Globalizing the History of Capital: Ways Forward

How the West Came to Rule is a welcome contribution to Marxist debates on capitalist origins
not just for its sharp focus on the issue of Eurocentrism in the way capitalism is written up
historically and conceived popularly,1 but also because it sets out to develop an alternative
framework to those histories. The essential feature here is its subsuming of large parts of the
world outside and beyond Europe and the general argument that it is impossible to
understand the true origins of western capitalism without assigning a central place to those
areas of the world. Stated in this way the argument is unexceptionable, since no Marxists
have seriously disagreed with Marxs view that western capitalism (capitalism as it emerged
in Britain and more widely in western countries) would have been impossible without the
preceding or accompanying histories of colonial subjugation, Atlantic slavery and the world
market more generally. The debates have always been about how much all of that mattered
and whether capitalism can really be said to have started in a single country, notably
England, and somehow spread outwards from there.
Both the critique of Eurocentrism and the call for a more integrated historiography of
capitalism have the potential to steer future Marxist scholarship and debate away from the
problematics and framing guidelines of the transition debates, not least of the one dominated
by the work of Brenner and the perspectives of what is called Political Marxism. But for
this shift to new ways of thinking about capitalist origins to come about How the West needs
at least a preliminary critique that rids it both of its residual formalism (as I see it) and of the
one or two confused characterizations this leads to. Whether combined and uneven
development really does work as a framework of explanation at the level of generality at
which the authors situate it (that is, beyond the dynamics of a capitalist world dominated by
a mounting sense of nationality) is a separate issue that I shall leave aside for others to take
up.
Narratives of origins
It may help to start by laying out some leading examples of historians models of capitalist
emergence and growth:
1. Capitalist emergence as a dynamic of accumulation that creates a self-sustaining,
integrated national economy (Wood);
2. Capitalist emergence as a dynamic of accumulation that creates an expanding world
economy (Braudel et al.);
3. Anievas and Nsancioglus geo-political model where the dynamic of capitalism figures less
as many capitals than in the transmuted form of many states; and finally,
4. Beckerts recent global history of the cotton textile industry.

Here the first two models are largely if not purely economic, the third is mainly political,
and the last (Beckerts) is both economic and political. In 1. the key role devolves on
agrarian capitalism, in 2. on merchant capitalism,2 in 3. on dialectically conceived
interactions between sectors of an evolving world economy (uneven and combined
development), and in 4. on the way what Beckert calls war capitalism helped pave the way
for industrial capitalism in the shape of a leading industrial sector. Moreover, in consonance
with 2. but in a more contextualized way, perhaps, Beckert actually demonstrates the links
between merchant capital and industrial capitalism, the evolution of the latter out of the
former, in the one sector usually seen as leading Britains industrial expansion.
The least convincing of these models is the first. Ellen Woods critique of the so-called
commercialization model hinges on a notion of large-scale trade that divorces it radically
from production, as if big merchants were uninterested in either accessing supply sources or
ensuring financial control over producers. Moreover, she seemed to think, astonishingly, that
the long-distance trade characteristic of pre-capitalist economies [was not] driven by
competition.3 On the issue of whether world economy mattered to capitalism (= England),
her response was capitalism indeed in one country, albeit within a network of international
trade,4 which is a bit like saying, okay, lets throw in international trade for good measure.
Even after the seventeenth century, nowhere, neither in the great trading centers of Europe
nor in the vast commercial networks of the Islamic world or Asia, was economic
activitydriven by the imperatives of competition and accumulation.5 The world market
that fuelled the rise of the West was founded on non-capitalist commerce.6 To Wood, the
East India Company epitomised non-capitalist extra-economic exploitation in the form of
tax and tribute,7 which contrasts sharply with Cain and Hopkins altogether more accurate
description of the company as an advanced form of commercial capitalism.8 Woods is a
world without mining, shipbuilding, textiles, domestic industry, putting-out networks, sugar
plantations, etc. None of this matters to her because all of it belongs to a world where
markets are quintessentially non-capitalist (not driven by the imperatives of competition
and efficiency) and no true capitalists exist, since true capitalism only starts in the English
countryside in some vague interval between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only
is this an abstraction from substantial swathes of history, but it is an abstraction from the
way markets themselves are organized and from the way they work.
The remnants of formalism
Thus the agenda of a specifically Marxist historiography of capitalism remains misshapen by
spurious claims to orthodoxy and intoxicating doses of formalism, teleology and residualism.
By residualism I mean the tendency, among Marxists especially, to treat major strands in
the earlier history of capitalism as a dress rehearsal for industrial capitalism. Multiple or
coexisting modes of production, transition, primitive accumulation and the
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characterization of merchant capital as antediluvian are all signs of this thoroughly

conventional but unhelpful framing of capitalist origins and can, alas, all be found in How the
West , although they coexist here with a perspective that constantly pulls away from this
obsolete problematic. Thus Wallerstein is accused of his inability to theorise the coexistence
and interaction of multiple modes of production (p. 18) without stating what a mode of
production is for the authors themselves. Combined development is sadly defined at one
point as an amalgmation of differentiated modes of production within a social formation (p.
30-31), something that Trotsky himself certainly never had in mind! The Caribbean
plantations are said to amalgamate different modes of production (p. 162), a
characterization that owes more to Robin Blackburns ambiguities than to Marx himself, and
the Mughal empire of the late seventeenth century is said to have embodied a combination
in which two differentiated modes of production coexisted, which is a first in terms of any of
the standard Marxist discussions of medieval India that Im aware of. The plantations are
also described as transitional forms (p. 158), when it is not clear precisely what they were
transitions to, and at one stage the whole focus of the book is described en passant as the
long transition to capitalism (p.29); which capitalism? how long? Developments in
sixteenth-century England are summarily described as English primitive accumulation, (p.
116ff.) and French development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is likewise
described, summarily, as the process of primitive accumulation (p. 200). Even Dutch
capitalism at its apogee is summed up as a combined form of primitive accumulation (p.
243). But Marxs famous passage on primitive accumulation is intended to underscore the
violent nature of capitalist expansion and to suggest, of course, that industrial capitalism as
it emerged in Britain was inconceivable, historically, in isolation from the convulsive
developments that tore up the globe even as they started integrating it.
The residualism is residual, the debris of problematics that have become progressively more
dilapidated, less and less capable of steering discussion in ways fruitful of history, as the
decades elapse. To look at some of the more substantive historical issues raised by How the
West, the argument that the Mongols proved decisive to the emergence of capitalism (p. 88)
depends on what emergence of capitalism is supposed to mean, that is, on the time scale used
for understanding this complex, multi-stranded process. When Marco Polos family set out
for the East, Venice was already, in Giorgio Craccos description, a republic ruled by a strong
capitalist oligarchy, a leading centre of the new capitalisms that had emerged from the
commercial revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. If so, the Mongols surely were
no more decisive to the emergence of capitalism than, say, Islam and the role Islam played
in revitalizing the Mediterranean by contributing decisively to the revival of Italian trade
thanks to the links established with the rich Muslim markets of the south and the east.
The Mongol rulers certainly sought to promote trade (p. 74), but they did so even more in
terms of Qubilais aggressive maritime policies and the expanding sea trade,9 and Marco
3

Polos own description of Yuan China leaves one in no doubt that the coastal regions were
among the most prosperous in the country. Three features are especially striking in that
account: the resilience of Chinese domestic markets, the revenue the Great Khan extracted
from commerce, and the vitality of the maritime links to South Asia. For example, he notes
that for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere to pick up pepper for export to
Christendom, Zaiton [Quanzhou] is visited by a hundred .10
A&N are good on the nature of the Ottoman state, seeing the tributary mode of production
as characterized by the subordination of potentially subversive aristocracies and seeing
territorial expansion (geopolitical accumulation) as an intrinsic feature of this mode. It
doesnt follow that rebellions were any less characteristic of tributary regimes Byzantium,
China and the Mughals all prove otherwise.
The argument that European states were more dependent on merchant capital than the
tributary regimes raises the fundamental but grossly understudied issue of the relation
between forms of Absolutism and capitalist trade. A&N see the Ottomans as largely
uninterested in commerce and exercising significant control over merchant activities (p.
105). If so,11 this, again, is not a feature that can be generalized to other tributary states.
Both the Safavids and tsarist Russia were vitally interested in their external commerce.
Pokrovsky quotes Collins, court physician to Tsar Alexis, as saying, The tsar is the first
merchant in his realm, and adds Enumeration of the tsars monopolies [whisky, caviar, furs,
silk, etc.] gives us an interesting picture of the concentration of Russian exports that laid the
foundation for native commercial capitalism.12 In the seventeenth century the tsars
trade with Persia was undoubtedly the greatest commercial enterprise of Muscovite Russia,
referring of course to the trade in raw silk.13 On the Iranian side of this global circuit,
Vladimir Minorsky could even describe the Shah as the largest capitalist.14 Once the
unruly feudalism of the tribes and local dynasties [had been] replaced by centralisation,
The Shahs [were] now the largest capitalists. They amass goods in their Buytt; they
attract and court European merchants; they use their Armenian subjects as their trading
agents for disposing of the chief exportable commodity, namely silk.15 These interventions
are strongly reminiscent of Portugals monarchical capitalism16 and of Mousniers even
more scandalous description of the absolute monarchy of the early sixteenth century as a
sort of large capitalist enterprise.17 Here is a field that badly needs new research and solidly
comparativist perspectives.
No one can deny that the Atlantic was decisive to European dominance in the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries, laying out the first foundations of a more integrated global economy
tied together in part through its massive flows of silver. Marx noted that the great
revolutions that took place in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesrapidly
advanced the development of commercial capital and saw the colonial companies as powerful
4

levers for the concentration of capital (Marx passages cited p. 147) The point of interpreting
these passages in newer ways is surely that the building of an Atlantic economy was not just
a precondition for the growth of capitalism in Europe or Eurasia but embodied the embrace of
capital through its own forms of capital accumulation. Even the slave trade generated the
networks of merchant capitalism studied in such detail by Jospeh Miller.18 For the
plantations that were the markets for that trade the point seems obvious to me. Without
doubt the least fortunate pages in How the West are those dealing with the slave plantations
(pp. 15862). The plantations are characterized both as transitional forms of social
relations combining complex amalgams of captalist and non-capitalist relations (p. 158), as
the interlacing and systemic fusion of different relations of production (p. 160), and as
productive units geared specifically towards capitalistic (sic) production (p. 158) which
operat[ed] according to distinctly capitalist rules of reproduction (p. 161). Now both
characterizations cannot simultaneously be retained, for if these enterprises really were
geared specifically towards capitalist production, then they embodied capitalist relations of
production even if exploitation in them was based on slave labour. No teleology prescribed
that those slaves would eventually be transformed into wage workers employed by the same
owners or by others.
Here as elsewhere in the book the eclecticism of seeking to accommodate the widest possible
range of Marxist writers and perspectives even when these conflict with each other simply
ends up contributing to a lack of clarity, if not (see below) to downright mischaracterization.
In this instance Robin Blackburns own hesitations in The Making of New World Slavery are
combined with that strand in the literature, largely U.S.-based, which sees New World
slavery as unambiguously capitalist. As I have written elsewhere:
In his debate with Frank, Laclau took the stand that in the plantations of the West
Indies, the economy was based on a mode of production constituted by slave labour,
characterizing the use of slave labour as a mode of production when Marx himself had
stated explicitly that a capitalist mode of production exists in the slave plantations.
That was in 1971. By 1997 when Blackburn published The Making of New World Slavery,
the same orthodoxy persisted but now in a much less confident form. The American
slave planter of the seventeenth century and after was not a capitalist in the strict
sense of the term, the species was only just coming into existence but neither was he
as far removed from capitalism as the feudal lord or the Ancient slaveowner. (Making,
p. 376) Again, the undoubted fact that neither the feudal estates of Eastern Europe nor
the slave plantations of the Americas can properly be regarded as capitalist enterprises
should not lead us, as it has led some writers, to regard them as equivalently distant
from the capitalist mode of production. (Making, p. 374) The hesitation expressed in
these passages stemmed presumably from Blackburns deeper historical understanding of
the Caribbean plantations. They were run according to business principles which were
5

very advanced for the epoch; The construction of slave plantations did indeed require
large fixed investments; The performance of the early eighteenth-century sugar
plantation embodied technical improvements in nearly every aspect of cultivation and
processing; and finally, the high capital value of a Caribbean slave plantation put
pressure on the planter to maximize output from a given crew. (Making, p.379, 336, 343,
339). All of which was a considerable advance over Laclaus blunt assertion of a mode of
production constituted by slave labour.
The insatiable thirst for slave labour in the Americas (p. 157) was a thirst for surplus-labour,
as Grossman points out in The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System.19
Through the plantations commercial capitalism fed into the mass of surplus-value extracted
and available for accumulation. Curiously, this is a point more clearly stated for Dutch
control of the Asian markets (in Chapter 7) than it is for Atlantic slavery. By incorporating
labour-power on a global scale, Dutch capital acquired a power of expansion it hitherto did
not possess. (p. 227) But exactly the same logic worked in the Atlantic, which is why Marx
referred to capital invested in the colonies (cited p. 163; my italics). And this was the point of
Eric Williams argument The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the
wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly.20 Thus formulations like outlet for
capitalists to absorb the surplus population created by the expulsion of peasants from
agrarian production (p. 150-51) or that plantation slavery provided an array of inputs (sic)
that contributed to the Industrial Revolution (p. 169) simply fail to describe the essential
function of New World slavery in the expansion of capitalism. Those perspectives remain
fundamentally teleological, as if either England or industrial capitalism were the forces
driving the rise of a new capitalism21 fuelled by the Atlantic economy.
References to merchant capitalism and mercantile capitalists only emerge at the very end
of the Atlantic chapter and then appear with less sense of hesitation in the two chapters that
follow. A&Ns uncritical endorsement of Perry Andersons view of the absolutist state as a
recharged apparatus of feudal domination (pp. 186, 256) generates a second, even less
tenable argument, namely, the baffling suggestion that the political autonomy, power and
influence of merchants in medieval Europe flowed from the feudal nature of the state in
those societies, and that feudal states were particularly sensitive to merchant interests since
their innate drive for expansion and the reproduction of the ruling class in them depended
on the wealth drawn from merchants and financiers (p. 256). Here the absolutist state is
collapsed into feudalism la Anderson (in contrast to the more mature conception
represented by Hilferding, Pokrovsky and other Marxists which stresses the autonomy of the
state and its alliance with capitalist interests), and the term feudalism bandied about with
such fluency that Scotland and the mercantile republics of northern Italy are all bastions of
this unreformed mode of production. But if Scotland was still an outpost of some residual
feudalism in 1707, why did the Agency Houses that pioneered the commercial expansion of
6

Britain in the eighteenth century consist of so many Scots?22 And how can anyone sensibly
characterize Venice and Genoa as the sites of a feudal ruling class and of feudal power (p.
218) when the aristocratic cliques (consorterie) that dominated both communes were so deeply
immersed in commerce and industry, ran Mediterranean-wide networks of business, and were
driven by a passion to defend existing markets and conquer new ones, usually in fierce
competition with each other?23 State-backed forms of commercial expansion (p. 258), the
fusion of political and mercantile interests typical, say, of the capitalist Dutch Republic
(p. 257) flowed not from the ostensibly feudal nature of the absolutist state but from an
Absolutism wedded to mercantilist notions and to its alliance with capitalist interests.
Capitalism and the state in league was how Braudel described this peculiar nexus between
state and merchant which became a central feature of all the European mercantile
capitalisms of the twelfth to nineteenth centuries.24 Thus the quote from Coen that trade
cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade (p. 257) reflects something closer
to what Beckert calls war capitalism, not the feudal war-making that A&N think was
driving the dominance of mercantile interests (misled, its worth repeating, by Andersons
erroneous characterization of Absolutism).
In Chapter 7 A&N provide a succinct description of two key features of the Dutch model of
commercial capitalism, its integration of Asian markets as its core business strategy and the
drive to enforce tighter control over production in those commercial circuits. The theoretical
implication of these pages is that the division between circulation and production is not
invariant across levels of abstraction and cannot simply be transposed from theory to
history without ending in the rut of formalism. The quote from de Andrade Arruda that the
Dutch went beyond the limits of circulation (p. 243) seems to be driving at this but does so
in a potentially misleading form. Circulation continued to dominate production, as Marx
said precisely with respect to the VOC, that is, the organization and control of labour were a
function of the expansion/accumulation of mercantile capital. (The fact that merchant capital
intervened in production didnt make it industrial capital.) The point is obvious when, as in
the Banda Islands, the VOC extorted surplus-value from plantation-organized slave labour,
perhaps less so when textile villages and weavers were subjected to control by rival European
companies operating, say, along the east coast of India in the later seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Here the subsumption of labour worked through the advance system,
which means that patterns of accumulation were necessarily complex and took the form of
(commodity?) chains that were more compressed/distended or less so depending on the way
they were organized.25
In any case, A&N are quite right to conclude that colonialism explains the emergence of
capitalism (p. 244; italics theirs), a position I fully endorse as long as we see that colonialism
was a form that the expansion of mercantile capital took, starting in the later middle ages
with the north Italian domination of Byzantine and East Mediterranean markets, then
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extending outwards into the wider expanses of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean as the scale
of accumulation was itself enlarged and new centres of capitalism emerged in northern
Europe. The expansion of capital was an intrinsically global process, not least because it was
spearheaded by the most liquid and mobile forms of wealth which, strangely, Marxists have
been reluctant to deal with and prefer to dismiss as antediluvian.
Surveying the argument as a whole, the geopolitics of its dominant perspective injects a
valuable dimension into debates about capitalism, both by foregrounding the international
basis of capitalisms history and by showing that no history of capitalism can be written
which doesnt accord a central place to the state itself and to many states. But, as my
remarks above have repeatedly suggested, what is missing in this account is a more coherent
picture of the history of capitalism itself, that is, a more decisive break with the teleology
implicit in notions like primitive accumulation (evoked throughout the text, if only
sporadically) and in seeing the major developments of the earlier centuries simply as
preconditions for some later capitalism, developments toward capitalism. Their critique of
Political Marxism is welcome and trenchant in places, but it simply doesnt go far enough.
A missing capitalism
This is not the place to write the missing Marxist history of merchant capitalism, but since
this looms large in the comments above, some remarks are in order. [S]ome of these
statements were simply illiterate (on a number of points). Such an illiterate expression was,
for instance, the phrase merchant capitalism. Capitalism is a system of production, and
merchant capital produces nothing, wrote Pokrovsky in the Recantation he was forced to
publish in the tenth edition of his Brief History of Russia (1931).26 Of course, Pokrovsky
himself had been a leading exponent of the view that commercial capitalism had been a
major strand of Russias economic and political history, arguing in fact that capitalism had
become dominant in Russia by the sixteenth century. As Barber notes, as late as 1929
Pokrovsky believed commercial capitalism played a huge role in the creation of the Russian
monarchy. It created this Russian absolute monarchy.27 That this was not a completely
novel idea is shown by the early pages of Mehrings Absolutism and Revolution in Germany.
With merchant capital, the revolutionary force of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, Mehring wrote, new life came into medieval society. Revolutionary merchant
capital not only created modern absolutism but also transformed the medieval classes of
society. And Mehring referred to these centuries as the age of merchant capital.28 But the
Stalinist backlash against Pokrovsky29 led British Marxist historians to drive merchant
capitalism out of the Marxist mainstream in Britain itself and then throughout the
Anglophone countries, leaving a legacy of timidity in the face of spurious orthodoxy
(Anderson would refer to mercantile capital but not mercantile capitalism) and further
spurious assertions of orthodoxy (as with Brenners completely false antithesis between
8

production and exchange and his Aunt Sally of circulationism).30 The notion of merchant
capitalism as a specific mode of productionreduces to an absurdity.31 Again, in the same
childish vein, [I]f Merchant Capitalism is intended merely as a descriptive term for that
first and early stage of capitalism prior to the Industrial Revolution and to the arrival of
machinofacture then one need not quarrel simply about a word. But if the use of the term is
intended to implythe existence of a distinctive, and in some sense intermediate, system of
production and of social relations of production (subsequent to feudalism but prior to the
arrival on the scene of capitalism proper), then I suggest that this kind of classification is
mistaken and misleading.32
In France, by contrast, a rich tradition of historiography emerged from the 1940s that made
merchant capitalism central to its understanding of that first and early stage of capitalism
but stripped of any stagist connotations such as the passage from Dobb implies, and the
revival of interest in the subject from the 1980s, both in the Anglophone countries and
elsewhere, was entirely due to the influence of this tradition. Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords
and Merchant Capitalists (German orig. 1980), Ormrod, English Grain Exports and Agrarian
Capitalism (1985), Ingham, Capitalism Divided? (1984), Shenton, The Development of
Capitalism in Northern Nigeria (1986), and Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the
Angolan Slave Trade (1988), were all major contributions from the 1980s and dealt centrally
with a non-standard form of capitalism, much as many-valued logic challenged classical
orthodoxies about two-valued logic.33 The analogy is less far-fetched than it seems, since the
production/circulation binary was a key line of defence of orthodoxy against the heresy of
circulationism. To cite just one example, Ellen Wood discounts merchant capitalism
completely on the prejudice that only industrial capital is productive of value (cf. Pokrovsky
in his Recantation!). But what about the capital invested in the colonies, as Marx called it?
Was that not productive of surplus-value? How would it feed into the mass of profit
otherwise? And if so, would we have to call it industrial or argue instead that productive
capital is instantiated in more complex (non-standard) ways than Wood implies? In fact, the
division between circulation and production is based on a misunderstanding of Marxs
method, since Marx wouldnt have wanted to deny that merchant capital, especially
advanced forms of it like the VOC and the East India Company, might dominate
production, that is, enforce the production of, and extract, surplus-value, even when it lacked
any specific interest in reorganizing production or altering the labour process in any way.
As it happens, merchant capital created new forms of production both in the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic, so that Drescher was quite right to state that for Eric Williams Atlantic
slavery was a phase of commercial capitalism, not some autonomous or transitional mode of
production or an aberration thrown up by Gods design for a future industrial capital.34
Indeed, since sugar was the most heavily capitalized of the plantation businesses,35 it would
make sense to see the Caribbean plantations as industrial enterprises but dominated by the
9

commercial capitalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was a capitalism
that invested widely in a range of economic sectors beyond commerce in its narrower
definition. It was commerce that gave birth to industry, Verlinden wrote about the textile
and sugar industries of Antwerp.36 At Genoa, industries were dominated by the merchants of
the city. Heers calls this industrial capitalism, knowing full well that the capitalists who
controlled these industries were merchants.37 In Amsterdam, much of the initiative and
presumably much of the capital [for industrial development] was supplied by merchants,
says Barbour.38 And London merchants invested in provincial manufacturing on a large
scale.39
Yet even when the subordination of labour took less direct forms, merchant capital
dominated production, that is, extracted surplus-value from living labour, for example, in
the vast putting-out networks that sprawled across the European countryside as part of a
dispersed and unmechanized manufacturing industry turning out what Goubert for the
Beauvaisis calls enormous quantities of textiles. Here powerful merchants dominated
labour drawn from households with minuscule holdings, yet sustained a thriving woollen
industry with markets extending across the Atlantic.40 Indeed, despite the dreadful
conditions that defined the lives of millions of outworkers, the Verlaggsystem, Braudel
argued, led to the concentration and expansion of industry, a more rational division of
labour, and increased production.41 But it thrived essentially on the flexibility it allowed
capital and on the low wages endemic to the system. A passage in the Grundrisse describes
this economic regime of rural manufacture dominated by merchant capital and integrated
into large-scale commerce as a major part of the story of the evolution of capitalism, and
Marx clearly implies that the weavers and spinners subject to the merchants control have
been brought under his command as wage labourers.42 Here putting-out merchants were
exploiting a mass of artisans/household workers as wage labourers, hence creating wage
labour, as the European companies tried to do with weavers in the Indian textile villages
from which they sourced substantial quantities of piecegoods in the eighteenth century.43
Between them, the large-scale capitalism of long-distance trade and the Verlag system
absorbed vast amounts of capital in the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, much of this tied
up in Beckerts empire of cotton which, more than any other industry, welded these forms
of merchant capitalism into a unified and increasingly integrated economic system.
Beckerts history of the cotton textile industry is, like the work of Anievas and Nsancioglu,
an attempt to write the history of capitalism as a global story. This sets it apart from tons of
literature that frames the issue of origins purely in terms of transition and finds it
impossible to think about capitalism without the sombre European legacy of its feudal past.
Unlike Anievas and Nsancioglu, however, Beckert repeatedly underscores the decisive role of
merchant capital in creating modern capitalism,44 thus breaking down the artificial division
between merchant and industrial capitalism and allowing for a more coherent history of
10

capital. Merchant capitalists figure throughout the narrative in a major way, and the fluidity
of their form of capitalism is extensively documented as a series of conventional antinomies
(mechanized vs unmechanized industry, etc.) simply falls away as so many moments of a
totalizing dialectic.45 Beckert writes the history of capitalism as a biography of one product,
showing the possibilities contained here.46 Moreover, in one crucial respect there is an
important overlap between the two studies, viz. both highlight the crucial role of the state in
securing the victory of British and European capital over the rest of the world through the
military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many
regions of the world. 47 The violence summed up in Marxs notion of primitive
accumulation is unpacked and retotalized as war capitalism (by Beckert) the violent
expropriation of land and labor in Africa and the Americas48 and the practico-inerts,
congealed violence, of slavery and colonialism. But as Beckerts expression implies, violence
was an instrumentality of capital more than a medieval inheritance. This is true even of the
later middle ages. Although Portugals eventual expansion as a colonial power was scarcely
the outcome of a preconceived plan, its successful emergence reflected the defeat of the
Castilian model favoured by the Portuguese nobility. (The maritime bourgeoisie supported
the Crown in its struggle with this aristocracy.)49 In other words, let alone the Dutch with
their purely commercial outlook, even Portugals maritime expansion reflected a culture of
violence more peculiar to the way the Venetians and other Italian merchants had behaved
throughout the Mediterranean into the Byzantine Black Sea as they struggled to create their
trading empires, especially from the twelfth century, than to the war-prone nature of some
quintessentially feudal continent. The violent nature of European commercial capitalism has
unmistakeably Mediterranean roots that almost certainly predate the emergence of feudalism
in Europe, and to this extent a form of war capitalism may well be the best way of
characterizing even Romes expansion and domination, secured initially through massive
naval confrontations broadly reminiscent of the First World War.50
Reinstating merchant capitalism (that is, going back almost a century to the fluency with
which Pokrovsky could write his Marxist history of Russia!) brings two benefits. It gives the
history of western capitalism more coherence than it has currently, and secondly, it suggests
that a form of capitalism was more widespread across cultures than the standard (twovalued, Eurocentric) account implies. Both perspectives chime well with the broad thrust of
How the West in rejecting narratives of European exceptionalism on the one side, and
isolationist or endogenist models of capitalist emergence, on the other. And between them
they begin to allow us to write a history of the integration of world economy. The large-scale
capitalism of foreign trade both generated industries domestically (shipbuilding, transport,
sugar, etc.) and plugged into whole sectors of the international economy such as textiles,
plantation businesses, and industrial crops (jute, cotton, palm oil, tobacco, raw silk, indigo
and so on). At these higher echelons of the mercantile system, profitability was crucially
11

linked to economies of scale, vertical integration and the turnover of capital. For example,
Lyashchenko described even banks and railways as instruments of capitalist trade turnover
and allowed for rapid turnover by purely capitalist commercial methods.51 A good example
is the way the big Glasgow tobacco firms of the eighteenth century used the store system to
buy up American tobacco in advance to save on freight costs and turn over capital quickly
by selling tobacco rapidly in bulk to European customers.52 This was a trade controlled by
a small group of wealthy merchants organized into a handful of syndicates,53 with the vast
proportion of company earnings [] ploughed back,54 that is, accumulated as an expanded
mass of mercantile capital. With foreign trading companies advances were an essential
means of maximizing their purchases of export produce.55 Price domination, scale, and the
velocity of circulation of merchant capital were thus equally important determinants of
profitability, favouring the bigger capitals and showing why the commercial capitalism of
the nineteenth century (colonial commercial capital in Suret-Canales expression) was
largely run by oligopolies.56 By then, the distinction between industry and commerce was
even more tenuous in colonial territories like India, as the Calcutta agency houses floated
numerous jute, tea, and coal companies on the British and local capital marketsFrom the
1870s the involvement of the agency houses in manufacturing intensified.57 The peculiar
fusion of merchant and industrial capital reflected in the managing agency system meant
that British merchant houses developed extensive interests in industries like jute, tea, coal
and engineering, and elsewhere, outside India, in the rubber companies floated in London
that started up estates in Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies. Here was a mercantile
capitalism that spawned industries in a whole region of India even as it retained its essential
character as merchant capital.
Indeed, long before the full blast of the Industrial Revolution, shipbuilding, mining,
textiles, the silk industry,58 Chinese porcelain,59 and sugar refineries60 were leading sectors of
mercantile capitalism, to say nothing of finance, shipping, slaving, insurance, and the
plantation trades. A totalizing history that rejects the teleology of a capitalism waiting to
happen (primitive accumulation in the bad sense) would have to look at the issue of
investments and industrial organization for each of these leading sectors. It would also have
to try and map the changing geographies of commercial capitalism, starting, say, with the
Muslim Mediterranean and Near East and the networks they extended into the Indian
Ocean. A combination of these perspectives (sectors, geographies) coupled, perhaps, with
more biographies like Beckerts for cotton or Tullys for rubber,61 would offer a sound basis
for tracking the evolution of capital before capitalism, if, after all, one insists on retaining
precisely these terms. The sheer historical variegation of capital, especially commercial
capitalists, over the centuries is striking from the Roman capitalists who had vast sums
invested in Asia, according to Cicero,62 or the capitalists of Fars in southern Iran whom the
geographer al-Istakhri described in the tenth century as passionate about accumulating
12

capital,63 or the large capitalists who drained the salt marshes east of Basra using slaves
imported from East Africa,64 or the northern Kiangsu industrialists who invested in a
booming iron industry employing thousands of wage labourers,65 or the merchant princes of
late Song/Yuan China who owned massive shipyards and were both shipowners and
international merchants at the head of great business firms,66 or the Corner brothers of
Venice who built substantial sugar interests in Cyprus on plantations that imported large
copper boilers from Italy,67 to the Dutch Calvinist merchants who emerged from the great
Flemish dispersion of the seventeenth century to become the economic lite of Europe and
the heirs of medieval capitalism;68 the big colonial merchants of London who would
accumulate sufficient capital to diversify investment around their core business into shipowning, joint-stocks, insurance, wharf-leases, and industry, when London expanded rapidly
in the late seventeenth century;69 the East India houses of the nineteenth century, old City
firms with branch houses in India that speculated repeatedly in indigo, opium and sugar; the
Beirut trading houses who exported raw silk to French commercial houses in Marseilles and
Lyons in the early part of the twentieth century;70 or, finally, big international merchants of
our own period, like UAC, CFAO, and Metallgesellschaft. All or most of these groups
epitomised distinctive regimes of mercantile capitalism peculiar to the historical
circumstances of their societies and time. The Roman fine ware industry was organized on a
capitalist basis,71 but it doesnt follow that Romes economy was driven by capitalism in the
sense in which one would normally understand this. The same could be said of the place of
capitalism in the Islamic world72 and, probably, in China.73 However, enough has been said
to show that there is a huge scientific research programme awaiting the dedication of
Marxist historians willing to think in new ways.
Final remarks on the problematic of origins
Marx identified the capitalist mode of production with the self-expansion of industrial capital
and seemed to suggest that the manufacturing period was one of an emerging industrial
capitalism. He ascribed major importance to commercial capital (he refers, for example, to
the overwhelming influence it exercised in the period of the rise of modern production)74
but nowhere integrated it into a coherent view of the long-term history of capitalism itself.
Not only does the development of commercial capital thus remain distinct from the
capitalist mode of production, but (unlike Engels) he makes no attempt to ask if a history of
capitalism might not allow for the possibility that the growth of industry was bound up,
initially, precisely with commercial capital. The underlying assumption always was that the
subordination of production to capital was simply tantamount to industrial capitalism. On
this assumption, the whole late medieval/early modern period would for Marx have involved
the rise of industrial capital and therefore of the capitalist mode of production.

13

Yet Marx himself described mercantilism as the first scientific theoretical treatment of the
modern mode of production.75 With the Mercantile System, he writes elsewhere, it is no
longer the transformation of commodity value into money that is decisive but instead the
production of surplus-value.76 And in another passage, this time from the Grundrisse, he
describes the Mercantile System as an epoch where industrial capital and hence wage labour
arose in manufactures; but here he adds the fascinating aside: Industrial capital has value
for them [the Mercantilists], even the highest value, as a meansbecause it creates mercantile
capital and the latter, via circulation, becomes money.77
If, as Marx believed, the manufacturing period involved an expansion of industrial capital,
then of course these were industries largely controlled by merchants. We can always call this
industrial capitalism, but today historians would doubtless prefer to see these early forms of
industrial capital as simply one aspect of the wider system of merchant or commercial
capitalism that expanded in the late medieval/early modern world. In his brilliant
monograph on the Venetian silk industry Luca Mol points out that in Vicenza by the end of
the sixteenth century the silk mills belonging to merchants alone were well over 100.78
Merchant capitalists extended control over production in multiple ways. But they also
dominated a host of major economic sectors such as foreign banking, trade, shipping,
government finance, tax farming, and so on. In any case, regardless of where they invested,
we have to abandon the tautology which claims that The independent and preponderant
development of capital in the form of commercial capital is synonymous with the nonsubjection of production to capital,79 an assertion which ignores Marxs own remarks about
the role of merchants in the luxury industries.
If the capitalist mode of production is broadly defined as an era characterised by the
increasing subordination of production to capital , we can frame the problem of origins by
asking when and where production began to subordinated to capital, and asking questions
about the kind of capitals involved in those developments. Against the dichotomy between
capital and capitalism favoured by A&N, we can then argue that the triumph of
capitalism as a mode of production hinged as much on the early, commercial forms of
capitalism as it did on the eventual triumph of an industrial capitalism emancipated from its
mercantile past.

Hobson 2004, Darwin 2008, Mielants 2008, etc. redress the balance in interesting ways.
Braudel 1969 p. 534, where he refers to capitalisme marchand as an economic system that
survived more or less intact from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
1
2

14

Wood 1999, pp. 2021.

Wood 1999, p. 40.
5 Wood 1999, pp. 712; my italics.
6 Wood 1999, p. 72.
7 Wood, Empire of Capital, cited Anievas and Nsancioglu, p. 28.
8 Cain and Hopkins 2002, p. 88. As to how we should define merchant/commercial capitalism,
Frdric Mauro offered broadly similar definitions throughout the sixties, e.g., in a system of
pure commercial capitalism, the control and the profits of production should both be in the
hands of a merchant class distinct from the workers (Mauro 1961, p. 2).
9 Sen 2006, pp. 427ff., aggressive maritime policy.
10 Marco Polo 1958, p. 237.
11 Contrast Darwin 2008, p. 76: Nor were Ottoman rulers indifferent to commercial
objectives. Their naval expansion into the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and their effort to
assert sea power in the Indian Ocean, may have been intended to profit from the networks of
trade just as much as the maritime enterprise of Portugal, Spain and later Holland.
12 Pokrovsky 1931, pp. 2645.
13 Pokrovsky 1931, p. 269.
14 Minorsky 1943, p. 19.
15 Minorsky 1943, p. 14.
16 Dias 1963.
17 Mousnier 1967, p. 98: une sorte de grande entreprise capitaliste.
18 Miller 1988; cf. Vail and White 1980, p. 2: mercantile capitalisms most avaricious and
rapacious agents, the slave traders.
19 Grossmann 1970, pp. 396415.
20 Williams 1994, p. 210.
21 Braudel 1975, vol. 1, p. 510.
22 Greenberg 1951.
23 Giorgio Cracco in his classic study described Venice as a state of big capitalists (Cracco
1967 p. 202).
24 Braudel 2002, vol. 2, pp. 4434. The power balance between state and capital was never
static, of course, cf. Tawney: Before the [English] Civil War, mercantilism, if that word is
to be employed, is a policy imposed by the executive on the business world; after, it is a
policy imposed by the business world on the executive (Tawney, Lectures on Economic
History 14851800, cited Ormrod 2003, p. 46).
25 I have dealt with this structure of capitalist accumulation, as I call it, in Banaji 2016.
26 Pokrovsky 1933, vol. 1, p. 282.
27 Barber 1981, p. 61.
28 Mehring 1975, pp. 1, 3, 7.
29 See Barber 1981, also noting that Lenin greatly admired Pokrovskys work.
30 See Ormrod 1984, p. 147.
31 Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983, p. 7.
32 Dobb 1967, p. 15.
33 Rescher 1969.
3
4

15

Drescher 1977, p. 5: Williams sweeping thesis, that slavery was a phase of commercial
capitalism which aroused opposition only when it had ceased to perform its function.
35 Pares 1960, p. 24.
36 Verlinden 1966, p. 140.
37 Heers 1961, p. 251.
38 Barbour 1950, p. 67.
39 Ormrod 2003, p. 16.
40 Goubert 1960, pp. 131ff.
41 Braudel 1975, vol. 1, p. 432. Cf. Lefebvre 2005, p. 42: millions of peasants worked for
city merchants.
42 Marx 1973, pp. 51011. See de Roover 1968. It is curious that a Belgian banker could
discuss the extent to which the Florentine woollen industry was capitalistic in character,
while latter-day Marxists repeat platitudes like The main vocation of the large merchant
was circulation rather than production (Wood 1999 p. 73, about the same industry).
43 Hossain 1988.
44 Beckert 2014, p. 205.
45 Beckert 2014, pp. 140ff., esp. Eventuallymerchants nearly everywhere would
concentrate production in factories (p. 145).
46 Beckert 2014, p. xxii.
47 Beckert 2014, p. 37.
48 Beckert 2014, p. xv.
49 Thomaz 1989.
50 This refers of course to the so-called Punic Wars of the mid-third century, see Abulafia
2014, pp. 178ff. and the comparison at p. 177.
51 Lyashchenko 1998, p. 63.
52 Devine 1975, p. 58.
53 Devine 1975, pp. 72ff.
54 Devine 1975, p. 92.
55 Fieldhouse 1994, p. 121.
56 The classic example is the domination of West Africas trade by four large firms, cf.
Fieldhouse 1994, who also shows that it took the most advanced forms of merchant capital to
think of consolidating in the face of overcapacity; by 1929, 93 separate companies had been
brought into UAC!
57 Jones 2000, p. 289.
58 Poni 1976; Mol 2000; Tognetti 2002. The Byzantine Book of the Eparch refers to both
silk merchants (metaxopratai) and silk manufacturers (serikarioi) employing wage labour.
59 Xu and Wu 2000, pp. 30826.
60 Mauro 1960, p. 231; Furtado 1968, p. 9; Braudel 1975, vol. 1, pp. 1545, protected by a
powerful capitalism. Note Brenners reference to West Indian sugar capitalism, meaning
the role of the English new merchants in developing the sugar economy there, Brenner
1993, pp. 159ff.
61 Tully 2011.
62 Cicero, Pro lege Manilia, 7.1718.
63 Al-Istakhri 1870, p. 138.
34

16

Lewis 1966, pp. 1034.

Hartwell 1966, esp. p. 48: The decisive factor was the existence of substantial capital in
the hands of individuals and groups willing to invest it in mining and manufacturing.
66 Lo 1970.
67 Verlinden 1966, p. 168, who says Les Cornaro exploitaient leurs plantations de manire
capitaliste.
68 Trevor-Roper 1967.
69 Zahedieh 2010, p. 64.
70 Firro 1990.
71 Picon 2008.
72 Rodinson 1966.
73 Xu and Wu 2000.
74 Marx 1981, p. 455.
75 Marx 1981, p. 455. In editing Marxs notes, Engels apparently removed the word
wissenschaftlich from Marxs sentence.
76 Marx 1981, pp. 92021.
77 Marx 1973, pp. 3278.
78 Mol 2000, p. 237.
79 Marx 1981, p. 445.
64
65

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22