Church and Ethical Responsibility in the Midst of World Economy

Greed, Dominion, and Justice

Chung

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896425
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Magisterial in scope and scrupulous in its investigation and attribution of sources, Church and Ethical Responsibility in the Midst of World Economy will take its place as an important document that contributes much in terms of prophetic praxis--it challenges those who are comfortably complacent and unwilling to be disturbed.

1

Colonialism and the Historical Development of Capitalism

The first stage of the journey toward capitalism was marked by the conquest and pillage of America (sixteenth century), while the second stage was marked by the rise and affirmation of the bourgeoisies (seventeenth and eighteenth century). These elements of capitalism fused into a powerful mix, propelling European states toward the territorial conquest of the world. Based on this unique fusion of state and capital, capitalism became identified with the state, thus triumphing.1

What Western history calls “the great discoveries” initiated the first stage described above. In 1486, Bartholomew Diaz “discovered” and traveled around the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1492, Christopher Columbus “discovered” America. In 1498, Vasco da Gama arrived in India after a nine-month voyage around Africa. Thus began a great hunt after wealth in the form of trade and pillage, with which the church’s missionary efforts became entangled. Following the return of Columbus with reports of the New World, the Council of Castile (established under Queen Isabella in 1480) met. Adam Smith characterized the action of Castile as follows: “The pious purpose of converting inhabitants to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project. But the hope of finding treasures of gold there, was the sole motive which promoted them to undertake it . . . It was the sacred thirst of gold . . .”2

Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, confessed: “We Spanish suffer from a sickness of the heart for which gold is the only cure.”3 In 1519, the pillage of the treasure of the Aztecs in Mexico began; and subsequently, in 1534, the pillage of the Incas in Peru. According to Columbus, “one who has gold does as he wills in the world, and it even sends souls to Paradise.”4 A staunch Catholic, Columbus’s stated mission was conversion of the pagans to Catholicism. However, the pagans were killed or enslaved. Hans Konig’s Columbus: His Enterprise, writes:

We are now in February 1495 . . . Of the five hundred slaves, three hundred arrived alive in Spain, where they were put up for sale in Seville by Don Juan de Fonseca, the archdeacon of the town. “As naked as the day they were born,” the report of this excellent churchman says, “but with no more embarrassment than animals . . .” The slave trade immediately turned out to be “unprofitable, for the slaves mostly died.” Columbus decided to concentrate on gold, although he writes, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”5

Mission and Economic System

Genoese capitalism prepared the way for future participation in the trade between Seville and Castile’s colonial empire. The establishment of the Casa di San Giorgio in 1407 played an important role in the organization of the Genoese capitalist class in light of the political impasse between the power of money and the power of the sword. The Genoese predominance in trade underlined the course of sixteenth-century Spanish development. The Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, the most famous of the precursors and inspirers of the great discoveries, was obsessed with the idea of the Crusade. Queen Isabella of Castile was the most successful of the entrepreneurs of the discoveries and was the leader of a new crusade for expanding the territorial domain of Christian and Castilian power. The expulsion of the Jews took place during her reign. In the violent baptism of the Moors of Granada, the powers entrusted to the new Inquisition represented a reaction against the Muslim pressure. They intensified religious fervor and intolerance in Spain. The trans-oceanic expansion of Iberian commerce in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was promoted by entrepreneurial agency that was held by an organic relationship of political exchange. It entailed an Iberian aristocratic component. In the fifteenth century, material expansion of the first Genoese systematic cycle of accumulation came along with Iberian rulers.6

Genoese capitalists sponsored an expedition across the Sahara in 1447 and two voyages along the West African coast in the 1450s in search of African gold. By 1519 the power of Genoese capital played a critical role in the election of Charles V, the king of Spain (1525), as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The German electoral princes would never have chosen Charles V if the Augsburg house of Fugger had not financially helped him. Genoese merchant bankers were in tandem with the Fuggers and the Weslers in Germany.7 The Weslers took possession of Chile while the Fuggers did the same thing in Venezuela.

Las Casas reported about the German merchants: “They raged much more cruelly [at the Indians] under them than all the barbarians I have already mentioned [i.e., the Spaniards]; more bestially and furiously than the bloodiest tigers and the angriest wolves and lions. In their avarice and greed they were much more frantic and deluded than all those who came before, they devised even more abominable ways of extracting gold and silver, they set aside all fear of God and the king and all shame before men . . .”8

The Genoese merchants were capable of converting the intermittent flow of silver from America to Seville into a steady stream, making themselves indispensable to the king of Spain.9 Beside Spain and Portugal, it is pivotal to bear in mind that the capital-owning families of Upper Italy and Upper Germany played a major role in the universal expansion of capital accumulation in the first phase of the capitalist world system.

From the seventeenth century on, slaves became the main trading commodity between Europe and Africa. Europe’s conquest and colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean islands from the fifteenth century onward created an insatiable demand for African laborers, who were deemed more fit than indigenous people to work in the tropical conditions of the New World. The other European colonies soon adopted the system of sugar plantations successfully used by the Portuguese in Brazil, which depended on slave labor. Sugar cultivation began on the Mediterranean islands, then later moved to the Atlantic islands. Then it crossed the Atlantic over to Brazil and the West Indies. Slavery followed the route of the sugar.10

In 1496, when not one ounce of the gold was left, the Spaniards cut out estates for themselves in which the Amerindians were still living. The Indians became their property. The Spaniards used a system known as encomienda instead of slave plantations. The encomienda differed from slave plantation in that the encomienda in Hispanic America was a direct creation of the Spanish Crown and its ideological justification was Christianization. The Spanish king assigned land and Indians (repartimientos) to the conquerors and entrusted them with evangelization (encomienda).

Although the stated goal was evangelization, the chief functions of encomienda were to supply a labor force for the mines and cattle ranches, to raise silk, and to sup...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Church and Economic Justice
• Chapter 1: Colonialism and the Historical Development of Capitalism
• Chapter 2: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• Chapter 3: Political Right and Economic Freedom
• Chapter 4: Industrial Capitalism and the Self-Regulating Market
• Chapter 5: Sociocritical Dialectics in the Shift from Alienation to Emancipation
• Chapter 6: The Dynamism and Limitations of the Capitalist System
• Chapter 7: The Reality of Late Capitalism and Its Challenge
• Chapter 8: Capitalism and World-Systems Analysis
• Chapter 9: Economic Globalization, Neo-Liberalism, and Empire
• Chapter 10: Alternatives to Global Capitalism in Ecumenical Context
• Excrusus: East Asian Religions and Social Justice
• Epilogue: A Theology of God’s Life and Emancipation from Greed and Dominion
• Bibliography