like franklin and elnoor roosevelt were on hand when the memorial was unveiled early in 1933, fittingly so at the dawn of a new deal and a decade of historic strides for organized labor. >> each week at this time "american history tv" features an hourlong conversation from c-span's a sunday night interview series "q and a." here's this week's encore "q and a" on "american history tv." >> this week on "q and a," our guest is historian joyce appleby, author of the new book "on the history of capitalism, called "the relentless revolution." >> joyce appleby, why did you

call the book on the history of capitalism "the relentless revolution"? >> because that's really what the history of capitalism has been, one revolution and social arrangement, technology, workplaces, areas of profits, production centers. it's been one revolution after another. i think the austrian economist said it as well, capitalism is about creative part. we get the creative part, which is wonderful, new technology, but we sometimes forget the destructive part. every invention that succeeds wipes out its predecessor, and this means a change in the way people work, the skills they have to have and it never stops. i mean, as we know from having lived through 2008 and 2009, we had sort of this whammy out of nowhere. now we realize it wasn't out of nowhere, but that's what it seemed like and that's part of

the relentless revolution going from a boom time to a burst bubble. >> define capitalism. >> i define capitalism as a system in which private individuals make -- take initiatives with their own capital to -- usually to enhance production, but to produce something that they can sell on the market for a profit. and i give that definition and it seems so ordinary, and yet every element in that definition was an affront to the established customs and tradition in the society in which capitalist practices began. >> give us an example of what was an affront. break it down. >> well, individual initiative. in a society of scarcity, which all traditional societies were, they were always under the threat of famine. they didn't have a lot of individual initiatives. it was hike a sinking ship and

you stayed in your place and did what you were told because they were so close to the edge in their capacity to produce food so that individual initiative would seem very dangerous. and then the idea that being private, extending the private sphere. this is a traditional economy in which the government didn't produce things. produced on land that is owned byiom lords, but the governmen controlled it. there were laws for degrading, forestalling, and one other which is meant that when the crop was in, you couldn't hold it off the market for a better price. you couldn't sell it to brewers if the government said that they needed it for food. you had to take it to the market on a certain day and sell it. so, that was a lot of control. but now you have private capital going where the owner of it

wants it to go. and those are just very disruptive things. enhancing production is another way, you know, enhanced production without assaulting old customs and ways of working. >> so, go back to the very beginning. can you put a date on it when it started and where did it start? >> no. i can put a century on it. it started in england. as you know, i don't think capitalism was inevitable. i think it was a very propitious convergence of trends and developments and some fortuitous events. i put it in the 17th century because the core of capitalism was developing new machines on the basis of a new science that greatly accelerated the amount that could be produced by any worker. and this work was done in the -- it's what, you know, we think of

the philosophers of galileo and newton and boyle and they discovered that atmosphere had weight and they discovered that this was no -- that there was a vacuum, that natural laws are uniform, and these ideas, as i say, might have just maintained within an intellectual elite, but england had a very open society and so these advances of science just advanced right into the workshop of a thomas neukom or a james watt who perfected the steam engine. how many people through the ages must have seen boiling water push up the top? so, you know, and yet it took all these centuries for what? for the theories that explained it. for the mechanics who had the ingenuity and desire. it was a propitious linking of

technological advances with economic opportunity and a very supportive social environment. but england had already solved the problem of food shortages and that was key. didn't cause capitalism, but it made it possible. >> you also throw a bone to the dutch. >> oh, definitely. >> why? what role did they play? >> the dutch were great innovators, but the dutch were financiers and traders. that's what they did well. they -- amsterdam, the cities of the netherlands, they just had store houses of everything beautiful that was made in the world as well as timber and grain. they made themselves the great carriers of the world. and they innovated with banking and finance. they had -- had interest rates of 2%, 3%, 4% where everywhere else in the world it was 12%.

of course, this is what start-up companies need, they need access to capital at a low rate. so, the dutch were important. but the dutch had one problem, they could only feed themselves through nine months of the year, so they had to import for three months of the year, and this -- i think it crimped their imagination. i don't think they could see the possibilities of the systems that they had started, whereas the english exported food. they were well enough developed in agriculture that they didn't have to worry after they'd gone through the century of improvements. the dutch also were satisfied. they were, you know, fat and happy. so, they weren't pushing to change what they did well. what was remarkable about england and why you have capitalism is once they started, they never stopped. they kept innovating with new developments, applying it to

different, productive processes, you know, everything from drilling mining shafts to making porcelain. >> let's review your background. when we talk on this program, ten years ago -- >> was it ten years ago? >> -- for one of your books, and you pointed out you were born in omaha, nebraska. >> omaha, nebraska. >> but you lived in kansas city, missouri. you lived in dallas. >> dallas. >> and evanston. what were you doing in evanston? your father was in the corp -- >> my father worked at united states gypsum and he worked in sales and he was actually moving to bigger offices. >> but you ended up in california and went to stanford. where did you get your master's degree? >> i got my master's degree at the university of california, santa barbara. i was there living there with my husband and we had an add agency in santa barbara and i was very lucky, because they initiated a master's program or i would not have been able to get it. >> what about your ph.d.?

>> i got it at graduate school and it was within ten miles of my house, by this time i had three children and so i had a very short tether. but it expanded to a place that had graduate education. >> did you have a son that played a role in this book? >> he did. >> what did he do? >> he's a man of leisure, he learns, and it's fantastic what he knows. he lives near me, and it's wonderful to talk to him about this, because he never lost his imagination about capitalism, i would talk about one subject and he would amplify. i think i mentioned that sarnoff, and he would always -- >> the founder of rca and nbc. >> yes. >> go back. you taught at san diego state university. >> i taught there for 14 years and then i came to ucla.

>> 1981. are you still teaching? >> no. no, i retired seven years ago. >> so, go back to this. how did you go about -- when did you start this book and how did you go about researching it? >> i started it -- it took me two years, and then there was the copy editing process, so i guess that started four years ago this summer. i knew a lot about the first part because i'm an historian of early modern europe and i'd done a book on economic thought in england which meant i had to understand economic developments as well. and then after that, when we got into -- got into the industrial revolution, by no means am i an authority on that, i simply read. i did what scholars did. but the interesting thing was that i never thought of it as a book for scholars. i thought of it as a book for a general public, and that was so liberating. i didn't think of all those

critics who were going to be arguing with my thesis. i just thought of general readers eager to learn about the history of capitalism. and it truly was fun to write. >> do you remember when you were surprised? you didn't know -- i mean, you studied history all your life. you didn't know something you found out about capitalism. >> yes. there was a lot of things. a lot of things. i mean, i didn't know, for instance, much about germany in the 19th century, and yet when i saw that both the united states and germany had passed the leader, the pioneer england, i became very interested in how the germans did it and what was curious and what made a real impression on me as i developed the book was how different the united states' economic development and political development, too, was from that of germany. so, here are these two different paths toward capitalistic leadership.

different leaders and truly a different m.o. and that made me realize that because capitalism as i stress is a cultural system, it wears a different face in every country. >> explain the difference between the germans and the americans. >> well, the germans, for instance, were struggling -- the prussians were struggling to create a nation in germany, and they started off with a customs service. and so they used the economy to create this unity which they finally through bismarck achieved, prussian which was by far the largest of the 300 principalities and states that cop pose co composed germany. because they were led by aristocrats -- well, let me just back up. the aristocrats were not particularly interested in industry. they were interested in german prosperity, but they had a

rather content industrial magnates, and they -- so the industrial magnates couldn't count on the government for financing or banks, and so they arranged to have investment banks. the first investment banks were in germany, in a couple of major cities. the other thing was that the germans, the center of the industry was in the northwest. and they had to pull people from the poorer parts of germany as workers in these factory in the steel factories and the like. but there began to be unrest among those leaders. here's one of the big differences that i'm getting to, i haven't forgotten the question. there was an attempted assassination of the kaiser, and so there was a clampdown on radicalism. but bismarck initiated a social welfare program in 1880, workers insurance, workers'

compensation, pensions and the like. he wanted to buy off, as it were, the radicals. and because he had power, he wasn't stopped by the industrialists who hated this sort of thing. they weren't interested in securing all these benefits for workers. well, you look at the united states, and we had a very poor safety net. we never have had strong unions and that means that our social welfare as we know going through health care debate, it's very hard to push on this front. so, that's one of the big differences. >> what other than farming started capitalism? what was the first industry? >> mining. >> where? >> in england. mining was important and they needed pumps first to get rid of the water. and then the steam that fills mines, and steam engines that they could use as effective pumps. the initial use of steam, the

neukom steam engine consumed enormous amounts of coal, so you couldn't leave the coal fields very far. you had to have your industry there, and mining was there. what james watts does, half century later, as someone said, he took an awkward contraption and turned it into the engine of the industrial revolution, is he got a way of getting rid of all that steam and conserving all the coal. then you could take the steam engines and put them anywhere, in boats to drive the machinery and wedgwood famous porcelain factories. so, you know, the first is in the late 17th century. i'm carrying you forward to the end of the 18th century, and it doesn't really change the standard of living until well into the 19th century. >> what was next? you had mining? >> mining. and then the great bonanza of

the steam engine was textile making. textile making. there was -- cotton was a lot easier to mill than wool. and cotton was in demand all over the world. and the english perfect through the power loom, the spinning mules, the various inventions, improve the number of spindles that can be did run at the same time on the same engines. and greatly accelerate the output to most of england's industrial workers worked in textile factories. that's sort of the poignant moments in american history, if you jump ahead to the 19th century, is that in the civil war the english were cut off from southern cotton. they refused to recognize the confederacy. and the workers are all, you

know, then off, you know, out of the factory, no jobs. and there is a pressure to get the government to recognize -- the manufacturers to recognize the south, and the workers stand fast even though they are suffering. they do not want to help slavery. and lincoln wrote a wonderful letter to them, and it's on the base of a statue of him in manchester. getting a little off the field, but there's so many kind of fascinating stories inside this epic. >> you wrote this -- i have to say i was surprised only because you don't normally -- a historian doesn't normally say things like this. i should also place myself on the contemporary ideology continuum, i am a liberal with strong libertarian strain. why did you put that -- somebody reading this all of a sudden you've labeled yourself. >> i guess i thought that it

would be well for the person to know who was talking to them and telling them this story. and as i said, i wrote it for a general audience. i think people are curious when you deal with a subject like capitalism. i went on to say that i very much wanted to write this without having characters in black hats and characters with white hats and seeing the virtues of capitalism or lament its abuses. i wanted to give -- not even handed. i just wanted to give an account sort of like friday, sergeant friday, that just told the facts. so, obviously i interpret the facts all the way through to give it a coherence. does it seem strange to you? >> the only reason i thought either journalists or historians will say, i'm just a historian, i'm not on one side or the other and you never know until somebody says what they are here. let me probe you a little bit on the left-leaning liberal and

libertarian. where do you come down on -- what makes you a libertarian on what issues? >> well, welfare reform. what's that got to do with libertarian? i dislike the dependency that i felt was implicit in our welfare system and that i see as a libertarian wanting people to be free of this kind of dependency. there are quite a few issues in which freedom would be more important to me than social justice in some instances. social justice is very important. what was i reading about today? an issue that -- oh. this issue about the school, s yes, hastings, the case is coming before the supreme court, hastings told the christian league, students of the christian league, that they can no longer have university facilities, their law school facilities, because they

excluded people whose sexual life was immoral. and i was thinking, you know, i think they ought to have the right to exclude, you know, i think that's a right of free association. it doesn't seem to me that it's damaging a lot of people. i don't know whether that seems like a libertarian to you, but i leaned against the institution. >> the other side, left leaning. >> left leaning is easier. i'm really, really concerned with social justice. i think it's abominable that we don't pay a living wage. when we start paying a living wage to workers all over the world, i bet half of our social problems will be gone. poverty is -- it's the bain of people's lives and there are a lot of people who are poor. i mean, it's not a small number. and so i guess being for the living wage is different from not wanting welfare. i want people to work to be able to earn a comfortable living.

and i think if you have such an unequal society as we do, the government's got to put money into public good, like concerts for kids and art education and parks and the things that they can't get from upper middle-class parents, the government in that sense of enrichment of a child should be doing that. that's certainly liberal. >> where do you come down on capitalism, for or against it? >> oh, i'm for it. i'm for it. capitalism has a great wealth-generating capacity, we just have to learn, we have to do the delicate balancing act of regulating where it needs to be but without killing the incentives that fuel it. >> how do you do that? >> well, you know, we didn't do such a bad job after the depression. we can see now that all that deregulation was a mistake. i think that we can get our financial house back in order.

i think there will always be panics or bubbles burst. the reason why there will always be is capitalism is a system in which no one in charge. many people have a lot more power than other people, but no one is in charge, so you can have everybody running off a cliff at once and not know it. i think -- i don't think it's that difficult to regulate it. i don't think you're going to do it perfectly. you're going to have to adjust it with changes. >> read you back some of what you said about contemporary capitalism and its critics. you said -- you talk about greed. but you say nowhere is greed the only thing that people hold against capitalism. i've made a little list and it includes such charges as responding to short-term opportunities to neglect the long-term effects, power without responsibility, promoting material values over spiritual ones, commodity human relations,

and monetizing social values, unset ffleing old communities, institutions and arrangements and awarding aggressiveness and, yes, greed. go back to that whole area that you're talking about there. what were you trying to get at? >> well, as i say, i made a little list and the list in part comes from people who are fighting against capitalism, who are critics against capitalism, howard noonness or frances moore. i mean, all those are charges that are made against capitalism, the anti-globalization people say that. i thought it was important to get those all out there because i think they are aspects of capitalism. if we had the political will, we could address every one of those. maybe not the rewarding aggressiveness, because i maybe thought i should have dropped that, because aggressiveness is

important to capitalism. what we lack is the political will to make these changes. and one of the reasons i think we lack this political will is because we've been sold a bill of goods that the economy is an independent system, it's a autonomous and self-correcting and works on its own, don't try to interfere. i don't think that's so. it's a cultural system and there's much we can do to shape it, and this is what i would like to see. >> is greed good or bad? and what role does it play in capitalism? >> well, i think when you have 40% -- going in finance as we had up until two years ago, i would have to say there's a wanting a very high salary greedy? if so, you could say is the money attractive to people. no, i don't think greed is particularly good. i think moderation.

like the greeks and the golden rule. there's a desire to live comfortably to work to achieve that, but i think what we see of greed is when other human values are out-of-bounds, out of kilter, because greed is so dominant. that we're not thinking about the time that we have to enjoy our family or -- i realize enjoy the family is what politicians always say when they resign, but people do want to enjoy their family. so i think greed as an excess, yes. >> talked about germany. great britain. the dutch. who else in the world have been great capitalists? >> well, we see two very unusual countries representing 40% of the world's population, india and china coming along, of course, the other one is japan much earlier.

and i think japan moved -- really a small island and not that populated, the number two economy for a long time. that was quite a story. and the ancient story generally the four little tigers of singapore, south korea, taiwan, and hong kong. they modernized and developed capitalism even faster than japan, and they all did it, interestingly enough, with a highly directive elite. one of the things that all those countries did, too, was that they had agricultural reform. they got the land out of the hands of passive landlords. put it in the hands of the farmers. poured back money into agricultural education, you know, or kind of bought off any critics of their industrial project, because the farmers were doing very well. and then those leaders knew what they had to do to connect with the -- in this case the emerging world of consumer electronics

and information technology. >> you single out three printed works in your book. one adam smith's "local nations" two thomas payne and. why did you pick those? >> adam smith was a philosophy professor and he was a scotsman and there was a lot going on in scotland at the time and he had this capacity to just look at this massive separate little facts and bring them into an organized story of a free economy, what he was interested in. he didn't call it capitalism. and he explained how capitalism emerged and long accumulation of capital and then the application

of the division of labor that enhanced production. and it laid the basis, it laid the basis of economics, which was furthered by david ricardo and malthus and other people. but it also laid the basis of this self-corrected economy. of course, adam smith is the one who had the idea of the invisible hand. he said, you know, it's not through benevolence that we get bread and beer from the brewer and the baker, it's from their own self-interest in competing to produce a good product at a lower price and we benefit. and that's been kind of the linchpin of capitalism ever since, yes, they had this competition, but there's this invisible hand that makes that competition work for us. manufacturers never had dinner together but what they set the price of wages. very ironic way. at a time in which workers if

they had tried to conspire to have an association, they'd be sent right off to jail. he's no dummy. he knows what's going on in this world. i guess i got interested in the subject through adam submit. >> when did you read "wealth of nations" first? >> i read "wealth of nations" i guess early in graduate school. i probably read extracts in college, because i did take some economics courses. but i was a graduate student, i would have been in my early 30s. >> did you have to go back and read it again for this book? >> no. no. because this isn't about's vy i. it's not about economic theory. it's about the development itself. the actual transition -- not transition. it's the actual conflicts, novelties, innovations, struggles that gave shape to the capitalism we have today.