The destructive miracle of capitalism has pushed humans into insignificance

THE INSATIABLE MACHINE: How Capitalism Conquered the World

by Trevor Jackson

Published by  Norton

312 pages $33.99

 

In 2003, the literary theorist Fredric Jameson wrote that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Trevor Jackson seems to agree, but only to a point. In The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, Jackson says that the prevailing economic system has already gone a long way toward destroying our “finite planet.” He argues that if we don’t find a way to change course, the end of the world won’t be something we have to imagine; it will actually arrive.

 

 

Such is the grim foundation for Jackson’s book, which offers a compact and vivid account of several centuries of capitalist expansion. Jackson, an economic historian at Berkeley, is a critic of capitalism, which he defines as a system that turns things like labour and land into assets for market exchange. But he adds that the reasons for capitalism’s dominance are far from simple, and not all damning. Colonialism and violence are part of the story, yes — but so is a 16-fold increase in average living standards.

 

Capitalism remade the world, transforming the Earth and reconfiguring social relationships. The Industrial Revolution upended the old assumption that population growth would necessarily cancel out any economic growth. That the eight billion people alive today are, on average, richer and healthier than their ancestors three centuries before is, he allows, “a miraculous outcome.”

 

What it wasn’t was inevitable. Unlike boosters who insist that capitalism is the inescapable result of a propensity for competition and trade Jackson wants to draw attention to how strange its history is. “Instead of, say, observing that Britain had the Industrial Revolution and asking why other places did not,” he writes, “it makes more sense to recognise that the Industrial Revolution was a weird thing to have.”

 

Many elements had to fall into place, and some were accidental. Individual actors made all kinds of decisions without any intention of changing the world. They weren’t driven just by greed, he says; they were motivated by survival. With the advent of capitalism, traditional modes of enduring scarcity, like custom and kinship, were replaced by accumulation. The consequence has been what he calls “a new and specific form of social warfare.” Consider the billionaire class, whose members seem to be getting ever more defensive and pitiless: “Even the richest and most powerful capitalists are themselves subject to the same struggle for survival in the markets as everyone else.”

 

The Insatiable Machine  begins with Portuguese and Spanish explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries and ends in the years after World War I, when capitalism seemed as if it could very well collapse. Jackson briskly connects the creation of a global monetary system and the development of financial instruments and institutions to the growth of chattel slavery, industrialisation and imperialist expansion. Along the way, he zooms in on three individuals who lived through key points in this turbulent history: Martin Luther in 1517, Isaac Newton in 1717 and Vladimir Lenin in 1917.

 

Comparing Newton’s milieu to Luther’s shows how radically transformative capitalism was. In Luther’s preindustrial subsistence economy, most people ate a monotonous diet and kept only two sets of clothing. Contrast this with the labourers in Newton’s London, who — while not rich — could regularly consume soft wheat bread and beer. The nexus of imperialism and capitalism also brought them tropical treats like tobacco, tea and sugar. New habits of escalating consumption linked the labour regime of wage work in Europe to enslavement in the New World. Europeans worked longer hours, earning more money and buying more imports from plantations in the Americas. This “industrious revolution” created a novel consumer culture.

 

These new earners weren’t responding only to the supply of goods. Jackson shows that in England many of them had been forced into wage work by the process known as enclosure, in which common lands — previously the means of subsistence — were privatised. The full story of capitalism’s links to slavery is necessarily intricate; Jackson has written a smoothly readable account while sacrificing none of its complexity.

 

Capitalism, in Jackson’s telling, is reflexively voracious: “It obeys the dumb, inhuman logic of its own unthinking operation. It cannot stop growing or expanding.”

 

Still, the capitalist machine was “made by people,” Jackson says, “which means it can be unmade by them.” It’s a strikingly humanist assertion, even if at other moments Jackson seems hard pressed to believe it. He compares owners of capital to “gut flora” — “necessary for the metabolism of the whole entity” but “individually unimportant.” He states that the burning of fossil fuels has already pushed the climate past the point of no return. “We can focus on survival,” Jackson writes. “But it is too late to stop the catastrophe.”

 

Whether intentional or not, Jackson’s overall message is that the system becomes so self-reinforcing that it pushes individual humans into insignificance. Luther, Newton and Lenin are included in this book merely because they provide “snapshots” of their economic worlds: “The people themselves are not important, which is exactly the point.”

 

The reviewer is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.

 

©2026 The New York Times News Service