The Origin of Capitalism

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The Origin of Capitalism is a 1999 book on history and political economy, specifically the history of capitalism, by scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood, written from the perspective of Political Marxism. It was reviewed as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Michael Perelman.[1]

Summary

The book is divided into three sections. The following summary is based on the second edition (though some references are to the first).

Wood's Marxist approach originates from Karl Marx's critique of political economy in his works Das Kapital and Grundrisse.[2] In the capitalist form of society, human labor power is for sale in the market as one of many commodities.[3] Goods and services, including those regarding the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange.[3] All the actors in a such system are driven by competition and profit-maximization.[3] However, the study presents capitalists' appropriation of "workers' surplus labor without coercion"[4] by using the market to set rates of compensation both for wages and for appropriation[4] as the most distinctive and historically important feature of capitalism. Thus it argues that the origin of capitalism lies fundamentally in social property relations rather than in trade and commerce.

Wood argues that past historians have tended to see capitalism as a natural and even inevitable human behaviour, which came into being when barriers to trade and commerce were removed: essentially, in their understanding, people were waiting for the opportunity to become capitalists. Wood argues rather that capitalism did not come about until a set of unique historical circumstances compelled people to.

Part I, 'Histories of the Transition'

In Part I, Wood surveys past work on the transition to capitalism. She sketches how Adam Smith, Max Weber, Fernand Braudel, and Henri Pirenne assumed that capitalism naturally arises from trade, commerce, and urbanisation once city-dwellers have accumulated enough primitive capital to be able to reinvest it in production. However, she also finds that even commentators who were critical of this account tend to argue that the transition to capitalism entailed farmers seizing new opportunities to switch from subsistence to commodity production as the constraints of feudalism were loosened. Examples include Karl Marx himself, Karl Polanyi, Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, and Perry Anderson. This suggests that capitalism is a natural and inevitable behaviour, waiting for its opportunity, rather than historically unusual and specific. Building particularly on the arguments made in the Brenner Debate and on the work of E. P. Thompson, Wood argues that 'we need a form of history that brings this specificity into sharp relief'.[5]

Part II, 'The Origin of Capitalism'

In Part II, Wood argues that capitalism emerged in the unique conditions of late medieval and early modern English agrarian society, basing her argument firmly on Robert Brenner's ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’.[6] She argues that commerce is not equivalent to capitalism and does not produce it because 'the dominant principle of trade everywhere was not surplus value derived from production but "profit on alienation", "buying cheap and selling dear" ':[7] that is, although trade involves the seeking of profits, it does not in itself affect how goods are produced. Wood argues that polities which flourished from trade such as medieval Florence and the early-modern Dutch Republic that did not become capitalist are not examples of a 'failed transition', but rather examples of how trade and urbanisation has flourished widely in human history without capitalism developing. She likewise argues that various past societies, such as early modern France, had peasantries with ample opportunity to enter into commercial production, which, however, did not take this opportunity. Thus Wood concludes that capitalism must have arisen from changing imperatives in fundamental relations of production.[1]

Wood sees these unique circumstances arising in late medieval and early-modern England (particularly the south-east). In the wake of the Norman Conquest, the English state was unusually centralised. This gave aristocrats relatively limited powers to extract wealth directly from their feudal underlings through political means (not least the threat of violence). England's centralisation also meant that an unusual number of English farmers were not peasants (with their own land and thus direct access to subsistence) but tenants(renting their land). These circumstances produced a market in leases. Landlords, lacking other ways to extract wealth, were incentivised to rent to those tenants who could pay the most, while tenants, lacking security of tenure, were incentivised to farm as productively as possible to be able to win leases in a competitive market. This led to a cascade of effects whereby successful tenant farmers became agrarian capitalists; unsuccessful ones became wage-labourers, required to sell their labour in order to live; and landlords promoted the privatisation and renting out of common land, not least through the enclosures.[8] 'It was not merchants or manufacturers who drove the process that propelled the early development of capitalism. The transformation of social property relations was firmly rooted in the countryside, and the transformation of England's trade and industry was result more than cause of England's transition to capitalism'.[9]

Part III, 'Agrarian Capitalism and Beyond'

In Part III, Wood sketches how industrial capitalism developed from its agrarian English origins. She argues that the end of subsistence farming produced a large population which needed both to sell its labour and to buy basic necessities of life, creating a mass consumer market quite different from the markets for luxury goods that characterised non-capitalist commerce. This mass market underpinned the development of mass production.

Wood argues that England's rising productivity slowly but inevitably forced competing economies to enter capitalist modes of production: although the development of capitalism was a chance event, it set in motion a transition that would become global. She argues that English capitalism did not cause England's imperialism, noting that neighbouring non-capitalist economies like Spain and France also built overseas empires. She does find, however, that English capitalism produced a distinctive kind of imperialism. Rather than ruling purely through 'extra-economic' methods of exerting power (such as force), England exported its model of social property relations to its colonies, providing powerful economic imperatives for people to adopt capitalism. English imperialism also drew on the nascent capitalist ideology of thinkers such as Thomas More, Sir John Davies, John Locke, and William Petty to justify taking the land of peoples who were thought not to be making sufficiently productive use of it.

Wood sketches the reliance of capitalism on the political structures of the nation-state(particularly its protection of private property), and emphasises that the humane and universalist ideas of the Enlightenment emerged in the still non-capitalist France of the eighteenth century, setting Enlightenment ideas in contrast to capitalist ideologies. Finally, she emphasises that if capitalism is a historically specific and unusual development, it is not inevitable or the only way that humans might organise themselves.

Editions

The book was originally published in 1999 by Monthly Review Press, and then a revised[10]edition was published in 2002 by Verso, with the subtitle "A Longer View".[11] A reprint appeared in 2013.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1999) The Origin of Capitalism, Monthly Review Press, 1999. ISBN 1-58367-000-9, 120 pp.Wood, Ellen Meiksins (2002) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, Verso, 2002.ISBN 978-1-85984-392-5, 213 pp.Wood, Ellen Meiksins (2013) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, Aakar Books, 2013. ISBN 978-93-5002-241-2, 224 pp.


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The Origin of Capitalism

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.

Ellen Meiksins Wood critiques accounts about the origin of capitalism—across the political spectrum, including Marxist’s—for overlooking the begging questions about what really drove the emergence of capitalism. She says accounts often present circular arguments in which capitalist dynamics were sort of always-already present and that particular historical conjunctures merely “unfettered” or quantitatively multiplied these extant tendencies and activities. Such accounts, she argues, naturalize capitalism and make it seem like system that is both inevitable and unshakeable. Her account emphasizes not the “opportunities” afforded by markets in the consolidation of markets, which she derides as the commercialization model, but rather the “imperatives” that market dependencies create and extend throughout the capillaries of social life and relations.

Her main argument is that a non-circular, denaturalizing account of the origins of capitalism must trace the origins of capitalism to the English countryside and its changing property relations beginning in the 16th Century. Contrary to most accounts, Wood writes: “It was not merchants or manufacturers who drove the process that propelled the early development of capitalism, The transformation of social property relations was firmly rooted in the countryside, and the transformation of English trade and industry was result more than cause of England’s transition to capitalism” (129).

Wood traces how changing property relations more than any other factor in the countryside drove the imperatives of “competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labor-productivity” and how these eventually came to “regulate not only economic transactions but social relations in general” (7). Indeed, changing property relations in the English countryside was what really set the conditions of possibility for capitalism.

She surveys the “commercialization model” of capitalism’s origins beginning with Adam Smith’s famous statement about the human propensity to truck and barter as well as classical political economists’ ideas about “original accumulation.” She mentions Marx’s critiques and moves to an extended review of the transition debate and Perry Anderson’s work on absolutism and capitalism. Wood next spends considerable time reviewing the Brenner Debate, defending his ideas as one of the few attempts to explain the emergence of capitalism without assuming in the argument precisely what needs to be explained—that is, he sought out an internal dynamic within feudalism that did not “presuppose an already existent capitalist logic” at work (52).

Robert Brenner argued that the “dynamic of self-sustaining growth, and the constant need for improvement in labor productivity, presupposed transformations in property relations that created a need for such improvements simply to permit the principle economic actors – landlords and peasants – to reproduce themselves” (66).

While France and other European countries were mainly engaged in feudal-like surplus extraction through taxation of peasants and the seeking of profitable state offices, the greater concentration of property in England and a large number of tenants meant that landlords increasingly turned to money-denominated rents, creating a veritable market in leases and a reliance on money. The market of variable rents in which producers were compelled to compete for lands “stimulated the development of commodity production, the improvement of productivity, and self-sustaining economic development” (102).

Woods argues that these dynamics introduced market imperatives in which surplus extraction began to occur through “dull compulsions” rather than the “extra-economic” forms of (more coercive) extraction under feudalism or absolutism that involved the combination of economic, political, and military forces. With economic appropriation, landlords and other wealthy actors had incentives for promoting the productivity of labor since it afforded them the possibility of higher rents. “In pre-capitalist societies, appropriation – whether just to meet the material needs of society or to enhance the wealth of exploiters – took, so to speak, an absolute form: squeezing more out of direct producers rather than enhancing the productivity of labor” (150).

The 16th and 18th enclosures were thus a complimentary (almost culminating) process to already extant dynamics rather than the constitutive moment of capitalist relations. Wood nicely explores the ideology of “improvement”—not just betterment, but as Locke defined it in terms of profitability via exchange value—that justified such dispossession both locally and internationally with imperialism. Indigenous and other sorts of customary rights stood in the way of accumulation as it served the landlords.

“The most salutary corrective to the naturalization of capitalism and to question-begging assumptions about its origins is the recognition that capitalism, with all its very specific drives of accumulation and profit-maximization was born in the countryside, in a very specific place, and very late in human history” (95).

http://territorialmasquerades.net/the-origins-of-capitalism/



From edition 2003 Issue 4

Gary Pearce. 'Where Did Capitalism Come From? Revi

Published: AUGUST 10, 2010

During the last couple of decades, Ellen Meiksins Wood has produced a number of impressive books and articles that have sought no less than the renewal of historical materialism as it engages with the problems of capitalist development. In the introduction to the new edition of her The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View she argues that the anti-globalisation movements of recent years make plain the need to understand the shaping force of capitalism on every dimension of human life. The increasing universalisation of capitalist logic suggests a need to return to capitalism’s beginnings, to regain some sense of its historical peculiarity and transitoriness, and thereby defamiliarise much that now seems normal and natural.

The broad parameters of her argument are readily discernible. The universalising of capitalism begins with the assumption that it has existed since time immemorial, that it was present in the very earliest of commercial transactions. The ‘commercialization model’ of development posits capitalism as the logical outcome of a process that only needs the removal of traditional fetters and obstacles to achieve full realization. Accordingly, the maturing of capitalism is a process characterised by technological improvement and increasing division of labour, a matter of quantitative increase rather than qualitative break. It is also associated with the growth, development and influence of cities and trade. All of this, Wood argues, begs the question of capitalism’s origins, assumes the very thing that needs to be explained. It bypasses focus on capitalism’s origins by assuming that it always existed in some form or other and only needed the right conditions or opportunity to be fully realised. Wood casts aside this universalisation and sets herself the task of outlining capitalism’s historical specificity. Rather than associate capitalism with expanding opportunity, Wood wants to draw attention to the specific imperatives and compulsions evident in the unique capitalist drive to competition, accumulation, profit and productivity.

One of the challenging and interesting aspects of Wood’s work can be seen in the way she offers some fairly unorthodox interpretations of capitalist origins, while finding confirmation of the classical Marxist tradition. She criticises the modernising strain in Marx: think of The Communist Manifesto‘s celebration of relentless capitalist expansion and growth. But she takes as her starting point Marx’s critique of classical political economy for its universalising of capitalist relations across human history. She turns her attention initially to the Marxist ‘transition debate’ contained in R. H. Hilton’s edited collection The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,1 examining arguments and underlying assumptions. She asks of various positions in this now classic exchange whether feudalism has its own intrinsic dynamic or is always somehow transitional to capitalism. Are ‘external’ factors such as towns and trade incompatible with feudalism, and do they then trigger the development of capitalism?

The American Marxist Robert Brenner posed similar questions in what became a second round in the debate on the transition question. Several seminal articles by Brenner provide some of the key themes and concerns of Wood’s work: the question of capitalist origins itself; the focus of agrarian capitalism; the explication of modes of production — not in the abstract but as socially constituted and contested. 2 She looks to Brenner for the way he does not assume capitalism’s prior existence and allows for differential patterns of European development. Wood has also written eloquently on the important generation of British Marxist historians that included Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm.3 In this book, she draws on Thompson’s tracing of the emergence of capitalism as a specific ‘social form’, prior even to industrialisation or the development of a mass working class.

The question of whether the growth of cities, trade and commerce in various places connotes early capitalism provides the starting point for Wood’s consideration of various patterns of development. She observes that there have been sophisticated urban cultures and trading networks both in the European and non-European worlds that did not see the emergence of the specifically capitalist market imperative. Trade in the Italian city-state of Florence, for example, was based on buying cheap and selling dear within fragmented markets, taking advantage of regional specialization. This trade was more an adjunct to pre-capitalist extra-economic rivalries than driven by capitalist competition. The new edition of this book also examines the Dutch Republic, which is often regarded as one of the sites for capitalism’s first emergence. She notes its cultural achievements, its sophisticated trading and commercial practices, its technological advances and its level of urbanization. Here Wood argues that the dominance of Dutch merchants was again underpinned by pre-capitalist forms of economic superiority in negotiating separate markets, revealing an interest in the opportunities of circulation rather than the specific imperatives of capitalist production.

Wood is emphatic about when and where she believes capitalism to have first emerged: the rural southeast of sixteenth-century England. One of the important conditions here included the highly unified British State, which stood in contradistinction to the ‘parcellized sovereignty’ of continental Europe. As if in compensation for their lack of extra-economic powers, the rural aristocracy wielded considerable economic power by virtue of a significant concentration of landholding. We note how the strength of English agrarian society is not taken by Wood as symptomatic of a society mired in tradition and custom, but is regarded as a condition for the emergence of the first modern society. Thus, rural England sees the early development of farming by tenants rather than peasants, and the concomitant extraction of rents according to tenant productivity rather than direct coercion. There was a new dependence on the market both for accessing land itself and selling produce, with market price set by the most productive. The English mode of development saw also a new emphasis on the keyword ‘improvement,’ which came to signify the enhancing of land for productivity and profit. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this concept was employed with considerable ideological effect in the attack on customary practice, especially in the transformation of property rights that occurred with the enclosure of common lands.

The locale for the earliest emergence of capitalism has seen recently both ‘mad cow disease’ and a foot-and-mouth epidemic. Some time ago, Raymond Williams pointed to how the realities of agrarian capitalism formed the subtext to the English rural idyll.4Like Williams, Wood perceives capitalism’s important association with the English countryside because she is interested in its unique set of social property relations – the ‘new laws of motion’ – that only later gave rise to fully mature forms of capitalism characterised by trade, industry and a mass proletariat. She insists upon looking internally to England’s domestic commercial system, with its unified national market, rather than externally to factors such as foreign trade. This was a new type of market — not in luxury goods but a mass market in cheap necessities that everyone was increasingly forced to access for the reproduction of daily life. This produced pressures to cost effectiveness, competition and productivity. Wood’s argument is that the strength of the English economy’s ‘mutually reinforcing agrarian and industrial sectors’ only later forced the development of capitalism elsewhere under competitive pressure or direct imposition (145).


Wood’s book The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991) argued that the dominant paradigm of development sees the conflation of capitalist economic development on the English model and bourgeois revolution on the French.5 Wood returns to this theme here noting the ‘different issues and terrains of class struggle’ between England and France (116). For France, the issue was ‘politically constituted property’: the 1789 Revolution was fought over aristocratic privilege, with bourgeois access to state office and peasant taxation being important issues of grievance. For England the key issue was economic appropriation, evident in struggles over property rights and enclosure. The conflation of the French and English experiences gives us the somewhat tautological notion that capitalism was brought about by bourgeois revolution. Wood resists this explanation of capitalism’s origins, arguing that the English Revolution brought about capitalism to the extent that it advanced the interests of the aristocratic landed class. The French Revolution, on the other hand, advanced the interests of bourgeois professionals and state office-holders rather than capitalists.

Some of the sharpest recent criticism of both Wood’s and Brenner’s ideas has come from those detecting something Eurocentric in the idea of ‘capitalism in one country.’ Such critiques have sought typically to give imperialism more explanatory value in the story of capitalism’s emergence. 6 Wood responds by observing that anti-imperialist critiques are themselves contained by the commercialisation model to the extent that they become embroiled in the question of who has primacy in lifting the barriers to some normative model of development. Wood wants not to dispute the achievement of the non-European world in the development of trading networks, technology or urban cultures, but asks whether their growth bespeaks the development of capitalism. Similarly, Wood doesn’t dispute the role of imperialism in frustrating non-European development, let alone its contribution to European development, only the suggestion that it somehow produced capitalism as a specific formation. Wood argues that historical specificity does not connote historical superiority. She adds that the best way to challenge Eurocentrism is to challenge assumptions that the Western mode of development is natural and universal, to question capitalism as a ‘universal standard of merit and progress’ (32).

The new edition goes on to distinguish between different forms of imperialism, observing that Britain was a relative latecomer to colonization with the wealth of its domestic economy more important in the early stages of capitalist development. Pre-capitalist forms of imperialism represented by Spain and Portugal derived their colonial wealth from extra-economic appropriation that was not for the development of capital but for various feudal pursuits. Spain was concerned not so much with settlement as with ‘amassing bullion’ (151) and securing trade monopolies. It was only after the development of capitalism that later forms of British imperialism reordered such activities, so that the imperial enterprise saw not just plunder but also the expansion and development of capitalist imperatives. Ireland is important here, first colony to the first capitalist power, for the way a long period of domination and suppression was supplemented, in the late-sixteenth century, by more systematic forms of economic, political and legal imposition. The expropriation of land for settlers brought the new social property relations of agrarian capitalism. The ideology of improvement, particularly as linked by Locke to productive use for profit, provided legitimacy for imperial dispossession.

The Origin of Capitolism also contains a new chapter on the nation state which, of course, is now routinely connected to processes of rationalization and modernization. As usual, Wood is concerned to complicate our understanding of the relations between old and new, connecting the modern state’s emergence with the fragmented political conditions of the pre-capitalist world. According to her, it is aristocratic conflict and peasant resistance that initially drives the consolidation of state power under a centralising absolutist monarchy. While the French are often regarded as providing the very paradigms of political modernity, French Absolutism saw a continuing pre-capitalist unity of politics and economics with state office itself a form of private appropriation. The consolidation process is only later completed via the separation of politics and economics under capitalism. England, on the other hand, had a coherent and unified parliament and common law legal system complemented by a unified national economy. Wood admits the minor issue of the Civil War, but sees this as concerning an ‘already centralized sovereign state’ (171), brought on by the monarch upsetting the balance between Crown and Parliament. It is interesting to note that when Germany and France were forced to adopt capitalism under competitive threat, their essentially pre-capitalist states facilitated the development of capitalism.

If Wood does not want to see the conflation of categories like capitalist and bourgeois, she finally comes to consider what this means for understandings of modernity generally. The direction of the argument follows a familiar line: the ‘project of modernity,’ a predominantly French project, stems not from a new and developing capitalism but from an essentially pre-capitalist drama. Universalism, for example, was part of the bourgeois struggle for increased access to state office and its attack on traditional privilege. This was only later distorted as the negation of tradition and custom as such, with the bourgeoisie as avatar of progress, reason and freedom against the repressive forces of the past. England again provides the contrast with its predominant ideological modes of empiricism and classical political economy. It is not difficult to see how Wood came to feel the need for some distinctions between capitalism and the Enlightenment, given the postmodern wholesale jettisoning of the latter. In making this distinction she offers the somewhat intriguing but undeveloped suggestion that the Enlightenment represented an ‘alternative route out of feudalism.’

It’s easy to feel drawn to Wood’s polemics as she pursues her ideas into many areas of debate and discussion. If there is a criticism to be made it would concern a certain preference for a nicely turned theoretical paradigm – largely borrowed from Brenner – over the exigencies of the historical material. She discards abstract models to make her well-targeted distinctions between pre-capitalist and capitalist forms, modernity and capitalism. But the exactness of these distinctions sometimes seems to allow abstraction to return under a new guise, simplifying these categories against the more dialectical messiness of historical reality. Still, as a kind of thought experiment it represents a vigorous challenge to the pervasive assumptions of modernization theory in both its Marxist and liberal forms. The issues stemming from such theory look not quite so resolved as they once were.

Gary Pearce is a librarian at RMIT University Library. Until recently, he was studying at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. He has now submitted and had accepted a PhD thesis titled ‘Margins and Modernism: Ireland and the Formation of Modern Literature.’

1This debate was first published in the journal Science and Society before being collected in R. H. Hilton, ed. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1976).

2Two of these articles, ‘Agrarian Class Struggle and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’ and ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,’ were first published in the journal Past and Present and la
ter collected with contributions from others in T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philpin, ed. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,’ New Left Review, no. 104 (July/August 1977): 25-92.

3 For Wood’s articles on Thompson in particular see ‘Rethinking Base and Superstructure’ and ‘Class as Process and Relationship’ both of which are now collected in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

4 See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985).

5Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), 4.

6 See the recent debate in the magazine Against the Current, including James McAuley, ‘The Trouble with Capitalism in One Country Theories,’ Against the Current, no. 94 (September/November 2001). (19 January 2003). See also James M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford Press, 2000).


https://politicsandculture.org/2010/08/10/gary-pearce-where-did-capitalism-come-from-revi-2/