Capitalism and Its Critics, A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, John Cassidy, c. 2025. Incredibly good book.

Capitalism and Its Critics, A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, John Cassidy, c. 2025. Incredibly good book. 

Highly recommended. 

 Introduction

Mercantile capitalism vs industrial capitalism 

Chapter 1: William Bolts and the East India Company

Cromford Mill, 1771 -- the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

East India Company founded December 31, 1600. 

• Williams Shakespeare: 1564 - 1616
• Sir Henry Neville, died, 1615
• Between 1598 and 1602, Shakespeare wrote several major plays, including comedies like Much Ado About Nothing (1598), As You Like It (1599), Twelfth Night (1601), and the comedy-problem play All's Well That Ends Well (1601-1602), along with the great tragedy Hamlet (1599-1601) and histories like Henry V (1599) and Henry IV, Part 2 (1598) 

1776: William Bolts, East India Company, US Revolutionary War

Chapter 2: Adam Smith on Colonial Capitalism and Slavery

A really, really good chapter.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the year the thirteen colonies declared their independence. 

Sugar, slavery and Adam Smith 

mercantile capitalism vs industrial capitalism 

Mercantile capitalism focused on trade, controlling routes, and accumulating wealth through buying cheap and selling dear (arbitrage), often with state support for monopolies, while industrial capitalism shifted focus to mass production, mechanization, factories, wage labor, and profit from selling manufactured goods, emphasizing private enterprise and reinvesting in production efficiency. The core difference is trade vs. production, moving wealth from merchants and states to industrialists and private owners of capital.  

Mercantile Capitalism (c. 15th–18th Century)  

• Focus: Commerce, trade routes, colonies, accumulating bullion (gold/silver). 
• Wealth Source: Profit from buying and selling goods (arbitrage), tariffs, and monopolies. 
• Role of State: Strong government intervention, protectionism, granting monopolies (e.g., East India Company). 
• Labor: Often relied on coerced labor (slavery) in colonies. 
• Key Activity: Merchants controlled capital and distribution.  

Industrial Capitalism (c. Late 18th–19th Century)  

• Focus: Manufacturing, mechanization, factory system, mass production. 
• Wealth Source: Profit from selling mass-produced goods, reinvesting in technology. 
• Role of State: Decreased intervention (compared to mercantilism), favoring private initiative and open markets. 
• Labor: Emergence of wage labor and industrial working class. 
• Key Activity: Industrialists owned means of production (factories) and drove output.  

Key Transition

• The shift involved capital moving from circulation (trade) to production, driven by technological innovation (Industrial Revolution) and new social structures, making production and industrial growth the primary engines of wealth, replacing state-backed trade monopolies.  

 

Chapter 3: The logic of the Luddites

Brontë country, River Spen at Liversedge in West Yorkshire; April 12, 1812. 

 

Chapter 4: William Thompson's Utilitarian Socialism

Born, 1775, Irish port of Cork. Manchester cotton mills, abuse of women and children. 

 

Chapter 5: Anna Wheeler and the Forgotten Half of Humanity

Begins with the story of William Thompson, working on his first book in the early 1820s, met anna Wheeler, a learned and well-connected Irish widow.  

 

Chapter 6: Flora Tristan and the Universal Workers' Union

1838, 30 years old, writer living in Paris; visited London with Anna Wheeler.  

 

Chapter 7: Thomas Carlyle on Mammon and the Cash Nexus

Born in the Lowlands of Scotland. 

Chapter 8: Friedrich Engels and The Communist Manifesto

1840, Manchester was Britain's second largest city; adjoining town of Salford. 

1842: Friedrich Engels, 22 year old, arrived in Salford to work at a cotton thread facgtory that his father co-owned.  

Chapter 9: Karl Marx's Capitalist Laws of Motion

August 24, 1849, 31-y/o Karl Marx traveled from Paris to London, where he was live for the rest of his life.

 

Chapter 10: Henry George's Moral Crusade

 Begins with the story of Leland Stanford, a cofounder of the Central Pacific Railroad, tapped a symbolic golden spike into a final piece of track that lnked his firm's line running east from Sacramento to the Union Pacific Railroad's line running west fomr Omaha; Promontory Summit, Utah, about 70 miles northwest of Salt Lake City. 

 

Chapter 11: Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry

About the time of Mark Twain. Coined a number of economic terms:

• "conspicuous consumption"
• "the leisure class"  

 

Chapter 12: John Hobson's theory of Imperialism

1899 

 

Chapter 13: Rosa Luxembourg on Capitalism, Colonialism, and War

Born in 1871, Poland. Russian agitator during the revolution that saw the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March, 1881.  

 

Chapter 14: Nikolai Kondraliev and the Dynamics of Capitalist

1917: St Petersburg; Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. Party of Socialist Revolutionaries -- unlike Stalin ... said economic vision of the future was based on expanding Russia's self-governing village communities of peasant households. May, 1917, Viktor Chernov, a veteran SR, became minister of agriculture ... one of Chernov's advisers was a young economist named Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev.  

 

Chapter 15: John Maynard Keynes's Blueprint for Managed Capitalism

JMK has shot to international fame with his 1919 polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace.  

 

Chapter 16: Karl Polanyi's Warnings About Capitalism and Democracy

Vienna, Budapest 

 

Chapter 17: Two Skeptics of Keynesianism: Paul Sweezy and Michal Kalecki

The three decades after WWII -- the Golden Age of industrial capitalism.

Again, "Keynesian managed capitalism."

Keynesian economics, named after John Maynard Keynes, argues that government intervention through fiscal and monetary policies can stabilize economies, especially during downturns, by managing aggregate demand (total spending) to combat recessions and control inflation, using tools like public spending and interest rates to boost employment and output when private demand falters. Key ideas include that demand drives output, economies can get stuck below full employment due to insufficient spending, and government spending can "prime the pump" to boost the economy, as seen during the New Deal era.

Cleanest opposite to Keynesian economics is the Austrian School of Economics with Monetarism as teh most influential practical counterweight in policy. -- ChatGPT.

Monetarism is an economic theory, championed by Milton Friedman, that asserts the money supply is the primary driver of economic growth and inflation, arguing that central banks should control its growth rate for stable prices, not discretionary intervention, as it posits markets are inherently stable and government involvement often causes instability. Key to monetarism is the Quantity Theory of Money (M x V = P x Q_, which links money supply (M) and velocity (V) to price levels (P) and output (Q). 

 

 

 

Chapter 18: Joan Robinson and the "Bastard Keynesians"

1921, scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, the first women's Oxbridge college where she switched to economics -- Joan Violet Maurice, b. 1903. 

 

Chapter 19: J. C. Kumarappa and the Economics of Permanence

India, 1929; J. C. Kumarappa, 37 years old; Mumbai (Bombay at the time) 

 

Chapter20: Eric Williams on Slavery and Capitalism

1935, Eric Williams, Trinidad, the Caribbean 

 

 

Chapter 21: The Rise and Fall of Dependency Theory in Latin America 
-- "The periphery of the economic system."

 

Chapter 22: Milton Friedman and the Rise of Neoliberalism

"... the Keynesian model of managed capitalism was still ascendant in Western countries..." -- April 23, 1964. 

 

Chapter 23: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Limits to Growth

 

Chapter 24: Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework

Brooklyn, NY: New York Wages for Housework Committee 

 

Chapter 25: Theorists of Thatcherism: Stuart Hall vs Friedrich Hayek

 

 

Chapter 26: Parsing Globalization: Samir Amin, Dani Rodrik, and Joseph Stiglitz

 

Chapter 27: Thomas Piketty and Rising Inequality

2014: Thomas Piketty, a 43-y/o professor at the Paris School of Economics who had recently published a seven-hundred page book, Capital in the 21st Century, in which he traced the long-term dynamics of inequality and warned that the prospect of recent trends continuing was "potentially terrifying."

 

Chapter 28: The End of Capitalism, or the Beginning?

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Chapter 28: The Sahel

The Sahel is a vast, semi-arid transitional zone in Africa, south of the Sahara Desert, stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, known for its grasslands, diverse cultures, and historical empires, but now facing severe challenges from climate change, drought, poverty, political instability, and violent extremism, impacting millions who rely on agriculture and herding for survival.  

It includes parts of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea, among others. 

 

 

 

Keynesian economics, named after John Maynard Keynes, argues that government intervention through fiscal and monetary policies can stabilize economies, especially during downturns, by managing aggregate demand (total spending) to combat recessions and control inflation, using tools like public spending and interest rates to boost employment and output when private demand falters. Key ideas include that demand drives output, economies can get stuck below full employment due to insufficient spending, and government spending can "prime the pump" to boost the economy, as seen during the New Deal era.