I stumbled across your announcement for a conference titled "Theory as History: Ernest Mandel's historical analysis of world capitalism" on Jerry Levy's OPE-L, a listserv made up primarily of Marxist professors.
http://www.iisg.nl/research/mandel.html
This conference appears to recruit Ernest Mandel to the Brenner-Wood camp on a rather specious reading of his "Marxist Economic Theory". You write:
>>Mandel pointed out in several different publications that primitive accumulation and the existence of a substantial agricultural surplus product were necessary but insufficient conditions for the transition to a capitalist society. The quantity of money capital accumulated in Moghul India for instance was probably no less than in Europe during the same period. Yet it was in Europe, not in India, that capitalism made its breakthrough. Mandel explained this 'Europe first' pattern as a result of a different relationship of forces between the state and the bourgeoisie. The stronger the bourgeoisie was, the more continuous capitalist accumulation could be. 'In the last analysis the uneven development of capital in East and West results from the dissimilarity of the two regions' agricultures, from two different relationships between land, water and the masses of people, which led in the East to a greater centralization of the social surplus product thanks to an agriculture based on irrigation and led in the West to a dual economy and a greater decentralization of the social surplus product.' This position is controversial, as can be seen from the ongoing debate about the role that the colonies played in the industrialization of Europe (e.g. O´Brien 1982; Wallerstein 1983; O´Brien and Prados de la Escosura 1998) as well as in the so-called Brenner Debate.<<
You must have a read a different Ernest Mandel than the one I am familiar with. He wrote in "Marxist Economic Theory":
>>In the decisive formative period of the capitalist mode of production, extending from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the creation of the world market was of crucial importance. Its main results for the primitive accumulation of capital in Western Europe have been examined above. But all through this period of the birth of capitalism the two forms of surplus-value appeared at each step. On one hand, it was the outcome of the surplus labour of the wage workers hired by the capitalists; on the other, it was the outcome of vales stolen, plundered, seized by tricks, pressure or violence from the overseas peoples with whom the western world had made contact. From the conquest and pillage of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards the sacking of Indonesia by the Portuguese and the Dutch and the ferocious exploitation of India by the British, the history of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is an unbroken chain of deeds of brigandage which were so many acts of international concentration of vaIues and capital in Western Europe, the enrichment of which was for, in the literal sense of the word, by the impoverishment of plundered areas.
It can be stated unhesitatingly that the contribution made by this capital was decisive for the accumulation of the commercial capital and money capital which, between 1500 and 1750, created the conditions which proved propitious for the industrial revolution. It is difficult to calculate the total amount involved, but if one takes into account only the most substantial contributions these add up to a staggering sum.
Hamilton estimates at over 500 million gold pesos the total amount gold and silver exported from Latin America between 1503 and 1660. According to Colenbrander, the total value of the dividends, officials' remittances and cargoes of spices taken out of Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company amounted to 600 million gold forms for the period 1650-1780. On the basis of the calculations made by Father Rinchon, we know that profits from the slave trade amounted in eighteenth-century France to nearly half a billion livres tournois (without including the profit arising from the work done by the slaves, which came to several billion livres).' The profits obtained from the labour of the negroes in the British West Indies amounted to £200 to £300 million.<<
If this has anything to do with Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, I will fly over to Amsterdam for your conference and eat a plateful of cockroaches in full view of all the professors there.
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