[PEN-L:11318] Re: Re: Capitalist development

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

I forwarded Ellen Wood some of this exchange and she answered me with
a few introductory sentences and some excerpts from recent writings.

Doug

----

[introductory comment]: "As you'll see in the extracts appended here
from Origin and the summer issue, I don't argue that colonial trade
'wasn't important' but that its contribution to the development of
capitalism can't be explained without explaining the new, internal
dynamic of England's domestic capitalism, the differentia specifica
of English development, which transformed traditional forms of trade
and empire into new, capitalist forms (trade and empire didn't have
the same dynamics or consequences elsewhere in Europe, in the absence
of that internal capitalist dynamic)."

[excerpts]:

from Origin of Capitalism, pp. 100-101:

     »The new dynamics of this growing capitalist system
produced a new form of colonial imperialism.  There had been
other, even larger and more powerful, colonial states.  But
Britain created a new kind of imperial drive: not just the
age-old pre-capitalist hunger for land and plunder (though that,
of course, did not disappear) but an outward expansion of the
same capitalist imperatives that were driving the domestic
market, the imperatives of competitive production and expanding
consumption.«
     »As early as the seventeenth century, or perhaps even the
sixteenth, the distinctive attitudes and behavior of English
imperialists were visible in England's first major colony,
Ireland.  Forward looking public servants, like the political
economist William Petty, saw Ireland as a testing ground for
agrarian capitalism, a laboratory in which to test the effects of
transforming property relations, whatever the consequences for
the multitudes of dispossessed.«
     »British imperialism also, of course, contributed to the
development of the world's first industrial capitalism.  But
while industrialization did feed on the resources of empire, it
is important to keep in mind that the logic of imperialism did
not by itself bring about industrial capitalism and that imperial
power in other European states did not produce the same effects.
For one thing, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the
domestic market was still more important in the British economy
than was international trade.  In this as in many other ways
agrarian capitalism was the root of British economic development.«
     »Marxist historians have persuasively demonstrated, against
many arguments to the contrary, that the greatest crime of
European empire, slavery, made a major contribution to the
development of industrial capitalism.6  But here too, we have
to keep in mind that Britain was not alone in exploiting colonial
slavery and that elsewhere it had different effects.  Other major
European powers --France, Spain, Portugal-- amassed great wealth
from slavery and from the trade in addictive goods like tobacco
which, it has been argued, fueled the trade in living human
beings.7  But, again, only in Britain was that wealth converted
into industrial capital --and here again the difference lies in
the new capitalist dynamic which had already transformed the
logic of the British economy, setting in train the imperatives of
competitive production, capital accumulation, and self-sustaining
growth.«
     »Trade and empire, then, were certainly essential factors
in the development of industrial capitalism, but they cannot be
treated as primary causes, or, to put it another way, their
specific effects varied greatly according to their context.  We
have to look to the English domestic market, and to the agrarian
capitalism in which it grew, to find the differentia specifica
that harnessed commerce and empire to capitalist industry.«

And here's the extract from the summer issue [of Monthly Review], pp. 6-7:

     »For those who regard capitalism as the consequence of
commercial expansion when it reached a critical mass, there is
something paradoxical about the development of English
capitalism.  England was certainly part of a vast trading
network.  But other European nation states in the early modern
period were also deeply involved in the system of international
trade, and non-European civilizations in Asia and the Islamic
world also had highly developed and extensive trading networks.
What distinguished England --and what was specifically capitalist
about it-- was not, in the first instance, predominance as a
trading nation or any peculiarity in its way of conducting
foreign trade.  England's peculiarity was not its role in an
outwardly expanding commercial system but, on the contrary, its
inward development, the growth of a unique domestic economy.«
     »What marked off England's commercial system from others
was a single large and integrated national market, increasingly
uniting the country into one economic unit (which eventually
embraced the British Isles as a whole), with a specialized
division of labor among interdependent regions and a growing, and
mutually reinforcing, interaction between agricultural and
industrial sectors.  This market was also distinctive in the
extent to which it traded not just in luxury goods but in cheap
everyday goods --the means of survival and self-reproduction--
for a mass market.«
     »So while England competed with others in an expanding
system of international trade, a new kind of commercial system
was emerging at home --which would soon give it an advantage on
the international plane too.  Unlike traditional commercial
systems, this one did not just depend on profits derived from the
carrying trade or an "infinite succession of arbitrage operations
between separate, distinct, and discrete markets."5  This
system was unique in its dependence on intensive as distinct from
extensive expansion, on the extraction of surplus value created
in production as distinct from profit in the sphere of
circulation, on economic growth based on increasing productivity
and competition within a single market --in other words, on
capitalism.«
     »So capitalism, while it certainly developed within --and
could not have developed without-- an international system of
trade, was a domestic product.  But it was not in the nature of
capitalism to remain at home for long.  Its need for endless
accumulation, on which its very survival depended, produced new
and distinctive imperatives of expansion.  These imperatives
operated at various levels.  The most obvious was, of course, the
imperialist drive.  There was, to be sure, nothing new about
colonialism, and Britain's major European rivals were just as
much involved in the subjugation of colonial territories, in the
oppression of colonial peoples, and in the slave trade.  But here
again, capitalism had a transformative effect.  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, its
particular need for resources, labor, and markets.«