How economies were organized for the thousands of years before capitalism: sharing bands, temple and palace economies, Rome, Mauryan India and Han China, then feudal Europe, the Islamic world, Song China and India’s village economies, then mercantilism, the East India Companies and colonial extraction. The arguments about state and market turn out to be very old.
1900 to 1975: wartime planning, the Russian Revolution and the socialist calculation debate, the Great Depression and Keynes, fascism, the New Deal and Gandhi, then Bretton Woods, the Western Golden Age, East Asia’s developmental states, India’s License Raj, Mao’s China, Soviet stagnation, and the stagflation that ended the era.
The Industrial Revolution, and the two thinkers who explained it: Adam Smith’s case for markets and its critiques, Marx’s theory of history, surplus value and crisis and its critiques, the labor theory of value done fairly, how Marx thought socialism and communism would arrive, and how capitalism changed in response.
1975 to now: Volcker breaks inflation, Thatcher and Reagan, China’s reforms under Deng, India’s 1991 opening, the Soviet collapse and shock therapy, globalization and the currency crises it brought, then the 2008 crash, the eurozone crisis, the tech giants, China’s state capitalism, the backlash against trade, the pandemic inflation and the AI boom.