RE: Re: S. Africa/mode of prod. debate

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi:

> Wasn't it your contention -- as well as Jim Blaut's, etc. -- that as
> far as technology, seed/yield ratio, quality of textile production,
> etc. were concerned, at the moment of the New World conquest,
> "Europeans" & "non-Europeans" were not that different, staggering
> differences in living standards today being products of capitalism &
> imperialism?  Or were they already vastly unequal then, in the same
> way that core & periphery are today?

You have to look at it not one dimensionally, but as you already argued,
with regard to the mutltiude of factors. What Blaut et al including me argue
is that English protocapitalism acquired much and benefited greatly by
technology transfer from the East, which it largely paid for not by rents
accrued from enclosed land in the English shires (that obviously did not
happen) by but silver from America, loot from India, and similar plunder or
profits extracted from genocidal slavery.

When John Wilkinson, a Coalbrookdale ironmaster, died, the sermon at his
funeral was read from a cast iron lectern in the church he endowed which
also had iron window frames, guttering, screens and rooflights; even the
kerbstones on the road outside were made of iron; and Wilkinson himself was
interred in an iron coffin with an iron headstone set above him, a method of
burial which became  a shortlived fashion.  From being as rare as hen's
teeth 50 years before, suddenly there was so much iron that for a while
no-one knew what to do with the stuff. When the Napoleonic war ended and
arms orders dried up, there was a glut of iron. It did not last long.

Wilkinson also built the first iron boat, for which he was accused of
witchcraft by the locals, who hated him anyway.Within thirty years England
was covered by the Railway, and the Royal Navy sent its flotilla of
Ironclads up the Yangtse to teach the Chinese the meaning of Free Trade.
None of this had anything to do with the 'English Countryside'. Even then,
when industrial imperialism was getting into its glutting stride, the best
steel came not from the Black Country, as the industrial area near
Birmingham in the English Midlands soon came to be called, but from Bengal,
or from Sweden or Spain. The best pottery still came from China and so did
the best silk. The best seed/yield ratios were still probably in parts of
Asia, altho that was changing fast. What all this tells you is that here is
a world economy, united by long-distance trade established over centuries
and even millennia (there were Carthaginian trading posts in England in the
5th BCE) with broadly comparable but essentially stagnant organic economies
connected by trade, from Asia to America to northern and southern Europe.
The breakthroughs in fossil-fuelled machinery and in mass-production
metallurgy, happened on the basis of a prior accumulation, not of
agricultural rents but from the plunder of Africa and America and south
Asia. This breakthru enabled England and then n. europe to leapfrog,
temporarily, Asia. That's how it happened.

> Was there a world system that encompassed the entire world -- as
> opposed to states, empires, & networks of trade relations -- before
> the rise of capitalism?

Yes.

Mark Jones -- and I just got to Michael's admonition to stop so have
stopped.