Re: "The exchange of commodities begins...

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I want to illustrate why it may be a conceptual and polemical trap to
counterpose the development of capitalism "in the English countryside" to
the development of capitalism "within the global economy" - to paraphrase.

My earlier post under this thread title shows Marx arguing that from the
very beginning the development of commodity exchange started in exchange
*between* different communities (however fast the dynamic might then take
off within one or other community).


The following extract from "A People's History of England" (A L Morton,
1938) comes immediately after the one I quoted earlier about the importance
of state enforced peace for the development of the mass production of wool
in England in the Middle Ages. This next passage argues how these
revolutionary pre-capitalist developments were, very much from the
beginning, linked with international trade and merchant capital.



"As early as the Twelfth Century the Cistercian monks had established huge
sheep farms on the dry eastern slopes of the Pennines. The Cistercians were
not only large scale farmers, but financiers as well, and through their
hands and those of the Lombard and Florentine merchants who acted as their
agents was passed much of the revenue which the Popes drew from England, a
revenue stated in Parliament in the reign of Edward III to be five times
that of the Crown. Much of this revenue was collected in the form of wool
rather than of currency.

Besides Yokshire, the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, Hereford and the uplands of
Lincolnshire were important wool growing areas by the Thirteenth Century if
not earlier. At first the bulk of the export trade was in the hands of
Italian and Flemish merchants. The former, especially, coming from cities
were banking had already made great progress, were able to conduct
financial operations on a scale unknown in Northern Europe. It was because
the Lombards were able to finance him more efficiently than the Jews that
the latter were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290. This action,
often represented as a piece of disinterested patriotism, was in fact the
result of the intrigues of a rival group of moneylenders who could offer
the King better terms.

With the growth of the trade English exporters began to challenge their
foreign rivals. Export figures for 1273, incomplete but probably reliable
enough, show that more than half the trade was in English hands. The
establishment of the Wool Staple marks this stage in the growth of English
merchant capital. The idea of the Staple was to concentrate all wool
exports in one place or a few places, both to protect the trader from
pirates and to make the collection of taxes easy. First various towns in
Flanders were selected, then, in 1353, a number of English towns. Finally
in 1362, the Staple was fixed in Calais, which had been captured during the
Hundred Years' War. From the start the Staple was controlled by native
merchants."



To put it another way, as Engels did in "The Law of Value and the Rate of
Profit" at the end of Vol III of Capital:

The merchant was the revolutionary element in this society where everything
else was stable".

 It is confusing to counterpose the origins of capitalism in the English
countryside to the role of the  international economy. The exchange of
commodities between communities continued to be a revolutionary factor in
the development of economic relations.

Plunder and oppression are unmistakably part of the domestic and wider
global picture, but so are the seemingly inexorable processes of commodity
exchange.


Chris Burford

London