Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism

Xavier Lafrance, Charles Post, Xavier Lafrance, Charles Post

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319956565
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319956572
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume builds and expands on the groundbreaking work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origins of capitalism. Whereas Brenner and Wood focused mostly on the emergence of capitalism in the English countryside (agrarian capitalism), this book utilizes their approach to offer original, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically informed accounts of transitions to capitalism – both agrarian and industrial – in a wide range of countries in order to provide within a single volume a diverse collection of relatively brief yet detailed case studies of the historical transition to capitalism distributed across three continents. Offering a new and highly original analysis of the global spread of capitalism, this book will be a unique contribution to the longstanding debate on the transition to capitalism.

© The Author(s) 2019

Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post (eds.)Case Studies in the Origins of CapitalismMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Xavier Lafrance¹ and Charles Post²

(1)

University of Québec in Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

(2)

Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Charles Post

End Abstract

The Great Recession that began in 2007–2008 has brought a renewed interest in the study of capitalism.¹ The immense turmoil and human suffering caused by the deepest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s underlined the urgency of understanding the logic of the capitalist system and its manifold impacts on our lives—its tendency to crisis,² its environmental impact³ or the way it nurtures inequalities. Interest in the last has been clearest in the extraordinary success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century⁴ and the Occupy movement’s pitting of the 1% against the 99%. A decade after the outbreak of the recession, these issues are still firmly on both the political and the academic agendas.

A renewed attention to capitalism as a system has led to the publication of several volumes on the history of capitalism in recent years.⁵ In the United States, the “new history of capitalism” has by now become an established subfield, with its own programs, departments research chairs and book series. A number of important books on the history of US capitalism have also been published.⁶ This historical interest is not surprising, given that how we approach the history of capitalism shapes our ability to comprehend the logic of this system and our capacity to act on it. To grasp the dynamics of capitalism, we must be able to differentiate it from preceding historical societies. This book’s aim is to contribute to our understanding of capitalism by offering historical analyses of its origins in different regions of the world. We stress that capitalism is a distinct type of society and one that is very recent in the history of human civilizations. Because of this insistence on the historical, as opposed to natural, character of capitalism, the studies gathered here differ from most recent and older contributions on this topic.

Almost all past efforts at historicizing capitalism and at explaining its origins have ended up assuming the very things that need to be explained. Most historical explanations of its origins have been circular, suggesting that capitalism emerged out of pre-existing, if embryonic, capitalist dynamics. Most have focused on the quantitative growth of commercial activities progressively liberated from long-standing traditional constraints or a universal human proclivity to develop labor-saving technology (productive forces). This propensity to explain capitalism as an outgrowth of age-old and quasi-universal trading activities—the “commercialization model”—has its roots in the historical narratives developed by the Enlightenment and the classical political economists.⁷ Here, ancient profit-taking commercial practices, typically involving buying cheap in one region and selling dear in another, are equated with capitalism and its restless drive to accumulate. We are left with historical explanations that essentially revolve around the removal of obstacles to timeless processes—an endeavor often attributed to triumphant urban merchants, sometimes involving violent revolutions. Historical lines of demarcation are blurred, with the unique imperatives of capitalism becoming naturalized.

Such teleological assumptions still permeate recent historical accounts. For instance, editors of the recently published two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism claim that one of their main goals is to determine: “Why did capitalism and modern economic growth take so long to get started in the first place?”⁸ Assuming that capitalist accumulation was bound to eventually happen, they claim that: “we look for the beginning of the ‘rise of capitalism’ as far back as archeologists have been able to detect tangible evidence of some human activity that was consistent, if not fully congruent, with the practices of modern capitalism”.⁹ The editors and contributors find evidence of capitalistic economic growth as far back of ancient Greece and Rome and even first millennium BCE Babylonia. In another recent book, Jürgen Kocka offers a “history of capitalism from antiquity to the present”.¹⁰ While seeking “trace elements of a kind of proto-capitalism in small amounts” throughout history, he claims that merchant networks that developed in China, Arabia and parts of Europe are precursors of “modern capitalism”.¹¹ Henry Heller has also lately tackled the issue of the birth of capitalism, from an ostensibly Marxist perspective. While assigning a key role of the “territorial state” in forging markets and directing colonial ventures, Heller maintains that late medieval class struggles between feudal landlords, on the one hand, and urban and rural producers, on the other hand, allowed the more “socially and economically ambitious” upper stratum of the urban population to play a “key role in the development of capitalism from the late fifteenth century”. These “proto-capitalist elements”, the small producers, eventually “formed the shock troops of the early bourgeois revolutions” and engaged in “[t]he development of productive means to enhance the extraction of relative surplus value and the ultimate emergence of the law of value in the competitive market”.¹² In standard tautological fashion, economic behaviors stemming from the application of the law of value—cost-cutting strategies implying the productivity-enhancing development of means of production—are here presented as factors leading to the emergence of this very law. Never mind the fact that the presence of the law of value “distinguished capitalism from feudal systems in Europe and elsewhere”, as Heller himself stresses, apparently unaware of any contradiction.¹³

A notable and stimulating exception among recent contributions is the work of Joyce Appleby, who claims that “there was nothing inexorable, inevitable, or destined about the emergence of capitalism”.¹⁴ Appleby refuses to read capitalism back into historical societies that preceded it or to present it as the logical continuation of trading activities. As she puts it, “capitalism is not a predestined chapter in human history, but rather a startling departure from the norms that had prevailed for four thousand years. Nor did commerce force capitalism into being. There have been many groups of exceptional traders—the Chinese, Arabs, and Jews come to mind—but they were not the pioneers either the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution. We could say that a fully developed commercial system was a necessary, but insufficient, predecessor to capitalism”.¹⁵ Moreover, “capitalism was not a general phenomenon, but one specific to time and place”.¹⁶ While Western European countries were eventually compelled to imitate their neighbor and rival, Appleby insists that only England experienced a capitalist transition at first.¹⁷

On these points, the perspective developed by Appleby is similar to our perspective. Indeed, the case studies gathered here stress the historical character of capitalism; none take for granted its emergence. However, whereas Appleby’s theoretical inspiration is Weber’s work which views capitalism as a “cultural system”,¹⁸ we rely on a historical materialist framework and an understanding of the capitalist system developed by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. The approach advanced by Brenner and by Wood has often been dubbed “political Marxism” (PM). For reasons that become clear in what follows, we prefer to speak of “Capital-centric Marxism”, whose roots are in Marx’s mature critique of political economy.¹⁹

Classical Accounts of the Origins of Capitalism and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Adam Smith offers one of the first systematic attempts at explaining the origins of capitalism and one that still informs—unwittingly or not—much of contemporary research on this issue. Smith developed the classical version of the commercialization model of the origins of capitalism. For him, the same fundamental factors producing economic prosperity in modern society also explain the historical development of human civilizations in general.²⁰ Seeking to better their condition, self-interested individual producers specialize and enter exchange relationships with others. Out of a natural human propensity to “truck, barter and exchange”, a division of labor emerges and sustains economic development. An “invisible hand” thus not only organizes the activities of self-interested individuals in modern economies, but also propels a historical development going through four “modes of subsistence”, from hunting and gathering, to pastoral society, to settled agriculture and, finally, commercial society. This evolution of the division of labor goes hand in hand with an accumulation of capital stock allowed by the parsimony of individual economic actors. Hence, an “accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on th[e] great improvement in the productive powers of labour” that derives from the invention and usage of “a variety of new machines” in commercial societies.²¹

Another classical explanation of the origins of capitalism, and one that offers an infl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Expropriation and the Political Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in England
• 3. “Compelled to Sell All”: Proletarianization, Agrarian Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution
• 4. Peasant Farming in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France and the Transition to Capitalism Under Charles de Gaulle
• 5. The Transition to Industrial Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century France
• 6. The Transition to Capitalism in Catalonia
• 7. The American Road to Capitalism
• 8. Colonialism, Racism, and the Transition to Capitalism in Canada
• 9. The Peasantry and Tenancy-Market Dependence: Rural Capitalism in Meiji-Era Japan
• 10. Rural Property Relations and the Regional Dynamics of Brazilian Capitalism
• 11. The Political Economy of the Transition to Capitalism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Towards a New Interpretation
• 12. Uncertainty, Contingency, and Late Development in Taiwan
• 13. Rethinking the Rules of Reproduction and the Transition to Capitalism: Reading Federici and Brenner Together
• 14. Conclusion
• Back Matter