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oil. This greatly expanded the ambit of production, freeing economies from the limitations that land for growing food and producing timber imposed. Over time the relentless revolution increased the exploitation of natural resources and the accompanying degradation of the environment. “Can the globe sustain these capitalist successes?” has become an urgent question.
    Capitalism has produced some enduring tensions, evident from the sixteenth century onward. Where the extremes of riches in a society of scarcity were usually tolerated, capitalism’s capacity to generate wealth made salient, and hence open to criticism, inequalities in the distribution of economic and political power. Similarly, government interference was acceptable when the society was at risk of starving, but no longer so when the system seemed to function better when its participants had the most freedom. This very lack of government regulation in market economies enhanced chances for cycles of boom and bust, as we know so well today. These issues will continue to surface through the history of capitalism. Finding just solutions to the problems they cause remains the challenge.
    Most decision making in the capitalist system lies with those who have access to capital. Since these ventures almost always involve employing men and women, entrepreneurs depend upon others for labor. Workers in turn depend upon employers for the wages that support them and their families. Once separated from land or tools, ordinary men and women had no resources with which to earn their daily bread and so had to go out and sell their labor. But the way we talk about jobs doesn’t always make clear this mutual dependence. The adjective “free” as in “free enterprise” serves the ideological purpose of masking the coercion in capitalism. People may be free to take a job or not, but they are not free from the need to work as long as they wish to eat. Employers are not under the same existential restraint. Today all the “frees”—trade, enterprise, markets—have become so saturated with rhetorical overtones that I shall use these terms with care and then mainly to avoid the monotonous repetition of “capitalism.”
    Clarity about the nature of the capitalist system could enable us to make wiser policy decisions. Recognizing that capitalism is a cultural, not a natural, system like the weather might check those impulses in American foreign policy framing that assume that becoming like us is a universal imperative. Nor is the market a self-correcting system, as its apologists argue. Ideological assumptions about the autonomy of economics make it hard for us to recognize that the market serves us, not just as individual participants but as members of a society desirous of paying workers living wages, providing universal health care and good schools, as well as making humanitarian outreaches to the world. At a critical moment in the journey of capitalism to dominance, the importance of cultural influences and social considerations was dispatched to a conceptual limbo. We need to drag them back into the light.
    In this book, I would like to shake free of the presentation of the history of capitalism as a morality play, peopled with those wearing either white or black hats. Even though every history is always suffused with moral implications, historians don’t have to take sides. Still, they have to recognize how morals influence what people did in the past. Economists like to treat their subject as a science and minimize the moral overtones of wealth distribution, but neglect of people’s powerful sense of right and wrong is an evasion of reality. How could it be otherwise when economic life touches so closely our values and, by extension, our politics? With a better understanding of capitalism, people in democracies can play a much more positive, vigorous role in shaping economic institutions. To those who will disagree with my proposals in this history of capitalism, what