Clearly it was not a lack of knowledge, wealth, or skill that kept the Chinese from maintaining contact with the Occident. What might it have been? On the practical side, the greater prosperity of Chinese merchants who had established commercial relations throughout the Indies might have checked any interest in going farther afield. Perhaps the Ming emperors lost interest in African countries when they discovered them to be, in most regards, inferior in science, art, and craftsmanship to theirs. Belief in the utter superiority of the “Heavenly Kingdom,” as they styled it, predominated in Chinese culture. And why not? In ancient times, in an example of engineering wizardry, a Chinese innovator was able to cut a long trench through granite mountains to control floods by alternating bonfires and baths of cold water to crack the rocks.1 The many examples of technical ingenuity and scientific achievement that highlight Chinese history point to a superior level of excellence in education. What didn’t take place in China was a continuous path of developments, each building on its predecessor. Nor did the Chinese share the evangelical imperative of European Christianity, giving explorers some moral authority to search for converts among foreigners. A lot of “mays” and “mights.” We’ll never really know, but we can appreciate the significance of these contrasting responses.
The Dutch, French, and English quickly followed the Spaniards to the New World to carve out their piece of this unexplored area. As contemporaries quickly realized, almost everything, at least the things that Europeans wanted and couldn’t grow themselves, grew in the tropics. As they moved from exploration to exploitation, European adventurers began looking for a source of labor to cultivate the new crops for export back home. The Portuguese had been trading in African slaves since Henry the Navigator’s first voyages and soon began shipping enslaved men and women across the Atlantic. Unlike most of the native tribes in the New World, Africans were accustomed to the disciplined work of mining and farming. Aboriginal Americans made poor slaves; they often simply died of despair when chained to work. By the middle of the seventeenth century, with escalating demand, French, Dutch, and English merchants had entered an intense rivalry with the Portuguese to dominate the slave trade.
These voyages had an incalculable impact on Europe and Africa. The new demands for labor created modern slavery, an institution far crueler and more inhumane than the slavery of biblical times. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, close to twelve million African men and women were wrenched from their homes and shipped to the New World to work first for the Spanish mines and ranches and then on the sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco plantations that the Spaniards, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and English created throughout the Western Hemisphere. The sea-lanes of the Atlantic gave access to this new source of labor.
The Trailblazer
In view of this spectacular activity across the globe, it may seem a bit perverse for me to pinpoint the beginnings of capitalism in one small island kingdom in the North Atlantic. Yet only in England did these dramatic novelties produce the social and intellectual breakthroughs that made possible the emergence of an entirely new system for producing goods. A series of changes, starting in farming and ending in industry, marks the point at which commerce, long existing in the interstices of traditional society, broke free to impose its dynamic upon the laws, class structure, individual behavior, and esteemed values of the people. Although thousands of books have been written about this astounding phenomenon, it still remains something of a mystery.
Visiting the Vatican Museum several years ago, I was struck by the richness of life captured in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century paintings there. They were full of plants, furniture, decorations, and clothing! I couldn’t help but contrast these lavish depictions of everyday life with plain feaures of England. How counterintuitive that this poor, cold, small, outlandish country would be the site of technological innovations that would relentlessly revolutionize the material world! In the early twentieth century the historian Arnold Toynbee thought he had found the key to all development in the formula of “challenge and response.” The English might have been challenged by their very lack of distracting luxury. Toynbee’s hypothesis didn’t hold up under rigorous scrutiny, but there may still be an element of truth in it.
For generations, scholars concentrated on eighteenth-century industrialization to mark the beginning of capitalism. They labeled it the Industrial Revolution. This is understandable because the spectacular appearance of factories filled with interfacing machinery and disciplined workers so visibly differed from what had gone before. But this is to start an account of a pregnancy in the fifth month. Critical changes had to take place before these inventions could even be thought of. But which ones and for how far back?
How deep are the roots of capitalism? Some have argued that its beginnings reach down into the Middle Ages or even to prehistoric times. Jared Diamond wrote a best-selling study that emphasized the geographic and biological advantages the West enjoyed. Two central problems vex this interpretation: The advantages of the West were enjoyed by all of Europe, but only England experienced the breakthroughs that others had to imitate to become capitalistic. Diamond’s emphasis on physical factors also implies that they can account for the specific historical events that brought on Western modernity without reference to the individuals, ideas, and institutions that played so central a part in this historic development.2
David Landes entered the lists of scholars recounting the “the rise of the West” with an explanation that blended many climatic and cultural factors without providing a narrative of how they interacted to transform Western society. Alfred Crosby, in his assessment of this question, stressed a change in Europeans’ fundamental grasp of reality. In the thirteenth century they adopted a quantitative understanding of the world that promoted mathematics, astronomy, music, painting, and bookkeeping. While presenting a fascinating account of technical achievements, Crosby’s insistence upon intellectual changes leaves society and politics in a conceptual limbo. Deepal Lal goes back even farther in time to the eleventh century, where he finds the roots of the “Great Divergence” in papal decrees that established a common commercial law for all of Christendom.3
The Latin motto post hoc, ergo propter hoc reminds us that because something happened before something else, it is not necessarily a cause of the following event. The emergence of capitalism was not a general phenomenon, but one specific to time and place. People who take the long-run-up view of the emergence of capitalism note factors like the discovery of the New World, the invention of the printing press, the use of clocks, or papal property arrangements. These were present in countries that did not change their economic ways. Logically, widely shared developments can’t explain a response that was unique to one country. What the myriad theories about how the West broke with its past do have right is that there were many, many elements that went into capitalism’s breakout from its traditional origins. It is also important to keep in mind that a succession is not a process. A process is a linked series of operations; a succession is open to interruption and contingency.
European Divergence
There was nothing inevitable about the English moving from the agricultural innovations that freed up workers and capital for other uses to a globe-circling trade and on to the pioneering of machine-driven industry. It’s only in retrospect that this progression seems seamlessly interconnected. But it wasn’t. This appearance reflects a human tendency to believe that what happened had to happen. It is important to break with this cast of mind if we are to understand that capitalism is not a predestined chapter in human history, but rather a startling departure from the norms that had prevailed for four thousand years. Nor did commerce force capitalism into being. There have been many groups of exceptional traders—the Chinese, Arabs, and Jews come to mind—but they were not the pioneers of either the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution. We could say that a fully developed commercial system was a necessary, but insufficient, predecessor to capitalism.
; To say that capitalism began in England is not to suggest that the explorations of the Portuguese and Spanish did not have an impact on the history of capitalism. These staggeringly bold adventures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries opened up minds and pocketbooks in England as elsewhere. But the examples of Spain and Portugal bolster the case for England’s exceptionalism. Despite sallying forth in successive expeditions, neither country modified its aristocratic disdain for work or indifference to the needs of merchants and artisans. Everything that was remarkable about Portuguese and Spanish voyages got folded back into old ways. What differed in England was that a sequence of developments never stopped. And they attracted commentary, debate, and explanations. This intellectual engagement with the meaning of economic change blocked a reversion to old ways of thinking. Novel practices and astute analysis of them are what it took to overturn the wisdom of the ages. Many countries had brilliant episodes in their history; sustaining innovation through successive stages of development distinguishes England’s performance.
Of course to start at any date is arbitrary. All historical developments have antecedents, some going back centuries. Each cut of the historian’s ax into the layers of the past proves that the roots of modern society are very deep. Yet the seventeenth century brought fundamental alterations to England, and contemporaries became acutely and astutely aware of them. At its beginning a venerable social order existed to keep in place established precepts, prerogatives, and regulations. A century and a half later capitalism had gained critical momentum against the regime of status, stasis, and royal control. From the risky ventures and trial-and-error methods of large and small entrepreneurs emerged successes so resounding that there was no turning back. Changes became irreversible and cumulative. Growth turned into development, not just expansion, but getting more from less. Capital would never again be scarce. Indeed, the Dutch became the financiers of Europe with the savings accumulated during their heyday as the world’s greatest traders.
The “rise of the West” is a very old theme in history books, one that, alas, has produced many invidious comparisons between the West and “the rest.” I certainly do not want to contribute to the hubris that this historical tradition has fostered. I think that a careful reader of this book will note the emphasis on the unusual convergence of timing and propitious precedents in my explanation of how capitalist practices became the new social system of capitalism. Focusing on England may seem a bit old-fashioned, but the latest scholarship confirms that England was the unique leader.
Recently a stimulating debate has erupted around the proposition that Europe wasn’t so different from the rest of the places on the globe before 1800. Kenneth Pomeranz has written a provocative study that details how parts of Asia enjoyed a standard of living in the eighteenth century similar to that of Western Europe. Only with nineteenth-century industrialization did there occur that “great divergence” that led to European hegemony, in his view.4 Pomeranz’s study has had a salutary effect, promoting new research and forcing a searching reevaluation of old opinions. His argument for “global economic parity” concentrates on material factors like life expectancy, agricultural productivity, and interregional trade. Intangibles like the public’s receptivity to change and the flexibility of the government responses get little of Pomeranz’s attention. Nor does he consider how various developments interacted with one another, either enhancing or discouraging successful innovations. At the cultural heart of capitalism is the individual’s capacity to control resources and initiate projects. England’s great and unexpected success forces us to look for the invisible influence at play that we might otherwise overlook.
Measures of well-being taken at one point in time don’t say much about the direction or momentum behind different economies. Many times in the past, countries have flourished for a while only to fall back to an earlier level. Only in England after the sixteenth century did the initial, enterprising successes lead steadily to other innovations.5 There, mutually enhancing economic practices escaped the confining channels of custom and gained leverage as blueprints for change. This fact impresses not as evidence of national superiority, but rather of how much contingency and fortuity played in the genesis of capitalism. In stressing the singularity of England, I am also emphasizing how surprising it is that this revolutionary new system of capitalism emerged at all.
England advanced economically just as it was being torn apart politically. During the seventeenth century, constitutional and religious conflicts turned into open rebellion and then civil war, followed by a republican experiment, itself brought to an end by the restoration of the monarchy. This period of divided authority coincided with the formation of a unified, national market for the country. Either because of, or despite, the protracted political turmoil, innovators and interlopers were able to defy venerable regulations about how the grain crop should be raised and marketed. When the political arrangements of 1688 restored political stability to the country, the new economic practices were firmly in place. So well established were they that old-timers complained of their being treated as customary.
Economic Change and Analysis
Most economists, when they think about history, take their cues from Adam Smith. His Wealth of Nations was the first great account of the economic changes England had witnessed in the two centuries before 1776, when it was published. Smith placed economic development in a long sequence of progressive steps that had evolved over time. This interpretation of the history of capitalism as moving forward effortlessly has produced the greatest irony in the history of capitalism, an explanation of its origins that makes natural what was really an astounding break with precedent. This view also depends upon people already thinking within the capitalist frame of reference. According to Smith, capitalism emerged naturally from the universal tendency of men and women to “truck and barter.” In fact it took economic development itself to foster this particular cultural trait. Smith turned an effect into a cause. For Smith and his philosophical colleagues, economic change had slowly, steadily led to the accumulation of capital that could then pay for improvements like the division of labor that enhanced productivity. No cultural adjustment had been considered necessary because underneath all the diversity in dress, diet, and comportment beat the heart of economic man—and presumably economic woman.
Because the full elaboration of economic developments in England took place over two centuries—almost seven generations of lived experience—it was possible to imagine it as the evolutionary process that Smith described. But in continental Europe industrialization came with brutal speed. Men and women were wrenched from a traditional rural order and plunged into factories within a single lifetime. Karl Marx, observing this disruption in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, could not accept the English evolutionary explanation for the emergence of capitalism. He believed that coercion had been absolutely necessary in effecting this transformation. Marx traced that force to a new class of men who coalesced around their shared interest in production, particularly their need to organize laboring men and women in new work patterns.
Separating poor people from the tools and farm plots that conferred independence, according to Marx, became paramount in the capitalists’ grand plan.6 He also stressed the accumulation of capital as a first step in moving away from traditional economic ways. I don’t agree. As Europe’s cathedrals indicate, there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads, canals, windmills, irrigation systems, and wharves. The accumulation of cultural capital, especially the know-how and desire to innovate in productive ways, proved more decisive in capitalism’s history. And it could come from a duke who took the time to figure out how to exploit the coal on his property or a farmer who scaled back his leisure time in order to build fences against invasive animals.
What factory work made much more obvious than the tenant farmer-landlord relationship was the fact that the owner of the factory profited from each worker’s labor. The sa
le of factory goods paid a meager wage to the laborers and handsome returns to the owners. Employers extracted the surplus value of labor, as Marx called it, and accumulated money for further ventures that would skim off more of the wealth that laborers created but didn’t get to keep. These relations of workers and employers to production created the class relations in capitalist society. The carriers of these novel practices, Marx said, were outsiders—men detached from the mores of their traditional societies—propelled forward by their narrow self-interest. With the cohesion of shared political goals, the capitalists challenged the established order and precipitated the class conflict that for Marx operated as the engine of change. Implicit in Marx’s argument is that the market worked to the exclusive advantage of capitalists.
In the early twentieth century another astute philosopher, Max Weber, assessed the grand theories of Smith and Marx and found both of them wanting in one crucial feature: They gave attitudes to men and women that they couldn’t possibly have had before capitalist practices arrived. Weber asked how the values, habits, and modes of reasoning that were essential to progressive economic advance ever rooted themselves in the soil of premodern Europe characterized by other life rhythms and a moral vocabulary different in every respect. This inquiry had scarcely troubled English economists or historians before Weber because they operated on the assumption that human nature made men (little was said of women) natural bargainers and restless self-improvers, eager to be productive when productivity contributed to their well-being.
The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism Page 2