The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

It may be possible to argue (as I would be inclined to do) that the non-capitalist character of such commercial economies was as much their strength as their weakness, and that, for instance, the Italian Renaissance, which flourished in the environment of commercial city-states in Northern Italy like Florence, would not have achieved its great heights under the pressures of capitalist imperatives. But that is another story. The point here is simply that, in the absence of those [market] imperatives, the pattern of economic development was bound to be different.

The most salutary corrective to the naturalisation of capitalism and to question-begging assumptions about its origin is the recognition that capitalism, with its very specific drives of accumulation and profit-maximisation, was born not in the city but in the countryside, in a very specific place, and very late in human history. It required not a simple extension or expansion of barter and exchange but a complete transformation in the most basic human relations and practices, a rupture in the age-old patterns of human interaction with nature.

With the advent of industrial capitalism, market dependence had truly penetrated to the depths of the social order. But its precondition was an already well-established and deeply rooted market dependence, reaching back to the early days of English agrarian capitalism, when the production of food became subject to the imperatives of competition. This was a unique social form in which the main economic actors, both appropriators and producers, were market-dependent in historically unprecedented ways.

The market dependence of English farmers was based not simply on the need to exchange in order to obtain good they could not produce but also on the particular relation between 'economic' tenants and landlords devoid of extra-economic powers. Even the productive capacity to be self-sufficient did not make producers in England less market-dependent.

There had long been attempts to subdue Ireland by direct or indirect military means, and in the sixteenth century, there were various unsuccessful efforts to establish private military settlements as a defence against Irish rebellion. This was, in effect, a feudal model of imperial domination, with a kind of feudal lordship being used to dominate a dependent population by extra-economic means. The Tudor monarchy sought to extend its rule over Ireland force in a more systematic way, dominated by the state, but it also tried something new, which was to have far-reaching implications for the development of British imperialism.

In the late sixteenth century, England's Irish strategy underwent something like an instant transition from feudalism to capitalism. The Tudor state decided to embark upon on a more aggressive process of colonisation. But this time, the effort to exert extra-economic control by a more effective military conquest was supplemented by an attempt to impose a kind of economic hegemony, using military force to implant a new economic system, as well as a new political and legal order.

Capitalism had emerged in one country. After that, it could never emerge again in the same way. Every extension of its laws of motion changed the conditions of development thereafter, and every local context shaped the processes of change. But having once began in a single nation state, and having been followed by other nationally organised processes of economic development, capitalism has spread not by erasing the national boundaries but by reproducing its national organisation, creating an increasing number of national economies and nation states. The inevitably uneven development of separate, if interrelated, national entities, especially when subject to imperatives of competition, has virtually guaranteed the persistence of national forms.

Once market imperatives set the terms of social reproduction, all economic actors - both appropriators and producers, even if they remain in possession, or indeed outright ownership, of the means of production - are subject to the demands of competition, increasing productivity, capital accumulation, and the intense exploitation of labour.

For that matter, even the absence of a division between appropriators and producers, is no guarantee of immunity. Once the market is established as an economic 'discipline' or 'regulator', once economic actors become become market-dependent for the conditions of their own reproduction, even workers who own the means of production, individually or collectively, will be obliged to respond to the market's imperatives - to compete and accumulate, to let 'uncompetitive' enterprises and their workers go to the wall, and to exploit themselves. The history of agrarian capitalism, and everything that followed from it, should make it clear that whatever market imperatives regulate the economy and govern social reproduction, there will be no escape from exploitation.