The Story of Capitalism or at Least One Version of It

I thought I understood capitalism. After all, I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve started a handful of companies. I have an MBA with a concentration in Finance. Turns out, capitalism is complicated. Very complicated.

I recently listened to the podcast series Capitalism by Scene on Radio. Twelve episodes. Hosts John Biewen and Ellen McGirt walking through 500 years of economic history.

What I learned reshaped my understanding. For most of human history, land wasn’t something you could buy and sell. People lived in villages with commons. Shared grazing land. Wood gathering. Power was unequal, but there were obligations that went both ways. Then came enclosure. Starting in the 1500s, elites in England began fencing off the commons. What had been customary rights became trespassing. People were pushed off land their families had worked for generations.

This created something new at scale. The wage worker. Someone with nothing to sell but their time. Enclosure didn’t just change boundaries. It changed what it meant to be human.

And the story can’t be told without empire. Plantation slavery scaled up sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Banks and insurers rose to handle the volume. Even Adam Smith, capitalism’s supposed champion, wrote about the injustice of it.

I’m sharing these trail notes not because I have the answers, but because I think we need to understand the roots of the systems we live in. When we look at capitalism through the lens of love and fear, the patterns are hard to unsee. Fear of scarcity. Control of resources. Extraction over relationship. Understanding those roots is the first step toward building something different.

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Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org