I listened to a cushvlog recently where Matt was talking about capitalism emerging pretty concretely from England out of the puritanical revolution (?) and then spreading through the world via colonialism. Anyone have any book recs talking about this subject? Would love if it took it even further into areas of how capitalism started shaping social relations/institutions once becoming a real global force
Eric Hobsbawm has a nice book (trilogy actually), “The Age of Revolution” (+ 2 more “Age of [something]”s) on the dual revolutions of England and France and their contribution to the underpinnings of capitalism. It was a good, fairly broad, historical overview for a real American dumb dumb like me
Giovanni Arrighi has a book, “The Long Twentieth Century”, on the evolution of capitalism, following Ventian -> Genoese -> Dutch -> English -> US as hegemonic leaders really determining the “character” of capitalism in a given period. Super interesting, I have like one last chapter. Arrighi is “world systems” adjacent
Gerald Horne is mostly focused on the extraction of surplus via (settler) colonialism, that both fueled and coexisted alongside industrialization, and has a ton of books. But the one I’m listening to now is “Dawning of the Apocalypse”. I’m not super far into it, but it’s tying together trends happening in settler colonies vs in the home countries, in a very dialectical way.
Marx, Capital Vol 1 Part 8.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_debate
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century
Read Capital Vol1. Marx literally goes through the enclosure of the commons and the forced migration into the cities
In Age of Empires IV, the English have a late game upgrade to their Farms called Enclosure, which causes the Farms to also generate Gold.
English capitalism was exported by colonialism but I would point to the Italian city states and the “free cities” of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hanseatic league, probably also the merchants of Amsterdam, as the birthplace of modern capitalism more than England.
England had fully embraced capitalism by the 17th century and its totally correct to point to their colonial empire as once of the major exporters of capitalism globally but it feels like some mastabatory triumphalist anglo shit to claim it began in England.
Like, if you’re someone who thinks capitalism is fucking great and you’re a WASPy American, then you’re going to claim “it’s thanks to my anglo genes and judeochristian values that we civilized you shits”, that’s the vibe I get.
But really they were relatively late adopters in Northern Europe. It was well established in the cities of Europe for hundreds of years before England really embraced it. England was something of a cultural and economic backwater until around the reign of Elizabeth I. It didn’t take off economically until global commerce shifted to the Atlantic Ocean (instead of the Mediterranean and Baltic seas) and this is when the geographic situation of England became an advantage.
What about the use of military power to enforce trade network dominance and colonial monopolies isn’t the bourgeois mode of production?
I feel like you’re defining that term in a specific way. Mercantilism is a form capitalism takes. Capitalism is historically inseparable from imperialism so the distinction is false. Mercantilism is simply the term for the early era of capitalist imperialism.
Whenever I hear mercantalism, I immediately think of modern liberals wanting to clean their hands of Imperialism by saying it wasn't real capitalism.
This is a book I haven't read, so I guess this is a double-blind recommendation, but it was recommended to me by a friend who was sending me leftist materials to read: The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century. It's more about capitalism within England rather than around the globe, but it might be worth a look.
From the Amazon description:
Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.
Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a privileged ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city’s poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn’s Triple Tree.
In this new edition Peter Linebaugh reinforces his original arguments with responses to his critics based on an impressive array of historical sources. As the trend of capital punishment intensifies with the spread of global capitalism, The London Hanged also gains in contemporary relevance.
I actually came into this thread to recommend this book and The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood (Which /u/LibidinalMarx recommended below this) - It’s a brilliant overview of early capitalism and it uses the spread of capital punishment to tell the story of the spread of capital.
Dickens also has an essay called something like “the history of the modern rich” that illustrates the background of his view of how things came into being and why which I also recommend. I’ll see if I can find a link and add it in.
A good abridged version is in the first few chapters of Less is More by Jason Hickel
Seconding the Hobsbawm series. He revolutionized our understanding of history. Run, don't walk to your nearest bookstore to get a copy. You will not be disappointed.
Ah thank you all so much for these recos. Will definitely do some research around the suggestions here
