India, April 5 -- A mid labour's lost power, US-China bust-ups and a world, in many ways, at war with itself, are there really grounds for a cautious optimism? Excerpt from an interview with Sven Beckert, Laird Bell professor of history at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History (2025). I wanted us to understand how we came to the point we find ourselves at today. The capitalist revolution is a radical departure from other ways of organising economic life. The book aims to tell this story from a truly global perspective, because so much of our thinking about capitalism has been fundamentally Eurocentric: a story about Florence, Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam, London, Manchester, New York City. Much of the rest of the world s...