Chris Burford wrote:
> Although Wood's book "A Trumpet of Sedition" (with Neal Wood) is
> subtitled
> 'Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism 1509-1688', the following
> passage shows that the issue of wool is important to her
> explanation of the
> basis of the rise of English capitalism prior to this period.
>
> On page 17 of the Pluto, London, pb edition of this book (1997)
> (preface by
> Christopher Hill) in the first chapter, entitled 'Two Centuries of
> Revolution' she wrote:
>
> " While agricultural advances could not be matched by those of the
> manufacturing and commercial sectors, even here headway was far from
> negligible. Capitalist agriculture was encouraged by the accelerating
> demand for the export of woolen textiles. Since the twelfth century raw
> wool had been the leading export, to be replaced in the fifteenth century
> by woolen textiles the production of which greatly expanded in
> the next two
> centuries, not only for sale abroad but also for the home market.
>
> Enormous operations by capitalist graziers, especially in the south and
> east, helped to satisfy the need for raw wool to be woven into
> textiles by
> the thriving industry of rural cottagers. The weaving, collecting,
> finishing and distribution of cloth for export and home consumption was
> organized by capitalist entrepreneurs. So rural England was the
> birthplace
> not only of agrarian capitalism but also of English capitalist
> manufacture
> in the production of textiles."
>
> This does not mean that Samir Amin, for whom I have a lot of
> admiration, is
> necessarily wrong in arguing that imperialism in the sense of
> colonisation
> of the rest of the world by Europe is inherent to the *expansion* of
> capitalism.
Amin surely does nor argue that imperialism is "inherent" but repeatedly
says that it is a primary motor behind capitalist expansion. What Wood is
constantly trying to do, in the face of the evidence which she herself often
adduces, and which draws wrong or unjustified conclusions from, is to claim
that capitalism is a "wholly new", "unprecedented" mode of production which
arose uniquely in the English countryside because of events and process
specific to England. She, like Brenner, argues that the emergence of
outwork, "free" waged labour, and a class of rent-seeking landlords, were
some of the key prerequisites which were allegedly absent elsewhere. This
kind of argument does not stand up as scholarship; what it does do is to
enable and legitimise a reformist politics, that is it argues for the kind
of obsession with the minutiae of domestic matters, of parliamentary
business and the struggle for small reforms in Congress, which is indeed
very often and very visibly the metier of exactly those folks who are ALSO
loudly supporting the "marxism" of Brenner/Wood and deploring the
"philosophical idealism" and the "unmarxist moralism" which some people are
constantly and erroneously complaing about.
The pattern this debate seems to have is that first the Brenner/Wood thesis
is presented and then it is subjected to a little scrutiny, whereupon it
falls apart. At this point, loud cries are heard that this is all
'irrelevant' anyway, and that we are getting swamped with 'history' and with
boring stuff about things like slavery, the genocidal extermination of First
Nations etc, which all happened long ago and cannot be compared in
importance with the fate of Bush's tax bill or with the question of what or
whom Andrew Sullivan does or does not do.
Nevertheless, there are still plenty of awkward questions for the
Brennerites to answer. To take your own excerpt form Wood's recent book: the
problem Wood has is that England was a monetised economy locked into a
global systems of capital movements, markets and a global division of
labour, long before shee seems to think was the case, and in the 16th
century England was far from the rural backwater stuck on the edge of Europe
which she so often says it was. She has a way of canning the awkward facts
even while silently incorporating their consequences. It is this kind of
hackwork which arouses suspicions about her scholarship, frankly.
Wool, as a matter of historical fact, has a very long history as a commodity
exported from Britain and was one of the reasons why the ancient Romans
invaded the place. 500 years after the Romans left, the wool industry was
still so important to Anglo-Saxon England that control of its wealth was one
of William the Conqueror's main motivations for attacking Harold Godwinsson.
Wool was important to the breathtaking growth of industrial cities like
Bruges, Ghent, and the North Italian cities in the 12th century. Wool was
one of the main motivations for the persisting attempts made by the Normans
to crush the Welsh principality in the 12th and 13th century. Wool was
connected with a huge growth in European fulling, weaving and dyeing
industries. The population of Europe almost doubled and many towns and
cities date from this era. Woolen textiles were traded widely back down the
Silk Roads and by the 13the century there was a true world system of
mercantile trade, and a world division of labour, stretching from Beijing
to Vienna. Janet Abu-Lughod is the definitive historian of this period. The
real source of Mongol power and the creation of Genghis Khan's empire
happened because Mongolia straddled the strategically-crucial Silk Routes.
The struggle to find a way around by sea was an obsession of Western
scholars, mapmakers, financiers and merchant-adventurers since the time of
the Crusades (which themselves began as an attempt to enter by force the
trade and production powerhouse which stretched from Byzantium, to the
Caspian to southern China and Korea). Marco Polo was only one of many who
sought an answer to the problem of reconstructing this world system on more
European terms. Columbus was another.
England was a monetised economy by early Norman times, and the whole thrust
of Norman policy was to develop English markets and the productivity of
English agriculture, including primarily of course, wool. To read Wood, none
of this quite happened. What she and Brenner are concerned about was what to
them seems almost a miraculous thing, namely the emergence of an English
landed interest based on rent.
Of course, there were very few rentier landlords in pre-Reformation England,
altho there were indeed large pools of "free" waged labour. So there is a
big difference between the social relations of the ''English countryside"
before and after the 16-17th centuries. But what was the crucial event which
led to the change? The Reformation.
Well, it is very difficult indeed to show that what Henry VIII (1491-1547)
wanted to do was to create English capitalism, and that that was why he
reformed the churched and dissolved the monasteries, in the process
privatising their huge landholdings. Henry had an odd attitude to his wives.
By an accident of birth, he tended to father girls. This was a dynastuc
headache and he blamed (wrongly) his queens. If Henry hadn't produced the
wrong kind of sperm, the Reformation might not have happened, and where
would Brenner/Wood be then?
Because it was the Reformation and the Dissolution which above all other
events, triggered the succession of events which did lead to Enclosure, the
loss of the common, the creation of an English capitalist agriculture and
the class of rent-seeking landlords. This shows, if it shows anything, that
the events and processes which led to the emergence of English capitalism
were (a) dominated since ancient times by the existence of a world-system
which connected Europe, the Middle East and Asia and whose main commodities
were textiles and silver -- and this world-system was the objective,
material context within which the contingent events, the flow of accdient
and coincidence on the historical suirface-- was embedded.
Thus (b) the events which catalysed the emergence of industrial capital in
Englad rather than elsewhere where often fortuitous, coincidental, and
completely unrelated to the final outcome (unless you can find another way
to connct up Henry VIII's anger at Ann Boleyn to the Industrial Revolution).
Wood is seemingly capable of saying "Since the twelfth century raw > wool
had been the leading export" and then of going on to almost at once speak of
"rural England [as] the > birthplace > not only of agrarian capitalism but
also of English capitalist > manufacture > in the production of textiles",
and not see that what she herself is describing is how from the very first
days, English society and agriculture and English civilisation generally,
was dynamically linked to a burgeoning world system, and that it was
precisely this which energised the successive waves of transformation of the
"English countryside", making it by Shakespeare's time a mere appendage to
what was already (after Edo, Japan) the world's biggest urban centre, one
completely devoted to international trade, finance and colonial affairs, a
city and a court whose was turned not inland but towards France, the middle
East, Asia, and finally, crucially, towards the Americas.
History-writing as bad as Wood's must be bad for a reason: and that is that
Ellen Mieksins Wood is trying to provide a political cover for a crass and
primitive and parochial reformism.
If you want socialism, you have to understand that capitalism is a
world-system which was formed by and emerged from earlier world-systems
(effacing them in the process), and that imperialism was present from the
beginning and is determinant now. But that requires a different kind of
politics, in practice.
As Samir Amin puts it in his article in the June 2001 Monthly Review:
>>Imperialism is not a stage, not even the highest stage, of capitalism:
from the beginning, it is inherent in capitalism’s expansion.<<
Mark Jones
