THE INSATIABLE MACHINE

A concise, colorful, and convincing account of capitalism's rise to global dominance.

With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fastpaced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber, along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers. THE INSATIABLE MACHINE traces capitalism's development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossilfuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian at University of California, Berkeley, who also writes for the New York Review of Books, Nation, Dissent, and Baffler. He is the author of a monograph, IMPUNITY AND CAPITALISM.