The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World

A concise, colorful, and convincing account of capitalism’s rise to global dominance.

Today, a vast majority of us live under the economic system called capitalism―it touches almost every aspect of our lives, and most people alive have never known another. Yet, a cursory look at the world around us reveals that things can’t stay this way forever: an economy built on infinite amassing and consumption of resources is at odds with a finite planet. How did this happen? As the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, It wasn’t always capitalism, it didn’t have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn’t have to be this way.

With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains where capitalism came from, how it spread across the globe, and how it came to be the dominant way of organizing life. He traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery in the eighteenth century, fossil-fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism in the nineteenth century. Along the way, readers learn about the surprising role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch cheese, whale blubber, imperial gin and tonics, Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers in the history and development of capitalism.

Full of memorable characters and lively vignettes as well as sweeping quantitative analysis and historical synthesis, The Insatiable Machine makes clear that capitalism is neither a natural, permanent, nor inevitable feature of human life but rather an economic system that has a history. And just as it was made by people, it can also be unmade by them.

12 illustrations