The strongest point of his 1100 page book is his emphasize of "war capitalism" as the motor for the European expansion. Namely, for the first time in the human history, the conquerors instead of using loot for their prestigious consumption or, in the best case, taking artisans as captives, decided to invest surpluses in more production. This did not happen in Spain and Portugal proper for a number of reasons but in the Northern Europe (Low Countries) and parts of Italy -- both possessed at the time by Habsburg Empire(s).
The rest 3/4 of the book more or less follow traditional neocon narrative because the alternatives were expelled from the Western universities. Marxism and socialism occupy about three paragraphs of Beckert's overstretched book. Yet, the spread of welfare state in Western Europe and North America and, consequently, the expansion of government powers was, to a large extent, the answer to the propagation of the socialist ideas. Welfare state in France had direct origins in Saint Simon and his circle and Bismarck's "White Revolution" was an answer to the growing power of Social Democrats in Germany. Further on, UK elites decided on the welfare state course immediately after the First World War before the Great Depression being afraid that millions of unemployed soldiers would imitate the Russian revolution. Only in the prosperous United States, the Great Depression, to which Beckert describes the birth of the Big Government, was the main driver of massive social programs.
Equally, a de-colonization of Africa, South Asia and the Far East in the aftermath of the Second World War was imposed on the reluctant European powers and Japan by the United States as a policy paradigm for a fledgling Cold War.
This author views modern society as very distant from the capitalism a-la Adam Smith or Karl Marx dependent on one's preferences. In "old" capitalism, the capital appeared from profits on sales of something (cod, nails, so favored by Smith, or even books). In the "new" capitalism, the capital comes from investors: banks and private equity and debt funds, who suck money from pension and insurance funds, i.e. in the final reckoning, from the accumulation of workers' wages. This system has more in common with the Ancien Regimes in Europe where governments worked as giant monetary pumps from the Third Estate, including capitalists, into the first two.
