On 2/5/21 5:58 PM, Michael Meeropol wrote:
But Louis, WHY did India, etc. NOT develop the British style
capitalist mode of production? Because it was militarily too weak to
create its own domestic version of capitalism --- unlike, for example,
Japan which reacted to Admiral Perry's ships by vigorously working to
adopt their version of capitalism which protected them from imperial
domination -- even the "independent" countries of Latin America that
escaped formal colonialism were prey to first Britain's informal
empire and later domination (and often intervention) by the US.
The Power of Contingent External Factors
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html>
How then can we explain the fact that capitalist Britain defeated all
its major adversaries, leading to new bourgeois revolutions in feudal
absolutist states like France and Germany and to Europe’s joint
domination of the world from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth
century?[3]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n3>
Answering this question requires an enormous amount of research, which
is continually ongoing and uncovering new evidence. But surely an
adequate explanation should at least take account of contingent factors
external to capitalism.
These external factors include the decline, for their own internal
reasons, of other, rival modes of production (such as Spanish feudalism
and the modes of production predominating in South and East Asia).[4]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n4>They
also include capitalism’s ability to profit from other productive
relations like slavery, which as EMW says “were shaped by the logic of
capitalism.” (35)
In the absence of these factors British capitalists would never have had
the profits from tobacco, indigo, sugar or the Latin American carrying
trade to invest in their Lancaster mills, or the market for their
textiles in the rest of the world.
Without those profits and markets, there might not have been much of an
industrial revolution. And without the industrial revolution, it is open
to doubt whether the British empire would have ever outclassed the
Chinese, who as EMW says were “for a long time far ahead of Europe in
general, not least in technology.” (33)[5]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n5>
These are all might-have-beens, of course. As a non-economic historian,
I am not well qualified to say what were or were not crucial factors in
the triumph of European capitalism. But EMW provides little evidence on
this point either. I can at least summarize evidence, which she fails to
mention, that strongly suggests that slavery and colonial expansion were
crucial to European capitalism’s ultimate triumph.
Her assertion that British colonialism was notable “for the prominence
of white settler colonies, as distinct from other forms of imperial
domination” (34–35), for example, sidesteps the question of India’s role
in Britain’s capitalist development. There is evidence that this role
was far from negligible.
After the English victory at Plessy in 1757, the East India Company’s
backers received five million pounds from plundering the Bengal state
treasury, and another five million from the English monopoly over export
and import trade between 1775 and 1780 alone. All these profits and much
more, as Eric Wolf points out, made it possible “to subordinate Indian
resources to the process of accumulation in the home country.”[6]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n6>
Yet this vast wealth was by no means an automatic result of overwhelming
economic or military strength resulting from Britain’s capitalist
development. Until fairly late in the seventeenth century, when Britain
was already a capitalist society, its trading posts in India and those
of other European powers were present on Indian soil only by permission
of the Mughal empire, which was quite capable of defending itself
against European incursions or dictates.
The situation changed only at the century’s end, when “the stage was ...
set for the intrusion of the English into Indian affairs” as the Mughal
empire succumbed to its own internal difficulties.[7]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n7>This
suggests that British capitalism’s development was due in part not only
to its own laws of motion, but also to those of the mode of production
then prevailing in South Asia.
British profits from the Atlantic slave trade and from slave production
in the Americas are obviously another external factor that could have
contributed to the development of British capitalism. Even though recent
evidence suggests that direct profits from the slave trade were not
terribly important as a source for capital investment in British
industry, slavery may well have contributed to British capitalist
development in several other ways.
Consider, for example, the trade in products that slaves produced and
consumed. One recent study concludes that the Atlantic trade was the
“principal dynamic element in English export trade all the middle
decades of the eighteenth century”—precisely the decades when the
industrial revolution took off. English exports to Africa and the
Americas increased tenfold during the eighteenth century while English
exports to Europe stayed constant.[8]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n8>
Slavery may also have contributed to the development of British industry
by supplying it with cheap raw materials—cheaper than could have been
produced under capitalist relations themselves. Most of the cotton for
British mills was obtained either from the U.S. South or from Egypt.
U.S. cotton was grown by African slaves under non-capitalist relations,
on land wrested from Cherokees, Creeks and Choctaw not by capitalist
purchase but by military force. Egyptian cotton was grown by corveé
labor, on land also taken by force.[9]
<https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1020.html#n9>
The cotton cloth produced in the eighteenth century by Indian
handicrafts, British textiles’ fiercest initial competition, obviously
did not enjoy these competitive advantages, which were hardly inherent
to capitalist relations of production.
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