Few questions of history have as many contemporary political implications as this deceptively simple one: how did capitalism come to be?
In this clarifying work, Ellen Meiksins Wood refutes most existing accounts of the origin of capitalism, which, she argues, fail to recognize capitalism's distinctive attributes as a social system, making it seem a culmination of a natural human inclination to sell and buy.
Wood begins with searching assessments of classical thinkers ranging from Adam Smith to Max Weber. She then explores the great Marxist debates among writers such as Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and E. P. Thompson. She concludes with her own account of capitalism's agrarian origin, challenging the association of capitalism with cities, the identification of "capitalist" with "bourgeois," and conceptions of modernity and postmodernity derived from those assumptions.
Only with a proper understanding of capitalism's beginning, Wood concludes, can we imagine the possibility of it ending.
