The Non-European Origins of European Industrial Capitalism
1858 | Engraving of slaves in the British West Indies working the sugar cane
Paula Reisdorf recently completed an MA in Global Political Economy from the University of Sussex. She has been involved in anti-racist activism since her undergraduate years, which she spent at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Being part of a student group called Disrupting Whiteness, she has held workshops on white privilege, structural racism and postcolonialism. She brings a decolonial and postcolonial angle to political economy, a discipline that she views as too often perpetuating systems of white supremacy.
By Paula Reisdorf
The origins of capitalism have been debated by generations of scholars, Marxists and non-Marxists alike.[i] The two most active Marxist schools of thought that have theorised capitalism’s origins are Political Marxism (PM) and World Systems Analysis (WSA). Within PM, it is Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood who have theorised this so-called ‘transition debate’ and with WSA, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein have taken up this task. Despite both schools having contributed extensively to the historical account of agrarian as well as industrial capitalism’s origins, they are both limited in their Eurocentrism.
PM argues that capitalism has its roots in sixteenth century England with the outside world playing no significant role.[ii] Because it only applies in the European example, Wood and Brenner effectively declare all other transitions to capitalism that occurred outside of Europe anomalies.[iii] Thus, PM’s analyses fall into the category of what Blaut calls ‘Eurocentric diffusionism’.[iv] According to Blaut, Eurocentric diffusionism is the idea that all systems, developments and ideas first occur in Europe and from there diffuse or spread to the rest of the world. Both Brenner and Wood’s argument that capitalism emerged solely in Europe with the non-European world being a static part ready to be subsumed by capitalist diffusion is the epitome of such an analysis.[v]
Frank, on the other hand, criticizes this diffusionist approach, arguing instead that the process of capitalist development included both the metropolis and the satellite, developing the former at the expense of the latter.[vi] Wallerstein also takes a less Eurocentric position than PM by arguing that the economic and geographical expansion of Europe in the sixteenth century was crucial to the development of a capitalist system.[vii] However, he still sees Western Europe as being the primary agency-bearing instrument in the emergence of capitalism. He states that ‘[it] was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born’.[viii]
Similarly, Wood states that ‘without English capitalism there would probably have been no capitalist system of any kind’.[ix] Thus, both Wallerstein and Wood still situate the origins of capitalism in Western Europe, giving primary agency to those in the metropolis over those in the satellite. In contrast to the Eurocentrism present in both WSA and PM, I will attempt to demonstrate how the non-European world was indispensable to the emergence of industrial capitalism and capitalism overall. In order to do this, we must go back in time to the sixteenth century.
Sixteenth century England witnessed the dispossession of small-scale farmers from their land, leading them to seek employment in the cities.[x] However, because there were not enough jobs for this new influx of people, many were left jobless and began forming social movements like the Diggers and Levellers who were increasingly challenging the ruling class from the seventeenth century onwards.[xi] This provided a massive threat to capitalist development at the time and the British government sought two main strategies to rid itself of these people: either through their absorption into the domestic industry involved in colony-related work, including shipbuilding, sugar refining and textile production, or through their direct removal to the colonies either as indentured servants or as settlers.[xii]
The latter was enshrined into law in various legislative acts passed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, including the Vagabonds Act of 1597, which allowed for the removal of ‘criminals’ to the colonies to work in penal servitude.[xiii] Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, a total of 350,000 English people had crossed the Atlantic.[xiv]
Simultaneously, the now-land-less workers centred around London – which had become the biggest European city by the eighteenth century – were dependent on basic commodities to survive, as they were no longer able to provide for themselves on a subsistence basis.[xv] The key commodities that were consumed by the increasing urban population were slave-grown commodities like sugar, tobacco and coffee.[xvi]
The reason that they were able to afford these products was because slave-produced commodities dramatically cheapened the price. Hence, from 1670 to 1770, per capita consumption of refined sugar in Britain increased from 1 lb to 25 lb.[xvii] From 1660 onwards, England’s sugar imports exceeded all of its other imports combined.[xviii]By 1900, sugar made up one fifth of the calories consumed by the British population.[xix]
Sugar wasn’t the only slave-grown basic commodity that was consumed by England’s new urban population. The percentage of so-called ‘grocery products’ that were imported increased from 16.9 per cent in 1700 to 34.9 per cent by 1800 and included basic goods like tea, coffee, rice and pepper.[xx]
At the same time, England’s settler colonies in the Americas provided the consumer base necessary to fuel industrialisation itself. English exports to the Americas and the West Indies increased by 2,300% over the course of the eighteenth century.[xxi] These exports were not dominated by raw materials as was common during the time; rather, more than three quarters of all British exports to the Americas were manufactured commodities, including textiles, metalware and glassware.[xxii]
To illustrate the clear link between demand from the Americas and industrialisation let us take the case of cotton. Between 1760 and 1790, the demand for cotton increased drastically, thus giving the incentive to continue increasing productivity. Hence, this period also saw the emergence of technological developments to increase the productivity of cotton spinning such as the spinning jenny, Arkwright's water frame and Crompton's mule.[xxiii] Thus, technological innovation that has often been associated with the development of capitalism was largely dependent on the existence of settler colonies in the Americas.
Slavery also provided a fuel for industrialisation as it was particularly slave-grown commodities like cotton, sugar and tobacco that pushed the industrialisation of various cities in Britain. In 1840, close to 40% of total workers in England were employed in cotton production. By 1850, 89% of the 374,000 workers employed in cotton production worked in factories with mechanised production.[xxiv]
Glasgow, which in 1700 was still considered to be a small European port, became one of the largest commercial cities in Europe due to its trade in tobacco over the course of the eighteenth century.[xxv] Similarly, Bristol’s access to sugar – coming primarily from the so-called ‘sugar islands’ of Barbados and Jamaica – meant that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Bristolian city centre contained twenty sugar refineries with numerous snuff mills being located in the suburbs.[xxvi]
Another major way in which the slave trade fuelled industrialisation in Britain was through slaveowners’ investment in British industry. A notable case is that of Richard Pennant, a Member of Parliament (MP) for Liverpool during the 1760s, who inherited 600 slaves alongside 8,000 acres of sugar plantations. Of this inherited wealth, he invested large sums into building the largest slate quarry in the world at the time – the Penrhyn Quarry in North Wales.[xxvii]
Even in its abolition, slavery provided a last push for industrialisation in Britain. The modern equivalent of £17 billion was paid out as compensation to former slaveowners for losing their ‘human property’ upon abolition in 1834.[xxviii] This money was subsequently invested into the British economy and fuelled industrialisation further.
This investigation into the significance that New World slavery and settler colonialism played in the origins of industrial capitalism in England should be the beginning of further investigation into this area. Since scholars have tended to separate capitalism from colonialism and slavery, we have effectively limited the necessary examination of the roots of our current global economic system and the political discussion on dealing with the consequences of colonialism today. Once we, as a society, recognise that the capitalist mode has, from its onset, been intricately linked with colonial violence, we can begin to seriously talk about reparations, because we must ask ourselves how we can give reparations for a violence that is part of a system we are still living under.
[i] Higginbottom 2018, p. 34.
[ii] Brenner 1977, p. 78; Wood 2002, p. 101.
[iii] Heller 2011, p. 4.
[iv] Blaut 2000, p. 133.
[v] See: Brenner 1977, p. 27, and Wood 2002, p. 145.
[vi] Frank 1966, p. 24.
[vii] Wallerstein 1974, p. 102.
[viii] Wallerstein 1974, p. 357.
[ix] Wood 2002, p. 142.
[x] Marx 1996[1867], p. 709; Wood 2002, p. 108.
[xi] Anievas & Nişancıoğlu 2015, p. 150.
[xii] Anievas & Nişancıoğlu 2015, p. 151.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Morgan 2000, p. 6.
[xv] Wood, 2002: 133
[xvi] Anievas & Nişancıoğlu 2015, p. 166.
[xvii] Morgan 2000, p. 21.
[xviii] Mintz 1985, p. 44.
[xix] Mintz 1985, p. 6.
[xx] Mintz 1985, p. 67.
[xxi] Mintz 1985, p. 56.
[xxii] Morgan 2000, pp. 19, 61.
[xxiii] Morgan 2000, p. 73.
[xxiv] Anievas & Nişancıoğlu 2015, p. 167.
[xxv] Morgan 2000, p. 86.
[xxvi] Mintz 1985, p. 38; Morgan 2000, p. 59.
[xxvii] Morgan 2000, p. 53; National Trust n.d.
[xxviii] Olusoga 2018; Britain’s Forgotten Slaveowners 2015.
Bibliography
Anievas, A. & Nişancıoğlu, K. 2015. How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Blaut, 2000. Marxism and Eurocentric Diffusionism. In Chilcote, R.H. (ed.) The Political Economy of Imperialism: Critical Appraisals. Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 127-140.
Brenner, R. 1977. The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism. New Left Review. 104: 25-92.
Britain’s Forgotten Slaveowners. 2015. [Documentary]. David Olusoga (director). London: BBC.
Heller, H. 2011. The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-first-century Perspective. London: Pluto Press.
Higginbottom, A. 2018. Enslaved African Labour in the Americas: from primitive accumulation to manufacture with racial violence. Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre as Américas. 12(1): 22-46.
Marx, K. 1996[1867]. Capital: Volume I. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Mintz, S.W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books.
Morgan, K. 2000. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
National Trust, n.d. Penrhyn Castle and the transatlantic slave trade. Available at: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/penrhyn-castle/features/penrhyn-castle-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade [Accessed: 23 August 2019].
Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. London: Academic Press.
Wood, E.M. 2002. The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.