>As you are on the general topic anyway, and since Michael is inviting 100
>word answers to presumably complex topics, could somebody please explain why
>capitalism originated in England as opposed to Spain. I am trying to
>understand the connection between slavery and imperialism and the
>origination of capitalism. Was not Spain the most powerful nation in Europe
>in the 16-17th centuries and in possession of large colonies which it
>exploited? If so, why capitalism in England and not Spain? Or is the
>assumption of my question wrong?
>
>Thanks,
>
>David Shemano
Ellen Meiksins Wood dealt with this question in "The Origins of
Capitalism." She, like Brenner, thinks that capitalist class relations, in
farming particularly, is the main explanation for Great Britain's
phenomenal success--an absurd idea of course. She writes:
"British imperialism also, of course, contributed to the development of the
world’s first industrial capitalism. But while industrialization did feed
on the resources of empire, it is important to keep in mind that the logic
of imperialism did not bring about industrial capitalism by itself.
Imperial power in other European states did not produce the same effects,
and on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the domestic market was still
more important in the British economy than was international trade.
Agrarian capitalism was the root of British economic development.
"Marxist historians have persuasively demonstrated, against many arguments
to the contrary, that the greatest crime of European empire, slavery, made
a major contribution to the development of industrial capitalism. But here,
too, we have to keep in mind that Britain was not alone in exploiting
colonial slavery and that elsewhere it had different effects. Other major
European powers—France, Spain, Portugal—amassed great wealth from slavery
and from the trade in addictive goods like tobacco which, it has been
argued, fueled the trade in living human beings. But, again, only in
Britain was that wealth converted into industrial capital—and here again
the difference lies in the new capitalist dynamic which had already
transformed the logic of the British economy, setting in train the
imperatives of competitive production, capital accumulation, and
self-sustaining growth."
Spain was always set against England like a prodigal son, or as a frivolous
grasshopper against a thrifty and hardworking ant. While England plowed New
World wealth into a burgeoning industrial capitalism, the Spanish were
frittering away their booty on golden carriages, diamond-studded slippers
and baroque cathedrals they could ill afford. In the back of my mind I
always pictured John Cleese of "Fawlty Towers" smacking the hotel's foolish
bellboy Manuel while explaining to shocked guests, "Don't mind him--he's
from Barcelona."
Taking advantage of my access to Columbia University's research libraries,
one benefit of being a computer programmer there, I decided to investigate
other stories about Spain. I was simply tired of hearing it described as a
feudal basket case. It was one thing to make such allegations, it was
another to back them up.
Curiously enough, Brenner had cited 15th century Catalonia in his first
"Past and Present" article as one of the few examples of a "capitalist
system based on large-scale owner-cultivators also generally using wage
labour." Because of this, he argues, Catalonia was one of the few areas in
Europe--besides England--that had escaped the "general economic crisis of
the seventeenth century." There's only one problem with this analysis. It
seems to be false.
At least that's what Jaime Torras argues in the Fall 1980 Review of the
Braudel Center, edited by Immanuel Wallerstein. Based on recent research on
Catalonia, the key element of agrarian success in the region--such as it
was--was labor intensification and crop specialization rather than class
relations or farm size. I say such as it was because evidence points to a
general failure of Catalonian agriculture for most of the 17th century
until the cited measures took effect.
This was not the end of the story of the Spanish economy, at least with
respect to its either validating or invalidating the Brenner thesis. "Past
and Present," the journal that had provided the launching pad for the
Brenner thesis, published a collection of articles by Spanish historians in
1994 titled "The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century." Edited by
I.A.A. Thompson and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, the book purports to present a
"revisionist" account of the period based on the availability of new
archival material. This was necessary since a review of scholars--including
E.J. Hobsbawm and Robert Brenner--had revealed "how unsatisfactory is their
treatment of metropolitan Spain." More to the point, the standard version
of Spanish history, including that produced by Marxist historians, was one
that argued:
"[T]he failure of the Spanish economy has in a long tradition that extends
from the seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth been
explained in terms of arbitrary government, a bad religion, the tyrannical
Inquisition, reactionary hidalgo values, the wretched laziness of the
people, the absence of a capitalist and entrepreneurial spirit and other
failings of the national character, as much as in terms of objective
economic analysis."
The articles contained in the volume do not add up to a unified version of
what took place in 17th century Spain. Nevertheless, a careful reading
leads to one conclusion: the Brenner thesis seems woefully inadequate for
describing this period and this region.
Take for example the key question of urban growth. For Ellen Meiksins Wood,
the fact that the urban population of England doubled between 1500 and 1700
confirms the highly productive character of British capitalist agriculture.
When fewer people are required to produce foodstuffs, then they are freed
up to work in the cities in burgeoning industrial enterprises. However,
according to Angel García Sanz, the population of Madrid increased from
30,000 in 1561 to 130,000 in the 1630s. ("Castile 1580-1650: economic
crisis and the policy of 'reform'") This beats English urban growth by 100
percent.
Perhaps the most 'revisionist' argument of all comes from Gonzalo Anes who
argues that the Spanish economy grew during this period rather than
decline. ("The agrarian 'depression' in Castile in the seventeenth
century") Basing himself on tithe figures from parish archives, Anes makes
a compelling case that:
"The increase of the urban population in the sixteenth century guaranteed
the peasantry a firm market for their products and in some specific cases,
as the demand from towns and cities grew, it elicited a response from the
agrarian sector in the form of an extension of the area under cultivation
and a diversification of crops. It also allowed, where possible,
specialisation in the products in greatest and most regular demand by the
urban population. To the increase in urban demand must be added the
increase and diversification of overseas demand, which has in the past been
given greater importance than it deserves. The figures we have for trade
with the Indies, despite the uncertainty concerning the quantities of
agricultural produce exported, are indication enough that exports could not
have set off the growth of the agrarian sector. Nevertheless, overseas
demand for Castilian and Andalusian agricultural produce did contribute to
agricultural growth in areas from which it was profitable to export, since
it promoted production for the market and the specialisation that followed
from it. That demand helped stimulate a process of expansion which had its
origins in behavioural changes within the rural population resulting from
the readjustments that took place during the fifteenth century to changes
in average yields, in labour productivity, in wages and consequently in the
rents and dues demanded by the lords, and in the relative price of
agricultural and manufactured goods."
Moreda produces some dramatic statistics. Figures for twenty Castilian
cities in 1530 and 1594 show an increase of 84 percent, figures that seem
consistent with Sanz's. While some of this growth reflects increased
commercial activity related to colonial outposts in the New World, much of
it has to do with exports to the rest of Europe.
This leads us to a key question which I find practically ignored in Brenner
and Woods. Namely, does the growth of agrarian capitalism ensure a happy,
upward path toward the industrial revolution and well-fed wage workers?
Frankly, most of what I have seen in Brenner and Woods seems innocent not
only what I have read in recent ecological analysis of capitalist
agriculture but what Marx himself wrote. For Marx, capitalist agriculture
is filled with contradictions. While yielding short term profits, it leads
to the exhaustion of the soil and the rural work force. Looking back at
Wood's essay on the agrarian origins of capitalism in the special Monthly
Review issue on agriculture is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. While
every other contributor was explaining the irrational destructiveness of
capitalist agriculture, Wood seemed swept up by the bourgeois ideology of
"improvement" that swept across Europe in the 17th and 18th century. For
her there are obvious injustices associated with the growth of agrarian
capitalism such as people being forced from their land by the Enclosure
Acts. Yet this seems some kind of necessary evil to reach the goal of a
modern industrial society--sort of like Stalin breaking the back of the
kulaks in the 1930s.
If there has been anything I've learned in the past 7 years or so since
being won to the Green perspective, it is that capitalist agriculture is
bound to produce anything but prosperity and a well-fed population. This is
particularly true of 17th century Spain which seems to have suffered more
from capitalist turbo-growth in the countryside rather than feudal stagnation.
According to Anes, profit-driven expansion of agriculture in the 16th
century led to putting more and more land into cultivation. That made it
necessary to convert more and more land into arable fields even when such
conversion would ultimately undermine the ecological health of agriculture
overall. Specifically, "the ploughing up, sowing and cultivation of
woodland, scrub and pasture reduced the area of permanent grazing, and
necessarily also reduced the number of cattle and sheep maintained in each
village in line with the loss of feed." Furthermore, with more land to
plow, more plough-teams were required. However, with less grazing there
were inevitably fewer oxen that could be supported. Eventually, oxen were
replaced by mules which were more expensive. For poorer farmers this was a
mixed blessing. The oxen were not only cheaper, their hides and flesh could
be used once their useful working lives were done.
The relentless drive toward more and more land for crop cultivation led to
burning woods, much as takes place in contemporary Brazil. Anes writes, "In
reply to petitions of the Cortes in 1555 and 1560 against the burning of
woods in Andalusia, Extremadura, the kingdom of Toledo and elsewhere, to
provide young shoots for better grazing for goats, Philip II ordered that
animals should not be allowed into the newly burned wooded areas for five
or six years in order to preserve the holm-oak and other trees. Despite the
heavy penalties, it was not a success." Of course not. Profit is a
merciless dictator.
As this process spread across Spain, as more and more land became exhausted
due to lack of fertilizer, the eventual result was predictable: a
depression in the countryside. There were other factors that impinged on
the Spanish farmer, including steep taxes to support the imperial
adventures of the Crown and tithes for the clergy. Spain also had to
contend with dwindling imports of silver from the New World, an exhaustible
resource just like land. At any rate, the last thing one can say about
Spain in this period is that it was some kind of "feudal" historical
counterfactual to England. Spain, in this period, was a victim of its own
early agrarian capitalist success.
Louis Proyect
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