Book Discussion: Capitalism—A History of a World Revolution

Capitalism: A History of a Global Revolution

(Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2025)

Prof. Dr. Sven Beckert (Laird Bell Professor of History, Harvard University)

in conversation with

Prof. Dr. Matthias Leanza (Chair of Historical Sociology, University of Basel),

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Jürgen Osterhammel (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, FRIAS) and

Thomas Steiner (Badische Zeitung).

Moderator: Prof. Dr. Werner Frick

About the book:

Hardly any other phenomenon has shaped human history over the past few centuries as much as capitalism. Our lives, work, thinking, and political actions are closely intertwined with this economic system. With his new book *Capitalism: A History of a Global Revolution* (Rowohlt Verlag), Beckert presents a comprehensive global history of capitalism in November 2025. Across 1,280 pages, the historian—who, among other things, conducted research at FRIAS as a Marie S. Curie Fellow in 2019—tells the story of capitalism across continents and centuries: Arab merchants, Indian weavers, and enslaved Africans on Caribbean sugar plantations play just as central a role as Amsterdam financiers or steel industrialists in the Saarland.

Event in the “Books Everyone’s Talking About” series organized by the Studium Generale at the University campus Freiburg, in cooperation with the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS).