History nerds get in here, let's see those takes
Perfidious Albion takes the largest slice of the blame of course
although I think you're sleeping on the fact that a lot of the "excess capital" (though it wouldn't be understood as such at the time) that allowed the buildup of productive forces and industrialization like of the English textile industry (that we point to as kind of the birthplace of this whole thing) was thanks to the Spanish bullion trade injecting enormous amounts of specie into european economies. People who owned gold and silver mines were literally :brrrrrrrrrrrr: for their time
also while it's not necessarily a fair accusation and we're starting to reach a bit, the mercantilism we attribute to have being popularized by Italian city-states like Genoa (I think can be attributed as having) laid the foundations for an understanding of nation-state economies before we even really had a concept of nation-states.
spoiler
Also blame the Prussians for assisting the English in defeating Napoleon.
It's kind of funny because after all the murder and torture and slavery Spain never really built up it's economy and as soon as the cheap silver ran out they foundered and their empire fell apart.
Isn’t that because they spent all that money fighting religious wars which were basically impossible to win given the technology of the time as well as the poor understanding of disease?
I don't know how much was spent on warfare, but I do know that right as Spain was becoming an economic super-power on cheap, unlimited silver they were also violently exiling all the Muslims and Jews in Iberia, and it just so happened that the Muslims and Jews who had been there for centuries constituted most of the non-agrarian economic base of the region. So in their religious zeal to create a purely Christian Kingdom they were kicking out or killing everyone with a skilled trade or a university education, essentially enforcing a massive and long lasting brain drain on themselves. And once all those people were exiled or killed the Spanish leadership never effectively replaced them.
This is a consequence of feudalism becoming absolutism, isn’t it? The old decentralized feudal way of doing things just wasn’t cutting it anymore (probably because there just wasn’t enough people to work the land), so they decided to make just one big feudal kingdom and blame Jewish and Muslim scapegoats for their problems. The same thing happened in France.
It's kind of a funny crank position, Napoleon Did some kind of hare-brain economic reforms to rescue the French economy and alt-hiatory nerds like to think capitalism as we understand it would not have emerged from a Europe dominated by Napoleon's economic system. I don't think there's really anything concrete to support this and alt-history is pretty woo anyways.
Forgive me for knowing almost nothing about pre-1900 history outside of North America, but am I right to think that relative to most of the people fighting against Napoleon, Napoleon was usually the less bad one?
Modern banking is Italian and more complex financial instruments like shares are Dutch and bleeding the natives white while you praise yourself for civilizing them is all of the above but the British did it best.
Don't forget about Columbus starting the encomienda system in the first place.
I don’t think you’re blaming the Spanish enough here
The Dutch never even pretended to "civilise". They wanted nutmeg (which was only found in one place at the time), the people there said no.
They murdered everyone on the island and imported slaves to get the nutmeg. None of this faffing about with proxy rulers like the British.
the book is actually quite good, she provides a convincing alternative to what i interpret to be braudel's climatological determinism (though to be fair he did cover a lot of shit, but the weather part felt very sus to me).
such secrets, and many more, have been revealed to me by strange spirits claiming to be Cthonic-leninists.
If there are two things I hate it's people who are intolerant of others' cultures and The Dutch.
It's the English
Read the origins of capitalism by Ellen meiksins wood
yes, it was the English manorial lords turning the commons into "sheep-walks" circa the 1500s. Thomas More coined the phrase that "the sheep have eaten men." Then the lords sold the wool in Italy. This had the side consequence of booting peasants off farming lands, thus starting the 500-year proletarianization process where they ended up in cities as factory workers. (Although many peasants chose to abandon farming too). In the cities, they were brutally disciplined on how to embody the twelve-hour-a-day laborer, so a bunch of legislation sprang up punishing loafers. In addition to the "So-Called Primitive Accumulation" chapter in Capital vol. I, Ernst Mandel has written good stuff on this; David Harvey has shown how the field enclosures of 1500s England never stopped under capitalism, as they continue on in spirit as "accumulation by dispossession."
a bunch of legislation sprang up punishing loafers
For a long time the English would kill you if you were twice found unable to prove you had a job. A death sentence for unemployment.
Oh shit I know this one, it was the wool trade wasn't it? Those damn sheep lovers
Italy invented Capitalism, the Dutch invented Liberalism and the English invented Imperialism and Industrialism
The dark horse answer is of course the Holy Roman Empire, Jakob Fugger heads raise up :red-fist:
I'm going to blame the Dutch, because no-one understands Dutch so they won't be able to defend themselves.
The actual correct answer is probably :england-cool: .
Where did China and Baghdad fit in to the puzzle of capital accumulation and financialization? I've studied some Muslim history and I don't recall any complex banking schemes and I know very little about how the Chinese economy functioned at any point.
Capitalism arises from the feudal mode of production under very specific circumstances, at least according to Helen Meiksins Wood; it doesn’t really seem to appear until the bubonic plague kills half the people in England. The other societies you’ve mentioned here tended to have centralized governments with monopolies on commodity production and severe limits on profit. The goal was the social reproduction of the state rather than capital accumulation.
Places like China, Korea, and even the Netherlands basically set things up so that you could only get rich by working for the government. You exploited the peasantry via taxation, as opposed to the economic exploitation of capitalism, which is undertaken via rents and wage labor and depends upon the market taking over all aspects of society and rewarding those who can increase the productive forces (with better farming tools for instance) while proletarianizing those who fail to do so.
The Netherlands used the slave mode of production I think (which itself relies on lots of commerce and big cities just like in ancient Rome and can even lead to banking and joint stock companies like in Florence), while China and Korea used pretty much the same thing, but with a slight modification involving the Confucian exams as well as lots of eunuchs who in theory couldn’t have children. It wasn’t officially a hereditary ruling class but usually only the richest families could pass the exams.
Late medieval England is in this very weird situation where they have a unified central government and fairly developed infrastructure but landlords are basically free to exploit peasants as much as they want. The central government doesn’t reign in landlords as much as in other places. I’m not really sure what gets things going exactly or how England even ended up in this situation with all the right ingredients, but I think the bubonic plague is the key. Once you have the right ingredients, capitalism happens. Without those ingredients, it can’t happen.
I think Wood maintains that market society is a better term for capitalism. You have some wage labor even in ancient Rome, but there are so many limits that it just never goes anywhere. Slavery was much more popular there. It’s a society with markets, but not a market society. In a market society, in contrast, you need to sell or exploit labor or you die.
Ancient Islamic banking was very complex in order to facilitate silk road trade, and many principles of Islamic banking are still used today (as western banking practices usury which is banned under Sharia Law). Sukuk bonds and murabaha contracts are based in real assets and were originally designed around 700AD to move money long distances with low risk during transport. Banks on opposite sides of the silk road would carry a supply of money/assets and use the notes to designate how much of that would be converted into liquid payments.
This way you could avoid caravans getting raided and losing high volumes of gold and coinage while still transferring value to people creating or transporting goods across the continent. Italian bankers saw the success of this system and took away all the religiously enforced norms to make banking a for-profit enterprise. This would be the point at which trade was used for upward accumulation by the bourgeoise.
I have heard that the Islamic banking system, especially the no-usury part, has been partially adapted to the US housing market. From what I've heard people will form a kind of house-buying union and contribute funds, and when they have enough money they'll buy a house for one of the members of the union. And that member will pay back in the value of the house without interest, with maybe a limited fee on top of the closing price, to enable the union to buy the next house. And they go round and round buying houses for people as they amass enough cash to do so. I understand they've run in to some trouble with US regulation but I can't remember what exactly.
I think Middle East was heavily merchant capital: buy silks there, resell spices here, but they didn’t use means of production as a vehicle of getting rich. China, idk, I think they’ve had over complicated serfdom, but my knowledge is sorely lacking
The Dutch have a lot of shit to answer for but for personal reasons I must blame the English.
Albion for sure. The Dutch perfected it, but the british are truly the biggest offenders
ACKSHUALLY capitalism is a natural economic system that has existed in one form or another for the entirety of human history. Even animals practice primitive forms of capitalism. Capitalism predates humanity and will live on after we die. Capitalism in fact extends forwards and backwards in time from the beginning of the universe to the end of days. Capitalism was here at the beginning and will live on and once our sun blinks off and a cold darkness falls across our solar system. Time moves on, we live, we die, but capitalism remains, like a God watching over their children. Capitalism is all that has ever been and all that will ever be; capitalism is everything that is and is not. Capitalism devours all, because capitalism is all, an ancient God predating existence.
It's true I saw a monkey sitting on a pile of more coconuts than it could ever eat throwing rocks at other monkeys as they brought the capitalist monkey more and more coconuts.
