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A review by win_monroe
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood
3.0
7/10
This historical and Marxist reading of the origins of capitalism is both frustrarting and fascinating. It's frustrating styllistically because its incredibly repetitive and spends a lot of time adjudicating various marxist inside baseball debates. At one point I think there was about 10 pages discussing views about an argument that had not yet been stated. It's also frustrating substantively because interesting arguments are made often without much in the way of supporting evidence. Needless to say, the book also takes a particularly critical view of capitalism, which in and of itself is fine, but often results one-sided characterizations that clearly do not seem capable of presenting pros and cons for thoughtful assessment.
Nonetheless, if one can get past such limitations, the book is a fascinating and, in many places, compelling. In short, Wood argues that most narratives about the origins of capitalism either (1) assume is a natural state of society that had previously been held back by older social forms or (2) erroneously assume it arose from various outside factors such as international trade, gradual accumulation of wealth, urbanization, or technological progress. Wood argues that when comparing where capitalism first arose (the late medieval English countryside), none of these factors can explain why it happened there well before anywhere else.
Instead, Wood argues capitalism originated in the English countryside due to a change in property relations. Specifically, an increasingly centralized government resulted in weak feudal landowners who could not extract wealth through force and began to do so through renting to tenants. This created a market for tenants who could make more out of the land by increasing productivity rather than just forcing workers to work more. This led to a triad of landowner, capitalist tenants, and wage-laborers. As agricultural productivity increased, this led many previously more or less self-sufficient agricultural workers to no longer be needed, moving to the city and creating the large wage-reliant population that formed the basis for later industrial capitalism.
Importantly, what made the early English agrarian economy distinctly capitalist was the competitive imperatives and incentives driving improvement of productivity as measured by profitability, not the accumulation of capital, nor technological progress, international trade, or simply the removal of barriers that were restraining a natural impulse toward exchange. Instead of being natural and inevitable, capitalism grew out of a very particular change in the economic relations between people in a very specific environment.
Is this narrative correct? Hard to say, but regardless of whether you view the coming of capitalism as good, evil, or anywhere in between, Wood makes a strong case for where and how it started.
This historical and Marxist reading of the origins of capitalism is both frustrarting and fascinating. It's frustrating styllistically because its incredibly repetitive and spends a lot of time adjudicating various marxist inside baseball debates. At one point I think there was about 10 pages discussing views about an argument that had not yet been stated. It's also frustrating substantively because interesting arguments are made often without much in the way of supporting evidence. Needless to say, the book also takes a particularly critical view of capitalism, which in and of itself is fine, but often results one-sided characterizations that clearly do not seem capable of presenting pros and cons for thoughtful assessment.
Nonetheless, if one can get past such limitations, the book is a fascinating and, in many places, compelling. In short, Wood argues that most narratives about the origins of capitalism either (1) assume is a natural state of society that had previously been held back by older social forms or (2) erroneously assume it arose from various outside factors such as international trade, gradual accumulation of wealth, urbanization, or technological progress. Wood argues that when comparing where capitalism first arose (the late medieval English countryside), none of these factors can explain why it happened there well before anywhere else.
Instead, Wood argues capitalism originated in the English countryside due to a change in property relations. Specifically, an increasingly centralized government resulted in weak feudal landowners who could not extract wealth through force and began to do so through renting to tenants. This created a market for tenants who could make more out of the land by increasing productivity rather than just forcing workers to work more. This led to a triad of landowner, capitalist tenants, and wage-laborers. As agricultural productivity increased, this led many previously more or less self-sufficient agricultural workers to no longer be needed, moving to the city and creating the large wage-reliant population that formed the basis for later industrial capitalism.
Importantly, what made the early English agrarian economy distinctly capitalist was the competitive imperatives and incentives driving improvement of productivity as measured by profitability, not the accumulation of capital, nor technological progress, international trade, or simply the removal of barriers that were restraining a natural impulse toward exchange. Instead of being natural and inevitable, capitalism grew out of a very particular change in the economic relations between people in a very specific environment.
Is this narrative correct? Hard to say, but regardless of whether you view the coming of capitalism as good, evil, or anywhere in between, Wood makes a strong case for where and how it started.