![]() ![]() Both scholarly and accessible, this book unpacks a complex web of seemingly unrelated events its dazzling achievements are tarnished only by multiple misnomers: there is no city called “Calico” in India (there's a Calicut) and no language called “Hindu” (it's Hindi). Bob Timmermann President 3, C-SPAN Historians ranking 7 Embargo O grab me In this biography of the Third President, UCLA professor Joyce Appleby begins the seventh chapter of the book with this sentence: Americans’ most pressing history assignment is coming to terms with Thomas Jefferson. Appleby turns Marxism on its head as she proposes that the new social relations introduced in England as a result of converting common land into freeholds were the “consequence, not the cause, of the transformation in English farming.” If this sounds like breathless global time travel, it is still a laudable effort at demonstrating that there was nothing “inevitable” about the rise of capitalism. ![]() This set England on the path to controlling famine and, ultimately, freed capital and labor for trade. ![]() ![]() She narrates the rise of capitalism as a process of accretion, starting with Dutch agricultural innovations that were adopted and improved upon by the British. ) traces its trajectory through European, American, and Asian successes and setbacks, its unhappy experiments in colonization, the world wars, and into contemporary India and China. Arguing that capitalism is a cultural-rather than purely economic-phenomenon, Appleby ( Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination ![]()
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