The Origin of Capitalism

This is a frustrating book. Many of the individual chapters, taken on their own, are insightful and clarifying. However, the overall argument ultimately fails to achieve it's stated goal of avoiding the commercialisation thesis and providing a historically specific origin for capitalism.

Surveying the literature on the emergence of capitalism Wood identifies a dominant 'commercialisation' model which posits a transhistorical human tendency to truck, barter and trade. According to these models this trading tendency will naturally tend to expand in scale and complexity unless prevented by a counter tendency. The origin of capitalism is then the moment where something in the fragmentary nature of European feudalism left a big enough gap for trade to expand into capitalism.

Wood is right to find this unsatisfactory, it is essentially a repudiation of any sort of explanatory role for periodisation in history. As she puts it:

There was, in fact, no need in the commercialization model to explain the emergence of capitalism at all. It assumed that capitalism had existed, at least in embryo, from the dawn of history, if not in the very core of human nature and human rationality.

She sees Pirenne defend this view explicitly and attributes an implicit adoption to many more across the full political spectrum (including Marxists who would nominally reject it).

This is also my first problem with the work, there is a conspicuous lack of quotation or citation when Wood describes the views of others in the transition debates. Having previously read Rodney Hilton's collection of early transition debate papers I am not impressed by her representation of the writers featured there and that leaves me skeptical to claims about those Wood mentions but I have not read. In general she takes a excoriating polemical tone, reminiscent of the worst parts of the marxist literary tradition, without the scholarly firepower to back it up.

Nonetheless, Wood’s critical commentary makes some vital conceptual clarifications. Her central distinction between the role of markets as opportunities to act compared to market participation as an imposed necessity helps clarify the requirements for an adequate explanation.

It is one thing to say, for example, that English commercial agriculture presupposed the Flemish market for wool. It is quite another to explain how ‘commercial agriculture’ became capitalist agriculture, how the possibility of trade became not only the actuality but the necessity of competitive production, how market opportunities became market imperatives, how this specific kind of agriculture set in train the development of a capitalist system.

We can certainly say that the European trading system was a necessary condition of capitalism, but we cannot just assume that commerce and capitalism are one and the same, or that one passed into the other by a simple process of growth. Anderson has assumed the very thing that needs to be demonstrated, namely that commerce, or indeed production for the market (a widespread practice throughout much of recorded history), became capitalism by means of sheer expansion, which at some point achieved a critical mass.

First, identifying prerequisites is necessary but not sufficient to isolate a causal explanation. Secondly, the question of transformation of quantity to quality is not automatic and noting an expansion of merchant activity coincided with a transformation in social relation is not the same as establishing it as a cause.

In a later chapter she examines transition explanations that center the so-called bourgeois revolutions by insisting that there can be no easy identification of bourgeois with capitalist. France as the exemplary case featured a bourgeois class that was more defined by their officeholding relationship to the state than any production driven commerce.

These and a dozen other valuable tid-bits might make the book worth picking up if you can muster the effort to sort the signal from the noise.

The central failure of the book is beg the question when providing an alternative account of the origin of capitalism. In contrast to the commercialisation model where the removal of obstructing social relations is central, or an orthodox marxist account where the presence of new forces of production initiates change, Wood posits that

a radical transformation of social relations preceded industrialisation

And that

these social property relations generated new economic imperatives, especially the compulsions of competition, a systematic need to develop the productive forces, leading to new laws of motion

These new property relations only developed in England. Indeed, Wood insists they could only develop in England and that the possibility of false starts and failed revolutions is a figment of the commercialisation model.

Where this account stumbles is that it fails to explain what internal dynamic in Feudalism produced this change in property relations and even less so why in England alone. It would be entirely reasonable to bracket this theoretical issue and proceed from an empirical claim but unlike earlier work on the transition debate there is little engagement with the empirical literature.

Instead this claim is substantiated by directing the reader to Brenner’s work which is described as explaining

lords and peasants, in certain specific conditions peculiar to England, involuntarily setting in train a capitalist dynamic while acting, in class conflict with each other, to reproduce themselves as they were. The unintended consequence was a situation in which producers were subjected to market imperatives.

Not even a sketch of this explanation is provided in the book, leaving the reader to take for granted the results of the much contested Brenner debates.

After the work done in the first half of the book to specify in great detail what an adequate explanation would require it is a great disappointment that in "The Origin of Capitalism" you will find no explanation of that origin.

The later half of the book is an interesting elaboration on the historical evolution of English agrarian capitalism and it's transformation of feudalism abroad into a global capitalist system. However, this progression presupposes the existence of capitalist social relations in English agriculture. In the end the central crux of the book has been outsourced and what remains are footnotes to Brenner.