Joyce Appleby . The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism . New York : W.W. Norton and Company . 2010 . Pp. xii, 494. $29.95.

Abstract

Critics of capitalism since Karl Marx have recognized a revolutionary creativity that enabled it to overcome the many contradictions thrown up by its unprecedented capacity for destruction and dislocation. Joseph Schumpeter captured the contradiction elegantly with the phrase “creative destruction.” Inextricably entangled, the two aspects are equally indispensable to grasping capitalism and the modernity it has dynamized if not created. This book tracks the revolutions of capitalism from its English origins to the global present, with emphasis more on the creativity than the destructiveness. Joyce Appleby takes the reader with fluent ease through more than two centuries of history organized around the genealogy of capitalism: from incipient beginnings with Iberian and Dutch overseas enterprises that provided the conditions for its flowering in eighteenth-century England to its globalization following World War II. Capitalism “began in England with the convergence of agricultural improvements, global explorations, and scientific advances … and followed the power trail that England projected around the globe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (p. 21). Its origins rested on contingencies but once it had come into existence, it spread with near inevitability, first to Western Europe and, eventually, globally. Capitalism took new routes with newcomers to its domain in accordance with national circumstances. It also got entangled in the politics of nation-building. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany and the United States joined England as the powerhouses of capitalism. The ensuing contest for supremacy, punctuated by two world wars of unprecedented ferocity, was resolved by the emergence of the U.S. after World War II as the unchallenged capitalist power, unchallenged until recently, that is, when developments in societies of East and South Asia suggest perhaps a new phase in its unfolding.