‘Capitalism’ is a word some people don’t even dare to use out of fear that they might be regarded Marxist leftist. Historians have been less shy, fortunately, and consider ‘capitalism’ as a powerful lens, through which we can understand how our current globalized world has come into existence. Every trained historian has been taught about the classics authored by Marx, Weber, Sombart, Schumpeter and Braudel. We know therefore that these giants had different ideas about what capitalism is.

Capitalists have been identified well before Marx wrote his famous Das Kapital. In the eighteenth century it was people earning their income through accumulating money. Marx himself sparingly used the word capitalism but wrote about the capitalist mode of production as an incredibly adaptive and even progressive force. Weber and Sombart made capitalism and modernity almost twins in terms of mentality. And since Braudel and Wallerstein capitalism in all its different appearances, capitalism became global even before it was national.

The banking crisis of 2008 has revived scholarly and public interest in the phenomenon of capitalism. With an undertone of frustration, indeed, as we see how profits accumulate among those who do not need it, leaving the costs and ecological damage for the other 99 percent. For some this anomaly signifies that capitalism has run its malignant course. As historians we know, however, that it was not the first time that the end of capitalism was predicted.

Is there an end to capitalism? Can it be reshaped into a more ecologically sound and humane system, a ‘green capitalism’? Or another one: when did capitalism start? We might not be able in the two days allotted to the Posthumus conference to solve all these questions, or even one of them, but we may enjoy the intellectual challenge to think about capitalism as historical phenomenon.

Ulbe Bosma, Senior Researcher IISH and Endowed Professor of International Comparative Social History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.