It isn't often that the towering figure in a field of study (or several) distills a half-century of learning, productivity, and insight into a pocket-sized synthesis of theory, history, and historiography for the benefit of students—a category that in this case includes not only undergraduate and graduate students but also less learned (read: all) colleagues worldwide. Such is the favor done by the author of Capitalism: A Short History for the benefit of the rest of us. Since earning his doctorate in 1968, in the first wave of new social historians, Jürgen Kocka has published seminal works (in both German and English) on German, European, and American labor, business, and economic history.

This volume goes beyond survey and synthesis, which in themselves make it worthy of consideration for course adoption. What makes it essential scholarly reading, however, is that the book has an argument. Kocka's thesis reflects both his own body of work and the fall and rise of capitalism in society and in scholarship during the past fifty years. Simply put, he argues that “as a concept of historical synthesis capitalism is unsurpassed, bringing together the economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of the past” (p. vii). He is aware that some readers will regard this as a self-evident statement while others will regard it as a self-evident overstatement. But Kocka means it when he calls capitalism “a concept,” as distinct from a historical reality. “I propose a working definition of capitalism,” he writes, “that emphasizes decentralization, commodification, and accumulation as basic characteristics,” undergirded by individual and collective rights, by the mechanisms of markets, and by capital, credit, and investment (p. 21). He explains, “Such a working definition delineates capitalism as an ideal type, a model, that one uses even though one knows it is not wholly identical with historical reality” (p. 23). Instead, he returns throughout the book to the dual (scholarly and political) origins of the concept of capitalism, “which emerged as an instrument of critique and of analysis at one and the same time” (p. 162).

This conceptual emphasis holds the book together by filling in or smoothing over the inevitable chronological or topical leaps, but it also requires that a substantive chapter (one of only four) be expended on origins and on reviewing major thinkers—chiefly Marx, Weber, and Schumpeter, but including nods to Sombart, Veblen, and Polanyi, and critiques of Braudel and Wallerstein, among others. (Adam Smith gets his own section at the end of chapter three, which covers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.)

These theoretical précis may be at once too brief and too dense to bring along readers (like undergraduates) who have yet to struggle through the classics for themselves, and they leave the actual history to be covered in only three chapters: “Merchant Capitalism,” “Expansion,” and “The Capitalist Era.” This final chapter must race from 1800 to 2008 in only sixty-five pages, which actually amounts to 40 percent of the text. Even so, that may not feel like enough for some readers (perhaps especially undergraduates), after waiting nearly a hundred pages to get to modern capitalism and more than a hundred to get to the twentieth century.

Of course, modern historians in general (and Americanists in particular) habitually whine about squeezing their turf into one semester or one chapter, to the perennial amusement of colleagues whose fields span many centuries or countries. Meanwhile, Capitalism: A Short History covers more than two thousand years, starting in China and Arabia and getting to India, Africa, and South America, and still manages to reserve more than half its text for Europe, North America, and Japan in the last five hundred years. Beyond this book's erudition, it is a marvel of concision and cohesion.

For a short history, it is not an easy or fast read, at least not in the English edition reviewed here. Its readability is not enhanced by the literal translation commissioned by Princeton University Press from the original German text, which was published in 2014, under the title Geschichte des Kapitalismus (History of Capitalism) by Verlag C.H. Beck. (I compared both editions to prepare this review.) The author or editor may have overruled the translator's better instincts, but sentences like this one—“The enterprise is an important space in which capital and labor enter into a relationship with each other: there is an interaction between capitalistically legitimated entrepreneurs employing a workforce, on the one hand, and the dependently employed, namely workers and salaried employees who do not own capital or the means of production, on the other hand”—still read much more like German than English, and some readers (again, particularly undergraduates) will find such passages to be rather hard going (p. 22).

Additional differences between the German and English editions reveal one big thing that is missing from this little book: the so-called new history of capitalism. As it has emerged in the twenty-first century, this continuing trend has merged social and cultural history with business and economic history in ways that opened new topics and reopened old ones. This is a puzzling omission, since it is not at all the case that Kocka synthesizes only classic or twentieth-century works. The bibliographies of both editions are quite heavy on works published during the past decade (in English, German, and French), including those by global historians such as Jürgen Osterhammel. In addition, the bibliography of the English edition has been expanded to include essays (but not monographs) by “new historians” such as Stephen Mihm, Michael Zakim, and Jeffrey Sklansky, as well as important works published after the German edition. These include the latest books by Sven Beckert and Walter Johnson, but not their earlier contributions to the emergent “new history.” Moreover, among these additions to the English bibliography, only the new works on slavery and capitalism (with which Kocka disagrees) are substantively incorporated into the text or footnotes (pp. 70, 175n9). Kocka does allude, on the first page of the first chapter (explicitly in the German edition and implicitly in the English edition), to a front-page New York Times article that featured these and other new historians in 2013. In addition, he has added a paragraph and footnote to the English conclusion that are not present in the German edition.

The last four paragraphs above are mere quibbles in the spirit of actually critiquing the work at hand, but the opening line of this review conveys all you need to know about what this author and this book have to give.