issue 102 of international socialism journal published spring 2004 copyright

8/3/2019 Issue 102 of International Socialism Journal Published Spring 2004 Copyright

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Issue 102 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Spring 2004 Copyright

© International Socialism

The rise of capitalismChris Harman Capitalism is a peculiar form of class society. Like previous class societies it involves

a minority section of society grabbing the surplus created by the toil of the rest of society. But there are important differences. Previous ruling classes simply seized thesurplus, while capitalists get it by buying people's capacity to work (what Marx called'labour power'). And previous ruling classes used almost all the surplus on their ownluxury consumption or on fighting each other. The use of any of the surplus toimprove the means of production was spasmodic. Economic growth was usually slow, often non-existent, sometimes negative for centuries at a time. Capitalist ruling

classes, however, are driven by economic competition within and betweenthemselves to plough a sizeable portion of the surplus back into expansion of themeans of production. There is not merely economic growth, but compulsiveaccumulation. It is this which has enabled capitalist ruling classes that two and a half centuries ago controlled only fringe areas of north western Europe to engulf the globetoday.

The question as to why this new form of class rule arose in certain parts of western Europe and not elsewhere has long perplexed historians, including Marxisthistorians. It was one of the problems the bourgeois sociologist Max Weber tried todeal with in his extensive, and often tortuous, writings. It runs through the great

three-volume study Capitalism and Civilisation by the French economic historianFernand Braudel.1 It has also been at the centre of two big debates among WesternMarxists--that among those close to the Communist parties in the 1940s and early 1950s, published in the volume The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,2 andthat among 'New Left' historians in the 1970s, published in the volume The Brenner

Debate.3

The issues raised in the debate do not seem to have much practical importancefor socialists at the beginning of the 21st century, now that capitalism has clearly conquered the whole globe, leaving virtually no pre-capitalist states in existence. Thisis in sharp contrast with the situation for earlier generations of socialists, raised in a

world in which pre-capitalist ruling classes, or at least the remnants of them, stillexerted a decisive influence over state structures, so that how to break their gripcould seem all-important for those in what we now call the 'Third World'.

Nevertheless, the issues remain of ideological importance. The argument is still widespread that capitalism arose in western Europe as a result of the special valuesof a Hellenic or 'Judaeo-Christian' cultural inheritance. It is used by apologists forcapitalism like David Landes,4 opening the door to the conclusions that 'Western

values' have to be defended at all costs from the 'values' of 'Islamic', 'African','indigenous American' or other cultures, which are then blamed for the poverty of much of the world.

The narrow and wider debates

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Unfortunately, much Marxist discussion of the question has been quite narrow inscope. It has concentrated on the particular factors that allowed western Europe tomake the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the 16th century onwards

while eastern Europe went through the phase of renewed feudalism, often called the'second serfdom'; on why England became capitalist before France did; or on the

character of the society that existed in England between the end of serfdom (in thelate 14th century) and the full emergence of capitalism (a good three centuries later).5

I tried to take up some of these narrow issues in an article I wrote some dozen years ago.6 One of the things I stressed was that concentrating, as much of the debatedid, on why Britain moved towards capitalism before France, or western Europe

before eastern Europe, can obscure the most obvious thing--that right across much of Europe (or at least western and central Europe) there was the rise of a new form of production and exploitation standing in partial contradiction to the old form from atleast the 14th century onwards. But I paid little attention in that article to the widerquestion as to whether similar forces were at work in the civilisations of Asia,7 the

Americas and Africa. And if so, why did industrial capitalism emerge in parts of Europe before going on to conquer the rest of the world? I did deal with this widerquestion in passing in my book A People's History of the World .8 But, as RobinBlackburn noted in a very friendly review of the book, my treatment of the debatesover the issue was 'peremptory'.

Yet these are the questions that were raised in an explicitly non-Marxist manner by Max Weber in his writings on religion, and which have been raised again in astrongly anti-Marxist way by David Landes in his much-hyped The Wealth and

Poverty of Nations.9

These are also the questions that have attracted new interest from a variety of works over the last decade or so--Abu Lughod's Before European Hegemony,10 J MBlaut's The Colonisers' View of the World ,11Gunder Frank's ReOrient ,12 M S Alim's'How Advanced was Europe in 1760 After All?',13 Xu Dixin and WuChengming's Chinese Capitalism, 1522-184014 and Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great

Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.15 Incontrast to those like Landes, these works stress, to different degrees and fromdifferent perspectives, elements of similarity within the economies of the conjoinedEurasian and African continents.

Abu Lughod stresses the level of development of trade and economic output in

the period before 1500 in what Europeans called 'the Orient'.16 M S Alim argues thatit is by no means self evident that Europe was 'more advanced' than the rest of the

world in the 18th century. He claims:

The historical evidence indicates that wages in India and Egypt were comparable to those inthe historically advanced countries... Indian wages in textiles and agriculture were at leastequal to those in Britain... Egypt had a per capita income of $232 in 1800 compared to $240for France... In agricultural productivity Brazil and Pakistan in 1820 were ahead of France andIreland, and India was at par with Ireland... The leading industrial countries in 1750 had only a modest lead over lagging countries in manufacturing output per capita. If Britain'sindustrial manufacturing output per head was 10, then China's was 8, India's 7, Brazil 6,France 9, Belgium 9, the US 4.

















































All this suggests 'a near parity of economic development of western Europe andChina, India and the Middle East as late as 1800... The progress that Eurocentricaccounts have attributed to Europe was part of a general development that affected

Asia and the Middle East as well'.17

Blaut argues that there was a system of trade stretching from Asia through theMiddle East and the northern half of Africa to the southern fringes of Europe in themedieval period that linked great agrarian societies dominated by 'feudal' rulingclasses. Within each of these there was a:

...process of increasing urbanisation and increasing long distance commodity movements which characterised the late middle ages throughout the hemisphere... In all three continents we find relatively small rural regions (they were generally hinterlands of major port cities),along with a few highly commercialised agricultural and mining regions, which were clearly being penetrated by capitalism... Among them were Flanders, south eastern England,northern Italy, sugar-planting regions of Morocco, the Nile Valley, the Gold Coast, Kilwa,Sofala (and hypothetically part of Zimbabwe), Malabar, Coromanchel, Bengal, northern Java

and south coastal China... Cities clothed the landscape from northern Europe to southern Africa to eastern Asia... We can distinguish a special group of cities that were strongly oriented toward manufacturing and trade, were more or less marginal to powerful feudalstates and were engaged in long distance maritime trade.18

It is a mistake, Blaut insists, to contrast 'Europe' with 'China', 'India' or 'Africa' inthe way the discussion about the rise of capitalism often does. The focus insteadshould be on the similarity of development within enclaves of 'proto-capitalism' to befound within each global region. And the existence of the intercontinental tradenetwork ensured new productive techniques flowed rapidly from one to another: 'Thediffusion of technological innovations had gone so far that the productivity of humanlabour was hardly ever limited by lack of technical knowledge of a kind available toother farmers in other parts of the hemisphere'.19

Such passages have the great merit of stressing the global context against whichcapitalism developed in certain regions of western Europe, especially the spread of trade and advances in productive techniques. This is a welcome corrective to thenarrow focus on supposedly unique developments in late medieval western Europe.

They accord with parts of my own (often implicit) argument in A People's History of the World . Capitalism is not a product of some peculiarly Europeandevelopment. Since the first agriculture in the Middle East some 10,000 or so yearsago there has been a cumulative, if sporadic, growth of new forces of productionspreading right across the connected land masses of Europe, Asia and Africa. Therise of capitalism in Europe is just one passing phase in this whole process. Elementspushing for capitalism began to emerge in several different parts of the world. Inpractice these elements developed more slowly elsewhere than in Europe forcontingent historical reasons (or rather, more slowly than western Europe, for things

were much more like India than England in huge swathes of eastern and southernEurope)--and then arrived too late in the day to do so independently. It was not'European values' that created capitalism, but rather capitalism that created what wethink of as European values. And capitalism did not arise because of some uniqueEuropean occurrence, but as a product of the development of the forces and relations

of production on a global scale.















But these points alone leave unanswered the question of why countries likeHolland and Britain could then begin to undergo further changes before the rest of the world. Blaut skirts round the question by describing the network of medievalcities as 'proto-capitalist' and insisting that 'feudalism in Europe was no nearer itsfinal demise in 1492 than were the feudalisms of many extra-European regions'.20 But

feudalism did suffer its demise in at least these two parts of Europe in the followingcentury and a half. There 'proto-capitalisms' began changing into full-bloodedcapitalisms. Elsewhere the transformation stopped, or even reversed, with feudalforms of production deepening their hold in Poland, eastern Germany, the Czechlands, the Balkans and even parts of northern Italy that had seemed at the forefrontof proto-capitalist development at the time of the Renaissance in the 15th century.

Instead of dealing with this question seriously, Blaut has a tendency simply todismiss those who raise it as 'Eurocentric'--as if it is somehow Eurocentric torecognise that parts of Europe, their rapid economic growth and their global empires

were a dominant factor in world history from at least the mid-18th century onwards.

This tendency is even more marked in the recent works of Gunder Frank, who claims'Marx's entire "theory of capitalism" was vitiated' by 'Eurocentric' assumptions that'Europe was different'.21 He replaces the notion of capitalism with that of a worldsystem supposedly existing since the first emergence of a trading class, without there

being any such thing as the 'rise of capitalism' separate from the industrialrevolution.22 He sees a single dynamic to the productive system based upon 'long' or'Kondratieff' waves going right back to 10th century China23 or even to the Bronze

Age.24 This is to deny the most elementary fact--that we live today under an economicsystem based, as no other was, on the drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. And this is not just a result of the growth of trade.

Trade and the rise of class society

Class societies began to emerge in various parts of the world from around 5,000 years ago onwards. Over a period of several centuries, what had once been communalproduction fell under the control of ruling minorities who ensured it provided them

with an increasingly luxurious and leisurely lifestyle. At first they tended to exploitthe rest of society collectively, as temple priests or royal households, rather thanthrough private property. On this basis civilisations as diverse as those in the Nile

Valley, ancient Iraq, northern China, the Indus Valley, central America, the Andes,Crete, Ethiopia and west Africa developed.25 Over time central control tended to

weaken and a class of 'aristocrats', 'gentry' or 'lords' to emerge which exploited directcultivators in each locality. At the same time, the polarisation of society into classesfound its reflection in greater or lesser degrees of disintegration of the old communalforms of agricultural production and the emergence of peasant households as themain productive units. There would then be a continual tussle between the centralstate administration, with its corps of tax collectors, and the local rulers over who gotthe lion's share of the surplus which was taken from the peasants in the form of labour services, crops or, sometimes, cash. All these societies had one thing incommon--the ruling class, whether made up of lords and aristocrats or of stateadministrators, took the surplus directly off the peasant producers, without any pretence of exchange of goods.


























Such ruling classes increasingly felt the need for products that could not beobtained simply from the local cultivators. They needed materials for palace andtemple building, for the making of armaments and for luxury consumption. Suchthings could often be obtained only by looting distant peoples, or through some sortof exchange with them.

There was some exchange long before the rise of classes. Archaeologists havefound artefacts that must have been made many hundreds of miles away among theremains of hunter-gatherer settlements of southern France more than 20,000 yearsago, and the circulation of the products of human labour was even more widespreadin the agricultural societies that began to emerge ten millennia later. There was noother way, for instance, that the villagers of the river plain of southern Iraq could getmetal ores and even wood (since the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates was

virtually treeless). But the circulation of products in pre-class societies was not tradein the sense that we know the term today. It was not carried out according to strictcalculations of profit or loss, but according to traditions of gift-giving and gift-taking,

based on customary rites, much as continued to happen in pre-class societies inplaces like Polynesia right into the 20th century .26

The rise of the ruling classes of the new civilisations transformed this situation.They demanded distantly-obtained products on a scale that could not be satisfied by the old-established customary networks. At the same time, they were rarely preparedto face the hardship and risks involved in procuring such things themselves. Peoplesoon emerged who were--in return for a share of the surplus the ruling class hadobtained through exploiting the cultivators. So specialised traders got a 'mark-up' by selling to the ruling class goods from a great distance away. Some were individualsfrom the exploited cultivator class, others from the nomadic peoples living between

the centres of civilisation. But regardless of their origins, they began to crystalliseinto a privileged classes separate from the old ruling classes.

Such merchant classes emerge in similar ways in societies with little or nocontact with each other: in second millennium BC Babylon and Egypt; in India,China, Greece and Rome by 300 BC; in Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico by AD200; in the Arabian peninsular by AD 600; among the Mayas of the YucatanPeninsula by AD 1000; on the northern coast of the Andean region by 1500 BC. Oncein existence such a class usually left its mark ideologically and politically as well aseconomically. The spread of each of the great world religions--Buddhism, Hinduism,Christianity and Islam--was along trade routes travelled by the merchants. The

world's major languages often developed out of the vernacular forms by which peoplecommunicated with each other along trade routes and in marketplaces. And sectionsof the established agrarian ruling classes repeatedly found the merchants useful alliesin struggles with other sections for dominance: the rise of the Ch'in kingdom andthen empire in northern China and of the Mauryan empire in India in the 4th and3rd centuries BC depended on such manoeuvres, and the Arab dynasties that ruledthe Middle East a millennium later owed their success to reliance on merchants as

well as tribal armies and landed exploiting classes.

But in these alliances the merchants were always the junior partners to therulers, and much mistrusted by them. Merchant wealth came from siphoning off some of the surplus under the control of the old ruling class, and this was resented.So the most powerful merchant could suddenly be thrown into prison, lose his head







or be cut in half. He lacked the independent base in production and exploitation todo much more than kowtow to the old rulers.

Marx made a distinction between merchant capital (that profits from financingtrade), usurers' capital (that makes profits from interests on lending) and productive

capital (that profits from employing workers to operate its means of production).Merchant capital and usurers' capital existed under all the old empires, whereverthere was large-scale trade or moneylending. But productive capital made only a rareand fleeting appearance. In ancient Rome, for instance, the most successful'capitalists' were the 'tax farmers', whose wealth came from the contracting out of taxcollecting by the state. In Ch'in and Han China (300 BC-AD 300) the merchantscollaborated with the state in running the salt and iron monopolies. In the Arabempires of the Middle East the goods traded by the merchants were produced by peasants exploited by big landowners, by self employed artisans or, occasionally, by state enterprises--not by enterprises run by the merchants themselves.

The preconditions for full capitalism

It is wrong to equate such usurer or merchant classes, who are dependent onexploitation carried out by others, with capitalism as such, as non-Marxists such asBraudel do--and as does Gunder Frank.

The system as we know it today could only come into existence because at somepoint a capitalist class emerged that did directly control production and wastherefore able to directly exploit people on its own account, rather than simply beingan intermediary between other exploiters.

One precondition for the emergence of true capitalism, as Marx showed, was theseparation of the immediate producers (those who did the work) from the means of production, which passed into the hands of the new exploiting class. The producersthen had only one way to get a livelihood. They had to persuade the members of thisexploiting class to make use of their capacity for labour (their 'labour power') inreturn for a remuneration sufficient to keep them alive and fit for work. But the levelof that remuneration was substantially lower than the value of the goods produced by their work. The difference, the 'surplus', went straight into the pockets of the ownersof the means of production. They gained the fruits of the exploitation of labour, evenif it was legally 'free', just as much as the old ruling class that exploited unfree labour.

Marx described in Capital the forcible separation of the workforce in Britainfrom control over the means of production by the driving of people from the land

with the enclosures of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and the 'clearances' of the19th century. In many parts of the world the process continued right into the 20thcentury with the seizure of 'native' lands in places like southern Africa by whitecolonists--and also with the so called 'collectivisation' of agriculture under Stalinism.

Without such a separation of the workforce from the means of production thespread of production for the market could lead, not to capitalism, but to a new

variant of serfdom, the so called 'second serfdom' of eastern and southern Europe, or

to the encomienda system in Latin America. The output of production in these



regions was directed towards world markets, but the internal dynamic was very different to that of capitalism, with its drive to competitive accumulation.27

Slavery, serfdom, free labour and exploitation

Separating the producers from the means of production was not by itself sufficient to bring about the development of capitalism. There are many historical instances in which such separation did not lead to capitalism. For example, in Italy under theRoman Republic after the Punic Wars (the 2nd century BC) the peasants were drivenfrom the land by indebtedness. What replaced them, however, was not wage labour

but large-scale slavery .28 Even the world's first industrial enterprises did notnecessarily employ wage labour: Nishijima Sadao writes that 'professional workers,convicts, captives and corvée labourers' did the work in Ch'in China (3rd century BC).29 A thousand years later the biggest factories in China were state run, and:

Labourers were normally paid by the state...but this did not mean that the artisans worked

voluntarily for the state... Many skilled workers were drafted in to work for the government[and] artisans were subject to cruel and harsh punishments if their service was deemedunsatisfactory; not a few of them were even tortured to death.30

Slavery was a logical way for a ruling class to extract a surplus from those itexploited, since direct physical control was certainly a way to make someone work for

you. It provided certainty that the maximum proportion of social labour wouldaccrue to the exploiter.

But it had a downside whenever increasing production depended upon theinitiative of the labourers. If they bitterly resented the conditions under which they

toiled then the quality of the good produced was likely to suffer, and any tools used inproduction were likely to experience excessive wear and tear. There was also theproblem of supervising slave labour, which could be an expensive business, since theslavedrivers had to be provided for out of the surplus from the slave, and 'super'slavedrivers had to exist to stop the slavedrivers taking too much of that surplus.

From early on there were critics within ruling classes of the deleterious effects of slavery on total output. Already, as in the 'Discourse on Salt and Iron' in 81 BC China,there were critics of conscripted labour, who 'pointed to the poor quality of the toolsactually produced in the imperial iron agencies' and 'deprecated the misuse of statelabour'.31 Much the same argument was repeated by Adam Smith 1,800 years later in

his objections to unfree labour in The Wealth of Nations and in the mid-19th century by industrial interests in the north eastern US who opposed the westward spread of the slave system of the South.

In fact, slavery was not the main form of exploitation in most agricultural classsocieties. Rome under the late Republic and early Empire was the exception, not therule. In ancient Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, ancient India, ancient China, and in theempires of the pre-Hispanic Americas, production was in the hands of peasanthouseholds, who were then forced to hand over their surplus or provide a certainamount of unpaid labour to landowners or state officials. Serfdom or something closeto it prevailed, not outright slavery.























What is more, where slavery did exist, occasions occurred in which sections of the ruling class could come to see advantages in moving to serfdom--in half-freeingformer slaves. This happened in the later Roman Empire in the 4th and 5thcenturies--as the price of slaves rose many landowners opted for the 'colonate'system of serf-like peasant production. The French Marxist historian Guy Bois has

argued that it happened again in the 10th century in western Europe, as those whocontrolled the landed estates discovered pragmatically that giving greaterresponsibility to the individual peasant household led to a growth in agriculturaloutput.32 Replacement of total control of the workforce (slavery) by partial control(serfdom) may have led to a fall in the proportion of the total output going to thelord, but this was more than compensated for by the growth in that output.33

Forces of production and relations of exploitation

This last example also points to something important which too many Marxists haveignored out of a desire not to appear too 'crude' or 'economistic'. Changes in forms of

exploitation are connected with changes in production methods. It was precisely because new productive techniques were beginning to spread into western Europe--usually from the other end of the Eurasian land mass--in the 10th and 11th centuriesthat it made sense to those who controlled the land to devolve more responsibility tothe peasant household. For the new techniques worked best when there was carefultending of crops and farm animals, something difficult to attain using slaves.Changes in the forces of production encouraged changes in the relations of production.

This was the point of Marx's famous summary of the development of differentmodes of production in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy of 1857:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, whichare independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage inthe development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arisesa legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of socialconsciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or--this merely expresses the same thing in legalterms--with the property relations within the framework of which they have operatedhitherto.34

It was also the point he made some ten years earlier, when he claimed:

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productiveforces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, inchanging the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The handmillgives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.35

The summation is crude. It is also historically inaccurate. What accompanied therise of European feudalism after the 10th century was not the spread of the handmill,

but its replacement over the centuries, the watermill--and the watermill then went onto play an important role in the genesis of industrial capitalism. But Marx's central

point was correct. There was a necessary connection between production methodsand the most fruitful way for a minority to exploit the rest of the population. And this



















was not just true of the rise of European feudalism. It was also true of the rise of exploitation based upon 'free' labour--of capitalism.

This is something ignored by the school of thought which emphasises the role of the market in the rise of capitalism, but also by the rival school which stresses the

importance of bitter class struggle. As they debate with each other, they make thesymmetrical mistake of neglecting the processes by which humans advance theircapacity to wrest a livelihood from nature.

For capitalism to arise, there had not only to be separation of the immediateproducers from control over the means of production, but also new ways of producing that would give the exploiters a bigger surplus when operated by 'free'

waged labour rather than by slave or serf labour. And these new ways of producinghad to be such that they escaped from the control of the old agrarian ruling classes(or at least from the major sections of those classes).

Mechanisation, markets and capitalism

Productive capitalism was not possible before a certain point in human history. This was when there was a massive escalation of the use of the products of past labour toincrease the productivity of present labour, when the use of relatively simple tools

began to give way to the first mechanisation, in the broadest sense of the term.36

This could have a fourfold effect. It (1) increased the output--and therefore thepotential surplus--to be obtained from a given quantity of labour. It (2) increased thecost of equipment and materials needed to undertake production--and therefore thelikelihood that the individual producers would not be able to supply themthemselves. It (3) increased the dependence of production on the initiative andcommitment of the producer (if only because more care needed to be taken on theexpensive equipment) and therefore the advantage of exploiting 'free' as opposed toserf or slave labour. And it (4) increased the importance of trading networks whichcould supply raw materials and dispose of the increased output.

Where 'mechanisation' had all four effects it separated immediate producersfrom control over the means of production on the one hand and encouraged the useof 'free' labour by the new class of controllers on the other. It also increased theintegration of the whole production process with the market.

All four effects were not always present. Often in the early stages the individualproducer still partially owned and controlled the means of production, although

becoming increasingly dependent on merchants, landowners or moneylenders forfunds and raw materials. In these cases transitional forms to fully capitalistproduction flourished--for instance, the putting-out system in the towns, share-cropping in the countryside. As we have seen, there were also many cases in whichslave or serf labour was used in early forms of industrial production. And in somecases at least, mechanised forms of production were quite compatible with the denialof any initiative to some groups of labourers. This was true on the sugar plantationsof the Caribbean in the 18th century and the cotton plantations of the American

South through the first half of the 19th century.







Yet once 'mechanised' processes were under way the possibilities of a transitionto capitalist forms of production were there. The development of productivecapitalism depended on such developments in the forces of production. By contrast,

where such developments did not occur, merchant and usurer capitalism werepossible, but not productive capitalism.

This explains why capitalism did not develop in the ancient civilisations of theMiddle East and the Mediterranean lands or in the pre-Hispanic civilisations of the

Americas. In neither case were the forces of production sufficiently advanced for anew class of capitalist exploiters independent of the old ruling classes to emerge.

The not so dark ages

There is a traditional, purely European, view of history which sees the second half of the first millennium AD as one of stagnation and then regression, the 'Dark Ages'.The view is not completely true even of Europe, where the decline of urban life was

accompanied, by the 9th and 10th centuries, by the spread of new agriculturalmethods. And the view is completely wrong when it comes to other parts of theEurasian-African landmass. Across wide regions the productive forces underwentaccelerated development, and with it there were possibilities for new social relationsof production.

This was most clearly the case in China. Already in the Ch'in and Han periods(the last centuries BC and the first centuries AD) there was the large-scale productionof cast-iron implements (not known in Europe until the 14th century), and by theSung period (around the year 1000) there were new advanced ways of harnessinghorses, the use of milling machinery and of farming implements on the land, book printing, paper making, the working of bellows by water power in iron making, theuse of pit coal in metallurgy and explosives in pits, the making of weapons, clothing,ships and luxury goods under factory-like conditions, and the construction of clockwork devices. Joseph Needham has shown how all sorts of key developments inmechanisation occurred in China many centuries before they were known in westernEurope.37

Merchant classes arose that were able to influence society politically by makingalliances with monarchs against the big landed aristocrats, in much the same way asin the absolute monarchies that arose at the end of the west European feudal period.Sometimes these merchants moved over from involvement in trade alone toinvolvement in the production of things like iron, salt and luxury goods. And by theend of the first millennium the owners of large estates began to see advantages inrelying on tenant farmers or wage labourers to work them--again, a developmentsimilar to that which took place in the late European Middle Ages. The economic andpolitical changes were matched in both periods by ideological ferment, with new setsof ideas challenging the Confucian worldview of the landed gentry class.38

By the 12th century this society had most of the productive techniques which were to be associated with the rise of capitalism in western Europe 500 years later.There was widespread use of 'free' labour. And there was a merchant class capable of

exerting influence on the state. Yet capitalism did not break through.











To explain this, you have to look not just at the forces of production, but theinterplay between what Marx called the 'base' and the 'superstructure'.

The political superstructures of the successive Chinese dynasties from the Ch'in(around 300 BC) onwards were large, costly and highly cohesive, centred around

structures of bureaucratic control that survived at the core of large local states evenduring times when the central empire collapsed. This necessarily restricted the spacein which members of the merchant class could develop their own independentpolitical presence. In the T'ang period (around AD 700) the state kept tight controlover the cities to prevent their inhabitants exhibiting any independence--wallsdivided the cities into separate wards, and police patrolled the streets at night toprevent people moving around. The old ruling class remained in control, crampingfurther development of the forces of production while wasting a vast proportion of existing output, until the state could no longer sustain itself and went into crisis.

Considerable changes in production also occurred in the Indian subcontinent

from about 400 BC through to around AD 500. There was a rapid growth of urbancrafts, flourishing internal trade and international trading networks which stretchedto Vietnam, Indonesia and China in one direction and to the Roman Mediterraneanin the other. But important techniques known in China were not to be found in India(for example, the use of cast iron), and from about the 6th century AD onwards there

was a decline of trade and urban life while the focus for the artisan crafts shifted tothe villages, where they were integrated into a caste system increasingly dominated

by a priestly layer, the Brahmins. There were still important advances in productivetechniques, but they mainly seem to have been in agriculture at a time when tradeand urban life were in decline.

Just as the Indian societies were experiencing this 'ruralisation', there was acontrary process taking place across the Middle East and North Africa (and inMoorish Spain). The growth of influence of the merchants in the century after the

Arab conquests of the 7th century was such that some historians have referred to therevolution that established the Abbasid dynasty in the 8th century as a 'bourgeoisrevolution'.39 There were sophisticated, long distance banking systems, advances inseafaring allowed merchants to ply the whole region from southern China tonorthern Spain, and paper making and silk weaving spread there from China. Overallthere was a massive development of merchant capitalism and usurers' capitalism.But production in the countryside was still dominated by old landed classes and inthe cities by petty artisans, leaving little possibility for productive capitalism to

emerge. Important Chinese techniques like printing and iron casting were notadopted, even though there were groups of Arabian merchants in southern Chinesecities who would have been aware of these innovations. Under such circumstancesthe urban classes who had played an important political role at the time of the

Abbasid revolution lost their influence. The historic centre of the Middle East,Mesopotamia (Iraq), went into decline by the beginning of the second millennium asa result of a deterioration of its irrigation system and overexploitation of itspeasantry, while the new centre, Egypt, was constrained by the rapacious rule of amilitary caste (the Mamelukes).

Again these events can only be understood by examining not merely the growthof production and the changes in class composition that accompanied this, but also







the clash between political and ideological formations associated with old and new forms of production--the interaction of base and superstructure.

Here there is a real contrast in the medieval period between the situation of theeastern empires and that of much of Europe. The superstructures in medieval Europe

were weak and fragmented. A plethora of local lords struggled with each other toexploit and dominate the mass of people in each locality, often barely recognising theauthority of kings and emperors who themselves were involved in continual dynasticconflicts. The main instrument of ideological control, the church, was organisedalong hierarchic lines of its own, with allegiance to popes in Rome (and at one pointin Avignon) whose political ambitions often clashed with those of kings and lordsalike. This fragmentation allowed the merchant and artisan classes to create politicalspace of their own, running many of the towns in which they resided, sometimes by agreement with local lords, princes and kings, sometimes in continual struggleagainst them. By the 14th century they were an independent element in the politicalgeography of regions like northern Italy and Flanders; they were important

components that enabled powerful monarchies to contract themselves in France,Spain and Britain in the 16th century; and they provided launching pads for the

bourgeois revolutions of the 17th century (in Holland and England) and the late 18thcentury (in France).

The weakness of the European superstructure itself had a cause--the relatively backward character of north western Europe in the first millennium AD. The lowerlevel of development of the forces of production meant that the superstructure wasmuch less developed in the 10th century than in China or the Middle East. As I put itin A People's History:

Europe's very backwardness encouraged people to adopt from elsewhere new ways of wrestinga livelihood. Slowly, over many centuries, they began to apply techniques already known inChina, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and southern Spain. There was a corresponding slow butcumulative change in the social relations of society as a whole--just as there had been in SungChina or the Abbasid caliphate, but this time without the enormous dead weight of an oldimperial superstructure to smother continued advance. The very backwardness of Europeallowed it to leapfrog over the great empires.40

The adoption of new techniques in agriculture encouraged such fragmentation of the superstructure, at least at first. The techniques required the peasant family to beable to concentrate on production with at least a minimal guarantee that it would notsee a distant aristocrat or tax collector walk off with all the benefits. Production

advanced where there was a local lord who 'protected' (in the mafia sense of theterm) as well as robbed the peasantry.

Nevertheless, by the 14th century Europe had imposing and expensivesuperstructures of its own. Its cathedrals may still look amazing, but they diverted

vast amounts of surplus from being used to further improve production--as did thecastles, the monasteries and abbeys and the near endless wars between emperors,kings and popes. All these factors together did provoke the enormous social crisis of the 14th century--and a further great period of crisis in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Whole regions which had been expanding rapidly were thrown right back as a result.But, and here was the major difference with similar crises at the end of the Sung

period in China and the Abbasid period in Mesopotamia, the development of the







forces of production resumed where it had left off after relatively brief periods, basedon the beginning of the emergence of new relations of production.

Not that the Chinese superstructure was unchanging. It entered into deep crisisat the end of the Sung period. First a Turkic people conquered the north, splitting the

empire in two, and then the Mongols conquered both parts. The Mongol Chineseempire in turn fell apart in the face of an agrarian crisis and peasant rebellions in the14th century which finally culminated in the conquest of the state by the Mingdynasty.

The crisis which led to the fall of the Mongol dynasty and its replacement by theMing occurred at the same time as the great crisis of the 14th century in feudalEurope and seems to have had similar roots. The sheer costs of the sustaining theluxury consumption of the ruling class and an increasingly elaborate superstructureprevented further advances in food production, giving rise to famines, plagues anddiscontent among all the lower layers of society.

But the outcomes of the two crises were different in important respects.

In China the local revolts gave way to a new, centralised empire whose rulersconsciously followed a strategy of keeping a tight check on the growth of themerchant and artisan classes. And they did so with remarkable success, so thatalthough there was an expansion of trade and industry and the development of acertain independent culture catering for the classes involved in them, these classesnever developed the bases of semi-autonomous political power they were able toexercise in many European towns. As Wu Chengming tells, although there was agrowth of markets, the big landlords in the countryside relied upon slaves and

bondservants of their labour: 'For the period before the 1840s we have found recordsof only two or three landlords involved in cash crop farming of a more or lesscapitalist nature. Wage labour of a truly capitalist character was extremely rare'.41 Soalthough agricultural products were sold in the towns, only a very small proportionof products flowed from the town to the countryside.42 Meanwhile, most industrialproduction was by small-scale, independent craftspeople. 'Embryonic capitalism' didnot make its appearance until 'two centuries later than in Europe'.43

The weak development of an independent productive base of China's money andmerchant capitalists made it difficult for them to intervene independently as a socialforce. In parts of the south eastern Chinese seaboard, the merchants formed armedgroups during the middle Ming period (ie the 16th century) to protect illicit trade andto fight against imperial armies that tried to stop it. These might be seen as potentialseeds of a bourgeois power standing in opposition to the empire, but they were seedsthat did not germinate, despite the fact that production in China may well have beenmore advanced, in terms of output per head and of techniques, than in westernEurope at that time.44 And when the Ming empire entered its great period of crisis(again, at the same time as a period of great crisis in Europe, that of the 17thcentury), there were embryos of new forces, with a worldview of their own, but they

were far too weak to raise the prospect of reshaping society in their own image.

There was a sharp contrast not just with revolutionary Holland and Britain, butalso with some other regions of Europe. The 'strong monarchies' of the 16th century and the absolutisms of the 17th and 18th centuries were actually fairly ramshackle



















affairs, dependent on the ability of monarchs to bribe as well as intimidate localpower-holders in the towns as well as the countryside. Even after rulers had crushedrevolts in the most bloody fashion (as the Austrian monarchy did in the Thirty Years

War), they still depended on degrees of compromise and could not prevent some new social forces continuing to emerge, creating the conditions for a new wave of struggle

a century or two later.

The case of India

Those Europeans who first came into direct contact with India in the latter part of the 18th century, when the British began their conquest of the subcontinent, found aregion much of which was undergoing a deep economic and political crisis. They interpreted this as meaning that India had never known anything other thaneconomic stagnation--a view that influenced Marx's writings on India more than half a century later. Indian economic historians, many of them influenced by Marxism,have shown how wrong that view was.

R S Sharma, for instance, has argued that in early medieval India at least there was a similar, through not identical, feudal mode of production to that in medievalEurope:

Feudalism appears in a predominantly agrarian economy which is characterised by a class of landlords and a class of servile peasantry. In this system the landlords extract surplus throughsocial, religious or political methods, which are called extra-economic. This seems to be moreor less the current Marxist view of feudalism. The lord-peasant relationship is the core of thematter.45

As in Europe there was room for certain advances in productive methods withinthis:

We can certainly identify significant changes in the mode of production in early medievaltimes. This period was undoubtedly an age of larger yields and of great agrarian expansion... Animal husbandry was improved because of care given to the treatment of cattle diseases...The use of iron became so common that it began to be employed for non-utilitarianpurposes... The increase in the number of varieties of cereals including rice, wheat and lentilsas well as in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and so on, is striking.46

In the later medieval period, after the conquest of most of northern India by Muslim monarchies from the 12th century onwards, much of the surplus taken from

the peasantry went into the hands of state officials rather than old local lords. AsIrfan Habib has noted, 'The king's bureaucracy thereby became the principalexploiting class in society'.47 This has led some historians (including Habib) to seethis period at least as non-feudal.

But the central productive relation remained that between the dependentpeasantry and those that exploited them, even if the exploitation was to a large extentcarried out by the state rather than individual lords. And for much of the period theimpact was to produce changes like those which occurred in later medieval Europe--agrowth of towns, increased reliance on markets and money, and a transformation of much of agriculture. Habib writes that after the first conquests:















Large-scale trade between town and country must have resulted. This in turn promoted thecultivation of superior crops... The large export of grain and other produce from the country,caused by the exaction of the revenues, maintained a class of specialised grain merchants...Town crafts also grew .48

With the establishment of the Mogul empire in the 16th century, there was 'the

growth of commerce and the extensive activation for the market... The rapid spreadof the tobacco crop within the first 50 years of the 17th century throughout the lengthand breadth of India is an index of how quickly the peasant was now able to follow the market'.49

There was development of the means of production, with the adoption of many of the same innovations that took root in medieval and early modern Europe. IrfanHabib has pointed out that the Indian subcontinent had developed to the samegeneral level in making elementary machines as western Europe by the 17th century.The building of the Taj Mahal in the mid-17th century utilised the skills andtechniques of craftsmen from right across Eurasia, while the Indian textile industry used looms and spinning wheels essentially the same as those used in 16th and early 17th century Europe. Overall, there was a massive growth of markets, of trade, of craft production (it is worth remembering that in the 18th century India sold muchmore to Europe than vice versa) and of urbanisation.

The direction of economic and social development in India was notfundamentally different to that in Europe. This was because of considerablesimilarities in both the relations of exploitation and the productive forces. Thedirection in which Indian and west European economic development was heading

was the same. There were considerable differences in speed of development. Butthese difference existed on just as great a scale between different regions within bothEurope and India.

It was the impact of the political superstructure reacting on the economy that brought the development to an end across wide swathes of northern India. Themonarchy followed a policy of moving its officials from area to area every few yearsso as to stop them ever establishing the independent local roots which would givethem the ability to resist central control. But this meant the officials set out to enrichthemselves as quickly as possible at the expense of the local people, showing littleconcern about sustaining, let alone increasing, the productivity of the land undertheir control. According to Habib, the flow of agricultural products to the markets of

the cities was not matched, as in parts of Europe, by a flow of manufactured goodsfrom the cities to the countryside, where some could have contributed to increasingoutput. The resulting limitation to the domestic market could also help explain why the machines used to make goods in the cities of 17th century India were generally made of wood, while metal was used in Europe.50 By the end of the 17th century the

weaknesses in agriculture were reducing the productive resources of the empire as a whole and leading to rebellions and civil wars, which further sapped productiveresources.51 The break-up of the old superstructure might, in time, have led to anunlocking of the indigenous forces pushing towards capitalist or semi-capitalistforms of production. But something else intervened first. The merchant capitalists of the still dynamic region of Bengal saw the easiest way to protect their trade as

backing the emerging political power of the British East India Company .52























The controversy over the 'Asiatic mode of production'

Marx argued at certain points that what existed in India was an example of an'Asiatic mode of production' different to the feudalism of western Europe.53

He outlined a theoretical account of societies where the ruling class collectively exploited an oppressed class, which itself was engaged in collective production. Hesuggested that this was a transitional form between primitive communism and a fully developed class society. This seems in fact to have fitted the description of certainancient societies (early Sumer, early Egypt, Peru). But, as we have seen, he wasfundamentally mistaken in seeing India as an unchanging society with a staticeconomy.

Some people have concluded that Marx was right in one respect--in seeing themajor role played by the state administrators in exploitation as leading to a mode of production so different to that of European feudalism as to deserve a different name-

-whether the 'Asiatic mode', 'the tributary mode' or some other name.54

But this approach is mistaken regarding India. The increased importance of thestate as against the individual landlords did not stop there being some remarkablesimilarities in the trajectories of late medieval and early modern India and Europe--especially when you take into account the backwardness of much of Europe until the

beginning of the 20th century. The differences that do exist do not need the wholeconceptual apparatus of a different mode of production to explain them. As theTurkish Marxist Halil Berktay has pointed out, 'Each [feudal] society is not just thefeudal mode but also its entire superstructure, which, moreover, comes into being asa concrete historical reality through a specific process woven by innumerablehazards, and each such society thereby also incorporates elements of the soil on

which it arises'.55

To fail to see this is to fall into a 'vulgar economic determination' which 'consistsin holding that the actual movement of any given society will reach the potentialdynamic of its mode of production fully and completely'.56

The conquests of northern India by armies from the north west of thesubcontinent in the 12th and again in the 16th centuries led to the temporary imposition of powerful, centralised political superstructures, which sappedproductive resources and hampered further economic developments. But similarthings happened at various points in parts of Europe--for instance, after the wars of religion of 16th century France and the Thirty Years War in 17th century centralEurope. And in any case, there was a tendency after a period of about a century and ahalf for the superstructures of the northern Indian empires to begin to crack apart,opening up possibilities for a more 'normal' development of feudalism--and within itthe possibility of embryos of productive capitalism.57

The notion of the Asiatic mode of production has been applied to China as wellas India. The German Sinologist Wittfogel did so in the 1920s and 1930s while still aMarxist, presenting a relatively sophisticated picture of clashes between three

exploiting classes in China from the 5th century BC onwards--an old feudal class based on land ownership, a bourgeoisie of merchants, and a state bureaucratic class


























which controlled the hydraulic systems (dams and canals) important for agricultureand trade.58 After he had migrated to the US, ceased to be a Marxist and adopted ahard Cold War ideology, Wittfogel tried to generalise his notion to vast regions of the

world with a theory of 'oriental despotism'. In most cases, his arguments consist of little more than saying there is a powerful despotism and that therefore there must

be some mode of production different to that which developed in medieval Europe.

However, it seems to me that he did have a point in his original Marxist attemptto come to terms with Chinese society. This was a region, as we have seen, whererepeated and powerful trends towards the development of capitalism occurred, butnever quite broke through the superstructure. And there was one significant factorabout the mode of production that was different to Europe (and, for that matter toIndia, Islamic North Africa or the Ottoman Empire of the early modern period). This

was the centrality of canal systems for irrigation, transport and flood control. Fromabout 400 BC onwards centrally planned canal systems were important foragriculture in parts of northern China. But their importance soon became much

greater than that. They provided the vital transport system for carrying food and raw material to the cities of the north--salt from the coast, iron and, from the time of theT'ung and Sung empires on (from the 7th to the 12th centuries), rice from the

Yangtze valley. The actual transportation of these things might be in the hands of merchants. But they could not do without the canal system, and these required theexistence of an imperial state bureaucracy.

In other words, the bureaucracy was based not simply on balancing betweendifferent classes, but had an independent base of its own through its control of amajor means of production. This was a means of production the merchants could notdo without, and so they could never raise revolutionary demands against the

bureaucracy. Nor, for that matter, could the large landowners who emerged at various points in Chinese history. They had a common interest with the bureaucracy in maintaining a strong central imperial state, rather than an opposed interest increating local networks of power under their own control.

So it was that each period of crisis and peasant revolt culminated in therestoration of the centralised superstructure, within which the merchants and artisanclasses played a subordinate role. It was not until the empire was on the verge of collapse at the beginning of the 20th century that the Chinese bourgeoisie began toplay an independent role--and even then it was limited by fear of the workers andpeasants on the one hand and by continued dependence on the state on the other (so

that Guomindang (Kuomintang) China was characterised by massive levels of statecapitalism).

The subordinate role of the merchants and artisans did not stop significantadvances in the forces of production in China, even after the Sung period. But it didmean that China lost the massive lead over Europe it held in the 10th century, and italso meant that those forces pressing for reform of the empire in the 11th century

were too weak to be successful. It also hampered those pushing for some equivalentof the Renaissance in the 17th century, so creating a growing dependence on Westernscience and technology for further advance.

The long trajectory of Chinese history is perhaps best understood as shaped by two elements in the productive base of society--an agricultural base with a tendency







to develop rather like European feudalism, with potentially capitalist elementsemerging long before they did in Europe, and a 'hydraulic' base encouraging theformation of a bureaucracy powerful enough to block the elements of capitalism fromever breaking out of marginality.

Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming use the term 'feudalism' to describe the society of imperial China. But they point to a great contrast between its development and thatof feudal Europe:

In medieval Europe, the struggle between the power of money and the power of the land...wasplayed out in the towns... A burgher class emerged and turned the towns into autonomous worlds... In China, however...landlord power extended to town and countryside... Genuineexchange between town and country--the exchange of handicraft and agricultural products-- was inhibited, and there was a one-way flow of agricultural and peasant handicraft productsto the towns, a weak market for urban handicraft products and false impression of circulation... In the Ming and Qing periods [ie the 15th to late 19th centuries] the situationchanged slightly with the rise of new commercial towns; but they were few and far between

and could not escape from feudal controls and levies. The merchant class could not transformitself into an independent political and economic force and thus play a revolutionary role.59

The state administrative structure had 'far greater control than in feudal Europeor even in the monarchies of the 16th century'. The examination system for publicpositions was 'an intellectual straitjacket', in the late Ming period 'tax inspectors

were sent out to harass merchants, constantly provoking riots and revolts',60 andright through to the first European conquests 'the state used its power to inhibitforeign trade because of the political aim of strengthening feudal rule'.61

In other words, the extraordinary power and social weight of the superstructure

cramped the growth of the embryos of capitalism.

The role of the conquest of the Americas

Blaut and Gunder Frank do have one explanation for why Europe was to achieveglobal dominance. They argue that the conquest of the Inca and Aztec empires in the

Americas gave certain European states control of massive new sources of silver at very little cost, and could then use them to buy up enormous resources from east andsouth east Asia, so providing a massive boost to their own economies. But that leavesmajor questions unanswered. The states that actually controlled the Americas (Spainand Portugal) were not the ones that made the first transitions towards full

capitalism. In the three centuries after Columbus's voyage, the economy of theCastilian heart of Spain stagnated. Getting control of the silver was not enough.There had to be societies capable of taking advantage of it, that is, societies in whichthe first embryos of capitalism were already growing out of feudalism. As KennethPomeranz has pointed out in relation to Gunder Frank's argument, 'If one imagines a

world in which Europeans had reached Mexico or Peru, but in which all of Europehad social structures like Romania, or even Prussia, it seems unlikely that muchsilver would have been shipped to China'.62

And why were the 'proto-capitalists' of other continents unable to challenge the west European domination of the gold and silver sources, if they enjoyed the same

technological dynamic as early modern Europe? In the early 15th century Chinesemaritime technology was ahead of that of Europe and a Chinese fleet was able to sail



















across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa. Yet a century and a half later it was Spanish and Portuguese, not Chinese, ships that werecircumnavigating the world and grabbing the silver that was so much in demand inChina.

Blaut's arguments (and all of those which see western Europe's rise to worlddominance simply as a result of its pillaging of other parts of the world) take forgranted that which they seek to explain. You can explain the rise of the Europeanempires if their domestic economies had a certain productive edge compared withthose in the rest of the world. You cannot provide such an explanation if you believethat right across all three continents there were not only enclaves of 'proto-capitalism', but that they were all at the same stage of development. The fact is thatsomehow or other changes did take place in parts of western Europe which may haveexisted elsewhere in embryonic forms but never reached maturity. You can only explain that by looking at the concrete history of each region, with the interplay of productive forces, productive relations, political superstructures and rival class

forces.

Alim does recognise 'the possibility that a few countries in western Europe hadacquired by 1500 small but critical advantages in gunnery and shipping, whichpermitted the conquest of the Americas and growing domination over the maritimecommerce of the Indian Ocean', so accelerating 'capital accumulation and technicalchange in the leading maritime countries of Europe'.63

But the advances in gunnery and shipping were not completely isolated fromother factors. They were part of wider developments which meant that parts of Europe not only caught up with the more advanced technologies of the East, but

leapfrogged over them. Rodney Needham, the noted historian of Chinese science andtechnology, recognised this. Although Chinese inventors had arrived at clockwork and other technological devices hundreds of years before their European equivalents,these devices were not in general use and the Chinese had much to learntechnologically from the Jesuit mission that settled in Beijing in the late 17thcentury .64

In other words, China was more advanced in terms of knowledge of techniquesuntil the Renaissance and Reformation shook up European society (including eventhe Catholic church), but then began to lag behind. In a similar way, the level of technology in parts of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent was more

or less the same as the most advanced parts of Europe until at least the beginning of the 16th century. The difficulties the Europeans had in conquering more thanisolated coastal enclaves in these regions showed that the weaponry deployed by theMuslim states of Africa, the Mogul empire, the Ottomans or Ming China was not thatdifferent to the weaponry of western Europe in, say, 1550.

But then a gap opened up, as the economies of these regions stalled, while thosein north western Europe did not. Rulers of countries like Holland and England could

begin to build global empires that pillaged, enslaved and destroyed elsewhere--and inthe process gained a cumulative advantage that persists to this day.

As Abu Lughod put it, 'Europe pulled ahead because the Orient was in temporary disarray'.65















Pomeranz sets out to demonstrate the similarities between the moves towardscapitalism in different parts of the world, 'with several surprising similarities inagricultural, commercial and proto-industrial development in various parts of Eurasia as late as 1750'.66 But he accepts 'the vital role of internally driven Europeangrowth',67 that 'Europe had by the 18th century moved ahead of the rest of the world

in terms of labour-saving technologies',68 and that 'we do find some importantEuropean advantages in technology during the two or three centuries before theindustrial revolution' which 'turned out to be important for truly revolutionary development'.69

He does see the colonisation of the Americas as playing an important role inEurope's development. He recognises that the flow of resources to Europe before theindustrial revolution had a limited importance.70But he sees the really important roleas being in the 19th century, when the opening up of agriculture in the Americasallowed parts of Europe to industrialise and increase their populations withoutrunning into acute food shortages.71 In other words, some internal development did

enable parts of Europe to arrive at full-blooded capitalism before the rest of the world, but it could not have continued along that path without empire andcolonisation.

A worldwide process

Much of this confirms my view in A People's History of the World .

Economic development never took place on its own, in a vacuum. It was carriedforward by human beings, living in certain societies whose political and ideologicalstructures had an impact on their actions. And these structures in turn were theproduct of historic confrontations between social groups shaped by their position inproduction--by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary class struggles.

This vital feature of historical development was neglected in the 'narrow' debateon the reasons in Europe for the prior development of capitalism in Britain.

Arguments focused on issues like the growth of markets and changes in economicrelations in town and countryside. They tended to neglect both the growth of theforces of production under feudalism and the great epochal conflicts that swept thecontinent in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries--the driving force of the

bourgeois revolutions. The recent discussions on the breakthrough of capitalism on a worldwide scale suffer from some of the same faults. In particular, they fail to seethat contradictions between the economic base of society and its political andideological superstructures are not resolved by economics alone. They are fought out

between rival classes ideologically and politically as well as economically. Andsuccess in such battles is never guaranteed in advance, but depends upon initiative,organisation and leadership.

Pomeranz recognises at one point that 'much of the credit for the acceleration of diffusion of best practice [in European technology] after 1750 must go to theelements of "scientific culture"...emerging, especially in England, in the 150 years

before 1750'.72


































But the spread of this 'scientific culture' was part of a much wider process of challenging old ruling ideologies as the nascent bourgeoisie began to fight for itsplace in the sun. It was inseparable from the ideological battles of the Renaissance,the Reformation and the Enlightenment--and from their political expressions in thereligious wars of the 16th century, the Dutch and English revolutions and, finally, the

great French Revolution.

Just as Europe was not the only continent where the elements pushing towardscapitalism emerged, it was also not the only continent to see people beginning to putforward views of the world we now identify with the Enlightenment and the spread of scientific knowledge. People like Landes claim ideas could arise because of deeply rooted cultural features of European society going back to Greek or Biblical times.They fail to explain why vast swathes of Europe remained immune to such ideas untilthe end of the 19th century. They also ignore the way the Enlightenment wasprefigured by thinkers in Abbasid Mesopotamia, Moorish Spain and Sung China,only to be crushed on each occasion as old superstructures reasserted their hold over

people's ways of producing and thinking. They also ignore how close counter-revolutionary currents came to crushing the growth of new ways of thinking even inthe most advanced parts of Europe at the time of the Counter-Reformation, theThirty Years War and the English Revolution.

The whole of Eurasia-Africa was affected by successive waves of advances in theforces of production during what we call the Middle Ages. These took root moreeasily in some parts of Europe than elsewhere precisely because its previouseconomic backwardness meant there was a weaker superstructure and were fewerobstacles to them doing so. Everywhere the spread of these innovations led,eventually, to the first green shoots of a new way of getting a surplus, based on the

buying and selling of labour power. The growth of these shoots was blocked to varying degrees by old institutions. The blockage was greatest in the most advancedpart of the world, the Chinese Empire, and it was weakest in a few parts of westernEurope, where the shoots would eventually break through and pull the oldsuperstructures apart. Elsewhere in Europe, Asia and Africa, the shoots grew a bit,

but had not broken through by the time the west European armies and navies arrived(except in Japan).

When the breakthrough occurred it was not just a question of economics, butpolitics and ideology as well. The classes associated with the new ways of producing

wealth had to fight against the stranglehold of old rulers. And that meant beginning

to recast their own worldviews. Where they were too tied to the old order to do this,they were defeated and the old order hung on for a few more centuries until the

battleship and cheap goods of Europe's capitalists brought it tumbling down.

Marx and Engels were mistaken on some important things, like the character of Indian society, because of the limited knowledge available to them. But on oneessential question they were right. The development of the forces of production inthe Middle Ages encouraged the growth of a new form of exploitation and of a new class that benefited from it. This class found itself to varying degrees at loggerheads

with the old landed exploiters--although not just in Europe as Marx and Engels told, but across wider swathes of Eurasia-Africa. But for the new form of exploitation to break through and remould the whole of society according to its dynamic, that classrequired its own ideas, its own organisation and, eventually, its own revolutionary


















































leadership. Where its most determined elements managed to create such things, thenew society took root. Where it failed, not just in Asia and Africa, but in wide swathesof Europe, stagnation and decay were the result.

There is a lesson in this for all of us today. Without social revolution, the product

of ideological and political struggle, economic change alone can lead to catastrophe.

There is one world history (at least as regards the conjoined continents of Europe, Asia and Africa), not several. The advance over millennia of the forces of production and the technologies and scientific knowledge associated with them is nota peculiar European phenomenon. Nor is the 'spirit of capitalism'. Capitalism is aproduct of world history, which for a brief historical period found a focus in the

western fringes of Eurasia before going on to transform the whole world. As it did so,it created new relations of production, and with them new social forces driven tooppose it.

Today these relations of production exist everywhere. The argument should not be a spurious one which attempts to identify them with one part of the world oranother, but should be about how to overthrow them.

NOTES

1. F Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization, 15th to 18thCentury, 3 vols (New York, 1981-1984).

2. R Hinton (ed), The Transition from Feudalism toCapitalism (London, 1978).

3. 3: T H Ashton, The Brenner Debate (Cambridge, 1987).4. D Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why

Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (Abacus, 1999).5. This narrowness characterised most of the

contributions in R Hinton (ed), as above.6. C Harman, 'From Feudalism to Capitalism',

in International Socialism 45 (Winter 1989). Reprintedin C Harman, Marxism and History(London, 1998).

7. The only Asian society usually referred to in the debateis Japan, because of its similarities to Europeanfeudalism and its success in making the transition tocapitalism at the end of the 19th century withoutundergoing colonisation by Europeans. See, for example,the contribution by the Japanese Marxist H Takahashi,in R Hinton (ed), as above.

8. C Harman, A People's History of the World (London,1999).

9. D Landes, as above.10. J Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York,

1989).11. J M Blaut, The Colonisers' View of the World (New

York, 1993).12. A Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998).

13. M S Alim, 'How Advanced was Europe in 1760 After All?', Review of Radical Political Economy, vol 32, no 4(September 2000), pp621-625.

14. Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming (eds), Chinese Capitalism1522-1840 (Basingstoke, 2000).

15. K Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe,and the Making of the Modern World

Economy (Princeton, 2000).16. J Abu-Lughod, as above, p10.17. M S Alim, as above, p625. Alim's figures cannot be

accepted without reservation. They are based oncalculations made by Paul Bairoch in the 1970s, butother calculations by Angus Maddison point toEuropean real wages rising well above those in Asia fromthe 16th century onwards. One recent study by Robert C

Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford, comes to a conclusionas regards China not that different to Alem's (see R C

Allen, 'Involution, Revolution or

41. 'Introduction' to Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming (eds), asabove, p18.

42. As above, p8.43. As above, p18.44. See note 17 for the some of the controversies over

measuring European and Asian economic development.45. R S Sharma, 'How Feudal was Indian Feudalism?', in H

Mukhia (ed), The Feudalism Debate (New Delhi, 1999),p83.

46. As above, pp102-103. For technical advance inagriculture in this period, see also I Habib, Essays in

Indian History (New Delhi, 1995), p76.47. As above, p81.48. As above, p89.49. As above, p93.50. For the similarity of the machines but the different

materials used to make them, see above, p213.51. This is a central argument of his The Agrarian

Structure of Mughal India (Bombay, 1963).52. See, for instance, C A Bayly, Indian Society and the

Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1987).Bayly's picture of 18th century India is much moredynamic economically than Habib's. But he is dealing

with Bengal rather than the region around Agra--that is,a region several hundred miles from that studied by Habib.

53. For Marx, see 'The British Rule in India', New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853, reprinted in K Marx and F

Engels, Collected Works, vol 12, p125; 'The FutureResults of British Rule in India', New York DailyTribune, 22 July 1853, reprinted in K Marx and FEngels, Collected Works, vol 12, p217.For writings in the Marxist tradition, see H Mukhia (ed),as above; A B Bailey and J R Llobera (eds), The Asiatic

Mode of Production (London, 1981). For the debate inChinese academic circles, see T Brook (ed), The Asiatic

Mode of Production in China (New York, 1989).54. So Chris Wikham uses the term 'tributary mode' and

Mukhia refuses to use the term 'Asiatic mode' in hisrejection of the feudal designation for medieval India.For both, see their essays in H Mukhia (ed), as above.

Among writers who believe 'feudalism' is an apt term formedieval India are also considerable disagreements:some hold it fits the period before the first Islamicconquests in the north (the 12th century), and some holdit fits the period right up to the collapse of the Mogul

empire (the early 18th century).55. H Berktay, in H Mukhia (ed), as above, p289.56. As above, p298.


































































































































































































































What?', www.econ.ox.ac.uk , September 2002). Anotherstudy, by Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta of

Warwick University, argues that although the amount of grain that could be bought with the wage in parts of India and China was higher than that in Europe, the

buying power in terms of other things was much lower(see S Broadberry and B Gupta, 'The Early ModernGreat Divergence', emlab.berkeley.edu, February 2003).

18. J M Blaut, The Colonisers' Model of the World (New York, 1993), pp165-167.19. As above, p157.20. As above, p162.21. A Gunder Frank, as above, p323.22. As above, pxix.23. As above, pxxi.24. As above, p228.25. For a fuller summary of these developments, see C

Harman, A People's History of the World , as above,pp17-28, 54-55. See also my article 'Engels and theOrigins of Human Society ', International Socialism 65(Winter 1994); A J Pla, Modo de produccion asiatico ylas formaciones economico sociales inca yazteca (Mexico City, nd); W E Soriano, Las Incas,economia, sociedad y estado el el Tahuantusuyo(Lima,1997). Such societies fit Marx's account of the Asiaticmode of production. Marx was, however, wrong to usethe category to describe medieval and early modernIndia.

26. The classic description of this process is by theanthropologist B Malinowski, in his Argonauts of theWestern Pacific (London, 1981), based on researchcarried out in the 1910s.

27. See W Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (London, 1976).

28. See, for example, P A Brunt, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic (London, 1971), and Italian Manpower 225bc-ad14 (Clarendon, 1971); A H MJones, The Roman Economy (Blackwell, 1974), p123.

29. 'The Economic and Social History of the Former Han',in Cambridge History of China, vol 1 (Cambridge,1986), p548.

30. L J C Ma, Commercial Development and UrbanChange in Sung China (Ann Arbor, 1971), p137.

31. M Loewe, 'The Former Han Dynasty', in Cambridge History of China, vol 1, as above, p188.

32. G Bois, The Transformation of the Year1000 (Manchester, 1992), pp117-126.

33. The shift also had an important additional advantage.Independent peasants whose livelihoods werethreatened by other developments (the growth of themarket, recurrent crop failures) were more likely to see a

way out through dependency on the lords as semi-freeserfs than to sell themselves into complete slavery. See GBois, as above, pp55, 145, 171.

34. Translation available on www.marxists.org 35. K Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, available

on www.marxists.org 36. I use the word 'mechanisation' here as the simplest way

to describe what was involved. But it is too restrictive aterm to fully describe the changes that mattered. Wethink of mechanisation as associated simply with the useof advanced tools and machines. But the products of past labour can be used to increase the productivity of present labour in other ways. This happened, forinstance, in late medieval Europe when horses withsophisticated harnesses were used to replace oxen inploughing, or when hedging, ditching and new systemsof crop rotation were used to increase the output of farmland. A more accurate description would be 'round-aboutness' of production, but the term is cumbersome(and confusing for those who think of either carousels orroad islands).

37. See C A Ronan and J Needham, The Shorter Scienceand Civilisation in China, vols 1 to 5 (Cambridge, 1980-1996). These books are invaluable not merely forunderstanding developments in China, but also for anunderstanding of the basic inventions that madepossible the moves to mechanised production anywhere.

38. See P B Ebrey, Family and Property in SungChina (Princeton, 1984).

39. B Lewis refers to the use of this term in Cambridge

57. Alex Callinicos has in conversation disagreed with my formulations. He sees a 'tributary' mode of production,different from feudalism, as existing when the statetaxes the peasants rather than individual lordsexploiting them through various forms of rent. For me,the central question is whether there is a fundamentally different dynamic to a society where the peasants areexploited through taxes rather than rents. For, as Tony

Cliff used to point out, 'definition is negation, but not allnegations are definition' ('The Theory of BureaucraticCollectivism: A Critique', appendix to State Capitalismin Russia (London, 1988), p334)--in other words, adefinition should be more than just a description. Itshould point to the determining content of the thingdefined. In the case of a mode of production, this means'the economic laws of motion of the system...its inherentcontradictions and the motivation of the class struggle'(as above, p353). This means you cannot deduce thecharacter of the mode of production simply from 'themode of appropriation or the mode of recruitment of theruling class' (as above, p344). Otherwise you would haveto conclude that there were two different modes of production in feudal Europe--one where the individualfeudal lord was the exploiter, the other where the role

was played by the collective institutions of the medievalchurch (as above, pp344-345). You would have also haveto conclude, as does Benno Teschke (in his The Myth of 1648 (London, 2003)) that absolutist France was notfeudal, since the exploitation of the peasantry andenrichment of the nobility was mainly through the taxsystem of the monarchy.It can only be correct to identify tax-based exploitationof the peasantry as constituting a different mode of production if it results in a fundamentally differentdynamic to society. If Marx's original formulation wasright and tax-exploitation societies always stagnated,then there would be a case for this. But, if the evidencerefutes Marx over this question and points to societies

with spasmodic advances in the forces of production, thegrowth of merchant classes' marketisation of muchoutput and at least embryos of 'proto-capitalism', thenthese display a dynamic essentially the same as that inEuropean feudalism. It is best to categorise them as

forms of feudalism, each with its own particular,historically determined superstructure, not a differentmode of production (just as it was best to see the oldUSSR from Stalin to Gorbachev not as some sort of 'new'form of class society, but as a particular form of capitalism, with an essentially capitalist dynamic of accumulation based upon the exploitation of wagedlabour). I think the evidence on late medieval and early modern India points to the second position, not the first.The failure of productive capital to break through in the17th and 18th centuries is not then to be explained by some innate characteristic of the mode of production,

but by the same essential factor as in many parts of Europe--the retarding role of the old superstructure.Teschke is logical, if wrong, when he argues that the roleof state taxation meant that absolutist France wasneither feudal nor in any sense in transition tocapitalism. Those like Alex who disagree with him overFrance should not embrace an essentially similaranalysis to his when it comes to India.

58. Witfogel's 1930s articles are reprinted in A B Bailey andJ R Llobera (eds), as above.

59. Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming (eds), as above, pp388-389.

60. As above, pp390-392.61. As above, p396.62. K Pomeranz, as above, p191.63. M S Alim, as above, p625.64. C A Ronan and J Needham, as above.65. J Abu-Lughod, as above, p10.66. K Pomeranz, as above, p8.67. As above, p3.68. As above, p4.69. As above, p32.70. He quotes Patrick O'Brien's estimates that 'the fruits of

overseas coercion could not have been responsible forover 7 percent of gross investment for late 18th century investment' and 'the profits from extracontinental trade


http://www.econ.ox.ac.uk/Members/robert.allen/WagesFiles/pomeranz.pdf



http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/olney/e211-fa03/e211-gupta.pdf



http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj65/harman.htm




http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm











Medieval History, vol 4, p643.40. C Harman, A People's History of the World , as above,

p141.

could have funded one fifth to one sixth of gross capitalformation', but adds that these are significant amounts.See above, p187.

71. As above, p32.72. As above, p44.

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