Capitalism and Modernity

The Great Debate

Jack Goody

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745631912
  9780745631905
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745637990
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This important new book investigates how the West attained its current position of economic and social advantage. In an incisive historical analysis, Jack Goody examines when and why Europe (and Anglo-America) started to outstrip all other continents in socio-economic growth. Drawing on non-Western examples of economic and technical progress, Goody challenges assumptions about long-term European supremacy of a 'cultural' kind, as was a feature of many theories current in social science. He argues that the divergence came with the Industrial Revolution and that the earlier bourgeois revolution of the sixteenth century was but one among many Eurasia-wide expressions of developing mercantile and manufacturing activity. This original book casts new light on the history of capitalism, industrialization and modernity, and will be essential reading for all those interested in the great debate about the economic rise of the West.

1

Culture and the Economy in Early Europe

As I have noted, discussions of the contribution of early Europe to the growth of capitalism, industrialization and modernization centre upon variables that we may vaguely call the cultural and the technical. Some authors of course argue that the advantages of Europe were derived from geographical factors. Many concentrate on long-standing cultural differences that go back to the classical period, to the Christian religion, or to the Germanic inheritance. To other cultural factors I will return, but first I want to discuss the work of two authors concerned with the medieval period who have concentrated upon technological achievements, of which there were many. The historian Lynn White was convinced that the roots of the modern world lay in the technical inventions of the European Middle Ages: ‘both modern science and modern technology are distinctively Occidental.’¹ And those achievements can be traced back to the late thirteenth century, when ‘Europe had seized global scientific leadership.’² ‘World dominance ‘began in the Middle Ages and took shape particularly in agriculture with the development of the heavy plough, the introduction of the horse collar (and the stirrup for warfare), and the three field system.’ These inventions, the result White claims of a uniquely European inventiveness, produced in the West, and in the West only, an agricultural as well as a concomitant political revolution that led to feudalism.

In commenting on Eurocentric approaches, the geographer Blaut criticizes White for his technological determinism, which he regards as failing to analyse the causes of the technology. That objection seems to me only partly valid; one can certainly regard technological achievements as a proximate cause of events. To reject that on Blaut’s grounds stands in danger of becoming involved in an infinite regress to supposed ultimate causes.

White’s proposals should rather be criticized, as Blaut also does, for their exclusively European focus, even where evidence for the origin of an invention is dubious (as with the horse collar and the stirrup). Inventiveness was certainly no exclusive prerogative of the Europeans, nor did the Judaeo-Christian tradition (characteristically excluding Islam, which has the same roots) have the liberating effects he supposes – as providing the faith in perpetual progress or in the separation of man and nature, with the latter being inert without spirit. His orientation is virtually exclusively European, and he sees ‘modernization’ as embedded in the unique European past and in that alone.

One persistent element in the analysis of the rise of capitalism in Europe has been the thesis that its development originated in the crisis in feudalism. And this crisis produced a form of capitalism in the agricultural revolution before it did in commerce or manufacture. However, the term agricultural revolution, like agrarian capitalism, has been subject to much debate. Croot and Parker see ‘the real agricultural revolution’ as ‘a long-continuing process of good husbandry, hard to detect where farmers left no records’.³ Cooper queries the whole notion of agricultural capitalism.⁴ Agricultural revolutions are by no means uniquely Western; the introduction of rice produced dramatic changes in the south of China, and of India, and of South-East Asia; it was the same with the advent of tropical crops and agricultural irrigation to Muslim Spain. The introduction of paddy fields and of terraced farming required an enormous input of capital; so too in Europe. The whole notion of a crisis in feudalism as a result of agricultural changes leading to capitalism has been recently expounded by Brenner⁵ and by Bois.⁶ The idea of putting ‘the seeds of capitalism’ so early (and yet from another point of view so late) was bound up with Marx’s Hegelian notion that one mode of production (capitalism in this case) emerged out of the contradictions of another (here feudalism). He did of course see mercantile capitalism as preceding the industrial variety, but it was mainly the contradictions in the base of feudalism, which was dominated by seigneurial production, that resulted in capitalism. That idea is elaborated in the work of Brenner, Bois and others. A different trend in medieval studies saw the ‘contradictions’ as arising out of the growth of towns,⁷ of artisanal activity, of commerce and of trade, with a number of later commentators, especially Wallerstein, Frank and Blaut, emphasizing overseas trade and expansion (‘the expansion of Europe’), with its consequent booty production. Following others (including Weber and Marx) Hilton sees ‘the independent urban commune’ as ‘an important component of the special features of European, as distinct from other feudalisms’.⁸ The distinctiveness of early European towns has been a dominant theme in the discussion of medievalists and others. The ‘commune’ township was far from widespread in Europe, but it has served as a model for the European in contrast to the Asian town. Its rule of law and its ‘liberties’ are thought to mark it off as a centre for the development of the market. It was Braudel who commented: ‘capitalism and towns were basically the same thing in the West.’⁹ That seems to imply either a very broad use of the term ‘capitalism’ or a very narrow one of towns. In fact the European town was in no way unique as regards the development of the market. Recent accounts of Chinese and other Asian towns show that they provided more than adequate environments for the growth of commercial exchange.

A somewhat wider approach has been taken by another economic historian, Joel Mokyr,¹⁰ in his book on The Lever of Riches, subtitled Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. It begins by referring to ‘the appalling poverty’ in most of Africa and Asia. The West’s opulence is the result of ‘Western technological superiority’. That is not a new phenomenon but has ‘deep historical roots’, going back ‘centuries, even millennia’. Technology was the lever of its riches, and depended, like science and art, on ‘human creativity, that rare and mysterious phenomenon’.¹¹

Mokyr begins his story with classical antiquity, but sees European society as showing ‘the first signs of what eventually became a torrent of technological creativity’¹² around 700 CE. At that time Western technology drew from ‘three sources: classical antiquity, Islamic and Asian societies, and its original creativity’. Since he is studying Western technology as the lever of riches, it is perhaps inevitable that it is the West that is credited with the ‘technological creativity’ that drives economic progress and makes some rich and some poor. But what about the other traditions that at least contributed to this superiority in the shape of printing, gunpowder and the compass, to take the Baconian trilogy, and to neglect many other features, including advanced agriculture and the artisanal activity of the Bronze Age, did not these too require creativity?

Nor does Mokyr recognize the possibly temporary nature of this advantage, which other societies have experienced at other times. He sees Islam as being marked by technological creativity in the early Middle Ages but as running ‘out of steam’ around 1200, by which time the economies of Western Europe had absorbed most of what the Orient had to offer and begun to ‘pull ahead’.¹³ China too had its day before 1400. But a string of brilliant inventions between 1200 and 1500 ‘prepared the way for Europe’s eventual technological leadership’. He goes on to claim that the ‘unique character of European technological change was determined both by the ingenuity displayed in making production more efficient, and in the speed with which some of those innovations were diffused throughout Western Europe.’ However, he also declared that, ‘in mechanical engineering, from water mills to clocks, the Moslems were for centuries far ahead of the West.’¹⁴ Why was this advance not due to a unique ingenuity too, and was the speed of diffusion through the vast Islamic world, from Cordoba to Lahore, not a feature of that society? The West may have moved ahead at this later time. But are the reasons he adduces really relevant?

The inventions through which Mokyr sees Europe as ‘pulling ahead’ included the windmill (though this was probably imported from Islam). Wind power was also developed in connection with ships, where the traditional lateen sail of the Mediterranean was complemented by the addition of a foremast and mizzen mast; the three-mast rigging known as a carrack gave speed as well as manoeuvrability against the wind. Such manoeuvrability was needed for Atlantic travel and for the voyages of exploration around Africa. It was helped by the introduction of the rudder, possibly from China. At the same time ships became lighter by means of the ‘carvel’ technique, where boards were placed edge to edge, with caulking in between. Navigational aids also improved, not only charts but the compass, known in China, then in Islam, and first mentioned in Christian Europe by Alexander Neckham about 1180. It took until about 1300 for this instrument to develop into a recognizable compass, perhaps later until it was widely used. Much of this improvement came from the adaptation of classical, Hellenistic and Islamic instruments – the use of latitude and longitude was derived from Ptolemy’s Geography (translated 1409), the Hellenistic astrolabe was adapted for use on ships around 1450, the simplified version of the quadrant invented by Muslims (who of course led the great Chinese expeditions to Africa) was employed in navigation.

The third area of progress was in metallurgical engineering, with improved furnaces, especially blast furnaces at the end of the fifteenth century, that permitted the casting of iron, which had been long since known to the Chinese. Cast metal type was used in the new printing press, another ‘invention’ that had long been present in China.

So a number of these products of a supposedly uniquely European technical creativity originated in or were stimulated by the East. While there were certainly some differences in national or continental traditions, many of these inventions took place in a wider context of international creativity. Take, for example, the important advances in the measurement of time. Both in Europe and among the Arabs, complex water clocks (clepsydra) had been created, but the invention of the verge and foliot mechanism (‘clockwork’) meant that the force of a falling object could be transmitted to a clock; the weight-driven mechanical clock appeared at the end of the thirteenth century and was then produced and adapted throughout Europe. That development has been said to have brought in new standards of accuracy in people’s behaviour and in the manufacture of machinery. In that particular form it was a Western invention, but it was part of a long and much wider search for more accurate ways of measuring time, which made progress in the Muslim world in astronomical observations and calculations as well as in the methods for the regular distribution of irrigated water.

A similar history occurred with spinning and weaving. The Chinese invented complex looms for the weaving of silk which were taken over by Islam; later developments took place in Italy, leading eventually in Britain to the series of inventions in the mechanical weaving of cotton and wool which resulted in the Industrial Revolution. The case of gunpowder and guns is an even more striking example of transcontinental developments.

This progress, it has been claimed, was in technology without science. It has been remarked that, in science, Europe in 1500 knew less than Archimedes, but the continent made some progress in technology. By 1500, Mokyr maintains,¹⁵ Europe had achieved technological parity with Islam and the Orient. That technology was essentially practical, as indeed was the case with China, of which Needham wrote that ‘the world owes far more to the relatively silent craftsmen of ancient and medieval China than to the Alexandrian mechanics.’¹⁶

However, between 1500 and 1750 Mokyr suggests Europe was marked by ‘the absence of discontinuous breakthroughs’.¹⁷ Ideas flowed but practical applications did not always follow. The most important technological change was ‘the new husbandry’ (another ‘agricultural revolution’?), modifying practice in many parts of Europe, beginning in the Low Countries and introducing new crops, the stall feeding of cattle and the elimination of fallow. The modern seed-drill appeared around 1700, new iron ploughs at roughly the same time. Wind and water power improved, but by the mid-seventeenth century coal became a major source of energy, although Holland continued to use peat; coal was imported. These developments were the precursors of the Industrial Revolution itself, undoubtedly a European phenomenon, but it seems doubtful, given the cosmopolitan background, whether it is correct to envisage any unique European technological creativity.

The alternative idea that technical progress was due more to a ‘technological dialogue’ or an ‘inventive exchange’ throughout Eurasia has been developed by Pacey;¹⁸ techniques were not only transferred but invention was stimulated. His major example is the exchange of developments in hydraulic engineering and machines between China, Iran and the Islamic world. He suggests that significant differences between Europe and Asian technology arose from ‘the greater stress on mechanical invention in the West as compared with the emphasis on large-scale hydraulic works in much of Asia’.¹⁹ These were more vulnerable to damage from outside. The advance of the nomadic Mongols and Turks from the north was clearly a threat to hydraulic agriculture, both in China and in Baghdad, leading to greater discontinuities. From Baghdad many Islamic scholars fled to Delhi, where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the Notion of Capitalism and the Rewriting of World History
• 1 Culture and the Economy in Early Europe
• 2 The Sixteenth Century
• 3 The Other Side of the Coin
• 4 Malthus and the East
• 5 The Challenge of China
• 6 The Growth and Interchange of Merchant Cultures
• References and Bibliography
• Index