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The course explores how the making of capitalism (its markets, companies, consumers, and industries) entailed the production of new political regimes, social habits and cultural expressions. Students focus on concrete histories of commodities from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century to study the global history of capitalism from the ground-up. They follow sugar from slave plantations in South America and the Caribbean to stock exchanges in European capitals; cotton, from the Bay of Bengal and the American South to the industrial cities of the North of England; wheat, from Russian steppes and the Great Plains in the United States to the silos of Odessa and Chicago; uranium, from American national laboratories to African mines.