During the heyday of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s, Canadian novelist Robertson Davies is alleged to have caused a stir by reframing a passage about homosexuality in an 1894 poem by Lord Alfred Douglas. The passage in question—“the love that dare not speak its name”—had become famous after being alluded to in Oscar Wilde's celebrated indecency trial in 1895. According to some accounts, the ever arch Davies, playing off of this passage, provocatively suggested that by the 1970s “the love that dare not speak its name” had “become the love that won't shut up.” (Sam Biederman. “Show Queen: The Musical Sublimation of Gay Romance.” Idiom, May 14, 2010; http://idiommag.com/2010/05/show-queen-the-musical-sublimation-of-gay-romance/). One can't help but feel the same way about capitalism these days. After decades in which consideration of capitalism qua economic system was left mainly to Marxist and marxisant academics—the obscurity of most of whose publications gives a wicked new meaning to marginalism—capitalism, especially “the new history” thereof, is now all over the place (Jennifer Schuessler. “In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar.” New York Times April 6, 2013: A1).

The national media are all over it, courses on the subject are exploding, and history graduate students who, BP (Before Piketty), might have mistaken Gini Coefficients for a character on an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, are now self-identifying as historians of capitalism. Who would have thought it? Certainly not the “specters haunting” the hallways of economics departments, i.e., the wizened retirees who taught the once-required “history of economic thought” courses that have largely vanished from the discipline's curricular playbook.

Much of the interest—and many of those interested—in the new history of capitalism came to the subject as a result of the Great Recession and its aftermath, as the academic phalanx of the Occupy Wall Street, anti-1 percent crowd. Not surprisingly, most practitioners of the new history of capitalism adopt a political economy perspective rather than a conventional economic approach and most are suspicious of, if not downright hostile to capitalism, and view its trajectory, principal beneficiaries, and long-term effects in dyspeptic terms. They generally decry the (now not very) “new economic history” both for its narrowness and its “economistic methods,” and because of the fact that over the past half century historians have pretty much disappeared from the field. The new historians of capitalism have found allies in economics departments as well, both among heterodox professors and among growing cadres of graduate students, who are calling for a different type of graduate training, with less math and formalization and more emphasis on the real world, empirical data, and policy applications.

Although the new historians of capitalism and their (somewhat and sometimes) allied brethren in economics haven't coalesced, some historians are taking a few baby steps in the direction of economics by trying to understand capitalism as an economic system and not merely as a rigged set of power arrangements. One notable example is “The History of Capitalism Summer Camp” at Cornell (along with Harvard, one of the centers of the new history). According to available promotional material, during this boot camp, “[f]aculty and graduate students from across the country…participate in two weeks of intense lectures and labs in core technical areas so as to give them confidence in applying quantitative methods and economic theory to historical research” (hoc.ilr.cornell.edu/summer-camp, accessed 22 May 2015). If it's Tuesday, this must be the asymptotics of maximum likelihood, and Wednesday, adverse selection, and all that, but, hey, at least they are trying. And there has been one salutary side effect of the trendiness of the new history of capitalism: It has taken some of the wind out of the formerly full and blustery sails of Atlantic history, which now seems so yesterday.

This is the context or at least one context in which to embed the two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism (hereinafter CHC). Both of the editors and many of the contributors are distinguished “new” economic historians and don't deal much with, or even mention the new history of capitalism, despite its trendiness. To be fair, the CHC project was initiated in 2005, when, as the editors remind us, “it appeared that capitalism was triumphant worldwide” and the “world's gross domestic product was growing at over five percent annually in real terms” (II: 530). That said, Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson know the ins and outs of capitalism's history as well as anyone, and although both appreciate the beneficial impact overall that capitalism has had on human existence, they understand its weaknesses and negatives, and neither is uncritical regarding its effects. This can be seen vividly in the concluding essay of Volume II, entitled “The Future of Capitalism” wherein Neal and Williamson, writing at the end of 2012, offer a balanced, sober, but ultimately positive appraisal of its prospects going forward, in so doing, providing a somewhat qualified “two cheers for capitalism” (the name of a 1978 book by Irving Kristol), worst economic system except for all the others, interpretative take.

The twinned volumes of CHC look alike, but are actually quite distinct, the relationship between the two being rather more fraternal than identical. Although the volumes are roughly of the same length and both more or less global in scope, the 18 essays in the slightly longer first volume cover the vast time span from Babylonia in the first millennium bce until the middle of the nineteenth century ce, while the 16 essays in Volume II take up the story of capitalism from that time to the present. Because the year 1848 is an especially prominent one for both economists and historians—John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy and Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto both appeared in that year, as did the onset of the bourgeois-democratic upheavals in Europe generally referred to collectively as the Revolutions of 1848—the editors use that year as the figurative dividing point between the two volumes, the first of which is concerned mainly with the rise and early development of capitalism, the second, with its global spread.

Readers, even experts, will learn much from the essays in both volumes, many, if not most of which are first-rate. In an unsigned review last fall, a writer for The Economist opined that the CHC is “not especially rigorous by academic standards and is better suited to the ordinary reader,” which judgment is wrongheaded, if not inane. Virtually any economic historian (or new historian of capitalism) will find these volumes to be valuable for the information included and regarding matters of analysis and interpretation as well. This is so, despite or perhaps because of the relative dearth of tables and figures and the near total absence of equations! Interestingly enough, The Economist seems to have missed the boat last year (albeit for different reasons) in both its review of the CHC (“A Grand Tour.” The Economist. 1 November 2014. www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21629211-experts-look-back-economic-system-dominates-western-world-grand-tour?fsrc=rss) and its controversial and subsequently retracted review of Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), one of the exemplars in the new–history-of-capitalism genre (“Our Withdrawn Review: ‘Blood Cotton.’ ” The Economist. 4 September 2014. www.economist.com/news/books/21615864-how-slaves-built-american-capitalism-blood-cotton).

Given its vast scope and sweep, it is not surprising that Volume I of CHC, subtitled The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848, is a challenging read. Few readers, specialist or otherwise, are completely up to speed on all of the areas, periods, and themes treated in the volume, the chapters in which range from ancient Babylonia, Greece, and Rome to the Silk Road trade routes, to the Middle East, India, and China in the pre-modern period, to nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, with additional stopovers in medieval and early modern Europe, in Africa and Latin America, and with Native Americans in pre-contact and post-contact North America. This being the case, many readers must perforce give the star-studded cast of authors assembled—a number of whom, interestingly, are not economists—the benefit of the interpretive doubt, as they try valiantly to absorb the often unfamiliar evidence marshaled and the data assembled, evidence/data often resulting from the employment of imaginative and creative research strategies that merit strong praise.

Volume I is challenging for other reasons as well, however, reasons relating to conceptualization. As the title suggests, the quarry for this overall project is capitalism, and one operating conceit behind Volume I is to find evidence of it and to flush it out. This task is difficult, perhaps a bit more so than the editors believe. Although he acknowledges different varieties of capitalism over time, Neal (the principal editor of Volume I) states early on in his introduction that “[f]our elements…are common in each variant of capitalism, whatever the specific emphasis:

1. 1. private property rights;

2. 2. contracts enforceable by third parties;

3. 3 markets with responsive prices; and

4. 4 supportive governments.” (I:2)

Furthermore, for a given economic system to be deemed capitalist, each of these elements, according to Neal, “must deal specifically with capital” over “a long time horizon, spanning at least several years and preferably several human generations” (p. 3), and Neal is careful to note that capitalism qua capitalism entails “a thoroughgoing market system…embedded within broader social, political and cultural systems that are essentially supportive” (I: 4).

Neal points out that some, if not all of the above elements were in place in various locales long ago, and correctly states that economies in certain parts of the world experienced periods of economic expansion and growth well before the start of the era of “modern” economic growth in the eighteenth century, first in Great Britain, thence elsewhere. If this is so, one key question in CHC becomes, as Neal puts it: “Why did capitalism and modern economic growth take so long to get started…?” (I: 2). Fair enough—this is an excellent question. But in attempting to answer it, Volume I is organized, rather too much for my taste, around the search for “salient features of modern capitalism and how these were manifested in earlier times,” and in looking “for the beginnings of the ‘rise of capitalism’ as far back as archaeologists have been able to detect tangible evidence of some human activity that was consistent, if not fully congruent, with the practices of modern capitalism” (I: 2, 6).

There are a number of problems with this “slouching toward capitalism” approach (some of which are touched on by Mark Harrison in Volume II in his essay “Capitalism at War”). It is at least implicitly teleological, encouraging the reduction of complex, heterogeneous economies, societies, and histories into a procrustean search for and emphasis on the elements mentioned above. It suffers as well from what Marc Bloch famously referred to as the “idol of origins,” with its preoccupation on the detection of “tangible evidence of some human activity that was consistent, if not fully congruent, with the practices of modern capitalism.” Complicating this matter further, the very word origins, as Marc Bloch pointed out, is quite ambiguous, to wit: Does it mean start or cause? Or both? (The Historian's Craft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953: 29–35).

Finally, the four elements emphasized are not akin analytically to the four classical elements: earth, water, air, and fire (which correspond fairly closely, by the way, to modern conceptions of matter). What about other missing or at least underplayed considerations, considerations relating to mentalité, most notably? Whether one wishes to engage such concerns via Weber, Tawney, or Polanyi, or via Marx (c-m-c to m-c-m, and all that), additional consideration of precisely how different peoples in different locales at different times thought about and interpreted their market relationships surely matters at least a little. One need not abandon the economics ship for economic anthropology to concede that.

In essence, then, my principal concern with the CHC's organizing conceit—at least for Volume I—boils down to this: Is the value added of considering the “economies” of ancient Babylonia, Greece, and Rome, the lands of the Silk Road, medieval India, etc., largely in terms of how they prefigured modern capitalism, worth the presentist distortions this conceit inevitably produces? Should Babylonia, Greece, Rome, the lands of the Silk Road, etc., be deemed economic failures or only incompletely successful because all ultimately failed—often because of institutional weaknesses—to break through the Malthusian barriers impeding transitions to “modern economic growth”? I think not; others will feel otherwise. In either case, readers of Volume I of CHC will be intellectually enriched by the excellent essays included, for which Larry Neal deserves thanks.

The conceptual concerns flagged above weigh much less heavily on Volume II of CHC, subtitled The Spread of Capitalism: From 1848 to the Present, and edited primarily by Jeffrey Williamson. Why? Basically because the protracted gestation, labored birth, and early development of capitalism were treated and treated well late in Volume I, leaving the authors of the 16 chapters in Volume II largely free to deal with questions relating to the spread of capitalism globally, to the ways in which it manifested itself in various sectors (manufacturing, agriculture, finance), to the opposition it evoked, and to various and sundry topical themes related to its evolution—war, colonies and empires, technology, changes in business organization and strategy, the rise of the welfare state, etc.

Most readers of this Journal will be much more familiar with the both the periods and themes treated in the essays in Volume II, many of the authors of which are among the leading authorities in the world on the subjects upon which they write. Although the geographic and temporal coverage is a bit uneven, the volume provides readers with an exceptional overview of the main economic contours of capitalism over the past two centuries, its economic record and economic implications, whence it came, and where and how it spread. Note the italics in the previous sentence, though.

For this volume, like Volume I, is focused closely'some, a bit unfairly, might say narrowly—around the economic dimensions of capitalism, leaving it open to critical charges of economism. New historians of capitalism, anyone? There is, in fact, some validity to such charges, as many topics and themes in which changes associated with capitalism are considered central—the family, the status of women (indeed, even the demographic transition), social class, etc.—are given short shrift. It is perhaps not surprising that the types of intellectual and cultural changes treated by the recently deceased historian Peter Gay in the five volumes of The Bourgeois Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–1998) are unexamined, but–with the exception of Ron Harris's essay on legal innovation, and the partial exceptions of Jeffrey Frieden and Ronald Ragowski's piece on the political responses to capitalism, and Peter Lindert's on social welfare policy—there is little substantive discussion of the changing role of ideas, even of economic ideas, inspired by the capitalist project. And circling back to the economic world, there isn't much on the role of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship or, for that matter, on capitalism and inequality, despite the fact that among the contributors to the volume are some of the leading experts on the subject (Williamson and Lindert, most notably).

Given the monumentality and complexity of the subject being treated, such gaps are, alas, unavoidable. Indeed, one could argue persuasively that two volumes and nearly 1,200 pages on the subject are not nearly enough. One could easily envision additional volumes on the transition to capitalism (déjà vu all over again!), on alternative economic systems and critics of capitalism, and on capitalism's broader relationship to society and culture. And to reiterate, this reviewer would have preferred a more deeply historicized and contextualized conceptual approach to Volume I. Enough caviling and carping: Let me end properly on a high note. The CHC, on balance, is a superb exploration of many important episodes in and aspects of the history of capitalism, a rara avis if ever there was one. After all, how many two-volume works of almost 1,200 pages leave the reviewer hungering for more? For good reason, too, for at the end of the day, capitalism is a subject that won't–and shouldn't be—shut up.