A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."

To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins Wood says, actually no: those histories are using capitalism to explain capitalism, assuming that even before capitalism, people wanted above all to do things like lower the unit cost of production that only make sense according to capitalist logic. International trade and urbanization did not result in capitalism in the golden age of the Dutch Republic, and the end of feudalism did not result in capitalism in France. Specific changes to the relations of production and property in England created, not just market opportunities, but market imperatives in which people were forced to turn to the market for everyday needs. That created capitalism, and England then spread the reach of those imperatives to the rest of the world.

What's not sketched out here, only vaguely hinted at in the conclusion, is how we can use this knowledge to theorize (let alone build) a better system. After all, Wood is under no illusions that the immediate pre-capitalist system of feudalism provided a great life for most people, acknowledging frankly that there, too, there was a privileged class that exploited another. Knowing how the world transitioned from one bad system to another doesn't provide you with a good system, but it does at least show us that market imperatives are not, in fact, the automatic result of inescapable human nature.