Capitalism in Global History

This virtual issue affirms the relevance of global history to the history of capitalism, and the relevance of capitalism to global history. Neither proposition is self-evident. ‘Global history’ emerged in the early 1990s, in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union and an apparently triumphant New World Order of ‘globalization’, as well as the peak of the linguistic-cultural turn across the academic humanities and social sciences. The problems and the vocabulary of ‘capitalism’, along with much else of Marxist inspiration, seemed increasingly irrelevant, as historians and others struck out to explore global interconnections and comparisons.1 The ‘new history of capitalism’, on the other hand, came to prominence following the financial crash of 2008, as the globalized international order...