John Cassidy is a staff writer at the New Yorker. The twenty-eight chapters of his new book, Capitalism and Its Critics, have much in common with the articles published in that magazine. Each one is a substantial essay on an economist, activist or policymaker and their work. The astonishingly large cast includes some familiar figures, such as Marx and Keynes, and some who are less well known (to most of us), such as Flora Tristan and J C Kumarappa. It is, inevitably, somewhat short on women, but Anna Wheeler, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Robinson and Silvia Federici receive their due. 

Cassidy begins with an early critic of the East India Company (EIC), the anglicised Dutchman William Bolts. Bolts was born in Amsterdam in 1735 and came to England at the age of fourteen. He joined the EIC in 1759 and went out to Bengal. The EIC was, as he discovered, a byword for rapacity, loading Indian natives with taxes, buying their raw materials at starvation prices and selling them the necessities of life at artificially inflated ones. Although Bolts himself profited from the system, he left the EIC, returned to Britain and waged a campaign against it. It was unavailing. He died impoverished and obscure. Edmund Burke’s better-known attempt to impeach Warren Hastings a few years later was no more successful. Only the EIC’s bankruptcy and the need for government help brought about reform before its abolition in 1874. 

Tristan is better known than Bolts, but largely to feminist scholars. She was born in Paris in 1803 to an upper-class Peruvian father and a middle-class French mother. Her father died when she was four, leaving no will and no French marriage certificate. She and her mother were plunged