I'm looking for suggested reading on the history of Capitalism, although I suspect that there may have been several manifestations of it throughout history hence allusion to plurality in the title.
>>6422 That's like saying the Bible is all you need to learn about the history of the Christian Church. It's certainly a good place to start, but you'll be rather lost if someone asks you a minor detail like "what is a Pope".
A few books I would recommend, OP:
The Very Short Introduction series has a pretty good book on Global Economic History. Just a basic overview, gives a pretty conventional reading, puts things in context, etc.
Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? is a look at the role of women and particularly domestic work, which is missing from a great deal of histories of capitalism.
The Invention of Capitalism is a work which serves both as a Marxist history of capitalism and a critique of prior histories (anyone telling you to avoid Marxists because Marx is discredited is an idiot, Smith, Say, Ricardo etc. are all "discredited" and still have a useful perspective, and understanding the interpretation of capitalist history which drove the major deviation away from capitalism is invaluable).
Debt: The first 5000 years is a highly readable examination of the history of debt, and the economic structures which arose around it. Provides a very cogent counter to the received wisdom of money developing out of barter systems and debt developing from money.
For the recent history of financial capitalism, the ECB's favourite economist Yanis Varoufakis wrote a neat little book called The Global Minotaur which provides a highly polemical excoriation of late 20th century financialisation and offers a take on the roots of the global financial crisis.
If you're interested in the crisis (and if you're interested in capitalism, you should be), the best book I know of on the subject is Martin Wolff's The Shifts and The Shocks, which provides a global perspective, as opposed to the often Amero-centric stories we get from writers across the pond, very readable, and from an author who demonstrates an unusual willingness to learn unorthodox lessons.
