The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meiksins Wood

2000 years ago, Celtic peoples inhabited the island of Great Britain. In the year 43, these people came under the rule of the Roman Empire. After 400 years of rule, the Roman empire collapsed and its soldiers left Great Britain. In their wake, German tribal chiefs crossed the channel and established early kingdoms and the Anglo-Saxon culture. By 886, Alfred the Great had emerged as a regional king in England, and his descendants would become the first kings of England, beginning the line of English monarchs that wove a thread through history to today's King Charles. In 1066, William the Conqueror (a French–Viking cousin of the family) conquered England to claim the throne. William instituted the Norman language, a Norman ruling class, and the Norman system of feudalism. Feudalism governed English life for the remainder of the Middle Ages until it yielded to capitalism — the system we know today.

This is where The Origin of Capitalism begins, in the latter days of feudalism.

How did capitalism emerge in England after centuries of feudalism? And why has it never never emerged anywhere else in the world?

After reading The Origin of Capitalism, I went back to the essays I wrote for my economic history classes in university. (These were the best part of my major in economics.) I found a heavily annotated PDF of an article about why industrialization happened in the UK before the Netherlands, even though the Netherlands was far more economically advanced. That article offered no satisfying explanation. It left me with a sense that no one really knows why industrialization happened in England. Since industrialization was bound to happen sooner or later, it happened in England first more-or-less by chance.

That's not really true. At least, not according to Meiksins Wood.

Industrialization was never inevitable. It was a consequence of capitalism, and capitalism emerged in England for specific reasons. We can imagine an alternative timeline where the British monarchy quashed a nascent bourgeois class, preventing the rise of capitalism and industrialization altogether. In that timeline, we might still be living in some aristocratic province of the Americas, still in the Age of Sail.

What is capitalism?

That being the case, it's important to understand how capitalism came about — and, for that matter — what it is. Meiksins Wood starts her book with a definition of capitalism as good as any I've ever read, which is worth quoting in full:

Capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market. This is true not only of workers, who must sell their labour-power for a wage, but also of capitalists, who depend on the market to buy their inputs, including labour-power, and to sell their output for profit. Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on ‘extra-economic’ powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion – such as the military, political, and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants – but must depend on the purely ‘economic’ mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental rules of life. Because of those rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society’s work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself. In the process of supplying the needs and wants of society, workers are at the same time and inseparably creating profits for those who buy their labour-power. In fact, the production of goods and services is subordinate to the production of capital and capitalist profit. The basic objective of the capitalist system, in other words, is the production and self-expansion of capital.

This distinctive way of supplying the material needs of human beings, so very different from all preceding ways of organizing material life and social reproduction, has existed for a very short time, barely a fraction of humanity’s existence on earth. Even those who most emphatically insist on the system’s roots in human nature and its natural continuity with age-old human practices would not claim that it really existed before the early modern period, and then only in Western Europe. They may see bits of it in earlier periods, or detect its beginnings in the Middle Ages as a looming threat to a declining feudalism but still constrained by feudal restrictions, or they may say that it began with the expansion of trade or with voyages of discovery – with, say, Columbus’s explorations at the end of the fifteenth century. Some might call these early forms ‘proto-capitalism’, but few would say that the capitalist system existed in earnest before the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and some would place it as late as the eighteenth, or perhaps even the nineteenth, when it matured into its industrial form.

Yet, paradoxically, historical accounts of how this system came into being have typically treated it as the natural realization of ever-present tendencies. Since historians first began explaining the emergence of capitalism, there has scarcely existed an explanation that did not begin by assuming the very thing that needed to be explained. Almost without exception, accounts of the origin of capitalism have been fundamentally circular: they have assumed the prior existence of capitalism in order to explain its coming into being. In order to explain capitalism’s distinctive drive to maximize profit, they have presupposed the existence of a universal profit-maximizing rationality. In order to explain capitalism’s drive to improve labour-productivity by technical means, they have also presupposed a continuous, almost natural, progress of technological improvement in the productivity of labour.

In most accounts of capitalism and its origin, there really is no origin. Capitalism seems always to be there, somewhere; and it only needs to be released from its chains – for instance, from the fetters of feudalism – to be allowed to grow and mature.

So, capitalism is a unique way of organizing society that emerged in England in the 16th century. It is unique in that most people depend on a market economy to access food and shelter, while the minority dominant class depends on the market to maintain its dominance. The dominant class does not directly use violence to get what it wants. Instead, the dominant class outsources violence to the state, which maintains a monopoly on violence in the form of police, military, and a carceral system. While Meiksins Wood doesn't make this argument, I think it's also pertinent that the capitalist system forces participation in capitalism through taxation. All citizens must pay taxes in state currency, and therefore must participate in the capitalist economy to earn currency. So, capitalism has three parts:

• The laborer, who works

• The appropriator, who owns the land, debt, machinery, and ideas

• The state, who enforces cooperation in the system

The laborer and appropriator interact through economic mechanisms while the state interacts with both through extra-economic mechanisms.

Before capitalism

The first part of the book summarizes the history of capitalism. Historians agree that capitalism has an origin, somewhere between the creation of the city-state and the Industrial Revolution:

Economic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi maintained that the motive of individual profit associated with market exchange was never till the modern age the dominant principle of economic life. Even where markets were well-developed, a sharp distinction must be made, he said, between societies with markets, such as have existed throughout recorded history, and a 'market society.' In all earlier societies, 'economic' relations and practices were 'embedded' or submerged in non-economic — kinship, communal, religion, and political — relationships. There have been other motives driving economic activity than the purely 'economic' motives of profit and material gain, such as the achievement of status and prestige, or the maintenance of communal solidarity. There have been other ways of organizing economic life than through the mechanisms of market exchange.

That is to say, economics has always been secondary to community. Even in societies that have markets, the market necessarily govern daily life.

Meiksins Wood outlines the mainstream history of the origin of capitalism ("the commercialization model"), debates within Marxism ("the transition debate"), and countervailing views in Marxism ("the Brenner debate"). Meiksins Wood argues that most historians — including most Marxists — treat capitalism as an inherent property of human collectives, which requires no explanation. Meiksins Wood arguges to the contrary that capitalism was a system that needed inventing.

What fails to emerge from all of this is an appreciation of the ways in which a radical transformation of social relations preceded industrialization. The revolutionizing of productive forces presupposed a transformation of property relations and a change in the form of exploitation that created a historically unique need to improve the productivity of labour. It presupposed the emergence of capitalist imperatives: competition, accumulation, and profit-maximization... The specific imperatives of the capitalist market — the pressures of accumulation and increasing labour–productivity — are treated not as the product of specific social relations but as a result of technological improvements that seem more or less inevitable.

Industrialization needed an economic system to drive it. The resources required to invent the steam engine or the factory were so great that they couldn't have emerged in the absence of immense economic pressure. Capitalism provided the pressure to drive the innovation that produced the industrial revolution. Historians often treat these innovations as a historical inevitability that paved the way for capitalism, but that view is mistaken.

Feudalism

Many historians see capitalism as having emerged from European feudalism. Meiksins Wood uses Perry Anderson's definition of feudalism:

A mode of production defined by an 'organic unity of economy and polity', which took the form of a 'chain of parcellized sovereignties', together with a hierarchical chain of conditional property. State power was fragmented among feudal lords, and lordship represented a unity of political and economic power. The fragment of the state that feudal lords possessed — their political, juridical, and military powers — at one and the same time constituted their economic power to appropriate surplus labour from dependent peasants. Lordship was accompanied by 'a mechanism of surplus extraction', serfdom, in which 'economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion were fused.'

Feudalism existed in England from roughly the 1000s to the 1400s. In capitalism, state power is centralized. In feudalism, state power is diffused among feudal lords. Those lords have dominion over the serfs who live on their land, and they extract surplus from their peasantry through economics and threat of violence. Serfs are peasants who are legally bound to the land, and the state of being a serf is called serfdom. (So serfdom is a status within feudalism.) The children of a serf will also be bound to the land. Serfs had obligations to their lord, such as labor, payment, or agricultural produce. To be fair, it doesn't sound like a nice life.

Holland and mercantilism

Outside of feudalism, medieval Europe also had extensive mercantilism — an economic system of international trade. Trade is "the exchange of reciprocal requirements." Meiksins Wood argues that "It does not by itself generate the need to maximize profit and, even less, to produce competitively." A more advanced evolution of trade is profit-taking, which is:

buying cheap in one market and selling dear in another... But here too there is no inherent and systematic compulsion to transform production... Profit by means of carrying trade or arbitrage between markets has strategies of its own. These do not depend on transforming production, nor do they promote the development of the kind of integrated market that imposes competitive imperatives. On the contrary, they thrive on fragmented markets and movement between them.

Meiksins Woods says that before there was capitalist trade, there was an extensive trade in grain across Europe. However, the trade in grain was not the motor of European commerce. It was likely a supporting trade for luxury commerce,

in the sense that the (grain-consuming) urban population of Europe was swelled by people servicing the opulent living and 'conspicuous consumption' of richer consumers. In the Middle Ages, international trade was driven by the wealth of the landed aristocracy, whose consumption patterns — their hunger for luxuries, as well as for the instruments of 'extra-economic' coercion — especially military goods, on which their economic power depended — dictated the logic of the commercial system.

Trade in basic necessities was a secondary market. Trade in cosmopolitan luxuries was the primary market. But consumption and production were not linked as a capitalist system, because lower costs in a grain-producing region wouldn't have imposed economic pressures on the consuming economies — unlike in the cyclical system of a capitalist economy. So, mercantilism was opportunistic (and likely violent, colonial, and exploitative), but not competitive.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the mercantilist Dutch Republic offered the strongest rival to England's claim as the first capitalist economy.

Its commercial wealth and cultural achievements were enormous. It pioneered some of the most sophisticated commercial practices and instruments, in banking, stock trading, and financial speculation, to say nothing of its technical capacities in shipping and its military successes... [it] seems to have been the most highly commercialized society in history, before the advent of capitalism.

Meiksins Wood argues that the Dutch Republic "failed" to transition to capitalism because it was simply not a capitalist economy, and it had different economic incentives.

The Dutch economy itself was dominated not by capitalist producers but by the commercial interests of merchants whose principal vocation, even when they invested in agriculture or industry, was circulation rather than production.

The Dutch republic also relied on "extra-economic" power, like trade wars and privateering. The Dutch Republic's golden age ended during the catastrophic 1600s.

Florence and the Renaissance

Similarly, Meiksins Wood says that Florence was a very advanced and wealthy city at the end of the Middle Ages, but it wasn't a capitalist economy. On the contrary, Florence's wealth likely precluded market economics:

It may be possible to argue (as I would be inclined to do) that the non-capitalist character of such commercial economies was as much their strength as their weakness, and that, for instance, the Italian Renaissance, which flourished in the environment of commercial city-states in northern Italy like Florence, would not have achieved its great heights under the pressures of capitalist imperatives... in the absence of those imperatives, the pattern of economic development was bound to be different... the dominant classes were willing and bale to encourage and exploit not only commerce but also production... Yet the appropriation of great wealth still depended on extra-economic powers and privileges... A system of this kind would inevitably respond to declining market opportunities not by enhancing labour-productivity and improving cost-effectiveness but by squeezing producers harder or by withdrawing altogether from production.

Markets

Most of world was free of market imperatives through the eighteenth century. Where markets existed, they were not driven by profit-maximization. Instead, dominant classes extracted surplus labour through extra-economic forces like rent or taxation:

While all kinds of people might buy and sell all kinds of things in the market, neither the peasant-proprietors who produced, nor the landlords and officeholders who appropriated what others produced, depended directly on the market for the conditions of their self-reproduction, and the relations between them were not mediated by the market... It was a fundamental change in these social property relations — a change that made producers, appropriators, and the relations between them market-dependent — that would bring about capitalism.

Capitalism was born when market imperatives seized hold of food production, the provision of life's most irreducible necessity.

Historians imagine that capitalism somehow triumphed over feudalism, breaking the chains of history. Meiksins Wood outlines a different narrative, where capitalism didn't need to compete with feudalism, since both were driven by class struggle between lords and peasants. Capitalism wasn't an inevitable "next step" from feudalism, otherwise capitalism would have emerged in other feudal states. In France, feudalism turned into absolutism rather than capitalism. But other than its formation in early modern England, capitalism has never independently emerged anywhere else in the world. Capitalism has only spread through the (usually violent) expansion and diplomacy of capitalist states.

In capitalism, laborers and lords perpetually compete in the market, forming a cycle of consumption, like an ever-growing ouroboros. This system pulls everything into its orbit and drives participants to reduce costs and increase prices. Participants with more power (by default, the lords) have more economic leverage, so the system tends to tip in their favor. With all else held equal, wages will fall and prices will rise. In theory, this might be offset somewhat by innovation, as it increases efficiency. However, the competition and innovation of capitalism also has high human costs, and so laborers tend to lose out in this equation. Meiksins Wood sums up why capitalism tends towards explotation:

Not the emergence of steam or the factory system, but rather the need inherent in capitalist property relations to increase productivity and profit. Those capitalist imperatives were imposed on traditional forms of work no less than on new forms of labour, on artisans still engaged in pre-industrial production no less than on factory hands.

The emergence of capitalism shifted peasants' understanding of the world. Previously, if a peasant couldn't find food in a marketplace, there would have been a transparent reason. Capitalism put the market beyond the control of the people, passing control to "self-regulating" price mechanisms. Peasants were forced to accept that sometimes food was unavailable for abstract reasons of supply and profit. As this new worldview took hold, with new conceptions of property and profit, it took precedence in law. The state enforced the ethic of profit with force, placing capitalists' right to profit over the customary rights of subsistence and communal or customary lands. "Coercion by the state was required to impose the coercion of the market."

If this sounds like a peaceful compromise, it was not. The rise of capitalism was marked by persistent war, rebellion, revolution, oppression, famine, and exploitation.

Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on the complete dispossession of direct producers, who (unlike chattel slaves) are legally free and whose surplus labour is appropriated by purely ‘economic’ means. Because direct producers in a fully developer capitalism are propertyless, and because their only access to the means of production, to the requirements of their own reproduction, even to the means of their own labour, is the sale of their labour-power in exchange for a wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers' surplus labour without direct coercion... Just as workers depend on the market to sell their labour-power as a commodity, capitalists depend on it to buy labour-power... This market dependence gives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societies, as not only a simple mechanism of exchange or distribution but the principal determinant and regulator of social reproduction.

How capitalism emerged

Halfway through the book, Meiksins Wood formulates her research question:

Given that producers were exploited by appropriators in non-capitalist ways for millennia before the advent of capitalism, and given that markets have also existed 'time out of mind' and almost everywhere, how did it happen that producers and appropriators, and the relations between them, came to be so market-dependent?

From here, Meiksins Wood begins to answer that question in earnest. Meiksins Wood's thesis — that capitalism had its origin in changes in English agricultural economics — comes directly from Marx's Capital, though Meiksins Wood's account benefits from a century-and-a-half of intellectual development since Marx, producing a deep and nuanced understanding.

In the 1500s, England was a starkly different society than any other country in Europe. Thanks to England's isolation as an island, it was uniquely demilitarized. While feudal lordships fragmented most of continent Europe, the British crown had unified Britain under a single government. Britain saw relatively little internal conflict.

In the eleventh century (if not before), when the Norman ruling class established itself on the island as a fairly cohesive military and political entity, England already became more unified than most countries. In the sixteenth century, England went a long way toward eliminating the fragmentation of the state, the ‘parcellized sovereignty’, inherited from feudalism.

Britain already had an impressive network of roads and aqueducts. At the same time, the island of Great Britain is large and naturally well defended by the surrounding seas, with easy shipping access to the continent. England was centralized around the monarchy in London. As a result, there was little need for a built-up military. Since England's dominant class couldn't finance itself with military plunder, it needed to rely on gentler forms of exploitation.

Since the Normans introduced feudalism in the 1000s, land in England had been unusually concentrated in the hands of a small aristocracy. Relatively few lords controlled exceptionally large swaths of land. These lords maintained a compromise with the monarchy whereby they would respect the rule of London while they profited off their own land.

In a creative twist, landlords started increasing their revenue by raising rents on their tenants. Maybe this was an idea borrowed from the Netherlands, across the North Sea, where merchants had become expert at market economics through the impressive mercantile network they had built since the 1400s. For the English, it was radical to view land as a good that one could trade in a market. In principle, it held appeal to the peasants who wanted freedom from the bondage of serfdom.

Landlords saw serfdom as ultimately untenable: it depended on the violent oppression of a laboring class, which is expensive and risky. So they released their serfs from the bondage of feudalism into the competition of the market economy. For centuries, peasants had relied on customary rights to the land, paying rents that remained steady for generations. Now a peasant had the freedom to choose a tenancy as they liked. This was not a revolution, but a gradual movement that spread outwards from Southern England.

Agrarian landlords in this arrangement had a strong incentive to encourage – and, wherever possible, to compel – their tenants to find ways of reducing costs by increasing labour-productivity... Tenants were increasingly subject not only to direct pressures from landlords but also to market imperatives that compelled them to enhance their productivity... Tenants were obliged to compete not only in a market for consumers but also in a market for access to land... This market-mediated relation between landlords and peasants is visible in the attitude to rents that was emerging by the sixteenth century. In a system of ‘competitive rents’, in which landlords, wherever possible, would effectively lease land to the highest bidder, at whatever rent the market would bear, they became increasingly conscious of the difference between the fixed rents paid by customary tenants and an economic rent determined by the market.

The word "farmer" literally means "renter," preserved in the modern sense of "farm out." The landlords now increased their revenue by raising rents, evicting tenants in favor of new tenants who would pay more. Those new tenants had to produce more crops or livestock in order to pay the higher rent.

Agricultural improvement

These early agrarian capitalists invented agricultural science to increase their crop yields. Farmers learned that they could increase their productivity by consolidating many small plots into fewer large plots, buy turning idle common land into intensively-worked private land, and by hiring employees to work the land. They called this process "improvement" from the old French "into profit."

The word ‘improve’ itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just ‘make better’ in a general sense but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land for profit... By the seventeenth century, the word ‘improver’ was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing it or reclaiming waste... Improvement meant, even more fundamentally, new forms and conceptions of property. ‘Improved’ farming, for the enterprising landlord and his prosperous capitalist tenant, ideally though not necessarily meant enlarged and concentrated landholdings. It certainly meant the elimination of old customs and practices that interfered with the most productive use of land...

The most dramatic form of improvement was the enclosure of formerly-common land. Until this point, much land had been farmed communally. Now, landlords erected stone fences around their fields — a dramatic physical manifestation of the new legal fiction of private property. "Enclosure meant not simply a physical fencing of land but the extinction of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood."

Enclosure was the end of communal life in England and the birth of a society dependent on the market exchange of private property — capitalism. Now, the peasants who did not themselves own land were excluded from the fields by physical barriers. They had no choice but to sell their labor on farms or in the growing towns.

John Locke argued that the earth exists to be used productively. Locke believed that labor created profit. Arguing in the interests of the new class of capitalists, Locke said that man creates value by mixing his labor with the land, and unworked land had virtually no value compared to cultivated English land. He specifically said that untilled American Indigenous lands at 1/10th, 1/100th, or 1/1000th the value of English lands.

We need to be reminded that the definition of property was in Locke's day not just a philosophical issue but a very practical one... a new, capitalist definition of property was in the process of establishing itself... Increasingly the principle of improvement for profitable exchange was taking precedence over other principles and other claims to property, whether those claims were based on custom or on some fundamental right of subsistence. Enhancing productivity itself became a reason for excluding other rights.

Locke gave the dominant class an ideological rationale for the dispossession of land, whether at home in England or abroad in the New World. In this new worldview, it is unethical to leave potential profits unrealized, and so it is only noble to enclose and colonize. England created a worldview that demanded acceleration. The ideology of improvement legitimized the reality of bourgeois avarice, driven by capitalist competition.

Coercion

"Compulsion lies at the heart of the new economic dynamic," writes Meiksin Wood. In capitalism, no one chooses to participate; they capitulate to the system, or the system crushes them.

Once some members of a community begin acting competitively, all members of the community are forced into competition. If other tenants tried to ignore the market, they would be driven out of their land by increasing rents. So market forces spread.

Under capitalism, inefficiencies became opportunities. Any disadvantage for one party could potentially become a competitive advantage for another party. "This was, in other words, the first economic system in history in which the limitations of the market impelled instead of inhibiting the forces of production."

This is why agrarian capitalism made industrial capitalism possible. Contrary to popular belief, industrialism was not driven by invention. Meiksins Wood writes that the inventions of the early industrial revolution were "modest." Rather, innovation was a product of aggressive competition and profit-seeking.

Until the production of the means of survival and self-reproduction is market dependent, this is no capitalist mode of production. With the advent of industrial capitalism, market dependence had truly penetrated to the depths of the social order. But its precondition was an already well-established and deeply rooted market dependence, reaching back to the early days of English agrarian capitalism, when the production of food became subject to the imperatives of competition.

Capitalism is based on exploitation — landlords using the leverage of their ostensible ownership to extract an outsized share of the productivity of their land as reward for their service as managers of the land. But those landlords, who enjoy the exceptional comfort and luxury that their capital affords them, need protection. After all, what should we expect from the dispossessed, impoverished peasants with no opportunity for betterment despite their lifetimes of dedicated toil?

“The economic imperatives of capitalism are always in need of support by extra-economic powers of regulation and coercion, to create and sustain the conditions of accumulation and maintain the system of capitalist property. The transfer of certain ‘political’ powers to capital can never eliminate the need to retain others in a formally separate political ‘sphere’, preserving the division between the moment of economic appropriation and the moment of political coercion. Nor can purely economic imperatives ever completely supplant direct political coercion, or, indeed, survive at all without political support.”

“In fact, capitalism, in some ways more than any other social form, needs politically organized and legally defined stability, regularity, and predictability in its social arrangements. Yet these are conditions of capital’s existence and self-reproduction that it cannot provide for itself and that its own inherently anarchic laws of motion constantly subvert. To stabilize its constitutive social relations – between capital and labour or capital and other capitals – capitalism is especially reliant on legally defined and politically authorized regularities.”

The contract between the landlord and the laborer depends on a pretense of peace, and so the landlord must refrain from exercising violence against their tenants. But capitalism requires violence to safeguard its characteristic inequity. So landlords and government form a pact, separating the "moment of appropriation" (economic extraction) from the "moment of coercion" (extra-economic extraction). The landlord is responsible for extracting profit, while the state uses violence to enforce the system of capitalist violence, with measures such as criminalizing homelessness or quashing rebellions in order to force laborers into the workforce. In this way, capitalism created the modern nation-state.

The present

We can't understand the world we live in — technology, government, money, work — without understanding capitalism and its origin.

The capitalist system is, needless to say, in a constant state of development and flux. But we will not understand its current processes of change and contradiction if we fail to trace them to their foundations. The rise of capitalism cannot be explained as the outcome of technical improvements, 'the Western European trend of economic progress', or any other transhistorical mechanism. The specific transformation of social property relations that set in train a historically unique 'progress' of productive forces cannot be taken for granted. To acknowledge this is critical to an understanding of capitalism - not to mention the conditions of its abolition and replacement by a different social form. We must recognize not only the full force of capitalist imperatives, the compulsions of accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labour-productivity, but also their systemic roots, so we know just why they work the way they do.

Capitalism emerged at a unique point in time when a society decided to mutate traditionally collective ideas — land, shelter, food — into individual ideas. This change took hundreds of years to fully arrive. Perhaps, in the early days, it offered oppressed peoples the promise of a new world: a world which — though they couldn't possibly have understood or foreseen it at the time — would still be rigged against them.

At the end of the book, Meiksins Wood concludes:

Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the age-old social tendency to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’. It is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions. The expansionary drive of capitalism, reaching a point of virtual universality today, is not the consequence of its conformity to human nature or to some transhistorical law, or of some racial or cultural superiority of ‘the West’, but the product of its own historically specific internal laws of motion, its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expansion. Those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set them in train. They required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the provision of life’s basic necessities.

There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers.

We have created a world with incredible wealth, intelligence, and creativity — and yet... we have invented mass-incarceration, mass-displacement, industrial warfare, ecological collapse, colonialism, and widespread human disempowerment. What is this bargain?

Remaining questions

There are three things that the book left me wanting to understand more:

First, capitalism carries an incredibly persuasive notion of progress. Capitalist (and even Marxist) philosophers have upheld an ideological view that humanity is progressing away from a dark past toward a brilliant future. How did capitalism create this idea, and what is the alternative?

Second, why did capitalism emerge at this specific time? Humans have existed for a hundred thousand years, and the last ice age ended ten thousand year ago. My understanding, based partly on The Dawn of Everything and The Little Ice Age (and I'm sure also unpacked in more books on my reading list, including Guns, Germs, and Steel, Debt, The Great Transition, and The World the Plague Made) is that human population gradually grew after the last ice age, spiking during a warm period that started around the year 900, which then crashed around the year 1300, creating a period of unprecedented hardship in Western Europe. This is the question I plan to explore more next.

Finally, what was the attitude of the people who chose to accept this new order? Did they know what they were doing, or was it imposed on them from above? I've read a little about the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the first major uprising in English history. The peasants, who had a sophisticated understand of law, demanded an end of serfdom and equality of all men under the king. Revolutionaries across the country destroyed legal records strategically. In London, the revolutionaries received an audience with the King, who acquiesced to their demands and swore to abolish serfdom — until the following day, when the negotiations turned, the mayor of London beheaded the rebel leader, and the rebels were branded traitors. As Gerald Harriss writes in his history of the period:

The destruction of the lordship did not mean the abolition of private property — no hint of common ownership emerged — but it did imply free access to and use of natural resources like rivers, woods, and pastures. This vision of a realm composed of village communities under a distant king is indicative of the restricted horizons of the villagers who led it... In some aspects the peasant movement echoed the bastard feudal society it sought to overthrow: in the formation of sworn confederacies, the distribution of livery, the extortion of protection money, and the formation of bands or 'routs.' But their determination to eradicate law and lordship made them true radicals.

Meiksins Wood's work is radical, too, in that it rejects a mechanical view of human history. History unfolds like a dance between various peoples and their environment. Somehow we have danced our way into a very strange chapter of history — the chapter with the iPhone and the cluster munition. I would like to understand the dance steps that brought us here.