‘Capitalism Is a Series of Regime Changes’

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Another week and another Angry Planet about the horrifying systems that rule our lives.

Is there a depressive theme running through the work right now? Possibly. I promise we’ll soon replace it with rage.

This week on the show we have Sven Beckert to talk about his new book Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert is a professor of history at Harvard and his tome is an attempt to capture the entire history of an economic system in one book. It’s a doorstop, but it’s also readable and clear-eyed. Some come with me on a journey that runs through the plantations of South Carolina to the tech markets of Shenzhen.

Cotton as an entry point to the history of capitalism
The economic big bang
Industrial Revolution as mutation
“It’s still being born.”
Human data is oil to be fracked
The Quaker Oats metaphor
“The market is God.”
Ascribing morality to economics
When Gary Hart ushered in Neoliberalism
“Capitalism is a series of regime changes.”
Moments of great change offer opportunities

Capitalism: A Global History

The Old Order Is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:17.8	Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.
0:21.4	I am Matthew Galt.
0:23.0	You know, we've been doing a lot of conversations recently about feeling like we're at the end of things.
0:30.2	And that maybe something new is coming.
0:32.8	And that maybe we even have an opportunity here in the midst of the turmoil that we're all experiencing.
0:38.5	And I would say that this is another episode that is on that theme.
0:42.9	And with us today to talk about it is Sven Beckert, sir.
0:45.8	Will you introduce yourself?
0:47.3	Great to be here, Matthew.
0:48.7	So my name is Sven Beckert.
0:50.0	I'm a historian.
0:51.5	I study mostly the history of the United States, but I also do increasingly global history.
0:56.9	I'm working in the field of economic history.
1:01.4	I teach courses on the history of American capitalism.
1:04.2	And I just finished a book on the global history of capitalism,
1:09.3	which is an effort to tell the entire 1,000 years of capitalism
1:13.1	throughout the planet between two book covers.
1:18.1	And it came in at around like, what, 1,200 pages, give or take?
1:22.0	It's not short. It's not short. But I think it's a great read. It's not a difficult read.
1:27.1	I think, you know, if you're interested
1:28.7	in how we came to live in the world we live in today, I think that's a great starting point.
	...

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