The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View Paperback – 15 Apr 2002

WWood recent death and my own interests in longer view of capitalism strangely overlapped and I revisited this gem of historiography. Wood and Brenner have been key in getting me to re-think some over-generalizations about capitalist teleology assumed in both liberal and Marxist circles. Many Marxists after Marx have made the same assumptions as liberals about the natural development of capitalism out of feudalism as if it were an innate process of development to economics. Wood not only contested this view, but her synthesis of Brenner with E.P. Thompson explains many otherwise hard to explain traits of capitalism: Why was capitalism so much more tied to England and England’s settler colonies than to Spain or to the various early modern European merchant states like the Italian city states or the Dutch Republic, why did France require a bourgeois revolution whereas England had a religious revolution, why do Locke’s myths about property origins seem so crucial to capitalist thinkers?

This book is divided into three sections. The first is an excellent overview of the various models for the origins of capitalism including most of the figures around the various liberal models, the world-systems quasi-Marxist answers, and the key figures on the transition debate (Paul Sweezy, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, and Kohachiro Takahashi) as well as the Brenner Debates on Agrarian capitalism. While knowledge of these debates that happened between late 1950s and late 1990s does help, Wood presents them clearly and without assuming much prior knowledge. Through these debates, one can see that part of the issue is that the definition of capitalist pre-conditions isn’t settled. Is capitalism the existence of a market or the social compulsion for the market to dominate? If it is the former, then capitalism does seem natural as markets between societies for certain goods have existed in almost all societies. If it is the latter, then such systems as early modern French absolutism or the merchant systems that liberals often call mercantilism are not actually capitalism.

The second section book more clearly lays out this option while Wood acknowledges her intellectual dependence on E.P. Thompson and Robert Brenner more clearly. This section discusses how specific political arrangements after the Tudor period led to English aristocracy being dependent on value from land-holdings on the market instead of pure taxation from extra-economic forces to increase their wealth. This agrarian model creates the pre-conditions for the industrial model but did not exist elsewhere in Europe nor really even outside of England until colonialism pushed it out in search of my growth. Woods focuses on the fact that most of Europe, even colonial states like Spain, put its surplus into the military or into the use value of aristocrats, whereas the legal structures of England required re-investment and improvement to be profitable. This was power was more centralized in the hands of land-owners in the English civil war (revolution), and even after the monarchy was restored, this power was not lost. Woods also goes into why the Dutch and Italian merchant states did not give up extra-economics means of enrichment and thus didn’t develop the same culture or reinvestment. Then Woods convincing shows John Locke laying out a argument and a myth that naturalized these English developments after the English Civil War.

Admittedly, one can become slightly frustrated with Wood here. Here argument is sound, but she does not show specific instances. While she does do this in other books, one gets the feeling that this is only to lay out the logic and the minimal of empirical evidence for her position on the debates but not necessarily go deeply into the empirical historical case. Some people may be frustrated by this tendency, but she does go into these details in other works.

In the third section, Wood talks about the relationship to Enlightenment and Modernity. Wood uses Weber’s arguments about the collapsing of various kinds rationality into instrumental rationality, but unlike someone like Horkheimer or Adorno, does not assume this was the only direct result of Enlightenment thinking. If French absolutism were more sustainable, a different model may have been developed. In this sense, Wood seems to argue against critics like Adorno or Frederic Jameson that only one modernity was possible. This also opens her to be combined with theorists who don’t necessarily agree with her on the origins of capitalism when talking about capitalist development outside of Europe. For example, Jairus Banaji’s critique of overly simplistic schemas being read unto the development of capitalism in Asia can work with Wood even though the two thinkers disagree on the origins of capitalism. This third section, however, does seem to be less historiographical and more into taxonomic debates in popular left philosophy and thus seems slightly out if place in the book.

While I regard this book as excellent, it does leave a few areas unexplored. What exactly was primitive accumulation needed for it? Were the enclosures a form of primitive accumulation or something else? How crucial was the Protestant reformation for the differences in aristocratic privilege to have developed in England but not France? The timing seems to indicate that it was crucial but the direct relationship is never discussed even though it seems the breaking of church property tithe systems were just as vital as enclosures to making property the key vision of liberty in England and English speaking colonies? Another question, how crucial was US chattel slavery and what was it relationship to agrarian capitalism? Wood does mention that there is a relationship but doesn’t go very deeply into it. She explains, for example, that US slavery and primitive accumulation accelerated capitalism because of its reliance on the English model whereas the Spanish model did not even though it accumulated and enslaved as much. However, she doesn’t go into specifics here in how the developments were related.

These caveats aside, however, this book is particularly helpful at getting a grip on global capitalism origins and why it seems so related to Anglo-culture in specific and to Western Europe in general without completely Eurocentric exceptionalism being involved. It is clear and readable and presents a complicated but convinced argument.

This book is hard to read, because it must be digested slowly. Whenever anyone has the prime definition of a word, such as capitalism; one expects that it should be fairly easy to understand. Ms. Wood does not make it easy; but certainly does make it legitimate and required.
She explores the history of Capitalism, by also including debates and disagreements by economists of opposing theories and opinions.
This is what makes it difficult to find the essence and the origin on a simple "map" of economies of human history.
I highly recommend this book. But don't read anything else, simultaneously. This book requires your intimate attention, in order that you get the true explanation and history of The Origin of Capitalism. It is a longer view for sure.

I would definitely recommend reading this book, especially in these times. The mainstream neoliberal trend toward privatization since the 1980's has lead to the increased support for the Chicago school of economic thought. This book explains in great detail the authoritarian history of capitalism and how a free society cannot exist under an unregulated market economy. Along with The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, this has been a very influential book for me.

Genesis of Capitalism
Ellen Meiksins Wood

I am a life- long student of Marxism and studied this book as a part of my research for a book project, "God, government and Globalization,".
Ms Wood offers an overview of the development of capitalism:
" Marxists advocate bourgeois revolution to break the fetters of feudalism. Capitalist market is only the most advanced form of exchange. Industrialization was the inevitable outcome of human instincts.
Cyclical recessions and meltdowns are inbred in capitalism. Capitalism recovers from recurrent crisis at the cost of suffering of hundreds of millions of people.
Human labor is a commodity for sale. Bulk of work is done by property less laborers who create profit for those who purchase their labor.
The capitalists exercise control by financing the election campaigns, obliging the officials to do their bidding, purchasing the media so people hear only what they want them to".
She goes on to describe theories to explain the emergence of capitalism:
Commercialization model theory:
Classical political economy, enlightenment and Marxism all agree that capitalism is the natural outcome of human practices and required only passing of the feudal and mercantile phases for it to mature.
Adam Smith "with truck, barter and exchange", individuals have been engaged in exchange of goods and services since the beginning of history.
In this model capitalism is thus not a qualitative break, but a quantitative increase.
These restraints were removed in the West in ancient Mediterranean Society, but with several century long feudal hiatus of the Roman Empire.
The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne attributed the hiatus to Muslim empire's expansion, which closed off the trade routes between the East and the West and the Mercantile Society was replaced by a rentier one.
In this view mercantile practice of buying cheap and selling dear is the same as capitalist exchange and accumulation of wealth through appropriation of surplus value.
Bourgeois are by definition town dwellers, not noble and work for a living, but use their mind rather than the body.
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Other models:
Weber contends that capitalism arose only in specific historical conditions, and emphasized the uniqueness of Western cities and religion.
The Demographic model attributes European economic development to cycles of population growth and decline; that transition to capitalism is governed by the law of supply and demand-Malthusian blockages.
World systems theory intersects with dependency theory; world economic development by unequal exchange between core and periphery regions and exploitation by imperial power in colonial times and neo-imperial-post colonial form.
Karl Polayni challenged Adam Smith that propensity to `truck, barter and exchange' did not regulate the economy till a century after Adam Smith assigned the dominant role to it. Markets operated under different logic from that of the modern capitalist one.
Polayni points out that that only internal national markets, a very late development, resisted by merchants and autonomous towns, were run on competitive principle. Integrated internal market were the result of state intervention largely based on self -sufficient peasants. State regulation continued to prevail over competition.
The main theme of Polayni's historical account is that industrial revolution brought about a market society, invention of complex machines made it necessary to convert "natural and human substance of society into commodities".
. Commercialization model is based on the premise that Europe deserves the credit for lifting barriers to development of capitalism. Marxists believe that certain historical conditions, not European superiority produced specific consequences like capitalism.
Euro-centric accounts assume that Europeans replaced superstition with rationalism, enlightenment and technology progress and liberated the bourgeoisie.
This book helped me understand the essence of capitalism.

Everything was ok and as expected