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
Between 1611 with the creation of the first stock exchange to 1848 with the Springtime of Nations, we have 237 years to play with
With the first proto-bacteria to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, with no market regulation or taxation.
a cool thing to do is to make a distinction between capital-istic and capital-ism
an organisation with an owner and employees making products, selling them, and seeking profits is a capitalistic structure. but it doesn't necessarily exist in a capitalism. this can be a plantation in ancient rome.
capitalism is the state-protected universalisation of capitalistic organisation. the state got rid of or transforms the commons, the guilds, aristocratic privledges, ecclesiastical power, etc.
where capitalism starts depends on if you want to wax protestant or municipal (and if you read protestant work ethic or arrighi) --prots northern europe, municipal italian city states
In The Origin of Capitalism Ellen Meiksins Wood makes the argument that capitalism began in rural southeastern England during the enclosures. She doesn’t really nail it down to a more specific time or place though. It would be cool if we could find the first landowner who threw his tenants off the land due to market imperatives.
8 am on June 22, 2022
4 hours in, and I'm kinda sick of this shit already nglIn the debate about the origins of capitalism two schools confront each other. For one of these, capitalism was born of the effects of the great discoveries of the sixteenth century and the Atlantic trade; for the other it was born of the breakup of feudal relations
Actually, the conditions needed for the development of capitalism are two in number: proletarianization and the accumulation of money-capital. While the accumulation of money capital occurred in an the trading societies of the East, of Antiquity, and of the feudal world, it never led to the development of capitalist relations, because a supply of free and available labor power was lacking. This process of proletarianization - that is, in practical terms, the exclusion from the village community of part of the rural population - is explained, so far as Europe is concerned, by the break-up of feudal relations. But these two conditions must both be present, and it is the absence of this conjunction that forbids us to speak of "capitalism in the Ancient World,'' or "capitalism in the Oriental Empires."
The expression "mercantilist capitalism" used to describe the period of Europe's history between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution (1600-1800) is perhaps responsible for many errors in analysis. It is an ambiguous expression, for this period was in reality one of transition. After the event we can now see that it was transition to capitalism. But until the Industrial Revolution the capitalist mode of production did not yet really exist. The period in question was marked by: (1) the continued predominance of the feudal mode of production within the fonnations of that time; (2) the flourishing of long distance trade (mainly the Atlantic trade); (3) the effect of this latter development upon the feudal mode of production, which disintegrated. It was this third feature alone that made the period one of transition. And it was because the feudal mode is a particular form of the tribute paying mode that long-distance trade could cause it to disintegrate.
- Samir Amin, unequal development
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.
Tulip Mania was 1637 and that seems like some capitalist shit, so my highly scientific answer is, "before that I guess maybe."
I would argue the Italian city-states during the Renaissance were more or less capitalist. They represented an extremely early form of capitalism, pre-industrial capitalism and pre-mercantile capitalism. And like the many inane arguments surrounding whether China is socialist or not, the same could be said for these Italian city-states, endless arguments over whether they are capitalist or proto-capitalist or capitalist with feudal characteristics or feudal with capitalist characteristics. Here is my argument:
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The source of power for all feudal states is territory and land. It is through land that they can support a large peasant population via agriculture. A large population means feudal lords can draw upon a large labor force to maintain public works and infrastructural projects through corvee labor. Peasants didn't pay taxes by giving their single gold coin to the tax collector, at least not in societies where feudalism was at its peak. They fulfilled their feudal obligations through tax-in-kind and annual corvee labor instead. A large population also meant the potential to conscript a large feudal army. But a cursory glance at Italian city-states like the Republic of Venice shows they didn't have the landmass to justify their status as Great Powers. In contrast to what you would expect from feudal states but perfectly in line with capitalist states, their power and wealth was accumulated through trade, not through land.
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The Renaissance as an intellectual movement was anti-feudal, and part of the reason why there was renewed fascination with ancient Greek and Roman culture was because they represented a form of culture that wasn't feudal by virtue of pre-existing feudalism. It's similar to how modern trad-caths cling to Catholicism due to it being illiberal by virtue of it being feudal. Ideology springs forth from a material base, so the reason why the Renaissance was anti-feudal was because the material base in which it sprang from wasn't feudal. At the height of feudal hegemony and feudal realism, the ancient Greeks and Romans were seen as a bunch of pagans whose pagan un-Christian and un-feudal empires were destined to crumble away and be replaced by godly feudal kingdoms where everyone understood their feudal obligations within the feudal hierarchy. The feudal realism bubble popped in those (proto) capitalist Italian city-states, which meant a new intellectual movement that opposed feudalism, even if unconsciously, could be born. The Renaissance would pave the way for the Reformation, which would then pave the way for the Enlightenment.
I know that many of the Italian city states like Venice, Genoa, Florence were oligarchical republics unlike the monarchies surrounding them. Would it be fair to say they were similar to, if not an example of, a DotB?
From quickly scanning Wikipedia articles, their governments seem to have a bizarre mixture of feudal and liberal elements. For example, the Venetian doge was styled similar to a monarch, but he was also an elected official and had increasingly diminished political power. They had a legislative body that was filled with oligarchs, but the oligarchs then conspired to make the legislative body de facto hereditary, turning themselves into a form of aristocracy. Overall, they feel like republics with feudal characteristics.
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Happen to be reading the chapter on the development of capitalism in the book "economics" by Ha-Joon Chang. He says 16th century, but
"the process [of capitalism coming about] went so slowly we can't tell [exactly] from the numbers" (own translation, reading the book in Dutch).
I think that's lib for "dialectics>metaphysics but I haven't heard of dialectics". As for place, he goes with GB & NL. He mentions "parts of Italy" a few pages earlier but doesn't touch upon that later.
Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors from 1533 has a ton of references to the development of early capitalism. I just learned this last night but all of the elements in the painting suggest the rise of global mercantilism and decline of the aristocracy, esp the obfuscated skull in the foreground.
Description starts on page 2 of the introduction https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30792/642710.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
