Introduction: Varieties of Capitalism

Capitalism has transformed the world over the last three centuries. Emerging out of the trading networks of medieval Europe, it propelled the Europeans out across the globe in search of markets, goods, and profit. Beginning in the late eighteenth century the rise of industrial capitalism in England, and then on the European continent, helped give birth to the modern world—one dominated at the beginning of the twentieth century by a handful of European nations and the United States. The “rise of the West” to global economic and political supremacy ultimately rested on its powerful economic system—industrial capitalism.1 At the end of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have produced something of a capitalist euphoria even leading some commentators to declare the final victory of capitalism and democracy over socialism, and even the “end of history.”2