Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

Venezuela
Veret, Desirée
Versailles Treaty
Victoire, Jeanne
Victoria (queen)
Victoria Mill
Vienna
Vietnam
Vietnam War
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (Wollstonecraft)
Virginia Company
Visible Hand, The (Chandler)
Visions of Inequality (Milanović)
Vogel, Jefim
Vogt, Karl
Volcker, Paul
Voltaire
Vorwärts
voting rights
Vuskovic, Pedro wages; in Britain; Cummings on; George on; for housework; industrial revolution and; Marx on; minimum; and payments for mothers; prices and; productivity and; racial divisions and; and reserve army of jobless workers; Robinson on; stagnation of; subsistence; of weavers; of women workers; see also income
Wages Against Housework (Federici)
Wages Due Lesbians
Wages for Housework
Wales
Wallerstein, Immanuel
Walras, Leon
war
War Communism
Ward, Aaron Montgomery
Waring, Marilyn
War in South Africa, The (Hobson)
Warner, Charles Dudley
Warren, Elizabeth
Warsaw
Washington Consensus
Watt, James
Watts, John
wealth; billionaires; compensation systems and; Cummings on; and diminishing utility of income; and dividing line between workers and capitalists; equal distribution of; George on; imperialism and; of “1 percent”; redistribution of; taxes on; Veblen on; see also inequality
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith)
weavers
Weber, Max We Can Conquer Unemployment (Lloyd George)
Weitling, Wilhelm
Welch, Jack
welfare; see also social programs and benefits
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley
Wells, H. G.
Wernher, Julius
Western Daily Press
West India Association
West Indies
West Indies Federation
Westley, John
What Is Property? (Proudhon)
Wheeler, Anna; Bentham and; at Bethlem Royal Hospital; death of; early life of; Fourier and; marriage of; Owen and; “Social Condition of Women” speech of; Thompson and; Tristan and; women’s rights and
Wheeler, Henrietta
Wheeler, Rosina
Whig Party
White, Harry Dexter
White House Council of Economic Advisers
White Review, The
White Terror
Whitney, Eli
Whitworth, Charles
Why the Village Movement? (Kumarappa)
Wigforss, Ernst
Wilberforce, William
Wilhelm I (kaiser)
Wilhelm II (kaiser)
Wilkinson, William
Williams College
Williams, Eliza
Williams, Eric; Capitalism and Slavery; The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery; family background and early life of; at Howard University; The Negro in the Caribbean; People’s National Movement launched by; on role of slavery in industrial capitalism (the Williams Thesis); as scholar; on slavery; as Trinidad and Tobago leader Williams, Robert
Williams, Thomas
Williamson, John
Wilson, Harold
Wilson, Woodrow
Wohl, Cecilia
Wolf, Julius
Wolff, Edward N.
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Woman’s Emancipation; or, The Pariah’s Testament (Tristan)
Woman’s Role in Economic Development (Boserup) women: changes to societal role of; childrearing and; clothing of; cooperative communities and; division of labor and; domestic work of; education for; nuclear family and; in Peru; in Russia; welfare programs and
Women and Economics (Gilman)
Women’s Educational Equity Act
women’s rights; coverture and; marriage and; reproductive; Second Wave feminism; Thompson and; Tristan and; United Nations and; voting; wages for housework; Wheeler and
women workers; in factories; wages of
Wood, Adrian
Woolf, Leonard
Woolf, Virginia
wool industry
workers: children as; compensation systems for; competition among; division between capitalists and; divisions among; efforts to improve conditions for, as counterproductive; in France; imperialism and; indentured; occupational divisions among; proletariat, see proletariat; racial divisions among; slavery and; social reforms and; strikes of, see strikes; unemployment and, see unemployment; women as, see women workers; workday length for
workers’ associations
Workers’ Educational Association
Workers’ Union, The (Tristan)
Workshop, The
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
World Bank
World Economic Forum (WEF)
World Economy and Its Conjuncture During and After the War, The (Kondratiev)
World Inequality Database
Worldmaking After Empire (Getachew)
world systems theory
World Trade Organization (WTO)
World War I; economic downturn following; Versailles Treaty and
World War II; Britain and
Wright, Frances
Wright, Gavin
Wright, Richard
Xi Jinping
Yergin, Danie
Yom Kippur War
YouGov
Young, David
Young Hegelians
Young India
Zetkin, Clara
Zetkin, Konstantin
Zinoviev, Grigory
Zuckerberg, Mark
Zucman, Gabriel

Zurich

Also by John Cassidy

Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

A Note About the Author

John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold and How Markets Fail, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. He lives in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux 120 Broadway, New York 10271

Copyright © 2025 by John Cassidy
All rights reserved
First edition, 2025

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: Global average GDP per capita graph (here), from “Data Page: Global Average GDP per Capita over the Long Run,” from Max Roser, Pablo Arriagada, Joe Hasell, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Economic Growth,” 2023; data adapted from World Bank, Bolt and van Zanden, Angus Maddison. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-capita-overthe-long-run.

“Elephant Curve” graph (here), from Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” Policy Research Working Paper WPS6719, World Bank, December 2013,
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/914431468162277879/Global-income-distribution-fromthe-fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall-to-the-great-recession.

Cover design by Thomas Colligan

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-60109-6

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Contents

Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction

1. “The roguery practised in this department is beyond imagination”: William Bolts and the East India Company

1. “The mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers”: Adam Smith on Colonial Capitalism and Slavery

1. “On the brink for the last struggle”: The Logic of the Luddites

1. “It is time … to seek for a radical, a permanent cure of the evils that afflict society”: William Thompson’s Utilitarian Socialism

1. “In speaking of the degraded position of my sex”: Anna Wheeler and the Forgotten Half of Humanity

1. “Abandon your isolation: unite with each other!”: Flora Tristan and the Universal Workers’ Union 82

1. “One of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth”: Thomas Carlyle on Mammon and the Cash Nexus

1. “Our friend, Moneybags”: Karl Marx’s Capitalist Laws of Motion

1. “A particularly crude form of capitalism”: John Hobson’s Theory of Imperialism

1. “The rhythm of long cycles”: Nikolai Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development

1. “Economics once more became political economy”: Joan Robinson and the “Bastard Keynesians”

1. “Nature … faithful and submissive to those who respect her”: J. C. Kumarappa and the Economics of Permanence

1. “The periphery of the economic system”: The Rise and Fall of Dependency Theory in Latin America