History Professor Trevor Jackson's new book, "The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World," was reviewed in The New York Times.
In 2003, the literary theorist Fredric Jameson wrote that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Trevor Jackson seems to agree, but only to a point. In “The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World,” Jackson says that the prevailing economic system has already gone a long way toward destroying our “finite planet.” He argues that if we don’t find a way to change course, the end of the world won’t be something we have to imagine; it will actually arrive.
Such is the grim foundation for Jackson’s book, which offers a compact and vivid account of several centuries of capitalist expansion. Jackson, an economic historian at Berkeley, is a critic of capitalism, which he defines as a system that turns things like labor and land into assets for market exchange. But he adds that the reasons for capitalism’s dominance are far from simple, and not all damning. Colonialism and violence are part of the story, yes — but so is a 16-fold increase in average living standards.
Capitalism remade the world, transforming the Earth and reconfiguring social relationships. The Industrial Revolution upended the old assumption that population growth would necessarily cancel out any economic growth. That the eight billion people alive today are, on average, richer and healthier than their ancestors three centuries before is, he allows, “a miraculous outcome.”