The podcast Chapo Trap House’s miniseries Hell on Earth is an entertaining story which proposes that the Thirty Years’ War midwifed the birth of capitalism. Ultimately, however, the interesting argument doesn’t hold up.
I don't agree with Brenner, I think the original works from Postan are much more consistent with a materialist interpretation, basically primitive accumulation and demographic changes lead to the development of proto capitalist forms. His example is the 100 years war, by the begining of the 14 century we see the development of banks and finance in England, as well as large merchant capital, but once the plague hits, even if the war was still going on, the demographic basis for these institutions is no longer there, rich merchants buy land and titles, other landlords stop managing their states and ether sell them or rent them the banks and Italian creditors disappear or become much less relevant. The volume of trade decreased and merchants and manufacturers formed guilds to protect their shares of a diminishing pie.
Once population recovered, mpl fell and it became easier to extract sulprus value from laborers and accumulation started again. It was not a crisis, but the fact that an agrarian crisis like the one in the 1300s was averted by the discovery of the americas, that enabled primitive accumulation to continue. Even with the addition of india, the system was about to collapse in the early 1800. Had the industrial revolution been delayed a few decades, we'd be back at the 14th century.
I don't agree with Brenner, I think the original works from Postan are much more consistent with a materialist interpretation, basically primitive accumulation and demographic changes lead to the development of proto capitalist forms. His example is the 100 years war, by the begining of the 14 century we see the development of banks and finance in England, as well as large merchant capital, but once the plague hits, even if the war was still going on, the demographic basis for these institutions is no longer there, rich merchants buy land and titles, other landlords stop managing their states and ether sell them or rent them the banks and Italian creditors disappear or become much less relevant. The volume of trade decreased and merchants and manufacturers formed guilds to protect their shares of a diminishing pie.
Once population recovered, mpl fell and it became easier to extract sulprus value from laborers and accumulation started again. It was not a crisis, but the fact that an agrarian crisis like the one in the 1300s was averted by the discovery of the americas, that enabled primitive accumulation to continue. Even with the addition of india, the system was about to collapse in the early 1800. Had the industrial revolution been delayed a few decades, we'd be back at the 14th century.