How the West Came to Rule, by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu

War played an important role in the development of capitalism. The "war-making activities" (or "political accumulation") of feudal lords spurred the development of "capitalist production relations." The scholar Erica Schoenberger argues that markets developed,

"out of the state-building tasks of territorial conquest and control during the medieval period... markets emerged out of, or were created to respond to, the myriad logistical problems faced by states in the 'mobilization of resources and their management across space and time.'" In order to move wealth and goods, medieval war-making demanded commodity markets. "Commodity markets in material resources, property and labour were all crucial to the movement of wealth and goods that was necessary for Medieval war-making." Moreover, statesmen relied on businessmen for financing. Quoting William H. McNeil,

By the sixteenth century even the mightiest European command structures became dependent on an international money and credit market for organizing military and other major undertakings.

Marx argued that wage labor first became essential in armies, not the "interior of bourgeois society." The British Navy relied on massive shipyards to outfit its fleets. "In particular, the expansion of naval capacities contributed to the development of capitalist relations, since land reclamation, felling trees, building harbours, dry-docks, and ships all required a steady and large supply of wage-labourers." In the early 1700s, merchant shipping employed tens of thousands of wage laborers, a large break from the historic landlord-tenant, master-servant, and master-apprentice relationships that had hitherto dominated British industry.

Some Marxist historians argue that only systems of economic exploitation are truly capitalist or proto-capitalist, whereas, for example, the English East India Company used "non-capitalist extra-economic explotation in the form of tax and tribute," making it "unambiguously non-capitalist." This relies on the principle that coercive exploitation is non-capitalist, which is not necessarily a useful framing.

Such historians (including Ellen Meiksins Wood, author of the excellent The Origin of Capitalism) argue that capitalism is essentially based on class, not race or gender. However, many theorists (especially feminist and subaltern) have argued that the emergence of capitalism depended on "such coercive, nonmarket forms of exploitation and oppression."

Political markists like Wood argue that,

Capitalism can be said to have emerged only when the direct producers and appropriators have lost nonmarket access to their means of subsistence and production, and become entirely dependent on the market for their self-reproduction.

Post-colonial theorists adopt a more expansive understanding of capitalism and its origin, decentering Europe and European worldviews. That is one of the projects of this book — to understand the origin of capitalism from a more global and less Eurocentric perspective.

By emphasising how European modernity has always been constituted against – and through the subordination of – a non-Western ‘Other’, these authors have stressed how colonial practices are deeply embedded in the structures of European power and identity... Postcolonialism emphasises the heterogeneity of social development and its irreducibility to exclusively European forms. Accordingly, history is neither universal nor homogenous, but marked by difference, hybridity and ambivalence – in short, multiplicity. As such, postcolonialism also seeks to dislodge the linearity of historical time...Postcolonialism is, first and foremost, a specific reaction against attempts in Western thought to subsume all sociohistorical experiences under the universal rubric of capitalist modernity. These universalist accounts suffer, because they tend to misread, or worse, overlook difference.

Postcolonialism revolts against "historicism," the tendency to unversalize historical narratives and treats capitalism as inevitable. A typical historicist tendency is to cast the peasant as "premodern," "backward," or "traditional." "The upshot is that an otherwise politically significant peasantry becomes silenced, misrepresented or marginalised by history writing." In order to truly decenter Europe in history, we need to dissect the mythology of European history.

Labor originates in the lived experience of the worker. Machines abstract our labor into time, giving rise to the concept of wealth. Wealth is based in productive time, and wealth is augmented through labor-saving technology, obviating the worker who invented the labor in the first place.

Marx believed that capitalism would lay the ground for socialism which would inevitably prepare the world for a communist revolution. Leon Trotsky, in contrast, rejected the idea of waiting for the revolution. Trotsky insisted on the revolution of the "now." Trotsky articulated the idea of "uneven and combined development" to descrice historical development. Countries influence each other through competition and cooperation. "There were... emergeny layers and axes of the unevenness of human development that would be articulated through a multiplicity of state forms, social relations, and ideological and cultural institutions. We examine the specificities of these forms... nomadic, tributary, feudal and so on... Capitalism emerged from within and through these antecedent processes of unevenness."

Combined development explores how humans have helped each other through history. As an example, paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands "depended for their biological reproduction on exogamous interaction with other bands, extending networks of consanguinity which provided the basis for periodic gatherings, shared language and security against environmental stress."

To start with, humans must "product and reproduce their means of subsistence." We need to find food and shelter. So, we depend on our environment. According to Marx and Engels, all history starts from this natural basis. But this isn't an even ground for all peoples; in fact, it is "the largest single source of uneven development." Note the significance of that point: environmental differences are one of the most important factors in historical unevennes. Quoting Justin Rosenberg,

Climatic, topographic and evological differentiation across geographical space offered an enormous variety of habitats to which human groups adapted as they spread outwards from their East Africa home... Temporally, too, the earth was (and is) a dynamic phenomenon, uneven across time... Thus the process of peopeling the earth, largely accomplished by HGBs [hunter-gatherer bands], was necessarily uneven in both space and time. This unevennes was expressed in (and further compounded by) an 'enormous variation' in human socio-ecological adaptation.

That is to say, our environmental conditions and our relationship to those conditions form the first and most significant factor in our economic development.

We need to understand the world as highly varied and interconnected. There is no pure form of development and no natural state. There is no generic idea of "modern" or "traditional."

In this book, we examine the historically distinct dynamics, scales and forms of uneven and combined development in no less than five modes of production: the nomadic, tributary, feudal, slave-based and capitalist... the various interactions between these modally differntiated societies produced a multiplicity of variegated sociological amalgamations, representing entirely new modalities of development.

The Mongol Empire

The evolutionist view of history illustrates a dichotomy between "state" and "non-state", "civilized" and "barbaric". In this view, the state is a natural evolution from barbaric tribes, which justifies any "civilizing" projects. Nomadic Eurasian empires were cast as "arrested" and "lawless." European states sought to subdue and subsume nomadic societies. In the colonization of the Americas, Europeans argued that Native Americans had "failed" to enclose and replensih their lands, legitimizing the European territorial claims.

Subsequently, the remnants of nomadic life in North America were systematically eradicated through state-led sedetarisation in the 19th century. Similarly, the modernisation of the Ottoman state in the 19th century was accompanied by a policy of forced settlement of nomads, along with a legitimating ideology of ‘Ottoman Orientalism’ which painted nomads under its jurisdiction as ‘savages’ who required ‘civilising’. In the same period, the Russian Empire forced its nomadic population to settle as part of its attempts to modernise the creaking Tsarist state. This too was complemented by an ideological construction of the nomad as ‘uncivilised’.

The tragic irony of these prejudice is that nomads played a crucial role in establishing the philosophical and political foundations of capitalism and the modern state.

It is worth recalling that in the late Medieval and early modern epochs, Europe was in no sense destined to rise to the position of global prominence it currently holds. Up until at least the mid-13th century, the social formation making up 'Europe' were in fact the least developed region of a 'world system' of increasing economic integration and cultural contacts between 'East' and 'West.' Arising late on the periphery of this world system, European development had the most to gain from the new intersocietal links being forged, particularly through the diffusion of new technologies and ‘resource portfolios’ spreading from East to West.

From more advanced Asian societies, Europe gained math, navigation, and military technology. In fact, the adoption of these Asian innovations gave Europe — an impoverished, under-developed backward — the power to leapfrog its Asian counterparts.

How did this happen? The most important step (steppe) was the unificantion of most of Eurasia under the Mongol Empire between 1210 and 1350. The Mongols brought Europe and China "in direct contact with one another for the first time in a thousand years."

So how do nomads unify the diverse, sometime advanced, sometimes powerful polities of Eurasia? In fact, it was their way of life — nomadic pastoralism — that served as the key to their ingenuity and success. For pastoral nomads, the source of wealth is open land for grazing. Wealth generation therefore demands "more and more productive units." The Mongols had a perogative to find more grazing land in the 'spotty and archipelagic' grasslands of interior Eurasia. The nomadic groups relocated in summer and winter, giving them natural mobility and military prowess. Conquest was part of their routine political strategy. Beyond grazing, the Mongols relied on raiding more sedentary community for their grains and goods. Finally, the Mongols used their mobility to develop strategic trade networks across Eurasia.

Economic ‘openness’ in the conquered lands was therefore crucial to the reproduction of nomadic empires. These lands acted as logistical mechanisms for the supply of food, strategic resources, luxury goods, tributes and taxes.

Mongol society was highly flexible and innovative. The nomadic groups needed a form of organization that could facilitate migration, conquest, and trade while responding to shifting weather. The Mongols had an "ideology of inclusiveness and quasi-equality." As such, the Mongols were averse to strong centralisation of power.

Because intratribal or supratribal organisations were so heavily predicated on warfare,39 unification tended to occur through the appointment of a supreme chief, or khan, who would represent the ‘higher unity’ of these horizontal structures.40 Hence, political authority tended to be concentrated according to the personal qualities of the most skilled warrior in the position of chief, who was best suited to leading the ‘joint ventures’ of migration and raiding.

The Mongol empire is one of the most significant phenomena in world history. The empire brought together the Eurasian landmass into a "unified system of geopolitical relations."

What we then find in the world of the 13th and 14th centuries is a plurality of differentiated societies, based on different modes of production (tributary in Asia, nomadic in the steppes, feudal in Europe), constituting a single interactive geopolitical whole.

Up to this point in history, China was one of the most advanced and powerful players on the world stage. After the Mongols overthrew the Sung dynasty, "China never regained the dynamism of its past." The threat to China's interior land borders drove to shift focus away from seafaring, famously represented by the decision "not to follow up Admiral Zheng He's naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean." It signaled "the abandonment of seaborne expansion and... the eventual weakening of the Empire... The very withdrawal of powerful Chinese fleets from commercially and strategically important nodes of the Indian Ocean littoral meant that the Portuguese and Dutch had a considerably freer rein during their later, 16th-century penetration into the region."

In this way, the Mongol engagement with China opened the Pacific and Indian regions to European expansion. "Had it not been for China’s central strategic problem, the nomadic threat, we could speculate that it might well have reached the Americas first."

The Mongols had little interested in the environmentally and economically poor regions of Western Europe. As such, the Mongol Empire's military dominance of Eurasia and subsequent opening of trade routes delivered an economic windfall to Europe. The Mongols would guarantee the safety of merchants traveling in the Empire and grant lucrative treaties to European traders. The Mongols also helped diffuse military technologies like gunpowder and navigation techniques.

The establishment of the Pax Mongolica was then a major boon for overland trade connecting East to West, which notably benefited Northwestern Europe. It created a transcontinental trading system in which commerce, trade, technologies and ideas travelled along the Silk Road like never before. This has led some scholars to go so far as to attribute the origins of ‘globalisation’ to the unification of the Eurasian land mass accomplished by the Mongols. Having connected the disparate regions of Eurasia under a single authority for ‘the first and indeed only time in history', the Mongols contributed to the emergence of a nascent 'world economy' by facilitating 'land transit with less risk and lower protective rent.'

The Mongol trade routes built the wealth of Venetian and Genovese merchants. It contributed to an economic boom in Europe that stimulated industry, especially in textiles,

Which proved critical to the ‘urban-agrarian’ symbiosis that characterised the rise of capitalist social relations in parts of the Late Medieval Netherlands. The widened market for wool in Flemish towns would in turn encourage English landowners in the Stuart period to convert to commercial agriculture.

That is to say, the Mongol empire was essential to the commercialization of Europe.

The Mongol Empire created the idea of a unified world and popularized commercial trade, which would encourage Europeans to continue to seek trade opportunities after the decline of the Mongol Empire. Moreover, the fall of the Mongol Empire provided the geopolitical space for Europe to expand. "It was the ‘Fall of the East’ that set the conditions for the later ‘Rise of the West’. "

Commercialization precipitated a sea change in Europe. Commercial industries provided a means of escape for serfs in bondage, and an alternative economic model for the lords struggling to keep them.

The Black Death

The Black Death was one of the most important factors in the development of capitalism in Europe. The demographic shock was a "watershed in the transition to capitalism." The impact of the Black Death was exacerbating by the existing poverty and famine in Western Europe as a result from the crisis of feudalism.

The image of the Black Death is indirectly captured in Albrechy Durer's 1498 painting, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

The four harbingers of reckoning furiously rout all before them. Straddling the horses of ‘pestilence’, ‘war’, ‘famine’, and ‘death’, each signified the chokepoints of feudalism: the bubonic plague, internecine military competition, the vicissitudes of agrarian production, and demographic fluctuations. Meanwhile, a diabolical monster drags members of the ruling class into hell, representing and demonising the widespread rebellions that would attack the institutions of serfdom, empire, and papacy from below.

The Black Death overturned the value of land which had upheld feudal lords' wealth. With a newfound abundance of land, peasants no longer needed to fear expulsion. They could flee to new lands or demand better conditions. They mounted rent strikes. Direct producers realized better living conditions or emancipation from serfdom. Wages doubled or tripled across Europe, while work obligations reduced. The gender pay gap dropped. "For a brief period, the peasantry held historically ‘unprecedented power’ in what proved ‘a golden age of the European proletariat." As Jane Whittles writes,

Manorial lords had retained their hold on the economy in the century before the Black Death because of the high demand for land. Once this factor was removed by population decline, the diversified economy undermined the manorial lords’ position. Land was still an important element in the economy, but it was not the only element, and it was now not difficult to acquire …. Peasants, or rather wealthy peasants, had capitalized on the fifteenth-century situation, building up their land holdings, and orientating themselves increasingly towards market production.

Lords lowered rents in response to pressure from peasants and in an effort to keep and attract tenants to prevent land from going fallow. The decreased revenue from rents was somewhat offset by increased productivty as the decimated population abandoned marginal soils and converted empty fields to pasture.

The loss of labor force lowered the price of agricultural products (which require less labor) relative to manufactured products (which require more labor). This was a windfall for the peasantry, who could now enjoy cheaper food, and a serious blow to the nobility, who could no longer afford fine clothes, furnishings, and manors. The price of land fell, driving down rents and interest rates, shrinking the income of the landowning classes.

The shortage of labor drove technological innovation, seeking ways to produce food and goods with less human input. Peasants started using oxen and fertilizer more often. Former grain mills were repurposed for cloth, wood, and other manufacturing processes. The period also saw the maritimize revolution and an uptake of firearms. As Europe had no domestic market for manufactured wares, textile manufacturers sought new markets abroad, opening a new era of mercantalism and "the structural reconstruction of intra-European economic relations."

"The late Middle Ages was a period of impressive technological achievement," writes David Herlihy.

After the Black Death, feudal lords found their power in three main strategies: intra-lordly war, overseas trade, and reactionary clamp-downs on workers.

In the face of labour shortages caused by the plague and the consequent upturn in wages, the ruling class sought to reimpose strictures on the peasants that had until then been gradually diminishing, by attempting to strengthen serfdom, and hold down wages in both town and country. This was exemplified by the Statues of Labourers decreed in England in 1349–51, immediately following the Black Death.

The workers did not respond kindly to these power plays. In 1358, peasants in Northern France launched one of the greatest revolts in a millennium. Wool combers revoled in Florence in 1378. Then, workers in England revoled in 1381, seeaking "nothing less than the total abolution of serfdom and the existing legal system." Starting in 1476, a series of peasant revolts in Germany culminated in the Peasant Wars of 1522-25.

The Black Death "ushered in a new era of profound social disclocations and economic change."

Political Marxists argue that capitalism was imposed and that peasants would never choose it, which "denaturalises the emergence of capitalism." However, the social changes around the Black Death indicate that peasants someone consciously opted for proto-capitalist systems as an alternative to serfdom, with the unintended consequence of developing market depdence.

The economic prosperity of the post-Black Death period also created new differentiation and stratification within the peasantry. The number of smallholders fell while the more well-off peasants increased their wealth. The smaller, poorer families were more likely to die out than the wealthier ones, while the wealthier families had enough land to maintain the status of their children. The smallholders were the main source of labor for lords and wealthy peasants. They were also the ones who pushed for higher wages and "were generally regarded as an insolent and demanding group; that is, they were those at the forefront of the class struggle against the lords." This was a revolutionary period because it saw both an increase in the available land per person and a decrease in seigneurial power.

The middle peasanty became a class of "quasi-capitalists," while the rich peasantry came to acquire the land that would form the basis of their capitalist transformation in the 1500s. The emergence of dramatic economic inequality, "peasant differentiation" created a new class of peasant wage-laborers. The class differentiation in the peasantry created inequality that would allow "the English lords to carry through an assault on the peasant rights in the seventeenth century."

The Ottomans

This process looked quite different in England and France. In France, the monarchy competed with the land-owners. "When peasant revolts occurred, the state would habitually support them against landlords." The monarchy upheld the existing regime. In England, the landlords developed an alliance with the monarchy, so the monarch would quash peasant revolts. This alliance goes back to the Norman invasion. The military conquest and small size of Britain created a cohesive political entity.

However, the authors argue that England's success owed more to its isolation from conflict in continental Europe. The Ottoman Empire was a major source of anxiety in Early Modern Europe. Martin Luther said that the Ottamans were a punishment from God.

Nonetheless, Europeans learned from the Ottamans. Some Germans saw the Ottaman Empire as a model of efficiency. Henry VIII sent a mission to study the legal code of Suleyman II. Europeans appreciated the Ottaman's merit-based administration the Ottaman ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire wrote, "Among the Turks, dignities, offices, and administrative posts are the rewards of ability and merit... This is why the Turks succeed in all that they attempt." This contrasted starkly against the European model based on birth. Machiavelli, Bodin, Bacon, and Montaigne all celebrated Ottaman "military discipline and administrative efficiency." Under Suleyman I, the Ottamans were the most powerful empire in the world.

The Ottamans relied primarily on taxation for surplus extraction, unlike the European "lord-peasant nexus." As a result, peasants had better rights and privileges. The struggle therefore came from the ruling class, which could fall into disputes over the distribution of surplus. "The prevention of this conflict... was possible so long as the Ottaman ruling class could maintain its material well-being and ideological unity... such unity was achievable only through a policy of military and economic expansion." As long as the Ottamans had unity and military success, they had stability.

"The unity and stability of the Ottaman Empire... contrasted significantly with the European forms of social reproduction."

In Europe, no one monarch controlled the mechanism for extracting surplus from the peasanty — that power fell to the many landowners and local rulers. "As a consequence, peasants were more susceptible to coercive squeezes on their productivity, while having no recourse to outside legal protection." This created a social instability declining living standards and regular revolts, supplemented by regular war from intra-lordly conflict.

The violent nature of European society demanded "extraordinary" financing. "In order to raise armies, European rulers borrowed from international banking houses... Hence, a byproduct of European feudal war-making was an attendant rise in the political autonomy, power and influence of merchants, with increasing degrees of representation in the decision-making structures of states."

The Ottamans had little need for financing, and therefore no such demand for extraordinary merchant influence. Government had much greater influence over commerce and trade. For the Ottaman government, agricultural production, not commerce, was the priority, which is why the Ottamans didn't pursue eastward trade routes when they had the chance following the 1517 capture of the Mamluk Empire. European powers like Portugal focused explitly on commercial–territorial expansion. European rulers depended on

The wealth drawn from merchants and financiers to either fund (geo)political accumulation (in the case of Habsburg Spain and Austria) or for the direct reproduction of the ruling class itself (in the case of city-states such as Genoa and Venice). Consequently, the states was sensitive to — or at the behest of — merchant interests, and state resources, especially military, were deployed in order to obstain commercial advantages.

This created an advantage for the European states furthest removed from the Ottaman Empire — Northwest Europe. The states closer to the Ottomans — Italy and the Habsburg Empire — had to contend with a constant military threat, stifling commercial opportunities. Meanwhile, England and Holland enjoyed commercial prosperity and relative safety. The Ottomans also helped create another important European political concept: Europe. The Ottomans prompted reflection among the European elite at the moment when the Protestant Reformation was fracturing the unifying identity of "Christendom." Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius, invented the adjective "European" following the fall of Cosntantinople to the Ottomans.

Up to this point, Europe was effectively dependent on the rest of the world — relying on trade with wealthier Eastern states, including the Ottomans.

The spice trade that would become a cornerstone of colonial capitalism was primarily conducted between the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, with European markets only receiving surpluses left over from Middle Eastern consumption.

For European rulers, all international political questions considered the role of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, the Ottomans came into direct contact with the Habsburb Empire, engaging in drawn-out wars in Southeast Europe. For a time, the Ottomans were the strongest maritime power in the Mediterranean. This Muslim power seemed so threatening that the papacy put more effort into fighting the Ottomans than it did into fighting Protestantism. In 1571, a coalition of European states from modern day Italy and Spain assembled 290 ships under the banner of the "Holy League" and defeated the Ottoman navy, a battle that was "central to the formation of a European identity that was distinctly 'non-Ottoman.'"

The victory proved futile, as the Ottomans continued to assemble ever-larger forces, make incursions into Europe, and stay European crusades. "The 16th century was one of near-permanent victory for the Ottomans and defeat for Christendom." The Ottomans adopted a clever strategy of encouraging the Protestant Reformation to sow discord in Europe. They provided direct military assistance to Hungarian Protestant revolutionaries in 1604, naming their leader King of Hungary. Ottoman ruler Sultan Murad III formed an alliance with Queen Elizabeth I, forging a 1580 commercial treaty in defiance of their shared enemy — the Habsburgs. The Ottomans also made connections with Protestants and Calvinists in France and the Nethelands. In Africa and South Asia, they made alliances to Islamic sultanates to block Portuguese merchants.

In numerous ways it was the Ottoman threat that so persistently redirected both Habsburg and Papal resources away from the internal divisions that were stretching the Empire in the northwest, contributing in turn to the perpetuation of ‘multiple polities within the cultural unity of Christian Europe.’ ... while the Habsburgs, Genoese, Venetians, Spanish and Portuguese were antagonistically engaged with the Ottomans, Northwestern European states such as France, the Low Countries and particularly England were afforded the geopolitical space to conduct modern state-building practices.

Ottoman power created fractures in Europe that allowed for new commercial forces to emerge. These new forces proved monumentally important. After the Ottomans blocked eastward trade via the Black Sea, Red Sea, and Mediterranean, Europeans had to search for new trade routes. "By blocking the most dominant European powers from their customary conduits to Asian markets, the Ottomans directly compelled them to pursue alternative routes."

While blockading their enemies (the Genoese, Habsburgs, Spanish, and Portuguese), the Ottomans privileged neutral European parties — the French, English, and Dutch. These Northwestern European states were allowed to trade with Asia. "The Ottomans reconfigured the entire European balance of power." The traditional power centers of Southern and Central Europe now had limited trade routes and greatly increased military engagements. In Northwest Europe, this fueled the emergence of "company capitalism" while in Southern Europe, this led to the discovery of the Americas.

As the Dutch and English came to rely evermore on their relationships with the Ottomans, they developed significant trading enterprises and budding industrial economies, driving inflation in land prices, population growth, rising rents, and depressions in rural wages. England growth became industrial, not military. From 1470 to 1550, Englands military fell from 25,000 men to 20,000 while Spains rose from 20,000 to 150,000. This limited armament also meant that England lacked the absolutist military government to enforce "extra-economic" exploitation present in Spain and France. Instead, English lords prefered to squeeze peasants through market mechanisms, which the militarily weak monarchy had no power to prevent (unlike France, where the monarchy competed with the nobility).

The Age of Sail

In the 1400s, Europe turned its attention away from Central Asia and outwards toward the Atlantic. What they discovered "would arrest Spain's socio-economic development and accelerate its geopolitical decline as a great power, while simultaneously affording numberous benefits to Europes two latecomers, Holland and England." The colonization of the Americas would give rise to the institutional and legal structures that form the basis of modern territorial sovereignty.

The Christian encounted with Indigenous Americans prompted massive theological debate. Early in the history of colonization, the 1500s theologian Francisco de Vitoria argued that Amerindians had "natural" commonalities with Christians, including the capacity for reason and "orderly, arranged" polities. Vitoria constructed a secular universalist philosophy of the "laws of nations." Other commentators saw the Indigenous population as "gentle and peace-loving," with the conquistadors as "devils." The Indigenous people were to be treated with a principle of Christian equality. That ideal of universalism became the justification for oppression of Indigenous Americas, who suffered from "primitivism" and "backwardness." Vitoria wrote with a tone of sympathy, "they lack many... conveniences, yea necessaries, of human life... It might, therefore, be maintained that in their own interests the sovereigns of Spain might undertake the administration of their country... just as if the natives were infants. The same principle seems to apply here to them as to people of defective intelligence." Spanish saw Amerindian nudity as a symptom of "an absence of customs, rites, religion." The Spanish thought the Indigenous peoples were naive as they lacked private property and mining. The Spanish saw the Indigenous populations as natural slaves as they had no intelligence or productive industry of their own. As the Indigenous people were human, under a universalist conception, then Spain had a moral obligation to impose Spanish practices. War was justified as the "means by which Indians and their territory [were] converted into Spaniards and Spanish territory, the agency by which the Indians thus [achieved] their full human potential."

This was the beginning of the Eurocentric linear view of history, where "In the beginning all the world was America," as John Locke wrote. Non-Europeans represented the barbaric past, while Europe symbolized the civilized future. This obsession with linear social development became the basis for racism (which was considered scientific), and the justification for schools of thought justifying the domination of Europeans over non-Europeans through the 1600s and 1700s. It was the level of technological development (itself a symptom of capitalist development) that determined the "moral worth of a particular 'race' and/or society." According to John Lock, Indigenous people had no right to the land as they had not "mixed their labour" with it sufficiently. Travel writing became a popular genre, embellished with images of cannibalism, polygamy, devil worship, sodomy, and bestiality that delighted and shocked Europeans.

In the Spanish colonies, the colonialists decimated the indigenous populations through war, disease, illness, over-exploitation, and general terror. As a result, the Spanish had to replenish their workforce with West African slaves. The colonies were in a perpetual state of crisis, meaning that the golden goose of Spanish America became a constant source of economic struggle. To keep the mines productive, the Spanish waged a constant war on the local populations. In response, large-scale Pan-Andean movements, often led by women, revolted. The Spanish responded with charges of diabolism and witchcraft. The ongoing cultural and physical conflict justified European exploitation and colonialism further.

The condescending attitude of European colonialists, viewing Indigenous cultures as essentially empty and backwards, waiting to be filled with "civilized" governance, created the prototype for the modern state — a paternalistic force that grants rights in as much as it deems the populace mature enough to possess them or else uses war and incarceration to impose its form of order. "The capacity for and battle over sociopolitical organisation and self-government — that is, statehood and sovereignty — constitutes a key component of the 'standard of civlization.'" This is the basis for the modern idea of state sovereignty.

It was only after this form of domineering government proved its worth in the colonies that it "radiate back to the European imperial metropole."

As the idea of an administrative state as a humanitarian project took hold, so did the idea of the state as a geographic entity. In the colonies, state boundaries took form along cartographic gridlines. "Newly formulated notions of linear time came to be complemented by novel conceptions of linear geographical space." This was a new conception of the world defined by math — accounting, commerce.

In 1494, the Treaty of Trdesillas, between Spain and Portugal, drew history's first abstract linear boundary between colonial powers. Colombus had just returned to Spain, while Portugal had just discovered passage around Africa. Spain took everything west of the line (which ran down the middle of the Atlantic and across Brazil), and Portugal took everything east. "For first time in history an abstract geometric system had been used to define a vast — global — area of control," writes Branch. This idea of abstract space arose from the struggle to dominate Indigenous populations.

For Spain, the conquest was a disaster. The enormously expensive project inadvertently created a glut of precious metals at home, crashing the Spanish manufacturing sector and leading the Spanish monarchy to finance the conquest through further borrowing. The Spanish monarchy went bankrupt eight times by the end of the 1600s. Much of the wealth extracted an imported by Spain ended up in the coffers of Northwest Europe. "Almost half of the gold and silver acquired by Spain ended up in Holland."

While Spain struggled, the Dutch and English trading companies balanced trade in American precious metals against Asian spices and textiles. The Dutch and English created elaborate trade networks circulating goods between India, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and the Middle East. China, which had struggled under a bullion shortage, drove the trade with its enormous appetite for silver. The trade was so profitable that some scholars say that the rise of the West is "almost entirely accounted for by the growth of nations with access to the Atlantic Ocean... most directly involved in trade and colonialism in the New World and Asia."

As England made large advancements in agricultural development, the country faced a glut of capital, causing prices to fall faster than costs and creating a recession. In the 1600s, England developed large surplus population, driving urbanization, unemployment, vagrancy, and social unrest. The monarchy found a solution in the slave trade.

First of all, the government put surplus laborers to work to build ships, drain marshes for new harbors, and build new cities around the ports. Then, the government sent surplus populations to populate the colonies. England was unique in Europe as a country with excess humans. The outlet eased social pressure and quashed sedition, consolidating the state power necessary for such an operation; the crown criminalized vagrancy and other symptoms of the recession, and then sent such "criminals" to the colonies. In the 1600s, England relocated 200,000 subjects to the colonies.

The relocation efforts were completely outpaced by the ongoing genocide in the Americas. Between 1492 and 1650, the American Indigenous population dropped from 90 million to 10 million, opening up "virgin land" for settlers.

In England, these changes allowed the state to impose private property law and capitalist systems based on discipline, scarcity, and criminalization. Such tactics had little effect in the Americas, where land was abundant. Colonial overseers dealt with constant resistance and rebellion from workers, who built solidary across ethnicities, including Irish, African, and First Nations. Alternatively, a "steady stream" of workers defected to Indigenous communities, where they enjoyed better guarantees of food and freedom, or else they formed bands of pirates or buccaneers. As a result, even with the massive transplantation of English labor, the colonies had a labor shortage.

By the 1700s, England stopped exporting workers to the colonies. Industrialization required workers at home in the factories. Instead, England sought workers in Africa.

In the 1500s, Africa "held numerous geopolitical and economic advantages over Europeans" Up to this point, Africa had militarily fended of European incursionsr. Europeans had tried and failed to establish West African plantations. Europeans couldn't get a foothold in the African mainland, where the Indigenous population controlled the rivers. Instead, Europe had to negotiate via trade and diplomacy.

In West Africa, rulers didn't hold wealth in the for of land. Rather, they held wealth in the form of people; that wealth paid dividends in the form of taxes, military service, and labor. But these slaves had a quality of life similar to workers in Europe, and could even join the ruling class.

European traders brought guns and maize to Africa. The cheap calories from maize spurred rapid population growth, while the guns created a new military culture. Using the guns, West African rulers waged war to expand their territory. The slaves captured in war provided a new source of wealth to trade to the Europeans. While some states refused to trade with the Europeans, they inevitably faced a massive military disadvantage and quickly lost out to the slave-trading states.

In fifty years, starting in the middle of the 1600s, 700,000 Africans boarded boats destined for the Americas. The city of Allada grew from 0 slave exports in 1500 to 19,000 per year in 1700. Eventually, this put Africa into a relationship dependence on Europe.

In the colonies, plantation owners had to segregate the new slave workforce. They still faced the threat of conjoined resistance from workers. To break up that solidarity, they enforced strong distinctions between Black and white workers. Legisation in 1705 codified the rights of servants versus slaves, defining slaves as property. Plantation owners assigned more arduous work to African slaves. Starting with "The Scale of Creatures" by William Petty in 1676, European philosophers invented philosophical ideology to

• Starting in 1676 with 'The Scale of Creatures' by William Petty, scientific racism classified Europeans as superior to Africans, turning racism into an ideology

• John Locke and David Hume also contributed to the ideology of white supremacy

• Slaves grew their own food, separate from the market economy, giving slave plantations the unique ability to withdraw from markets

• 90% of American slaves worked in commodity production

• Ginning machine introduced in 1784

• Plantations were 'the most intensely commercialized farms in the world'

• Brazilian sugar plantations had labor forces up to ten times as large as farms of the same size in Europe, "more akin to later factories"

• In 1770, slave profits were 0.5% of Britain's national income and 39% of commercial and industrial investment; income from American colonial properties was equal to 50% of British gross investment and "provided a significant input into British industrialization"

• Cheap cotton was an important input to British industrialization and commerce

• The plantation economies created a massive supply of consumer goods accessible to British workers

• Sugar provided "virtually free calories" for industrial workers in the UK

Revolutions

• Between 1492 and 1960, there were 256 years of international revolution (more than half)

• This chapter explores "three instances of bourgeois revolution," Dutch, English, and French

It would then seem that the default setting of modern international relations has been one of revolution: an epoch perhaps best understood as a series of continuing attempts to confront the challenges of social disorder and revolution wrought by the international expansion of capitalist relations. In short, this is an era of permanent counter-revolution.

• Debate over whether the revolutions were bourgeois, but authors argue that this is not a necessary framing

• Argue that the Dutch (starting 1566), English and French Revolutions can all be conceived as forms of bourgeois revolutions

• A bourgeois revolution is one that "constructed the state as a sovereign territorial site of capital accumulation"

"Capitalism emerged in England as the outcome of a class struggle in which the lords were too weak to reimpose serfdom, but the peasants not strong enough to maintain their independence from the market."

Dutch

• The Netherlands wasn't really capitalist, even though it was economically advanced; it was primarily mercantalist

• The Netherlands was "a commercial empire of a magnitude hitherto unknown in human history"

• Commercial agriculture emerged in the Netherlands starting in the 1400s due to trade with the Baltics

• When grain supplies rose in the 1500s, the Dutch tightened their control of the Baltic supply, dominating the European market

• Power in the agrarian countryside was dispersed, so the bourgeois could only exert power through economic means (through capital markets)

• Commodification of land in the Low Countries started in the 1200s

• In the early 1500s, the Low Countries had the highest agricultural productivity in Europe

• 100 agricultural workers could feed 175 people in the Netherlands, 100 in Poland, 135 in England, France, and Italy

• Dutch came to supplant Genoese finance and then innovate on Italian protocapitalist institutions (stock market, monopolies, mercantile companies)

• The 1500s had only 25 years free from large-scale military operations in Europe (!!!)

War was possibl the most rational and rapid single mode of expansion of surplus extraction available for any given ruling class under feudalism.

• Lords could accrue wealth by seizing the demesnes of other lords, resulting in a war-driven process of state formation; "The lords left standing at the end of this process formed the basis of the absolutist state... The absolutist state system of early modern Europe remained driven by the systemic imperatives of geopolitical accumulation."

• Feudalism created a war-driven geopolitical system that continued after the end of feudalism, imbuing the logic of capialism

• This period of warfare was so intense because "the process of ruling class reproduction was itself in crisis and under threat"

• Internal expansion had ceased and seigniorial revenues had dropped with the plague and resultant demographic crisis and period of revolt along with the Ottoman threat; continuous war (international and domestic) was a "sociological necessity."

• Catholicism was the foundation of the legitimacy of the feudal system

• The Reformation "flourished in regions where feudalism was weakest" including urban areas, a "cultural emancipation"

• The Netherlands destabilized for 30 years until the Treaty of Wesphalia in 1648

• By the time of Westphalia, the Dutch Republic had become firmly bourgeois-dominated, ready for capitalist development

English

• The 1620s to 1640s were times of extreme hardship in England

• Charles I of England had been trying to build up his absolute power styled on European Catholic powers, running afoul of the landlord class which had become very powerful and capitalist over the preceding century

• The Thirty Years War was rooted in "intensified but differentiated class conflicts over the distribution of income," pitting protocapitalist regions against feudal ones

• By the time of Charles, the English crown was heavily dependent on parliament to raise funds for war

• Charles started war with Scotland when he attempted to impose protestant practices

• In the 1500s and 1600s, England was a combined feudal-capitalist state

• English economics is emobodied in the merchant ship, which was the keystone of capitalism, and yet run on unfree labor (press gang and slaves) run by shipmasters and owners accompanied by merchants and gentlemen adventurers

• These merchants formed a new class of wealth, which sided with the parliamentary opposition

• The parliamentary opposition wanted to check Charles' absolutist drive

• After Charles provoked war, the parliamentary opposition seized the opportunity to overthrow the king under Oliver Cromwell

• Cromwell's successors couldn't control government, and the monarchy was restored with the socio-economic reforms of the Cromwell period persisting

• England became a modern adinistrative-military state

• When Charles I's son, James II (a Catholic), tried to build an absolute regime, he was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution, replaced by William of Orange (a Protestant)

• The church was subordinated to parliament and many of the feudal institutions had been abolished

• The union of England and Scotland in 1707 eliminated England's greatest domestic threat

• Feudalism persisted in Scotland, threatening English capitalism

• Scottish Jacobite lords saw the union as a threat to their socio-economic power as a ruling class, which finally ended with their revolution in 1745

French

• After the Black Plague, French peasant revolts were successful enough to give peasants control over smaller farms and fend off market mechanisms, so feudalism persisted for centuries and France developed a strong absolutist state

• By the 1600s, 75% of French peasants didn't have enough land to support themselves

• By the 1700s, 90% of French peasants didn't have enough land to support themselves

• France had lots of cheap labor

• French industrial output grew more strongly than English through the 1700s; by 1780 French industrial output had caught up with English

• The most advanced industry in France was Lyonnais silk (the apex of European silk industries), employing 34,000 men, women, and children in a city of 150,000 — 22% of the population and 40% of the workforce

• The aristocracy continued to hold power, including arm, navy, and judicial posts, but many were involved in protocapitalist arctivities

• The revolution was driven by overlapping of interests between classes, resulting in many conflicting reform programmes after the fall of the monarchy

• In the 1700s, France competed with England, which had the power of its colonies and the slave trade

• This competition brought France into the Seven Years' War and then the American War of Independence, bringing France to the brink of bankruptcy and a recession, precipitating a political crisis in 1787: the state attempted to impose new taxes

• The monarchy sold off titles and offices, ennobling 10,000 people through the 1700s (plus their families), strengthening the influence of the bourgeoisie who bought the titles

• Nonetheless, there still weren't enough titles for the ballooning bourgeois class; they wanted reform

• After the revolution, the state confiscated more than 1000 furnaces and forges in Paris from the nobility and rented them out to bourgeois maitres, who came to centralize their ownership of them

Southeast Asia

• Mercantile and colnial powers created "pre-capitalist" social formations, such as 1500s diamond mines in India that employed 60,000 workers with complex administration

• But capitalism is defined by "the existence of a class with nothing other than their labour-power to sell" ... it's not enough to hoard wealth or innovate — you must create barriers to other options

Capitalism refers to a broader configuration (or totality) of social relations oriented around the systematic reproduction of the capital relation, but irreducible — either hitorically or logically — to the capital relation itself.

• Capitalism includes the prejudices that separate workers from each other as well as institutions like nation-states, laws, banks, military, and police

• In places like Genoa and Venice, the ruling class had no interest in reforming feudalism because it was how they held power (even as proto-capitalists)

• Colonisation was central to the formation of capitalism; that is unwaged or unfree labor was essential to the creation of the waged, "free" labor market

• By 1600, the Dutch had a shortage of labor, so they turned to labor in Asia

• Amsterdam was the "warehouse" of Europe, and it had the first permanent stock exchange in Europe (the Bourse)

• Amsterdam established the join-stock company, the VOC, which integration sovereign power with business in the name of profit

• Malacca (in Malaysia) was a very diverse city with inter-marriage between ethnicities and equal taxation across faiths; Asia was a land of pluralism, so it was not unusual that Europeans were welcomed into Asian society; European merchants were welcomed into political and economic networks

• Upon their arrival, Europeans were small fish in a big pond and had to play by local rules

• Following on their colonial success in the Americas, the Portuguese pursued a strategy of coercive extraction in the East, using a fortress system and property rights, toward the goal of out-competing the Ventian spice trade

• Portugal fought with the Ottoman Empire over the Indian Ocean, which demanded militarization of Portuguese holdings in South Asia; the Portuguese funded these projects through taxation in Asia, which made the Portuguese projects unsustainable

• The Dutch, on the other hand, used a mercantile approach to secure a monopoly on nutmeg in Indonesia, tying into the existing economic systems

• The mercantile (as opposed to military) approach created a self-sustaining Dutch trade operation in the East (this is in the late 1500s and early 1600s)

• The Dutch consolidated a monopoly on spices in Indonesia and established headquarters in Jakarta (after conquest)

• The people of the Molucca islands survived on fishing, hunting, and subsistence farming while also earning revenue from clove production, and worked practically for free for the VOC

• Because the workers worked for free, the Dutch lacked control over their labor; to consolidate power, they attacked villages with smugglers and destroyed clove production in uncoopoerative areas, bringing the workers in line and consolidating a monopoly

• When peasants sold spices to smugglers, they would destroyed subsistence crops

• The Dutch crushed any rebellions and relocated workers at will to control labor supply

• The Banda Islands, which produced mace and nutmeg, were home to "free citizens," making it hard for the Dutch to impose authority; locals would strike, sabotage, and fight back

• In response, the Dutch waged a brutal military campaign, killing most of the population: "Only a few hundred of a population that had numbered around 15,000 survived." The survivors were forced to work in spice production. The dutch established "One of the first modern plantation economies based on slave labour." The plantations produced only nutmeg and mace. The Dutch had to constantly import slaves (200/year) to maintain the population of 4,000, as death was so common.

• Slaves were hunter-gatherers and nomads abducted from peripheral areas, relocating labor power from the hunter-gatherer mode to the plantation mode, providing "super-profits" earned from the sale of spices in Europe, which could have a profit margin of 1000%.

This form of exploitation further developed techniques and structures of exploitation and accumulation that would, by the 18th century, be used in the thriving slave trade and plantation production in the New World.

• The Dutch traded with the Mughal Empire, which was "highly advanced", with a standard of living higher than Europe and a population of 100m in 1600 and tributary production (similar to feudalism)

• The Dutch set up factories to intevene in the tributory system; one silk-relling factory had 3,000 reelers

British India

• "How in the space of some 300 years did the leading edge in global economic and military power pass from 'East' to 'West'?" There was nothing exception about Europe up to 1700; conditions in Europe were no different from advanced regions of Asia until after 1800

• India provided the material inputs for Britain's industrialization

The capturing of India also a􏰁orded the British Empire crucial strategic advantages. In addition to occupying a territorialised dominion in the very heart of Asia, Britain obtained a substantial and relatively cheap military force, which it could then use to open up other markets throughout the world.

• Authors ask, "Why was the European states system so competitive and war-prone?"

• Feudalism was a result of the collision between the decomposing slave mode of the Roman Empire and the deformed Germanic tribes, the "Romano-Germanic synthesis", which was a product of the pressure of the Huns on the Germanic world

• Feudalism was a result of the stirrup diffusing from Asia to Europe and the response of Christendom to the Ottomans

• Feudalism didn't offer incentives to increasing productivity, so lords extracted more surplus through coercion — forcing peasants, or seizing other lords' demesnes, creating a war-driven process of state formation

• Political authority was highly fragmented in feudal Europe

• By the end of the middle ages, "the process of ruling class reproduction was itself under serious threat," having exhausted the potential profit of war

• The military sectory of early modern Europe was highly dynamic and could "maintain productivity growth for centuries, a feat virtually unknown elsewhere in pre-industrial economies"

• This process led to the absolutist state

• The endemic state of warfare created pressure to constantly innovate on the means of violence, generated military and armament industries in capitalist modes

• European states needed to extract revenue from overseas territorires to reproduce the ruling class at home, so European rulers were highly dependent on merchants, and happily deployed military in the aid of merchants

• The difference between European and Eastern states was the structural dependence on merchants for war financing and social reproduction

• In 1614, the Governor General of the VOC wrote "trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade"

• This led to naval innovation — especially the combination of guns and boats

• China turned away from the sea in response to the interior nomadic threat

• Geoffrey Parker writes that industrialization,

Helps to explain how Europeans extended their control over the total land area of the globe from 35 percent in 1800 to 84 percent in 1914, it cannot explain how they managed to acquire that initial 35 percent.

• Britain colonized India in the 1700s

• The Indian colony was hudely profitable and largely funded the British Empire

• Relied largely on opium exports from India to China

Indian exports made up 35 per cent of Chinese imports, and Chinese exports made up 1 per cent of Indian imports

• Britain used these profits to import US cotton, fuelling the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire

• Britain's Industrialization came at the expense of India's deindustrialization

• The British Indian Army grew from 160,000 soldiers in 1900 to 2,000,000 in WWII, "the leading British strategic reserve on land"

• Indian soldiers gave Europeans "the means to challenge even their most powerful opponents"

• The Dutch succeeded in their ventures due to violence, not commercial expertise

• Dutch and English always used the threat of naval war to back up commerce

p. 550

If we were to choose a single symbolic moment of the beginning of the West’s systemic ‘overtaking’ of the ‘East’ in its rise to global dominance, the years between the British taking of Bengal in 1757 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 would likely su􏰀ce. For it was during these seven world- transforming years that the 􏰁rst of the great tributary empires in Asia fell at the hands of the Europeans, while the 􏰁nal external systemic threat to the development of British (and thus world) capitalism, the French monarchy, was extinguished in a string of spectacular military victories ending the Seven Years' War. After the defeat of France and Spain in this conflict, Britain acquired dominion over a large portion of three continents under the terms of the Treaty of 1763.

• The defeat of France made way for the establishment of the Raj

[1759] This was the year that marked the beginning Britain's (and subsequently Europe's) dominance of the world

• Lenin said that it is not possible for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside the imperialist states for any length of time, "One or the other must triumph in the end"