"The Story of Capitalism Begins Not in Smog-Laden Factory Cities but on the Farms of the English Countryside"

"To be sure, plenty of pre-capitalist societies have relied on some of what we see as the trappings of capitalism: money, trade, markets, and even wage labor. But capitalism itself, Cook argues (like many historians and theorists of capitalism, going back to at least Marx), is something very novel. 'Markets, commodities, and consumer goods,' he writes, 'while certainly necessary components, do not a capitalist society make.' For Cook, it is instead the rise of dividend-producing investments that defines capitalism. First land, and then people, came to be seen not merely as commodities to be bought and sold, but as capital, the price of which was increasingly tied not to some measure of innate value or even to hours of labor committed, but by the promise of future profits."

Adam Gaffney at the New Republic reviews Eli Cook's The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life.