Excellent [review](Capitalism: A Global History — the accumulation machine) of Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert in the FT by John Kay who is wise & profound rather than merely smart).
So, he asks, “How did the capitalist revolution begin? How did a form of economic life that was such a breakaway from previous history spread around the world and into ever more spheres of life?” But that question demands a definition of “the capitalist revolution”. First and foremost, Beckert explains, it is an organisation of economic life “defined by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital”. In capitalism, capital is “productively invested, wealth is principally deployed to generate more — wealth — it is invested in undertakings that combine labor, machines, technical knowledge, and raw materials to generate further investable capital”.
Beckert continues “its core impetus is therefore the reproduction of conditions that allow such accumulation to continue; the ‘power of generation,’ as Marx puts a common insight most memorably, is not just a feature of capitalism but its very essence.” Beckert expands “Capitalism is a form of economic life in which owners of capital organize the production of commodities not because they need or want them but because they hope to produce more capital.” [emphasis added]