Roundtable: What is Missing from the New History of Capitalism?

Since about two decades the historiography on the New History of Capitalism first developed a new interpretation of capitalism in the United States (Levy 2021), which then shifted attention to the role of European empires (in particular the British) in the development on global capitalism (Griffin 2025). Meanwhile, capitalism as a global process had also acquired renewed interest among global historians (Beckert 2025, Kocka & Van der Linden 2016). Whereas Global History had long been looking towards China and India, the New History of Capitalism added an emphasis on the importance of the transatlantic trade in enslaved humans for the development of US American capitalism and, following a first stage of integration around the Atlantic, for the rise of the capitalist global economy (Inikori 2020). The conversation between Global History and the New History of Capitalism so far has been productive, particularly in exploring the nature of capitalism as a process, and also in exploring connections across space. However, more attention could be paid to what happened at the boundaries of capitalism (which, might turn out to be much more central to capitalism as a process than the cores). Similarly, the focus on capitalism as an economic process and on the roles of structures, interactions and entanglements, has distracted us from the ethical work involved in the maintenance and spread of capitalism. In this roundtable we will discuss these, and other, aspects that deserve more attention in the conversation between Global History and the New History of Capitalism. What aspects should a New Global History of Capitalism as a process pay attention to?