Following the money: A new history of capitalism analyzes the destructive economic system

Many years ago, I was struggling through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, trying to fathom the meaning of his labour theory of value, when I was struck by his clear explanation of the origins of capitalism. Not so much theory as straight up history. Marx, among many things, I found was a good historian. With The Insatiable Machine, I have again been able to review that history, but from a non-Marxist perspective.

It’s not that economic historian Trevor Jackson is negating Marx. He amply covers the exploitation of the masses and, like Marx, he fully recognizes the evils of the capitalist economic system. But he situates his argument in a way that I found easier to understand as he updates the conventional views of capitalism and how it works.

He doesn’t slam us over the head with its condemnation, although he clearly documents the destructive nature of the system regarding human suffering, environmental degradation and soul-destroying global ruination. Jackson gives capital its due, stating that the world’s eight billion people are generally better off than they were when we were only one billion. But the journey to the present is littered with violent death and destruction on five continents.

The book comes in five chapters with a helpful prologue, intermission and epilogue. The prologue sets the tone, with Jackson using Martin Luther and his 95 theses to show how it touched off the Protestant Reformation and a new pre-capitalist world. The intermission discusses the role of Isaac Newton. Yes, the physics man, but he was also a major player in the development of capitalism.

Between these instructive breaks in his narrative, Jackson outlines five aspects of capitalism with specific historic periods noted. We start with money because “the origins of origins of capitalism cannot be told without telling the history of money.” To do so, he takes us to the year 1415 as Spanish and Portuguese traders are sailing the known Earth in search of spices and gold.

By 1650, “the world was encircled by a single monetary system, based on the Spanish ‘piece of eight’ coin [the Spanish peso had eight reales], and the commercial world was monetized and presided over by a newly enriched commercial class.” Meanwhile, the Spanish conquistadors used the forced labour of millions of people to further enrich royalty and pay for their wars.

Marketization followed monetization, strengthening capitalism with steadily rising prices in what Jackson calls a “Price Revolution.” This moved Europe to the “Financial Revolution” around 1650 to 1920. Enter British, Dutch and French capitalists. For these European kingdoms, “the impetus of funding wars was at the heart of the Financial Revolution.”

To take advantage of the opening up of “the many (often bloody) opportunities for the creation and accumulation of capital,” violence was essential to building labour through the “enslavement of Africans and in the expulsion of European labourers and Indigenous societies from their land.”

Jackson expounds on the “Land and Labour” questions from the 1640s to the 1800s. Land enclosures in Britain forced workers off public lands and into cities. Many migrated to the New World, where slavery rapidly advanced the tobacco, sugar and cotton industries. “The continual migration to new land seized from Native Americans was the core dynamic of colonial American policies, economics and violence.”

The chapter titled “Industry” focuses on the Industrial Revolution as “environmentally destructive” while also being associated with higher incomes and a better quality of life. He covers the many machine inventions that displaced cottage industries and he discusses worker rebellions against the new technology, such as the machine-wrecking Luddites. We review the roles of coal and steam as it fuels capitalism’s growth.

For Jackson, the Industrial Revolution made the destruction of the environment possible, but it also hid other causes and made others profitable. Furthermore, it undermined “the capacity for collective action to address social problems like climate change.” The “dark satanic mills” wreaked havoc for many while enriching the few.

A final chapter covers “Empire” and here we learn of the brutal and horrifying exploitation of King Leopold of Belgium, for example, and his unrelenting violence in the Belgian Congo. We also learn of the Opium Wars in China and the growing power of the Japanese empire.

The arrival of railroads, the development of quinine and the creation of the first machine gun were all “tools of empire.” Did I mention guns, plenty of guns? Jackson concludes that “Empire was . . . a way of dividing the global working class, to ensure the preservation of elite rule and elite profits.”

In the epilogue: Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was an event that initiated the period (1917-1933) during which “capitalism faced its greatest crisis and came the closest to being destroyed.” If capitalism was ever to collapse, it was then. “But the machine survived.”

This period marks the only time in Jackson’s view that capitalism was threatened with extinction. It may contain the seeds of its own destruction, as Marx predicted, but Jackson argues that this current period of billionaire capitalism doesn’t show any signs of collapse.

Canada does not merit specific attention being then part of the British Empire. However, coverage of gold and silver rushes might have properly included the Klondike, for example. Nor does the Hudson’s Bay Company fit Jackson’s analysis of industry and empire. Indeed, the fur trade gets only passing mention in his history.

The Insatiable Machine is an unvarnished look at the death and destruction that have followed the development of the economic system that controls our lives, often threatens them and invariably increases the cost of maintaining them. But it is also a road map in the “struggle for a more equal world and a better future.” Taylor offers much to consider as we enter that struggle “in community and solidarity with those who came before us.”

Insatiable by the current numbers

“$20.1 trillion – That is the combined wealth of the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires, an amount equivalent to nearly a fifth of the total value of all goods and services produced by every country on earth in a year. Fifteen years ago, billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion.” New York Times, June 10, 2026

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