some history of enclosure and slavery

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[was: Re: [PEN-L:5752] Re: Max Weber's Genteel Racism (was Re: weber)}

At 09:44 PM 12/6/00 -0500, you wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > > CB: I think it was use of force and violence externally that made
> > > primitive accumulation on a global scale possible. Would have been
> > > difficult to accumulate globally by only doing things internal to Europe.
> >
> > Enclosure + chattel slavery = primitive accumulation = the origin of
> > capitalism.  The rise & development of the dominance of instrumental
> > reason (the Benthamite part of "Freedom, Equality, Property, & Bentham")
> > are an effect, not the cause, of the capitalist ensemble of social relations.

Doug asks:
> But why enclosure? Why travel abroad and steal people? Why did it occur to
> people to enclose common land for the first time? Why didn't they think of
> it before?

As feudalism's political decentralization (or rather, the decentralized
merger of political and economic power) slowly gave way to a more
(domestically) peaceful system due to various military victories, something
had to change: in many ways the whole institution of serfdom was one of
fearful self-defense and self-sufficiency in the face of bandits and other
feudal lords. (It wasn't only the forceful control of the serfs'
labor-time.) The kings started playing the absolutist game (or rather, some
feudal lords had elevated themselves to being effective kings), trying to
monopolize political and economic power in a centralized way. Of course,
the decentralized feudalists fought back, but often they lost, being pushed
to look for ways to reestablish or defend their power. In addition, such
events as the Great Plague of the 1300s shook the established social
relations up. Ironically, the Plague seemed to have tilted the balance of
rural power in favor of the peasants. Feudal lords tried to intensify the
forced-labor exploitation of the direct producers following traditional
relations of serfdom, but found that they faced resistance. As usual, class
struggle made the results contingent (though they might seem inevitable in
retrospect). In places like France, the direct producers seemed to have
"won," in the sense that they were able to start pursuing a survival
strategy on their small-holdings. In England, the landlords were
increasingly able to convert land into their own property, by enclosing the
common lands, expelling the rural producers or converting them into tenant
farmers or proletarians. Enclosure, as I read it, was part of an effort by
the lords to survive the transition from classic feudalism and to prosper
at others' expense.

The rise of the absolutist kings was also the rise of mercantilism: the
effort to economically unify their realms domestically (getting rid of tax
farmers, toll booths, etc., etc., trying to create a free-trade area which
the king could tax in a standardized "rational" way) also involved efforts
to manipulate foreign trade in the king's favor and to explore the world
outside of the bloody competition with other absolutist kings. When
Ferdinand and Isabella had conquered Iberia from the Moors, they started
spreading internationally, going to the West (since the Portuguese had gone
South and East). The competition of Absolutist kings in a seemingly endless
series of wars encouraged international expansion. Obviously, the
improvement of shipping and navigation technology helped with this, though
much of that improvement arose _due to_ the expansion.

Coming to Africa, they found an already-existing slave trade and
governments that were unable to resist. Worse, some kingdoms were willing
to collaborate, especially in the enslavement of other kingdoms' people.
The Enslavement then took off because the New World needed workers for the
forced-labor plantations, especially after the large number of plagues
killed off so many of the Indians.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine