Let's work those history muscles and see if we can nail it down to at least a specific decade while still trying to stay on the right side of the evolutionary theory literature
Let's work those history muscles and see if we can nail it down to at least a specific decade while still trying to stay on the right side of the evolutionary theory literature
I've heard convincing sounding arguments that capitalism existed during the Renaissance in Italy in a very localized and limited way. I don't know enough about that time period to know if that's really true, but from what I do know it's plausible. If it did, it didn't seem to have any impact on the more commonly talked about development that happened in England and spread from there.
There was this theory I heard from some historian I can't remember that claimed the Italian Wars (1494-1559) put an end to Italian proto-capitalist development
I need to learn more about this period of history. It's what I know the least about, but it seems like it's also one of the most important to understand the structures of the modern day.
I don't blame ya, it's a super difficult period to study and keep track off, so much shit was happening, the Reformation, sixty years of war in Italy, the beginning of European colonization, fall of the Aztecs, Ezio going ham, the height of Ottoman power, the Tudors
Historians like Patrick Wyman talk at length about how difficult it is to write about this time period for general audiences
Even though I have flippantly made as much the same point in the past, I think the fact is that this mercantilism is more concerned with protectionist nation-maintenance-type commerce rather than the individualized systems of surplus value we associate with the capitalist model. I think (and I'm not an economist or anthropologist or whatever) it's more useful to view these as early examples of nation-state economies rather than early capitalist economies.
Most historians of the origins would agree with you, while intense commercialization is a necessary ingredient it's not synonymous with capitalism
"Buying cheap and selling dear" is not the same thing as "Expropriated surplus value thru alienated production", what defines capitalism is the social relations of property and collective production
Or in a way the zoomers understand, Spice and Wolf is not about capitalism
Exactly, and one of the big angles to this I have in mind is that instead of being individual capitalists hoarding surplus value, you have wealthy merchant families or clans who are more concerned with the circulation of trade goods than the raw creation of wealth.
I think (and this is me starting to veer dangerously outside of my territory) that this comes at least in part form the fact these places weren't necessarily rich with natural resources, rather they are rich in strategic geographic positions along Mediterranean (essentially global for the period) trade routes. It is more important to them to ensure that merchants keep coming to the city than to generate massive profit.
Would you say that sort of mercantilism was:
a) a necessary antecedent of capitalism, from which the true elements of capitalism directly emerged?
b) a separate response to some of the same societal forces that would eventually produce capitalism, and its evolution was more a cousin than an ancestor?
c) a dead-end whose similarities to capitalism are wholly superficial, neither a proto-capitalism nor parallel system?
To me, a) seems the most correct, a period of transition to capitalism.
But I'm not OP
To kind of address your answer, I just don't feel comfortable drawing a line between the Genoan/Venetian-style Mercantilism I'm mostly referring to and Capitalism like this. I wouldn't say there isn't a connection there, just that you'd have to make the case to me; perhaps there is some link involving places like the Hanseatic League that completes that circuit and I just don't know enough about it.
c) would be the closest from what I know
The way I see it this Mercantilism much like capitalism is a system that finds its space between the cracks of established feudal social orders, but it finds this space because of a lack of technology on the part of the feudal ruler to effectively project their power across the same types of distances these merchant families could; whereas capitalism finds its toehold as the feudal social order starts to break down.
So I guess I would say they are parallels in-so-far as they both arose out of a (social? power?) vacuum left by the inefficiencies of the Feudal order, with those inefficiencies characterized by the differing historical circumstances of the two periods / geographic locations / loci of global power at the time (Mediterranean vs. North Seas)
Localized capitalists have existed throughout a whole lot of human history. Difference is when we start saying a society is capitalist versus a society has capitalists in it. It's like most modern monarchies, they're capitalist societies with monarchs in them.