The New Dark Age

How Fortune Turns Empire into a Museum Exhibit

The article under excavation—Nick Lichtenberg’s January 18, 2026 feature for Fortune, “This Harvard professor spent 8 years traveling the world researching the secret history of capitalism and how ‘marginal’ and ‘weak’ it used to be”—is presented as a generous intellectual offering to the professional–managerial class: a tour through capitalism’s past guided by a Harvard professor with a passport full of stamps and a conscience full of mild discomfort. The reader is invited into a story of discovery, curiosity, and historical surprise, where capitalism appears less as a system of domination and more as a strange cultural organism that slowly learned how to walk, then run, and finally rule the world. The narrative is framed as bold and provocative, yet carefully insulated from any political consequence.

Lichtenberg constructs Sven Beckert as a benevolent explorer of economic history, a scholar-adventurer who “Zoomed in from his home office” to explain the mystery of how we came to live the way we do. Beckert is repeatedly described as someone who “isn’t here to judge capitalism,” who is “not even sure what it is,” and who simply wants to understand it. This posture of neutrality is not incidental. It is the article’s ideological anchor. By insisting that the historian stands above judgment, the piece invites the reader to do the same—to approach capitalism not as a system of power that structures their life, but as a curious artifact of human ingenuity. The violence of history is rendered as background texture, something to be acknowledged politely and then set aside, like a footnote in a museum catalog.

The article is built around a familiar bourgeois narrative arc: discovery, evolution, and reconciliation. First comes the discovery story. Beckert has spent eight years traveling the world, from Aden to Gujarat to Barbados, uncovering what the article calls the “secret history” of capitalism. This language is important. Capitalism is framed as a hidden truth waiting to be revealed by a patient academic, not as a living system that continues to organize exploitation and inequality in the present. The reader is positioned as a spectator to history, not a participant in it. The crimes of empire are transformed into archaeological curiosities, unearthed by a professor with a research grant and a return ticket.

Then comes the evolution story. Capitalism, we are told, was once “marginal” and “weak,” practiced by odd merchant communities on the outskirts of medieval society. It slowly spread, node by node, island by island, until it became the dominant logic of modern life. This language of organic growth is doing heavy ideological work. Capitalism is described as if it were a species adapting to its environment, rather than a social system imposed through conquest, enclosure, and coercion. Empire disappears into process. Violence dissolves into “institutional innovation.” What was, in reality, a global project of domination is recoded as a long, winding journey of human creativity.

Finally comes the humanist reconciliation. The article acknowledges that capitalism’s history is dark, even brutal. We are told of Beckert’s shock at the sugar plantations of Barbados, of his discomfort reading the records of the seventeenth century, of his emotional reaction to the cruelty he encountered in the archives. But this violence is filtered through the historian’s feelings. The subject of the story becomes Beckert’s conscience, not the enslaved, the dispossessed, or the conquered. The reader is invited to share in a moment of moral reflection, only to be reassured, a few paragraphs later, that capitalism has also delivered “enormous productivity gains,” “unprecedented economic growth,” and the ability for a Harvard professor to fly to Cambodia for research. Tragedy is balanced by triumph. Blood is washed away by balance sheets.

Throughout the piece, capitalism is carefully depoliticized. It is not presented as a system of class power, but as a set of ideas and practices that slowly came to structure economic life. Empire is never named as a ruling order. Conquest is replaced with “global integration.” Plantation slavery becomes an “amazing story” about how Boston once depended on Barbados. The crimes of accumulation are safely located in the distant past, quarantined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the present is treated as a more civilized, more enlightened successor. History is sealed off from today’s realities, as if the world market were no longer built on the same foundations of extraction and exploitation.

The article closes with a gesture toward uncertainty. Beckert suggests that capitalism could someday end, that historians of the future may look back on our time with the same confusion we feel toward medieval trade. But this possibility is left floating in abstraction. No social force is named. No struggle is identified. No class is called into being. The future is described as “open,” but emptied of agency. History is something that happens to people, not something made by them. In this way, Fortune performs its quiet ideological labor: it acknowledges capitalism’s brutality, folds it into a story of human progress, and leaves the reader with the comforting sense that nothing, in the end, is truly at stake.

From Merchant Curiosities to World System: What the Record Actually Shows

The Fortune article rests on a thin factual scaffolding that gestures toward a vast history while carefully avoiding its structural foundations. What it offers, in fragments and anecdotes, is the outline of a story that must be reconstructed from the historical record itself. The verifiable claims presented are straightforward: Sven Beckert spent eight years researching a global history of capitalism; traces of capitalist logic can be found in merchant communities as far back as the twelfth century in places like Aden and Cambay; Song-dynasty China developed paper money centuries before Europe; and for hundreds of years, capitalist practices remained marginal to the dominant forms of economic life. The article further notes that until the late twentieth century, large portions of the world lived in non-capitalist systems and that even in the West, subsistence farming persisted well into the modern era. These points, taken on their own, are uncontroversial. What matters is how they are situated.

The historical literature makes clear that the existence of trade, markets, and merchant networks is not the same thing as the emergence of capitalism as a social system. Human societies have exchanged goods for millennia, but capitalism is defined by a specific set of social relations: private ownership of the means of production, production for profit rather than use, generalized wage labor, and the systematic reinvestment of surplus to expand accumulation. These relations did not simply evolve out of medieval التجارة (trade or commerce) routes. They were forged through a long and violent transformation of agrarian societies in Europe and then imposed globally through colonial expansion. Historians of political economy locate the decisive break not in ancient ports, but in the upheavals of the early modern period, when peasants were driven from the land, commons were enclosed, and a growing population was forced to sell its labor to survive.

The Atlantic world sits at the center of this transformation. The rise of plantation economies in the Caribbean and the Americas created the first truly global circuits of capital. Sugar, cotton, tobacco, and silver were not peripheral commodities; they were the pillars of early modern accumulation. Barbados, which the article treats as a fascinating but distant chapter in Boston’s past, was one of the richest colonies in the world in the seventeenth century, built on a brutal system of racial slavery that generated enormous profits for British merchants, insurers, shipowners, and financiers. New England did not merely “figure out how to become a service hub” for this economy. It was structurally integrated into a transatlantic system that bound northern merchants to southern plantations and European markets in a single chain of extraction.

This global system did not arise spontaneously. It was constructed and defended by imperial states. Chartered companies such as the British East India Company and the Dutch VOC were granted monopoly rights, military backing, and sovereign powers to wage war, seize territory, and enforce contracts. Colonial administrations reorganized land tenure, imposed cash taxes to force people into wage labor, and rewrote legal systems to protect private property and commercial profit. The modern financial system, from central banking to public debt markets, developed in tandem with imperial warfare and colonial expansion. Capital accumulation and state power were not separate spheres. They grew together.

Slavery occupies a central place in this history. The transatlantic slave trade displaced more than twelve million Africans and supplied the labor force for the most dynamic sectors of the early capitalist economy. Cotton from the American South fed the textile mills of Lancashire, turning Britain into the workshop of the world. Sugar from the Caribbean reshaped European consumption patterns and generated immense fortunes. These were not archaic remnants of a pre-capitalist world. They were among the most advanced and profitable enterprises of their time, organized around large-scale production, strict labor discipline, and international markets.

The article also notes that until the fall of the Soviet Union, roughly thirty percent of the world’s population lived in non-capitalist systems. This fact points to another omission. The twentieth century was not a period of uncontested capitalist expansion, but one of intense ideological, political, and military संघर्ष (struggle) between competing social orders. The Russian and Chinese revolutions, the rise of socialist states, and the wave of decolonization after the Second World War all represented attempts to break from a world economy structured by imperial domination. For much of the Global South, the question was not whether capitalism was natural or inevitable, but whether national development could occur without submission to foreign capital and metropolitan control.

When these histories are placed side by side, a different picture emerges from the one offered in Fortune. Capitalism did not move from the margins to the center because it was culturally persuasive or institutionally ingenious. It moved because it was backed by guns, ships, laws, and armies. Its expansion was inseparable from the rise of European empires and the remaking of the world through conquest and coercion. The “global history” of capitalism is, in fact, the history of a world system built on dispossession, forced labor, and unequal exchange—a system whose legacies continue to shape the economic geography of the present.

Empire as the Engine: Capitalism Seen from the Plantation, the Mine, and the Factory Gate

When the fragments assembled in the record are placed into a single frame, the story that emerges is not one of a marginal logic gradually discovering its destiny, but of a world system forged through conquest and held together by force. Capitalism did not rise because a handful of merchants in Aden or Cambay discovered a clever way to keep accounts. It rose because land was seized, peoples were displaced, labor was chained, and entire continents were reorganized around the demands of accumulation. What appears in polite business history as “global integration” was, in lived experience, a centuries-long war on the peasantry and the working poor, carried out by imperial states on behalf of commercial and financial elites.

The decisive rupture came when millions were torn from their means of subsistence and compelled to survive by selling their labor. In the countryside of England and across much of Europe, common lands were fenced off, village economies dismantled, and rural populations driven into towns and ports. Across the Atlantic, Indigenous nations were exterminated or expelled to make way for plantations and mines. In Africa, whole regions were transformed into hunting grounds for human beings. These were not unfortunate side effects of progress. They were the preconditions for a system that requires a permanent supply of cheap, disciplined labor and a steady flow of raw materials into metropolitan industry.

From the standpoint of those who cut cane under the Caribbean sun, picked cotton under the overseer’s whip, or dug silver from the bowels of Potosí, capitalism did not arrive as an abstract economic logic. It arrived as a regime of terror. The plantation was not a quaint relic of a pre-industrial past; it was the first great laboratory of modern production, where labor was regimented, output measured, and time disciplined with a brutality that prefigured the factory system. The wealth that built the ports of Liverpool and Boston, financed the mills of Manchester, and underwrote the rise of modern banking was wrung from bodies treated as property and from lands treated as spoil.

The state, far from standing apart from this process, was its central organizer. Navies cleared the sea lanes. Armies broke resistance. Colonial administrations imposed taxes payable only in cash, forcing subsistence farmers into the labor market. Courts enforced contracts that bound workers to employers and peasants to creditors. Central banks stabilized currencies and managed public debts incurred through imperial war. At every stage, political power was mobilized to create and protect the conditions of accumulation. The idea that capitalists were once “freewheeling” outsiders, loosely attached to the state, dissolves when confronted with the machinery of empire that made their fortunes possible.

Seen from the periphery, the modern world economy has always been organized around unequal exchange. The colonies and semi-colonies supplied cheap labor and raw materials; the metropolitan centers specialized in high-value manufacturing and finance. This division of labor did not disappear with the lowering of imperial flags. It was reproduced through new mechanisms: foreign debt, trade regimes, corporate monopolies, and political intervention. The same logic that once bound Barbados to Boston now ties cobalt mines in the Congo to battery factories in Europe and electronics plants in Asia. The names of the commodities have changed, but the structure of extraction remains.

The twentieth century shattered the illusion that this order was unchallengeable. Revolutions in Russia and China, national liberation struggles across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the construction of socialist economies represented a direct assault on a world system built to serve imperial capital. For a time, a substantial part of humanity stepped outside the circuits of accumulation that had defined the modern era. That these experiments were met with sanctions, sabotage, proxy wars, and open invasion is not an accident of history. It is proof that the guardians of the old order understood what was at stake: control over labor, land, and resources on a planetary scale.

Today’s crises—financial instability, ecological collapse, permanent war, and mass precarity—are not signs of a system in transition toward a gentler form. They are the symptoms of an order that has reached the limits of what it can extract from both people and nature. The promise of endless growth collides with a finite planet. The discipline of the labor market collides with a generation burdened by debt and shut out of secure work. The concentration of wealth collides with societies hollowed out by austerity and privatization. From the perspective of the global working class and peasantry, this is not a moment of philosophical uncertainty. It is a moment of reckoning.

The history that Fortune packages as an intriguing intellectual journey is, in fact, the history of a system that has always depended on domination to survive. Capitalism was not born weak. It was born violent. And it has remained so, adapting its methods as it expanded from plantation to factory, from colony to corporation, from empire to world market. To understand this history is not merely to correct the record. It is to recognize that the future of humanity will be decided by whether those who produce the world’s wealth can finally break the chains that bind them to an order built on their exploitation.

From the Ruins of Empire to the Architecture of a New World

The history uncovered in this excavation is not buried in archives. It is alive in the streets, the fields, the factories, and the ports of the world. The contradictions that built capitalism through conquest and labor terror are now driving a new cycle of resistance, as working people and colonized nations confront a system that has exhausted its legitimacy and devoured the future it promised. What the bourgeois press treats as a moment of uncertainty is, for the world’s majority, a moment of necessity. The question is no longer whether the existing order can be reformed, but whether humanity can survive its continuation.

Across the Global South, peoples who once supplied empire with sugar, cotton, oil, cobalt, and copper are refusing to remain sacrificial zones for foreign profit. From Latin America to West Africa, governments and popular movements are breaking with the old model of dependency and demanding control over land, minerals, and finance. Peasant organizations are resisting agribusiness land grabs and defending food sovereignty. Workers are striking against privatization and wage theft imposed in the name of “reform.” Indigenous nations are blocking extractive projects that poison their rivers and erase their futures. These struggles are not isolated. They are the living continuation of the long fight against a world economy built on dispossession.

At the level of states, a new alignment is taking shape. Countries that once served as raw material appendages to Western industry are building new trade routes, development banks, and payment systems outside the old financial architecture. South–South cooperation, regional infrastructure projects, and currency arrangements that bypass the dollar are not abstract diplomatic gestures. They are material attempts to escape a system designed to keep entire regions locked into permanent subordination. Every port, rail line, and industrial zone built beyond the reach of imperial finance is a blow against a centuries-old structure of domination.

Inside the imperial core itself, the working class faces a historic choice. The comforts of the old order were purchased with the stolen labor of the world. That bargain is collapsing. Deindustrialization, automation, debt, and permanent war have hollowed out the social foundations of Western capitalism. The same corporations that plunder the Global South offshore jobs, gut pensions, and turn housing into a speculative asset. The same banks that enforce austerity abroad extract rents at home. The same military machine that encircles rival nations drains public wealth and sacrifices working-class youth in endless conflicts. There is no future for labor in alliance with empire.

The path forward lies in defection from this order and solidarity with those who are dismantling it. Trade unions that once confined their demands to national contracts are building international networks against transnational corporations. Anti-sanctions coalitions are exposing economic warfare as collective punishment. Climate justice movements are linking ecological survival to the overthrow of extractive capitalism. Popular education projects are tearing down the myths that present exploitation as inevitability and empire as security. In every continent, new generations are rediscovering the simple truth that the wealth of a few rests on the poverty of many.

To organize around these contradictions is to recognize that the struggle against capitalism is inseparable from the struggle against imperialism. It means standing with nations that refuse to be recolonized by debt and force. It means defending the right of peoples to control their own resources and chart their own development paths. It means rebuilding the traditions of worker–peasant alliance that once shook empires to their core. And it means forging a politics that does not beg for inclusion in a dying system, but fights for the birth of a new one.

Capitalism was built through centuries of enclosure, slavery, and conquest. It will not be undone by polite debate or academic reflection. It will be undone by organized power: by workers who refuse to be disciplined into precarity, by peasants who refuse to surrender their land, by nations that refuse to be ruled from foreign capitals, and by movements that refuse to let the future be sold for profit. The ruins of empire are already visible. The task now is to build, from those ruins, an order rooted not in accumulation, but in human dignity and collective freedom.