obligations, their political status and position differed enormously. "Peasant" is a useful catch-all term for our purposes, particularly in the European context. A serf, for example, was obliged to provide food for their lord. Many serfs in places like Russia were essentially slaves who could be bought and sold. Lords across Europe controlled vast estates: one in Poland was half the size of Ireland; one in Hungary encompassed seven million acres. Catherine the Great once gave away forty thousand serfs, which says something about just how many she held.

Europe was a patchwork of principalities, duchies, empires, free cities, and kingdoms, each with different arrangements of its own. The historian William Doyle writes that over much of Europe, "the reality of the ancien régime was an intense confusion of powers and perpetual overlaps of unequal jurisdiction in which the king, so far from imposing an unchallengeable authority, was constantly bargaining with his subjects at a number of different levels." In other words, it was complicated.

I want to focus for a moment on absolutist France, because it is the most typical example of an absolute feudal monarchy. It was defined by what were called privileges — a patchwork of them. Different towns, provinces, individuals, estates, seigneurs, and the church all held different types of privilege. Some were taxed less; some not at all. Some operated under different laws or different courts. Tithes — a tax of roughly eight to ten percent at harvest time each year — were paid to the church by peasants. Other dues were paid to seigneurs at various times of year. Peasants owed their lords between fifteen and forty percent of their produce. There were many languages, many units of measurement, and many cultures operating in parallel.

Here is a general example that McPhee highlights. The village of Gabriac in southern France had a population of just eight hundred. Its lord was the Bishop of Béziers, who was rarely present, but there existed a detailed list of what the villagers owed him each year: eighty-five litres of barley, twenty-eight of wheat, eight hundred and eighty bottles of olive oil, eighteen chickens, four pounds of beeswax, four partridges, one rabbit, and various amounts of pepper, nutmeg, and cloves. Lords also typically owned or controlled the village mill and the communal oven at the centre of the village. Peasants generally owed their lord a period of labour at harvest time as well. All of this was ostensibly in exchange for the right to use the lord's land and for his protection.

On top of this, by virtue of their elevated position, French nobles were exempt from taxation. The privileges constituted a labyrinth of rights, dues, offices, and tolls shared between the state and the church, between the different levels of the nobility and the clergy. To give some indication of the extent of the church's power: it owned a quarter of all property in Paris. This was all one great political ladder that had to be climbed. Louis XVI, for example, sold seventy thousand venal offices — that is, positions sold to raise royal revenue. There were four hundred thousand nobles in France at the time, just before the Revolution, at the end of the eighteenth century. And one in ten women in the country was a nun.

That is just a snapshot of Europe. As we will see, England differed somewhat, but Germany, Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe, and much of the rest of the world — including India, China, and the Ottoman Empire — looked very similar. From our perspective, being a serf does not sound like much fun. Consider again that eighty percent of the population working in farming. That figure roughly means that eighty percent of humanity's collective attention was spent working the fields, feeding animals, fixing homesteads, and so on. And even that was not enough, because famine was an ever-present threat.

To take one particularly severe period: during the so-called "seven ill years" in Scotland in the 1690s, between five and fifteen percent of the population died of starvation. These were among the last serious European famines — and why they were the last is a big part of this story, which we will return to. But if we go further back to the fourteenth century, as many as ten to twenty-five percent of Europe's population were wiped out in some of the worst famines the continent had ever seen. That is before we have even mentioned bad harvests more broadly, illness, plague, and the general absence of adequate healthcare. The average lifespan in England as late as the seventeenth century was just thirty-six years.

But to try to truly situate ourselves in these periods: how did an average person think about what seems to us — and we must remember this is only how it seems to us — an almost hopeless existence? In 1833, the Manchester surgeon Peter Gaskell painted quite a rosy picture of pre-industrial England, describing domestic manufacturing as "infinitely superior to the manufacture of a later date." Workers laboured at home with their families, with small vegetable plots, with perhaps an animal or two. He did not intend to paint an Arcadia, he said, but the average person "commonly lived to a good round age, worked when necessity demanded, ceased his labour when his wants were supplied."

This kind of romanticised view has largely been criticised by historians as ideologically motivated — another instance of the "good old days" genre, the nostalgic backward glance through rose-tinted glass. The historian Christopher Bayly offers a more measured summary of ordinary lives in the period: "Peasants were not boors, as some learned people of the time thought, nor, by contrast, the charming inhabitants of an unspoiled Arcadia, as many indulgent literati had begun to assert by the eighteenth century." Most peasants, he says, were quite entrepreneurial. They wanted more — more land, more money, more respect. But despite this, compared with today, the world almost everywhere and for almost everyone was very tightly constrained: tied to lords, tied in knots of privileges and obligations, and above all, tied to the soil.

Produce was overwhelmingly determined by the seasons, by sunlight, by laws that were supposedly fixed by God — and then by the lord, by the great chain of being. Hobsbawm, in his "Age of" trilogy, which I will refer to frequently, writes that in the 1780s, "for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies." This image of being chained, tied down, fixed, and shackled is captured in the phrase "the great chain of being." It was widely used, and it expressed the idea that God, king, aristocrats, priests, gentry, peasants, European, African, dog, insect, grass, and soil — each had its place, like a position in a lineup. Except that you did not move from that place. That was your lot. That was your destiny. That was where you were meant to be in life.

Another Mancunian, Richard Guest, wrote in 1823 about Lancashire before the Industrial Revolution: "The events of the neighbourhood flowed in a regular, unbroken train. Politics were a field little entered into, and the histories of each other's families, including cousins five times removed, with marriages, births, deaths, etc. formed the almost only subjects of their conversations," and that "the lord was the dictator of opinion, the regulator of parish affairs and the exclusive settler of all disputes."

Again: chained, tied, shackled, cyclical, expected, routine. And some might even say declining — drifting away from the Garden of Eden, that idealised sense of perfection. Today, by contrast, we tend to believe that things can improve, that we can climb the social ladder, that the future may be better than the present. Compare this to Aristotle's view of the world — one that Christianity later borrowed. He thought that a rock falls to the ground because that is its place in the universe. That is where it belongs. That is where God willed it to move. The same logic applied to the king. The same to the peasant. The idea of belonging somewhere, of being one thing and one thing only, of doing things one particular way, strikes me as a remarkably powerful ideology. After all, everything has a home: the bees in the hive, the fish in the water, the rock on the ground, the person in their house. Some are born to power and others to poverty. The sun, the clouds, the stars — they belong in the sky.

Reminding ourselves of this helps us appreciate how utterly unnatural capitalism would have seemed to a thirteenth-century French peasant — why, in fact, feudalism would have appeared to be the natural way of things. Add to this a couple of further factors: that wealth and credit were distrusted by Christian culture; that borrowing, lending, and commerce more broadly were considered suspect; that one would be rewarded in the afterlife, and that worldly things were bad, dirty, and corrupting. In a society dominated by the church, this was a powerful set of beliefs. You arrive at a situation that seems not only difficult to see beyond but impossible to imagine escaping — difficult to change, difficult even to envision as changeable. Something genuinely new could hardly have seemed more alien.

Chapter Two: New Worlds

It is difficult to tell this story because it unfolds over such a long, slow span of time. Capitalism was not planned. It emerged from many different moments and many different factors, much as the phrase goes: "life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards." We have to look back retrospectively at what those moments were and try to piece them together. It is a strange thing for something to happen that the people living through it had no real sense of where it would lead.

The first class of these moments does not relate to capitalism specifically but to the general idea of something new emerging from the fixed shackles of feudal life. There was no more powerful impetus to challenging the feudal order than the discovery of the New World. This was one of the first stages of modern globalisation — the Age of Discovery — not just of new lands, but of new foods, spices, animals, materials, and not least new peoples, cultures, and languages. When Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, European culture began to change at a speed that was, in historical terms, remarkable.

Many of the new spices, vegetables, and sugar were intensely desirable. And the mere existence of abundant new land was an extraordinarily powerful idea. One has to try to imagine the compelling, exciting effect this would have had on people's lives and imaginations, even if it never touched them directly. Even simply thinking about it would contribute to a new mental landscape. This was a period in which the world was growing smaller and faster. Ships were improving, technology advancing, communications becoming easier, roads better. The invention of the movable-type printing press was spreading across Europe at roughly the same time. People could read more, learn more, hear more about these new and exciting things — novel things, in the most general sense of the word.

I am using the phrase "new worlds" here in the broadest and most expansive way. I mean new worlds in here as much as out there — a broadening of the imaginative horizon, an expansion of the mental landscape, an enlargement of the possible. The Renaissance was unfolding at roughly the same time, bringing with it new ways of producing and engaging with art and architecture, along with the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts and ideas.

It is in this expansive context that we can begin to understand why some countries leapt ahead of others, gaining what we might call first-mover advantages. And this idea of first movers is precisely why this story will take us from Spain and Portugal across to Italy, to the Dutch Republic, to England, and eventually to America. In a very real sense, we can see capitalism as a character setting out on a journey and developing as it goes.

Consider Portugal. It has a very long coastline along the Atlantic. Its fishing waters are rich and deep. The fishing culture brought with it ship knowledge and maritime technology. It is still close enough to Europe's core cities, but near enough to Africa to explore down that western coastline of an unknown continent. There were the Canary Islands — a useful stopping point for ships, a base for the slave trade, and a potential launching pad for further Atlantic exploration. Spain, of course, shared these advantages. Is it any surprise that these two countries produced the first modern empires?

Of course, first movers attract second and third and fourth movers. We can already see something integral to capitalism's development: mimesis, copying. Countries see what others are doing and want a share. This opening of the imaginative horizon was immediately contagious. Five hundred years ago, there were people on both sides of the Atlantic, but neither side knew the other existed. On the western side, people had reddish-brown skin and lived in huts or longhouses. On the eastern side, in Europe, people were pale-skinned and had learned to build large houses and ocean-going ships, but still knew very little about the rest of the world. When we look at it this way, we are forced to think about incentives, factors, and causes — the things that created the conditions for what we otherwise tend to see as the simple genius of one man sailing across the Atlantic. It was more than that. It was an entire culture that preceded Columbus — that he literally leapt from, across the Atlantic.

Appleby writes: "The novelties from European trade in the East Indies and the New World promoted new commercial institutions, created a fresh group of entrepreneurs and stimulated the imagination of contemporaries." Imagination is absolutely central here, as it sets the initial palette. It is crucial because, compared with the fixed time of the feudal chain of being, imagination throws us all mentally into the future and its different possibilities. Before this, most people would have thought of history as either cyclical — repeating day after day, year after year — or even as declining. People's mental horizons would have extended only to today, to this week at most, and barely beyond the planting seasons. Why would you think of progress in any other sense?

But now there was a new world — emphasis on new — with new animals, plants, materials, and land. Once you have sugar, cinnamon, coffee, and chocolate to offer guests, new silks, new dyes and colours, your imagination is ignited. Imagine wearing heavy, scratchy wool garments your whole life and then encountering light, bright, blue cotton. Consider the social and cultural capital to be gained from having these new things in your home — the "look at me" factor, the "talk of the town" factor. Imagine how powerfully that would transform the mental landscape.

If we skip forward a little, one commentator wrote in 1690 about trade: "The wants of the mind are infinite. Man naturally aspires, and his mind is elevated. His senses grow more refined and more capable of delight." Another wrote that "man's wants increase with his wishes, which is for everything that is rare, can gratify his senses, adorn his body, and promise the ease, pleasure and pomp of life."

Just imagine eating bland, unsalted, unsweetened meals your entire life. Imagine being the only person on the street wearing a vivid violet cloak, or carrying a powerful new perfume that everyone stops to notice. We have no real equivalent to this today. The discovery of the New World had something of the effect that a visitation from aliens might have on us now — the sheer newness of it, its unexpectedness, its alien peoples, landscapes, and cultures. That is literally what it was like for people of that period.

So here we have the first part of our equation. Novelty. Desire. Imagination. Possibility. A sense of plurality — a multiplicity of new ways of doing things, looking at things, thinking about things. A new mental frontier.

These are still very broad causes so far — the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance, the printing press. But there is one that some have seen as crucial: the Reformation. The sociologist Max Weber, in fact, argued that Protestantism was "the spirit of capitalism." What did he mean?

Very broadly, the Reformation was a sixteenth-century movement that saw many churches, countries, and theologians break away from the Catholic Church, which was seen as corrupt, greedy, and excessively hierarchical. It is worth noting that many of the newly independent Protestant regions were precisely the ones that industrialised earliest — the Dutch Republic, England, and later Germany. In his book The Unbound Prometheus, Landes notes how many Dissenters there were in the north and the Midlands of England, where industrialisation first took hold.

Weber's argument was that Calvinism, the particular form of Protestantism that emerged from the sixteenth-century Reformation, emphasised something called predestination — the idea that God, being all-knowing and all-powerful, already knew who was destined for heaven and who for hell, and that this could not be altered by a priesthood or by a church offering indulgences. Weber argued that this in turn led people to search for earthly signs that they were among the elect, and that this search motivated hard work, discipline, and good deeds. This debate still rages today, and many historians reject the thesis outright.

However, I think the broader idea of nonconformity is somewhat more interesting than the search for signs of divine favour. The Reformation eventually led, at least in time, to greater toleration for other religious views and, by extension, for other ways of doing things and thinking. In a society where universities had a very strong religious character and religion permeated virtually everything, a degree of intellectual toleration clearly enabled not only different religious practices but different approaches to science, economics, and politics as well.

In this sense, Protestantism simply meant a little more freedom, a little more slack from authority, a few more neural pathways for novel ideas to travel down. Again, this is not a direct cause of capitalism, but a loosening of the soil — a preparation of the ground from which something new might grow.

Finally, let us add the scientific revolution. This is a large topic in itself, but I think it is more useful to think of it not as a single revolution but as a scientific evolution — or rather, revolutions in fits and starts, waves that sometimes crested dramatically and at other times subsided. The central moment for our purposes, the great peak, is Francis Bacon publishing The New Organon in 1620. In it, Bacon argued that new inventions like the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press had changed the world more profoundly than anything else, and that science and the experimental method should therefore be advanced as energetically as possible.

One consequence was the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1662, with the goal of furthering scientific knowledge. But this was just one landmark in a broader culture of expanding horizons. Isaac Newton published his Principia on the laws of gravity and motion in 1687. There was an intense popular interest in physics, gravity, forces, vacuums, gases, pumps, bell jars, air pressure, and experiment in general — and this culture, as we will see, was absolutely crucial.

In his book on the steam engine, William Rosen writes: "A new enthusiasm for creating knowledge led to the public sharing of experimental methods and results. Two men — for these results built a network of communication channels among theoretical scientists. These channels eventually carried not just theoretical results but their real-world applications, which spread into the coffeehouses and inns where artisans could purchase access to the new knowledge."

New worlds, then: imagination, the Renaissance, the printing press, the Reformation, and a scientific revolution. Broad, loose, somewhat ambiguous seeds sown in stagnant feudal soil. They might have led to many different things — history is contingent, randomness enters at every turn, and many different pathways were possible. But for this story, and for history, they preceded the emergence of what we now call capitalism.

Chapter Three: First and False Starts

In his book on the Industrial Revolution, William Rosen notes that there are more than two hundred theories about its causes. If we are asking how and why capitalism emerged, that is a great many theories to examine. And as we will see, causes are strange things. It would be odd, for instance, to say that Columbus caused the Industrial Revolution. But looking back through a very long lens, he contributed to it, in a very small and indirect sense. Butterflies and wings flapping on the other side of the world, and so on. Some causes are much more immediate — the steam engine, for instance. So we have both proximate causes and causes mediated through a long chain of intervening events.

Another way to understand capitalism is to look at those factors that were present elsewhere and yet did not produce an Industrial Revolution and a capitalist takeoff in the same way that eventually happened in England.

Take Spain — a first mover with all the advantages we described: new goods, new ideas, new cultures flowing in from the Americas, abundant new land, slaves, ships, and advanced maritime technology. But the key problem with the conquistadors was that they were searching for gold. This might have brought wealth, but it did not produce capitalism — not new methods of production, not factories, not new social systems, not an emphasis on wage labour. In fact, it brought inflation, as large quantities of new gold circulated through the Spanish economy and drove up prices. We call this a resource curse today, and it still occurs — notably with oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia, which focuses its energies on the oil fields and grows very rich but struggles to diversify, especially as the resource begins to run out.

Many European aristocrats, moreover, considered commerce and manual work to be beneath them. Spain did not open its markets. It was highly repressive, enforced by the Inquisition. There was no religious freedom; books were banned and burned. Rights and monopolies to trade or explore had to be granted by the Spanish authorities. In short, Spain clung to the old controlled, top-down way of doing things.

Another candidate is the Italian city-states — Florence, Pisa — which were relatively free compared with much of Europe, focused on trade, especially with Asia via the Silk Roads, and were very wealthy. The Renaissance happened there. But the problem, again, was top-down control. The political economy was closed, fixed, and authoritarian. There was a strong focus on who traded, who could be a merchant, who received the right to operate in a given market and what the official granting that right received in return. The city-states may have been gateways to the silks and spices and luxuries of the East, but their political and economic system rested on privileges: a merchant might hold a monopoly on a particular good, granted by a particular political office in exchange for payment, with prices then regulated from above. In short, a closed, top-down pyramid.

But the most serious contender for the title of first capitalist economy — and in some respects the most justified claim — was the Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century. The Dutch became very rich very quickly, drawing the attention of the rest of Europe precisely because such a small country was generating such extraordinary wealth. Their main export was herring. Many pamphlets were written trying to explain this economic miracle. The Dutch were merchants and middlemen, much like the Italian and Iberian traders before them. One major factor in their sudden prosperity was their newly won independence from Catholic Spain. After independence, the Dutch Republic welcomed religious dissenters from across Europe, cultivating a culture of tolerance and a scepticism of orthodoxy.

The Dutch Republic's most radical innovation was the joint-stock company — and in particular the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602. The joint-stock company is probably the most immediate cause we have encountered so far for the emergence of capitalism. The premise was simple but world-changing, backed by law. The Dutch could buy shares in a joint-stock company, pooling their resources and sharing the risk of large ventures that no individual could undertake alone. An added advantage was that a nobleman could invest without having to work for the company himself — important in a world where work was still considered beneath the aristocracy. Investors were also not personally liable for any debts or losses. As Appleby writes: "Nothing revolutionised industrial finance more than the legal form of incorporation that gave limited liability to the owners of enterprises."

Why, then, did capitalism not fully take off in the Dutch Republic? Appleby suggests that the success in trade and commerce may have distracted the Dutch from improving methods of production and moving towards the factory system. The Dutch Republic was also very small — unlike Britain slightly later, it was difficult to project power across the seas, maintain a large navy, dominate trade routes, and then sustain a large empire.

Spain, Portugal, the Italian city-states, and the Dutch Republic might all be thought of as proto-capitalist, or as having proto-capitalist elements. But they still operated within controlled systems still attached to the old idea of a great chain of being, in which authority resided at the top and commanded downwards. And they were missing one very important factor that we today consider central to capitalism: factories, industry, and the systematic improvement of the means of production.

Chapter Four: A Revolution in Metal

Looking at these false starts, we can identify some proximate causes and begin to approach the core. But profit-seeking, commerce, and risk-sharing in joint enterprises are not exactly unique to the modern world. They occurred in the ancient world too. People have always sought to profit, to exchange, and to pool efforts for larger ventures. Of course, these activities became far more focused and significant as we approach the birth of capitalism. But there is one major cause that is highly correlated with it and that we have not yet fully examined — and if we look at it very closely, and then work backwards to ask what caused it, we may arrive at a clearer picture. That moment is the Industrial Revolution.

The most obvious place to begin is with that most modern of things: the engine. Recall the Royal Society, established in 1662 to advance scientific knowledge. Just a little later, in 1698, it advertised "the demonstration of a new invention for raising of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use and advantage for draining mines." The catchy title aside, this was Thomas Savery's Fire Engine, or The Miner's Friend, and it was the first rudimentary steam engine.

I know that steam engines can switch many people off. They did the same to me, at times — they can conjure a slightly nerdy fascination with Victorian engineering or school lessons about the Industrial Revolution. But I promise to make this as interesting as possible, because we really must understand how this remarkable invention completely changed the world. And if we want to understand capitalism today, we need to look at how it came about: the minutiae, the factors, the values, ambitions, and focuses of the people involved. It turns out to be quite an extraordinary story.

One common problem during this period was flooding in mines — dangerous for the miners, and limiting how deep a mine could be dug. Without going into excessive detail: Thomas Savery recognised that water heated into steam and then cooled back into water creates a vacuum in a chamber. He connected this vacuum to a pipe descending into the mine, and it drew the water up. Savery's device was one of many invented across Europe, but the most ambitious. It was still simple and limited. But just seven years later, in 1705, the inventor Thomas Newcomen improved on it by adding a piston and a beam, making the design radically more useful. At twelve strokes per minute, each stroke lifted ten gallons of water from a fifty-metre mine — making it the first truly widespread industrial device: extraordinarily practical across an entire central industry that affected many others in turn.

This invention has a strong claim to being the most consequential moment or creation in human history. It leads to so much: more engines, more factories, trains, cars, air travel, electricity. It leads, as we will see, to war machines. It is, in a very real sense, the foundation of modernity and industry. To take just one example of the scale of the problem that Savery and Newcomen had solved: at one English mine, five hundred horses had been used to haul water out of it. Imagine the upkeep, the work, the feed involved. Mining was in this way still half a farm. At another mine, horses could lift sixty-seven thousand gallons of water a day — a vast operation in itself — but Newcomen's engine could lift a quarter of a million. And remember: this was only the beginning.

I want us to remember the name Thomas Newcomen. We will return to him. Because if what he did was so earth-shattering, if it took so long in human history before someone accomplished it, we ought to ask exactly why he worked on this, what his motivations were, and what conditions and context made it possible. But for now, let us simply appreciate how groundbreaking it truly was.

First, obviously, it made him relatively wealthy, though he did not die rich. After a few years, Newcomen's atmospheric engine was being used in almost every major mine in the country, as well as in many new mines that could not previously have been worked at all. The advantage this gave England was immense. By 1800, there were 1,600 Newcomen engines operating across England, but only 45 in France. England was producing eighty-one percent of Europe's coal. Consider what this means: so many more people employed; so much cheaper the product, with 1,600 of these engines operating where the nearest competitor had only 45. It was bound to attract intense attention from the rest of the world.

One person who paid close attention was the Scottish inventor James Watt. He recognised that engines like Newcomen's could be useful for other purposes — powering ships, for instance. He improved the efficiency of Newcomen's design by adding a separate condenser. And interestingly, for our purposes, he was a meticulous measurer of wasted fuel and wasted heat. He experimented with different temperatures and volumes, using precise instruments, and improved the engine's efficiency by a factor of four. When you recall how many horses were being used and how many gallons were being drawn in a single day, even small improvements in efficiency meant enormous savings of time, resources, money, and of course profit.

As Landes writes: by 1800, the United Kingdom was using perhaps eleven million tons of coal a year. By 1830, that amount had doubled. Fifteen years later, it had doubled again. By 1870, it was crossing the one-hundred-million-ton mark. The focus on efficiency meant that even very small improvements — because of the scale of adoption, because of how many people would use and benefit from them — saved time, money, and manpower, opened new use cases, and had a truly revolutionary cumulative impact.

What followed was a series of world-altering knock-on effects, because efficiency was revealing itself as the central key that unlocked a whole range of activities, and because precision metalwork was at the core of pursuing that efficiency. A corresponding revolution in metallurgy took hold. John Wilkinson, for example, learned to bore cylinders with far greater precision. There were advances in lathes, drills, screws, and gauges for standardising sizes. Appleby writes: "Starting in the eighteenth century, a succession of ingenious men discovered how to make natural forces push, pump, lift, turn, twirl, smelt and grind all manner of things." All of this led to small, incremental improvements in generating warmth, in the ability to cook, in the capacity to manufacture essentials more cheaply. Things we take entirely for granted today — warmth alone seems to us a mere comfort, but it allows longer working hours, more activity at home, easier drying of materials, and, very simply, survival.

Hobsbawm wrote that "the gods and kings of the past were powerless before the businessmen and steam engines of the present."

But there was another distinct line of innovation running in parallel. Richard Arkwright's Cromford Mill was the first modern industrial factory system. He brought together water power and a spinning frame, and workers in a large factory — adjacent to a canal that connected to a railway, drawing together so much at once. But thinking specifically about what he produced — clothing — we can see how two lines converge. Arkwright's story really shows how cause and effect can operate simultaneously, because clothing connects two factors we examined earlier: the imagination and the new world.

First, you had lighter, more exotic materials arriving from the new worlds. The most commonly used material before was sheep's wool, which was coarse and heavy. Just imagine how uncomfortable old clothing must have been — scratchy, barely washed, worn day in, day out. I discard t-shirts today if I find them uncomfortable after a year's use, and those are soft, modern garments. Wearing roughly treated wool, day after day, year after year — it must have been entirely different from how we experience clothing today.

It is no surprise that when people had a little more time and a little more money and a little more freedom from the fields, one of the first things they spent both on was new clothing. Think about what producing fabric involves: picking, transporting, cleaning, combing, spinning into yarn, weaving, sewing, finishing with dye and bleach, and so on — all of it potentially mechanisable, all of it open to improvement. The most obvious problem to solve was supplying weavers with better, stronger, and cheaper yarn.

The biggest innovation here was Richard Arkwright's water frame of 1775, powered by water at a mill very near where I live. It used a complex system of wood, ropes, and pulleys on a frame to spin raw cotton into a stronger yarn by twisting it very tightly. One of Arkwright's workers, once the spinning frame was in operation, could produce as much in the same time as seven or eight workers elsewhere. That made his products seven or eight times cheaper. The competition simply could not keep up.

If we think about all of this technology, innovation, and culture and how it spread, it becomes clear that the English Midlands of that period were very much like Silicon Valley today. It was the height of progress, of innovation, of fascination. It was the pinnacle of advancement in the world, and news travelled fast. One European traveller noted that the common Englishman now wore leather shoes where people at home still wore wooden clogs.

Within forty years of Arkwright's invention, steam engines had replaced water wheels in the mills, raw cotton was being grown cheaply by enslaved people in America and imported in large quantities, and the figures tell the story with startling clarity. Between 1750 and 1769 — just nineteen years — cotton trade exports from Britain increased tenfold. In 1760, Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton. Just twenty-seven years later, in 1787, that number had reached twenty-two million. Fifty years after that, it was 366 million pounds. The price of yarn fell to one-twentieth of what it had been — the equivalent of something dropping from ten pounds to fifty pence. Think about that. Today, we simply do not see things get cheaper by factors like that. The change within a single generation, to people's lives, livelihoods, economy, culture, towns, and factories, would have been dizzying, as many testified. One English politician declared that it was "not five percent or ten percent, but hundreds and thousands percent" that made the fortunes of Lancashire.

These companies were the Apples, Googles, and Microsofts of their day. By 1780, Britain had overtaken France — a country with a much larger population — in terms of trade. Seventy years later, it had doubled France's output. And it is important to remember that these are only the major inventions — the big transformations we tend to remember as the most obvious examples of progress. They represent just the largest and most visible instances of many thousands of smaller devices, machines, innovations, and approaches. This was a culture of improvement: of tinkering, of using tools and new ideas to make countless things incrementally better. Landes even suggests that the small, anonymous gains were probably more important in the long run than the famous major inventions. That small, forgotten artisan or ironmonger, meticulous in their focus on a new method of cutting a slightly more precise thread — these people improved efficiency by not even one percent. But all of it slowly accumulated into a bubbling culture of advancement.

Consider chemicals — often underappreciated in this story. They were used for cleaning and dyeing, for soaps, glass, fertilisers, and the cleaning of homes, shops, and clothes. The chemical works in Glasgow boasted towering chimneys of 455 feet that dominated the skyline — in a real sense, the first modern skyscrapers. Businessmen, painters, and writers all flocked to stare at, marvel at, and criticise these factories that were appearing across the Midlands of England and, increasingly, elsewhere. Imagine seeing something like this for the very first time.

The next knock-on effect of the steam engine was, of course, the railways. They were first imagined as short lines with small locomotives replacing horses dragging carts along tracks to smooth the journey. Richard Trevithick built the very first locomotive at the ironworks in Wales in 1804. Compare it to Savery's engine just a century before — and you can see a century's worth of small, precise improvements to the basic engine concept compounded across time.

By 1830, the first commercial passenger line opened between Liverpool and Manchester — just thirty-two miles long. But again, the numbers are extraordinary. In 1830, there were still fewer than fifty miles of track in Britain. By 1840: 4,500 miles. By 1850, just ten years later: 23,500 miles, while almost all of Europe still had essentially none.

And the snowballing effects continued. In 1750, Britain exported iron at twice the average rate of production. By 1814, exports had grown to five times that level. By 1850, Britain was exporting more iron than the rest of the world combined. From 1740 to 1850, iron output in Britain rose from 17,000 to 2,250,000 tons.

We have, then, this interlocking system of invention, incremental improvement, and efficiency — all of it cascading outward. Clothes need raw materials; raw materials need railways; railways need engines; engines need iron; iron needs coal. The opportunity to contribute to this culture of innovation was everywhere. And England was exporting all of it. It was quite literally the workshop of the world.

There were, clearly, many brilliant individuals here. But what stands out to me — especially given that genius is difficult to measure — is the culture, the economy, and the society. Rosen writes that thousands of innovations were necessary to create steam power, and thousands more depended entirely upon it. A genius does not simply invent all of this, especially not after millions of years in which no one did. You need a culture, and this was a culture of scientific precision, of attention to minutiae, to valves, flues, condensers, to experiments with weights, dies, and volumes. The scientific gaze, the industrial gaze, was a cultural phenomenon.

Rosen continues that most mill owners "knew something of geometry, pre-levelling and mensuration — that is, the ability to understand and analyse volumes — and in some cases possessed a very competent knowledge of practical mathematics. He could calculate the velocity, strength and power of machines, could draw in plan and section."

We have, then, a culture of science, a culture of imagination, a culture of industry, of improving efficiency, of investing large sums of capital with the expectation of profit, of more and more wage labour drawn from the countryside to factories in growing urban areas. In short, we have capitalism taking off at exponential speed. But such dramatic shifts surely require dramatic causes. Was it really just a focus on science or imagination that drove this change? Or were there other, deeper factors?

Chapter Five: The Shape of the Capitalist Machine

So far, to recap, we have a few ingredients: imagination, new worlds, new materials, new horizons, greater tolerance, perhaps science, empiricism, and experimentation. But many of these are not specifically capitalist. If someone asked you to define capitalism, you would not say "imagination." I think we should turn now to laying this out more clearly, so we can form a sharper picture of how it emerged.

First, capitalism begins most obviously with capital — money, resources, assets collected, inherited, earned, stashed, extracted, or stolen, whatever the means may be. But this alone is not enough. Kings and emperors have long held vast reserves of wealth. What distinguishes capital in the capitalist sense is that it is held for a particular purpose: investment. All of the industrial inventions we have considered required substantial capital. Savery had investment from British government workshops and factories. Newcomen worked with private investors. Arkwright was neither rich nor poor, but had very wealthy benefactors. And railways, iron, cotton, the slave trade — all required large sums of initial investment.

So we can begin with capital plus investment. There is a debate about where these initial large stocks of European capital came from. Marx argued that the dispossession of land played a large role. Many point to the slave trade and the enormous influx of profits and cotton into England — and the numbers are impossible to ignore. Sugar and cotton produced by nine million enslaved people transported across the Atlantic for that specific purpose were, after all, the first widespread global capitalist commodities. So at very minimum, this must form a large and undeniable part of our picture. The question is whether it is a necessary cause, a contingent one, or a subsidiary factor.

Appleby concludes: "I don't agree" — meaning that the slave trade and colonial extraction were the primary drivers of capitalism. "As Europe's cathedrals indicate, there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads, canals, windmills, irrigation systems and wharves." Nor does the colonial thesis explain why the first colonisers — Spain and Portugal — did not become capitalist first. Nor why the Roman Empire or ancient China, both of which generated enormous wealth, did not. Wealth, hoarding, and financial power have existed across history; so has slavery and dispossession. But in those instances, capitalism did not emerge. Moreover, capitalism clearly functions today without anything resembling the Atlantic slave trade. So while that trade cannot be a necessary primary cause of capitalism, it remains an un-ignorable part of the story, and capitalism most certainly does require capital reserved for investment.

Investment requires the expectation of return, so profit enters the picture. Capital plus profit equals accumulation. But these factors, too, appear in many different historical contexts. One thing that distinguished England specifically was a focus on improving production and efficiency. The historian Ellen Meiksins Wood identifies four key components: accumulation, competition, profit maximisation, and "the constant systemic need to develop the productive forces." Another defining feature is that under capitalism, unlike under feudalism, virtually all of our goods come from the market in some form — they are not produced directly in our gardens or at our spinning wheels. So we can add markets to our list. Finally, all of this is pursued by private individuals and groups rather than governments — though some would take issue with this formulation.

Marxists and many on the left would argue that wage labour should be a central part of any definition. Unlike under feudalism, where peasants produced their own food, clothing, and materials, under capitalism workers are largely propertyless and must work for a wage. A Marxist would add that the worker is the source of the capitalist's profit. This is a contentious debate with no settled answer, and one I will set aside for now.

The definitions of capitalism are almost numberless. Having reviewed a range of them, I find that what we have already assembled adequately captures the picture that is beginning to emerge in England and that most definitions try to capture. And now we might add more as we proceed.

The crucial question is: what caused this absolutely dramatic historical shift? In the scholarship, this question is known as the transition debate — another contentious, wide-ranging, often fierce debate with little consensus, still ongoing and still evolving. Did the change come from within feudalism, from a conflict between peasants and lords? Or from without — from the growth of independent merchants and towns away from feudal estates? Was it a natural consequence of globalisation? Was it slavery? Was it ideas about freedom? Was it the culture of science? There were so many causes, so many different forces at work, that I think it is more honest simply to lay them out, show them as clearly as possible, and acknowledge that the outcome was, in a sense, overdetermined: caused by many things in many ways, depending on context, time, person, and event. Some causes were more important at certain moments and for certain people than others.

The best we can do is paint a broad picture of what happened. Someone can always object that this particular detail does not fit their particular example. What we are really working with is a set of family resemblances — the nose is similar, the hair somewhat the same. Capitalism is perhaps less like a single recipe and more like a style of cuisine: it has characteristic ingredients, but they differ from dish to dish.

To give a taste of this before the main course, let us look at one of the first people to think seriously about these questions: Adam Smith, the Enlightenment economist and the first real theorist of capitalism. Smith argued that human beings have a natural inclination to "truck, barter and exchange," that markets are natural for this reason, and that profit-seeking is natural too. If this is the case, all you need to do is remove the chains of feudalism, absolute monarchy, and religious authority — take away the shackles — and this natural inclination will express itself freely, allowing human beings to flourish. Smith maintained that "the principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our condition, a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave."

The British Conservative politician Edmund Burke agreed. He wrote to Smith that "a theory like yours founded on the nature of man, which is always the same, will last when those that are founded on his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten." He continued that "the uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition is the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived."

This is a good place to start with this debate, because it is so obviously wrong — and I think most sensible people and most historians would agree that it is wrong today. If capitalism is simply natural, constant, and uniform across all of human history, then why did human beings do something else entirely for hundreds of thousands of years? And then, very suddenly, over the course of a few centuries, develop a completely novel way of organising economic life and call it natural?

Even if you argue that it is natural but was repressed and held down by feudalism, you still need a cause that released it — that unchained it. Saying it is natural does not answer anything. It does not explain where capitalism came from, because, as Wood points out, if you accept that capitalism is natural, there is no reason to do any further explanatory work at all. It was always there, ready to emerge.

Instead, to really answer where capitalism came from, what its roots are, and how it grew, we need to examine specifically the fertile soil from which it grew: what people were doing culturally, politically, and economically, and what plants that soil produced. And to do that, we need to return to England.

Chapter Six: Why England

Again: hundreds of theories of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, whether considered separately or together. I think the cuisine metaphor works well. Some factors and causes are essential, others subsidiary, others optional — they can be added or removed. Imagination and science are also important to cooking, but as explanatory factors for capitalism they are broad and not especially particular.

Another factor often pointed to is the fourteenth-century Black Death. It killed between thirty and fifty percent of all Europeans and had a major effect on the Renaissance, too — Florence in particular suffered enormously. For our purposes, it also meant that those who survived inherited more capital, and that with labour suddenly scarce, workers could demand higher wages. There were more things to be done than there were people to do them. Was this crucial? Well, no — because the Black Death was not specific to England, and plagues had occurred before. It was likely a factor, a lubricant, but not a primary cause.

England had large coal deposits, which helped. Ironically, the depletion of its forests after centuries of clearing drove demand for coal and for the technology to mine it more efficiently. Coal is dense in carbon and therefore rich in energy. But coal is fairly widespread geographically, so it was a factor but not a central one.

One of the things we have already looked at is the improvement of productive efficiency — those small gains in how the steam engine worked, how deep a mine could be sunk, how strong and how cheaply yarn could be spun. Another efficiency advantage that England possessed was that business could be conducted with relatively little friction compared with the rest of Europe. In the sixteenth century, the Tudors had consolidated and strengthened a single, stable, and coherent set of institutions — courts, government, officials, army, and taxes — that simply did not exist, or did not exist to the same degree, on the continent. There was essentially one language, one currency, one system of weights and measures, and a network of roads. You could travel from place to place, speaking to everyone, trading with everyone, without the constant friction that plagued business elsewhere.

Compare this to France: a patchwork of nobility living off peasants through levies, tolls, taxes, tithes, and privileges that varied from place to place, village to village, person to person. It did not have a unified market as England did. Sending goods from Bordeaux to Paris might involve taxes at multiple points, bridge tolls, and even language barriers. Germany was even worse: some 350 principalities and cities, each with its own units, weights, measurements, tolls, regulations, and customs.

Think of the knock-on effects. A single language, a common road network, a unified legal system: news, culture, books, scientific knowledge, and imaginative stories about new materials and possibilities could all disseminate more easily. This cohesion — or at least this absence of friction — was key to the smooth transmission of goods, ideas, culture, and new possibilities, both physically and mentally.

Individual rights are frequently emphasised in discussions of capitalism, especially in the American context. But the period we have been examining mostly precedes the American and French revolutions. If we take Thomas Savery's rudimentary engine of 1698 as one bookend and Arkwright's water-powered cotton mill of 1775 as another, the American and French revolutions fall at the far end of this span. What had just preceded this period was the English Revolution concluded in 1689 — the so-called Glorious Revolution, which followed the English Civil War and codified a constitutional monarchy with a Bill of Rights guaranteeing property, fair trials, and parliamentary independence, while limiting the arbitrary power of the monarch.

The Civil War had begun in part because King Charles I wished to levy large new taxes to finance his wars — the threat that one's money and property could be arbitrarily seized by a monarch. The English Revolution changed this. It did not go as far as the American or French revolutions would later; it had less effect on ordinary people and made no claim to universal rights for all. But it did at least guarantee property stability and a degree of confidence in a coherent, stable system — stability far less likely to be found elsewhere.

Another English distinction lay in the structure of the nobility. In places like France and Spain, noble status was hereditary in full: a noble was a noble by blood. In England, by contrast, only the eldest son inherited the title and the access to the House of Lords that went with it. Other children became commoners, at least on paper, with no automatic political access. They had to make their own way — and of course, they had the wealth and the land to help them do so.

This created stronger economic incentives over purely political or military ones. A large proportion of the English upper classes had been, in a sense, demilitarised and depoliticised, making them more likely to turn their energies to commerce and improvement. There is some evidence this led to greater social mixing with commoners than was the case in, say, France.

Take this quotation from Lord Hervey in 1731: "We used to sit down to dinner, a little snug party of about thirty, stuffed up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc., and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch. We had Lords, spiritual and temporal, besides commoners, parsons and freeholders." Whatever one makes of its specific claims, this suggests at least some evidence of greater tolerance, a somewhat more open social commerce, and a greater transmission of ideas across class lines.

And so I think we find ourselves now right at the core of the story. All that industry — the trains, engines, smoke, and factories — lies in the future. But right now, in the middle of it all, is this nascent new world: new materials, new foods, new cottons, a modest advance in science, a little more tolerance, a little more security of property. All of this is in the air around everyone. But right now, imagine you are an English lord with hundreds or thousands of acres of land, a few books on natural philosophy, and no real route into political life. What do you do? You look at what lies directly beneath your feet and in your fields — at farming, perhaps mining, at the resources right there in front of you.

So perhaps capitalism was not born in factories and towns, but in the fields. There is a common assumption that it started in cities — in Italian merchant towns, or in the industrial Manchester of popular imagination, with its chimneys and slums and clattering factories. But it should be a clue that before the Industrial Revolution, many industrial centres were small towns, even villages. Cromford, just down the road from where I live, where one of the first modern factories was born, is still a small village today.

In other words, capitalism did not start in London or Florence. It started in agriculture. Recall that significant figure we began with: it took eighty percent of the population to support the whole — eighty out of every hundred people working in agriculture, growing and tending and repairing and maintaining the core and basis of life. And in sixteenth-century Europe, that number had not changed since the Roman Empire. As Appleby says: all economies begin with food production.

If eighty percent of people were involved in agriculture, eighty percent of the population's collective thoughts, anxieties, and energy were agricultural. Imagine a poor harvest followed by a hard winter. You have some seed for planting in spring and a few breeding animals. But things are growing desperate. Do you eat the animals? Do you gamble that next year's harvest will be better and hold them back? These were the kinds of calculations people had to make constantly. Famine was a fact of life. Scarcity was a fact of life. Time between repairing clothes and fences, tending animals and crops, was barely sufficient to secure survival — and often it was not.

This is why the New World, sugar, and new crops and animals were so transformative to people's mental horizons. Squash, tobacco, potatoes, corn, coffee, beans — all new. Corn could be grown in wetter soil than wheat and yielded twice as much. Potatoes could remain in the earth and be pulled up as needed. A few more reliable options would have had a radical effect on people's minds — on breaking free from the narrow daily rhythm that constrained thought to the immediately necessary.

But it was sugar that changed things in a particular and unexpected way. Yes, sugar is delicious and exciting, and may have provided bursts of energy that extended the working day. But the truly revolutionary thing about sugar was that it could be used to preserve fruits and vegetables through the winter — to conserve foods that had previously been impossible to keep. Food was on everyone's mind, as it still is — and especially so when there is not enough of it. The smallest improvements in preservation saved lives, saved time, saved fear of the long winter months.

Just to set the scene: in seventeenth-century England, a relatively prosperous country by the standards of the day, one expert estimated that half the population needed some form of assistance simply to get through each year. Half the population. Hold that thought, and combine it with the factors we have already considered — plus the fact that there was no serfdom in England.

What England had instead were large landed estates owned by an increasingly entrepreneurial upper class, which rented land out to numerous tenants, sometimes sold it, and increasingly mined it. Compare this with France and its vast patchwork of feudal and royal dues, privileges, tithes, and tolls. In France, the best route to getting ahead was to secure political office, to acquire a particular privilege — as a nobleman, a monopoly on some trade or road; as a peasant or merchant, a favour from a lord higher up the hierarchy. Ellen Wood calls this "extra-economic" or "political" power: it sits above ordinary commerce, justified not by business success but by philosophical, theological, or military authority, by the great chain of being.

This seems entirely logical, if you are a minor nobleman in such a system. What are your aspirations? Getting your hands dirty in fields with seed and animals, or climbing closer to God, to the Pope, to the king? But in England, this political and religious route to advancement was relatively more closed off. The route to improvement lay instead in extracting more from your fields, your workers, your animals, your land, your resources.

What this produced was a culture of improvement. Looking out over the English countryside of the period, you would have noticed two things very different from today: far fewer hedges, and far more land lying uncultivated. Much of the farmland had to lie fallow to recover each year, so only about a third could be worked at any one time. In the Netherlands, it had been discovered that instead of leaving land empty you could rotate different crops — grains, turnips, and so on. The English copied this system. And what followed, in the vague period we call the agricultural revolution, was a new approach to productivity. Meadows were flooded to warm the soil and extend the growing season. Different plants were found to enhance different types of soil. Parsnips proved useful as winter animal feed. A practice called "up and down husbandry" alternated animals and crops season by season, with animals fertilising the soil so that the next harvest was better.

By the early 1600s, the word "improver" was becoming common in English. Landes says that Britain's countryside was being "kneaded like dough."

Now imagine someone very good at this — and someone next door who is not. And another neighbour who is not. And you are an aristocrat renting out patches of land. You will notice that some tenants pay on time, others struggle. Some grow wealthier; others do not. Some offer more rent; others fall behind. In other words, land values begin to correlate more closely with the success or failure of different techniques. Competition increasingly determines rental income. There is more trading, more experimentation, more practical consequence to good and bad decisions.

Here we can see the basic economic and cultural roots of capitalism.

It is important to think about how economics and culture interact here. Wood points to the economic, noting that by the sixteenth century, capitalist practices were becoming more common in England: "the maximisation of exchange value by means of cost-cutting and improving productivity through specialisation, accumulation, reinvestment of surpluses, and innovation." But economic ideas do not operate in a vacuum. You need culture as the carrier of these ideas — to persuade people to adopt them. You need books, so people can read about new methods. You need it in the air, in the conversations at the inn and in the schoolroom. Culture is central.

And we do have that culture: the scientific experimentation of Bacon and the Royal Society, the idea that things can and do change, new worlds, new horizons, the Renaissance and Reformation, a sense of progress and forward movement. On top of this, agricultural reformers in England were publishing books and pamphlets of practical advice. Philosophers like John Locke were writing about improvement as the very basis of property: "The grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property." Locke believed that if you mixed your labour with the land, making good use of what God provided, you owned the fruits of that effort by divine right. This would later become a major influence on the American Revolution, and while the French revolutionaries did not draw directly on Locke, many of them looked to England as a model.

So you have this chicken-and-egg interplay between economics and culture, between material lives and ideas, where each calls the other forth. It is one of those questions that has been debated endlessly without a conclusive answer. I find it more interesting simply to explore how they interact dialectically, because what is unquestionable is that this powerful new emphasis on productivity was about to change the entire world.

This emphasis on improving productivity led to the long and contentious enclosure movement. Fields were divided up and hedged — this is where you get the patchwork image of the English countryside. Peasants were displaced from communal land. Traditional rights such as collecting wood from forests and growing vegetables on shared village plots were extinguished. This process was hated by many. For Wood, peasants may have had only marginal plots and "impoverished dwellings," but they were dispossessed of them nonetheless. A new class of so-called "masterless men" — vagrants and wanderers — began to appear in England, unchained from the old peasant ways but with nothing to replace them.

This is a contentious debate. Landes, for example, argues that rather than creating an army of unemployed vagrants, the enclosures increased demand for farm labour, and that the rural areas that saw the most enclosure saw the largest growth in resident population. From 1750 to 1830, Britain's agricultural counties doubled their inhabitants.

Whether this transformation was, on balance, a good or bad thing is a fiercely contested question that we will return to. But either way, it was the beginning of a new class — one often seen as central to the capitalist system: the working class, wage labourers, the proletariat, with nothing to offer but their own bodies and labour. For Wood, the competitive pressures between tenants and landowners, and the culture of productivity and improvement that followed, came first. But if we add wage labour to our list, we now have nearly all the ingredients for capitalism in place, with the emphasis on improving efficiency and productivity in pursuit of greater returns at the very core.

Let us return to our eighty-twenty figure. It took eighty percent of people to support the entire population. By the end of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth, as the agricultural revolution gathered pace, that proportion began to shift. By 1800, it took only thirty-six percent of the population to feed everyone. By then, one farming family was providing for roughly sixty others — and today, that number has fallen to just three percent. Consider the sheer quantity of time, brainpower, energy, and attention that this freed up to do other things. As Landes notes, this meant England was already relatively prosperous before the Industrial Revolution, with average salaries a third higher over the fifty years between 1700 and 1750.

One more thing needs addressing. So far, we have looked at broad societal causes. But does this ignore the "great man" theory of history? Are we forgetting that it is individual people — flesh and blood — who actually do these things, rather than abstract structural forces?

In his book on the steam engine, Rosen reminds us that the Industrial Revolution was first and foremost a revolution of invention. The agricultural revolution made England rich; the Industrial Revolution made it extraordinarily so. And when you look at the most influential inventors in this story — Savery, Newcomen, Watt — they all had patents.

A patent is a curious thing. It is a historically quite new idea and a strange legal and philosophical construction. Patents became more common during the Renaissance: Henry VI of England granted one for a novel technique to produce stained glass; one was granted in Florence for a boat designed to move heavy stones. Initially they were few and far between, mainly a way for monarchs to raise revenue for themselves.

By the Tudor period in the sixteenth century, patents were being granted for all manner of things — trade routes, salt, paper, and, most famously, playing cards. A patent is a monopoly — the right to trade, sell, or operate in a specific area for a certain period of time in a given location. In the early seventeenth century, James I and Elizabeth I both granted monopolies to well-connected individuals as a way of raising money. One writer observed that the typical Englishman lived in a house built with monopoly bricks, heated by monopoly coal, held together by monopoly belts and buttons and pins, and ate monopoly butter, currants, red herrings, salmon, and lobster.

But in 1602, a landmark court case arose over those playing cards. Queen Elizabeth had granted a monopoly for their sale, and this produced a major legal challenge led by Sir Edward Coke, one of England's most eminent lawyers. Coke argued that monopolies were wrong: they restricted employment, too many were granted, and most importantly, he theorised that a patent should only be awarded if the person receiving it had genuinely invented or improved upon something. Only then was the granting of such a monopoly just.

Coke won the case, and by 1624 a Statute of Monopolies had established that patents should only be granted for genuine inventions or improvements, should not be used to raise prices artificially, and should last no more than fourteen years.

Consider the timing. This is 1624 — just two years after Bacon published his book advocating for experimental, inductive scientific method. You have this idea, legally codified, that you may only receive a monopoly if you genuinely improve upon something, at exactly the same moment that a culture of agricultural improvement is spreading across the countryside and a culture of scientific enquiry is taking hold. Fast forward roughly seventy-five years, and all of the men building and improving steam engines have patents. This is, clearly, a distinct and progressing culture.

Let us return to Newcomen — the man who improved Savery's engine to draw water successfully from mines; perhaps the most consequential single industrial invention in history. He was engaged with the wider scientific community. He corresponded in the new "republic of letters" with famous scientists such as Robert Hooke. There were popular guides to science circulating widely, even children's guides, cheap because printing had improved. Classes were taught to artisans and blacksmiths by travelling lecturers. A nascent modern scientific economy was emerging.

Newcomen was a master craftsman, at home at the anvil and the lathe. Rosen points to one component called a Y-valve — a single part of the engine's design that had to be perfectly precise in shape and weight. Newcomen had to know a great deal about mathematics, volumes, equations, the densities and properties of different metals, steam, water, and heat — all of it learned from travelling lecturers and from pamphlets and books. But all of it — and this is worth pausing on — was done without any of the modern instruments we now take for granted.

Rosen writes that the only way to machine such a valve was by hand, and that the hands in question "had to be as sensitive and as precise as those of a violinist." Newcomen had what Rosen calls "tactile intelligence." This takes years of focus, decades of training in the smallest, most specific, most meticulous details.

That, I think, is the key insight. Who is going to invest this kind of time and effort when there is not enough food on the table? First, you need a productive, efficient agricultural system that has freed people from the constant struggle for subsistence. You also need knowledge of and engagement with a widespread national problem — such as flooding in mines. For that, you need a culture of reading and books and news about the country. And for those years of investment in time and skill to be worthwhile, you need to know that you will be rewarded — that the risk is worth taking.

This is where Rosen makes the compelling case that the patent system is absolutely crucial. Newcomen could charge licensing fees — three hundred pounds per year in some cases. One operator paid two hundred pounds plus half his future profits. There were a hundred engines in use within three years. Even then, Newcomen was not widely celebrated. Most people have probably never heard of him, and he did not die wealthy.

I am not saying that people do things only for profit — though it is obviously also true that they do. Some people act from love of science, from a sense of civic duty, from sheer compulsion. But you need at least to know that you will be able to survive while doing something, and that a more powerful person or institution will not simply take your innovation for themselves once you have created it. The patent system provides both protections. And crucially, as Rosen notes, it acts as a powerful incentive for people to spend years — sometimes decades — investing in their own skills: mastering the mathematics, the physics, the metallurgy, the chemistry. Learning to play the violin, so to speak, in such a meticulous way that you can design precise new instruments that go on to have an outsized effect on the wider economy and culture.

Rosen identifies a combination of "innovative culture," "individuals pursuing their own interests," and "national interest in innovation," all working dialectically. Savery worked in government war workshops because of the state's obvious interest in advances in military technology — without large state investment, that first engine would not have happened. But a political culture had developed that said: if you have an idea, a piece of land, a way of improving something, that is yours, and you will be able to benefit from it for a defined period of time.

And that acted as a tremendous incentive for people to invest years of their lives in acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to make the next great improvement.

We now have all the ingredients: the factors, the causes, the recipe for capitalism. What is astonishing is how quickly, once assembled, it set the entire world on fire. Landes's evocative book title — Prometheus Unbound — captures it perfectly. It is a powerful image of what capitalism and modernity are: something powerful and transformative, yes, but also something that burns. As we will see, some of the numbers are staggering. People prefer to emphasise their particular favourite factor, and everyone has a different theory of how they come together. But I agree with Appleby when she asks: why not recognise how mutually reinforcing all of these elements were?

We have in England a constellation of factors from which a new world would emerge: a culture of imagination, change, and possibility; a tradition of reform; a relative tolerance of different ways of doing things; a respect for rights and property; patent protection; a single national market. Out of these, the dynamics of profit maximisation, accumulation, competition, wage labour, private initiative, and markets would emerge.

But how long would a Promethean England last?

Chapter Seven: The Age of Capital — England's Supremacy

In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods and was punished for it eternally — an eagle pecking away at his liver, day after day, forever. It is one of those perennial myths, because it captures a genuine tension: the possession of something powerful and the powerful, unforeseen consequences that accompany it.

By the early nineteenth century, commentators were beginning to notice the same bittersweet contradictions emerging from the new economic system in Britain. No one doubted that Britain had uncovered some powerful new secret. But Romantic poets, reformers, and critics were beginning to lament the effect this Promethean energy was having on the most marginalised in society — and increasingly, on the colonised and the enslaved.

Protests took different forms in that early period. The Levellers physically levelled the new hedgerows and fences that were cutting them off from their old communal ways of life. The Luddites broke the new machines they believed were taking their jobs.

After visiting Manchester in 1835, the French writer and nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows. Here, humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish. Here, civilization works its miracles, and civilised man is turned almost into a savage."

Despite all of this, Britain's newfound wealth was undeniable and deeply compelling to the rest of the world. Britain's navy was as large as every other navy on earth put together. By 1700, Britain was producing twice as much food as any other country, and across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the growth became exponential.

The figures are extraordinary. In a single twenty-year period in the nineteenth century — just twenty years — steam and iron output quadrupled. In just fifty years, between 1800 and 1850, the British population doubled. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain accounted for roughly half of the entire world's trade in many major goods, including meat, sugar, and wheat. For comparison, the United States today accounts for roughly ten percent. A tiny island accounting for half the world's trade — and in such a short time.

Between 1850 and 1870 alone, Britain's trade almost tripled. In a five-year period in the middle of the century, the number of railway passengers almost doubled again. The speed, totality, intensity, and sheer unstoppability of this vast, rapid change was completely unprecedented, and its effects were felt everywhere.

Others across Europe and across the Atlantic took note. There was widespread imitation and industrial espionage — so much so that exporting the plans for a machine became illegal. France, Germany, and the United States were the three main imitators. By 1870, each was producing roughly one to two million tons of iron for their own machines and railways. Britain, by contrast, was producing around six million — half of the world's total of twelve million. So far ahead was Britain that its three nearest competitors combined still produced less than it did.

British travellers on the continent — like the agricultural improver Arthur Young — were astonished at the comparative poverty of countries like Spain, Portugal, and even France. The mimetic desire to imitate spread across Europe, America, and beyond. But the traffic in ideas, economics, and culture was not one-directional. It flowed both ways.

Many observers looked at Britain's industry alongside France's and America's declarations of universal rights and saw two sides of the same modern, progressive coin. A new ideology, as yet unnamed, was slowly taking shape: drawing loosely on Locke's philosophy of property as a natural right and Smith's conviction that trade and commerce were natural as well. The very loose idea of what we now call "liberalism" was in the air.

It was in this period that, in Hobsbawm's words, "the few remaining obstacles in the way of the untrammelled development of private enterprise would be swept away." Some described it — in a phrase I find evocative and will return to — as the period of the "conquering bourgeoisie."

The transformation of British society is also visible in the composition of Parliament. Before 1895, aristocrats were always a majority. After 1895, they never were again.

Hobsbawm's second book in his trilogy argues that the middle part of the nineteenth century was "the age of capital" — the age of liberal triumph. But things were already beginning to shift. No sooner had this liberal order appeared than contradictions were developing within it. Had it not been premised on the idea that the individual farmer, inventor, or businessman could be master of his own domain — rational, free, and in control? Yet already giant, unwieldy national bureaucracies were growing. Science was becoming too voluminous for any one person to master, even within a single field. Corporations were emerging that required enormous quantities of raw materials, capital investment, and management. And the state was growing alongside all of it.

Hobsbawm writes: "combination advanced at the expense of market competition; business corporations at the expense of private firms; big business and large enterprise at the expense of smaller," with this concentration implying "a tendency towards oligopoly."

Take Lloyd's Bank — still one of Britain's largest. It bought out and absorbed 164 smaller banks. National financial institutions were beginning to absorb smaller community banks everywhere. Department stores were beginning to eliminate local shops. Economies of scale — these vast corporate structures — were making the smaller, local approach uncompetitive.

Hobsbawm wrote: "In most people's minds, and in reality, capitalism still meant the one man, or rather one family owner-managed business. Yet this very fact raised two serious problems for the structure of enterprise. They concerned its supply of capital and its management."

Investment and capital now required much larger institutions. The same applied to the management of large workforces. The railway companies were the clearest example. They became so vast that they obviously required large, hierarchical management structures and close relationships with investment banks. As J.P. Morgan would recognise in America: he who controls the flow of capital — who sets the cost of lending and decides to whom it is extended — is a very powerful man.

Hobsbawm captures this with a memorable phrase: Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market was becoming very visible. "The visible hand of modern corporate organisation and management now replaced the invisible hand of Adam Smith's anonymous market. The executives, engineers and accountants therefore began to take over from owner-managers. The corporation replaced the individual."

Take the London and Northwestern Railway Company. By 1890, it employed 65,000 workers, operated 7,000 kilometres of track, and served 800 stations. This was something entirely different from a solitary inventor tinkering with an engine and licensing it, or from one person building a short railway line between two nearby factories. These were enormous, unwieldy bureaucracies, entirely beyond the management of a single individual.

To give a sense of the economic composition of this period: the Paris stock exchange in 1856 listed thirty-three railway and canal companies, thirty-eight mining companies, twenty-two metallurgical companies, eleven port and shipping companies, seven bus and transport companies, eleven gas companies, and forty-two other industrial companies ranging from textiles to galvanised iron and rubber. These vast infrastructure and raw materials corporations were becoming bigger than many parliaments, more important to people's daily lives than most governments.

Yet despite these growing contradictions, the ideology of the conquering bourgeoisie — the rational, self-made, in-control individual — remained dominant across Europe and America. This ideology drew on Montesquieu's conviction that concentrated power was dangerous and must be distributed among separate branches — executive, legislative, and judicial — so that each could check the others. This was the response to the most uncomfortable liberal question: what if one person, one ruler, one businessman, one corporation becomes too powerful?

By the 1870s, many were adding a scientific dimension to this ideological framework: the survival of the fittest. Hobsbawm wrote that "in the struggle for existence, which provided the basic metaphor of the economic, political, social and biological thought of the bourgeois world, only the fittest would survive, the fitness certified not only by their survival but by their domination."

Darwinism — or rather Social Darwinism, an ideology that Darwin himself largely resisted — had provided, through Herbert Spencer, the foundation for a kind of scientific liberalism in which individuals, businesses, countries, and races supposedly rose or fell, or even became extinct, according to biological laws of evolution. We know where this was going. The idea that individuals, businesses, and peoples were locked in an inevitable competitive struggle for survival became dominant among many powerful people in the latter nineteenth century. It created drives in other countries to catch up with Britain, and in Britain it stoked anxieties about America and Germany closing the gap — and it would eventually contribute to eugenics policies in many countries, in some cases leading to sterilisation programmes and, in extreme cases, to mass murder of those deemed to dilute racial purity. It is sometimes forgotten how dominant, how apparently scientific, and how widely accepted this ideology was among many powerful people in the period leading up to the wars of the twentieth century.

In 1888, a bestselling science fiction novel called Looking Backward, set in the year 2000, argued that the selfishness of 1888 capitalism was anti-scientific. The railroad magnate Andrew Carnegie said of the survival of the fittest that "while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department." One professor wrote in 1883 that "millionaires are a product of natural selection."

The high point of British supremacy was marked by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Queen Victoria opened it in the newly built Crystal Palace in south London. Fourteen thousand companies exhibited everything from new door locks to diamonds, pianos to ceramics, kitchens, foods, clothing, and machines. Anyone who was anyone attended.

The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky visited and wrote: "You become aware of a colossal idea. You sense that here something has been achieved, that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin vaguely to fear something." He continued: "You feel that something final has taken place here, that something has come to an end. It's like a biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy from the Apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes."

He became deeply sceptical, warning Russians not to follow down this materialistic, atheistic European path. He noticed "a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of personal gain, of self-determination, of the I, of opposing this I to all nature and the rest of mankind as an independent, autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to all that exists outside itself."

And he wrestled with these ideas: with atheistic individuals moving materialistically through the world without God. It was a period of profound Victorian crisis of faith, as science and industry dominated, as people's lives seemed in many cases to be improving without any obvious divine intervention.

The mid-century was like a hall of mirrors. Dostoevsky could look at the exhibits with awe, as the middle classes of Europe all did. The Crystal Palace was a modern wonder. But Dostoevsky and others, walking the streets of London at night, saw much of the city "half naked, savage and hungry." Charles Dickens and, later, Jack London noted the same. It was a world that appeared to be accelerating into an astonishing, science-fictional future while most of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe, still looked much as it had five hundred years before.

Even in the more advanced European countries like Spain and Portugal, there were fewer than a hundred miles of railway. And many liberal bourgeois types, despite living lives of unprecedented comfort, were living with a persistent sense of fear. Nowhere could even they vote, not in anything like the way we understand democracy today. But uprisings, revolutions, protests, and marches from ordinary people were constant across Europe. There was a persistent, simmering tension that frequently erupted into real violence. The conquering bourgeoisie had conquered — but they were ruling over unstable ground.

Chapter Eight: The Iron Boot and the Dispossessed

There is an ongoing debate about whether the initial wealth undeniably produced by capitalism was widely shared — or even marginally so. Were the emerging working classes, the vagabonds and vagrants, those dispossessed of their land or released from the feudal system, actually better off? The debate is genuinely interesting and genuinely unresolved.

Some argue that wages rose, but others say the increases affected only a minority of workers and that they were offset by the harsh working conditions of the period — cramped, diseased urban slum housing and industrial accidents on a significant scale. One study, looking beyond wage data to the physical records of people in prison, found that people actually got shorter in this period, suggesting they had fewer calories.

The perception at the time was, for most, a negative one. Landes says that many Britons "would have stopped it in its course, or even turned back, for good reasons or bad. They were distressed, inconvenienced or outraged by its consequences. They mourned merry England that never was, deplored the soot and ugliness of the new factory towns, bemoaned the growing political power of crass parvenus, cried out against the precarious poverty of a rootless proletariat."

Arnold Toynbee, the influential nineteenth-century English historian who coined the term "Industrial Revolution," wrote: "We now approach a darker period, a period as disastrous and terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible, because, side by side with a great increase of wealth, was seen an enormous increase of pauperism; and production on a vast scale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers. The steam engine, the spinning jenny, the power loom had torn up the population by the roots."

E.P. Thompson, in his landmark Marxist history of the English working class, wrote: "It is neither poverty nor disease, but work itself, which cast the blackest shadow over the years of the Industrial Revolution: long hours of unsatisfying labour under severe discipline for alien purposes." The working class was, after all, a new thing. It was very different from the peasantry — different in its organisational structure, its goals, its culture, its living conditions, and its economic circumstances.

This was the period of William Blake's "dark satanic mills," the Dickensian urban scene of smog and chimney-sweeping children and grinding factory toil.

Hobsbawm is worth quoting directly: he states that the condition of the labouring poor was appalling between 1815 and 1848, and that this "was not denied by any reasonable observer in that period." Textile industry slumps in Bolton in England and worker revolts in France in the 1840s put as many as two-thirds of people out of work for extended periods, and such crises were common.

In 1830, a member of the Royal Society, Frederick Baker, wrote: "About one third of our working population consists of weavers and labourers whose average earnings do not amount to a sum sufficient to bring up and maintain their families without parochial assistance... It is this portion of the community, for the most part decent and respectable in their lives, which is suffering most from the depression of wages and the hardships of the times."

An observer describing a women's march in Manchester in 1842 noted that there were two thousand women marching, that they were "dreadfully hungry," and that bread nearly covered in mud "was devoured with greediness indescribable."

This kind of disruption — happening mainly in industrial England, but increasingly across Europe and America — was making much of the conquering bourgeoisie profoundly anxious. A German scientist wrote in 1847 that "pauperism and proletariat are the separating ulcers which have sprung from the organism of the modern states; can they be healed? The Communist doctors propose the complete destruction and annihilation of the existing organism. One thing is certain: if these men gain the power to act, there will be not a political but a social revolution, a war against all property, a complete anarchy."

But there are opposing views. Some historians show that wages did rise, that regulations gradually corrected the worst abuses, and that housing, plumbing, water, and food were all slowly improving. Famines, in England at least, became a thing of the past.

The historian Emma Griffin has argued, drawing on working-class autobiographies of the period, that it is difficult to square the pessimistic "dark satanic mills" narrative with what ordinary people actually wrote about their lives. There are certainly criticisms of factory conditions in these sources, but there are also many accounts that complicate the simple dichotomy between a pleasant, traditional agricultural life and a tyrannical new factory system. Agricultural work was often brutal, long, and irregular; factory work, by contrast, was more reliably available, more regular, and sometimes experienced as a liberation from an authoritarian farmer-boss. One man recalled that his former agricultural employer was "somewhat tyrannical, ordering me up at four in the morning and requiring other things which I considered an infringement of my rights. I told him plainly I would not submit, and took it upon myself at once to become my own master." Another, recounting his early years in factory work, remembered: "I was never as happy as I was at that time."

Even Hobsbawm acknowledges that by the 1860s, the economic boom provided employment "on a quite unprecedented scale." Yet he cautions that, "unlike the middle class, the worker was rarely more than a hair's breadth removed from the pauper."

And it is important to note that even the end of serfdom in Prussia, for instance, gave peasants land and freedom from compulsory labour for their lord, but simultaneously removed the protections the lord had been obliged to provide — wood from the forest for fuel, maintenance of roads and bridges, relief in times of hardship. The picture is more complicated than a simple before-and-after comparison of freedom versus servitude.

But as Marx first pointed out, one thing is indisputable: with capitalism, slowly and then quickly, "all that was solid melted into air."

On the other hand, Rosen writes, in a passage worth quoting at length:

"If you examine the years since 1800, in twenty-year increments, and chart every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers — not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by the year 2000, but mortality at birth, in fact mortality at any age, calories consumed, prevalence of infectious disease, average height of adults, percentage of lifetime spent disabled, percentage of population living in poverty, number of rooms per person, percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary and post-secondary education, illiteracy, and annual hours of leisure time — the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning."

But I think this is the problem with many debates of this kind. Everyone wants to generalise. Everyone wants a clean answer. Entire periods, peoples, and lives are flattened into a single verdict, when the truth is that outcomes were varied and contradictory — some people improving, others not, by fits and starts, in different places and at different times. One person might have had a tolerable life in agriculture and then endured awful conditions in a local factory under an authoritarian boss. For someone else, just the next town over, the reverse might have been entirely true.

What is undeniable, as Hobsbawm points out, is that there was a growing, significant, and increasingly visible group that lived perpetually on or near the poverty line — in slums, working long and dangerous hours in polluted conditions for low wages. And this new group, the dispossessed and the alienated, the proletariat, the working class — very new as a class — was beginning, slowly, to organise.

The scene was set for a three-way standoff. There was the newly powerful bourgeois class of capitalists — new money. There was the slowly organising proletariat. And there was still, especially across continental Europe, the old aristocracy and the old regime — still firmly installed in positions of power, trying to balance the modernising pressures of the conquering bourgeoisie against the forces of democracy and working-class organisation that they feared would sweep away everything they had built and held.

The contradictions of this standoff were several. Even the old aristocrats and monarchies wanted to modernise, wanted to catch up. But they genuinely feared that universal suffrage — giving the vote to people they considered lesser, dangerous, uneducated — would mean the end of property. It would mean anarchy. Why would the working classes, if they got the vote, not vote to take everything from those who had it? Why would they not vote for a great levelling?

And here the bourgeoisie sided with the aristocrats. They wanted rights — voting rights, property rights, laws that benefited them — for themselves, but not for those who, in their view, had no stake in society and would only seek to take and destroy. Why would the turkeys vote to abolish Christmas?

This was the dominant three-way tension across the century, and a wave of revolutions spread across Europe throughout it, with 1848 as the apogee. They followed a common pattern: liberals demanded rights — free speech, constitutional government, secure property, representation — but then, fearing the revolution was going too far and threatening their own property, they halted it by siding with the old aristocracy against the proletariat.

Almost all of these revolutions failed in the short term. And yet the demands of the revolutionaries would eventually be met, by other means, over the following decades. Strange, then, that it was a century of failed revolutions whose demands were nevertheless, in the end, conceded.

Between 1826 and 1861 alone, there were almost five hundred peasant revolts in Russia. Austria's Prince Metternich wrote to the Tsar: "The governments across Europe, having lost their balance, are frightened, intimidated and thrown into confusion by the cries of the intermediary class of society."

Metternich would go on to build a vast secret police network to suppress insurgency across Europe. Alexis de Tocqueville warned: "We are sleeping on a volcano. Do you not see that the earth trembles anew? A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon."

Conservatives clung to power by slowly widening the franchise — as Britain's Reform Acts did across the century. In 1832, only one in thirty could vote. The Second Reform Act of 1867 raised this to just eight percent of the population. For many, this was nowhere near sufficient.

Along with liberals demanding the vote, socialism was slowly growing. Trade unions were gradually legalised and grew larger and more influential. A few turned to cooperative, socialist, and anarchist ideas. But to Marx's repeated disappointment, the revolution never arrived on the schedule he expected. Slumps, panics, and uprisings came and went; each time he believed revolution was at hand; each time capitalism recovered, grew, and marched on.

Not only did it recover and grow — it spread irrepressibly across the globe.

Chapter Nine: Globalisation

Globalisation is a complex concept. Definitions point to something like connectedness, or interconnectedness — a back-and-forth connectivity spanning the entire globe in a way that has no historical precedent. But is that an accurate description of what changed? There have always been vast trade networks — silk roads, spice routes, the slave trade — and if not globalisation, at least something like continentalisation has existed for thousands of years.

Perhaps it is more useful to think about globalisation as a mentality — as the experience of the globe as a field of connections, possibilities, prices, logistics, exchanges of ideas and culture. Has this mentality not always existed, even at a smaller scale?

My point is that the primary difference between earlier and modern globalisation is one of scale so vast that it becomes a difference of kind. Through the printing press, the railway, steam-powered ships, improved roads and postal systems, canals, and the telegraph, the drive towards information, speed, and efficiency — of acquiring it, transmitting it, acting on it — could now spread, be deployed, and be acted upon at a far greater volume and speed, enabling many new activities that had previously been impossible.

And as the globe was thrown together so quickly — in what one historian calls the Great Convergence — vast inequalities were suddenly brought into contact: inequalities of culture, language, economy, military power, and technological capability.

Hobsbawm's formulation is clean: "History from now on became world history."

British exports to Australia, for example, grew from £1.5 million in 1848 to £20 million in 1875 — in just twenty-seven years. Canals were dug, roads laid. Austria added 30,000 miles of roads in the twenty years between 1830 and 1850. The United States expanded its road network from 21,000 miles in 1800 to 170,000 by 1850.

And the invention of the telegraph quietly changed the world more profoundly than almost anything else. Events, prices, quantities, opportunities, and troop movements could now be transmitted between distant parties in hours or minutes, rather than days, weeks, or months. In 1849 there were 2,000 miles of telegraph wire. By 1869, there were over 100,000 miles. A transatlantic cable was laid in 1865. By the 1870s, London could reach India in five minutes. Imagine how unimaginable this would have seemed a single generation earlier — and how, in those improvements in communication, you can already see a direct line of modernity extending forward to the internet.

Hobsbawm writes that "the world was about to enter the era of electric light and power, of steel and high-speed steel alloys, of telephone and cinematography, of turbines and the internal combustion engine." US President Ulysses S. Grant wrote in 1873: "As commerce, education, and the rapid transmission of thought and matter by telegraph and steam have changed everything. Now, I rather believe that the Great Maker is preparing the world to become one nation, speaking one language, a consummation which will render armies and navies no longer necessary."

As well as communications and materials, this was also the period of the greatest mass movement of people the world had ever seen. London grew from one million inhabitants to seven million across the nineteenth century. By 1900, one million people were entering the United States each year.

The bridging of the Mississippi in 1855 is a useful symbol. Bridging great rivers is a challenge as old as civilisation. But a bridge of this scale — over such a river, with all the capital, labour, and technology it required — is a microcosm of this whole story: steam, iron, steel, railways, national infrastructure, capital, and the movement of vast populations. A real symbol of capitalism spreading across the globe, literally bridging nature.

Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, international trade tripled in size. Many historians see globalisation as not strictly inherent to capitalism — you can have globalisation under socialist or centrally planned systems as well — but the degree to which they were interlinked in this period is unmistakable.

Hobsbawm illustrates this with a brochure commonly used to teach English to Polish immigrants arriving in America:

"I hear the five-minute whistle. It is time to go into the shop. I take my check from the gate board and hang it on the department board. I change my clothes and get ready to work. The starting whistle blows. I eat my lunch. It is forbidden to eat until then. The whistle blows at five minutes of starting time. I get ready to go to work. I work until the whistle blows to quit. I leave my place nice and clean. I put on my clothes and go home."

The most important thing to teach a Polish immigrant in America was not simply the English language — it was the language of capitalist command. That these commands were considered among the most essential phrases a new arrival needed proves how thoroughly capitalism and globalisation were intertwined, and of the same type, the same global force.

All of this might sound like a triumphal march — capitalism advancing irresistibly, spreading modernity, technology, medicine, bridges and railways, new methods of producing food, and what some would call civilisation, around the world. But to think of it that way is to assume that the Promethean energy only built and never burned. And as Gandhi reportedly said, when asked what he thought of Western civilisation: "I think it would be a good idea."

Chapter Ten: Capitalism's Empires

The search for new markets, raw materials, and investment — backed by navies protecting ports, trade routes, and colonies — incentivised a global burst of imperial acquisition. It is undeniable that capitalism built infrastructure, modernised communication and transport networks, spread wealth to some across the globe, and in some cases even provided education. But everywhere it did so, it did so on the bones of indigenous peoples, traditions, cultures, and those who resisted.

In a short period between 1876 and 1915, around six countries came to control a quarter of the globe. As Hobsbawm records, Britain increased its territories by some four million square miles, France by 3.5 million, Germany by more than a million, Belgium and Italy by just under a million each. The United States acquired around 100,000, mainly from Spain. Japan expanded similarly, primarily at China's expense. And Portugal's ancient African colonies expanded by around 300,000 square miles.

Native Americans were slaughtered and displaced as modernity marched west. General William Sherman declared: "The railroad, which used to follow in the rear, now goes forward with the picket line in the great battle of civilization against barbarism." Capitalism spread as it looked for land to exploit, materials to extract, and new markets to sell to. And so the rest of the world was introduced to capitalism — at its ports of import and export, through imperial educational institutions set up for colonial administration, or at the barrel of a gun.

The British set up schools in India to train a select cadre of Raj administrators. Egypt was drawn into the British sphere of influence through its cotton and wheat, and through the Suez Canal's strategic importance. China was pulled in through the opium trade. Most countries that were capable of resisting tried to emulate the West rather than submit to it. Where there was genuine attachment to old ways of doing things, resistance tended to prove futile. The Chinese were forced to open their markets at gunpoint during the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century. The final cry of the Mughal Empire was silenced after the brief revolt of 1857. Native ways of life across the American continent were pushed further west and slowly extinguished as a cultural and political force. The Zulu and other African peoples were driven into the interior of the continent. The rest of Africa was carved up at a conference table in Berlin in 1884.

None of these peoples could resist the force of Western technology. A commonly cited British saying of the period put it bluntly: "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not." Compare the Maxim gun to a revolver; compare either to a spear or a bow and arrow. The massacres were quite literal.

While British maritime dominance produced a general Pax Britannica, it generated increasing rivalry between states, mounting pressure from nationalists and revolutionaries under the yoke of empire, and premonitions of what might follow. As the sociologist Max Weber wrote in 1894: "The unavoidable efforts at trade expansion by all civilised bourgeois-controlled nations after a transitional period of seemingly peaceful competition are clearly approaching the point where power alone will decide each nation's share in the economic control of the Earth."

India is a prime example of what this period meant in practice. The first voyage of the British East India Company in 1601 returned profits of two hundred percent. The vast subcontinent was rich in pepper, nutmeg, cloves, indigo, textiles, and cotton, and produced a quarter of the planet's total manufacturing. England at the time controlled just three percent. India was, in other words, incomparably richer than England, and was ruled by the powerful and sophisticated Mughal Empire. One Mughal emperor described the East India Company as "a company of base quarrelling people and foul dealers."

The Mughals were defeated by the Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Its governor, Robert Clive, was by then one of the wealthiest self-made men in Europe at just thirty-three years old. And by the early nineteenth century, the value of India's trade had fallen from one to three million pounds to less than £100,000, while the value of British trade through India grew by a factor of sixteen. Does that single set of figures not tell you everything you need to know about this period?

One Indian complained that "the English forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the merchants for a fourth part of their value, and by way of violence and oppression, they oblige the farmers to give five rupees for goods worth but one." British governance also overruled traditional community practices, worsening the impact of famines, because local rulers and communities had developed far more effective ways of managing these catastrophic but locally specific events.

In the late nineteenth century, the famines were unimaginable. In Rajputana in the 1860s and 1870s, a third of the population died. In Madras, twenty percent died, and millions perished across India while East India Company business continued as usual. The historian William Dalrymple writes that in the worst famine year, the equivalent of £100 million worth of goods in today's money was transferred from India to London. The historian Mike Davis, in Late Victorian Holocausts, places the blame squarely on capitalism: "The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from food-scarce, drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding."

Something similar happened in Ireland between 1846 and 1848. Food was exported from the country while people starved. Laws prohibited the eating of food from the fields of absentee landlords. Property laws were notoriously and brutally strict, with capital punishment in some cases for the theft of property. In the past, lords — in Ireland or local rulers and communities in India — might have responded to extreme conditions with local relief, suspending normal processes in recognition of extraordinary circumstances. For shareholders and government officials operating at a global remove, the bottom line mattered more than the suffering before them.

The British presence in India was likely the most extreme example of capitalist experimentation in history — at least up to that point. It was, for a period, an entire country run as a business. Dalrymple writes: "It wasn't the British government or the British people that conquered India, but an unregulated private corporation with profit as their sole motive."

And to those who object to judging the past by present standards: even many British people of the time were sharply critical. One article in the Gentleman's Magazine attacked "that rump of unconstitutional power, the East India Company." In 1830, the parliamentarian James Buckingham declared: "The idea of consigning over to a joint stock association the political administration of an empire peopled with 100 million souls was so preposterous that if it were now, for the first time, proposed, it would be deemed not merely an absurdity, but an insult to the common understanding of the realm." Dalrymple calls it "the supreme act of corporate violence in world history."

None of this is to argue for a systematic, explicitly organised, ideologically driven bourgeois Darwinian conspiracy to exploit every corner of the globe. But the combination of militarism, nationalism, social Darwinism, and capitalist profit — the hunt for raw materials and markets — led to what Lenin called "the highest stage of capitalism."

Chapter Eleven: The American Rise

In America, the new world had everything the conquering bourgeoisie needed: abundant land, rich resources, and a political and economic system modelled on the English one and in important respects taken even further. And while we remember the British Empire as the largest the world had ever seen, what is actually striking in retrospect is how brief British ascendancy really was. No sooner had Britain unleashed engines, iron, and industry on the world than two countries in particular were closing rapidly on it: Germany and America.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolically marked the high-water mark of British confidence. Quickly, everyone sought to copy. Switzerland had thirty-four steam engines in 1850 and a thousand just twenty years later. Austria went from roughly seven hundred to over nine thousand in the same period. The famous Krupp steelworks in Germany grew its workforce from just seventy-two people in 1848 to twelve thousand twenty years later.

But one country was turning European heads and causing real anxiety. America. Its growth can be summarised with one figure: in 1800, its population was around five million. A century later it was seventy-six million, spreading west, improving farming, manufacturing, and industry in the ways their cousins across the Atlantic had shown them — and then taking those ideas much further.

In the 1840s, eighty percent of American iron came from the Midlands of Britain. Sheffield steel was world-famous. Within a decade, the majority was coming from American companies. By 1850, American steam power output surpassed Britain's for the first time; by 1886, steel output had done the same.

Twenty-five years after the Crystal Palace, Philadelphia hosted the 1876 Centennial Exposition — a great building of iron, steel, and glass that served as America's Crystal Palace moment, openly modelled on and consciously intended to surpass the original. In every way, this great centennial celebration of a very new nation outstripped the British example. In his history of American capitalism, the historian Jonathan Levy writes that the exposition featured the biggest steam engine in the world, along with steam locomotives, steam fire engines, steam farm engines, steam road rollers, engines for steamships, steam pumps, steam-powered drivers, enormous steam forging hammers, and steam blast furnace blowers. Steam was everywhere, and American innovation was electrifying. Industrial spies and tourists from across the world marvelled at it. Skilled British factory workers were actually prohibited from emigrating; machines were not allowed to be exported; some were smuggled out, and others were drawn from memory by spies.

Brand after brand was founded in the late nineteenth century: Campbell's, Coca-Cola, Kellogg's. Hobsbawm summarises the pace of American innovation: "The rewards of innovation and enterprise were ample, and the inventors of the steamship (1807), the circular saw (1807), the screw cutting machine (1809), the artificial denture (1822), insulated wire (1827–31), the revolver (1835), the idea of the typewriter and sewing machine (1843–46), the rotary printing press (1846), and a host of pieces of farm machinery pursued them." No economy expanded more rapidly in this period than the American, even if its headlong rush was concentrated after 1860.

Consider just the revolver — so much more efficient to produce and operate than what came before. The typewriter and the sewing machine, each of which transformed entire industries overnight. And again, as we have noted, the many smaller subsidiary innovations that followed in their wake, each quietly revolutionising parallel industries.

Let us return once more to agriculture. Between 1840 and 1880, just forty years, the total area of farmed land in America tripled. Between 1849 and 1851, 191 patents were granted in agriculture. Just twenty years later, the equivalent three-year period saw 3,000 patents. One invention in particular — so ubiquitous today that most people barely notice it — changed farming completely: barbed wire. It kept livestock in place and dramatically increased the number of animals a farmer could manage. A single invention, a tiny detail, completely transforming an entire industry. One author observed that this single innovation meant that animals now constituted a form of capital in a new sense — not currency wandering freely across open range, but concentrated wealth, requiring the same management as any other form of investment, attracting the attention of banks and financiers.

One writer declared that "the world has never seen anything comparable to the surge in agricultural production" in America, and that "what European farmers had done over the span of several centuries, the Americans accomplished in little more than a single generation." A famous book called Where to Go to Get Rich declared that with a $150 deposit on a $1,000 mortgage — payable in just six years — a man could go west and claim a 160-acre plot on the Great Plains.

Now consider the knock-on effects, comparable in their ramifications to the invention of the steam engine. America is vast, and it would have felt vaster still in the nineteenth century. The problem was getting all that meat to where people needed it. If you butchered animals in the west, the meat would spoil before it reached the east — with no refrigeration. And if you did not butcher them, you had to drive entire herds of livestock across the continent by rail to be slaughtered where they were needed. And that is exactly what happened in Chicago.

The numbers tell the story. In 1800, Chicago had a population of a few hundred. By 1870, it had grown to 300,000. By 1890, to over 1.1 million. And by 1900, fourteen million animals were meeting their ends in the city each year. It had become a great capitalist chokepoint — a place of both extraordinary wealth and extraordinary squalor.

The poet Rudyard Kipling visited and declared that its air was dirt, its canals black as ink, and its abominations untold. But an English farmer, writing in 1886, noted: "I have calculated that the produce of five acres of wheat can be brought from Chicago to Liverpool at less than the cost of manuring one acre of wheat in England." The forces unleashed by an English agricultural revolution, centuries before, had eventually made it cheaper to import food from halfway around the world than to produce it at home — and Britain was now looking westward at America with undisguised unease. This is the logic of capitalism, and it is one we still live with.

If Chicago was the great symbol of the unstoppable capitalist city, no set of figures more aptly symbolised both the momentum and the contradictions of American dominance than those associated with the titans of industry — the so-called robber barons.

De Tocqueville had noticed something distinctive about American enterprise as early as 1835: "The European navigator adventures on the seas only with prudence. He departs only when the weather invites him to... At night, he furls his sails... The American neglects these precautions and braves these dangers."

Between Tocqueville's visit and the turn of the twentieth century, several American businessmen became recognisable names across both America and Europe: Andrew Carnegie in railways and steel; John D. Rockefeller in oil; J.P. Morgan in banking. I would like to explore these figures in detail one day, because studying them reveals so much about the period and about where we are today.

As economies of scale expanded, it became more efficient to absorb smaller businesses — smaller steel producers, for instance — so that raw material orders, factory lines, and infrastructure could all be managed at scale, at lower unit cost. This logic of acquisition and consolidation is why someone like J.P. Morgan became one of the most powerful men on the planet. He was, quite literally, America's banker — because in this period, America had no central bank, and for the government to raise loans, it went through Morgan. And much of the time, it was Morgan personally.

He was, arguably, the most connected individual who had ever lived — not in the sense of building companies, but in the sense of organising relationships, making deals, and controlling the flows of capital on which everything else depended. Without overstatement, the most connected man in history.

Take Andrew Carnegie. He built Carnegie Steel in 1875. Carnegie Steel initially produced around 20,000 tons of steel. Just fourteen years later, it was producing over half a million tons — at half the cost per ton, with improved quality. The weight a rail could bear rose from around eight tons to seventy. These were enormous improvements in efficiency, price, and quality, driven directly by the explosive growth of the railway network and the capital flowing into it.

The robber barons — a term still debated by historians — were undeniably men of great drive and passion, and in some cases considerable philanthropic ambition. But the success was purchased through driving down wages, monopolising and price-fixing, manipulating the young and naive stock market, and cultivating close relationships with politicians and lawmakers. Jay Gould even bought a newspaper — the New York World — intending to control business information and manipulate financial markets. The magazine Financier, hardly a radical publication, called Gould "the most accomplished of all modern criminals." Pulitzer said Gould was "one of the most sinister figures that have ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people."

A US diplomat, writing of the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, captured the spirit of the era: "He has combined the natural power of the individual with the fictitious power of the corporation. The famous L'état, c'est moi of Louis XIV — 'I am the state' — represents Vanderbilt's position in regard to his railroads. Unconsciously, he has introduced Caesarism into corporate life... Vanderbilt is but the precursor of a class of men who will wield within the state a power created by the state, but too great for its control."

The sheer dominance, the falling consumer prices, and the speed of growth all came at a cost — unsafe and unsanitary conditions, downward pressure on wages, booms and catastrophic busts, and long periods of unemployment. And an American working class that was beginning to organise and to strike. This led to violent confrontations that went well beyond what was seen in Britain or Europe.

Hobsbawm writes that in 1865 and 1866, "every railroad, colliery, iron furnace and rolling mill in Pennsylvania was granted statutory authority to employ as many armed policemen as it wished." The most well-known private security outfit was the Pinkertons — a detective and security agency whose most famous engagement was the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, where hundreds of Carnegie guards faced thousands of striking workers in a shootout in which eight people died, mostly strikers, before the National Guard was called in to end the dispute. In 1892 alone, state militias were deployed to break strikes twenty-three times. During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Chicago descended into chaos and violence; a thousand people were jailed and a hundred killed.

Levy writes bluntly: "By any possible criterion, in the age of capital, the United States had the most contentious and violent labour relations of any country in the world."

Unionisation in the United States followed a pattern similar to, if more violent than, that of Britain — securing slow concessions, incremental wage increases, and regulatory protections, battling corporations and government simultaneously. Investigative journalists — "muckrakers" like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — helped focus public attention on the practices of the corporate giants. This battle reached its legislative peak with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which made monopolies controlling an entire market illegal, and which led eventually to the most famous breakup of all: Rockefeller's Standard Oil, dissolved into several smaller companies.

The factors leading to the Act were price-fixing on monopolistic railways, preferential treatment for large corporations over small farmers, deliberate barriers to market entry, stock market manipulation, the corrupting of politicians, and eventually a broad public outcry. It was an era of populist and farmer revolt against the Promethean corporations — Goliaths against ordinary Davids. The Act was passed. Though it was applied sparingly, and less frequently as the twentieth century advanced, the more noteworthy trend was the one Hobsbawm had already identified: Smith's invisible hand becoming very visible. The family firm giving way to the giant corporation; the individual owner-manager giving way to the professional executive, the accountant, the lawyer, the bureaucrat; small anonymous businesses being absorbed by national and then international conglomerates.

Some historians now argue that the driving force was not individual greed but rational economies of scale — that in railway networks, oil refining, and steel production, it was genuinely more efficient to operate at massive scale, and that smaller companies therefore found it more profitable to sell out to larger ones than to continue independently. Landes puts it: "Smaller firms in traditional lines were pressed hard by bigger and more efficient competitors. Many collapsed in spite of all the resistance, ingenuity and sacrifice that old-style family enterprises are capable of."

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the first national business bureaucracy on a grand scale. These behemoths became less about individual entrepreneurs and more about stocks, shares, buyouts, and financing — about the progressive extinction of the family business. Between 1895 and 1904, a total of 1,800 American firms were consolidated, with the assistance of bankers like J.P. Morgan, into just 157 corporations. As the historian Charles Geisst writes: "The entire period of American capitalism since the Industrial Revolution has been an unrelenting trend towards consolidation."

Take the example of US Steel. Levy writes: "The productive capital wielded by the organisational scale of US Steel was extraordinary. The corporation controlled 213 separate factories, 41 mines and over 1,000 miles of railroad spread out across the entire northeastern and Midwestern manufacturing belt. It employed 162,000 individuals." McClure's magazine observed that US Steel "receives and expends more money every year than any but the very greatest of the world's national governments. Its debt is larger than that of many of the lesser nations of Europe. It absolutely controls the destinies of a population nearly as large as that of Maryland or Nebraska, and indirectly influences twice that number."

These corporations were civil services before the civil service existed in the private sector. They were capitalist bureaucratic nations — nations within nations.

A natural pinnacle for this part of the story is what Levy calls "the greatest achievement in the annals of the Industrial Revolution": the Ford assembly line. One statistic says enough. In 1910, Henry Ford manufactured 20,000 Model T automobiles. In 1916, just six years later, he manufactured almost 600,000 — at half the cost. If we gather everything we have looked at — engines, oil, national infrastructure, efficiency and productivity, the agricultural revolution that freed up labour, steel, railways, a national legal and patent framework — Ford's factory system and the individual car it produced becomes the culmination. The entire history, concentrated.

Ford even wrote — or had a copywriter write — the 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for mass production: "Mass production is the focusing upon a manufacturing project of the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity and speed." He had taken Newcomen and Watt's obsessive attention to the minute details of the engine and writ it large — imagining the entire factory as an engine. Every process, every line, every screw, every job was standardised, repeatable, and subject to the smallest improvements in efficiency. Specific machines were even built to bore individual holes to an exact dimension, where other manufacturers still used general-purpose drills. Ford was also the first to run his assembly lines on electricity.

He had a magazine — Forbes — telling readers that "time is the most valuable thing in the world." Small improvements in time, compounded across a production line, reduce cost. Before long, the cost is halved. Everything was organised on this principle. This was the period of Taylorism — the scientific management of workers. The engineer Frederick Taylor studied wasteful movement on the factory floor: the best position for tools, the most efficient layout for machines, the shortest path to the toilet and the lunchroom. He employed timekeepers with stopwatches. The application of Newcomen's principle — measuring volumes, pressures, and efficiencies — now applied to flesh and bones, to human beings.

Ford reduced the production time for a Model T from 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours. His factory, the Rouge, attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists a year. Vanity Fair described it as "an American altar of the god-objective of mass production." One visitor observed, simply: "Now the machine dominates American life."

Chapter Twelve: Crash — Build-Up to the Apocalypse

But the great American boom was heading towards a great global bust. While financial crises, depressions, and recessions have been features of economic life throughout history, the speed and scale of investment under capitalism made them — inevitably, I think — deeper and longer lasting.

Everyone knows about the Great Depression of 1929. But there were several important warm-ups. In 1873, a panic resulted from the overinvestment in American railways. Bonds had been sold to finance construction proceeding at great speed, but construction costs exceeded estimates. Hundreds of railway companies went bankrupt, along with thousands of businesses that depended on them. Banks failed. Railroad stocks lost nearly two-thirds of their value. Half of all railway companies went bankrupt or closed, and 21,000 miles of track were abandoned. The panic was felt as far as Vienna, where the stock market crashed too. German share prices fell by as much as sixty percent, and half the world's blast furnaces shut down. This was one of the first truly global, modern industrial and financial crashes — the dominoes tumbling across the iron tracks and shipping lanes that connected everything we had been looking at.

The crash of 1893 showed how truly global the economy had become, involving overinvestment in Argentinian farming, a poor harvest, overextension in Australian property, bank runs in Europe and America, slowing economies across the world, overinvestment in railways, debates about silver supply and currency value, and the closure of hundreds of American banks. The term "the Great Depression" was actually applied to this event — until a greater one came along and claimed the name.

There were further panics in 1896 and 1907. Some historians called the last two decades of the nineteenth century the Long Depression. But 1929 was going to eclipse all of them.

The causes of 1929, and of all of these crashes and depressions and panics, are debated, nuanced, and complex. People disagree about the hierarchy of causes and the relative weight to assign to interest rates, the gold standard, fiat currency, federal intervention, silver mining, and global market conditions — questions more technical than I can do justice to here. Rather than extending this history by another three hours, I want to focus on one overarching factor that, I think, helps to make sense of the others: optimism and confidence.

During the 1920s, the number of Americans holding stock rose by a factor of sixteen. Buying shares was becoming much more accessible, with more companies issuing them, more advertising, more coverage in magazines and on the radio. Some companies were very large and very profitable. Others were considerably more questionable. Historians point to how purchasing stock in this period had become something of a fashion, a craze.

Levy writes: "By 1929, some 2 million Americans had bought stock in some 770 different investment trusts, and 3.5 million had opened a brokerage account." As Keynes would put it: "When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done." But confidence in the casino was soaring.

Ford's General Motors, one of the biggest companies in the world, doubled its profits in just two years between 1925 and 1927. The great capitalist infrastructure corporations — US Steel, Rockefeller's Standard Oil (broken up but still under his effective influence) — were booming. Think about this period: the Roaring Twenties, with radios, glossy magazines, refrigerators, and automobiles suddenly everywhere. Advertising everywhere. Electricity everywhere. This was the period when true consumer culture was born — the Sears catalogue, from which you could order a dizzying array of new goods; skyscrapers with lifts; the first suburban housing boom. Wouldn't you be confident?

Levy writes: "Stock speculation seems to have become a highly energised activity, in which the desires of speculators slipped on and off one liquid security after another. Stockbrokers advertised nationally over the radio, to which an estimated thirty million Americans listened every evening."

In 1929, however, profits were failing to keep pace with rising stock prices. Inequality was widening. Share values were climbing on expectation rather than substance. And then suddenly, poor profits were reported. People panicked. On Black Tuesday alone, $14 billion in wealth was wiped from the markets — ten percent of the US total. Over two thousand banks failed in America in 1931 alone. World trade contracted by sixty-five percent. About a quarter of Americans had no means of supporting themselves, and unemployment in some places reached fifty percent. It was catastrophic.

The British banker Montagu Norman wrote to the head of the Bank of France: "Unless drastic measures are taken to save it, the capitalist system throughout the civilised world will be wrecked within a year." One banker reflected later: "The American people just sat there and took it. In retrospect, it's amazing. Just amazing. Either they were in shock or they thought something would happen to turn it around."

Levy sums it up: "The great bull market of the 1920s was a product of mass communications and mass psychology, and it was nothing short of a mass cultural spectacle."

Chapter Thirteen: Apocalypse — World War

Careful observers may have noticed that I have just jumped ahead to the crash of 1929, and am now jumping back to the rise of Germany before moving forward again to the outbreak of the first total global, modern, industrial war in 1914. There is a reason for this apparent disorder. The build-up to the Great Depression and the build-up to the Great War share a structural resemblance. Both had smaller premonitions and rehearsals before them — smaller crises, isolated conflicts — like sparks before an explosion. The timings may be slightly out of joint, but the logic and the connections — the building towards greater investment, greater mergers, larger machines, larger weapons, greater empires — suggest that rather than being two distinct cataclysms, they were connected: shaped by the same underlying forces and, at least in part, by the same causes. So was capitalism to blame for both?

The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is almost too literal a metaphor. The greatest industrial capitalist machine ever built — global, world-spanning, steam-powered — heading confidently towards a very modern disaster. What makes the metaphor even more resonant is that the British shipbuilders at Cunard, one of the most technologically advanced companies of their day, were casting nervous glances at Germany, whose own ships and navy were closing rapidly on them.

After German unification in 1871, Germany had become the dominant force on the European continent. In the space of three decades, German exports grew from half the size of Britain's to larger — second only to America. Giant corporations transformed the country as corporations had in the United States: Thyssen in steel, Siemens in telegraphy and electronics, Haber in fertilisers. Vast industrial cartels.

But Germany's rapid capitalist ascendancy illustrated how malleable the system really was. Unlike the more decentralised, individualistic approach of America and Britain, Germany under Bismarck took a far more authoritarian and state-directed approach — an executive-heavy monarchy that Bismarck himself characterised as "blood and iron": militarism and industry. The government planned railways, operated many mines, and liberalised much of the rest of the economy while directing capital and expertise strategically. The results were undeniable. Germany's railway network surpassed Britain's by 1875. As Appleby writes: "Once unification was achieved, Germany became the industrial giant of Europe."

Both Germany and America — contrary to the usual free-market narrative about the conditions necessary for capitalism to flourish — introduced protectionist tariffs to shield their own young industries from British dominance, preventing the circulation of capital out of their domestic economies until those industries could compete on equal terms. Max Weber observed that they created "a closed national state which afforded capitalism its chance for development."

By the early twentieth century, it was no longer a British world. It was a multipolar world of interconnected but competing corporations, empires, railways, shipping lanes, and of course militaries. Germany had colonies in Africa. France and Britain had empires across the world. America, despite internal objections and official denials, had expanded into Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, looking increasingly like an uneasy empire. Japan had modernised by imitating the Western model, built railways and infrastructure, won a stunning military victory against Russia in 1904, and was expanding into the Pacific and China.

It was a unique period. On one hand, great powers of roughly comparable wealth and might were spread across the globe — suggesting intensifying competition and, eventually, conflict. On the other hand, all these powers had broadly similar capitalist and imperial ideological systems. They traded in the same ways. Could they not coexist?

The period resembled a room of slowly inflating balloons, pressing against one another, each expansion threatening all of them to pop. We have seen how improvements in one capitalist industry — engines — drove innovation across many others: oil, metal, rubber, and hundreds more. But what about tanks? Precision engineering of gun barrels, of explosives? What about the forty million people killed worldwide between 1914 and 1918?

Was the struggle between the great European powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans on one side; Britain, France, Russia, and the United States on the other — a consequence, at least in part, of this capitalist system? Of profit-seeking, colonial expansion, businesses searching for raw materials and markets?

Writing during the First World War, Lenin interpreted the catastrophe as capitalist powers fighting over global markets. President Eisenhower, decades later, warned of the growing military-industrial complex. Hobsbawm thinks the connection is fairly clear.

Imagine you are a German military planner in 1910. All great powers employed such planners. Consider the central strategic question Germany faced: France on one side, Russia on the other. An attack from both directions simultaneously. The response — potentially having to fight on two fronts at once — requires, more than any military challenge in history, a sophisticated understanding of and control over global supply chains: raw materials, oil, rubber, steel; train lines and shipping lanes used for both troops and supplies; telegraph lines and communications. In other words, even in the planning stages, before a single shot was fired, modern war had become a global capitalist enterprise.

And war is, of course, survival of the fittest — the most powerful, the most wealthy. Hobsbawm points out that in all countries, certain groups were pushing for expansion, searching for new raw materials and new markets. He writes: "It was the very process of global capitalist expansion which multiplied tensions within the overseas world, the ambitions of the industrial world and the direct and indirect conflicts arising out of it," continuing that "the rivalries between the capitalist powers which led to this division also engendered the First World War," and that "much of the 'capitalism didn't cause the war' literature amounts to denying facts which were obvious enough at the time and still are."

Germany resented Britain and France's global empires. American interests and troops were extending across the Pacific, as were Japan's. And — crucially, and often forgotten — imperial expansion was not only about dominating countries and extracting raw materials. Sixty percent of British cotton was exported to India and the East. Capitalist empires were about controlling markets, protecting business interests, imposing tariffs, limiting competitors' share. Business was so thoroughly global that policymakers naturally began thinking in global terms. That is without even accounting for genuine imperialists and militarists.

More than half of all British savings were invested abroad in 1900. A British Prime Minister told the French ambassador in 1897: "If you were not such persistent protectionists, you would not find us so keen to annex territories." Consider this statement by the German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1900: "I understand by a world policy merely the support and advancement of the tasks that have grown out of the expansion of our industry, our trade, the labour power, activity and intelligence of our people. We have no intention of conducting an aggressive policy of expansion. We wanted only to protect the vital interests that we had acquired in the natural course of events throughout the world." How can the eventual military clash, in the light of comments like this, not be understood as part of this broader capitalist story?

Hobsbawm writes: "Businessmen, always inclined to fill the blank spaces on the map of world trade with vast numbers of potential customers, would naturally look for such unexploited areas. China was one which haunted the imagination of salesmen — what if every one of those three hundred millions bought only one box of tacks? And Africa, the unknown continent, was another."

This is where things become more complicated. Hobsbawm makes a compelling and influential case. Capitalism runs through everything from the nineteenth century onwards — so how can it not be a factor? But as we have learned, causes are almost always overdetermined. Their relevance and explanatory power vary by moment, by country, by person, and by subject. And many historians have offered important qualifications.

Some point to the relative peace of the nineteenth century and of the postwar period — both intensely capitalist eras — and ask why, if capitalism tends towards war, these periods were so comparatively peaceful. Others note that the World Wars were the worst in history partly because there were simply more people alive to fight and die in them than ever before. Others argue that better military technology is a product of modernity and science broadly, not of capitalism specifically. And while some industries profit enormously from war, stock prices typically fall during military crises. So why would capitalists, as a class, want war?

The problem is that capitalism, as an explanatory framework, can become so totalising that it ends up explaining everything — and in explaining everything, explains nothing with sufficient precision.

Two other forces also bear partial responsibility. The first was nationalism — the idea of a people, a national pride, and a national struggle. Competition between national groups, and at the extreme, xenophobia and racism, predated capitalism by millennia. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand not because of capitalism but because of nationalism — because he believed in a Greater Serbia that Austria-Hungary was occupying and suppressing. Beliefs of this kind, in national identity, national rights, and national expansion, dominated the minds of many powerful groups across Europe and America.

The second was Social Darwinism. As we have seen, it was deployed to justify capitalism itself. But the idea that peoples were locked in a biological, evolutionary, universal struggle — the survival of the fittest — was widely believed to be confirmed by science as well as by general observation of the world. It was a very powerful ideology. One German general even wrote a book just before the war arguing that Social Darwinism made war between rival states a biological necessity — the conquest of inferior peoples a logical extension of evolutionary law. This ideology did not originate in capitalism, but it shared significant intellectual territory with it, and the crossover is difficult to disentangle entirely. Carnegie and Morgan both wrote about and embraced Social Darwinism explicitly.

By the armistice of 1918, and the great crash a decade after that, and the Depression that followed, and all that came with it — the Second World War, Nazism, fascism — if we accept that the First World War and the first Great Depression were events of a type, driven by overlapping causes and connected by the same underlying logic, then we must acknowledge that hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction, poverty, death, bankruptcy, illness, and tragedy were wrought upon the world in just two decades. Only to be followed in the 1930s by a Germany on its knees, hyperinflation, the end of the gold standard, the rise of fascism and communism, and an international capitalist system that looked, to many people, like it was not going to survive.

But capitalism survived. It came out of the postwar period stronger than ever. Like a heavyweight boxer on the ropes, beaten half to death, yet somehow getting back up and winning. But that part of the story is for another day — because by this point, by this final reckoning, capitalism had without any doubt conquered the globe.

This is the most difficult conclusion I have had to think through. It is such a vast and complex unfolding of events that it cannot honestly be reduced to a single narrative, however much I have just tried. This thing we call capitalism affects so many different people in so many different ways across so many different manifestations that any verdict has to be held lightly.

Chapter Fourteen: Conclusions

The way most people approach the question of capitalism's moral balance — has it been a force for good or for bad? — is, I think, not quite the right question. The answer depends on who you are, who you were, in what period and in what place, and what you are doing. If you are forced to generalise, if you are imagining being dropped at random into a life before capitalism or into a life today, and if you are thinking purely about material well-being, you would obviously choose today. But that does not mean we live in the best of all possible worlds. If anything, history shows that not only can things change — they very likely will.

Generalising is also limiting because, as the historian Will Durant once observed, historians tend to talk about the river — the big sweeping events — while ordinary people's lives continue on the banks, unnoticed. We have talked about vast infrastructure projects, imperial conquest, and scientific revolutions. It is much harder to capture the grocery shop on the corner of the street, the daily routine of a car salesman, the liberation of women from the domestic sphere into paid work, the impact of a union on something as simple as a one-hour lunch break.

When forcing yourself to general conclusions, you can only really speak in general terms. And I think there are two concepts that best encapsulate the questions this story raises, and that apply to as many of the ordinary lives we have considered as possible. They are the ideas of freedom and change.

Freedom has been one of the most common justifications for capitalism — freedom from the fixed great chain of being, freedom to exchange, to own property, to live a life not dictated entirely from above. Even Hobsbawm was generous here: "The crucial achievement of the two revolutions" — the French and the Industrial — "was thus that they opened careers to talent, or at any rate to energy, shrewdness, hard work and greed. Not all careers, and not to the top rungs of the ladder, except perhaps in the USA. And yet, how extraordinary were the opportunities, how remote from the nineteenth century the static, hierarchical ideal of the past."

However, capitalism has a Janus face. If freedom is what we value in it, it is also what motivated colonial peoples to resist capitalist expansion, to be free from foreign interference. It is what motivated the antitrust movement to fight corporate domination. It is what unions fought for — freedom from punitive contracts and the downward pressure on wages. What is interesting is that the very value used to justify capitalism — freedom — is the very value used to critique it. Marx was perhaps the first to notice that even capitalists were not as free as they appeared. They were compelled by competitive pressure into a spiral of accumulation, growth, innovation, and consolidation — or face extinction. Even the ostensible liberal master of the universe was not entirely free.

Wood describes it as "capitalist laws of motion and the imperatives of competition and profit maximisation, a compulsion to reinvest surpluses and a systematic and relentless need to improve labour productivity and develop the forces of production." If capitalists are not free in this sense, what does that imply about workers?

On the other hand, it depends on how we define freedom. We all have responsibilities and operate within contexts that constrain what we can and cannot do. But I think, for the purposes of assessing a political and economic system, freedom ought to mean the freedom to choose between a broader range of options than was available in a different time or under a different system. If that is the measure, then free time, the availability of goods and food, the resources to pursue one's own goals and interests, and the opportunity to educate oneself are the factors by which we should assess any system's record. The more expansive the set of freedoms available — the more ingredients with which to bake a good life — the better.

Which leads to the second general observation: change. The history of capitalism shows that it is not some unchanging natural state that emerges automatically from human nature. It can be shaped, moulded, altered. It has different ages and cultures, different laws and unions and technologies. It exists in many different forms — from laissez-faire to corporatism, from colonialism to financialism. It is a human construction, and it is up to us what we do with it.

These changes have often been driven by people who experienced the consequences of crisis, slavery, colonisation, poor working conditions — people who felt their own freedom, or their community's, diminished by the forces of capitalism and fought to change it. In that sense, the flows of capital around the world have been redirected, again and again, by laws, rules, and culture. Those laws, rules, and culture act as seawalls, dams, and troughs — guiding the flow of money and investment.

Levy makes a compelling point: the profit motive by itself does not naturally lead to capitalism, because the profit motive has always existed without always producing it. The structures and inducements around the motive are what give it its particular historical shape. These inducements can be cultural, social, political, and legal — the Homestead Act, federal land grants and bond loans for railways, military contracts, investment in education, tax policy, and regulation of all kinds.

Capitalism does not sit still. It is not static. The recipe is a human creation, and ingredients can be added or taken away. The place where economic, social, and cultural capital is most widely and evenly dispersed is the place most likely to produce the next innovative leap. That is obviously one reason why so much happens in a place like Silicon Valley today.

It has been the relationship between institutions and people that has set the tone for these recipes, in every age: whether that was the Royal Society, whether it was the philosophy of natural rights, whether it was the legal backing of the patent system, whether it was the fight for and eventual legal enshrinement of regulations on child labour or antitrust.

What is clear is that this relationship is almost infinitely malleable. Change is always not only possible but a requirement of history.

Some might argue that we should continue the story — through the New Deal and the postwar boom, through neoliberalism and deindustrialisation, through the age of multinationals and what some call neo-imperialism, through global corporations spreading across the developing world, through to the 1990s and the end of the Soviet Union. That might indeed be the moment when capitalism truly conquered the world in the fullest sense.

But I think the story told here falls naturally into a coherent first part. It was dominated by relatively straightforward Newtonian mechanics — single inventors, mechanical factories that one person could understand, family businesses growing into international ones. By the end of this period, all of that had changed. Single inventors had been replaced by institutional science; you needed a specialist degree to understand even one corner of one field of physics. The simple approach to mechanics represented by Newton had given way to the complexities of the atomic age and relativity. The small family business had been replaced by the massive corporation, requiring PR, accounting, legal, and engineering departments run by separate specialists. Naked imperialism — one company going out and dominating a colonial territory — had been replaced by the multinational corporation, which did in many ways the same thing, but in a far more complex and opaque manner.

When we talk about the issues of capitalism today, the frame has changed so much that we need the right concepts, the right chapters, the right language, and the right analytical tools to navigate them — to understand how one age of capitalism gives way to the next, and to think about what comes after.

What I find extraordinary, and what Hobsbawm points to, is that the age of laissez-faire was actually very brief. It was over before the people writing about it even knew it had ended. In the nineteenth century, Smith's invisible hand of the market had already morphed into the very visible hand of bureaucracy, finance, corporate consolidation, government regulation, vast databases, balance sheets, accountants, stock markets, and global impersonal networks and systems — seemingly beyond the control of any single individual.

The Promethean fire did not stay in the hands of its original thief. It spread, as fire does, beyond anyone's plan or prediction. That, in the end, may be the most important thing this history teaches us: not that capitalism is natural or inevitable or permanent, but that it is made by human beings, changed by human beings, and that it will be shaped, as it always has been, by the choices, the conflicts, and the ideas of the people living inside it.

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