Capitalism Timeline

The term 'capitalist', meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term 'capitalism' itself and dates to the mid-17th century.

Image source: Capitalism

The Hollantse Mercurius (1651–1691) used the word 'capitalists' in 1653 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital, an early recorded usage of the term.

In the mid-18th century, a group of economic theorists led by David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines, such as the belief that the world's wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at another's expense.

Image source: Adam Smith

Adam Smith described the market mechanism in The Wealth of Nations (1776) as allocating productive resources to their most highly valued uses and encouraging efficiency, a foundational text of capitalist economics.

Image source: The Wealth of Nations

In French, Étienne Clavier referred to 'capitalistes' in 1788, four years before the term's first recorded English usage by Arthur Young.

Alexander Hamilton used the term 'capitalist' in his Report of Manufactures presented to the United States Congress in 1791, advocating industrial development.

Image source: Report on Manufactures

Arthur Young provided the first recorded English usage of the term 'capitalist' in his work Travels in France (1792).

Image source: Arthur Young (agriculturist)

In his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), David Ricardo referred to 'the capitalist' many times, embedding the term in classical political economy.

Image source: David Ricardo

English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term 'capitalist' in his work Table Talk (1823), showing the word spreading into general literary discourse.

Image source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term 'capitalist' in his first work, What is Property? (1840), to refer to the owners of capital.

Image source: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Benjamin Disraeli used the term 'capitalist' in his 1845 work Sybil, bringing it into popular Victorian literature.

Image source: Sybil (novel)

The initial use of the term 'capitalism' in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850: 'What I call capitalism, that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.'

Image source: Louis Blanc

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term 'capitalism' first appears in English in 1854, in the novel The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray, where it meant 'having ownership of capital'.

Image source: The Newcomes

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon defined capitalism in 1861 as the 'economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor.'

According to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German American socialist and abolitionist, used the term 'private capitalism' in 1863.

Image source: Adolf Douai

Karl Marx frequently referred to the 'capital' and to the 'capitalist mode of production' in Das Kapital (1867), providing a systematic critique that shaped debates about capitalism for over a century.

Image source: Das Kapital

The imperialism of the 18th century decisively shaped globalization, extending European commercial and capitalist networks across the world.

Image source: Imperialism

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a series of loosely connected market systems had come together as a relatively integrated global system, intensifying processes of economic and other globalization.

Image source: Globalization

The United Kingdom first formally adopted the gold standard in 1821, anchoring its currency to gold and facilitating international trade and investment.

Image source: Gold standard

According to Karl Polanyi's argument cited in the source material, not until 1834 was a competitive labor market established in England, hence industrial capitalism as a social system cannot be said to have existed before that date.

After the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–1860) fought by Britain and France against China, vast populations of Asia increasingly became consumers of European exports.

Image source: Opium Wars

In the 19th century, Richard Cobden (1804–1865) and John Bright (1811–1889), who based their beliefs on the Manchester School, initiated a movement to lower tariffs and promote free trade.

Image source: Richard Cobden

In the 1840s Britain adopted a less protectionist policy, beginning with the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, opening the way toward freer trade.

Image source: Corn Laws

The 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts completed Britain's shift away from protectionism in the 1840s, embracing free trade principles associated with the Manchester School.

Image source: Navigation Acts

Canada followed Britain onto the gold standard in 1853, further integrating North American economies into the international monetary system.

The completion of the British conquest of India by 1858, alongside French conquests in Africa, Polynesia, and Indochina by 1887, brought vast populations into the orbit of European capitalist commerce.

Image source: British Raj

Newfoundland adopted the gold standard in 1865, continuing the spread of gold-based monetary systems across the British world.

The United States and Germany (de jure) followed onto the gold standard in 1873, completing a broad international monetary order based on gold.

The extension of adult-male suffrage in 19th-century Britain occurred along with the development of industrial capitalism, and representative democracy became widespread at the same time as capitalism, leading capitalists to posit a causal or mutual relationship between them.

Image source: Representation of the People Act 1884

In 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act became the first legislation passed by the United States Congress to limit monopolies, marking increased state regulation of capitalist markets.

Image source: Sherman Antitrust Act

Rudolf Hilferding is credited with first bringing the term finance capitalism into prominence through Finance Capital, his 1910 study of the links between German trusts, banks, and monopolies.

Image source: Rudolf Hilferding

Vladimir Lenin subsumed Hilferding's analysis into Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), his analysis of the imperialist relations of the great world powers.

Image source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

For the Comintern, founded in 1919, the phrase 'dictatorship of finance capitalism' became a regular expression in revolutionary critique of the capitalist order.

Image source: Communist International

Political capitalism or politically oriented capitalism is a term coined by Max Weber in his 1921 book Economy and Society to describe monetary profit-making through non-market means.

Image source: Economy and Society

In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek asserted that the free-market understanding of economic freedom present in capitalism is a requisite of political freedom.

Image source: The Road to Serfdom

While 19th-century capitalism was largely unregulated by the state, it became more regulated in the post–World War II period through Keynesianism, shaping mixed economies in the industrialized West.

Image source: Keynesian economics

Contemporary capitalist societies developed in the West from 1950 to the present, with relevant examples starting in the United States after the 1950s, France after the 1960s, Spain after the 1970s, Poland after 2015, and others.

Anthony Crosland explored in The Future of Socialism (1956) how a different future than that envisioned by Marx was emerging in Britain, ninety years after Marx's research on the state of capitalism in 1867.

Image source: The Future of Socialism

John Kenneth Galbraith described in The Affluent Society (1958) how postwar capitalism in North America diverged from Marx's predictions, producing widespread affluence rather than immiseration.

Image source: The Affluent Society

Monetarism gained increasing prominence in the capitalist world during Margaret Thatcher's years in office in the United Kingdom (1979–1990), marking a return of more unregulated capitalism termed neoliberalism starting in the 1980s.

Image source: Margaret Thatcher

Under Ronald Reagan's years in office in the United States (1981–1989), monetarism—a modification of Keynesianism more compatible with laissez-faire analyses—gained increasing prominence in the capitalist world.

Image source: Ronald Reagan

Late in the 20th century, capitalism overcame a challenge by centrally-planned economies and is now the encompassing system worldwide, with the mixed economy as its dominant form in the industrialized Western world.

Through globalization, capitalism spread across the world especially before World War I and again after the end of the Cold War, becoming the encompassing system worldwide.

Thomas Piketty asserted in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) that inequality is the inevitable consequence of economic growth in a capitalist economy, and that the resulting concentration of wealth can destabilize democratic societies. He also stated that capitalist economies might shift to a much more laissez-faire approach in the near future.

Image source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century