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Chris Harman

The rise of capitalism

(Spring 2004)

From International Socialism (2nd series), No.10 2, Spring 2004.

Copyright International Soc ialism Web site.

Marked up byEinde OCallaghan for the Marxists Internet A rchiv e.

Capitalism is a peculiar form of class society. Like previous class societies it involves

a minority section of society grabbing the surplus created by the toil of the rest of

society. But there are important differences. Previous ruling classes simply seized

the surplus, while capitalists get it by buying peoples capacity to work (what Marx

called labour power). And previous ruling classes used almost all the surplus ontheir own luxury consumption or on fighting each other. The use of any of the

surplus to improve the means of production was spasmodic. Economic growth was

usually slow, often non-existent, sometimes negative for centuries at a time.

Capitalist ruling classes, however, are driven by economic competition within and

between themselves to plough a sizeable portion of the surplus back into expansion

of the means of production. There is not merely economic growth, but compulsive

accumulation. It is this which has enabled capitalist ruling classes that two and a half

centuries ago controlled only fringe areas of north western Europe to engulf theglobe today.

The question as to why this new form of class rule arose in certain parts of

western Europe and not elsewhere has long perplexed historians, including Marxist

historians. It was one of the problems the bourgeois sociologist Max Weber tried to

deal with in his extensive, and often tortuous, writings. It runs through the great

three-volume study Capitalism and Civilisation by the French economic
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historian Fernand Braudel. [1] It has also been at the centre of two big debates

among Western Marxists that among those close to the Communist parties in the

1940s and early 1950s, published in the volume The Transition from

Feudalism to Capitalism[2], and that among New Left historians in the 1970s,

published in the volume The Brenner Debate. [3]

The issues raised in the debate do not seem to have much practical importance forsocialists at the beginning of the 21st century, now that capitalism has clearly

conquered the whole globe, leaving virtually no pre-capitalist states in existence.

This is in sharp contrast with the situation for earlier generations of socialists, raised

in a world in which pre-capitalist ruling classes, or at least the remnants of them, still

exerted a decisive influence over state structures, so that how to break their grip

could seem all-important for those in what we now call the Third World.

Nevertheless, the issues remain of ideological importance. The argument is still

widespread that capitalism arose in western Europe as a result of the special values

of a Hellenic or Judaeo-Christian cultural inheritance. It is used by apologists for

capitalism like David Landes [4], opening the door to the conclusions that Western

values have to be defended at all costs from the values of Islamic, African,

indigenous American or other cultures, which are then blamed for the poverty of

much of the world.

The narrow and wider debates

Unfortunately, much Marxist discussion of the question has been quite narrow in

scope. It has concentrated on the particular factors that allowed western Europe to

make the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the 16th century onwards

while eastern Europe went through the phase of renewed feudalism, often called the

second serfdom; on why England became capitalist before France did; or on the

character of the society that existed in England between the end of serfdom (in the

late 14th century) and the full emergence of capitalism (a good three centuries

later). [5]

I tried to take up some of these narrow issues in an article I wrote some dozen

years ago. [6] One of the things I stressed was that concentrating, as much of the

debate did, on why Britain moved towards capitalism before France, or western

Europe before eastern Europe, can obscure the most obvious thing that right

across much of Europe (or at least western and central Europe) there was the rise of
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a new form of production and exploitation standing in partial contradiction to the old

form from at least the 14th century onwards. But I paid little attention in that article

to the wider question as to whether similar forces were at work in the civilisations of

Asia [7], the Americas and Africa. And if so, why did industrial capitalism emerge in

parts of Europe before going on to conquer the rest of the world? I did deal with this

wider question in passing in my bookA Peoples History of the World. [8] But,

as Robin Blackburn noted in a very friendly review of the book, my treatment of thedebates over the issue was peremptory.

Yet these are the questions that were raised in an explicitly non-Marxist manner

by Max Weber in his writings on religion, and which have been raised again in a

strongly anti-Marxist way by David Landes in his much-hyped The Wealth and

Poverty of Nations. [9]

These are also the questions that have attracted new interest from a variety of

works over the last decade or so Abu Lughods Before European Hegemony

[10], J.M. Blauts The Colonisers View of the World [11], Gunder Franks

ReOrient[12], M.S. AlimsHow Advanced was Europe in 1760 After All?[13], Xu

Dixin and Wu Chengmings Chinese Capitalism, 1522-1840 [14] and Kenneth

Pomeranzs The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the

Modern World Economy. [15] In contrast to those like Landes, these works

stress, to different degrees and from different perspectives, elements of similarity

within the economies of the conjoined Eurasian and African continents.

Abu Lughod stresses the level of development of trade and economic output in the

period before 1 500 in what Europeans called the Orient. [16] M.S. Alim argues that

it is by no means self evident that Europe was more advanced than the rest of the

world in the 18th century. He claims:

The historical evidence indicates that wages in India and Egypt werecomparable to those in the historically advanced countries ... Indian wages intextiles and agriculture were at least equal to those in Britain ... Egypt had a

per capita income of $232 in 1800 compared to $240 for France ... Inagricultural productivity Brazil and Pakistan in 1820 were ahead of Franceand Ireland, and India was at par with Ireland ... The leading industrialcountries in 1750 had only a modest lead over lagging countries inmanufacturing output per capita. If Britains industrial manufacturingoutput per head was 10, then Chinas was 8, Indias 7, Brazil 6, France 9,Belgium 9, the US 4.

All this suggests a near parity of economic development of western Europe and

China, India and the Middle East as late as 1800 ... The progress that Eurocentric
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accounts have attributed to Europe was part of a general development that affected

Asia and the Middle East as well. [17]

Blaut argues that there was a system of trade stretching from Asia through the

Middle East and the northern half of Africa to the southern fringes of Europe in the

medieval period that linked great agrarian societies dominated by feudal ruling

classes. Within each of these there was a:

... process of increasing urbanisation and increasing long distance commoditymovements which characterised the late middle ages throughout thehemisphere ... In all three continents we find relatively small rural regions(they were generally hinterlands of major port cities), along with a fewhighly commercialised agricultural and mining regions, which were clearlybeing penetrated by capitalism ... Among them were Flanders, south easternEngland, northern Italy, sugar-planting regions of Morocco, the Nile Valley,the Gold Coast, Kilwa, Sofala (and hypothetically part of Zimbabwe),Malabar, Coromanchel, Bengal, northern Java and south coastal China ...

Cities clothed the landscape from northern Europe to southern Africa toeastern Asia ... We can distinguish a special group of cities that were stronglyoriented toward manufacturing and trade, were more or less marginal topowerful feudal states and were engaged in long distance maritime trade.[18]

It is a mistake, Blaut insists, to contrast Europe with China, India or Africa in

the way the discussion about the rise of capitalism often does. The focus instead

should be on the similarity of development within enclaves of proto-capitalism to be

found within each global region. And the existence of the intercontinental tradenetwork ensured new productive techniques flowed rapidly from one to another:

The diffusion of technological innovations had gone so far that the productivity of

human labour was hardly ever limited by lack of technical knowledge of a kind

available to other farmers in other parts of the hemisphere. [19]

Such passages have the great merit of stressing the global context against which

capitalism developed in certain regions of western Europe, especially the spread of

trade and advances in productive techniques. This is a welcome corrective to the

narrow focus on supposedly unique developments in late medieval western Europe.

They accord with parts of my own (often implicit) argument in A Peoples

History of the World. Capitalism is not a product of some peculiarly European

development. Since the first agriculture in the Middle East some 10,000 or so years

ago there has been a cumulative, if sporadic, growth of new forces of production

spreading right across the connected land masses of Europe, Asia and Africa. The

rise of capitalism in Europe is just one passing phase in this whole process. Elements
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pushing for capitalism began to emerge in several different parts of the world. In

practice these elements developed more slowly elsewhere than in Europe for

contingent historical reasons (or rather, more slowly than western Europe, for things

were much more like India than England in huge swathes of eastern and southern

Europe) and then arrived too late in the day to do so independently. It was not

European values that created capitalism, but rather capitalism that created what

we think of as European values. And capitalism did not arise because of some uniqueEuropean occurrence, but as a product of the development of the forces and

relations of production on a global scale.

But these points alone leave unanswered the question of why countries like

Holland and Britain could then begin to undergo further changes before the rest of

the world. Blaut skirts round the question by describing the network of medieval

cities as proto-capitalist and insisting that feudalism in Europe was no nearer its

final demise in 1492 than were the feudalisms of many extra-European regions.[20] But feudalism did suffer its demise in at least these two parts of Europe in the

following century and a half. There proto-capitalisms began changing into full-

blooded capitalisms. Elsewhere the transformation stopped, or even reversed, with

feudal forms of production deepening their hold in Poland, eastern Germany, the

Czech lands, the Balkans and even parts of northern Italy that had seemed at the

forefront of proto-capitalist development at the time of the Renaissance in the 15th

century.

Instead of dealing with this question seriously, Blaut has a tendency simply to

dismiss those who raise it as Eurocentric as if it is somehow Eurocentric to

recognise that parts of Europe, their rapid economic growth and their global empires

were a dominant factor in world history from at least the mid-18th century onwards.

This tendency is even more marked in the recent works of Gunder Frank, who

claims Marxs entire theory of capitalism was vitiated by Eurocentric

assumptions that Europe was different. [21] He replaces the notion of capitalism

with that of a world system supposedly existing since the first emergence of a

trading class, without there being any such thing as the rise of capitalism separate

from the industrial revolution. [22] He sees a single dynamic to the productive

system based upon long or Kondratieff waves going right back to 10th century

China [23] or even to the Bronze Age. [24] This is to deny the most elementary fact

that we live today under an economic system based, as no other was, on the drive

to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. And this is not just a result of the growth

of trade.
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Trade and the rise of class society

Class societies began to emerge in various parts of the world from around 5,000

years ago onwards. Over a period of several centuries, what had once been

communal production fell under the control of ruling minorities who ensured itprovided them with an increasingly luxurious and leisurely lifestyle. At first they

tended to exploit the rest of society collectively, as temple priests or royal

households, rather than through private property. On this basis civilisations as

diverse as those in the Nile Valley, ancient Iraq, northern China, the Indus Valley,

central America, the Andes, Crete, Ethiopia and west Africa developed. [25] Over

time central control tended to weaken and a class of aristocrats, gentry or lords

to emerge which exploited direct cultivators in each locality. At the same time, the

polarisation of society into classes found its reflection in greater or lesser degrees of

disintegration of the old communal forms of agricultural production and the

emergence of peasant households as the main productive units. There would then be

a continual tussle between the central state administration, with its corps of tax

collectors, and the local rulers over who got the lions share of the surplus which was

taken from the peasants in the form of labour services, crops or, sometimes, cash. All

these societies had one thing in common the ruling class, whether made up of lords

and aristocrats or of state administrators, took the surplus directly off the peasant

producers, without any pretence of exchange of goods.

Such ruling classes increasingly felt the need for products that could not be

obtained simply from the local cultivators. They needed materials for palace and

temple building, for the making of armaments and for luxury consumption. Such

things could often be obtained only by looting distant peoples, or through some sort

of exchange with them.

There was some exchange long before the rise of classes. Archaeologists have

found artefacts that must have been made many hundreds of miles away among the

remains of hunter-gatherer settlements of southern France more than 20,000 years

ago, and the circulation of the products of human labour was even more widespread

in the agricultural societies that began to emerge ten millennia later. There was no

other way, for instance, that the villagers of the river plain of southern Iraq could get

metal ores and even wood (since the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates was

virtually treeless). But the circulation of products in pre-class societies was not trade
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in the sense that we know the term today. It was not carried out according to strict

calculations of profit or loss, but according to traditions of gift-giving and gift-taking,

based on customary rites, much as continued to happen in pre-class societies in

places like Polynesia right into the 20th century. [26]

The rise of the ruling classes of the new civilisations transformed this situation.

They demanded distantly-obtained products on a scale that could not be satisfied bythe old-established customary networks. At the same time, they were rarely

prepared to face the hardship and risks involved in procuring such things

themselves. People soon emerged who were in return for a share of the surplus

the ruling class had obtained through exploiting the cultivators. So specialised

traders got a mark-up by selling to the ruling class goods from a great distance

away. Some were individuals from the exploited cultivator class, others from the

nomadic peoples living between the centres of civilisation. But regardless of their

origins, they began to crystallise into a privileged classes separate from the old rulingclasses.

Such merchant classes emerge in similar ways in societies with little or no contact

with each other: in second millennium BC Babylon and Egypt; in India, China,

Greece and Rome by 300 BC; in Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico by AD 200; in

the Arabian peninsular by AD 600; among the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula by

AD 1000; on the northern coast of the Andean region by 1500 BC. Once in existence

such a class usually left its mark ideologically and politically as well as economically.

The spread of each of the great world religions Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity

and Islam was along trade routes travelled by the merchants. The worlds major

languages often developed out of the vernacular forms by which people

communicated with each other along trade routes and in marketplaces. And sections

of the established agrarian ruling classes repeatedly found the merchants useful

allies in struggles with other sections for dominance: the rise of the Chin kingdom

and then empire in northern China and of the Mauryan empire in India in the 4th

and 3rd centuries BC depended on such manoeuvres, and the Arab dynasties that

ruled the Middle East a millennium later owed their success to reliance on

merchants as well as tribal armies and landed exploiting classes.

But in these alliances the merchants were always the junior partners to the rulers,

and much mistrusted by them. Merchant wealth came from siphoning off some of

the surplus under the control of the old ruling class, and this was resented. So the

most powerful merchant could suddenly be thrown into prison, lose his head or be

cut in half. He lacked the independent base in production and exploitation to do


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much more than kowtow to the old rulers.

Marx made a distinction between merchant capital (that profits from financing

trade), usurers capital (that makes profits from interests on lending) and productive

capital (that profits from employing workers to operate its means of production).

Merchant capital and usurers capital existed under all the old empires, wherever

there was large-scale trade or moneylending. But productive capital made only arare and fleeting appearance. In ancient Rome, for instance, the most successful

capitalists were the tax farmers, whose wealth came from the contracting out of

tax collecting by the state. In Chin and Han China (300 BC-AD 300) the merchants

collaborated with the state in running the salt and iron monopolies. In the Arab

empires of the Middle East the goods traded by the merchants were produced by

peasants exploited by big landowners, by self employed artisans or, occasionally, by

state enterprises not by enterprises run by the merchants themselves.

The preconditions for full capitalism

It is wrong to equate such usurer or merchant classes, who are dependent on

exploitation carried out by others, with capitalism as such, as non-Marxists such as

Braudel do and as does Gunder Frank.

The system as we know it today could only come into existence because at some

point a capitalist class emerged that did directly control production and was

therefore able to directly exploit people on its own account, rather than simply being

an intermediary between other exploiters.

One precondition for the emergence of true capitalism, as Marx showed, was the

separation of the immediate producers (those who did the work) from the means of

production, which passed into the hands of the new exploiting class. The producers

then had only one way to get a livelihood. They had to persuade the members of this

exploiting class to make use of their capacity for labour (their labour power) in

return for a remuneration sufficient to keep them alive and fit for work. But the level

of that remuneration was substantially lower than the value of the goods produced

by their work. The difference, the surplus, went straight into the pockets of the

owners of the means of production. They gained the fruits of the exploitation of

labour, even if it was legally free, just as much as the old ruling class that exploited

unfree labour.


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Marx described in Capital the forcible separation of the workforce in Britain

from control over the means of production by the driving of people from the land

with the enclosures of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and the clearances of the

19th century. In many parts of the world the process continued right into the 20th

century with the seizure of native lands in places like southern Africa by white

colonists and also with the so called collectivisation of agriculture under Stalinism.

Without such a separation of the workforce from the means of production the

spread of production for the market could lead, not to capitalism, but to a new

variant of serfdom, the so called second serfdom of eastern and southern Europe, or

to the encomienda system in Latin America. The output of production in these

regions was directed towards world markets, but the internal dynamic was very

different to that of capitalism, with its drive to competitive accumulation. [27]

Slavery, serfdom, free labour and exploitation

Separating the producers from the means of production was not by itself sufficient to

bring about the development of capitalism. There are many historical instances in

which such separation did not lead to capitalism. For example, in Italy under the

Roman Republic after the Punic Wars (the 2nd century BC) the peasants were

driven from the land by indebtedness. What replaced them, however, was not wage

labour but large-scale slavery. [28] Even the worlds first industrial enterprises didnot necessarily employ wage labour: Nishijima Sadao writes that professional

workers, convicts, captives and corve labourers did the work in Chin China (3rd

century BC). [29] A thousand years later the biggest factories in China were state

run, and:

Labourers were normally paid by the state ... but this did not mean that theartisans worked voluntarily for the state ... Many skilled workers were draftedin to work for the government [and] artisans were subject to cruel and harsh

punishments if their service was deemed unsatisfactory; not a few of themwere even tortured to death. [30]

Slavery was a logical way for a ruling class to extract a surplus from those it

exploited, since direct physical control was certainly a way to make someone work

for you. It provided certainty that the maximum proportion of social labour would

accrue to the exploiter.

But it had a downside whenever increasing production depended upon the
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initiative of the labourers. If they bitterly resented the conditions under which they

toiled then the quality of the good produced was likely to suffer, and any tools used

in production were likely to experience excessive wear and tear. There was also the

problem of supervising slave labour, which could be an expensive business, since the

slavedrivers had to be provided for out of the surplus from the slave, and super

slavedrivers had to exist to stop the slavedrivers taking too much of that surplus.

From early on there were critics within ruling classes of the deleterious effects of

slavery on total output. Already, as in the Discourse on Salt and Iron in 81 BC

China, there were critics of conscripted labour, who pointed to the poor quality of

the tools actually produced in the imperial iron agencies and deprecated the misuse

of state labour. [31] Much the same argument was repeated by Adam Smith 1,800

years later in his objections to unfree labour in The Wealth of Nations and in the

mid-19th century by industrial interests in the north eastern US who opposed the

westward spread of the slave sy stem of the South.

In fact, slavery was not the main form of exploitation in most agricultural class

societies. Rome under the late Republic and early Empire was the exception, not the

rule. In ancient Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, ancient India, ancient China, and in the

empires of the pre-Hispanic Americas, production was in the hands of peasant

households, who were then forced to hand over their surplus or provide a certain

amount of unpaid labour to landowners or state officials. Serfdom or something close

to it prevailed, not outright slavery.

What is more, where slavery did exist, occasions occurred in which sections of the

ruling class could come to see advantages in moving to serfdom in half-freeing

former slaves. This happened in the later Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th

centuries as the price of slaves rose many landowners opted for the colonate

system of serf-like peasant production. The French Marxist historian Guy Bois has

argued that it happened again in the 10th century in western Europe, as those who

controlled the landed estates discovered pragmatically that giving greater

responsibility to the individual peasant household led to a growth in agricultural

output. [32] Replacement of total control of the workforce (slavery) by partial

control (serfdom) may have led to a fall in the proportion of the total output going to

the lord, but this was more than compensated for by the growth in that output. [33]

Forces of production and relations of exploitation


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This last example also points to something important which too many Marxists have

ignored out of a desire not to appear too crude or economistic. Changes in forms of

exploitation are connected with changes in production methods. It was precisely

because new productive techniques were beginning to spread into western Europe

usually from the other end of the Eurasian land mass in the 10th and 11th

centuries that it made sense to those who controlled the land to devolve more

responsibility to the peasant household. For the new techniques worked best whenthere was careful tending of crops and farm animals, something difficult to attain

using slaves. Changes in the forces of production encouraged changes in the relations

of production.

This was the point of Marxs famous summary of the development of different

modes of production in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy of 1857:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definiterelations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of productionappropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces ofproduction. The totality of these relations of production constitutes theeconomic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legaland political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of socialconsciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productiveforces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms with the propertyrelations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. [34]

It was also the point he made some ten years earlier, when he claimed:

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring newproductive forces men change their mode of production; and in changingtheir mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, theychange all their social relations. The handmill gives you society with thefeudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. [35]

The summation is crude. It is also historically inaccurate. What accompanied the rise

of European feudalism after the 10th century was not the spread of the handmill,but its replacement over the centuries, the watermill and the watermill then went

on to play an important role in the genesis of industrial capitalism. But Marxs

central point was correct. There was a necessary connection between production

methods and the most fruitful way for a minority to exploit the rest of the

population. And this was not just true of the rise of European feudalism. It was also

true of the rise of exploitation based upon free labour of capitalism.
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This is something ignored by the school of thought which emphasises the role of

the market in the rise of capitalism, but also by the rival school which stresses the

importance of bitter class struggle. As they debate with each other, they make the

symmetrical mistake of neglecting the processes by which humans advance their

capacity to wrest a livelihood from nature.

For capitalism to arise, there had not only to be separation of the immediateproducers from control over the means of production, but also new ways of

producing that would give the exploiters a bigger surplus when operated by free

waged labour rather than by slave or serf labour. And these new ways of producing

had to be such that they escaped from the control of the old agrarian ruling classes

(or at least from the major sections of those classes).

Mechanisation, markets and capitalism

Productive capitalism was not possible before a certain point in human history. This

was when there was a massive escalation of the use of the products of past labour to

increase the productivity of present labour, when the use of relatively simple tools

began to give way to the first mechanisation, in the broadest sense of the term. [36]

This could have a fourfold effect. It (1) increased the output and therefore the

potential surplus to be obtained from a given quantity of labour. It (2) increased

the cost of equipment and materials needed to undertake production and

therefore the likelihood that the individual producers would not be able to supply

them themselves. It (3) increased the dependence of production on the initiative and

commitment of the producer (if only because more care needed to be taken on the

expensive equipment) and therefore the advantage of exploiting free as opposed to

serf or slave labour. And it (4) increased the importance of trading networks which

could supply raw materials and dispose of the increased output.

Where mechanisation had all four effects it separated immediate producers from

control over the means of production on the one hand and encouraged the use of

free labour by the new class of controllers on the other. It also increased the

integration of the whole production process with the market.

All four effects were not always present. Often in the early stages the individual

producer still partially owned and controlled the means of production, although

becoming increasingly dependent on merchants, landowners or moneylenders for


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funds and raw materials. In these cases transitional forms to fully capitalist

production flourished for instance, the putting-out system in the towns, share-

cropping in the countryside. As we have seen, there were also many cases in which

slave or serf labour was used in early forms of industrial production. And in some

cases at least, mechanised forms of production were quite compatible with the denial

of any initiative to some groups of labourers. This was true on the sugar plantations

of the Caribbean in the 18th century and the cotton plantations of the AmericanSouth through the first half of the 19th century.

Yet once mechanised processes were under way the possibilities of a transition to

capitalist forms of production were there. The development of productive capitalism

depended on such developments in the forces of production. By contrast, where such

developments did not occur, merchant and usurer capitalism were possible, but not

productive capitalism.

This explains why capitalism did not develop in the ancient civilisations of the

Middle East and the Mediterranean lands or in the pre-Hispanic civilisations of the

Americas. In neither case were the forces of production sufficiently advanced for a

new class of capitalist exploiters independent of the old ruling classes to emerge.

The not so dark ages

There is a traditional, purely European, view of history which sees the second half of

the first millennium AD as one of stagnation and then regression, the Dark Ages.

The view is not completely true even of Europe, where the decline of urban life was

accompanied, by the 9th and 10th centuries, by the spread of new agricultural

methods. And the view is completely wrong when it comes to other parts of the

Eurasian-African landmass. Across wide regions the productive forces underwent

accelerated development, and with it there were possibilities for new social relations

of production.

This was most clearly the case in China. Already in the Chin and Han periods (the

last centuries BC and the first centuries AD) there was the large-scale production of

cast-iron implements (not known in Europe until the 14th century), and by the Sung

period (around the year 1000) there were new advanced ways of harnessing horses,

the use of milling machinery and of farming implements on the land, book printing,

paper making, the working of bellows by water power in iron making, the use of pit

coal in metallurgy and explosives in pits, the making of weapons, clothing, ships and


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luxury goods under factory-like conditions, and the construction of clockwork

devices. Joseph Needham has shown how all sorts of key developments in

mechanisation occurred in China many centuries before they were known in western

Europe. [37]

Merchant classes arose that were able to influence society politically by making

alliances with monarchs against the big landed aristocrats, in much the same way asin the absolute monarchies that arose at the end of the west European feudal period.

Sometimes these merchants moved over from involvement in trade alone to

involvement in the production of things like iron, salt and luxury goods. And by the

end of the first millennium the owners of large estates began to see advantages in

relying on tenant farmers or wage labourers to work them again, a development

similar to that which took place in the late European Middle Ages. The economic and

political changes were matched in both periods by ideological ferment, with new sets

of ideas challenging the Confucian worldview of the landed gentry class. [38]

By the 12th century this society had most of the productive techniques which

were to be associated with the rise of capitalism in western Europe 500 years later.

There was widespread use of free labour. And there was a merchant class capable

of exerting influence on the state. Yet capitalism did not break through.

To explain this, you have to look not just at the forces of production, but the

interplay between what Marx called the base and the superstructure.

The political superstructures of the successive Chinese dynasties from the Chin

(around 300 BC) onwards were large, costly and highly cohesive, centred around

structures of bureaucratic control that survived at the core of large local states even

during times when the central empire collapsed. This necessarily restricted the

space in which members of the merchant class could develop their own independent

political presence. In the Tang period (around AD 700) the state kept tight control

over the cities to prevent their inhabitants exhibiting any independence walls

divided the cities into separate wards, and police patrolled the streets at night toprevent people moving around. The old ruling class remained in control, cramping

further development of the forces of production while wasting a vast proportion of

existing output, until the state could no longer sustain itself and went into crisis.

Considerable changes in production also occurred in the Indian subcontinent from

about 400 BC through to around AD 500. There was a rapid growth of urban crafts,

flourishing internal trade and international trading networks which stretched to


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Vietnam, Indonesia and China in one direction and to the Roman Mediterranean in

the other. But important techniques known in China were not to be found in India

(for example, the use of cast iron), and from about the 6th century AD onwards

there was a decline of trade and urban life while the focus for the artisan crafts

shifted to the villages, where they were integrated into a caste system increasingly

dominated by a priestly layer, the Brahmins. There were still important advances in

productive techniques, but they mainly seem to have been in agriculture at a timewhen trade and urban life were in decline.

Just as the Indian societies were experiencing this ruralisation, there was a

contrary process taking place across the Middle East and North Africa (and in

Moorish Spain). The growth of influence of the merchants in the century after the

Arab conquests of the 7th century was such that some historians have referred to

the revolution that established the Abbasid dynasty in the 8th century as a

bourgeois revolution. [39] There were sophisticated, long distance bankingsystems, advances in seafaring allowed merchants to ply the whole region from

southern China to northern Spain, and paper making and silk weaving spread there

from China. Overall there was a massive development of merchant capitalism and

usurers capitalism. But production in the countryside was still dominated by old

landed classes and in the cities by petty artisans, leaving little possibility for

productive capitalism to emerge. Important Chinese techniques like printing and

iron casting were not adopted, even though there were groups of Arabian merchants

in southern Chinese cities who would have been aware of these innovations. Undersuch circumstances the urban classes who had played an important political role at

the time of the Abbasid revolution lost their influence. The historic centre of the

Middle East, Mesopotamia (Iraq), went into decline by the beginning of the second

millennium as a result of a deterioration of its irrigation system and overexploitation

of its peasantry, while the new centre, Egypt, was constrained by the rapacious rule

of a military caste (the Mamelukes).

Again these events can only be understood by examining not merely the growth of

production and the changes in class composition that accompanied this, but also the

clash between political and ideological formations associated with old and new forms

of production the interaction of base and superstructure.

Here there is a real contrast in the medieval period between the situation of the

eastern empires and that of much of Europe. The superstructures in medieval

Europe were weak and fragmented. A plethora of local lords struggled with each

other to exploit and dominate the mass of people in each locality, often barely


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recognising the authority of kings and emperors who themselves were involved in

continual dynastic conflicts. The main instrument of ideological control, the church,

was organised along hierarchic lines of its own, with allegiance to popes in Rome (and

at one point in Avignon) whose political ambitions often clashed with those of kings

and lords alike. This fragmentation allowed the merchant and artisan classes to

create political space of their own, running many of the towns in which they resided,

sometimes by agreement with local lords, princes and kings, sometimes in continualstruggle against them. By the 14th century they were an independent element in the

political geography of regions like northern Italy and Flanders; they were important

components that enabled powerful monarchies to contract themselves in France,

Spain and Britain in the 16th century; and they provided launching pads for the

bourgeois revolutions of the 17th century (in Holland and England) and the late 18th

century (in France).

The weakness of the European superstructure itself had a cause the relativelybackward character of north western Europe in the first millennium AD. The lower

level of development of the forces of production meant that the superstructure was

much less developed in the 10th century than in China or the Middle East. As I put it

inA Peoples History:

Europes very backwardness encouraged people to adopt from elsewhere newways of wresting a livelihood. Slowly, over many centuries, they began toapply techniques already known in China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and

southern Spain. There was a corresponding slow but cumulative change inthe social relations of society as a whole just as there had been in SungChina or the Abbasid caliphate, but this time without the enormous deadweight of an old imperial superstructure to smother continued advance. Thevery backwardness of Europe allowed it to leapfrog over the great empires.[40]

The adoption of new techniques in agriculture encouraged such fragmentation of the

superstructure, at least at first. The techniques required the peasant family to be

able to concentrate on production with at least a minimal guarantee that it would not

see a distant aristocrat or tax collector walk off with all the benefits. Productionadvanced where there was a local lord who protected (in the mafia sense of the

term) as well as robbed the peasantry.

Nevertheless, by the 14th century Europe had imposing and expensive

superstructures of its own. Its cathedrals may still look amazing, but they diverted

vast amounts of surplus from being used to further improve production as did the

castles, the monasteries and abbeys and the near endless wars between emperors,


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kings and popes. All these factors together did provoke the enormous social crisis of

the 14th century and a further great period of crisis in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Whole regions which had been expanding rapidly were thrown right back as a result.

But, and here was the major difference with similar crises at the end of the Sung

period in China and the Abbasid period in Mesopotamia, the development of the

forces of production resumed where it had left off after relatively brief periods,

based on the beginning of the emergence of new relations of production.

Not that the Chinese superstructure was unchanging. It entered into deep crisis at

the end of the Sung period. First a Turkic people conquered the north, splitting the

empire in two, and then the Mongols conquered both parts. The Mongol Chinese

empire in turn fell apart in the face of an agrarian crisis and peasant rebellions in the

14th century which finally culminated in the conquest of the state by the Ming

dynasty.

The crisis which led to the fall of the Mongol dynasty and its replacement by the

Ming occurred at the same time as the great crisis of the 14th century in feudal

Europe and seems to have had similar roots. The sheer costs of the sustaining the

luxury consumption of the ruling class and an increasingly elaborate superstructure

prevented further advances in food production, giving rise to famines, plagues and

discontent among all the lower layers of society.

But the outcomes of the two crises were different in important respects.

In China the local revolts gave way to a new, centralised empire whose rulers

consciously followed a strategy of keeping a tight check on the growth of the

merchant and artisan classes. And they did so with remarkable success, so that

although there was an expansion of trade and industry and the development of a

certain independent culture catering for the classes involved in them, these classes

never developed the bases of semi-autonomous political power they were able to

exercise in many European towns. As Wu Chengming tells, although there was a

growth of markets, the big landlords in the countryside relied upon slaves andbondservants of their labour: For the period before the 1840s we have found

records of only two or three landlords involved in cash crop farming of a more or less

capitalist nature. Wage labour of a truly capitalist character was extremely rare.

[41] So although agricultural products were sold in the towns, only a very small

proportion of products flowed from the town to the countryside. [42] Meanwhile,

most industrial production was by small-scale, independent craftspeople.

Embryonic capitalism did not make its appearance until two centuries later than in


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Europe. [43]

The weak development of an independent productive base of Chinas money and

merchant capitalists made it difficult for them to intervene independently as a social

force. In parts of the south eastern Chinese seaboard, the merchants formed armed

groups during the middle Ming period (i.e. the 16th century) to protect illicit trade

and to fight against imperial armies that tried to stop it. These might be seen aspotential seeds of a bourgeois power standing in opposition to the empire, but they

were seeds that did not germinate, despite the fact that production in China may

well have been more advanced, in terms of output per head and of techniques, than

in western Europe at that time. [44] And when the Ming empire entered its great

period of crisis (again, at the same time as a period of great crisis in Europe, that of

the 17th century), there were embryos of new forces, with a worldview of their own,

but they were far too weak to raise the prospect of reshaping society in their own

image.

There was a sharp contrast not just with revolutionary Holland and Britain, but

also with some other regions of Europe. The strong monarchies of the 16th century

and the absolutisms of the 17th and 18th centuries were actually fairly ramshackle

affairs, dependent on the ability of monarchs to bribe as well as intimidate local

power-holders in the towns as well as the country side. Even after rulers had crushed

revolts in the most bloody fashion (as the Austrian monarchy did in the Thirty Years

War), they still depended on degrees of compromise and could not prevent some

new social forces continuing to emerge, creating the conditions for a new wave of

struggle a century or two later.

The case of India

Those Europeans who first came into direct contact with India in the latter part of

the 18th century, when the British began their conquest of the subcontinent, found a

region much of which was undergoing a deep economic and political crisis. They

interpreted this as meaning that India had never known anything other than

economic stagnation a view that influenced Marxs writings on India more than

half a century later. Indian economic historians, many of them influenced by

Marxism, have shown how wrong that view was.

R.S. Sharma, for instance, has argued that in early medieval India at least there

was a similar, through not identical, feudal mode of production to that in medieval


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Europe:

Feudalism appears in a predominantly agrarian economy which ischaracterised by a class of landlords and a class of servile peasantry. In thissystem the landlords extract surplus through social, religious or politicalmethods, which are called extra-economic. This seems to be more or less thecurrent Marxist view of feudalism. The lord-peasant relationship is the coreof the matter. [45]

As in Europe there was room for certain advances in productive methods within this:

We can certainly identify significant changes in the mode of production inearly medieval times. This period was undoubtedly an age of larger yields andof great agrarian expansion ... Animal husbandry was improved because ofcare given to the treatment of cattle diseases ... The use of iron became socommon that it began to be employed for non-utilitarian purposes ... Theincrease in the number of varieties of cereals including rice, wheat and lentilsas well as in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and so on, is striking. [46]

In the later medieval period, after the conquest of most of northern India by Muslim

monarchies from the 12th century onwards, much of the surplus taken from the

peasantry went into the hands of state officials rather than old local lords. As Irfan

Habib has noted, The kings bureaucracy thereby became the principal exploiting

class in society. [47] This has led some historians (including Habib) to see this period

at least as non-feudal.

But the central productive relation remained that between the dependent

peasantry and those that exploited them, even if the exploitation was to a large

extent carried out by the state rather than individual lords. And for much of the

period the impact was to produce changes like those which occurred in later

medieval Europe a growth of towns, increased reliance on markets and money,

and a transformation of much of agriculture. Habib writes that after the first

conquests:

Large-scale trade between town and country must have resulted. This in turnpromoted the cultivation of superior crops ... The large export of grain andother produce from the country, caused by the exaction of the revenues,maintained a class of specialised grain merchants ... Town crafts also grew.[48]

With the establishment of the Mogul empire in the 16th century, there was the

growth of commerce and the extensive activation for the market ... The rapid spread

of the tobacco crop within the first 50 years of the 17th century throughout the

length and breadth of India is an index of how quickly the peasant was now able to

follow the market. [49]
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There was development of the means of production, with the adoption of many of

the same innovations that took root in medieval and early modern Europe. Irfan

Habib has pointed out that the Indian subcontinent had developed to the same

general level in making elementary machines as western Europe by the 17th

century. The building of the Taj Mahal in the mid-17th century utilised the skills and

techniques of craftsmen from right across Eurasia, while the Indian textile industry

used looms and spinning wheels essentially the same as those used in 16th and early17th century Europe. Overall, there was a massive growth of markets, of trade, of

craft production (it is worth remembering that in the 18th century India sold much

more to Europe than vice versa) and of urbanisation.

The direction of economic and social development in India was not fundamentally

different to that in Europe. This was because of considerable similarities in both the

relations of exploitation and the productive forces. The direction in which Indian and

west European economic development was heading was the same. There wereconsiderable differences in speed of development. But these difference existed on

just as great a scale between different regions within both Europe and India.

It was the impact of the political superstructure reacting on the economy that

brought the development to an end across wide swathes of northern India. The

monarchy followed a policy of moving its officials from area to area every few years

so as to stop them ever establishing the independent local roots which would give

them the ability to resist central control. But this meant the officials set out to enrich

themselves as quickly as possible at the expense of the local people, showing little

concern about sustaining, let alone increasing, the productivity of the land under

their control. According to Habib, the flow of agricultural products to the markets of

the cities was not matched, as in parts of Europe, by a flow of manufactured goods

from the cities to the countryside, where some could have contributed to increasing

output. The resulting limitation to the domestic market could also help explain why

the machines used to make goods in the cities of 17th century India were generally

made of wood, while metal was used in Europe. [50] By the end of the 17th century

the weaknesses in agriculture were reducing the productive resources of the empire

as a whole and leading to rebellions and civil wars, which further sapped productive

resources. [51] The break-up of the old superstructure might, in time, have led to an

unlocking of the indigenous forces pushing towards capitalist or semi-capitalist forms

of production. But something else intervened first. The merchant capitalists of the

still dynamic region of Bengal saw the easiest way to protect their trade as backing

the emerging political power of the British East India Company. [52]


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The controversy over the Asiatic mode of production

Marx argued at certain points that what existed in India was an example of an

Asiatic mode of production different to the feudalism of western Europe. [53]

He outlined a theoretical account of societies where the ruling class collectively

exploited an oppressed class, which itself was engaged in collective production. He

suggested that this was a transitional form between primitive communism and a

fully developed class society. This seems in fact to have fitted the description of

certain ancient societies (early Sumer, early Egypt, Peru). But, as we have seen, he

was fundamentally mistaken in seeing India as an unchanging society with a static

economy.

Some people have concluded that Marx was right in one respect in seeing the

major role played by the state administrators in exploitation as leading to a mode of

production so different to that of European feudalism as to deserve a different name

whether the Asiatic mode, the tributary mode or some other name. [54]

But this approach is mistaken regarding India. The increased importance of the

state as against the individual landlords did not stop there being some remarkable

similarities in the trajectories of late medieval and early modern India and Europe

especially when you take into account the backwardness of much of Europe until the

beginning of the 20th century. The differences that do exist do not need the whole

conceptual apparatus of a different mode of production to explain them. As the

Turkish Marxist Halil Berktay has pointed out, Each [feudal] society is not just the

feudal mode but also its entire superstructure, which, moreover, comes into being as

a concrete historical reality through a specific process woven by innumerable

hazards, and each such society thereby also incorporates elements of the soil on

which it arises. [55]

To fail to see this is to fall into a vulgar economic determination which consists in

holding that the actual movement of any given society will reach the potential

dynamic of its mode of production fully and completely. [56]

The conquests of northern India by armies from the north west of the

subcontinent in the 12th and again in the 16th centuries led to the temporary

imposition of powerful, centralised political superstructures, which sapped


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productive resources and hampered further economic developments. But similar

things happened at various points in parts of Europe for instance, after the wars of

religion of 16th century France and the Thirty Years War in 17th century central

Europe. And in any case, there was a tendency after a period of about a century and

a half for the superstructures of the northern Indian empires to begin to crack apart,

opening up possibilities for a more normal development of feudalism and within it

the possibility of embryos of productive capitalism. [57]

The notion of the Asiatic mode of production has been applied to China as well as

India. The German Sinologist Wittfogel did so in the 1920s and 1930s while still a

Marxist, presenting a relatively sophisticated picture of clashes between three

exploiting classes in China from the 5th century BC onwards an old feudal class

based on land ownership, a bourgeoisie of merchants, and a state bureaucratic class

which controlled the hydraulic sy stems (dams and canals) important for agriculture

and trade. [58] After he had migrated to the US, ceased to be a Marxist and adopteda hard Cold War ideology, Wittfogel tried to generalise his notion to vast regions of

the world with a theory of oriental despotism. In most cases, his arguments consist

of little more than saying there is a powerful despotism and that therefore there

must be some mode of production different to that which developed in medieval

Europe.

However, it seems to me that he did have a point in his original Marxist attempt

to come to terms with Chinese society. This was a region, as we have seen, where

repeated and powerful trends towards the development of capitalism occurred, but

never quite broke through the superstructure. And there was one significant factor

about the mode of production that was different to Europe (and, for that matter to

India, Islamic North Africa or the Ottoman Empire of the early modern period). This

was the centrality of canal systems for irrigation, transport and flood control. From

about 400 BC onwards centrally planned canal systems were important for

agriculture in parts of northern China. But their importance soon became much

greater than that. They provided the vital transport system for carrying food and

raw material to the cities of the north salt from the coast, iron and, from the time

of the Tung and Sung empires on (from the 7th to the 12th centuries), rice from the

Yangtze valley. The actual transportation of these things might be in the hands of

merchants. But they could not do without the canal system, and these required the

existence of an imperial state bureaucracy.

In other words, the bureaucracy was based not simply on balancing between

different classes, but had an independent base of its own through its control of a

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major means of production. This was a means of production the merchants could not

do without, and so they could never raise revolutionary demands against the

bureaucracy. Nor, for that matter, could the large landowners who emerged at

various points in Chinese history. They had a common interest with the bureaucracy

in maintaining a strong central imperial state, rather than an opposed interest in

creating local networks of power under their own control.

So it was that each period of crisis and peasant revolt culminated in the

restoration of the centralised superstructure, within which the merchants and

artisan classes played a subordinate role. It was not until the empire was on the

verge of collapse at the beginning of the 20th century that the Chinese bourgeoisie

began to play an independent role and even then it was limited by fear of the

workers and peasants on the one hand and by continued dependence on the state on

the other (so that Guomindang (Kuomintang) China was characterised by massive

levels of state capitalism).

The subordinate role of the merchants and artisans did not stop significant

advances in the forces of production in China, even after the Sung period. But it did

mean that China lost the massive lead over Europe it held in the 10th century , and it

also meant that those forces pressing for reform of the empire in the 11th century

were too weak to be successful. It also hampered those pushing for some equivalent

of the Renaissance in the 17th century, so creating a growing dependence on

Western science and technology for further advance.

The long trajectory of Chinese history is perhaps best understood as shaped by

two elements in the productive base of society an agricultural base with a

tendency to develop rather like European feudalism, with potentially capitalist

elements emerging long before they did in Europe, and a hydraulic base

encouraging the formation of a bureaucracy powerful enough to block the elements

of capitalism from ever breaking out of marginality.

Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming use the term feudalism to describe the society ofimperial China. But they point to a great contrast between its development and that

of feudal Europe:

In medieval Europe, the struggle between the power of money and the powerof the land ... was played out in the towns ... A burgher class emerged andturned the towns into autonomous worlds ... In China, however ... landlordpower extended to town and countryside ... Genuine exchange between townand country the exchange of handicraft and agricultural products wasinhibited, and there was a one-way flow of agricultural and peasant


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handicraft products to the towns, a weak market for urban handicraftproducts and false impression of circulation ... In the Ming and Qing periods[i.e. the 15th to late 19th centuries] the situation changed slightly with therise of new commercial towns; but they were few and far between and couldnot escape from feudal controls and levies. The merchant class could nottransform itself into an independent political and economic force and thusplay a revolutionary role. [59]

The state administrative structure had far greater control than in feudal Europe oreven in the monarchies of the 16th century. The examination system for public

positions was an intellectual straitjacket, in the late Ming period tax inspectors

were sent out to harass merchants, constantly provoking riots and revolts [60], and

right through to the first European conquests the state used its power to inhibit

foreign trade because of the political aim of strengthening feudal rule. [61]

In other words, the extraordinary power and social weight of the superstructure

cramped the growth of the embryos of capitalism.

The role of the conquest of the Americas

Blaut and Gunder Frank do have one explanation for why Europe was to achieve

global dominance. They argue that the conquest of the Inca and Aztec empires in the

Americas gave certain European states control of massive new sources of silver at

very little cost, and could then use them to buy up enormous resources from eastand south east Asia, so providing a massive boost to their own economies. But that

leaves major questions unanswered. The states that actually controlled the Americas

(Spain and Portugal) were not the ones that made the first transitions towards full

capitalism. In the three centuries after Columbuss voyage, the economy of the

Castilian heart of Spain stagnated. Getting control of the silver was not enough.

There had to be societies capable of taking advantage of it, that is, societies in which

the first embryos of capitalism were already growing out of feudalism. As Kenneth

Pomeranz has pointed out in relation to Gunder Franks argument, If one imaginesa world in which Europeans had reached Mexico or Peru, but in which all of Europe

had social structures like Romania, or even Prussia, it seems unlikely that much

silver would have been shipped to China. [62]

And why were the proto-capitalists of other continents unable to challenge the

west European domination of the gold and silver sources, if they enjoyed the same

technological dynamic as early modern Europe? In the early 15th century Chinese


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maritime technology was ahead of that of Europe and a Chinese fleet was able to sail

across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa. Yet a century

and a half later it was Spanish and Portuguese, not Chinese, ships that were

circumnavigating the world and grabbing the silver that was so much in demand in

China.

Blauts arguments (and all of those which see western Europes rise to worlddominance simply as a result of its pillaging of other parts of the world) take for

granted that which they seek to explain. You can explain the rise of the European

empires if their domestic economies had a certain productive edge compared with

those in the rest of the world. You cannot provide such an explanation if you believe

that right across all three continents there were not only enclaves of proto-

capitalism, but that they were all at the same stage of development. The fact is that

somehow or other changes did take place in parts of western Europe which may

have existed elsewhere in embryonic forms but never reached maturity. You canonly explain that by looking at the concrete history of each region, with the interplay

of productive forces, productive relations, political superstructures and rival class

forces.

Alim does recognise the possibility that a few countries in western Europe had

acquired by 1500 small but critical advantages in gunnery and shipping, which

permitted the conquest of the Americas and growing domination over the maritime

commerce of the Indian Ocean, so accelerating capital accumulation and technical

change in the leading maritime countries of Europe. [63]

But the advances in gunnery and shipping were not completely isolated from other

factors. They were part of wider developments which meant that parts of Europe

not only caught up with the more advanced technologies of the East, but leapfrogged

over them. Rodney Needham, the noted historian of Chinese science and technology,

recognised this. Although Chinese inventors had arrived at clockwork and other

technological devices hundreds of years before their European equivalents, these

devices were not in general use and the Chinese had much to learn technologically

from the Jesuit mission that settled in Beijing in the late 17th century. [64]

In other words, China was more advanced in terms of knowledge of techniques

until the Renaissance and Reformation shook up European society (including even

the Catholic church), but then began to lag behind. In a similar way, the level of

technology in parts of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent was more

or less the same as the most advanced parts of Europe until at least the beginning of


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the 16th century. The difficulties the Europeans had in conquering more than

isolated coastal enclaves in these regions showed that the weaponry deployed by the

Muslim states of Africa, the Mogul empire, the Ottomans or Ming China was not that

different to the weaponry of western Europe in, say, 1550.

But then a gap opened up, as the economies of these regions stalled, while those in

north western Europe did not. Rulers of countries like Holland and England couldbegin to build global empires that pillaged, enslaved and destroyed elsewhere and

in the process gained a cumulative advantage that persists to this day.

As Abu Lughod put it, Europe pulled ahead because the Orient was in temporary

disarray. [65]

Pomeranz sets out to demonstrate the similarities between the moves towards

capitalism in different parts of the world, with several surprising similarities in

agricultural, commercial and proto-industrial development in various parts of

Eurasia as late as 1750. [66] But he accepts the vital role of internally driven

European growth [67], that Europe had by the 18th century moved ahead of the

rest of the world in terms of labour-saving technologies [68], and that we do find

some important European advantages in technology during the two or three

centuries before the industrial revolution which turned out to be important for

truly revolutionary development. [69]

He does see the colonisation of the Americas as playing an important role inEuropes development. He recognises that the flow of resources to Europe before the

industrial revolution had a limited importance. [70] But he sees the really important

role as being in the 19th century, when the opening up of agriculture in the Americas

allowed parts of Europe to industrialise and increase their populations without

running into acute food shortages. [71] In other words, some internal development

did enable parts of Europe to arrive at full-blooded capitalism before the rest of the

world, but it could not have continued along that path without empire and

colonisation.

A worldwide process

Much of this confirms my view inA Peoples History of the World.

Economic development never took place on its own, in a vacuum. It was carried
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forward by human beings, living in certain societies whose political and ideological

structures had an impact on their actions. And these structures in turn were the

product of historic confrontations between social groups shaped by their position in

production by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary class struggles.

This vital feature of historical development was neglected in the narrow debate

on the reasons in Europe for the prior development of capitalism in Britain.Arguments focused on issues like the growth of markets and changes in economic

relations in town and countryside. They tended to neglect both the growth of the

forces of production under feudalism and the great epochal conflicts that swept the

continent in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries the driving force of the

bourgeois revolutions. The recent discussions on the breakthrough of capitalism on a

worldwide scale suffer from some of the same faults. In particular, they fail to see

that contradictions between the economic base of society and its political and

ideological superstructures are not resolved by economics alone. They are fought outbetween rival classes ideologically and politically as well as economically. And success

in such battles is never guaranteed in advance, but depends upon initiative,

organisation and leadership.

Pomeranz recognises at one point that much of the credit for the acceleration of

diffusion of best practice [in European technology] after 1750 must go to the

elements of scientific culture ... emerging, especially in England, in the 150 years

before 1750. [72]

But the spread of this scientific culture was part of a much wider process of

challenging old ruling ideologies as the nascent bourgeoisie began to fight for its place

in the sun. It was inseparable from the ideological battles of the Renaissance, the

Reformation and the Enlightenment and from their political expressions in the

religious wars of the 16th century, the Dutch and English revolutions and, finally, the

great French Revolution.

Just as Europe was not the only continent where the elements pushing towardscapitalism emerged, it was also not the only continent to see people beginning to put

forward views of the world we now identify with the Enlightenment and the spread

of scientific knowledge. People like Landes claim ideas could arise because of deeply

rooted cultural features of European society going back to Greek or Biblical times.

They fail to explain why vast swathes of Europe remained immune to such ideas

until the end of the 19th century. They also ignore the way the Enlightenment was

prefigured by thinkers in Abbasid Mesopotamia, Moorish Spain and Sung China,


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only to be crushed on each occasion as old superstructures reasserted their hold

over peoples ways of producing and thinking. They also ignore how close counter-

revolutionary currents came to crushing the growth of new ways of thinking even in

the most advanced parts of Europe at the time of the Counter-Reformation, the

Thirty Years War and the English Revolution.

The whole of Eurasia-Africa was affected by successive waves of advances in theforces of production during what we call the Middle Ages. These took root more

easily in some parts of Europe than elsewhere precisely because its previous

economic backwardness meant there was a weaker superstructure and were fewer

obstacles to them doing so. Everywhere the spread of these innovations led,

eventually, to the first green shoots of a new way of getting a surplus, based on the

buying and selling of labour power. The growth of these shoots was blocked to

varying degrees by old institutions. The blockage was greatest in the most advanced

part of the world, the Chinese Empire, and it was weakest in a few parts of westernEurope, where the shoots would eventually break through and pull the old

superstructures apart. Elsewhere in Europe, Asia and Africa, the shoots grew a bit,

but had not broken through by the time the west European armies and navies

arrived (except in Japan).

When the breakthrough occurred it was not just a question of economics, but

politics and ideology as well. The classes associated with the new ways of producing

wealth had to fight against the stranglehold of old rulers. And that meant beginning

to recast their own worldviews. Where they were too tied to the old order to do this,

they were defeated and the old order hung on for a few more centuries until the

battleship and cheap goods of Europes capitalists brought it tumbling down.

Marx and Engels were mistaken on some important things, like the character of

Indian society, because of the limited knowledge available to them. But on one

essential question they were right. The development of the forces of production in

the Middle Ages encouraged the growth of a new form of exploitation and of a new

class that benefited from it. This class found itself to varying degrees at loggerheads

with the old landed exploiters although not just in Europe as Marx and Engels told,

but across wider swathes of Eurasia-Africa. But for the new form of exploitation to

break through and remould the whole of society according to its dynamic, that class

required its own ideas, its own organisation and, eventually, its own revolutionary

leadership. Where its most determined elements managed to create such things, the

new society took root. Where it failed, not just in Asia and Africa, but in wide

swathes of Europe, stagnation and decay were the result.


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There is a lesson in this for all of us today. Without social revolution, the product of

ideological and political struggle, economic change alone can lead to catastrophe.

There is one world history (at least as regards the conjoined continents of Europe,

Asia and Africa), not several. The advance over millennia of the forces of production

and the technologies and scientific knowledge associated with them is not a peculiar

European phenomenon. Nor is the spirit of capitalism. Capitalism is a product ofworld history, which for a brief historical period found a focus in the western fringes

of Eurasia before going on to transform the whole world. As it did so, it created new

relations of production, and with them new social forces driven to oppose it.

Today these relations of production exist everywhere. The argument should not

be a spurious one which attempts to identify them with one part of the world or

another, but should be about how to overthrow them.

Notes

1. F. Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization, 15th to 18th

chris harman_ the rise of capitalism (spring 2004)

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