How Capitalism Works: Historical
How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Anchor questions
- If capitalism was made rather than given, when and where was it made? What was there before it?
- How did most people come to have nothing to sell but their ability to work? What did they lose along the way?
- What did it take, in force and law, to turn land held in common into private property?
- What is the relationship between the wealth of the industrial world and the slavery and colonialism that came before it?
- Whose resistance is missing from the story of capitalism’s rise, and why?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.
Books
- Leo Huberman (1903 to 1968), Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations (1936). Possibly the best beginner’s narrative history of capitalism from feudalism to the 1930s, written for workers and told as a story. Plainspoken and Marxist without jargon. The ideal first book for a general reader. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942 to 2016), The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (1999, expanded 2002). The clearest short introduction to the debate over capitalism’s birth, arguing it was not natural or inevitable but a specific product of agrarian social relations in the English countryside. The entry point to “political Marxism.” Free to borrow: archive.org
- E. P. Thompson (1924 to 1993), The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The great popular history of how the industrial working class was made, not simply born from factories but self-formed through struggle, custom, and culture between 1780 and 1832. Long and endlessly readable. Free PDF: bard.edu
- Michael Perelman (1939 to 2020), The Invention of Capitalism (2000). Shows how the classical political economists quietly advocated stripping peasants of self-sufficiency to force them into wage labor, the secret history behind laissez-faire. Excellent on the making of the wage. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
- Silvia Federici (b. 1942), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). A feminist history of the transition to capitalism that places the witch hunts, the disciplining of women’s bodies, and unpaid reproductive labor at the center of primitive accumulation. Widely used in popular education. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
- Eric Williams (1911 to 1981), Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The classic thesis that Atlantic slavery and the slave trade financed the British Industrial Revolution: capitalism and racial slavery as intertwined, not opposed. A cornerstone of the slavery-and-capitalism strand and a bridge to Theme 3. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Peter Linebaugh (b. 1942) and Marcus Rediker (b. 1951), The Many-Headed Hydra (2000). A history from below of the revolutionary Atlantic, the sailors, slaves, and commoners who resisted the making of the capitalist world. Narrative and inspiring. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
Primary sources
- Karl Marx (1818 to 1883), “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Capital, Volume I, Part VIII (1867). The foundational account of how the peasantry was violently separated from the land through enclosure, expropriation, and colonial plunder to create both capital and a propertyless working class. Vivid and readable, the origin point for everything else in this lens. Read chapters 26 to 33. Free: marxists.org
Films and lectures
- Crash Course World History #33, “Capitalism and Socialism” (CrashCourse, John Green, 2012). Roughly 11 minutes. About 11.3 million views, the most-watched item across this whole theme. Traces capitalism’s rise out of the Industrial Revolution and the socialist reaction. Mainstream framing, useful as a shared starting reference to then complicate. youtube.com/watch?v=B3u4EFTwprM
- “Neoliberalism: From Ronald Reagan to the Gig Economy” (Tom Nicholas, 2019). Roughly 25 minutes, about 448,000 views. A video-essay history of neoliberal capitalism from the 1970s to precarious gig work. Bridges the historical and practical lenses. youtube.com/watch?v=rG3bNSyhlSU
- Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origin of capitalism (lecture). The most authoritative short treatment of enclosure and the agrarian origins of capitalism, but a niche academic upload with only a few thousand views. Best assigned as facilitator preparation alongside her book, rather than screened for a group. youtube.com/watch?v=7nKE6oN4i8U
Status
This lens has a developed first pass for this theme. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. Contributions welcome.