One of the twentieth century's most thorough and discerning historians, Karl Polanyi sheds "new illumination on . . . the social implications of a particular economic system, the market economy that grew into full stature in the nineteenth century". (R. M. MacIver)

"Capital" is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates.

The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the "empire of chaos."

It will change the way you look at the tragedy of persistent poverty in a world of plenty.

This book studies the effects of cyclical fluctuations in the process of capital accumulation - the sixteenth-century expansion, the seventeenth-century depression, the cyclical swings between the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the Peace of Paris in 1763, the Depression and the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions between 1762 and 1789.