Critique: We Need to Understand What Makes Capitalism Special

Source: jacobin
Authors: ByDaniel Colligan
URL: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/review-jackson-economic-history-capitalism

What the article reports

Daniel Colligan reviews Trevor Jackson's The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World (University of California, Berkeley), a short synthetic history of capitalism's rise from the Price Revolution through nineteenth-century imperialism. The review summarizes Jackson's chapter structure, his definition of capitalism, his engagement with controversies over slavery and industrialization, and his polemical closing argument that capitalism must be abolished to avert ecological collapse. The piece is published in Jacobin, an avowedly socialist magazine.

Factual accuracy — Adequate

Most verifiable claims check out or are adequately hedged. The chapter date ranges ("Money 1415–1650s," "Finance 1650–1720," etc.) are presented as Jackson's own periodization, so they cannot be independently falsified here. The attribution to "Eric Williams" as the initiator of the slavery-and-industrialization controversy is accurate — Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) is the standard reference. The characterization of "Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, and Edward Baptist" as NHOC-associated scholars is accurate and well-established in the field.

One small factual flag: the review spells Newton's contemporary as "Issac Newton" — a misspelling of "Isaac" — which is a minor copy-editing error but a falsifiable one. More substantively, the claim that "Southern cotton production, in any case, was of less importance to the American economy than agricultural commodities like hay or wheat" is attributed to Jackson, not independently sourced, and is a contested empirical point that the review does not flag as such. A reader unfamiliar with the historiography might take it as settled.

The review does not introduce factual claims of its own beyond summarizing Jackson; its accuracy is therefore largely a function of how faithfully it renders the book, which cannot be fully checked here.

Framing — Tendentious

1. "and rightly so" — Colligan editorializes in his own voice to endorse Jackson's rejection of the Adam Smith–inspired position, inserting authorial approval without attribution or argument.

2. "Perhaps it is appropriate that Lenin is the figure who closes the book; in the final pages, it feels like Jackson is attempting to conjure some of the urgency of Lenin's writings." — Framing Lenin's urgency as something desirable to "conjure" reflects Colligan's sympathies rather than a craft observation about the book.

3. "Jackson's call to divert the calamitous trajectory that capitalism is pushing humanity toward reprises the upshot of Marxist critiques" — The phrase "calamitous trajectory" is authorial, not a quote from Jackson; it smuggles an evaluative claim about capitalism's present direction into what reads as descriptive summary.

4. "The insatiable machine's rapid degradation of Earth's ecosystems seems to be Jackson's main motivation" — This sentence is half-attribution, half-endorsement; "rapid degradation" is the reviewer's language, not a neutral summary.

5. The closing sentence — "Jackson has produced a serviceable narrative of capitalism's development that avoids the analytical pitfalls that have crippled many competing accounts" — is a straightforwardly positive verdict delivered in the reviewer's own voice, which is appropriate for a review, but the word "crippled" carries rhetorical weight that goes unexamined.

Source balance

Ratio: The review presents zero voices defending capitalism, zero voices skeptical of Jackson's ecological or political conclusions, and zero alternative reviewers or historians who assess Jackson's book critically. All substantive scholarly voices either support or are ventriloquized through Jackson's framing. NHOC scholars are named only as targets of Jackson's criticism; they are not quoted in their own defense. This is approximately a 4:0 critical-to-neutral ratio on capitalism as a system.

The format is a book review, which conventionally centers the author under review — but a review for a general audience still benefits from noting where the book's arguments are contested.

Omissions

1. No dissenting assessment of the book itself. The review does not mention any scholarly or critical reception of The Insatiable Machine — no peer responses, no contrary reviews. A reader cannot gauge whether the book's specific empirical claims (e.g., on the relative size of the sugar economy or imperial investment flows) are broadly accepted or disputed.

2. NHOC scholars not given a fair hearing. Beckert, Johnson, and Baptist are named as targets of Jackson's critique but never summarized charitably. A reader unfamiliar with, say, Beckert's Empire of Cotton has no basis for evaluating whether Jackson's rebuttal is compelling or a strawman.

3. No disclosure of Jacobin's editorial stance. Jacobin is an explicitly socialist publication. A reader encountering this review without that context — plausible on a shared link — would benefit from knowing the outlet's ideological orientation, especially given the review's uncritical sympathy for Jackson's call to "kill capitalism."

4. Jackson's ecological claims are not contextualized. The review treats Jackson's assertion that "The world I live in will be destroyed within my lifetime" as motivating but does not note that this is a rhetorical and contested framing of climate science, distinct from the scientific consensus on warming itself.

5. Absence of any mainstream or pro-market economic history. The review frames the debate entirely within a spectrum running from NHOC to non-Marxist left to Marxist. Works by economic historians sympathetic to markets (e.g., Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr) are not mentioned even as foils, leaving readers with no sense of the full historiographical landscape.

What it does well

• Accurate and detailed chapter-by-chapter summary. The review faithfully maps Jackson's structure, including the thematic chapter dates ("Money 1415–1650s," "Finance 1650–1720," etc.), giving readers a clear sense of the book's architecture.
• Engages with real historiographical debates. The treatment of the Williams thesis and the NHOC controversy is substantive; the review correctly identifies these as live disputes rather than settled questions, noting "there is plenty of disagreement about the particulars."
• Uses block quotation judiciously. Direct quotes from Jackson — "plunder is nothing compared to profit," "the aggregate size of the sugar economy and its profits were just not that big" — are specific and well-chosen to illustrate the book's argumentative moves.
• Appropriate format acknowledgment. The opening observation that Jackson's book is "surprisingly slim, comprising less than 250 pages" sets useful expectations and frames the review's praise for concision honestly.
• Identifies an internal tension in Jackson's argument. The reviewer notes that Jackson himself concedes financial institutions contributed surprisingly little to the Industrial Revolution — "One of the big puzzles of financial history" — without papering over it, which is intellectually honest.

Rating

Overall: 6/10 — A knowledgeable and readable review whose genuine strengths in summarizing a complex historiographical debate are offset by unattributed editorializing and a source frame that never steps outside the anti-capitalist consensus it inhabits.