The Origin of Capitalism Ellen Meiksins Wood

The Origin of Capitalism
Ellen Meiksins Wood


Collapse of communism made many people believe that capitalism was the natural condition of humanity. , negated cyclical recessions and meltdowns.
There is a conflict between the needs of people and requirement of profit.
Capitalism recovers from recurrent crisis at the cost of suffering of hundreds of millions pf people. The conviction that there can be no alternative to capitalism is deeply rooted in the western mind. The belief is that, history from the very beginning has been driven by capitalist laws, and the system is the destination of history.
Capitalism-all goods and services are produced for profit, human labor is a commodity for sale, workers and capitalists are dependent upon the market. Producer are dependent upon it for access to the means of production, unlike the peasants who have retained non-market possession of land. They cannot directly use the power of coercion-military, political and judicial as feudal lord can.
Competition and profit maximization are fundamental to capitalism. Bulk of work is done by property less laborers who create profit for those who purchase their labor. The basic objective pf capitalism is production and expansion of capital.
It did not exist before the early modern period and then too in Western Europe. In proto form it existed in the mercantile period, but came into its own in the 19th CAD.
It has been regarded as the natural realization of an ever present tendency. They have presumed the existence of profit maximizing rationality and to improve labor productivity a continuous progress of tech improvement inherent in nature..
These explanations beg the question that emergence and growth of capitalism is manifestation of human rationality and techno advancement began with the use of tools by homo-sapiens and human socialization. Progress from the earliest times to mercantilist and capitalist society has been inevitable. It only had to be released from the chains of feudalism and mercantilism. Seeds of capitalism were embedded in the most primitive acts of exchange. Techno has continuously advanced. Marxists add bourgeois revolution to break the fetters of feudalism. Capitalist market is only the most advanced form of exchange. Industrialization was the inevitable outcome of human instincts. In the Marxist version, petty commodity production freed of feudalism grows into capitalism. (1)
Central to the argument is that humans will always want to maximize profits and make innovation to increase the productivity of labor.
Capitalism is an opportunity to be taken. Market connotes an opportunity, a place where opportunities exist to sell and buy-implies a choice.
In capitalist ideology market implies freedom guaranteed by supply and demand, chosen freely by people. They compel economic actors to act rationally.
According to socialists it involves commodification of labor and class exploitation.
But the system is market dependent and dictates of the market-competition,, accumulation, profit maximization and increase of labor productivity regulate all aspects of life. Social relations between people are relations between things. “Fetishism of commodities” according to Marx.
It is an imperative rather than a choice or an opportunity.
Capitalism is not a natural progression but rupture with earlier forms. If it was natural, it could not be overthrown. It is incompatible with democracy, social justice and survival of ecology.
Chap 1 Commercialization model:
Capitalism is the natural outcome of human practices and required only removal of obstacles for it to mature..
This appears in classical political economy, enlightenment and in Marxism.
Adam Smith “with truck, barter and exchange”, individuals have been engaged in exchange of goods and services since the beginning of history. Division of labor led to specialization. In time technique of production improved which may have been the reason for division of labor. Capitalism in this view is the highest stage of progress and capitalism emerged when restraints (feudalism) removed, does not prescribe to the view that capitalism arose when market became compulsory.. Capitalism is thus not a qualitative break, but a quantitative increase.
These restraints were removed only in the West since ancient Mediterranean society but with several centuries long feudal hiatus of the Roman empire.
The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne attributed the hiatus to Muslim empire’s expansion which closed off the trade routes between the East and the West and mercantile society replaced by a rentier one. (1).
Commerce revived with growth of cities, the assumption being the association of cities with capitalism. Cities dominated by bourgeoisie emerged and freed themselves once and for all from constraints of feudalism and in due course capitalism arose and matured. In this view mercantile practice of buying cheap and selling dear is the same as capitalist exchange and accumulation of wealth through appropriation of surplus value. Prudence and frugality allows accumulation of sufficient wealth to invest. This is primitive accumulation and once it reaches critical mass brings capitalism (which Marx debunked Vol 1 of Capital), thus the bourgeoisie are the agents of progress. Bourgeois are by definition town dwellers, not noble, worked for a living, but used his mind rather than his body and can refer to professional, intellectual as much as to a merchant. The convergence of bourgeois and capital was implanted in western culture was brought about by British economic development with the French revolution. But many historians who subscribe to the view do acknowledge that capitalism represents a break between the feudal, mercantile and capitalist mode of production. From production for use to production for exchange to that of accumulation.
They believe that feudalism was the real rupture which interrupted the development of mercantile society.
Commercialization model does not acknowledge capitalism’s specific imperatives that compel people to enter the market, reinvest surplus, improve labor productivity, compete, profit enhancement to maximum possible and capital accumulation, adherents of this model saw no need to explanation of social property relations or exploitation.
The paradox is that market is supposed to be an arena of choice and commercial society another name for freedom, but the
concept rules out human freedom.

Refinements:
Max Weber to Ferdinand Brandel (2)
Weber capitalism arose only in specific historical conditions, and emphasized the uniqueness of Western cities and religion, but he always talked about the factors that impeded capitalist development in other places, kinship, forms of domination, their religious traditions, and thought that all Europe followed one historical path.
Demographic model attributes European economic development to cycles of population growth and decline, that transition to capitalism governed by the law of supply and demand (3)-Malthusian blockages. It however challenges the primacy of expanding as determinant of European development.
World systems theory intersects with dependency theory, world economic development by unequal exchange between core and periphery regions and exploitation by imperial power in colonial times and neo-imperial-post colonial form (4). Capitalism emerged in early modern period when vast trading networks covered the globe. Most advanced non-European countries whose tech and commerce exceeded that of Europe were thwarted by the unbalance (India supplied ships to the British to fight Napoleon). West further had small states which encouraged trade based division of labor and did not impeded commerce and accumulation. Eastern Empires drained wealth away and hampered investment. It shares with commercialization model in extent of trade index of capitalist development, simply inverts commercialization model in that advanced society fails to grow into capitalism due to impediments. Another variant is that commercial gravity shifted from Italian city states to Netherlands., Spain and finally to Britain, each stage built on the last and refining it. In accountancy, techno in the English industrial revolution. (5).
Neo-classical economics has not added to it as it is not interested in history.
New social history is interested in long term process of social change. But here too tendency to beg the question. Thomas Mann “teleological bias” industrial capitalism prefigured in medieval European society (7) driving force of European development due to techno and commercial expansion (8) and absence of constraints, decentralized political order of feudalism( with out head) left merchants with a substantial degree of autonomy the help of rationalism and normative order provided by Christianity. Private property was allowed to develop into capitalist property because no community or class organization possessed monopoly powers.
Karl Polayni, “The Great Transformation-1944” individual profit associated with market exchange, never a dominant principle economy till the modern age (9). Must distinguish society with market which have existed through history from Market society. In all earlier societies economic relations submerged in non-economic relations, kinship, communal, religious, feudal. Motives of economic activities were other than just profit. Status, community, solidarity, reciprocity, appropriation, redistribution of surplus by authority. He challenged Adam Smith that propensity to truck, barter and exchange did not regulate the economy till a century after Adam smith assigned dominant role to it. Markets operated under different logic from that of the modern capitalist one.
Pre-capitalist economies were not competitive, they were complementary, even when distorted by unequal power. External trade was simply carrying trade, trader moved goods from market to market and local trade was regulated and exclusive. Competition discouraged as it disorganized trade. Polayni points out that that only internal national market, a very late development was resisted by merchants and autonomous towns , were run on competitive principle. Even internal markets in early modern period were for some time only a collection of separate municipal markets and joined by carrying trade as were overseas markets. Integrated internal market were the result of state intervention largely based on self sufficient peasants. State regulation continued to prevail over competition.
Only a market society has distinct economic motive. Human labor and land are treated as commodities in self regulating system of markets driven by price mechanisms, society itself becomes adjunct of the market. In a market society social relations are embedded in the economy, than the other way round
Polayni; so disruptive was the system of self regulating market to social relations and human psyche that with out protective counter move of state intervention, human society would have been annihilated. 910). This is a departure from the argument that continuities existed between the feudal/commercial/capitalistic development.
The main problem with Polayni’s argument is have to do with explanation of the conditions and historical process under which market society emerged.
The main theme of Polayni’s historical account is that industrial revolution brought about a market society, invention of complex machines made necessary to convert “natural and human substance of society into commodities” (11).Since elaborate machines are expensive, they do not pay for themselves unless huge amounts of goods are produced…all factors involved must be on sale (12). “the industrial revolution was merely the beginning of an extreme and radical revolution that utterly…transformed society by commodifying humanity and nature” (13). The transformation was the effect of technological progress (14), it was the culmination…of earlier improvements in technique…organization and notably the enclosure movement in England.
Polayni…inevitability…of Western European trend of economic progress (15). According to him the state retarded change. (Tudor Stuarts retarded the enclosures) with out which…progress might have been ruinous…industrial revolution itself required state intervention to preserve social fabric (16). The process from commercialization to industrialization to market society may have been a natural development. West European feudalism, in contrast to more advanced East, did not have strong bonds of kinship, clan and tribe…when feudal ties weakened…nothing stood in the way of domination of market forces (17) which helped to destroy feudal institutions.
That does not explain that radical transformation of social relations preceded industrialization. It presupposed the emergence of imperatives of capitalism. Competition, accumulation and profit maximization. Accumulation and enhanced productivity are treated not a product of specific social relations, but a result of techno progress.
Why did capitalism not emerge in other countries? Was it failed transition?
Anti-Euro-centrism:
Commercialization model is based on the premise that Europe deserves the credit for lifting barriers to development of capitalism. Not all Euro-centric writers share the contempt of non-Europeans.(18). The rank includes racists, ecological determinists, non-racist who underestimate the influence of European imperialism (Empires rise like tidal waves and fall like them, Mesopotamia, Africa, Egypt, Greek, Roman, Persian, Asia, Europe, run out of steam, not hungry any more) and Marxists who believe certain historical conditions, not European superiority produced specific consequences like capitalism.
In some euro-centric accounts capitalism has no beginning and involves no transition from one mode of production to another, assumes its latent existence from the dawn of history, only how obstacles were removed explain its development. Europeans displaced parasitic form of feudalism and monarchy with constitutional monarchy and liberal democracy, superstition with rationalism, enlightenment and technology progress and liberated the bourgeoisie. Ant-Europeans deny Europe’s superiority and emphasize more advanced non-European societies through history and the importance of European imperialism in development of capitalism and especially of the British on profit in sugar plantations and slave trade and 1492 a major milestone.. Non-West would have evolved into capitalism, if the western imperialists had not robbed them (why were they able to do so)
Ant-Europeans start from the same premise as Euro-centric do.
Europe diverged from the rest of the world with bourgeoisie revolution and advent of industrial capitalism. Imperialism gave it the critical accumulation of wealth. Non-Europeans were a case of arrested development, did not throw of shackles from over the bourgeoisie.
That evades the issue of transition to capitalism. Marx offered “primitive accumulation” and capital not simply as wealth, but social relations and transformation of social property relations as the “real” primitive accumulation.
Critics of Euro-centric history have no concept of capitalism as a specific form, which compels agents of economy to behave in a specific way. Bourgeois revolution dressed up as Marxism is not very different, from Euro-centric bourgeois accounts which treat bourgeoisie as agents of progress.
Western path of natural development deflates European triumphalism. The very specific effects of capitalist societal property relations have to be understood.

Chap 2 Marx:
Old models of capitalism were a mix of trans-historical determinism and free market voluntarism. The antithesis would acknowledge its imperatives which were, however, rooted in trans-historical natural law, but constituted by human agency and subject to change.
In the debate about the origin of capitalism, there is disagreement both between Marxist and non-Marxist but equally among the Marxists themselves. Some Marxists adhere to commercialization mode with a lot of techno determinism.
Marx offered two narratives(1) , one is very like conventional model with succession of stages of history and division of labor and the leading role assigned to burghers who brought about capitalism by being liberated from feudal chains. Capitalists existed in “interstices” of feudalism (Earlier works The German ideology with Communist Manifesto). Capitalism is not explained but presupposed. This is implicit in the idea of bourgeois revolution.
In Grundrisse and the Capital he applied his critique to the system’s origin to “primitive accumulation”.(Vol 1Capital). Variation on the theme of Adam Smith explains the origin as a result of colonial exploitation and unequal exchange. Capitalism is a quantitative expansion of commerce with no conception of qualitative transition from one social system to another.
Marx insisted that wealth in itself was not capital which was a specific social relation and that there was transition from feudalism to capitalism. Mere accumulation of wealth was not the decisive factor in the origin of capitalism.
Capital is a social relation and not just any kind of wealth. Wealth is transformed into capital by transformation of social property relations.
Marx offered that no amount of so called primitive accumulation (so called is important) from theft, commerce, imperialism or exploitation of labor will constitute capital and nor will it produce capitalism. Transformation of social property relations which generate the capitalist laws on motion and imperatives competition, profit maximization, compulsion to reinvest surplus and relentless need to improve labor productivity and develop forces of production.
The transformation of social property relations took place in the English countryside with expropriation of direct producers. Landlords derived increasing rents from commercial profit of capitalist tenants. Small producers were displaced and made into land laborers. Marx regards this as the real primitive accumulation as it changed social property relations which generated capitalist imperatives. Marx insisted on the historical beginning in very specific historical condition of capitalism, so it was not a natural inexorable process and could have an end.

Transition Debate:
1950 economist Paul Sweezy and economic historian Maurice Dobbs (Studies in the Development of Capitalism-1946) exchanged views. That developed into a debate mainly between Marxist historians in the Journal Science, later published as a book.
Dobbs’ work undermined the foundations of the old model especially capitalism being quantitative expansion of commerce, was the transition to be found in the relations between lords and peasants, was it external to those relations, is what Dobbs and Sweezy argued over?
Dobbs and R.H. Hilton argued that trade did not demolish feudalism. Trade and town were not inimical to it. Feudalism dissolved due to class struggle between peasants and lords and capitalism was brought about. Hilton pointed out that money, trade, towns and the so called commercial revolution were integral to the feudal system..
Dobbs and Hilton suggested that the fall of feudalism and rise of capitalism due to liberation of petty commodity production from feudalism due to the class struggle (3) (transfer of surplus labor lords) led to improved production techniques(Hilton). Peasants resisted and freed themselves.
Sweezy argued that feudalism was tenacious and pressure came from outside. Trade expansion dissolved feudalism and ushered pre-capitalist commodity production which was unstable and gave way to 17-18 CCE capitalism (5). He disagreed with Marxist view that industrial capitalisms rose from the ranks of petty producers. Sweezy proposed that we should understand Marx’s “Really revolutionary way” as process in which the producer in stead of growing from petty producer into a merchant and capitalist “starts out as both a merchant and an employer of wage labor” and capitalist enterprises are launched fully fledged in stead of a gradual process(6) emerging out of the putting out system. Generalization of commodity production could not account for the rise of capitalism, highly developed commodity production in medieval Italy did not (7). It would be more accurate to say (contrary to Dobbs) the decline of European feudalism was due to the inability of the ruling class to maintain control and exploit society’s labor power (8).
Sweezy suggests a fundamental antagonism between long distance trade and the basis principles of feudalism, on the face of it consistent with the commercialization model, While Dobbs attacks it frontally. Dobbs and Hilton insist that town and trade were not by nature necessarily inimical to feudalism., and the prime mover was to be found in change of property relations and class struggle between lords and peasants.
Dobbs move away from commercialization model but one basic assumption remains the same, capitalism emerges when fetters of feudalism are removed.
One point stands out in Dobbs and Hilton that transition to capitalism is a matter of shaking loose, an economic logic already present in simple commodity production.
The commercialization model and related explanations assume the existence of capitalism, or a capitalistic logic in order to explain its emergence. They do not offer a convincing response to Sweezy’s question about failure of commercial centers in Italy and Flanders to transition into capitalism. The question posed by Italy and Flanders is why and in what ways the “failed” transitions did economic actors fail to break away from their attachment to capitalism.(10). The problem is not the ‘really revolutionary way’ gives credit to yeomen, but that they tend to be depicted as more less freely choosing the capitalist road, once released from feudal impediments, while capitalism is regarded as more or less organic growth out of petty commodity production. There is a qualitative, not simply a quantitative, difference between petty commodity production and capitalism, a difference not explained yet.

Perry Anderson on Capitalism and Absolutism
In the 1970s Anderson, editor of New Left Review and an influential Marxist published “Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism-Greco-roman to European feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State-an analysis of European absolutism (the third volume on bourgeois revolution and development of capitalism awaited).
He defines feudalism as a mode of production as ‘an organic unity of economy and polity’ which took the form of parcellized sovereignties’ together with a hierarchal chain of conditional property. State power was fragmented among feudal lords and lordship represented a unity of political and economic power. Lordship was accompanied by ‘a mechanism of surplus extraction’, serfdom in which ‘economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion were fused’(11). Feudal bonds were weakened by commutation of feudal dues into money rents, and with that the cellular unity of political and economic oppression was weakened. The result was a displacement of politico-legal coercion upwards to wards a centralized, militarized summit-the absolutist state.’(12)
Parcellized coercive powers were centralized in a monarchy.
In the interstices of the feudal system, and in the town, an economic sphere emerged which was not controlled by the aristocracy. Towns became the sites of technical innovations, and while ‘the political order remained feudal…society became more and more bourgeois’(13).
The emergence of capitalism is a critical step in his argument, that absolutism was not capitalist or proto-capitalist. It was ‘a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination.’ (14). This upward displacement of the feudal coercive power’s principal contribution to the evolution of capitalism was to fracture the unity of economy and polity. Political power was concentrated in royal state and economy began to achieve a certain autonomy. The commodity economy and the bourgeois society that had grown in the interstices of feudalism were liberated and developed on their own terms.
The absolutist state separated the two moments of exploitation: the process of surplus extraction and the coercive power that sustained it. The feudal fusion of economy and polity started giving way to separation characteristic of capitalism.
There is another way of looking at absolutism, monarchical state itself becomes a form of property., an instrument of appropriation analogous to t feudal lordship, , lord appropriates rent , while the state appropriates peasant surplus as tax.
For Anderson the absolutist state simply represents the politico-legal coercive power that enforces the economic exploitation that takes place at a different level Absolutism seems to have been a necessary transition between feudalism and capitalism.. Capitalism was the result of liberation of economy from the dead hand of feudalism and unleashing of the natural bearers of economic rationality, the burghers or bourgeois, though the process could not be completed till bourgeois seized political power through revolutions.
There are serious problems with this treatment of absolutism, one being that English capitalism did not enjoy absolutism, and French absolutism did not give rise to capitalism.
It might be well to argue that absolutism was not a transitional phase between feudalism and capitalism, but an alternative route out of feudalism .
But Anderson’s position is only a refinement, though illuminating and fascinating, of the commercialization model.
The idea of capitalism in one country is only slightly more plausible than that of socialism. For Marx the moments of biography of capital were distributed from Italian cities, to Flanders to Portuguese and Spanish empires to French ports till combined in England at the end of 17th century. Historically it makes better sense to view the emergence of capital as a value added process, gaining strength as it
The role of cities was always central. Marx was trying to explain the genesis of ‘Industrial capitalist’ not the origin of capitalism. He is trying to explain how the accumulation of wealth was converted in the right conditions –in already capitalist social conditions (in England) from simply the unproductive profits of usury and commerce into industrial capital. Marx situates the primitive accumulation, expropriation of direct producers especially peasants that gave rise to capitalist property relations, in England and in the countryside.

Not the least of England’s specificities, according to Brenner, was that unlike other centers of production which had experience export booms, early modern England was unique in maintaining industrial growth even in the context of declining overseas markets (17), capitalism indeed in one country. English commercial agriculture presupposed the Flemish market for wool, but it quite another thing to say how commercial agriculture became capitalist agriculture., how the possibility of trade became not only the actuality but the necessity of competitive production, how market opportunities became market imperatives.
We can say that the European trading system was a necessary condition of capitalism, but commerce and capitalism are not one and the same thing or that commerce passed into capitalism by a simple process of growth.

Chap 3 Marxist alternative.
The Brenner Debate. Historian Robert Brenner 1976 “Agrarian class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” took aim at 1) Demographic model Economic Development in post-medieval Europe followed long-term cycles in population growth-secular Malthusian and the commercialization model. They were unable to account for the opposite effects same factors produced in different and the divergent effects were enough to question the status of these models. He explained the unprecedented economic growth in early modern England on the basis of varying configurations of social property relations, though he did not ignore demographic cycles and trade expansion.
Though influenced by Dobbs, he concluded that there was no pre-existing capitalism, even in an embryonic form, and that applied not only to pre-capitalist trade, but also to petty production which Dobbs and Hilton regarded as proto-capitalism. He like Sweezy took feudalism as the starting point, and criticized the concept that economic actors will adopt capitalist strategies, if given a chance which applies not only to commercialization model but also to the theory of rising petty commodity production.
Like Dobbs and Hilton he did look for an internal dynamic of feudalism, but unlike them did not presuppose pre=existing capitalist logic.
He did subscribe to class struggle but with him, again unlike Dobbs and Hilton, there was not liberating an impulse towards capitalism. Instead, it was lords and peasants under certain specific conditions peculiar to England setting in train a capitalist dynamic, the unintended consequence of which was that the producers were subjected to market imperatives. Dissolution of feudalism had more one consequence, capitalism in England and absolutism in France.
In England an exceptionally large proportion of land was owned by landlords and worked by tenants on economic leases with rents responsive to market conditions and not fixed by law. Growing number of tenants were subjected to market imperatives, not to grow from petty producers to capitalists, but to specialize for the market to become competitive to access means of subsistence and land itself. The English ruling class, unlike the French one, was distinctive in its dependence on productivity of tenants rather than coercive power to squeeze surplus out of them. English property relations had distinctive ‘rules for reproduction’ direct producers and landlords both depended on the market in an unprecedented way. The rules produced their own laws of motion, which led to a break with Malthusian cycles, self-sustaining development, competitive pressures, need to increase productivity. This new dynamic was agrarian capitalism and was specific to England.
The operative principle in his argument id compulsion and imperative, not opportunity. Petty producer and Yeomen farmer were subject of imperatives of, and not agents of capitalism. Yeomen were capitalist tenants subject competitive pressures, as were owner-occupiers. Both were interested in agricultural improvement, innovative land use, implied enclosure, and increasing exploitation of wage laborers. The capitalist tenant did not start of as petty producer, his specific relation to the means of production made him a capitalist from the very start. He along with his wage laborers were subject to market imperatives from the very outset.
Brenner’s argument was predicated on the original Marx’s proposition that pre-capitalist societies were characterized by ‘extra-economic’ forms of surplus extraction, carried out by means of political, juridical and military power, or ‘politically constituted property’-Brenner’s term. Direct producers, especially peasants, remained in the possession of means of production, but were compelled by the superior force of landlords to give up a part of surplus as rent or tax.. Feudalism united political and economic power. Capitalism separated them, extraction was purely economic through commodity exchange as property less laborers responding to economic coercion sell their labor power for a wage to gain access to means of production. Brenner was explicating the basic difference between the capitalist mode of appropriation which depended upon improving labor productivity because of the imperatives of competition and profit maximization and pre-capitalist mode in which these imperatives did not operate.
Brenner asked how old forms of ‘politically constituted property were replaced in England by a purely economic form, and how did it set in train self sustaining economic development.
Since Brenner other criticisms have emerged. Were English agrarian relations distinctive enough to call them agrarian capitalism? Arguments against it-was English economic growth, especially agriculture, really distinctive in its drive to improve productivity. After all the French agriculture productivity in 18th CCE roughly equivalent to the English one (2). Secondly since capitalism is defined by exploitation of wage labor, it is an argument against agrarian capitalism as England in 17th CCE was not a predominantly wage earning society (3). Don’t the process of expropriation and proletarianization , the prosperous farmers and property laborers belong to pre-history of capitalism.
The claim about agricultural productivity in France misses the point. Though total output in the two countries was the same, it took fewer people in England to produce the same output. That also produced a non-agricultural labor force and a mass market for cheap consumer goods which were essential conditions for the development of industrial capitalism.
Extent of wage labor as distinct from casual labor was limited in early modern England. From a common beginning of middle peasantry with large landholdings in the 15th CCE, France moved to morcellization of peasant holding and agricultural stagnation, England towards the triad of landlord, capitalist tenant and wage laborer and improvement in agriculture.
The development of English capitalism required the development of fairly prosperous middling farmers and yeomen played a leading role in the history of capitalism. Richer peasants have existed in many places and in many times with out becoming capitalists. What was different in England. The difference was the new economic logic which subjected English peasants to imperatives of competition. The effect was to increase pressure on less productive farmers and to drive them off the land. Peasants elsewhere and at other times availed themselves of marker opportunities, while in England they were subjected to market imperatives.
Both landlords and tenants were compelled to move in response to the imperatives of competition, new forms of appropriation established new compulsions which conditioned the differentiation and large part the dispossession of the peasantry. This happened through purely economic pressures of competition and direct coercion of landlords who had new kind of interest in large and concentrated holdings. A mass proletariat was the end, not the beginning of the process. Market dependence of economic actors was a cause not a result of proletarianization. Distinctive dynamics of capitalism come into play when producers become market dependent and therefore subject to imperatives of competition.
Brenner and Bourgeois Revolution.
In 1993, some years after the debate Brenner published Merchants and Revolution, a study of the role of merchants in the English revolution. Many critics argued that Brenner had to acknowledge the role of bourgeois after all. Anderson called it a ‘deep paradox’ (5).
Brenner did issue a challenge to conventional Marxist historiography, that the conception of bourgeois revolution had much in common with commercialization model. He contended that the conception belonged to the early phase of Marx’s work still heavily dependent upon the mechanical materialism of 18th CCE enlightenment and contrasts sharply with his later mature critique of political economy (6). In the earlier theory productive forces develop almost naturally via the division of labor, the traditional concept of bourgeois revolution as the transition to capitalism itself contradictory and self defeating as on its own assumptions it renders revolution unnecessary.
The commercialization model equated bourgeois with capitalist, so Anderson’s criticism is question-begging as the model.
In France the bourgeois revolutionary was not a capitalist or even merchant but a lawyer or officeholder.
Though the commercialization model is flawed, capitalism. did emerge with in a net work of international trade and could not have emerged with out the network. England arguably transformed the nature of trade by creating a distinctively integrated national market, perhaps the first truly competitive market.
We also need to understand the nature of non-capitalist trade. Together the system of trade and the European state system operated as a conduit through which England was able transmit its competitive pressures to other states and economies, so that non-capitalist states could become the engine of capitalist development in response to geopolitical, military as well as commercial pressures. Capitalism imposed its imperatives on other European states and transformed traditional forms of colonialism into new capitalist form of imperialism.
E.P. Thompson:
Brenner’s argument explains the context in which the very nature of trade and markets was transformed and it happened long before industrialization, in fact imposed themselves on direct producers before mass proletarianization and were a decisive factor in creating a mass proletariat.
E.P. Thompson in his work, “the making of the English working class” the establishment of market society comes not only as a process of proletarianization, but also as a confrontation between the market society and alternate practices and values, a confrontation between classes those whose interests were expressed in the market and those who contested it by putting the right of subsistence before the imperative of profit. Two related points stand out in his analysis. The first is the timing of the transformation moment, the ‘making’ of the working class and places it in 1790-1832 and ends well before the industrial transformation of production was complete. The second, he sees the transformation as a fundamental continuity, the workers who seem no different from their artisan predecessors, and whose oppositional culture is embedded in pre-industrial radical traditions are already a new kind of proletariat.
Some Marxists have criticized this as Thompson’s pre-occupation with subjective cultural factors rather than the Tran formative effect of the techno transformation on organization of proletariat and on the nature of labor force. Marxist analysts have a tendency of industrial revolution to techno innovations or to development of trade and market relations.
Thompson as Brenner after him showed that the dynamic of self sustained growth presupposed transformation of in property relations and created a need for improvement in labor productivity. The diversity between England and France had little to do with their respective techno practices. Thompson’s purpose is to explore the consequences of specifically capitalist mode of exploitation, one was the intensification of labor and work discipline. Not the emergence of steam or factory system, but the need in inherent in capitalist property relations to increase labor productivity and profit. They were also imposed on artisans still engaged in pre-industrial production. A common experience of capitalist imperatives made it possible for all kinds of workers to join class organizations and create a new class culture.
In the first instance capital appropriated surplus labor from workers still in traditional forms of production. The capitalist imperatives did not at first the technical process. Capitalism did not reach maturity until capital had transformed the labor process itself, that is until capitalism assumed its industrial form. Thompson was trying to the establishment of capitalism as a social form rather than as a neutral technical process called industrialization. 18th century was the moment in time when the capitalist transformation of property relations was being consolidated. In 18th century England market was the main arena of struggle. People had very little control over the market for their products or over the prices, social protest was therefore directed at the market which violated certain customary expectations about rights of access to the means of life (11). Now the market getting beyond communal control, subordination of all communal values to the imperatives of profit. The new ideology of political economy was increasingly enforced by state repression. Coercion of the state was required to impose the coercion of the market.
We need a history which acknowledges the difference between commercial profit taking and capitalist accumulation, between market as an opportunity and an imperative, historical process of techno development and the capitalist drive to improve labor productivity and trace all the above in the forms of social property and class relations.

Chap 4 Commerce or Capitalism.
The transition from feudalism and capitalism, regarded as a West European process, but feudalism in Europe was internally divisive and produced several outcomes, only one of which was capitalism.
The autonomous city states in medieval and renaissance Italy and the absolutist French state did not produce capitalism. They only entered the orbit of existing capitalism and by that time they all became subject to an increasingly international capitalist system (1). We have to separate capitalist from bourgeois and capitalism from the city.
Towns And Trade.
One well established convention of Western culture is that capitalism was born and bred in the city. Only extraneous obstacles have stood in the way of any urban civilization giving rise to capitalism. Only the wrong religion, the wrong kind of state, ideological/cultural fetters have stood in the way of capitalism springing up anywhere since tech has permitted adequate surplus.
In the West it developed because of the unique autonomy of its cities and their quintessential burgher/bourgeois class. All that was needed was quantitative growth and accumulation of wealth, in some versions, helped along by protestant ethic. There is the tendency to male capitalism look like a natural process, and to disguise its historic social form, generally accompanied by making it appear a more or less automatic consequence of “truck, barter and exchange.
Yet there have been many towns in history where capitalism never developed, e.g. temple cities ancient empires. Many societies with advanced urban centers, highly developed trading systems and vast commercial networks have made ample opportunities of market in Asia, Africa and Americas, but never experienced market imperatives. They often produced a rich infrastructure far in advance of the European backwater which first gave rise to capitalism. Vast
Ly successful commercial and autonomous city states like Florence did not do so, while England with its centralized monarchy with the least autonomy did it.
The critical factor was certain social property relationships which generated capitalist imperatives. The non-capitalist countries had producing classes and peasants who remained in possession of the means of production especially land. They were ruled and exploited by dominant classes and states who combined economic and coercive powers.
The simple logic of trade is exchange of reciprocal requirements. It does not by itself generate the need to maximize profit and even less to produce competitively. There are more complex transactions like buying cheap and selling dear and in the process of conveyance from one market to another and arbitrage between them., but there is no inherent compulsion to transform production. In pre-capitalist societies also middlemen/merchants lived by making profit, but they did not depend upon transformation of production or development of integrated markets that imposed competitive imperatives.
The trading networks of medieval and early modern/Europe depended upon a degree of local/regional specialization which allowed merchants to make profit by carrying the goods to places of their scarcity in a growing network of long distance trade. Profit was separate from efficient production. Fierce commercial rivalry existed, even wars were fought, but they had less to do with competitive production than with extra-economic factors like superior shipping domination over seas, transport routes, monopoly privileges or financial institutions, supported by military power. There was no systemic need to lower costs to lower cost of production, though techno innovations did offer military superiority.
Even in the 17th CCE most of the world including Europe was free of market imperatives. There was great commercial activity, but it was not driven by competition and accumulation.
International trade created great commercial centers that involved commercial arbitrage between separate markets(3), but no single integrated and unified market in which people made profit by producing in a cost effective manner in direct competition with others in the same market. Great commercial power was created by producing luxury goods for the dominant classes. There was no mass market for cheap goods that would drive industrial capitalism in England later. Even in the trade in basic necessities like grain was governed by the same principles of profit in circulation rather than production.
Non-capitalist principles of trade existed in conjunction with non-capitalist mode of exploitation. Even rent appropriating landlords depended upon extra-economic powers to extract wealth. The peasants-proprietors, landlords and office holders did not depend on the market for appropriating what others produced.
Commerce in Basic Necessities.
Since the emergence of agriculture much of world’s population has been working at production of food, there have always been people who have depended upon others to do it for them. The distribution has relied on gift, kinship, state distribution or coercion. But trade in food stuffs has been widespread and has been source of power and wealth. It has ranged from local market exchange to large scale trade at great distances. Its growth into a major feature of society depended upon growth of cities, with a large concentration of population, not engaged in production of own food.
Capitalism was born when market imperatives seized hold of food production.
In the commercialization model, international trade based in medieval and early modern Europe was supposed to be the foundation of capitalist development.
In the middle ages international trade was driven by the wealth of landed aristocracy. Rodney Hilton “whether by lay or ecclesiastical…the principal market for a range of products, mainly luxuries which entered into international trade…”.
The disjunction between commercial power in Europe and the trade in grain illustrates the point that it was not an index of wealth and economic power till Britain broke the pattern. The commercial pattern of pre-capitalist Europe was characterized by a series of disjunctions.
Mercantile wealth depended upon relative inaccessibility of markets and the possibility of making profits through endless arbitrage. There was fundamental separation between consumption and production. Grain was cheap by the economic standards of the consuming powers. Nor did the low price of grain impose competitive pressures on consuming economies. Trading advantages of commercial leaders depended extra-economic factors like monopoly, better shipping, networks, trading posts and military might.
Florence and the Dutch Republic:
In the great European commercial centers the wealth of dominant classes rested on commerce and appropriation of surplus from direct producers which did not take the form of feudal rent. But great wealth, like other pre-capitalist societies, depended upon politically constituted property. Cities of such kind have been described as collective lordships.
Florence in medieval and early modern times, by any measure of commercial sophistication, manufacture and culture, was far ahead of the back water England, yet the latter was on the verge of capitalist development, while the former ‘failed’ to take that route. Florence was a collective lordship, no less than absolutist France.
Though highly successful, their economic development was self limiting. The market did not work to create the relentless capitalist drives.
But renaissance would not have achieved its heights under the pressures of capitalist imperatives.
The case of the Dutch Republic in 16th and 17th CCE is more complex and a case can be made for its being a rival to England in being the first capitalist economy (5). It pioneered some of the most sophisticated commercial and financial practices in banking, stock trading and speculation, and shipping techno and military prowess. The English borrowed many of its agricultural advances. The commercial elite invested in domestic production to an unprecedented degree and ways.
It is more of a favorite as a ‘failed’ transition, as it did not take the leap to industrial capitalism as England did. It was not in its essence a capitalist economy, and was not driven by its economic logic. The Dutch were largely dependent on European market and the luxury market and subject to its limitations, but also the economy was dominated by commercial interests and not by capitalist producers. Perhaps more important was the dominance of the city and the interests of the urban elite. The great wealth and commercial power depended almost entirely on its pre-eminence in international trade. An unusually large urban population was sustained by the dominant role in international trade. They constructed their commercial empire on the strength of non-production sphere. They typically relied, before the dominance of capitalist Britain, on extra-economic superiority like shipping, monopoly on trade routes, posts and settlements and sophisticated financial practices. The Dutch devoted more to military expenditure than on any other activity and were known for military adventures for commercial advantages like the seizure of a Portuguese ship in 1602, or the ‘amboina
Massacre of English merchants in the Moluccas. The Dutch fell back when the European economy declined in 17th CCE. The Dutch ruling class relied on public office as a source of private wealth (6). The English responded to the European crisis by investing in increasing the productivity of labor, the Dutch during and in the aftermath of the 17th CCE crisis disinvested in agriculture (8). They tried to revive monopoly privileges by such measures as re-establishment of the Dutch east India co, and the Company’s monopoly on its navigational charts.
The only solution to the problem of commercial profitability was defeat of French mercantilism for which an alliance with England and a friend on the English throne were necessary, and they therefore supported the claim of William of Orange’s bid for the English throne (10). London was occupied by Dutch troops, the invasion was no more or less than a commercial enterprise.
Once British capitalism assumed its industrial form
the competitive pressure it was able to impose on its rivals created pressures for similar developments among them.
With the compulsions of capitalism came its contradictions.

Chap 5 The Agrarian Origin of Capitalism.
Capitalism was born not in the city but in the countryside, and in a very specific place, very late in human history. It was not a simple expansion of barter and trade but a complete transformation in the most basic human relations.
For millennia people have been engaged in agriculture, and have been divided into classes for nearly as long, into people who worked and those who lived off the labor of others. Direct producers have been peasants with direct access to means of production and land. Their surplus has been expropriated by exploiters using, in Marx’s terminology, extra-economic means, direct coercion, using force, and access to military, judicial and political power.
In France where production was dominated by peasant owners, centralized form of extra-economic exploitation competed with the older seigneurial form by tax/office appropriators by office holders.
The basic difference pre-capitalist and capitalist ones is that only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on complete dispossession of direct producers who, unlike slaves, are legally free and whose surplus labor is appropriated by purely ‘economic’ means. Because they are property-less, their only recourse is sale of their labor in exchange for a wage, their surplus can be expropriated with out direct coercion. This unique relationship is mediated by the market.
Markets have existed through history for sale and purchase, but the market in capitalism has a distinct function. Practically everything in a capitalist society is a commodity for sale. Both capital and labor are totally dependent on the market. Workers sell their labor power as a commodity, capitalists buy labor power and means of production, and realize profit by selling goods and services produced by workers in the market. This market dependence gives the market the role of the sole determinant and regulator of social reproduction. That presupposed its penetration into production of the most basic necessity-food.
This market dependence has specific systemic requirements and compulsions not shared by any other mode of production-competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, constant need to develop productive forces, and constant need to expand, search new markets, impose its imperatives on new territories and spheres of life, on all human beings and the environment.
Question on origin can be formulated thus, given that producers were exploited for millennia before the advent of capitalism, and exchange markets have existed for as long, how the appropriators and laborers came to be so market dependent.?
An answer can be made simpler by identifying the first time and place that the new social dynamic of market dependence is clearly discernible.
In Europe there was one exception of the general rule of availing of the market opportunities with out being subjected to market imperatives, that was England in by the 16th CCE. No other monarchical state was as effectively unified as England (others had dukes and lords who could challenge the king). Even in the 11th CCE, Normans had had established themselves as a fairly cohesive military and political entity. In the 16th CCE it went further towards eliminating fragmentation, the ‘parcellized’ sovereignty inherited from feudalism.. In other countries, monarchies lived in uneasy co-existence with post-feudal military powers whose possessors insisted on their autonomy of extra-economic extraction of surplus from direct producers.
The centralization of England had material foundations in impressive road and water ways network. London disproportionately large in relation to the total population was becoming the hub of a national market.
The material foundation of the emerging national economy was agriculture. The English ruling class, demilitarized before any other aristocracy in Europe, was part of the increasingly centralized state,, in alliance with the monarchy with out parcellization characteristic of feudalism. The state served the aristocracy as an instrument of order and protector of property, it did not have autonomous ‘extra-economic powers’ to the degree continental aristocrats did. What they7u lacked in extra-economic powers was more than compensated for with increasing ‘economic’ power of surplus extraction.
An unusually large proportion of land was worked not by peasant proprietors, but by tenants farmer literally means tenant, suggested by terms like farming out). This was true even before the waves of dispossession in 16th and 17th CCE associated with enclosure. In contrast, in France a larger proportion of land remained in the hands of peasants.
The relatively weak agrarian landlords in England, on the other hand, depended more on their tenant’s success than on coercive powers, and encouraged, and when possible compelled them to cut costs by increasing labor productivity.
Tenants increasingly subject to market imperatives in addition to pressure from landlords. A growing number were subject to rents fixed for market conditions, in fact there was a market in leases. Tenants had to compete for access to land. As time went on, advantage in access to land would go to the more competitive who could pay more rent by increasing productivity. The less productive ones would lose land.
In the competitive market, landlords would lease to the highest bidder, they became increasingly conscious of the difference between fixed and the rent determined by the market.(2). Their surveyors would talk about ‘value above oulde rent’, which would later develop into sophisticated theories of value and capitalist ground rent.
The development of economic rent illustrates the difference between the market as an opportunity and the market as an imperative.
John Merrington in an important article from the transition debate avers that though transformation of feudal surplus labor into monetary rents did not in itself alter the fundamental nature of feudal relations, it did have an important consequence by helping to fix surplus labor to a constant magnitude it ‘stimulated the growth of independent commodity production’.(3).
In France where peasant hold on the land was strong enough to resist pressures from landlords, rents were often fixed at a nominal rate. It was unfixed variable rents responsive to market imperatives that in England stimulated the development of community production and improvement of productivity and self sustaining economic development. It was the imperatives of the market that drove petty commodity producers to accumulate. In the competitive environment, holdings of productive farmers grew and less competitive ones joined the property less classes.
Market forces were no doubt assisted by coercive forces to evict tenants. There can be little doubt that the English peasantry, compared to the European variety, was an endangered species and market imperatives accelerated the polarization of English rural society into larger landowners and property less multitude. The triad of landlord, capitalist tenant and wage laborer was the result.. the process created a highly productive agriculture capable of sustaining a large population not engaged in food production and also a large wage labor class which would constitute a domestic market for cheap consumer goods, a market with no historical precedents. That is what formed English industrial capitalism.
In France feudalism was replaced by absolutism.
There was no impetus to capitalist development, comparable to England’s till England itself succeeded in imposing its competitive pressures on the international economy.
The integrated national market which Polayni described as the first kind of market to operate on competitive basis developed in England quite early, while France had to wait for Napoleonic era to remove internal barriers to trade. A competitive national market was a corollary, not a cause of market society.

The rise of Capitalist Property and the Ethic of Improvement:
By the 16th CCE English agriculture was a highly productive sector in which landlords and tenants both were preoccupied with ‘improvement’-enhancement of productivity for profit.
The word ‘improve’ in its original meaning did not just mean ‘making better’ but to do something for monetary profit, improver, by 17th century meant one who rendered land more profitable especially by enclosing it or reclaiming waste.
In the early modern period, productivity and profit were inextricably connected with the concept of improvement. Improvement was also a major preoccupation of the royal society of which Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle as well as the first earl of Shaftesbury, the Mentor of john Locke, and Locke himself were members.
In the first instance improvement depend much on techno innovations, rather on farming techniques-crop rotation, drainage, alternating tillage and pasture. It also meant enlarged and concentrated holdings.
Peasants had from time immemorial regulated land use in community interest., restricted certain practices and granted certain rights and provide for community’s less fortunate members. There were common lands on which members had grazing rights or the right to collect wood or leavings of the harvest.
Between the 16th CCE and 18th CCE there was growing pressure to extinguish customary rights. Traditional concepts of property had to be to be replaced by new capitalist conceptions of property (6).

Enclosure:
It did not simply a physical fencing of land, but the extinction of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood.
The first major wave of socially disruptive enclosure occurred in the 16th CCE, when landowners sought to drive commoners off lands that could be used as pasture for increasingly lucrative sheep farming. That created a mass of vagabonds, master-less men who roamed the countryside and were a menace to the social order (7). Thomas More, though an encloser himself described the practice as ‘sheep devouring men’. The effect may have been overestimated, bur it was the most vivid description of the birth of capitalism.
Enclosure riots punctuated the 16th and 17th CCE, and emerged as a major grievance in the English civil war. Initially the monarchy resisted the practice, but once the landed class had shaped the state to its requirements, finally consolidated in the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’, state interference ceased and a new kind of enclosure. ‘Parliamentary enclosure’ took place by acts of parliament.

Locke’s theory of Property:
The pressures to transform the nature of property surfaced in court cases, and judges often recognized reasons of improvement as legitimate claims against customary rights (8). John Locke’s second treatise of government (9) written in late 17th CCE is more emblematic of agrarian capitalism than any other work.
He starts of with,’ God hath given the world to men in common’ (11.26), nevertheless ‘private, individual property is a god-given natural right’. So, a natural right of property is established when a man (not a woman) ‘mixes his labor’, which he owns, with something, …by means of labor he removes it from its natural state…Locke’s whole argument on property turns on the notions of ‘improvement’. The earth is there to be made productive and profitable, and that is why private property which emanates from labor trumps common possession. ‘tis labor indeed that puts the difference of value on everything’ (11.40). “Of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, 9/10 are the effects of labor’, then goes further that 99/100…to labor’. He goes on that value is not just use value, but exchange value. His point dripping with colonial contempt is that unimproved land is wasted land, ‘he who removes land from the common and encloses it, in order to improve it, has given something to humanity.
In Locke’s argument there is no direct correspondence between labor and property, because one man can appropriate the labor of another. In calculating the value of an acre of land in America, he does not talk about the Indian’s expenditure of effort and labor, but about his failure to realize a profit. The issue is therefore not the labor but the productivity of property, its exchange value and its commercial profit.
The emphasis on creation of exchange value as the basis of property is a critical move in the theorization of capitalist property. That provided justification of colonial appropriation. It was used for enclosure of ‘unprofitable land at home, as well as territory in colonies that was not being put to commercially profitable use by the indigenous people.
In his much debated passage, Locke wrote, ‘the grass my horse has bit; the turf my servant has cut; and the ore I have digg’d in any place where I have right to them in common with others, become my property…(11.28). The landlord…by means of some one else’s labor is being industrious, no less and perhaps more than the laboring servant. In current days employers of labor, e.g. auto-makers, are being credited with production rather than the workers.
The kind of appropriation that can be called ‘productive’ is distinctively capitalist. It implies that property id used actively , not for conspicuous consumption, but for investment and increasing profit. Wealth is acquired not simply by using coercive force in the manner of 'rentier' aristocrats, not by buying cheap and selling dear like pre-capitalist merchants, but by increasing labor productivity-output per unit of work.
In conflating labor with production of profit, Locke becomes perhaps the first thinker to construct a systemic theory of property. Based on capitalist principles. Only William Perry, often called the founder of political economy suggested a ‘labor theory of value’ in 17th CCE in the context of agrarian capitalism., which he tested as Cromwell’s colonial agent in Ireland.(10).
Locke is critical of landowners who sit back and collect rent as well of merchants who act as middlemen, buying cheap and selling dear. Both in his view are parasitic. His work must not be taken as a defense of working people against the dominant class. He patronizes them and idealizes the great improving landlord.
Locke emphatically pronounced that all men (not women) were equal, still he justified slavery.

Class Struggle and Bourgeois Revolution:
Development of distinctive property forms in English agriculture entailed new forms of class struggle.
In France extra-economic modes of surplus extraction set the tone of class struggle. A bourgeois might oppose the excessive burden of taxation borne by the Third Estate and the exemptions enjoyed by the nobility and the church, at the same time seeking state office (could be bought) as a means of appropriating surplus labor through taxation. This would be a major issue in 1789 revolution, when the aristocratic privilege was challenged by the Third Estate and the bourgeois reacted against the threat to close their access to state office (11). For the producing classes the main issue in ancien regime was the burden of steeply rising taxation.
In England royal taxation never played the same role for the English propertied class as it did for the French. While the English landlords relied on the state to enforce their interests, and would come into conflict with the monarchy if their property or the parliament which functioned as a committee of property holders, were challenged by the latter, and their interest lay not in getting a share of the state as in enhancing their economic powers of appropriation, the right of enclosure figured more prominently in their agenda.
For the commoners of England resistance to enclosure or protection of customary rights was as important as taxation for the French peasant. The English commoner was fighting against landlords who were seeking to raise fines and rents to impose the norms of the market. Capitalism was advanced by the assertion of landlord’s powers against peasant’s claims to customary rights. This is also to cast doubts on the theory that the 17th CCE English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. No conception of bourgeois revolution exists in which the revolution explains the emergence of capitalism. All of them assume the prior existence of fairly well developed capitalist formations which find their own development thwarted by pre-capitalist classes and institutions. The bourgeois revolution then appears to be more the effect than the cause. No development of capitalism has ever occurred with out some kind of historic violent rupture. Revolutions can be bourgeois with out being capitalist, and the other way round.
In England if the revolution advanced the development of capitalism, it did by consolidating the already dominant position of a landed class. The revolution was not a class struggle that gave victory to a capitalist bourgeois against a ruling class thwarting its progress. The class struggle was between the ruling class and subordinate popular forces whose class interest was as much in promoting the progress of capitalist landlords and their bourgeois collaborators as in opposing them.
The yeomen farmers were capitalist tenants and were the backbone of the agrarian triad. It is misleading to treat popular struggles as the major force in advancing the development of capitalism at the expense of the more subversive and democratic struggles that challenged forms conducive to capitalist development. These popular forces lost the battle against capitalist landlords, but left a legacy still alive today in democratic and anti-capitalist movements.(12).
The French revolution fits in with the definition of bourgeois revolution better than the English does. Bourgeois and aristocracy had converged to a great extent in their economic positions and sources of income. The conflict between, nevertheless, did emerge especially over access to state office. The pressures that brought to about had more to do with tensions absolutism and state centralization than with capitalism. The professionals and officeholders at the heart of bourgeois revolution were more interested in civil equality among states, more concerned with non-capitalist ‘extra-economic’ appropriation especially taxation and access to office. Peasants were not certainly not capitalist even in making. The immediate effect of the revolution entrenched rather than removed pre-capitalist forms, consolidating the peasantry but also encouraging the growth of state and state office as a preferred bourgeois career. French bourgeois was revolutionary precisely because, and to the extent that, it was not capitalist.
The English revolution, in contrast, was not a conflict between bourgeois and aristocracy. By enhancing the power of the parliament of the propertied class, and advancing the interest of the larger land owner against the smaller on, and curtailment of customary rights of the subordinate class, it had more and more directly to do with the promotion of capitalism and the capitalist definition of property, than did the revolution in France.

Chap 6 Agrarian Capitalism and Beyond:
In England wealth still derived from agriculture in 16th CCE, both direct producers and appropriators were increasingly dependent on capitalist practices: maximization of exchange value by cost cutting , productivity improving, specialization, accumulation, reinvestment of surplus and innovation. This was very different from Malthusian cycles, and was accompanied by expropriation and creation of a property less mass.
From the vantage point of today’s agriculture, and ‘mad cow and foot and mouth’ disasters of 2001, which exposed the hazards of intensive farming, the terrible grip supermarket chains have on food distribution, and consequences of globalization, it is difficult to link the agriculture industry to day with British one of 16th CCE.
Many analysts think that intensive agriculture emerged after WW II when governments, aided and abetted by European common Agriculture policy.
Britain has long been in a class by itself as the homeland of agrarian capitalism. The continuities between the old and the new agriculture was disguised by the paradoxes of agrarian capitalism. On one side is the process of dispossession and enclosure which made poverty less visible. Poor peasants with their marginal plots and impoverished dwellings (current India) were replaced by more prosperous capitalist tenants and landless laborers. On the other side are country houses and parks and gardens. The territorial aristocrat lived off the rent of capitalist tenants.
The parliamentary enclosures of the 18th CCE testify to the victory of the landed class at the heart of agrarian capitalism, its control over the land and its triumph over the subordinate classes which had challenged them in the 17th CCE revolution.
In the 18th CCE, the notion of ‘improvement’ which combined profit with beauty-consolidate and enclose for increasing productivity and profit, but also beautify the landlord’s estate-even if that meant erasing whole villages to remove an obstruction to master’s view and replace them with gardens and parks. The economic logic being played out today in the destruction of countryside (ecology) was already at work, at least since 16th and 17th CCE.
The pressures for intensified production and profitability have been infinitely aggravated by the growth of super-market chains and globalization and the technical possibilities of technical possibilities of industrialized agriculture. The root of the problem now, as it was then, is the logic of capitalist profit.
William Cobbett, writing in early 19th CCE railed against the plight of English farmers, and warned of their imminent disappearance, we can hear the echoes of his lament today that the current agricultural crisis will be the last straw for the British farmer.

Was Agrarian Capitalism Really Capitalist:
The transformation of social property relations was firmly rooted in the country side, and the transformation of English trade and industry was the result more than the cause of England’s transition to capitalism. Merchants could function perfectly well within the pre-capitalist systems, and prospered in the context of European feudalism. By definition labor wage is central to capitalism. Many English tenants did employ wage labor, the triad identified by Marx-landlords living off the capitalist rent, capitalist tenants living on profit and laborers living on wages-has been regarded as the defining characteristic of agrarian relations in England.
But it must not be forgotten that competitive pressures, and the new ‘laws of motion’ that went with them, depended in the first instance on the existence of market dependent tenant producers rather than on a mass proletariat. Wage laborers, specially the ones who depended entirely on wages, had existed since ancient times, remained very much a minority in 17th CCE England.
These competitive pressures affected not just the tenant employers of wage laborers, but also farmers with their families who were themselves, direct producers. To be market dependant required only the loss of direct non-market access to the means of self-production, and specifically land. Market dependence was a cause, not a result, of mass proletarianization.
English agriculture was distinctively productive, that by the end of the 17th CCE grain and cereal production had gone so high that the country, for the first time became a leading exporter of the commodities, with a relatively small agricultural labor force. In France it took more units of labor to produce the same output.
By the time English population density began to eclipse that of other West European countries, the country’s economic development was already distinctive. A demographic increase may help to explain development of industrial capitalism, but it can explain the emergence of capitalism itself. In fact population explosion was the effect, not the cause.
Between 1500 and 1700 English population growth was distinctive in that the % of its urban population more than doubled, not the level of the Dutch, but the contrast with the French was telling. By 1850 when the urban population of England and Wales was 40.8%, that of France was 14.4% and that of Germany 10.8% (3). Dutch, on the hand depended on its role in international trade to sustain its urban as well as its agricultural producers. France remained a country of peasant proprietors.
Something more distinctive, urban population was not evenly distributed among English towns. Lyons was not dwarfed by Paris, while London was disproportionately large, growing from 60,000 in 1530 to 575,000 in 1700, and becoming the largest city in Europe.
The pattern points to transformation of social property relations in the heartland of agrarian capitalism, the south and south-east, and dispossession of small producers whose destination ad displaced persons would naturally be London whose growth represented the growing unification of the English state as well as of a national market.

Market dependence and a New commercial System.
It is true that English capitalism emerged in the context of a larger trading system, and would not have emerged without that. But the ‘economic’ laws of motion born in the countryside transformed the age-old rules of trade and created an entirely new kind of commercial system.
England even developed its own distinctive banking system. Other major European trading centers had medieval systems: money changing, public banks dealing with state finance, currency regulation and mechanism for financing foreign and long-distance trade. England was relatively weak in the kind of banking and developed a banking system rooted in domestic trade, largely in domestic products, ‘not in commercial arbitrage between separate markets’ but in the metropolitan market centered in London.
The English domestic market expanded outwards into international trade , the developing national economy was also becoming the center of an international commercial system. The characteristic instruments produced by the English domestic system-bills of exchange and specially ‘bills on London’ became bills of international trade.(6).England gained unambiguous ascendancy in international commerce, sometimes called ‘commercial capitalism’ it was based on the foundations of the earlier domestic commercial system and the military power, specially the massive naval power clearly rooted in the wealth by agrarian capitalism.
The commercial system was, the first and for a long time the only, system based on production of means of survival and self-reproduction for a growing mass market.
By the 17th CCE, the English domestic market was unified national market, without the disjunctions, and without the internal trade barriers that affected markets elsewhere. The national market was also distinctive in sheer size and particular composition for basic necessities and cheap commodities like iron cooking pots.
As the early dependence of English tenant farmers accelerated, dispossession also accelerated, and took the form of commodified labor. The even larger proportion of urban to rural population in the Dutch Republic did not have the same effect as there the urban population had swelled not just because of the dispossessed, but also to those who benefited from the commercial wealth. London was disproportionately enlarged by a disposed population.
It would be a mistake to define the specific characteristic of the new economy in Britain by stressing the growing wealth of the middle classes. More distinctive was the growth of numbers compelled to buy the most basic necessities. The growth of such a market pre-supposed the ability to buy. In the historical moment between agrarian and industrial capitalism, the purchasing power of the working class may indeed have been unusually substantial, but compulsion lies at the heart of the new economic dynamic. The consumption needs of relatively poor consumers became the new kind of driving force of a new kind of market. British industry developed on the strength of cheap basic goods like cotton cloth.
The development of a mass of proletariat employed by capital represented the ultimate development of the direct relationship between production and consumption. It also represented a new and systematic disjunction between supply and demand.
In a competitive environment with systemic imperatives to increase labor productivity, the general commodification of wage labor compelled capital, to maximum extract surplus value from workers in the time they controlled the labor power of those juridically free.
As a class dependant entirely on exchanging money wage for the most basic means of subsistence, the proletariat represented a larger market than ever existed before. The market made up in numbers what consumers lacked in wealth. And this created pressures to produce cheaply, and the need to invest in the technical means of improving labor productivity. This was the first market in history which in spite of limitations, impelled rather than inhibited the forces of production.
Until the production of the means of survival and reproduction is market dependent, there is no capitalist mode of production. With the advent of industrial capitalism, market dependence had truly penetrated to the depths of the social order.
The market dependence of English farmers was based on the particular relation between economic tenants and landlords devoid of extra-economic power.
The English situation was distinctive in-producer’s access was dependant on the market, possession of good and ample land did not eliminate or even reduce the dependence on the market, on the contrary dependence on the market, mediated by economic leases, was a condition to access of land. Profit, not direct consumption or exchange became the immediate object of production, and for the first time in history a mode of exploitation that systematically impelled the development of productive forces, came into being.

From Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism:
Without a productive agricultural sector that could sustain a large agricultural work force, the world’s first industrial capitalism would have been unlikely to emerge. There would have been no dispossessed mass obliged to sell labor power for a wage and without them there would have been no mass consumer market for cheap every day goods.
Finally without English capitalism, there would probably not have been any capitalist system of any kind. It was competitive pressures that compelled other countries to promote their economic development in capitalist direction.
The conditions of possibility created by agrarian capitalism were more substantial and far reaching than any purely technological advances required by industrialization. This true in two senses, first technological advances were not responsible for ‘agricultural revolution’ that laid the foundations of industrialization and second, the technological changes that preceded at the time of the first ‘Industrial Revolution’ were, in any case, modest (11).
An integrated market providing cheap necessities of life for a growing mass of consumers and responding to the competitive pressures created a new ‘logic of process’ the outcome of which was industrial capitalism.
Polayni suggested that ‘market’ society was a response to certain technological developments in a commercial society. But we can draw the conclusion from the history of agrarian capitalism that a capitalist dynamic rooted in a new form of social property relations preceded industrialization, both chronologically and causally.
Proletarianization would confer new and more far reaching coercive powers on the market by creating a working class completely market dependant and vulnerable to marker disciplines, with no alternative resources. The market itself would become a major axis of class division between exploiters and exploited, between buyers and sellers of labor power.
The end result was a system of production with mutually reinforcing agrarian and industrial sector, uniquely capable of imposing its competitive imperatives on other parts of the world.
Once capitalism assumed its industrial form, it indeed became a transmission belt for capitalist competitive pressures. Once commodification became a virtually universal form of social reproduction, producers even in the absence of class exploitation were subject to market imperatives.
The capitalist system is in a constant state of development and flux.

Chap 7 The Origin of Capitalist Imperialism:
All the major powers in 16th and 17th CCE were engaged in colonial ventures and imperialist oppression, but were associated with different patterns of economic development, only one of which was capitalist, and that (England) was slow in embarking overseas colonization, or even dominating trade routes.
Pre-capitalist Imperialism:
Left versions of commercialization model suggest that European imperialist ventures in Americas, Africa and Asia were decisive in the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ leading to capitalism. Imperialism permitted ‘proto-capitalists’ to accumulate the critical mass required to make the leap forwards that distinguished the ‘west’ from the other societies that had been more advanced in technical, commercial and was cultural development. Imperialist exploitation drained the resources and halted the development of non-European economies.
Some versions emphasize the importance of wealth amassed from Americas, and others stress the importance of slave trade and slave plantations, still others single out the impact of British empire in India.(1).
But we can not get any where attributing rise of capitalism to imperialistic ‘primitive accumulation’ nor to its decisive role in the origin of capitalism. Not only the British oversea lag behind that of its rivals, but also behind its own domestic capitalist development. Spain which acquired enormous wealth from south American mines did not develop in capitalist direction. It spent its wealth in feudalistic pursuits and the construction of Hapsburg empire.
Marxist historians have forcefully argued that the greatest crime of European empire, slavery made a major contribution to industrial capitalism. (2). But here too, Britain was not alone in exploiting colonial slavery. Other powers amassed great wealth from slavery and trade in sugar and tobacco, which fuelled the trade in human beings (3). But only Britain converted the wealth into industrial capital. The truly enormous wealth accumulated by Portugal and Spain had no such effect, as they were un-ambiguously non-capitalist.
Much, if not everything, depended on the social property relations at home in the imperial power.
We can, however, identify a specifically capitalist form of imperialism, more the result than the cause of capitalist development and very different from other European forms.
As a general rule pre-capitalist exploitation took place by ‘extra-economic’ means, by direct coercion, use of military, political and juridical power. Imperial expansion tended to follow the same logic, using military power to squeeze taxes and tribute out of territories and enslaving human beings, in the interest of non-capitalist commerce.
Some of the typical patterns of European colonialism in early modern period had not to do with settlement of colonies by people from the metropolis but with gaining control of important trade routes, monopolies or cornering the supply of precious commodity. The Spanish empire in Americas was in fact more concerned with amassing bullion than even with commerce. Where there was settlement, it was for the purpose of enhancing trade. This kind of settlement, if at all concerned with production, would be for supply of merchant ships as was the case with the Dutch Cape colony in Africa. French colonization of Canada was for the fur trade. There was no link with capitalist development.
Where production was developed as an adjunct to trade, it tended to be on pre-capitalist modes of extra-economic extraction, as the slave plantations which amounted to enslavement of the indigenous population. Capitalism, of course, did not put an end to these practices, on the contrary it pursued them with greater zeal, specially slavery, only created a new logic of its own which affected even the older forms of exploitation.

Ireland: A New Capitalist Imperialism:
The new dynamic of a growing capitalist system produced a new form of colonization and a new kind of imperial drive with the same capitalist imperatives that were driving the domestic market-competitive production and capital accumulation.
The processes we are concerned with took place from the Tudor colonization, while they consolidated the monarchy in England, they also set out to impose the state’s hegemony in Ireland and went on to Cromwell’s conquest in the mid 17th CCE.
In the 16th CCE unsuccessful attempts were made to establish private military settlements, to subdue the Irish, in effect a feudal lordship to control a dependent population by extra-economic means. In the late 16th CCE, England’s Irish strategy underwent a sudden transition from feudalism to capitalism. The effort to exert extra-economic military conquest was supplemented by economic hegemony. In 1585 the English government announced a plan to recreate the conditions of south east England in Munster and granted expropriated land to settlers who would introduce English agriculture to the region. As an adjunct to military suppression the imperial project was to subdue the Irish by transforming their social property relations and introducing agrarian capitalism and their complete eviction from the land.
The English embarked on forcible expropriation of the Irish and resettlement of their land by Englishmen and Scots. It compelled Irish chieftains to adopt English landlord-tenant relations, even encouraging English and Scot tenants on their land. It was no doubt partly the subject elite emulating and ingratiating themselves with the imperial overlords, but there were economic compulsions at work too. Vast numbers were dispossessed and pushed to the margin.
As soon as Irish commercial expansion became a competitive threat the English imposed restricti9ons that thwarted development in the 17th CCE, in a pattern that repeated itself through the history of imperial capitalism. This exemplifies one of the founding contradictions of capitalism: the need to impose its imperatives as universally as possible, but to limit the damaging consequences that it has for capitalism itself (4). Englishmen with the Irish experience under the belt, followed the techniques in Americas. Scots had learned the lesson in Ireland too and began a long history of serving the British empire.
For the Irish it often meant migrating to the colonies. Some Irish settlers having learned the lesson well, brought indentured servants from Ireland to the West Indies. This was accentuated by massive evictions after Cromwell’s conquest, to the single largest white immigration to the West Indies in 17th CCE.
The social transformation took the form of violent evictions to the point of genocide. Even without direct domination, it was possible to impose a new economic order with its own coercion-the world’s first structural adjustment program.
In India the imperial state faced a densely populated and economically advanced power, with deeply rooted and complex political arrangements. Military force and conquest remained central to the imperial project. Dispossession and extinction of traditional property rights have been a continuing practice., but above all capitalism has developed to its limit the practice of economic compulsion as distinct from direct military and political coercion.
In today’ ‘globalized’ economy old forms of military subjugation and direct rule have largely been replaced by imposition of economic compulsions, the imperatives of the capitalist market manipulated in the interest of a few imperial powers, one in particular. Behind the new global economic order is the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen, and the constant threat of military intervention by the USA, with or without ‘international’ sanction is a necessary bulwark of globalization. The old role of colonial settlers as means of transporting economic compulsions has been taken over by local nation states, which function as transmission belts for capitalist imperatives and enforce the ‘laws’ of the market.
By the 17th CCE increasing labor productivity became the overriding imperative, and making the land productive that is improving it was becoming the basis of property rights and the failure to do so could mean forfeiting the right of property. This principle of improvement as the basis property rights was working its way into law, especially over enclosure. It also appeared into political theory as enunciated by John Locke and he made it clear that by adding value to the land, he meant exchange value and he made special mention of American lands and dispossession of the indigenous people. The measure of labor to improve land was not effort but profitability. Indians failed to establish his right to land by not making profit out of it, so it becomes fair game to the ‘industrious’ and ‘rational’ colonists. (Nazis took the concept to its natural conclusion). Locke thus justified colonial appropriation of unused land with out the consent of the local sovereign.
But Locke went much further. Even if the indigenous people make use of the land themselves, but do not ‘improve’ it to enhance exchange value, the land will remain open to colonial expropriation. Hunting-gathering could not establish the right to property, neither did inefficient and unprofitable agriculture.
Now consider the arguments of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. He had learned colonization techniques in Ireland. Justifying the expropriation of land in New England in 1629, he foreshadowed Locke, “ for the Natives in New England they inclose noe land, neither have they any setled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by”. A lawyer, Sir John Davies, one of the principal figures in English imperialism in Ireland wrote to the Earl of Salisbury in 1610, “…His majesty is bound to use all lawful and just means to reduce his people from barbarism to civility…now civility can not… be planted among them by this mixed plantation of some of the natives and settling of their possessions in the course of common law…they would never, to the end of the world…improve the land…”

From Enclosure to Empire:
The understanding of English agrarian capitalism was refracted through imperial experience. Petty, often called the founder of classical political economy elaborated the theory of value, his seminal contribution to the field to the practical requirements of his position as Cromwell’s Surveyor General in Ireland for the purpose of distributing land among conquerors (5).
There can be little doubt that the English colonial experience in Ireland and the New world, was a major inspiration in the English theories of property and value, the basic tools of understanding their own domestic capitalism.. Thomas More as early as 1516 in his Utopia wrote that the seizure of vacant land can be justified even without the consent of the local sovereign.
There certainly was a growing ‘improvement’ literature in the 17th CCE with roots in 16th CCE re enclosure movement in England.
The imperial legitimacy of the colonial power (converting the heathen to Jesus was the religious ‘humanitarian’ justification) was rooted in rooted in the productivity of its subjects.
The concept of co-opting natives for the benefit of the Imperium was not new. Romans Empire, whose concept of colonia the British revived, was governed by a relatively simple state apparatus at home in alliance local aristocracies through out the empire. But the distinctive character of the British empire was a system with coercions of its own, economic imperatives replacing the extra-economic coercion of military conquest and direct political domination, these are peculiar to capitalism.
Economic principles took on a moral and religious meaning, human beings had taken god’s role as creators of value, their project had become the new religion.

Capitalism and the Nation State.
It is quite common to insist on the connection between capitalism and nation state, or even to define at least its origin as a system of nation states. The connections are seen through ‘modernity’ or ‘rationalization’ theories, according to which certain ‘modern’ or ‘rational’ economic, political and cultural forms have developed more or less in tandem.
Variations on the theme are Perry Anderson’s suggestion discussed in chapter 2, and Immanuel Wallerstein also noted earlier. But capitalism was not simply the natural outcome of certain trans-historical processes like ‘rationalization’, ‘technological progress, urbanization, or the expansion of trade. The reasons for its emergence have been discussed earlier.
The Sovereign Territorial State in Pre-Capitalist Europe:
The unity of economic and political power that characterized pre-capitalist states has existed in a wide variety of forms-ancient empires, collective lordships, absolutist state etc.
The ‘modern’ nation state emerged out of fragmented state power, parcellized sovereignty of feudal Europe and its feudal lordship (1).
The parcellized sovereignty of feudalism represented a network of very local and personal social relations, which were at once political and economic. Just as the feudal trading network was not an integrated global system, feudalism as a social system was an aggregation of personal and local networks with permeable or movable boundaries, expanded or contracted with the lord’s or monarch’s family alliances.
The feudal ruling class was eventually compelled, in the face of peasant rebellion and aristocratic feuds, to consolidate parcellized sovereignty into centralized monarchies and to the modern nation state. But the fluid boundaries of feudalism were never firmly fixed till personal rule was replaced by impersonal state, and could never be fully established until the separation of ‘political’ and ‘economic’, private property and public power which would be completed only in capitalism. Capitalism developed in tandem with the process of state formation. The process of state formation took different forms in different places, and capitalism was only one several outcomes the transition from feudalism.
One path out of feudalism was absolutism. The most notable example was the state in France regarded by many as the prototype of the emerging ‘modern’ nation state. The bureaucracy supposed to be the mark of the French state’s modernity represented a structure of offices used by office holders as a form of private property, a means of appropriating peasant produced surplus in the form of taxation. (In Pakistan they are more direct, in the form of bribes). Property in office even came to be recognized in law as heritable and alienable, like any other private property (the British in Bengal made tax collectors hereditary and they eventually became landowners. In Moghal times the office was not heritable). The absolute state never completely displaced other forms of politically constituted property. It always remained side by side and in tension with more fragmented remnants of parcellized sovereignty. The central state competing for the same peasant produced surplus, typically co-opted many potential competitors by giving them state office. They were inimical to capitalism because they fragmented the economy with their separate local and municipal markets and internal trade barriers.
The State in Capitalist England:
England was, in the first instance, alone in producing capitalism. The social transformations that brought about capitalism, though did not give rise to nation state, but were the same ones which brought the nation state to maturity. In England lordship never carried the same autonomous political power it had elsewhere in Europe and monarchy developed in tandem, rather than in competition with the aristocracy. When the civil war came in the 17th century, it was a battle over control of an already centralized sovereignty, because the king was upsetting the balance between crown and parliament, ‘The crown in parliament’ traditional alliance.
France even at the height of absolutist state had its regional ‘estates’, England had long had a unitary parliament. France had, until the French revolution, 360 local codes, England had nationally unified legal system especially in ‘common’ law
adjudicated by royal courts. The centralization of the state in England took the form of a cooperative project, a kind of division of labor between political and economic power, between monarchy and aristocrats, between a central political power that enjoyed a monopoly of coercive power much earlier than other states in Europe and an economic power based on private property.
The weakness of politically constituted property in England meant both the rise of capitalism and the evolution of a truly sovereign and unified national state. The particular form of English state formation belonged to the same process that brought about capitalism.
A state with an unambiguous sovereign power over a clearly defined territory did not come completely into its own until capitalist property had displaced pre-capitalist modes of appropriation.
Capitalism and International Relations:
England’s peculiarity was not its role in an outwardly expanding commercial system, (many other European and non-European countries had extensive, and the latter had long standing and more advanced systems and networks), but in its inward development, the growth of a unique domestic economy. England’s system was unique in its dependence on intensive as distinct from extensive expansion, on the extraction of surplus value in production rather than profit from circulation, on economic growth based on increasing productivity and competition with in a single market-in other words capitalism.
It was not in the nature of capitalism to remain at home for long. Its need for endless accumulation produced new and distinctive imperatives of expansion. The most obvious was the imperialist drive. The new requirements of capitalism created new imperialist needs and it was British capitalism that produced an imperialism answering to the specific requirements of capitalist accumulation.
The unique productivity engendered by capitalism especially in its industrial form gave Britain new advantages not only in its old commercial rivalries, but also in military conflicts. So in the 18th and especially in 19th CCE Britain’s major European rivals were under pressure to develop their economies in ways that could meet this new challenge. The state itself became a major player, most notable in Germany, with its state led industrialization, motivated by older geo-political and military considerations rather tan by a capitalist drive. Where there was adequate concentration of productive forces as in France and Germany, capitalism could develop in response to external pressures. States could become effective agents of capitalist development. The pre-capitalist state system, together with the old commercial network , became a transmission belt for capitalist imperatives. From then on capitalism spread outwards from Europe both by means of imperialism and increasingly by economic imperatives.
Capitalism has not spread by erasing national boundaries but by reproducing its national organizations, creating an increasing number of national economies and nation states. The inevitably uneven development has virtually guaranteed the persistence of national forms.
Capitalism and the Nation State
While no one would deny the global reach of capital, there is little evidence that today’s ‘global’ capital is less in need of national states than were earlier capitalist interests. Global capital, no less than ‘national’ capital, the relies on nation states to maintain local conditions favorable to accumulation as well as to help it navigate global economy. Globalization is characterized less by the decline of nation state than by growing contradiction of between the global scope of capital and its persistent need for more local and national forms of ‘extra-economic’ support, a growing disparity between its economic reach and its political grasp.
Economic powers of the feudal lord could never extend beyond the reach of his personal ties or alliances and his military force political rule or judicial authority, nor could those of an absolutist state or pre-capitalist empire. The separation of economic imperatives and direct political coercion is both a source of strength and a source of contradiction.
The separation makes possible capitalism’s unique capacity for universalization. By means of specifically market imperatives, capital is uniquely able to escape the limits of direct coercion and move beyond the borders of political authority. This makes possible both its distinctive forms of class domination and its particular forms of imperialism.