Modern World-System (Immanuel Wallerstein)

Modern World-System
Author	Immanuel Wallerstein
Publisher	University of California Press
First published	1974
Type	Book

Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is always difficult to list the immediate sources of ideas and assistance—from authors, colleagues, and students—in the conception and writing of a book, and particularly so in a book that pretends to synthesize other people’s empirical work. The great risk is neglect.

In the case of this volume the two authors whose voluminous writings most immediately inspired me on the path I finally decided to go were Fernand Braudel and Marian Malowist.

Once I had written a draft, Fernand Braudel read it carefully and gave me encouragement at a moment when I needed reassurance. Charles Tilly also read it carefully, and by raising pertinent questions forced me to clarify my argument. This was particularly so concerning the role of state-power and “absolutism” in general, and its counterpoint with the phenomenon of banditry in particular. Douglas Dowd put me onto Frederic Lane for which I thank him, since Frederic Lane is very worth being put onto.

As for Terence Hopkins, my debt is to our twenty years of intellectual discussion and collaboration. There is no sentence that can summarize this debt.

This book was written during a year’s stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Countless authors have sung its praises. Aside from splendid surroundings, unlimited library and secretarial assistance, and a ready supply of varied scholars to consult at a moment’s notice, what the center offers is to leave the scholar to his own devices, for good or ill. Would that all men had such wisdom. The final version was consummated with the aid of a grant from the Social Sciences Grants Subcommittee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research of McGill University.

C’est par une crise des revenus seigneuriaux que se termine le moyen-âge et s’ouvrent les temps modernes.

—MARC BLOCH

This collapse in real wage-rates [in Europe] formed the counterpart to the revolutionary rise of prices in the sixteenth century. The operation was fully paid for by the increased toil, hardships, impoverishments and dejection of the majority. Contemporaries were often aware that the deterioration was taking place.

—FERNAND BRAUDEL and FRANK SPOONER

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

—KARL MARX

PROLOGUE TO THE 2011 EDITION

The Modern World-System was published in 1974. It was actually written in 1971–1972. I had some difficulty finding a publisher for it. The book was about the sixteenth century, and it dealt with a virtually unknown topic: a world-economy, spelled deliberately with a hyphen. It was long, and it had an enormous number of substantive footnotes. When it appeared, one less than friendly reviewer complained that the footnotes crawled up and down the page. Finally, Academic Press, and its then scholarly consulting editor, Charles Tilly, decided to take a chance by putting it in their new social science series.

When it appeared, its reception surprised everyone, and in particular both the publisher and the author. It received favorable reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (on the front page) and in the New York Review of Books. In 1975, it received the award of the American Sociological Association for the best scholarly publication. At that time, the award was called the Sorokin Award. The award was so unexpected that I was not even present at the session at which the award was announced. The book was rapidly translated into a large number of other languages. It sold remarkably well for a scholarly monograph. By any measure, it was a success.

However, it also turned out right away that it was a highly controversial book. The book received wonderful plaudits, but it also was the subject of vigorous denunciations, and the latter came from many different camps. Writing thirty-seven years after the initial publication, I believe it is worth reviewing the critiques. What were their sources? How well have the critiques survived? What do I think myself today of the validity of the critiques? How have these critiques influenced the succeeding volumes?

I should note at the outset one particular subtext of the critiques. I was professionally a sociologist. This book seemed to many to be a book of economic history. Sociologists were not presumed, at least in the early 1970s, to be interested in writing about the sixteenth century or about matters with which economic historians dealt. Historians, on the other hand, were wary of intruders coming from other university disciplines, especially if they relied, as I did, almost entirely on so-called secondary sources. Furthermore, the book dealt centrally with global spatial relations, and this was supposed to be the purview of geographers. And finally, among the early enthusiasts for the book was an unexpected group: some archaeologists. So, I seemed to be defying the categories that at that time defined scholarly work, and not to fall into the usual boxes enshrined in the structures of knowledge.

I should start this discussion with my self-perception at the time I wrote the book. I explained in the introduction to the book how I came to write it. I was following a bad idea—that I might better understand the trajectories of the “new nations” of the twentieth century by studying how the nations that had been “new” in the sixteenth century had come to “develop.” This was a bad idea because it presumed that all states followed parallel independent paths to something called “development.” This bad idea, however, was serendipitous. It got me to read about western Europe in the sixteenth century and turned my attention to realities I hadn’t anticipated.

In my mind at the time, I was arguing primarily with Weberian sociologists—not with Max Weber himself, but with the use made of his categories in U.S. (and to some extent world) sociology in the period following 1945. Weber’s book on the Protestant ethic was very widely interpreted to mean that the existence of certain kinds of values was a necessary prerequisite to what in the post-1945 period tended to be called modernization or (economic) development. The usual scholarly procedure at the time was to examine, country by country, the existence, or coming into existence, of such values. The result was the creation of a sort of chronological pecking order of the march of progress. Which country was the first? Which came next? Which would now come next? And as a derived question, what did a country have to do now in order to come next?

I sought to challenge that narrative in several ways. First of all, I was insisting that this process could not be examined country by country, but only within a larger category that I called a world-system (the word world not being synonymous with global)—a world, not the world, as Fernand Braudel would phrase it.

Second, I suggested that the values in question followed rather than preceded the economic transformations that were occurring. I suggested that it was only by placing the various states in their relation to each other that we could understand why it was that some became the leaders in productive efficiency and the accumulation of wealth.

And third, I was rejecting the principal antinomy of the post-1945 Weberians, that of modern versus traditional. Rather, I shared the evolving arguments of the so-called dependistas like Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank that the “traditional” was as recent as the “modern,” that the two emerged in tandem, so that we could speak, in Frank’s famous phrase, of “the development of underdevelopment.”1

I expected to be denounced by the post-1945 Weberians. While they tended not to accept what I was arguing, they also tended by and large to receive my arguments civilly, despite what they seemed to think was my resuscitation of Marxist arguments (which they believed had been abandoned, or ought to have been abandoned, by serious scholars). I think they were surprised by the fact that I had actually plunged into sixteenth-century history, whereas many of them had simply relied on an abbreviated (and sometimes distorted) summary of the Weberian thesis in order to discuss twentieth-century material. Furthermore, as Terence Hopkins and I noted in a joint article soon thereafter, much of the so-called comparative analyses done by the modernization adepts involved the comparison of contemporary data on one non-Western country with presumed (but not empirically studied) data on the United States (or perhaps some western European country).2

In any case, the biggest brickbats came from elsewhere. There were three major varieties of criticisms. There were those I think of as the major critiques. These are the ones that reject world-systems analysis as a mode of analysis on the grounds that it is not consonant with their mode of analysis, which they think is obviously superior. Then there were those I think of as the minor critiques. These are those by persons who accept the legitimacy of world-systems analysis, at least to some degree, but argue with my detailed historical descriptions on the grounds that I am wrong in reporting or interpreting some important empirical data, or that I omitted some major kinds of data. And then there was a third variety, which emerged only in the 1990s: those who sought to revise world-systems analysis by removing the hyphen and the plural—that is, by insisting that there is and always has been only one “world system” over the last five thousand years. Let us consider each of these varieties, and their subvarieties, in turn.

The Major Critiques

If the post-1945 Weberians thought I was too Marxist, the “orthodox” Marxists thought I was not Marxist at all, but quite the opposite: “neo-Smithian.”³ What I mean by an orthodox Marxist is one that I think of as a Marxist of the parties—Marxism as defined by the German Social-Democratic Party, as defined by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and indeed as defined by most of the Trotskyist parties.

Although these groups differed quite radically in their political strategies, and in their interpretation of what had happened politically in various countries in the twentieth century, they did share certain fundamental premises. The first was the nature of the class struggle under capitalism, which they defined as being fundamentally between the emergent urban proletariat and the capitalist producers (primarily industrial entrepreneurs). The second was the primacy of an economic base in relation to a political and cultural superstructure. The third was the primacy of internal factors (i.e., those endogenous to a country) over external factors (i.e., those exogenous to a country) in causal explanations. The fourth was the inevitability of progress in terms of a sequence of different so-called modes of production.

The charge of the orthodox Marxists was that world-systems analysis violated all of these premises in one way or another. This charge was in fact justified to some extent. Speaking of volume 1 of The Modern World-System, these critics argued that I had presented what they called a “circulationist” argument whereas I should have been explaining matters in terms of what was going on in the sphere of production. That is to say, when I discussed core-peripheral relations, I was ignoring the class struggle inside England as the explanation of capitalist development in favor of crediting a factor considered external, like the nature and flow of trade between the Americas and northwestern Europe.

Of course, the immediate question is, Internal or external to what? For the orthodox Marxists, internal was always defined as internal to a country’s political boundaries. The “economy” was a national construct. Classes were national. It was countries that could be labeled either capitalist or not. This debate was fundamental. I was in the process of developing an alternative view of capitalism. In my view, capitalism was the characteristic of a world-system, of the specific variety I called a “world-economy.” Classes were classes of this world-system. State structures existed within this world-system.

My opponents from this camp were very intransigent about their view. Over the years, however, they came to be fewer and fewer in number. This had less to do with the impact of my writings than with the evolving situation in the modern world-system. The political movements that had held these views as late as the 1960s were profoundly challenged by the forces that constituted the world-revolution of 1968. They were put on the defensive by the emergence of strong movements insisting on the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexualities in the analysis of social reality. They were put on the defensive by the neoliberal political counteroffensive of the 1980s and the widespread acceptance of a concept called globalization. As a result, there are relatively few today who espouse the traditional analytic view of the orthodox Marxists of the 1960s.

There was also criticism from the proponents of what I considered to be a last-ditch intellectual stand of the orthodox Marxist mode of analysis. It was in the school of thought, quite vigorous in the 1970s, called “articulation of the modes of production.”4 From my point of view, what this group was doing was to accede to the argument that one could not analyze social reality solely within the confines of a single country. They saw that something was going on in the world-system, although they eschewed that term. Their revision was essentially to suggest that whereas one country might be capitalist and another still feudal, they somehow related to each other in specific and important ways. They said that the two modes of production “articulated” with each other, and therefore each was affected in some way by the other.

I thought of this halfway house as neither very convincing nor adding anything of significance to one’s ability to understand social reality. In any case, this school, after flourishing somewhat for a decade or so, simply waned. I am unaware of anyone who continues today to utilize this framework.

Another school that was very hostile, almost totally hostile, to world-systems analysis was that made up of the traditional nomothetic economists and sociologists. For them what I was doing, when they cared to take notice of it at all, was at best journalism, at worst ideological argumentation. By and large, they treated world-systems analysis to rejection by scorn. They seldom deigned even to discuss it other than when they were called upon to be anonymous critics of grant proposals.

Their studied neglect masked a fear. This group considered world-systems analysis every bit as dangerous as did the orthodox Marxists, albeit for quite different reasons. They did appreciate what was at stake. Stephen Mennell correctly noted recently that my book

is in effect a massive attempt at an historical disproof of David Ricardo’s apparently timeless “law of comparative advantage,” showing how initially small inequalities in ties of interdependence between societies and economies have been magnified over time to produce massive differences today between what are euphemistically called the “North” and the “South.”5

Since Ricardo’s law has indeed been a central and crucial premise of mainstream macroeconomics, it is no wonder that my arguments were treated so negatively by this camp.

However, to the extent that world-systems analysis gained strength within the structures of knowledge, some of the nomothetic camp did begin to produce analyses that were intended to refute empirically the heretical premises being advanced by us. These critics were particularly anxious to show that world-systems analysis did not explain why, in the contemporary world, some countries were more “developed” than others, nor why some so-called underdeveloped countries were improving their national situation more than others. This camp’s opposition is as unremitting as that of the orthodox Marxists. It is probably more enduring.

There is a third major critique. It comes from a group I think of as the neo-Hintzians. Otto Hintze was a German political historian who was thought to demonstrate in his writings the autonomy of the political sphere from the economic sphere of reality. I was subjected to two major critical analyses,6 both of which specifically invoked Hintze. They both said that I had falsely collapsed the political and economic arenas of analysis into a single arena, giving in effect primacy to the economic arena.

Of course, I had in fact insisted that political and economic variables resided in a single arena. I had refused to accept the argument that the political arena was autonomous, or the concept that it was governed by rules that were somehow different from, even antithetical to, those governing the economic arena. I had insisted in my book on a holistic analysis, in which political institutions were simply one institutional structure alongside others within the modern world-system. Although I tried to spell out the fallacy of such a separation of the two spheres in subsequent volumes, especially volume 2, this critique has showed staying power, in the sense that there are still many today who consider world-systems analysis too “economistic,” which is often a way of saying that, in their opinion, it is too “Marxist.”

In any case, the neo-Hintzians were no more faithful to Otto Hintze than the neo-Weberians to Max Weber, the orthodox Marxists to Karl Marx, or the Smithians to Adam Smith. In the case of Otto Hintze, he concludes his essay “Economics and Politics in the Age of Capitalism” (which appeared in 1929) with this summary of his views:

All in all, the war years and the decade that has elapsed since offer no evidence of an autonomous economic development of capitalism, wholly detached from the state and politics. They show rather that the affairs of the state and of capitalism are inextricably interrelated, that they are only two sides, or aspects, of one and the same historical development.⁷

This is, of course, exactly the point that I was trying to make.

Finally, there are the critiques coming from the “cultural” camp, which began to flourish in the 1970s. There are two things to remember when analyzing the rise of the cultural camp. The first is that the traditional liberal theoretical analysis of modernity broke modern life down into three spheres—the economic, the political, and the sociocultural. This was reflected in the creation of three separate social science disciplines dealing with the modern world: economics, concerned with the market; political science, concerned with the state; and sociology, concerned with everything else (sometimes called the civil society).

This liberal ideological predilection necessarily resulted in a debate about causal priority among the three spheres. Both the orthodox Marxists and the nomothetic mainstream economists gave causal priority to the economic sphere. The neo-Hintzians gave it implicitly to the political sphere. It was to be expected that there would be those who would give causal priority to the cultural sphere.

The second thing to remember is the impact of the world-revolution of 1968 on theoretical debates. For many, what had happened in 1968 was the final debacle (and consequently intellectual disavowal) of the economistic camp. Daniel Bell had earlier spoken of the “end of ideology,” in a strong attack on the relevance of Marxism and Marxist movements to the post-1945 world.8 After 1968, a new group now took up the dismissal of Marxism from a different standpoint. This group demanded conceptual “deconstruction” and expounded the end (and uselessness) of “grands récits” or “master narratives.”⁹ Basically, what they were saying is that the economistic camp—in particular, the orthodox Marxists—had neglected the centrality of discourse in evolving social reality.

There was at this time a second criticism of the orthodox Marxists. They were accused, quite correctly, of having set aside the priorities of those concerned with gender, race, ethnicity, and sexualities in favor of the priority of the class struggle and the “revolution” whose historical subject was the “proletariat.”

I was condemned for not joining this camp.¹⁰ When this group condemned master narratives, they tended to throw world-systems analysis into the same basket as orthodox Marxism and Weberian modernization theory, despite the fact that world-systems analysis had been making virtually identical criticisms of the orthodox Marxist and modernization master narrative. But of course, world-systems analysis was doing this by putting forward an alternative master narrative. We refused to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The fate of this culturalist critique is tied to the fate of the whole movement of “cultural studies.” There was a fatal flaw in the coherence of this camp. Half were primarily concerned with insisting on the priority of culture—indeed, on its exclusive intellectual interest. But the other half were interested in the “forgotten peoples”—those that had been neglected in the previous master narratives. The alliance broke down as the latter half began to realize that they, too, were really interested in master narratives, just different ones from those that were being used in the pre-1968 period. This group began to create a new trinity of concerns—gender, race, and class; or class, gender, and race; or race, gender, and class. And once the new trinity came into widespread use in the university arena, some of those who were primarily interested in the “forgotten peoples” ceased to denounce world-systems analysis and began to try to find ways in which they could come to terms with it or sought to tweak it to take still more account of their priorities.11

In the years since 1974, the major critiques have all been made. By the time we get to the 1990s, many of their proponents have dropped from the scene, although some are still making the same critiques. But the major critiques are now well known and have fallen into the background of the discussion concerning world-systems analysis, which is more and more seen as simply one competing paradigm in contemporary world social science. It is the minor critiques that are absorbing more and more attention.

The Minor Critiques

The minor critiques center around three different issues: the spatial boundaries of the modern world-system, the temporal boundaries of the modern world-system, and the institutional variables to be taken into consideration. The first volume of The Modern World-System was very clear about the spatial and temporal boundaries that it sought to establish. It was perhaps less clear about the range of institutional variables that were relevant.

Let us start with spatial boundaries. The argument of the book is that there exist real boundaries of what is to be considered inside and outside the capitalist world-economy. I asserted that inside these boundaries, one could speak of core, periphery, and semiperiphery. Chapter 6, however, is devoted to what is outside these boundaries, which I termed the external arena. And I sought to specify how one could tell the difference between a peripheral zone of the world-economy and the external arena.

The basic argument was that one could distinguish trade in bulk goods and trade in preciosities, the former but not the latter being based on unequal exchange. I later tried to argue this distinction in further detail.¹² Using this distinction, I suggested specific boundaries. Poland and Hungary were part of the modern world-system in the sixteenth century. Russia and the Ottoman Empire were not. Brazil was within, and the Indian subcontinent outside.

There were two ways of contesting these empirical assertions. One was to suggest that the distinction between bulk trade and preciosities was much more blurry than I had suggested, and that this distinction could not be used to establish systemic boundaries. The other was quite different. It was to suggest that some of the areas asserted to be outside were in fact engaged in bulk trade with parts of the capitalist world-economy and therefore, on the very basis of my distinction, should be seen as being “inside” the boundaries.

On what I call the major critiques, I gave no quarter. I still refuse to accept the legitimacy of these objections to world-systems analysis. On the critique about spatial boundaries, I have said from the beginning that I was ready to listen carefully to the empirical arguments and, when they seemed strong, to accept revisions of the empirical argument. Hans-Heinrich Nolte has long argued that Russia, in the sixteenth century, was as much part of the modern world-system as was Poland.13 Frederic Lane argued the same for the Ottoman Empire, without perhaps making the case in detail.¹⁴ However, much later, Faruk Tabak outlined a very strong case for why one should see the entire eastern Mediterranean (basically all part of the Ottoman Empire) as an integral part of the modern world-system in the sixteenth century.¹⁵

On the distinction between bulk goods and preciosities, various attempts to break down the validity of this distinction were advanced.¹⁶ I knew from the beginning that the distinction was a difficult one to make. I have been chastened by the force of the counterarguments. I still think my basic point is sound. But in any case, as I suggested later,¹⁷ even if I had to recognize a more complex picture of what constitutes “incorporation” into the capitalist world-economy, the concept that there were zones outside the functioning of the system but in some kind of trade relationship with it remains a crucial idea. It lays the basis for understanding how it is that the modern world-system was not global in extent at its outset and became that only later (in the mid-nineteenth century). In my view, there is still room for a lot of both theoretical and empirical debate about spatial boundaries.

The temporal boundaries are even more difficult. Many of the later minor criticisms want to push the beginning dates of the modern world-system to the thirteenth century.18 Janet Abu-Lughod sought to do something slightly different.¹⁹ She wanted to look at thirteenth-century Europe in its trade links with many different parts of the Eurasian landmass in order to throw a somewhat different light on what explained Europe’s “rise” in the sixteenth century.

Much of this debate about the temporal boundaries comes down to a debate about the nature of European feudalism. I had made a fundamental distinction between the “first” feudalism (of medieval Europe), which I saw as what we usually mean by feudalism, and the “second” feudalism of the sixteenth century, which I saw as an incorrect label for coerced cash-crop labor. I myself recognized later that the weakest chapter in volume 1 was chapter 1, “Medieval Prelude.” I offered what amounted to a revised version of that chapter in a volume devoted to China and capitalism.²⁰

The basic problem here is that, in my view, no macrohistorical theoretical framework has come up with a satisfactory explanation of the nature of European feudalism in what is usually considered its heyday, 1000–1500. Some analysts see it as a sort of protocapitalist system, and hence move the dates of the modern world-system back to include it inside the temporal frame. Others see it as the very antithesis of capitalism and so move capitalism forward to the more widely accepted date of the onset of the modern world, circa 1800.²¹

My own view is that the feudal system of medieval Europe is best defined as a disintegrated world-empire, held together very thinly by the Roman Catholic Church. Of course I do believe, as I suggest in this volume, that there were forces inside it who tried to transform it into a capitalist world-economy but failed. What I see as failures, some others see as first steps.

What I think crucial is to see that creating a capitalist world-economy is something very difficult to do. I tried in a later article to explain the exceptional conditions that made this possible.22 I tried in volume 2 of The Modern World-System to explain how this frail beginning was consolidated in the seventeenth century. I saw the seventeenth century not as a “crisis,” which resulted in a sort of return of “feudalism,” but instead as the hardening of the structure of the capitalist world-economy. I believe that this consolidation is what made it possible eventually to expand the system still further, both intensively and extensively.

So, in the end, although I have bent somewhat in the face of these minor critiques, I remain convinced of the essential correctness of both my spatial and temporal boundaries for the beginning period of the modern world-system.

It is the institutional parameters of the capitalist world-economy that were perhaps insufficiently laid out in volume 1. I spent almost all my energy trying to establish the sense in which what was occurring in the economic arena was capitalist in nature. Although industry was a small segment of the overall productive apparatus, I insisted that one’s eyes should focus especially on agriculture. It is true that wage labor was still a relatively small part of the mode of remuneration of the workforce, but I tried to show that capitalism involved more than wage labor. Although the bourgeoisie, as classically defined, seemed to be a relatively small group, I insisted that we see that the aristocracy was transforming itself into the bourgeoisie. This was all part of my attempt to revise quite radically the analysis of capitalism as a mode of production. I have written extensively on all these themes since 1974, and there now exists a sort of condensed summary of my views in World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction.²³

In the years following 1974, I was challenged for neglecting all the non-economic arenas: the political arena, the cultural arena, the military arena, and the environmental arena. All of these critics were insisting that I was being too “economistic” in my framework. I have already discussed my views on the critiques about the political arena and the cultural arena. I would note that I tried to make clearer my understanding of the political arena in volume 2 and of the cultural arena in volume 4 as well as in Geopolitics and Geoculture.²⁴

I was taken to task by both Michael Mann and William McNeill for my neglect of the military arena, and in particular for my neglect of the importance of military technology.25 I don’t think this was quite correct. I talked of military technology and its role here and there in this volume and in subsequent volumes of the work. But in general I think Clausewitz was right in his famous statement that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” If this is so, then one should be wary of giving the military too much analytic autonomy.²⁶

Finally, I have been criticized for neglecting the environment.²⁷ At first, I was inclined to say that I certainly didn’t mean to do this. But I have been saved from this mealy-mouthed excuse by Jason Moore, who did a careful reading of volume 1 to show the degree to which I had incorporated and made central to my analysis ecological factors and their consequences in the construction of the capitalist world-economy.²⁸ I was in fact astonished to realize the degree to which I had done this.

The best answer to the critique about leaving out various institutional parameters in volume 1 is that one can’t do everything at once. I think that by reading the corpus of my work, a reasonable person will see the degree to which I am faithful to my epistemological premise that only a truly holistic analysis can tell us anything important about how the real world works.

The Revisionist View of the World-System

Beginning in the 1990s, there emerged an important group of scholars who, in different ways, argued that the role of China in the modern world had been seriously neglected, which led, they argued, to a very distorted view of the world. Some did this by emphasizing the existence and persistence of a Sinic world from the fifteenth century to today.²⁹ Some did this by suggesting that the economic comparisons between China and western Europe were considerably off base.³⁰

Andre Gunder Frank, however, went much further. He was an early participant in world-systems analysis. He had himself written books that argued the origins of the modern world-system in the sixteenth century.³¹ However, in the 1990s he made a major shift in his analysis. Both by himself and in joint writings with Barry Gills,32 he laid forth the hypothesis that the world system (the only world system) had its origins some five thousand years ago. He insisted that this world system could be analyzed by using many of the basic tools of world-systems analysis, such as long waves that were simultaneous throughout the system.

He wished not only to insist that this singular world system had existed for five thousand years. He wished also to insist that China had always (or almost always) been the central hub of this singular world system. He saw Europe’s “rise” as limited to the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, and saw it as a momentary interruption in this China-centered system. He said that those of us who argued that the modern world-system originated in Europe, whether in the sixteenth century or earlier, were guilty of Eurocentrism. The charge encompassed both Fernand Braudel and me, but also both Marx and Weber.

His principal book, Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, has been widely read and discussed. Three of his colleagues in the world-systems analysis camp—Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and I—wrote lengthy critiques of the book in a special issue of Review.³³ My own critique centered on three matters. First, I felt that Frank’s argument was basically the same as that of neoclassical economics. Unlike other works in world-systems analysis, it truly deserved the label “circulationist.”

Second, I felt that his empirical analyses about the relations of western Europe and China in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, based primarily on the flow of precious metals, could be shown to be incorrect by using the very data that Frank provided. Furthermore, I tried to suggest that Frank’s earlier empirical analysis, which I found essentially correct, undid the arguments in this later work.³⁴

Third, however, and most important, his mode of analysis eliminated capitalism from the whole historical picture. I had argued that the sixteenth century marked the creation of a capitalist world-economy. There was no way in which Frank or anyone else could argue that capitalism dates back five thousand years. It voided the word of all meaning. Frank actually admitted this, saying that he no longer thought that capitalism was a useful intellectual concept.

One last problem in this Sinocentric view of world history was the ambiguous role Frank gave in the whole analysis to India, which seemed sometimes to be included in an Asian-centric world and sometimes to be excluded from a Sinocentric world. A recent book by Amiya Bagchi exposes this ambiguity by placing his own analysis of modern Indian history in the context of the emergence of the capitalist world-economy.35

Whether this radical revision of world-systems analysis will continue to play an important intellectual role cannot yet be seen clearly. It may depend on the changing empirical realities of the modern world-system itself in the coming decades.

Conclusion

For me, the writing of volume 1 of The Modern World-System was the start of a great intellectual adventure, which has been in many ways the central focus of my intellectual life ever since. I have now reached volume 4. As may be seen in the introduction to that volume, there are at least two volumes to come, possibly even a volume 7. I don’t know if I shall be able to complete the writing of all the subsequent volumes. I am perhaps saved by the fact that I have written many essays that cover material that would be in volumes 5 and 6. So my approach to the periods 1873–1968 and 1945–20?? is available in print. But writing essays and constructing a systematic narrative are not the same thing. I hope to be able to do the latter.

In any case, I am convinced—how could I not be?—that world-systems analysis is a necessary element in overcoming the constrictive paradigms of nineteenth-century social science. It is, as I have said in a detailed intellectual itinerary, neither a theory nor a new paradigm (even if others think it is both), but a “call for a debate about the paradigm.”³⁶ Volume 1 remains the original and still crucial linchpin in this call.

INTRODUCTION: ON THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Change is eternal. Nothing ever changes. Both clichés are “true.” Structures are those coral reefs of human relations which have a stable existence over relatively long periods of time. But structures too are born, develop, and die.

Unless we are to use the study of social change as a term synonymous to the totality of social science, its meaning should be restricted to the study of changes in those phenomena which are most durable—the definition of durability itself being of course subject to change over historical time and place.

One of the major assertions of world social science is that there are some great watersheds in the history of man. One such generally recognized watershed, though one however studied by only a minority of social scientists, is the so-called neolithic or agricultural revolution. The other great watershed is the creation of the modern world.

This latter event is at the center of most contemporary social science theory, and indeed, of the nineteenth century as well. To be sure, there is immense debate as to what are the defining characteristics of modern times (and hence what are its temporal boundaries). Furthermore, there is much disagreement about the motors of this process of change. But there seems to be widespread consensus that some great structural changes did occur in the world in the last several hundred years, changes that make the world of today qualitatively different from the world of yesterday. Even those who reject evolutionist assumptions of determinate progress nonetheless admit the difference in structures.

What are the appropriate units to study if one wishes to describe this “difference” and account for it? In a sense, many of the major theoretical debates of our time can be reduced to arguments about this. It is the great quest of contemporary social science. It is therefore appropriate to begin a work that purports to analyze the process of social change in the modern world with an intellectual itinerary of one’s conceptual search.

I started with an interest in the social underpinnings of political conflict in my own society. I thought that by comprehending the modalities of such conflict, I might contribute as a rational man to the shaping of that society. This led me into two great debates. One was the degree to which “all history is the history of the class struggle.” Phrased another way, are classes the only significant operating units in the social and political arenas? Or, as Weber argued, are they only one of a trinity of units—class, status-group, and party—which exist, the interactions among which explain the political process? Although I had my prejudices on the subject, I found, like others before me, that neither the definition of these terms nor the description of their relations was easy to elucidate. I felt increasingly that this was far more a conceptual than an empirical problem, and that to resolve the debate, at least in my own mind, I would have to place the issues within a larger intellectual context.

The second great debate, which was linked to the first, was about the degree to which there could or did exist a consensus of values within a given society, and to the extent that such a consensus existed, the degree to which its presence or absence was in fact a major determinant of men’s actions. This debate is linked to the first because it is only if one rejects the primordial character of social struggle in civil society that the question can even be raised.

Values are of course an elusive thing to observe and I became very uneasy with a great deal of the theorizing about values, which seemed often to combine the absence of a rigorous empirical base with an affront to common sense. Still it was clear that men and groups did justify their actions by reference to ideologies. Furthermore, it seemed clear also that groups became more coherent and hence more politically efficacious to the extent that they were self-conscious, which meant that they developed a common language and a Weltanschauung.

I shifted my area of empirical concern from my own society to Africa in the hope either that I would discover various theories confirmed by what I found there or that a look at distant climes would sharpen my perception by directing my attention to issues I would otherwise have missed. I expected the former to happen. But it was the latter that came to pass.

I went to Africa first during the colonial era, and I witnessed the process of “decolonization,” and then of the independence of a cascade of sovereign states. White man that I was, I was bombarded by the onslaught of the colonial mentality of Europeans long resident in Africa. And sympathizer of nationalist movements that I was, I was privy to the angry analyses and optimistic passions of young militants of the African movements. It did not take long to realize that not only were these two groups at odds on political issues, but that they approached the situation with entirely different sets of conceptual frameworks.

In general, in a deep conflict, the eyes of the downtrodden are more acute about the reality of the present. For it is in their interest to perceive correctly in order to expose the hypocrisies of the rulers. They have less interest in ideological deflection. So it was in this case. The nationalists saw the reality in which they lived as a “colonial situation,” that is, one in which both their social action and that of the Europeans living side by side with them as administrators, missionaries, teachers, and merchants were determined by the constraints of a single legal and social entity. They saw further that the political machinery was based on a caste system in which rank and hence reward was accorded on the basis of race.

African nationalists were determined to change the political structures within which they lived. I have told this story elsewhere and it is not relevant to refer to it here. What is relevant here is that I thereby became aware of the degree to which society as an abstraction was heavily limited to politico-juridical systems as an empirical reality. It was a false perspective to take a unit like a “tribe” and seek to analyze its operations without reference to the fact that, in a colonial situation, the governing institutions of a “tribe,” far from being “sovereign,” were closely circumscribed by the laws (and customs) of a larger entity of which they were an indissociable part, the colony. Indeed this led me to the larger generalization that the study of social organization was by and large defective because of the widespread lack of consideration of the legal and political framework within which both organizations and their members operated.

I sought to discover the general attributes of a colonial situation and to describe what I thought of as its “natural history.” It quickly became clear to me that I had to hold at least some factors of the world-system constant. So I restricted myself to an analysis of how the colonial system operated for those countries which were colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of European powers and which were “overseas possessions” of these powers. Given this constant, I felt I could make generally applicable statements about the impact on social life of the imposition of colonial authority, the motives and modalities of resistance to this authority, the mechanisms by which colonial powers entrenched and sought to legitimate their power, the contradictory nature of the forces that were able to operate within this framework, the reasons why men were led to form organizations that challenged colonial rule, and the structural elements that made for the expansion and eventual political triumph of anticolonial movements. The unit of analysis in all of this was the colonial territory as legally defined by the administering power.

I was interested equally in what happened to these “new states” after independence. As the study of colonial territories seemed to focus on the causes of the breakdown of existing political order, the study of the postindependence period seemed to focus on the opposite issue: How legitimate authority is established and a sense of membership in the national entity spread among the citizenry.

This latter study ran into problems, however. In the first place, to study the postindependence politics of Afro-Asian states seemed to be a process of running after the headlines. There could perforce be relatively little historical depth. Furthermore, there was the tricky question of Latin America. There were many ways in which the situations there seemed parallel, and more and more people began to think of the three continents as a “Third World.” But Latin American countries had been politically independent for 150 years. Their cultures were far more closely linked with the European tradition than anything in Africa or Asia. The whole enterprise seemed to be wavering on very shaky ground.

In search for an appropriate unit of analysis, I turned to “states in the period after formal independence but before they had achieved something that might be termed national integration.” This definition could be taken to include most or all of Latin America for all or almost all of the time up to the present. But it obviously included other areas as well. It included for example the United States of America, at least in the period before say the Civil War. It surely included eastern Europe, at least up until the twentieth century and possibly up to the present. And it even included western and southern Europe, at least for earlier periods of time.

I was therefore forced by this logic to turn my attention to early modern Europe. This led me first into the question of what I would take as the starting point of this process, a process I provisionally formulated, for want of a better conceptual tool, as the process of modernization. Furthermore, I had not only to consider the issue of starting points but of terminal points, unless I wished to include twentieth-century Britain or Germany as instances of this same social process. Since that seemed prima facie dubious, terminal points had to be thought about.

At this point, I was clearly involved in a developmental schema and some implicit notion of stages of development. This in turn posed two problems: criteria for determining stages, and comparability of units across historical time.

How many stages had there been? How many could there be? Is industrialization a turning point or the consequence of some political turning point? What in this context would the empirical meaning of a term like “revolution” mean, as in the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution? Were these stages unilinear, or could a unit go “backward”? This seemed to be a vast conceptual morass into which I had stepped.

Furthermore, getting out of the conceptual morass was very difficult because of the absence of reasonable measuring instruments. How could one say that seventeenth-century France was in some sense equivalent to twentieth-century India? Laymen might consider such a statement absurd. Were they so wrong? It was all very well to fall back on textbook formulae of the virtues of scientific abstraction, but the practical difficulties of comparison seemed immense.

One way to handle the “absurd” idea of comparing two such disparate units was to accept the legitimacy of the objection and add another variable—the world context of any given era, or what Wolfram Eberhard has called “world time.” This meant that while seventeenth-century France might have shared some structural characteristics with twentieth-century India, they were to be seen as very different on the dimensions of world context. This was conceptually clarifying, but made measurement even more complicated.

Finally, there seemed to be another difficulty. If given societies went through “stages,” that is, had a “natural history,” what of the world-system itself? Did it not have “stages,” or at least a “natural history”? If so, were we not studying evolutions within evolutions? And if that, was not the theory getting to be top-heavy in epicycles? Did it not call for some simplifying thrust?

It seemed to me it did. It was at this point that I abandoned the idea altogether of taking either the sovereign state or that vaguer concept, the national society, as the unit of analysis. I decided that neither one was a social system and that one could only speak of social change in social systems. The only social system in this scheme was the world-system.

This was of course enormously simplifying. I had one type of unit rather than units within units. I could explain changes in the sovereign states as consequent upon the evolution and interaction of the world-system. But it was also enormously complicating. I probably only had one instance of this unit in the modern era. Suppose indeed that I was right, that the correct unit of analysis was the world-system, and that sovereign states were to be seen as one kind of organizational structure among others within this single social system. Could I then do anything more than write its history?

I was not interested in writing its history, nor did I begin to have the empirical knowledge necessary for such a task. (And by its very nature, few individuals ever could.) But can there be laws about the unique? In a rigorous sense, there of course cannot be. A statement of causality or probability is made in terms of a series of like phenomena or like instances. Even if one were to include in such a series those that would probably or even possibly occur in the future, what could be proposed here was not to add a series of future possible instances to a network of present and past ones. It was to add a series of future possible instances to a single past-present one.

There had only been one “modern world.” Maybe one day there would be discovered to be comparable phenomena on other planets, or additional modern world-systems on this one. But here and now, the reality was clear—only one. It was here that I was inspired by the analogy with astronomy which purports to explain the laws governing the universe, although (as far as we know) only one universe has ever existed.

What do astronomers do? As I understand it, the logic of their arguments involves two separate operations. They use the laws derived from the study of smaller physical entities, the laws of physics, and argue that (with perhaps certain specified exceptions) these laws hold by analogy for the system as a whole. Second, they argue a posteriori. If the whole system is to have a given state at time y, it most probably had a certain state at time x.

Both methods are tricky, and it is for this reason that in the field of cosmology, which is the study of the functioning of the system as a whole, there are wildly opposing hypotheses held by reputable astronomers. Just as there are in the explanations of the modern world-system, a state of affairs likely to remain so for some time. Actually, students of the operation of the world-system possibly have it easier than students of the operation of the universe in terms of the amount of empirical evidence at their disposal.

In any case, I was inspired by the epigram of T. J. G. Locher: “One should not confuse totality with completeness. The whole is more than the assembled parts, but it is surely also less.”1

I was looking to describe the world-system at a certain level of abstraction, that of the evolution of structures of the whole system. I was interested in describing particular events only insofar as they threw light upon the system as typical instances of some mechanism, or as they were the crucial turning points in some major institutional change.

This kind of project is manageable to the extent that a good deal of empirical material exists, and that this material is at least partially in the form of contrapuntal controversial work. Fortunately this seems to be the case by now for a large number of the themes of modern history.

One of the major thrusts of modern social science has been the effort to achieve quantification of research findings. Utilizing the heavily narrative accounts of most historical research seems not to lend itself to such quantification. What then is the reliability of such data, and to what extent can one safely draw conclusions from the material about the operation of a system as such? It is a major tragedy of twentieth-century social science that so large a proportion of social scientists, facing this dilemma, have thrown in the sponge. Historical data seemed to them vague and crude, hence unreliable. They felt that there was little to be done about it, and that hence it was best to avoid using it. And the best way not to use it was to formulate problems in such a way that its use was not indicated.

Thus the quantifiability of data determined the choice of research problems which then determined the conceptual apparatuses with which one defined and handled the empirical data. It should be clear on a moment’s reflection that this is an inversion of the scientific process. Conceptualization should determine research tools, at least most of the time, not vice versa. The degree of quantification should reflect merely the maximum of precision that is possible for given problems and given methods at given points of time. More rather than less quantification is always desirable, to the extent that it speaks to the questions which derive from the conceptual exercise. At this stage of analysis of the world-system, the degree of quantification achieved and immediately realizable is limited. We do the best we can and go forward from there.

Lastly, there is the question of objectivity and commitment. I do not believe there exists any social science that is not committed. That does not mean however that it is not possible to be objective. It is first of all a matter of defining clearly our terms. In the nineteenth century, in rebellion against the fairy-tale overtones of so much prior historical writing, we were given the ideal of telling history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. But social reality is ephemeral. It exists in the present and disappears as it moves into the past. The past can only be told as it truly is, not was. For recounting the past is a social act of the present done by men of the present and affecting the social system of the present.

“Truth” changes because society changes. At any given time, nothing is successive; everything is contemporaneous, even that which is past. And in the present we are all irremediably the products of our background, our training, our personality and social role, and the structured pressures within which we operate. That is not to say there are no options. Quite the contrary. A social system and all its constituent institutions, including the sovereign states of the modern world, are the loci of a wide range of social groups—in contact, in collusion, and above all, in conflict with each other. Since we all belong to multiple groups, we often have to make decisions as to the priorities demanded by our loyalties. Scholars and scientists are not somehow exempt from this requirement. Nor is the requirement limited to their nonscholarly, directly political roles in the social system.

To be sure, to be a scholar or a scientist is to perform a particular role in the social system, one quite different from being an apologist for any particular group. I am not denigrating the role of advocate. It is essential and honorable, but not the same as that of scholar or scientist. The latter’s role is to discern, within the framework of his commitments, the present reality of the phenomena he studies, to derive from this study general principles, from which ultimately particular applications may be made. In this sense, there is no area of study that is not “relevant.” For the proper understanding of the social dynamics of the present requires a theoretical comprehension that can only be based on the study of the widest possible range of phenomena, including through all of historical time and space

When I say the “present reality” of phenomena, I do not mean that in order to strengthen the political claims of a government, an archaeologist for example should assert that the artifacts he uncovers belong to one group when he in fact believes them to belong to another. I mean that the whole archaeological enterprise from its inception—the social investment in this branch of scientific activity, the research orientation, the conceptual tools, the modes of resuming and communicating the results—are functions of the social present. To think otherwise is self-deceptive at best. Objectivity is honesty within this framework.

Objectivity is a function of the whole social system. Insofar as the system is lopsided, concentrating certain kinds of research activity in the hands of particular groups, the results will be “biased” in favor of these groups. Objectivity is the vector of a distribution of social investment in such activity such that it is performed by persons rooted in all the major groups of the world-system in a balanced fashion. Given this definition, we do not have an objective social science today. On the other hand, it is not an unfeasible objective within the foreseeable future.

We have already suggested that the study of world-systems is particularly tricky because of the impossibility of finding comparable instances. It is also particularly tricky because the social impact of statements about the world-system are clearly and immediately evident to all major actors in the political arena. Hence the social pressures on scholars and scientists, in the form of relatively tight social control on their activities, is particularly great in this field. This affords one further explanation to that of the methodological dilemmas for the reluctance of scholars to pursue activities in this domain.

But conversely this is the very reason why it is important to do so. Man’s ability to participate intelligently in the evolution of his own system is dependent on his ability to perceive the whole. The more difficult we acknowledge the task to be, the more urgent it is that we start sooner rather than later. It is of course not in the interest of all groups that this be done. Here our commitment enters. It depends on our image of the good society. To the extent that we want a more egalitarian world and a more libertarian one, we must comprehend the conditions under which these states of being are realizable. To do that requires first of all a clear exposition of the nature and evolution of the modern world-system heretofore, and the range of possible developments in the present and the future. That kind of knowledge would be power. And within the framework of my commitments, it would be a power that would be most useful to those groups which represent the interests of the larger and more oppressed parts of the world’s population.

It is therefore with these considerations in mind that I have embarked on this effort to analyze the determining elements of the modern world-system. It will take several volumes to accomplish this task, even in the preliminary format that this work must necessarily be.

I have divided the work, at least initially, into four principal parts, corresponding with what I think of as four major epochs, thus far, of the modern world-system. This first volume will deal with the origins and early conditions of the world-system, still only a European world-system. The approximate dates of this are 1450–1640. The second volume shall deal with the consolidation of this system, roughly between 1640 and 1815. The third shall deal with the conversion of the world-economy into a global enterprise, made possible by the technological transformation of modern industrialism. This expansion was so sudden and so great that the system in effect had to be recreated. The period here is roughly 1815–1917. The fourth volume will deal with the consolidation of this capitalist world-economy from 1917 to the present, and the particular “revolutionary” tensions this consolidation has provoked.

Much of contemporary social science has become the study of groups and organizations, when it has not been social psychology in disguise. This work, however, involves not the study of groups, but of social systems. When one studies a social system, the classical lines of division within social science are meaningless. Anthropology, economics, political science, sociology—and history—are divisions of the discipline anchored in a certain liberal conception of the state and its relation to functional and geographical sectors of the social order. They make a certain limited sense if the focus of one’s study is organizations. They make none at all if the focus is the social system. I am not calling for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of social systems, but for a unidisciplinary approach. The substantive content of this book will, I hope, make it clear what I mean by this phrase, and how seriously I take it.

MEDIEVAL PRELUDE

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, there came into existence what we may call a European world-economy. It was not an empire yet it was as spacious as a grand empire and shared some features with it. But it was different, and new. It was a kind of social system the world has not really known before and which is the distinctive feature of the modern world-system. It is an economic but not a political entity, unlike empires, city-states and nation-states. In fact, it precisely encompasses within its bounds (it is hard to speak of boundaries) empires, city-states, and the emerging “nation-states.” It is a “world” system, not because it encompasses the whole world, but because it is larger than any juridically-defined political unit. And it is a “world-economy” because the basic linkage between the parts of the system is economic, although this was reinforced to some extent by cultural links and eventually, as we shall see, by political arrangements and even confederal structures.

An empire, by contrast, is a political unit. For example, Shmuel Eisenstadt has defined it this way:

The term “empire” has normally been used to designate a political system encompassing wide, relatively high centralized territories, in which the center, as embodied both in the person of the emperor and in the central political institutions, constituted an autonomous entity. Further, although empires have usually been based on traditional legitimation, they have often embraced some wider, potentially universal political and cultural orientation that went beyond that of any of their component parts.¹

Empires in this sense were a constant feature of the world scene for 5,000 years. There were continuously several such empires in various parts of the world at any given point of time. The political centralization of an empire was at one and the same time its strength and its weakness. Its strength lay in the fact that it guaranteed economic flows from the periphery to the center by force (tribute and taxation) and by monopolistic advantages in trade. Its weakness lay in the fact that the bureaucracy made necessary by the political structure tended to absorb too much of the profit, especially as repression and exploitation bred revolt which increased military expenditures.² Political empires are a primitive means of economic domination. It is the social achievement of the modern world, if you will, to have invented the technology that makes it possible to increase the flow of the surplus from the lower strata to the upper strata, from the periphery to the center, from the majority to the minority, by eliminating the “waste” of too cumbersome a political superstructure.

I have said that a world-economy is an invention of the modern world. Not quite. There were world-economies before. But they were always transformed into empires: China, Persia, Rome. The modern world-economy might have gone in that same direction—indeed it has sporadically seemed as though it would—except that the techniques of modern capitalism and the technology of modern science, the two being somewhat linked as we know, enabled this world-economy to thrive, produce, and expand without the emergence of a unified political structure.³

What capitalism does is offer an alternative and more lucrative source of surplus appropriation (at least more lucrative over a long run). An empire is a mechanism for collecting tribute, which in Frederic Lane’s pregnant image, “means payments received for protection, but payments in excess of the cost of producing the protection.”⁴ In a capitalist world-economy, political energy is used to secure monopoly rights (or as near to it as can be achieved). The state becomes less the central economic enterprise than the means of assuring certain terms of trade in other economic transactions. In this way, the operation of the market (not the free operation but nonetheless its operation) creates incentives to increased productivity and all the consequent accompaniment of modern economic development. The world-economy is the arena within which these processes occur.

A world-economy seems to be limited in size. Ferdinand Fried observed that:

If one takes account of all the factors, one reaches the conclusion that the space of the ‘world’ economy in Roman antiquity could be covered in about 40 to 60 days, utilizing the best means of transport. . . . Now, in our times [1939], it also takes 40 to 60 days to cover the space of the modern world economy, if one uses the normal channels of transportation for merchandise.⁵

And Fernand Braudel adds that this could be said to be the time span of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century.⁶

The origins and the functioning of such a 60–day European world-economy⁷ in the sixteenth century is our concern here. It is vital to remember, however, that Europe was not the only world-economy at the time. There were others.⁸ But Europe alone embarked on the path of capitalist development which enabled it to outstrip these others. How and why did this come about? Let us start by seeing what happened in the world in the three centuries prior to 1450. In the twelfth century, the Eastern Hemisphere contained a series of empires and small worlds, many of which were interlinked at their edges with each other. At that time, the Mediterranean was one focus of trade where Byzantium, Italian city-states, and to some extent parts of northern Africa met. The Indian Ocean–Red Sea complex formed another such focus. The Chinese region was a third. The Central Asian land mass from Mongolia to Russia was a fourth. The Baltic area was on the verge of becoming a fifth. Northwest Europe was however a very marginal area in economic terms. The principal social mode or organization there was what has come to be called feudalism.

We must be very clear what feudalism was not. It was not a “natural economy,” that is, an economy of self-subsistence. Western Europe feudalism grew out of the disintegration of an empire, a disintegration which was never total in reality or even de jure.⁹ The myth of the Roman Empire still provided a certain cultural and even legal coherence to the area. Christianity served as a set of parameters within which social action took place. Feudal Europe was a “civilization,” but not a world-system.

It would not make sense to conceive of the areas in which feudalism existed as having two economies, a market economy of the towns and a subsistence economy of the rural manors. In the twentieth century, with reference to the so-called underdeveloped world, this approach has gone under the label of the “dual economy” theory. Rather, as Daniel Thorner suggests:

We are sure to deceive ourselves if we think of peasant economies as oriented exclusively towards their own subsistence and term “capitalist” any orientation towards the “market.” It is more reasonable to start by assuming that, for many centuries, peasant economies have had both orientations.¹⁰

For many centuries? How many? B. H. Slicher van Bath, in his major work on European agrarian history, marks the turning point at about 1150 A.D.. Even before then, he does not think Western Europe was engaged in subsistence farming, but rather from 500 A.D. to c. 1150 A.D. in what he calls “direct agricultural consumption,” that is, a system of partial self-sufficiency in which, while most people produce their own food, they also supply it to the nonagricultural population as barter. From 1150 A.D. on, he considers Western Europe to have reached that stage of “indirect agricultural consumption,” a stage we are still in today.¹¹

What we should envisage then, when we speak of western European feudalism, is a series of tiny economic nodules whose population and productivity were slowly increasing, and in which the legal mechanisms ensured that the bulk of the surplus went to the landlords who had noble status and control of the juridical machinery. Since much of this surplus was in kind, it was of little benefit unless it could be sold. Towns grew up, supporting artisans who bought the surplus and exchanged it for their products. A merchant class came from two sources: On the one hand, agents of the landlords who sometimes became independent, as well as intermediate size peasants who retained enough surplus after payments to the lord to sell it on the market¹²; on the other hand, resident agents of long-distance merchants (based often in northern Italian city-states and later in the Hanseatic cities) who capitalized on poor communications and hence high disparities of prices from one area to another, especially when certain areas suffered natural calamities.¹³ As towns grew, of course, they offered a possible refuge and place of employment for peasants which began to change some of the terms of relationship on the manor.¹⁴

Feudalism as a system should not be thought of as something antithetical to trade. On the contrary, up to a certain point, feudalism and the expansion of trade go hand in hand. Claude Cahen suggests that if scholars have often observed this phemonemon in areas other than western Europe,¹⁵ perhaps they have failed to notice the same phenomenon in Western feudalism because of ideological blinkers. “Having thus noted the possibility of convergence, up to a certain stage of development only, of the development of feudalism and of commerce, we ought to reconsider, from this point of view, the history of the West itself.”¹⁶

Yet a feudal system could only support a limited amount of long-distance trade as opposed to local trade. This was because long-distance trade was a trade in luxuries, not in bulk goods. It was a trade which benefited from price disparities and depended on the political indulgence and economic possibilities of the truly wealthy. It is only with the expansion of production within the framework of a modern world-economy that long-distance trade could convert itself in part into bulk trade which would, in turn, feed the process of expanded production. Until then, as Owen Lattimore notes, it was not really what we mean today by trade:

As late as the time of Marco Polo (at least) the trade of the merchant who ventured beyond his own district depended delicately on the whims of potentates. . . . The distant venture was concerned less with the disposal of goods in bulk and more with curiosities, rarities and luxuries. . . . The merchant sought out those who could extend favor and protection. . . . If he were unlucky he might be plundered or taxed to ruination; but if he were lucky he received for his goods not so much an economic price as a munificent largesse. . . . The structure of the silk trade and that of much other trade was more a tribute structure than a trade structure.17

Thus, the level of commercial activity was limited. The principal economic activity remained food and handicraft production traded within small economic regions. Nonetheless, the scale of this economic activity was slowly expanding. And the various economic nuclei expanded therewith. New frontier lands were cultivated. New towns were founded. Population grew. The Crusades provided some of the advantages of colonial plunder. And then sometime in the fourteenth century, this expansion ceased. The cultivated areas retracted. Population declined. And throughout feudal Europe and beyond it, there seemed to be a “crisis,” marked by war, disease, and economic hardship. Whence came this “crisis” and what were its consequences?

First, in what sense was there a crisis? Here there is some disagreement, not so much as to the description of the process as to the emphasis in causal explanation. Edouard Perroy sees the issue primarily as one of an optimal point having been reached in an expansion process, of a saturation of population, “an enormous density, given the still primitive state of agrarian and artisanal technology.”18 And lacking better plows and fertilizer little could be done to ameliorate the situation. This led to food shortages which in turn led to epidemics. With a stable money supply, there was a moderate rise in prices, hurting the rentiers. The slow deterioration of the situation was then rendered acute by the beginnings of the Hundred Years War in 1335–1345, which turned western European state systems toward a war economy, with the particular result that there was an increased need for taxes. The taxes, coming on top of already heavy feudal dues, were too much for the producers, creating a liquidity crisis which in turn led to a return to indirect taxes and taxes in kind. Thus started a downward cycle: The fiscal burden led to a reduction in consumption which led to a reduction in production and money circulation which increased further the liquidity difficulties which led to royal borrowing and eventually the insolvency of the limited royal treasuries, which in turn created a credit crisis, leading to hoarding of bullion, which in turn upset the pattern of international trade. A rapid rise in prices occurred, further reducing the margin of subsistence, and this began to take its toll in population. The landowner lost customers and tenants. The artisan lost customers. There was turn from arable to pasture land because it required less manpower. But there was a problem of customers for the wool. Wages rose, which was a particular burden for small and medium-sized landowners who turned to the State for protection against wage rises. “The disaggregation to manorial production, which becomes ever more severe after 1350, is proof of a continuous slump . . . [of] mediocrity in stagnation.”19

Stagnation is, on the face of it, a curious consequence. One might have expected the following scenario. Reduced population leads to higher wages which, with rents relatively inelastic, would mean a change in the composition of demand, shifting part of the surplus from lord to peasant, and hence ensuring that less of it would be hoarded. Furthermore, a reduction of population in an economy that was largely agricultural should have led to parallel reductions in demand and supply. But since typically a producer will normally reduce production by eliminating the less fertile plots, there should have been an increased rate of productivity, which should have reduced prices. Both of these developments should have encouraged, not discouraged, trade. Nonetheless trade “stagnated” in fact.

What went wrong in the calculation is the implicit assumption about elasticity of demand. North and Thomas remind us that, given the state of the technology and the range of the volume of international trade, transactions costs were very high, and any reduction in volume (due to a decline in population) would set in train a process of rising costs which would lead to a further reduction in trade. They trace the process like this:

[Previously] merchants found it profitable to reduce transactions costs by stationing factors in a distant city to acquire information about prices and possible trading opportunities; as the volume of trade shrank, this was no longer expedient. Information flows dried up and trade volume was further reduced. It is thus not surprising that economic historians have found depression (for them meaning a decreased total volume of economic activity) even in the midst of this world where higher per capita income would presumably have followed the relatively increased real wage that peasant and worker must have been experiencing.20

R. H. Hilton accepts Perroy’s description of events.21 But he takes exception to the form of analysis which makes the crisis comparable to one of the recurrent crises of a developed capitalist system, thus exaggerating the degree to which financial and monetary dilemmas affect a feudal system in which the cash-flow element is so much smaller a part of human interaction than in capitalist society.22 Furthermore, he suggests that Perroy omits any discussion of another phenomenon which resulted from the events Perroy describes, and which to Hilton is central, that of the unusual degree of social conflict, the “climate of endemic discontent,” the peasant insurrections which took the form of a “revolt against the social system as such.”23 For Hilton, this was not therefore merely a conjunctural crisis, one point in an up and down of cyclical trends. Rather it was the culmination of 1000 years of development, the decisive crisis of a system. “During the last centuries of the Roman Empire as during the Middle Ages, society was paralyzed by the growing expense of a social and political superstructure, an expense to which corresponded no compensating increase in the productive resources of society.”24 Hilton agrees with Perroy that the immediate cause of the dilemma was to be found in technological limitations, the lack of fertilizer and the inability to expand fertilizer supply by expanding the number of cattle, because the climate limited the quantity of winter forage for cattle. But “what we should underline is that there was no large reinvestment of profits in agriculture such that would significantly increase productivity.”25 This was because of the inherent limitations of the reward system of feudal social organization.

What Hilton’s emphasis on the general crisis of feudalism offers us over Perroy’s sense of the conjunctural is that it can account for the social transformation these developments involved. For if the optimal degree of productivity had been passed in a system and the economic squeeze was leading to a generalized seignior–peasant class war, as well as ruinous fights within the seigniorial classes, then the only solution that would extract western Europe from decimation and stagnation would be one that would expand the economic pie to be shared, a solution which required, given the technology of the time, an expansion of the land area and population base to exploit. This is what in fact took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

That peasant revolts became widespread in western Europe from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century seems to be in little doubt. Hilton finds the immediate explanation for England in the fact that “in the 13th century most of the great estate-owners, lay and ecclesiastical, expanded their demesne production in order to sell agricultural produce on the market. . . . [As a result], labor services were increased, even doubled.”26 Kosminsky similarly talks of this period as being that of “the most intense exploitation of the English peasantry. . . .”27 On the continent, there were a series of peasant rebellions: in northern Italy and then in coastal Flanders at the turn of the 14th century; in Denmark in 1340; in Majorca in 1351; the Jacquerie in France in 1358; scattered rebellions in Germany long before the great peasant war of 1525. Peasant republics sprang up in Frisia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in Switzerland in the thirteenth century. For B. H. Slicher van Bath, “peasant rebellions went with economic recession.”28 Dobb suggests that when such recession occurred, it fell particularly hard not on the lowest stratum of workers who probably never were very well off but on “the upper stratum of well-to-do peasants, who were in position to extend cultivation onto new land and to improve it, and who accordingly tended to be the spearpoint of revolt.”29

The sudden decline of prosperity involved more than peasant discontent. The depopulation which accompanied it—caused by wars, famines, and epidemics—led to the Wüstungen, the recession of settlements from marginal lands, the disappearance of whole villages sometimes. The desertion of villages should not be seen exclusively as a sign of recession. For there are at least two other major reasons for desertion. One, which was a continuing one, was the search for physical security whenever warfare overtook a region.30 A second, less “accidental” and more structural, was a change in agrarian social structure, the “enclosure” or “engrossing” of land. It seems clear that this process too was going on in the late Middle Ages.31 And it is somewhat difficult at this stage of our knowledge to disentangle the three.

Two things seem clear about the cessation of clearings and the recession of settlements. It was, as Karl Helleiner remarks, a “selective process with respect to size of holdings. The percentage of small holdings abandoned in the course of the late Middle Ages appears to have been higher than that of full-sized farms.”32 It was also selective by regions. The Wüstungen seemed to have been extensive not only in Germany and Central Europe,33 but also in England.34 It was on the other hand far more limited in France.35 No doubt this is in part explained by the fact that France was more densely settled and earlier cleared than other areas of Europe for both historical and pedological reasons.

At this time of contracting demand for agricultural products, urban wages and hence industrial prices were rising, because of the shortage of labor bred by population decline. This in turn raised the cost of agricultural labor while reducing rents (insofar as they were fixed while nominal prices were inflating). This led to what Marc Bloch has called the “momentary impoverishment of the seigniorial class.”36 Not only were profits diminished but the costs of management rose, as they always do in difficult times,37 leading owners to consider shedding direct management. The economic squeeze led to increased exactions on the peasantry which were then counterproductive, and resulted in peasant flight.38 One path to the restoration of income for the nobility, one often efficacious for the wealthiest stratum, was to involve themselves in new and remunerative careers with the princes.39 It was not however sufficient to counteract the effects of recession and therefore to stem the decline of the demesne.40 And it may incidentally, by removing seigniors from residence, have encouraged disinterest in management.

What then happened to the large estates? They were sold or rented for money to the principal group ready and able to engage in such a transaction, the better off peasants, who were in a position to obtain favorable terms.41

We must however remember that the social organization of agricultural production was not identical everywhere. The demesnes were the largest in western Europe, in part because denser population had required the relative efficiency of larger units. In central Europe, the effects of economic recession led to the same desertion of marginal lands, but the analysis of these Wüstungen is complicated by the fact that they represented in part enclosures as well as abandonment.42 Further to the east, in Brandenburg and Poland, as we shall discuss later, where population density was even thinner, the lords who collectively previously owned less land than the peasants “saw their estates acquiring all the lands left deserted by the sudden demographic collapse.”43 How profitable this would be for them in the sixteenth century, how profoundly this would alter the social structure of eastern Europe, how important this would be for the development of western Europe—all this was doubtless outside the ken of the participants in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But in the nonmarginal arable land areas of western Europe, the excessively large demesne gives way to smaller landholdings. Thus, simultaneously, there is the rise of a medium-sized peasantry on arable land in western Europe, the beginning of enclosures of less arable lands in western Europe (which would be the basis of expanded animal husbandry), and the concentration of property into large estates in eastern Europe (which would come to serve a new function as grain export areas).

Was this period of economic “collapse” or “stagnation” good or bad for the development of a capitalist world-economy? It depends on the length of one’s perspective. Michael Postan sees the fifteenth century as a regression from the developments of the fourteenth,44 a setback which to be sure was later overcome. Eugen Kosminsky sees it as part of the liquidation of feudalism, hence a necessary step in the development of a capitalist economy.45 The facts are the same. The theoretical perspective is different.

Thus far, in this discussion, we have scarcely mentioned the developments in the political sphere, and in particular the slow rise of the centralized state bureaucracy. In the heyday of western feudalism, when the state was weakest, the landowner, the lord of the manor thrived. However much, in a later era, the state machinery might be utilized by the nobility to further their interests, they were doubtless better served still by the weakness of kings and emperors. Not only were they personally freer of control and taxation but they were also freer to control and tax the peasants. In such societies, where there is no effective link between the central authority with its legal order and the masses, the effect of violence was double, since as Bloch noted, “through the play of custom, an abuse might always by mutation become a precedent, a precedent a right.”46

Lords of the manor then would never welcome the strengthening of the central machinery if they were not in a weakened condition in which they found it more difficult to resist the claims of central authority and more ready to welcome the benefits of imposed order. Such a situation was that posed by the economic difficulties of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the decline of seigniorial revenues.

Alongside the economic dilemmas occurred a technological shift in the art of war, from the long bow to the cannon and the handgun, from the cavalry war to the one in which infantry charged and hence in which more training and discipline was required. All this meant that the cost of war increased, the number of men required rose, and the desirability of a standing army over ad hoc formations became ever more clear. Given the new requirements, neither the feudal lords individually nor the city-states could really foot the bill or recruit the manpower, especially in an era of depopulation.47 Indeed, even the territorial states were having a hard job of maintaining order, as the frequency of peasant revolts shows.48

The fifteenth century, however, saw the advent of the great restorers of internal order in western Europe: Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England, and Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in Spain. The major mechanisms at their disposition in this task, as for their less successful predecessors, were financial: by means of the arduous creation of a bureaucracy (civil and armed) strong enough to tax and thus to finance a still stronger bureaucratic structure. This process had started already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With the cessation of the invasions, which had previously preoccupied and exhausted the princes, the growth of population, the revival of trade and hence the more abundant circulation of money, there was a basis for the taxation which could pay for salaried officials and troops.49 This was true not only in France, England, and Spain but in the principalities of Germany as well.

Taxes are to be sure the key issue. And it is not easy to begin the upward cycle.50 The obstacles to an effective taxation system in the late Middle Ages seem in retrospect overwhelming. Taxation can only in reality be on net production, and net production was low, as was the quantity of money, as well as its circulation. It was extremely difficult to verify taxes both because of a lack of personnel and because of the low level of quantified record keeping. It is no wonder that rulers constantly resorted to alternatives to taxation as sources of income: to confiscation, to borrowing, to selling state offices, to debasing the coinage. But each of these alternatives, while they may have solved financial dilemmas of the moment, had some negative long-term effects on the politico-economic strength of the king.51 Still it would be false to emphasize the difficulties. It is the magnitude of the achievement that is impressive. The many compromises might be seen as essential steps on the road to success. Tax-farming52 and the venality of office53 can be seen precisely as two such useful compromises. Furthermore, the increased flow of funds to the king not only hurt the nobility by strengthening the state, but also by weakening the nobility’s own sources of revenue, especially in the tighter economy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and especially for those not linked to the new bureaucracies. As Duby puts it: “A large part of the revenues extracted from the soil by the peasants still found its way into the lord’s hands, but the endless progress of taxation had greatly enlarged the share taken by the agents of the State.”54

And as the state grew stronger, monetary manipulation became more profitable. When in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the financial crises of states beset by war were compounded by low profit margins in the countryside that could be taxed, the states had to find other sources of revenue, especially since depopulation meant that princes were offering exemptions from taxation to those who would recolonize devastated areas. Monetary manipulation thus had many advantages. Léopold Génicot points out that there are three possible explanations for the frequent debasements of the period: the reduction of state debts (although debasement also thereby reduces fixed revenues, which constituted the bulk of income from royal domains); scarcity of means of payment, at a time when trade was growing more than the stocks of silver and when public disorder encouraged hoarding of bullion; or a deliberate economic policy of lowering the exchange rate to arrest deflation, combat hoarders, facilitate exports and thus revive commerce. Whichever the explanation of the debasements, they were “very largely inflationary” and “reduced in this way the real value of fixed revenues.”55 The principal recipients of fixed revenues were the seigniorial classes, and hence they were weakened vis-à-vis the state.

The state? What was the state? At this time, it was the prince, the prince whose reputation was lauded, whose majesty was preserved, who little by little was removed from his subjects.56 And it was the bureaucracy which emerged now as a distinctive social grouping with special characteristics and interests, the principal ally of the prince,57and yet one which, as we shall see, was to remain an ambivalent one. And it was the various parliamentary bodies the sovereigns created as mechanisms to assist them in the legislating of taxes, bodies composed largely of nobles, which the kings tried to use against the nobility and the nobility against the king.58

This state was a creation which dates not from the sixteenth century but from the thirteenth century in western Europe. Yves Renouard has traced how the boundary lines that determine to this day the frontiers of France, England, and Spain were more or less definitively settled in a series of battles which occurred between 1212 and 1214.59 It was on the basis of these lines rather than some others (for example, a Mediterranean Occitanian state including Provence and Catalonia; or an Atlantic state including the western France of the Angevins as part of England) that later nationalist sentiments were constructed. First the boundaries, later the passions is as true of early modern Europe as, say, of twentieth-century Africa. It was at this period that not only were the boundary lines decided but, even more important, it was decided that there would be boundary lines. This is what Edouard Perroy calls the “fundamental change” in the political structure of western Europe.60 In his view, it is between the middle of the twelfth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, in short at the height of commercial and agricultural prosperity of the Middle Ages, that we can date the transformation of Europe.

Why nation-states and not empires? Here we must be prudent about our terminology. Perhaps we should think of France of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a nation-state, of France of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an empire, of the seventeenth century as a nation-state again. This is what Fernand Braudel seems to think.61Why this pattern of alternation? Braudel suggests that “there was, with the economic expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries, a conjuncture stubbornly favorable to vast, even very vast States, to these ‘thick States’. . . . In fact, history is, in turn, favorable and unfavorable to vast political structures.”62 Fritz Hartung and R. Mousnier suggest the need for a minimum size (but also a maximum?) for the establishment of an absolute monarchy, a form which did not succeed in little States. “Doubtless, the latter could not constitute military and economic units large enough to sustain an absolute monarchy.”63 These are but hints at answers to a problem worth considerable theoretical attention. V. G. Kiernan helps us perhaps the most with the following conceptual clarification:

No dynasty set out to build a nation-state; each aimed at unlimited extension . . . and the more it prospered the more the outcome was a multifarious empire manqué. It had to be large enough to survive and sharpen its claws on its neighbours, but small enough to be organized from one centre and to feel itself as an entity. On the closepacked western edge of Europe, any excessive ballooning of territory was checked by competition and geographical limits.64

Unless, of course, they extended their empires overseas.

What would happen to those empires manqué was that they would develop different raisons d’état from empires, different ideologies. A nation-state is a territorial unit whose rulers seek (sometimes seek, often seek, surely not always seek) to make of it a national society—for reasons we shall discuss later. The affair is even more confusing when we remember that from the sixteenth century on, the nation-states of western Europe sought to create relatively homogeneous national societies at the core of empires, using the imperial venture as an aid, perhaps an indispensable one, to the creation of the national society.

We have discussed the crisis of western feudalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the background for, prelude to, the expansion of Europe and its economic transformation since the sixteenth century. Thus far the discussion and the explanations have been largely in terms of the social structure (the organization of production, the state machinery, the relationship of various social groups). Yet many would feel that the “crisis” of the fourteenth century and the “expansion” of the sixteenth could be accounted for, let us say in significant part, by factors of the physical environment—climate, epidemiology, soil conditions. These arguments cannot be lightly dismissed and the factors should be assessed and given their due weight in accounting for the social change that did occur.

The case for climate has been put most strongly by Gustaf Utterström. The argument in summary goes like this:

Thanks to industrialism, thanks not least to technical progress, man in our own day is less exposed to the whims of Nature than he was in previous centuries. But how often is it considered that another factor is that we are living in an age in which the climate, especially in northern Europe, is unusually mild? During the last 1000 years, . . . the periods of prosperity in human affairs have on the whole, though with important exceptions, occurred during the warm intervals between the great glaciations. It is in these same intervals that both economic life and the size of the populations have made the greatest advances.65

To strengthen his case, Utterström reminds us that climatic change might have had special bearing on the earlier periods in the transformation of Europe. “The primitive agriculture of the Middle Ages must have been much more dependent on favorable weather than is modern agriculture with its high technical standards.”66

Utterström points for example to the severe winters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the mild winters from 1460 to the mid-16th century, the severe winters of the second half of the seventeenth,67 which corresponds grosso modo to economic recession, expansion, and recession.

To regard population pressure as the decisive factor does not provide a satisfactory explanation of these economic developments. The fact that the population increased in the way it did raises a question which has not so far been asked: why did the population increase? . . . The great increase in population was . . . general throughout Europe. In northern and central Europe it got well under way during the period when the climate was unusually mild. This can scarcely be a chance coincidence: there must be a causal connection.68

In addition, Utterström makes epidemiological factors intervening variables. He explains the Black Plague by hot summers which led to the multiplication of the black rat, the host to the rat flea, one of the two carriers of the plague.69

Georges Duby acknowledges that this hypothesis must be taken seriously. Certainly some of the fourteenth century abandonments of cultivation (cereals in Iceland, the Scandinavian colonies in Greenland, the lowered forest limit in Sudetenland, the end of viticulture in England and its regression in Germany) are all plausibly explained by climatic change. But there are alternative plausible explanations. Most importantly, Duby reminds us that “agrarian recession, like the demographic collapse, started before the beginning of the fourteenth century,”70 hence before the presumed climatic changes. Instead, Duby would see climatic factors and then epidemiology as being cumulative woes which, in the fourteenth century, “dealt a crushing blow to the already fragile demographic structure.”71 Similar skepticism about the temporal primacy of climatic change in explaining the ups and downs have been expressed by Helleiner,72 Slicher van Bath,73 and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.74

Obviously, to the extent that there was climatic change, it would affect the operations of a social system. Yet equally obviously, it would affect different systems differently. Though opinions differ, it is probable that such glaciation as did occur was spread over the whole Northern Hemisphere, yet social developments in Asia and North America were clearly divergent from those in Europe. It would be useful therefore to return to the chronic factor of resource strain involved in the feudal system of social organization, or overconsumption by a minority given the overall low level of productivity. Norman Pounds reminds us of “how small the margin for security was for the medieval peasant even under conditions that might be termed normal or average. . . .”75 Slicher van Bath tends to corroborate this hypotheses of prolonged undernourishment by observing that it was precisely in protein-producing regions that men were most resistant to the plague.76

If however there was first economic regression because of the chronic overexploitation and resulting rebellions discussed previously, and then climatic factors added on both food shortages and plagues, it is easy to see how the socio–physical conjuncture could achieve “crisis” proportions. The crisis would in turn be aggravated by the factor that the plague, once it spread, became endemic.77 Furthermore, although fewer men should have meant more food since the landmass remained the same, it also meant a shift to pasturage and hence a reduction of caloric output. The demographic decline thus became endemic too.78 Pierre Chaunu adds that “the collapse of rent, the diminution of profits and the aggravation of seigniorial burdens” may have worsened the situation further by turning capital investment away from the land.79 And Dobb suggests that the resulting phenomenon of commutation may have further increased the burden of the peasant, rather than mitigating it as usually assumed, thereby adding to the dilemma.80 Thus, intruding the variables of the physical environment does not undo our previous analysis. It enriches it by adding a further element to help explain a historical conjuncture so consequential in the future history of the world, a further instance in which long-term stabilities and slow secular changes can account for conjunctures which have the power to change social structures which are intermediate from the perspective of temporal duration.

The analysis thus far is as follows. In Europe in the late Middle Ages, there existed a Christian “civilization” but neither a world-empire nor a world-economy. Most of Europe was feudal, that is, consisted of relatively small, relatively self-sufficient economic nodules based on a form of exploitation which involved the relatively direct appropriation of the small agricultural surplus produced within a manorial economy by a small class of nobility. Within Europe, there were at least two smaller world-economies, a medium-sized one based on the city-states of northern Italy and a smaller one based on the city-states of Flanders and northern Germany. Most of Europe was not directly involved in these networks.

From about 1150 to 1300, there was an expansion in Europe within the framework of the feudal mode of production, an expansion at once geographic, commercial, and demographic. From about 1300 to 1450, what expanded contracted, again at the three levels of geography, commerce, and demography.

This contraction following the expansion caused a “crisis,” one which was visible not only in the economic sphere but in the political sphere as well (internecine wars among the nobility and peasant revolts being the two main symptoms). It was also visible at the level of culture. The medieval Christian synthesis was coming under multitudinous attack in all the forms which later would be called the first stirrings of “modern” Western thought.

There are three main explanations of the crisis. One is that it was the product essentially of cyclical economic trends. The optimal point of expansion given the technology having been reached, there followed a contraction. The second is that it was the product essentially of a secular trend. After a thousand years of surplus appropriation under the feudal mode, a point of diminishing returns had been reached. While productivity remained stable (or even possibly declined as a result of soil exhaustion) because of the absence of structured motivation for technological advance, the burden to be borne by the producers of the surplus had been constantly expanding because of the growing size and level of expenditure of the ruling classes. There was no more to be squeezed out. The third explanation is climatological. The shift in European metereological conditions was such that it lowered soil productivity and increased epidemics simultaneously.

The first and the third explanation suffer from the fact that similar cyclical and climatological shifts occurred at other places and times without producing the consequence of creating a capitalist world-economy as a solution to the problems. The secular explanation of crisis may well be correct but it is inherently difficult to create the kind of serious statistical analysis that would demonstrate that it was a sufficient explanation of the social transformation. I believe it is most plausible to operate on the assumption that the “crisis of feudalism” represented a conjuncture of secular trends, an immediate cyclical crisis, and climatological decline.

It was precisely the immense pressures of this conjuncture that made possible the enormity of the social change. For what Europe was to develop and sustain now was a new form of surplus appropriation, a capitalist world-economy. It was to be based not on direct appropriation of agricultural surplus in the form either of tribute (as had been the case for world-empires) or of feudal rents (as had been the system of European feudalism). Instead what would develop now is the appropriation of a surplus which was based on more efficient and expanded productivity (first in agriculture and later in industry) by means of a world market mechanism with the “artificial” (that is, nonmarket) assist of state machineries, none of which controlled the world market in its entirety.

It will be the argument of this book that three things were essential to the establishment of such a capitalist world-economy: an expansion of the geographical size of the world in question, the development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones of the world-economy, and the creation of relatively strong state machineries in what would become the core-states of this capitalist world-economy.

The second and third aspects were dependent in large part on the success of the first. The territorial expansion of Europe hence was theoretically a key prerequisite to a solution for the “crisis of feudalism.” Without it, the European situation could well have collapsed into relative constant anarchy and further contraction. How was it then that Europe seized upon the alternative that was to save it? The answer is that it was not Europe that did so but Portugal, or at least it was Portugal that took the lead.

Let us look now at what it was in the social situation of Portugal that can account for the thrust toward overseas exploration which Portugal began right in the midst of the “crisis.” To understand this phenomenon, we must start by remembering that Europe’s geographical expansion started, as we have already suggested, earlier. Archibald Lewis argues that “from the eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century western Europe followed an almost classical frontier development.”81 He refers to the gradual reconquest of Spain from the Moors, the recuperation by Christian Europe of the Balaeric Islands, Sardinia, and Corsica, the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily. He refers to the Crusades with its addition first of Cyprus, Palestine and Syria, then of Crete and the Aegean Islands. In Northwest Europe, there was English expansion into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. And in eastern Europe, Germans and Scandinavians penetrated the lands of, conquered, and converted to Christianity Balts and Slavs. “The most important frontier [however] was an internal one of forest, swamp, marsh, moor, and fen. It was this wasteland which Europe’s peasants settled and largely put into cultivation between the years 1000 and 1250.”82 Then, as we have seen, this expansion and this prosperity was brought to an end by a “crisis” which was also a contraction. In political terms, this involved the rally of the Moors in Granada, the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Levant, the reconquest of Constantinople by the Byzantines in 1261, the Mongol conquest of the Russian plain. Internally, in Europe, there were the Wüstungen.

The great explorations, the Atlantic expansion, was thus not the first but the second thrust of Europe, one that succeeded because the momentum was greater, the social and technological base more solid, the motivation more intense. Why however a thrust whose initial center was Portugal? In 1250 or even 1350, few would have thought Portugal a likely candidate for this role. And retrospectively from the twentieth century, it clashes with our sense of probability, our bias against the minor power Portugal has been in modern times and indeed throughout all of history.

We shall try to answer this question in terms of motivation and capabilities. The motivations were European in scope, though some of them may have been felt more acutely in Portugal. What were the explorers looking for? Precious metals and spices, the schoolboy textbooks tell us. And this was true, to be sure, up to a point.

In the Middle Ages, Christian Europe and the Arab world were in a symbiotic relationship in terms of gold and silver. In Andrew Watson’s phrase, “in monetary matters, . . . the two regions should be treated as a whole.”83 The former minted silver, the latter gold. As a result of a long-term disequilibrium in prices, whose origins are complex and need not concern us here, the silver flowed eastward leading to an abundance in the Arab world. Silver exports could no longer lead to gold imports. In 1252, Florence and Genoa therefore struck new gold coins. The motive was there. One fact which made it possible was the expansion of the trans-Saharan gold trade in the thirteenth century.84 Watson thinks it is implausible to talk of a gold shortage, therefore, in western Europe between 1250 and 1500, for it was a time of increasing supply. Still there remained a constant outflow of precious metals from Europe to India and China via Byzantium and the Arab world, although the disequilibrium was lessening. Watson talks, somewhat mysteriously, of the “strong power of India and China to attract precious metals from other parts of the world.”85 The demand for bullion thus remained high. Between 1350 and 1450, the silver mines in Serbia and Bosnia began to develop86 and became an important source until the Turkish invasion of the fifteenth century cut them off from western Europe. Similarly, beginning in 1460, there was a sudden rise of silver mining in central Europe, made possible by technological improvements which permitted the exploitation of what had been theretofore marginal mines. Perroy estimates that between 1460 and 1530 silver production quintupled in central Europe.87Nonetheless, the supply was not keeping pace with the demand, and the search for gold by the maritime route (thus, for Sudanic gold, circumventing North African intermediaries) was unquestionably one consideration for the early Portuguese navigators.88 When, therefore, the discovery of the Americas was to give Europe a richer source of gold than the Sudan and especially a far richer source of silver than central Europe, the economic consequences would be great.89

The bullion was sought to provide a monetary base for circulation within Europe but even more to export it to the Orient. For what? Again, every schoolboy knows: for spices and jewels. For whom? For the wealthy, who used them as the symbols of their conspicuous consumption. The spices were made into aphrodisiacs, as though the aristocracy could not make love otherwise. At this epoch, the relationship of Europe and Asia might be summed up as the exchange of preciosities. The bullion flowed east to decorate the temples, palaces, and clothing of Asian aristocratic classes and the jewels and spices flowed west. The accidents of cultural history (perhaps nothing more than physical scarcity) determined these complementary preferences. Henri Pirenne, and later Paul Sweezy, give this demand for luxuries a place of honor in the expansion of European commerce.90 I am skeptical, however, that the exchange of preciosities, however large it loomed in the conscious thinking of the European upper classes, could have sustained so colossal an enterprise as the expansion of the Atlantic world, much less accounted for the creation of a European world-economy.

In the long run, staples account for more of men’s economic thrusts than luxuries. What western Europe needed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was food (more calories and a better distribution of food values) and fuel. Expansion into Mediterranean and Atlantic islands, then to North and West Africa and across the Atlantic, as well as expansion into eastern Europe, the Russian steppes and eventually Central Asia provided food and fuel. It expanded the territorial base of European consumption by constructing a political economy in which this resource base was unequally consumed, disproportionately by western Europe. This was not the only way. There was also technological innovation which increased the yield of agriculture, innovation which began in Flanders as early as the thirteenth century and spread to England, but only in the sixteenth century.91 But such technological innovation was most likely to occur precisely where there was dense population and industrial growth, as in medieval Flanders, which were the very places where it became more profitable to turn the land use to commercial crops, cattle-breeding and horticulture, which consequently “required the import of corn [wheat] in large quantities. Only then could the complicated interlocking system of agriculture and industry function to its fullest advantage.”92 Hence, the process of agricultural innovation fed rather than foreclosed the necessity of expansion.

Wheat was a central focus of new production and new commerce in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At first, Europe found in northern forests and Mediterranean plains its “internal Americas,” in the perceptive phrase of Fernand Braudel.93 But internal Americas were not enough. There was expansion at the edges, first of all to the islands. Vitorino Magalhães-Godinho has put forward as a working hypothesis that agriculture was the major motivation of Portuguese colonization of the Atlantic islands, a hypothesis pursued by Joël Serrão, who noted that the development of these islands was speedy and in terms of “the tetralogy of cereals, sugar, dyes, and wine . . . . [There was] always a tendency towards monoculture, one or the other of the four products always being preferred.”94 The new wheat that was grown began to flow throughout the European continent, from the Baltic area to the Low Countries beginning in the fourteenth century95 and as far as Portugal by the fifteenth,96 from the Mediterranean to England and the Low Countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.97

Foods may be placed in a hierarchy in terms of their cost per 1000 calories. M. K. Bennett finds this hierarchy fairly stable over time and space. Milled-grain products and starchy roots and tubers are at the bottom of his eight tiers, that is, they are the cheapest, the most basic of the staples.98 But on grains alone a good diet is not built. One of the most important complements in the European diet is sugar, useful both as a calorie source and as a substitute for fats. Furthermore, it can also be used for alcoholic drinks (particularly rum). And later on, it would be used for chocolate, a usage which the Spaniards learned from the Aztecs, and which would become a highly appreciated drink, at least in Spain, by the seventeenth century.99

Sugar too was a principal motivation for island expansion. And, because of its mode of production, with sugar went slavery. This started in the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century and then moved westward.100 The Atlantic expansion was simply its logical continuation. Indeed, E. E. Rich traces African slavery in Portugal back to 1000 A.D., the slaves being acquired by trade with Mohammedan raiders.101 Sugar was a very lucrative and demanding product, pushing out wheat102 but then exhausting the soil, so that it required ever new lands (not to speak of the manpower exhausted by its cultivation).

Fish and meat are higher on Bennett’s list of categories. But they were wanted as sources of protein. Godinho cites the expansion of fishing areas as one of the key dynamics of early Portuguese exploration.103 Meat no doubt was less important than grain, and was considerably and steadily reduced in importance in the period from 1400 to 1750104—a proof of a point to which we shall return, that European workers paid part of the costs of European economic development.105 Nonetheless the desire for meat was one of the motivations of the spice trade, not the Asian spices for the aphrodisiacs of the rich but the West African grains of paradise (Amomum melegueta), used as a pepper substitute as well as for the spiced wine known as hippocras.106 These spices were “barely capable of making thin gruel acceptable.”107

If food needs dictated the geographical expansion of Europe, the food benefits turned out to be even greater than could have been anticipated. World ecology was altered and in a way which, because of the social organization of the emergent European world-economy, would primarily benefit Europe.108 In addition to food, the other great basic need was wood—wood for fuel, and wood for shipbuilding (and housebuilding). The economic development of the Middle Ages, and one must assume its crude forestry techniques, had led to a slow but steady deforestation of western Europe, Italy, and Spain, as well as Mediterranean islands. Oak became especially scarce.109 By the sixteenth century, the Baltic area had begun to export wood in large quantities to Holland, England, and the Iberian peninsula.

One other need of provisioning should be mentioned, the need of clothing. There was of course the luxury trade, the demand for silks, whose ancient history was linked with the demand for jewels and spices. The growing textile industry, the first major industry in Europe’s industrial development, was more than a luxury trade, however, and required materials for processing: dye-stuffs for cotton and wool textiles and gum used to stiffen the silks in the finishing process.110

Bullion was desired as a preciosity, for consumption in Europe and even more for trade with Asia, but it was also a necessity for the expansion of the European economy. We must ask ourselves why. After all, money as a means of payment can be made of anything, provided men will honor it. And indeed today we almost exclusively use nonbullion items as means of payment. Furthermore, Europe was beginning to do so in the late Middle Ages with the development of “money of account,” sometimes deceivingly called “imaginary money.”

It would however take centuries before metallic money approached the status of symbolic money.111 It is not yet totally there even today. As a result Europe was beset by constant mutations of value through debasement, so constant that Marc Bloch calls it “the universal thread of monetary history.”112 Yet no one seriously suggested then dispensing with bullion.

There were various reasons why not. Those who advised the governments were self-interested in the system.113 We must not forget that in the late Middle Ages, it was still the case that mints were commercial propositions serving private interests.114 But more fundamental than self-interest was the collective psychology of fear, based on the structural reality of a weakly-articulated economic system. The money of account might always collapse. It surely was in no man’s hands, however wealthy, to control it either singly or in collusion with others. Indeed, who knew, the whole monetary economy might once again collapse? It had before. Bullion was a hedge. The money of payment might always be used as a commodity, provided only the two uses of money, as measurement of value and means of payment, did not get too far apart.115 For this, the use of bullion was essential. And hence without it, Europe would have lacked the collective confidence to develop a capitalist system, wherein profit is based on various deferrals of realized value. This is a fortiori true given the system of a nonimperial world-economy which, for other reasons, was essential. Given this phenomenon of collective psychology, an integral element of the social structure of the time, bullion must be seen as an essential crop for a prospering world-economy.

The motives for exploration were to be found not only in the products Europe wished to obtain but in the job requirements of various groups in Europe. As H. V. Livermore reminds us, it was the Iberian chroniclers of the time and shortly thereafter who first noted that “the idea of carrying on the Reconquista in North Africa was suggested by the need to find useful employment for those who had lived on frontier raids for almost a quarter of a century.”116

We must recall the key problem of the decline in seigniorial income in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. M. M. Postan has called the consequent behavior of the English nobility “gangsterism,” the use of illegal violence to recover a lost standard of income. Similar phenomena occurred in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. One of the forms of this violence was surely expansion.117 The general principle that might be invoked is that if feudal nobles obtain less revenue from their land, they will actively seek to have more land from which to draw revenue, thus restoring real income to the level of social expectations. If then we ask why did Portugal expand overseas and not other European countries, one simple answer is that nobles in other countries were luckier. They had easier expansions to undertake, closer at home, using horses rather than ships. Portugal, because of its geography, had no choice.

No doubt overseas expansion has been traditionally linked with the interests of merchants, who stood to profit by the expanded trade, and with the monarchs who sought to ensure both glory and revenue for the throne. But it may well have been that the initial motivation for Iberian explorations came primarily from the interests of the nobility, particularly from the notorious “younger sons” who lacked land, and that it was only once the trade network began functioning that the more prudent merchants (often less entrepreneurial than nobles threatened by being déclassé) became enthusiastic.118

Was the cause of expansion overpopulation? This is one of those questions which confuse the issue. Braudel tells us that there was of course overpopulation in the western Mediterranean, and as proof he cites the repeated expulsion of Jews and later the Moriscos from various countries.119 But E. E. Rich assures us that, as a motivation for expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, “overspill for redundant population was negligible. . . . The probability (for it can be no more) is that the increasing population went to the wars or to the cities.”120 Yes, perhaps, but how were those who went to the cities (or to the wars) fed—and clothed and housed, etc.? There was physical room for the population, even the growing population, in Europe. Indeed that was part of the very problem that led to expansion. The physical room was one element in the strength of the peasantry vis-à-vis the nobility, and hence one factor in the decline of seigniorial revenues, in the crisis of feudalism. European societies could have responded in various ways. One way was to define themselves (at least implicitly) as overpopulated and therefore in need of a larger land base.121 Actually, what the nobility (and the bourgeoisie) needed, and what they would get, was a more tractable labor force. The size of the population was not the issue; it was the social relations that governed the interaction between upper and lower classes.

Finally, can overseas expansion be explained by the “crusading spirit,” the need to evangelize? Again, the question obscures the problem. No doubt Christianity took on a particularly militant form in the Iberian peninsula where the national struggles had for so long been defined in religious terms. No doubt this was an era of Christian defeatby Moslem Turks in south-eastern Europe (to the very gates of Vienna). And Atlantic expansion may well have reflected a psychological reaction to these events, “a phenomenon of compensation, a sort of flight forward,” as Chaunu suggests.122 No doubt the passions of Christianity explain many of the particular decisions taken by the Portuguese and Spaniards, perhaps some of the intensity of commitment or overcommitment. But it seems more plausible to see this religious enthusiasm as rationalization, one no doubt internalized by many of the actors, hence reinforcing and sustaining—and economically distorting. But history has seen passion turn to cynicism too regularly for one not to be suspicious of invoking such belief systems as primary factors in explaining the genesis and long-term persistence of large-scale social action.

All that we have said of motivation does not conclusively answer: why the Portuguese? We have talked of Europe’s material needs, a general crisis in seigniorial revenues. To be sure, we here adduced a particular interest of Portugal in solving this problem by Atlantic exploration; but it is not enough to be convincing. We must therefore turn from the issue of motivations to that of capabilities. Why was Portugal, of all the polities of Europe, most able to conduct the initial thrust? One obvious answer is found on any map. Portugal is located on the Atlantic, right next to Africa. In terms of the colonization of Atlantic islands and the exploration of the western coast of Africa, it was obviously closest. Furthermore, the oceanic currents are such that it was easiest, especially given the technology of the time, to set forth from Portuguese ports (as well as those of southwest Spain).123

In addition, Portugal already had much experience with long-distance trade. Here, if Portugal cannot match the Venetians or the Genoese, recent research has demonstrated that their background was significant and probably the match of the cities of northern Europe.124

A third factor was the availability of capital. The Genoese, the great rivals of the Venetians, decided early on to invest in Iberian commercial enterprise and to encourage their efforts at overseas expansion.125 By the end of the fifteenth century, the Genoese would prefer the Spaniards to the Portuguese, but that is largely because the latter could by then afford to divest themselves of Genoese sponsorship, tutelage, and cut in the profit. Verlinden calls Italy “the only really colonizing nation during the middle ages.”126 In the twelfth century when Genoese and Pisans first appear in Catalonia,127 in the thirteenth century when they first reach Portugal,128 this is part of the efforts of the Italians to draw the Iberian peoples into the international trade of the time. But once there, the Italians would proceed to play an initiating role in Iberian colonization efforts because, by having come so early, “they were able to conquer the key positions of the Iberian peninsula itself.”129 As of 1317, according to Virginia Rau, “the city and the port of Lisbon would be the great centre of Genoese trade. . . .”130 To be sure, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Portuguese merchants began to complain about the “undue intervention [of the Italians] in the retail trade of the realm, which threatened the dominant position of national merchants in that branch of trade.”131The solution was simple, and to some extent classic. The Italians were absorbed by marriage and became landed aristocrats both in Portugal and on Madeira.

There was one other aspect of the commercial economy that contributed to Portugal’s venturesomeness, compared to say France or England. It was ironically that it was least absorbed in the zone that would become the European world-economy, but rather tied in a significant degree to the Islamic Mediterranean zone. As a consequence, her economy was relatively more monetized, her population relatively more urbanized.132

It was not geography nor mercantile strength alone, however, that accounted for Portugal’s edge. It was also the strength of its state machinery. Portugal was in this regard very different from other west European states, different that is during the fifteenth century. She knew peace when they knew internal warfare.133 The stability of the state was important not only because it created the climate in which entrepreneurs could flourish and because it encouraged nobility to find outlets for their energies other than internal or inter-European warfare. The stability of the state was crucial also because it itself was in many ways the chief entrepreneur.134 When the state was stable, it could devote its energies to profitable commercial ventures. For Portugal, as we have seen, the logic of its geohistory dictated Atlantic expansion as the most sensible commercial venture for the state.

Why Portugal? Because she alone of the European states maximized will and possibility. Europe needed a larger land base to support the expansion of its economy, one which could compensate for the critical decline in seigniorial revenues and which could cut short the nascent and potentially very violent class war which the crisis of feudalism implied. Europe needed many things: bullion, staples, proteins, means of preserving protein, foods, wood, materials to process textiles. And it needed a more tractable labor force.

But “Europe” must not be reified. There was no central agency which acted in terms of these long-range objectives. The real decisions were taken by groups of men acting in terms of their immediate interests. In the case of Portugal, there seemed to be advantage in the “discovery business” for many groups—for the state, for the nobility, for the commercial bourgeoisie (indigenous and foreign), even for the semiproletariat of the towns.

For the state, a small state, the advantage was obvious. Expansion was the most likely route to the expansion of revenue and the accumulation of glory. And the Portuguese state, almost alone among the states of Europe of the time, was not distracted by internal conflict. It had achieved moderate political stability at least a century earlier than Spain, France, and England.

It was precisely this stability which created the impulse for the nobility. Faced with the same financial squeeze as European nobles elsewhere, they were deprived of the soporific and financial potential (if they won) of internecine warfare. Nor could they hope to recoup their financial position by internal colonization. Portugal lacked the land. So they were sympathetic to the concept of oceanic expansion and they offered their “younger sons” to provide the necessary leadership for the expeditions.

The interests of the bourgeoisie for once did not conflict with those of the nobility. Prepared for modern capitalism by a long apprenticeship in long-distance trading and by the experience of living in one of the most highly monetized areas of Europe (because of the economic involvement with the Islamic Mediterranean world), the bourgeoisie too sought to escape the confines of the small Portuguese market. To the extent that they lacked the capital, they found it readily available from the Genoese who, for reasons of their own having to do with their rivalry with Venice, were ready to finance the Portuguese. And the potential conflict of the indigenous and foreign bourgeoisie was muted by the willingness of the Genoese to assimilate into Portuguese culture over time.

Finally, exploration and the consequent trade currents provided job outlets for the urban semiproletariat many of whom had fled to the towns because of the increased exploitation consequent upon the seigniorial crisis. Once again, a potential for internal disorder was minimized by the external expansion.

And if these conjunctures of will and possibility were not enough, Portugal was blessed by the best possible geographic location for the enterprise, best possible both because of its jutting out into the Atlantic and toward the south but also because of the convergence of favorable oceanic currents. It does not seem surprising thus, in retrospect, that Portugal made the plunge.

There is one last issue we must confront before we can proceed with the main part of the book. Thus far we have been concerned with explaining what it was that led Europe to the brink of creating a capitalist world-economy. Since our emphasis will be on how capitalism is only feasible within the framework of a world-economy and not within that of a world-empire, we must explore briefly why this should be so. The apt comparison is of Europe and China, which had approximately the same total population from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.135 As Pierre Chaunu elegantly states:

That Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama . . . weren’t Chinese, . . . is something which is worth . . . some moments of reflection. After all, at the end of the 15th century, insofar as the historical literature permits us to understand it, the Far-East as an entity comparable to the Mediterranean . . . is in no way inferior, superficially at least, to the far-west of the Eurasian continent.136

In no way inferior? This requires the traditional comparison of technologies, and here the scholars are divided. For Lynn White, Jr., Europe expanded in the sixteenth century because Europe outstripped the rest of the world in the technology of agriculture as early as the ninth century A.D.:

Between the first half of the 6th century and the end of the 9th century Northern Europe created or received a series of inventions which quickly coalesced into an entirely novel system of agriculture. In terms of a peasant’s labor, this was by far the most productive the world has seen. [White is referring to the heavy plough, the three-field rotation system, open fields for cattle, the modern harness and horseshoe]. . . . As the various elements in this new system were perfected and diffused, more food became available, and population rose. . . . And the new productivity of each northern peasant enabled more of them to leave the land for the cities, industry and commerce.137

White also argues that northern Europe pulled ahead in military technology in the eighth century and in industrial production in the eleventh. If one asks why this should be so, White attributes this to the profound upheaval of the barbarian invasions, to which the West presumably had a Toynbeean creative reaction.138

Other scholars however disagree on the factual assessment. Take military technology. Carlo Cipolla argues:

It is likely that Chinese guns were at least as good as Western guns, if not better, up to the beginning of the 15th century. However, in the course of the 15th century, European technology made noticeable progress. . . . European artillery was incomparably more powerful than any kind of cannon ever made in Asia, and it is not difficult to find, in [ 16th century] texts echoes of the mixture of terror and surprise that arose at the appearance of European ordnance.139

Similarly, Joseph Needham, who is still in the midst of his monumental account of the history of Chinese science and technology, dates the moment of European technological and industrial advantage over China only at 1450 A.D.140 What accounts for the European surge forward? Not one thing, says Needham, but “an organic whole, a packet of change.”

The fact is that in the spontaneous autochthonous development of Chinese society no drastic change parallel to the Renaissance and the “scientific revolution” of the West occurred at all. I often like to sketch the Chinese evolution as represented by a relatively slowly rising curve, noticeably running at a much higher level than Europe between, say, the 2nd and 15th centuries A.D. But then after the scientific renaissance had begun in the West with the Galilean revolution, with what one might call the discovery of the basic technique of scientific discovery itself, then the curve of science and technology in Europe begins to rise in a violent, almost exponential manner, overtaking the level of the Asian societies. . . . This violent disturbance is now beginning to right itself.141

Some scholars insist on the crucial role of the development of the rudder in Europe in the fifteenth century.142 But Needham argues the existence of a rudder in China since ± first century A.D., an invention probably diffused from China to Europe in the twelfth century A.D.143

If Needham’s account of Chinese technological competence and superiority over the West until the latter’s sudden surge forward is correct, then it is even more striking that Chinese and Portuguese overseas exploration began virtually simultaneously, but that after a mere 28 years the Chinese pulled back into a continental shell and ceased all further attempts. Not for lack of success, either. The seven voyages of the eunuch-admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1433 were a great success. He traveled the breadth of the Indian Ocean from Java to Ceylon to East Africa in his seven voyages, bringing back tribute and exotica to the Chinese court, which was highly appreciative. The voyages ceased when Cheng Ho died in 1434. Furthermore, when, in 1479, Wang Chin, also a eunuch, interested in launching a military expedition to Annam, applied to the archives to consult Cheng Ho’s papers on Annam, he was refused access. The papers were suppressed, as if to blot out the very memory of Cheng Ho.144

The origins of the expeditions and the causes of their cession are equally unclear. It seems to be the case that they were constantly opposed by the official bureaucracy of Confucian mandarins.145 The question is why. They seem, on the contrary, to have been supported by the Emperor. How else could they have been launched? Further evidence is found by T’ien-Tsê Chang in the fact that, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the function of the Bureau of Trading Junks, a state institution since the eighth century A.D., was shifted from that of collecting customs (which now became a provincial function) to that of transmitting tribute, which was to be sure of considerable importance in the era of Cheng Ho. Chang asks of the decentralization of customs collections, which presumably permitted lowered barriers in some regions: “[Did not the Emperor] have an eye to encouraging foreign trade the importance of which to China was only too evident?”146

Only too evident, yet soon encouragement ceased. Why? For William Willetts, this has something to do with the Weltanschauung of the Chinese. They lacked, it is argued, a sort of colonizing mission precisely because, in their arrogance, they were already the whole of the world.147 In addition, Willetts sees two more immediate explanations for the cessation of exploration: the “pathological hatred felt by Confucian officialdom toward the eunuchs”148 and the “drain on Treasury funds occasioned by the fitting-out of overseas missions.”149 The latter seems a strange reason, since the drain would presumably have been compensated by the income colonial enterprises might have generated. At least so it seemed to European treasuries of the same epoch.

There are other explanations which argue in terms of alternative foci of political attention diverting the initial interest in Indian Ocean exploration. For example G. F. Hudson argues that the removal northward of the capital, from Nanking to Peking in 1421, which was the consequence of the growing menace of the Mongol nomad barbarians, may have diverted imperial attention.150 Boxer sees the distraction as having been the menace from the east in the Wako or Japanese piratical marauding bands that preyed on the coast of China.151 M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz suggests that the pull of withdrawal may have been abetted by the push of expulsion by Moslem traders in the Indian Ocean.152

Even if all these things are true, it does not seem enough. Why was there not the internal motivation that would have treated these external difficulties as setbacks rather than as definitive obstacles? Was it, as some writers have suggested, that China simply did not want to expand?153 Pierre Chaunu gives us a clue when he suggests that one of the things that was lacking to China was a lack of “groups with convergent wills” to expand.154 This is more telling, since we remember that in Portugal what is striking is the parallel interests in overseas exploration and expansion shown by varied social groups. Let us review therefore the ways in which the European and Chinese world differed.

There is first a significant difference in agronomy. We discussed the emphasis on meat consumption in Europe, an emphasis which increased with the “crisis” of the fourteenth century. And while meat consumption for the mass of the population would later decline from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this did not necessarily mean a decline in the use of land for cattle rather than for grain. The absolute size of the upper classes going up from the sixteenth century on in Europe because of the dramatic rise in population, the same land area might have been used for meat. This would not be inconsistent with a relative decline in meat consumption by the lower classes, who would obtain their grains by import from peripheral areas as well as by more intensive cultivation in western Europe as the result of technological advance.

China by contrast was seeking a stronger agricultural base by developing rice production in the southeastern parts of the country. The emphasis on cattle in Europe led to the extensive use of animal muscular power as an engine of production. Rice is far more fruitful in calories per acre but far more demanding of manpower.

Thus, Chaunu notes, European use of animal power means that “European man possessed in the 15th century a motor, more or less five times as powerful as that possessed by Chinese man, the next most favored in the world at the time of the discoveries.”155

But even more important than this technological advance for our problem is the implication of this different relationship of man to the land. As Chaunu puts it:

The European wastes space. Even at the demographic lowpoint of the beginning of the 15th century, Europe lacked space. . . . But if Europe lacks space, China lacks men. . . .

The Western “take-off” occurs seemingly at the same date (11th-13th centuries) as the Chinese ‘take-off of rice-production, hut it is infinitely more revolutionary, to the extent that it condemns the great Mediterranean area to the conquest of the Earth. . . .

In every way, the Chinese failure of the 15th century results less from a relative paucity of means than of motivations. The principal motivation remains the need, often subconscious, for space.156

Here at least we have a plausible explanation of why China might not want to expand overseas. China had in fact been expanding, but internally, extending its rice production within its frontiers. Europe’s “internal Americas” in the fifteenth century were quickly exhausted, given an agronomy that depended on more space. Neither men nor societies engage in difficult tasks gratuitously. Exploration and colonization are difficult tasks.

One last consideration might be that, for some reason, the fifteenth century marked for China what Van der Sprenkel calls a “counter-colonization,” a shift of population out of the rice-producing areas.157 While this may have relieved the “over-population,” a term always relative to social definition, it may have weakened China’s industrializing potential without the compensating advantages of a colonial empire. The “take-off” may have thus collapsed.

There is a second great difference between Europe and China. China is a vast empire, as is the Turco-Moslem world at this time. Europe is not. It is a nascent world-economy, composed of small empires, nation-states, and city-states. There are many ways in which this difference was important.

Let us start with the arguments that Weber makes about the implications of the two forms of disintegration of an empire: feudalization, as in western Europe, and prebendalization, as in China.158 He argues that a newly centralized state is more likely to emerge from a feudal than from a prebendal system. Weber’s case is as follows:

The occidental seigneurie, like the oriental Indian, developed through the disintegration of the central authority of the patrimonial state power—the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire in the Occident, the disintegration of the Caliphs and the Maharadja or Great Moguls in India. In the Carolingian Empire, however, the new stratum developed on the basis of a rural subsistence economy. [Hence, it was presumably at a lower level of economic development than its oriental counterparts.] Through oath-bound vassalage, patterned after the war following, the stratum of lords was joined to the king and interposed itself between the freemen and the king. Feudal relations were also to be found in India, but they were not decisive for the formation either of a nobility or landlordism.

In India, as in the Orient generally, a characteristic seigniory developed rather out of tax farming [presumably because the central power was still strong enough to insist on taxes and the economy developed enough and with enough money-circulation to furnish the basic surplus for taxation; as compared with the presumably less developed Occident of the early Middle Ages] and the military and tax prebends of a far more bureaucratic state. The oriental seigniory therefore remained in essence, a “prebend” and did not become a ‘fief’; not feudalization, but prebendalization of the patrimonial state occurred. The comparable, though undeveloped, occidental parallel is not the medieval fief but the purchase of offices and prebends during the papal seicento or during the days of the French Noblesse de Robe . . . . [Also] a purely military factor is important for the explanation of the different development of East and West. In Europe the horseman was technically a paramount force of feudalism. In India, in spite of their numbers, horsemen were relatively less important and efficient than the foot soldiers who held a primary role in the armies from Alexander to the Moguls.159

The logic of Weber’s argument runs something like this: A technical factor (the importance of horsemen) leads to the strength of the intermediate warriors vis-à-vis the center during the process of disintegration of an empire. Hence the new social form that emerges is feudalism rather than a prebendal state, in which the center is relatively stronger than in a feudal system. Also, the economy of a feudal system is less developed than that of a prebendal system. (But is this cause or consequence? Weber is not clear.) In the short run, feudalization is obviously better from the standpoint of landlords, since it gives them more power (and more income?). In the long run, however, a prebendal land-controlling class can better resist the growth of a truly centralized monarchy than a feudal landowning class, because the feudal value system can be used by the king, insofar as he can make himself the apex of a single hierarchical system of feudal relations (it took the Capetians several centuries to accomplish this), to build a system of loyalty to himself which, once constructed, can simply shed the personal element and become loyalty to a nation of which the king is the incarnation. Prebendalism, being a far more truly contractual system than feudalism, cannot be conned by such mystical ties. (In which case, incidentally and in passing, we could see the growing prebendalism of eighteenth century France as regressive, and the French Revolution as an attempt to recoup the regression.)

Joseph Levenson, in a book devoted to the question, why not China?, comes up with an answer not too dissimilar from that of Weber:

Ideally and logically, feudalism as a sociological “ideal type” is blankly opposed to capitalism. But historically and chronologically it gave it stimulation. The very absence of feudal restraints in China put a greater obstacle in the way of the expansion of capitalism (and capitalistic world expansion) than their presence in Europe. For the non-feudal bureaucratic society of China, a self-charging, persisting society, just insofar as it was ideally more congenial than feudal society to elementary capitalist forms, accommodated and blanketed the embryonic capitalism, and ruined its revolutionary potential. Is it any wonder, then, that even in Portugal, one of the least of the capitalist powers in the end, a social process quite the reverse of China’s should release the force of expansion instead of contracting it? It was a process in Portugal and Western Europe generally, of a protocapitalist extrication from feudalism and erosion of feudalism. And this was a process quite different from the persistence in China of a non-feudal, bureaucratic society, a depressant of feudalism—and of capitalism, too.160

Here we have an argument we shall encounter frequently: Initial receptivity of a system to new forms does not lead to gradual continuous change but rather to the stifling of the change, whereas initial resistance often leads later on to a breakthrough.

Feudalization brought with it the dismantling of the imperial structure, whereas prebendalization maintained it. Power and income was distributed in the one case to ever more autonomous landlords, rooted in an area, linked to a given peasantry, and in the other to an empire-wide stratum, deliberately not linked to the local area, semi-universalistic in recruitment but hence dependent upon the favor of the center. To strengthen the center of an empire was a colossal job, one only begun in the twentieth century under the Chinese Communist Party. To create centralized units in smaller areas was impossible as long as the center maintained any coherence, which it did under the Ming and then the successor Manchu dynasty; whereas creating centralized units in a feudal system was, as we know, feasible if difficult. Weber outlined the reasons quite clearly:

A general result of oriental patrimonialism with its pecuniary prebends was that, typically, only military conquest or religious revolutions could shatter the firm structure of prebendary interests, thus creating new power distributions and in turn new economic conditions. Any attempt at internal innovation, however, was wrecked by the aforementioned obstacles. Modern Europe, as noted, is a great historical exception to this because, above all, pacification of a unified empire was lacking. We may recall that, in the Warring States, the very stratum of state prebendiaries who blocked administrative rationalization in the world empire were once its most powerful promoters. Then, the stimulus was gone. Just as competition for markets compelled the rationalization of private enterprise, so competition for political power compelled the rationalization of state economy and economic policy both in the Occident and in the China of the Warring States. In the private economy, cartellization weakens ration?’ calculation which is the soul of capitalism; among states, power monopoly prostrates rational management in administration, finance, and economic policy. . . . In addition to the aforementioned difference in the Occident, there were strong and independent forces. With these princely power could ally itself in order to shatter traditional fetters; or, under very special conditions, these forces could use their own military power to throw off the bonds of patrimonial power.161

There is another factor to consider in envisaging the relationship of the regional center or the forward point of a system with the periphery in a world-economy versus an empire. An empire is responsible for administering and defending a huge land and population mass. This drains attention, energy, and profits which could be invested in capital development. Take for example the issue of the Japanese Wako and their presumed impact on Chinese expansion. In principle, the Wako were less of a problem to China than the Turks to Europe. But when the Turks advanced in the east, there was no European emperor to recall the Portuguese expeditions. Portugal was not diverted from its overseas adventures to defend Vienna, because Portugal had no political obligation to do so, and there was no machinery by which it could be induced to do so, nor any Europe-wide social group in whose interests such diversion would be.

Nor would expansion have seemed as immediately beneficial to a European emperor as it did to a Portuguese king. We discussed how the Chinese emperor may have seen, and the Chinese bureaucracy did see, Cheng Ho’s expeditions as a drain on the treasury, whereas the need for increasing the finances of the state was one of the very motives of European expansion. An empire cannot be conceived of as an entrepreneur as can a state in a world-economy. For an empire pretends to be the whole. It cannot enrich its economy by draining from other economies, since it is the only economy. (This was surely the Chinese ideology and was probably their belief.) One can of course increase the share of the Emperor in the distribution of the economy. But this means the state seeks not entrepreneurial profits but increased tribute. And the very form of tribute may become economically self-defeating, as soon as political strength of the center wanes, because under such circumstances, the payment of “tribute” may be a disguised form of trade disadvantageous to the empire.162

There is a link too between military technology and the presence of an imperial framework. Carlo Cipolla raises the question as to why the Chinese did not adopt the military technological advantages they saw the Portuguese had. He suggests the following explanation: “Fearing internal bandits no less than foreign enemies and internal uprisings no less than foreign invasion, the Imperial Court did its best to limit both the spread of the knowledge of gunnery and the proliferation of artisans versed in the art.”163 In Europe with its multiplicity of sovereignties, there was no hope of limiting the spread of arms. In China, apparently, it was still possible, and hence the centralized system backed off a technological advance essential in the long run for the maintenance of its power. Once again, the imperial form may have served as a structural constraint, this time on technological development.

One last puzzle remains. There emerged in China at this time an ideology of individualism, that of the Wang Yang-ming school, which William T. Du Bary sees as comparable to humanist doctrines in the West, and which he calls a “near-revolution in thought,” that however failed “to develop fully.”164 Did not individualism as an ideology signal the strength of an emergent bourgeoisie, and sustain it against traditionalist forces?

Quite the contrary, it seems, according to Roland Mousnier. His analysis of the social conflicts of Ming China argues that individualism was the weapon of the Confucian mandarins, the bureaucratic class which was so “modern” in outlook, against the eunuchs, who were “entrepreneurial” and “feudal” at the same time, and who represented the “nationalist” thrust of Ming China.165 Mousnier argues as follows:

To advance their career [in Ming China], a large part of the educated classes of middle-class origin voluntarily became castrates. Because of their education, they were able to play a preponderant role and the Empire was in reality ruled by these eunuchs.

Once having obtained high posts, they aided their families, created for themselves a clientele by distributing offices and fiefs, became veritable powers within the Empire itself. The large role played by eunuchs seems to be therefore a function of the rise of the bourgeoisie. The princes of the blood and the men of importance [les grands] sought to defend themselves by creating a clientele also made up of educated men of middle-class origin whom they pushed forward in the civil service. . . . [This latter group] were sometimes disciples of Wang Yang-ming and invoked his precepts to oppose the eunuchs who were established in power. The eunuchs were for Chu Hi, defender of tradition and authority [to which the eunuchs had, at this point, primary access]. These struggles were all the more serious since princes of the blood, men of importance, and eunuchs all had a power base as land-controllers [maîtres du sol]. The Mings had sought to reinforce their position by creating a sort of feudalism of relatives and supporters. . . . The victim of this state of affairs was the peasant. The expenses of the State grew ceaselessly.166

So, of course, did they in Europe, but in Europe, these expenses supported a nascent bourgeoisie and an aristocracy that sought ultimately, as we shall see, to save itself by becoming bourgeois, as the bourgeois were becoming aristocratic. In Ming China, the ideology that served the western bourgeoisie to achieve its ultimate conquest of power was directed against this very bourgeoisie who (having achieved some power too early?) were cast in the role of defenders of tradition and authority. There is much that remains to be elucidated here, but it casts doubt on the too simple correlation of the ideology of individualism and the rise of capitalism. It surely casts doubt on any causal statement that would make the emergence of such an ideology primary.

The argument on China comes down to the following. It is doubtful that there was any significant difference between Europe and China in the fifteenth century on certain base points: population, area, state of technology (both in agriculture and in naval engineering). To the extent that there were differences it would be hard to use them to account for the magnitude of the difference of development in the coming centuries. Furthermore the difference in value systems seems both grossly exaggerated and, to the extent it existed, once again not to account for the different consequences. For, as we tried to illustrate, idea systems are capable of being used in the service of contrary interests, capable of being associated with quite different structural thrusts. The tenants of the primacy of values, in their eagerness to refute materialist arguments, seem guilty themselves of assuming a far more literal correspondence of ideology and social structure (though they invert the causal order) than classical Marxism ever was.

The essential difference between China and Europe reflects once again the conjuncture of a secular trend with a more immediate economic cycle. The long-term secular trend goes back to the ancient empires of Rome and China, the ways in which and the degree to which they disintegrated. While the Roman framework remained a thin memory whose medieval reality was mediated largely by a common church, the Chinese managed to retain an imperial political structure, albeit a weakened one. This was the difference between a feudal system and a world-empire based on a prebendal bureaucracy. China could maintain a more advanced economy in many ways than Europe as a result of this. And quite possibly the degree of exploitation of the peasantry over a thousand years was less.

To this given, we must add the more recent agronomic thrusts of each, of Europe toward cattle and wheat, and of China toward rice. The latter requiring less space but more men, the secular pinch hit the two systems in different ways. Europe needed to expand geographically more than did China. And to the extent that some groups in China might have found expansion rewarding, they were restrained by the fact that crucial decisions were centralized in an imperial framework that had to concern itself first and foremost with short-run maintenance of the political equilibrium of its world-system.

So China, if anything seemingly better placed prima facie to move forward to capitalism in terms of already having an extensive state bureaucracy, being further advanced in terms of the monetization of the economy and possibly of technology as well, was nonetheless less well placed after all. It was burdened by an imperial political structure. It was burdened by the “rationality” of its value system which denied the state the leverage for change (had it wished to use it) that European monarchs found in the mysticality of European feudal loyalties.

We are now ready to proceed with our argument. As of 1450, the stage was set in Europe but not elsewhere for the creation of a capitalist world-economy. This system was based on two key institutions, a “world”-wide division of labor and bureaucratic state machineries in certain areas. We shall treat each successively and globally. Then we shall look at the three zones of the world-economy each in turn: what we shall call the semiperiphery, the core, and the periphery. We treat them in this order largely for reasons of historical sequence which will become clear in the exposition of the argument. It will then be possible to review the totality of the argument at a more abstract level. We choose to do this at the end rather than at the beginning not only in the belief that the case will be more convincing once the empirical material has been presented but also in the conviction that the final formulation of theory should result from the encounter with empirical reality, provided that the encounter has been informed by a basic perspective that makes it possible to perceive this reality.

THE NEW EUROPEAN DIVISION OF LABOR C. 1450–1640

It was in the sixteenth century that there came to be a European world-economy based upon the capitalist mode of production. The most curious aspect of this early period is that capitalists did not flaunt their colors before the world. The reigning ideology was not that of free enterprise, or even individualism or science or naturalism or nationalism. These would all take until the eighteenth or nineteenth century to mature as world views. To the extent that an ideology seemed to prevail, it was that of statism, the raison d’état. Why should capitalism, a phenomenon that knew no frontiers, have been sustained by the development of strong states? This is a question which has no single answer. But it is not a paradox; quite the contrary. The distinctive feature of a capitalist world-economy is that economic decisions are oriented primarily to the arena of the world-economy, while political decisions are oriented primarily to the smaller structures that have legal control, the states (nation-states, city-states, empires) within the world-economy.

This double orientation, this “distinction” if you will, of the economic and political is the source of the confusion and mystification concerning the appropriate identification for groups to make, the reasonable and reasoned manifestations of group interest. Since, however, economic and political decisions cannot be meaningfully dissociated or discussed separately, this poses acute analytical problems. We shall handle them by attempting to treat them consecutively, alluding to the linkages, and pleading with the reader to suspend judgment until he can see the whole of the evidence in synthesis. No doubt we shall, wittingly and otherwise, violate our own rule of consecutiveness many times, but this at least is our organizing principle of presentation. If it seems that we deal with the larger system as an expression of capitalism and the smaller systems as expressions of statism (or, to use the current fashionable terminology, of national development), we never deny the unity of the concrete historical development. The states do not develop and cannot be understood except within the context of the development of the world-system.

The same is true of both social classes and ethnic (national, religious) groupings. They too came into social existence within the framework of states and of the world-system, simultaneously and sometimes in contradictory fashions. They are a function of the social organization of the time. The modern class system began to take its shape in the sixteenth century.

When, however, was the sixteenth century? Not so easy a question, if we remember that historical centuries are not necessarily chronological ones. Here I shall do no more than accept the judgment of Fernand Braudel, both because of the solidity of scholarship on which it is based, and because it seems to fit in so well with the data as I read them. Braudel says:

I am skeptical . . . of a sixteenth century about which one doesn’t specify if it is one or several, about which ones gives to understand that it is a unity. I see “our” century as divided in two, as did Lucien Febvre and my remarkable teacher Henri Hauser, a first century beginning about 1450 and ending about 1550, a second one starting up at that point and lasting until 1620 or 1640.1

The starting points and ending points vary according to the national perspective from which one views the century. However, for the European world-economy as a whole, we consider 1450–1640 the meaningful time unit, during which was created a capitalist world-economy, one to be sure that was, in Braudel’s phrase, “vast but weak.”2

And where was this European world-economy? That too is difficult to answer. For the historical continents are not necessarily geographical ones. The European world-economy included by the end of the sixteenth century not only northwest Europe and the Christian Mediterranean (including Iberia) but also Central Europe and the Baltic region. It also included certain regions of the Americas: New Spain, the Antilles, Terraferma, Peru, Chile, Brazil—or rather those parts of these regions which were under effective administrative control of the Spanish or Portuguese. Atlantic islands and perhaps a few enclaves on the African coast might also be included in it, but not the Indian Ocean areas; not the Far East, except perhaps, for a time, part of the Philippines; not the Ottoman Empire; and not Russia, or at most Russia was marginally included briefly. There are no clear and easy lines to draw, but I think it most fruitful to think of the sixteenth century European world as being constructed out of the linkage of two formerly more separate systems, the Christian Mediterranean system3 centering on the Northern Italian cities and the Flanders–Hanseatic trade network of north and northwest Europe, and the attachment to this new complex on the one hand of East Elbia, Poland, and some other areas of eastern Europe, and on the other hand of the Atlantic islands and parts of the New World.

In sheer space, this was quite an expansion. Just taking into account formal overseas colonies of European powers, Chaunu notes that in the five years between 1535 and 1540, Spain achieved control over more than half the population of the Western Hemisphere, and that in the period between then and 1670–1680, the area under European control went from about three million square kilometers to about seven (to be stabilized at that point until the end of the eighteenth century.4 However, expanding the space did not mean expanding the population. Chaunu speaks of a “demographic scissors movement” wherein demographic growth in Europe “is largely nullified at the planetary level by the decline in immense extra-European sectors.”5 Hence, the land/labor ratio of the European world-economy was immensely increased, one fundamental factor in Europe’s ability to sustain continued economic growth in this critical early period of the modern era. But expansion involved more than an improved land/labor ratio. It made possible the large-scale accumulation of basic capital which was used to finance the rationalization of agricultural production. One of the most obvious characteristics of this sixteenth century European world-economy was a secular inflation, the so-called price revolution. The connection between this particular inflation and the process of capital accumulation has been a central theme of modern historiography. We propose to try to sift through the complexities of this debate in order that, in the light of the patterns we observe, we shall be able to explain the particular division of labor that the European world-economy arrived at by the end of this epoch.

The cyclical pattern of European prices has a voluminous history behind it, and although scholars differ about dates and even more about causes, the reality of the phenomenon is agreed. If we put together two recent summaries6 of the prices of grains, we get the following picture:

1160–1260—rapid rise

1260–1310 (1330, 1380)—consistently high

1310 (1330, 1380)–1480—gradual fall

1480–1620 (1650)—high

1620 (1650)–1734 (1755)—recession

1734 (1755)–1817—rise

If we take the more narrow segment with which we are presently concerned, the sixteenth century, which appears on the above listing as “high,” there were of course economic fluctuations within that. Pierre Chaunu has uncovered the following cycle, based on his monumental study of the records of the Casa de Contratación in Seville, the key entrepôt of trans-Atlantic trade. By using measures of volume (both overall and for specific merchandises) and of value, Chaunu sees four periods:

1504–1550—steady rise

1550–1562/3—relatively minor recession

1562/3–1610—expansion

1610–1650—recession7

Volume and value measures are not to be sure identical. “The index of flow is likened, in an exaggerated fashion, to the fluctuation of prices. The peculiar price curve is flatter than that of trade-flow.”8 Chaunu considers his breaking point of 1610 to fit in with those of Elsas for Germany (1627) and of Posthumus for the Low Countries (1637) for, as we shall see, the decline set in at different times for different parts of Europe.9

These time discrepancies remind us that the world-economy was only in the process of emergence. Chaunu points out that in the fifteenth century, the three European trade areas (the Christian Mediterranean, the northwest, and eastern Europe) were at three different price levels, ranging respectively from expensive to inexpensive. The creation of a world-economy can be precisely measured by the “fantastic spread of prices at the beginning [of the century], and in the long run the closing of the gap.”10 Though the long run is longer than the sixteenth century, progress in closing the gap can be seen. If in 1500, the price gap between the Christian Mediterranean and eastern Europe was on the order of 6 to 1, by 1600 it was only 4 to 1,11 and by 1750 it was only 2 to 1. Henryk Samsonowicz says that from the early sixteenth century on, Prussian wages and prices came “closer and closer” to those in western Europe “despite the diametrically opposed directions of their social and economic development.”12 Despite? Should it not read “because of’?

One major explanation of the price rise of the sixteenth century has been that of Earl J. Hamilton. He first argued it in relation to sixteenth century Andalusian prices, later applying it more generally to western Europe:

Throughout the period under investigation there was a close connection between the imports of American gold and silver and Andalusian prices. . . . Commencing with the period 1503–1505 there was an upward trend in the arrivals of treasure until 1595, while from 1503 to 1597 there was a continuous rise in Andalusian prices. The greatest rises in prices coincide with the greatest increase in the imports of gold and silver. The correlation between imports of treasure and prices persists after 1600, when both are on the decline.13

By 1960, Hamilton’s theory had been subject to much attack, both empirical and theoretical. Nonetheless, he reasserted it even more vigorously:

[The increase of bullion supply since 1500] was probably much greater percentagewise than the price upheaval. So rather than seek ancillary causes of the Price Revolution, . . . one needs to explain the failure of prices to keep pace with the increase of stock of precious metals. Increased utilization of gold and silver for plate, ornamentation, jewelry and other non-monetary purposes as they became relatively cheaper through rising commodity prices neutralized some of the new bullion. . . . Liquidation of the unfavourable trade balance [with the Orient] absorbed large amounts of specie. . . . Conversion of produce rents into money payments, a shift from wages partially in kind to monetary renumeration and a decline in barter also tended to counteract the augmentation of gold and silver supply.14

As many of his critics have observed, Hamilton is working with Fisher’s quantity theory of money which states that PQ = MV and implicitly assuming that V and Q are remaining constant (P is equal to prices; Q is equal to the quantity of goods and services; M is equal to the quantity of money; and V is equal to the velocity of circulation). They have doubted the assumption and called for empirical enquiry.

In a major attack on Hamilton, Ingrid Hammarström argued that Hamilton had gotten his sequence wrong, that it was an increase in economic activity which led to an increase in prices which then accounts for the mining activities which produced the increased supply of bullion. To which Hamilton retorts:

Obviously the “rise in prices” usually resulting from “economic activity which somehow comes about” . . . would curb, not increase, mining of the precious metal through rising costs of production in conjunction with fixed mint prices of precious metals. Furthermore, the rise in prices would decrease, not increase, the coinage of existing bullion by relatively cheapening it for nonmonetary use15

But why need the mint prices have been fixed? This was a policy decision and it would scarcely have benefited those who would profit by the flow of bullion in expanding times (which included the Spanish crown) to discourage its production when such a large quantity was suddenly available at such low real cost (given the form of labor). As Hammarström points out, the fundamental question is what explains the use to which the bullion was put:

Why did Western Europe need the American bullion, not to be hoarded as treasure nor to be used as ornaments in the holy places (the use to which it was put in Asia and among the natives of America), but to form an important addition to its body of circulative coin—that is, as a medium of payment?16

Y.S. Brenner argues that a look at English data confirms Hammarström. He finds that the changes in the commodity-price level resulted “less from an increase, or lack of increase, in the European stock of metal, than from the manner in which this stock was employed.”17 He notes that the price rise antedates the arrival of American treasure.18Brenner argues that one should perceive that all the factors in Fisher’s equation were variable at this time:

In conclusion, the rise in prices during the first half of the 16th century was due to a combination of an increased velocity and volume of currency in circulation with a relatively decreased supply of, and intensified tightness of demand for, agricultural products. . . .

The velocity (V) of the circulation was increased by the development of industry and the expansion of commerce; the sharp rise in the speculation in land and in the legalized market for funds; and by the transition of greater sections of society from rural self-sufficiency into urbanized communities dependent on markets (money-supply) for their food.19

Hence, Brenner is arguing, it was the general rise of capitalist activity that accounts for the use made of the bullion.

The bullion theory of economic expansion presumes, if not fixed velocities (V) and quantities of goods (Q), at least upper limits. Is there any evidence in support of this? On quantities of goods and services, it does not seem very plausible. For one thing, it implies, as Jorge Nadal reminds us, the hypothesis of full employment:

Only then when the volume of goods produced cannot be increased, will any increase in expenditure (equivalent to the product of the quantity of money and velocity [la masa monetaria en circulación]) be translated into a proportionate increase in prices.20

Let us then not assume that an increase of bullion led to a price increase directly but only via its ability to increase employment. Miskimin argues, for example, that the “early mercantilist obsession with bullion flows” made sense in that:

Inflows of precious metals would presumably have set men and resources to work, and at the same time, tended to increase the funds available for government finance and thus lower the cost of fighting wars.

In which case, we can analyze which countries utilized the bullion most effectively

in terms of each country’s ability, whether institutionally or physically determined, to extend the full employment constraint in order to convert the influx of bullion into real economic growth.21

What about limits on velocity? W.C. Robinson in his debate with Michael Postan takes up the question of whether bullion flows are capable of explaining the fourteenth century downturn. He argues that in an economy with primitive credit mechanisms, “the V was something close to the actual physical turnover per coin per time period. . . . ” Hence the thirteenth century expansion which was stimulated by dehoarding and increases in velocity was subject to inherent constraints:

Eventually . . . the money supply reached its upper limit, save for modest annual increases, and velocity could increase no more. At this point trade was constricted and downward pressure on prices was felt. The buoyant optimism and high profits of the earlier period was replaced by pessimism and retrenchment. Hoarding of money began as a hedge against falling prices. In short, the downturn could become self-reinforcing.22

Postan, in his reply, argues that Robinson is factually wrong about a limit having been reached since dehoarding was continuing, that credit mechanisms were more flexible than Robinson suggests, and that the psychological attitudes of businessmen were a minor economic variable at that time.23 But basically he does not challenge the concept of a limit. Miskimin does, and it seems to me effectively:

It is also true, in all probability, that, given the level of development of credit institutions, there was a physical upper limit to the velocity of circulation of any given quantity of bullion, once it was struck into a finite number of coins. Debasement, however, by reducing the size of the units in which bullion circulated, would have the effect of raising the physical and institutional upper limits imposed on the velocity of circulation of bullion. Under the combined pressures arising from internal migration, urbanization, and specialization, it would appear possible, indeed likely, that when debasement raised the technical limits on velocity, the new freedom was used, and that the many European debasements of the sixteenth century acted through the velocity term to increase prices more than proportionally, relative to the level of debasement itself.24

Hence we come back to the fact that it is the overall system with its structured pressures for certain kinds of political decisions (for example, debasement) which is crucial to explain the expansion. It was not bullion alone, but bullion in the context of a capitalist world-economy, that was crucial. For Charles Verlinden, it was specifically the monopolistic forms of capitalism in this early stage that accounted largely for the continued inflation of prices:

In the explanation of cyclical crises, we must reserve a large place for speculation. “Monopoly” did not regulate price movements. It “deregulated” them in the short run, except for certain luxury products (wine). It is responsible for the catastrophic aspect of these movements. Indirectly it affected doubtless the peculiar movement. After each rise, partially artificial, prices did not come down to the pre-crisis level. Monopoly thus contributed, to a certain degree, to the intensification and acceleration of the long-term rise.25

Was the influx of bullion then good or bad? We are not posing a sort of abstract moral question. Rather were the consequences of the bullion inflow salutory for the creation of the new capitalist world-economy? Hamilton certainly seems to say yes. Joseph Schumpeter however thinks quite the opposite:

Increase in the supply of monetary metals does not, any more than autonomous increase in the quantity of any other kind of money, produce any economically determined effects. It is obvious that these will be entirely contingent upon the use to which the new quantities are applied. . . . The first thing to be observed [about the sixteenth century] is that, as far as Spain herself is concerned the new wealth . . . served to finance the Hapsburg policy. . . . The influx provided . . . an alternative to the debasement of currency to which it otherwise would have been necessary to resort much earlier, and thus became the’ instrument of war inflation and the vehicle of the familiar process of impoverishment and social organization incident thereto. The spectacular rise of prices which ensued was a no less familiar link in that chain of events. . . .

In all these respects, the evolution of capitalism was indeed influenced, but in the end retarded rather than quickened, by that expansion of the circulating medium. The cases of France and England were different but only because effects were more diluted. . . . All the durable achievements of English industry and commerce can be accounted for without reference to the plethora of precious metals. . . . 26

This argument is predicated on Schumpeter’s firm conviction that “the inflationary influence—which the writer thinks, as a matter of both history and theory has been exaggerated, but which he does not deny—was almost wholly destructive.”27 Without accepting Schumpeter’s bias for the rationally controlled as against the possibly impulsive and sometimes unpredictable consequences of inflation, his tirade does force upon us an awareness that the global effects of inflation were far less significant than the differential effects.28

Let us look first at food supply. Why, given a general economic expansion, was there a decreased supply of agricultural products? Well, first, there was not in an absolute sense.29 It is only if one considers the figures for countries like England or Spain separately rather than the European world-economy as an entity that there is a decreased supply relative to increased population. In those countries where industry expanded, it was necessary to turn over a larger proportion of the land to the needs of horses.30 But the men were still there; only now they were fed increasingly by Baltic grain.31 It was, however, more expensive grain because of apparent shortage, transport, and the profits of middlemen.

Was then the increased supply of bullion irrelevant? Not at all. For it performed important functions for the expanding European world-economy. It sustained the thrust of the expansion, protecting this still weak system against the assaults of nature. Michel Morineau points out that in medieval Europe, wheat prices rose and fell in direct response to harvests. What happened in the sixteenth century was not so much that bullion raised prices but that it prevented their fall.32 Indeed Carlo Cipolla is skeptical there was any real price rise at all.33 Rather he believes that what is truly significant about the financial structure of the sixteenth century was not the rise of prices but the decline of the interest rate. He argues that in the late Middle Ages, the interest rate was about 4–5%, rising to a high point between 1520 and 1570 of 5.5%, and then dropping suddenly between 1570 and 1620 to an average of 2%. Bullion cheapened money.34

What this seems to indicate is that the critical factor was the emergence of a capitalist system which, as Marx said, could be said to date “from the creation in the sixteenth century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.”35 The key variable was the emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of social organization of the economy. Probably we could say the only mode in the sense that, once established, other “modes of production” survived in function of how they fitted into a politico-social framework deriving from capitalism. Still it is salutary to remember that, at least at this point, “there was not one capitalism, but several European capitalisms, each with its zone and its circuits.”36 Indeed, it is precisely this existence of several capitalisms which gave importance to the increased stock of bullion, for the velocity of its circulation was precisely less in the beginning in northwest Europe than in Mediterranean Europe. As Braudel and Spooner conclude, “the quantity theory of money has meaning when taken with the velocity of circulation and in the context of the disparities of the European economy.”37

This brings us to the second half of the Hamilton argument. There was not only a price rise, but a wage lag. Here too the controversy about its existence and its causes is great.38 Hamilton argued that as prices rose, wages and rents failed to keep abreast of prices because of institutional rigidities—in England and France, but not in Spain.39This created a gap, a sort of windfall profit, which was the major source of capital accumulation in the sixteenth century:

In England and France the vast discrepancy between prices and wages, born of the price revolution, deprived labourers of a large part of the incomes they had hitherto enjoyed, and diverted this wealth to the recipients of other distributive shares. . . . Rents, as well as wages, lagged behind prices; so landlords gained nothing from labour’s loss. . . .

The windfalls thus received, along with gains from the East India trade, furnished the means to build up capital equipment, and the stupendous profits obtainable supplied an incentive for the feverish pursuit of capitalistic enterprise.40

The assertion that rents lagged behind prices has been subject to particularly heavy attack, notably by Eric Kerridge for sixteenth century England,41 as well as by others for other places and times.42 By 1960, Hamilton had retreated on rents but asserted this did not affect the thrust of the argument:

[O]ne may assume that at the beginning of the Price Revolution wage payments represented three-fifths of production costs. . . . I guess that in 1500 the rent of land may have been one-fifth of national income in England and France and that, with the tendency for rising agricultural prices to raise rents and the infrequent removals of rent contracts to lower them offsetting each other, rents rose as fast as prices during the Price Revolution. The remaining fifth of national income went to profits, including interest. With three-fifths of the costs lagging far behind soaring prices, . . . profits must have reached high levels in England and France in the sixteenth century, continued on a high plateau for four or five decades, and remained high, into the great, though declining, gap between prices and wages, until the close of the seventeenth century.43

There have been other criticisms of Hamilton’s wage lag hypothesis.44 One important line of argument was contributed by John Nef, who suggested that recorded money wages were not equivalent to total wages, since there existed wages in kind which might have expanded to fill the gap, and also rises in wheat prices might not have been matched by rises in all basic commodity prices:

In the first place, the index numbers hitherto compiled exaggerate the increase in the cost of subsistence during the price revolution. Secondly, the increase in the cost of the workingman’s diet was borne to some extent not by them but by their employers. Thirdly, many workmen held small plots of land from which they obtained some of their necessary supplies. It follows that they were probably able to spend a more than negligible portion of the money wages on commodities other than food.45

Phelps-Brown and Hopkins agree that the deterioration in wages might have been less bad than it seemed, since grain prices did rise faster than manufactured products. Hence processed food products, increasingly important, rose less in price than basic grains, and improvements in manufacture further reduced the cost of such processed items.46Nonetheless more recent (1968) evidence, based on better data than Hamilton originally used, including evidence offered by Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, tends to confirm the general hypothesis that there was a decline in real wages in sixteenth century western Europe.47

The fall of real wages is strikingly exemplified in Table 1 compiled from Slicher van Bath.48 It is the real wages of an English carpenter, paid by the day, expressed in kilograms of wheat.

TABLE 1 Real Wages of English Carpenter^a

	81.0
1300–1350	94.6
1351–1400	121.8
1401–1450	155.1
1451–1450	143.5
1501–1500	122.4
1551–1600	83.0
1601–1650	48.3
1651–1700	74.1
1701–1750	94.6
1751–1800	79.6
1801–1850	94.6

^a1721–45 = 100.

Three facts are to be derived from this table. The real wages of an English carpenter are not strikingly different in 1850 from 1251. The high point of wages (155.1) was immediately preceding the “long” sixteenth century, and the low point (48.3) was at its end. The drop during the sixteenth century was immense. This drop is all the more telling if we realize that English wages in the period 1601–1650 were by no means at the low end of the European urban wage scale.

This dramatic drop in wages was itself the consequence of three structural factors which were the remains of features of a precapitalist economy not yet eliminated in the sixteenth century. Pierluigi Ciocca spells out in careful detail how these structures operated to reduce real wages in an era of sharp inflation and why each of these structural factors was largely eliminated in later centuries. The three factors are: money illusions, as well as the discontinuity of wage demands; wage fixing by custom, contract, or statute; and delay in payment. By money illusions Ciocca means the inability to perceive accurately gradual inflationary rises except at discontinuous points in time. Even, however, if they were perceived, wages could only be negotiated at intervals. Furthermore in the sixteenth century, the state often intervened, where custom or contract broke down, to forbid wage raises. Finally, at that time, many workers were only paid once a year, which in an inflationary era meant depreciated money. By the twentieth century, money illusions would be counteracted by the organization of trade unions, the spread of education, the existence of price indexes, and the accumulation of experience with inflation. Furthermore, the political organization of workers makes it more difficult for the state to restrain wages. And of course frequency of wage payment is a long-acquired right. But in this early capitalist era, workers did not have the same ability to maneuver.49

What strengthens the plausibility of this analysis, that there was a wage lag because of structural factors in the sixteenth century European world-economy based on early forms of world capitalism, is not only the empirical data which confirms it but the two known empirical exceptions: the cities of central and northern Italy, and of Flanders. Carlo Cipolla notes that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, “labour costs seem to have been too high in Italy in relation to the wage levels in competing countries.” The reason, according to Cipolla, was that “the workers’ organizations succeeded in imposing wage levels which were disproportionate to the productivity of labour itself.”50 Similarly, Charles Verlinden finds that in the Belgian cities, wages followed the price of wheat products closely in the sixteenth century.51 Why these two exceptions? Precisely because they were the “old” centers of trade,52 and thus the workers were relatively strong as a politico–economic force. For this reason, these workers could better resist the galloping profiteering. In addition, the “advance” of capitalist mores had broken the old structures partially. It was, however, precisely as a result of the “strength” of the workers and the progress of capitalist mores that both northern Italian and Flemish cities would decline as industrial centers in the sixteenth century to make way for the newcomers who would win out: those of Holland, England and, to a lesser extent, France.

The thought that some workers (precisely those in the most “advanced” sectors) could resist the deterioration of wages better than others leads us to consider what were the differentials in losses53 occasioned by the long-term inflation. Pierre Vilar suggests a simple core-periphery alternation.54 This is however too simple a dichotomy. For it is not only the workers of the periphery, those who engage as we shall see in labor in Hispanic America and eastern Europe in the sixteenth century, who lost. Simultaneously the wage workers in most of western Europe lost as well, if not perhaps as much—do we know?—as the workers in eastern Europe (the “loss” being immeasureable for the workers of Hispanic America, since they had not previously been in the same economic system at all). And J.H. Elliott argues that the position of the Spanish worker in this decline more nearly approximates that of the east European worker rather than that of England.55

Thus if on some sort of continuum the Polish worker earned least and the Spanish next and let us say the Venetian most, where exactly was the English worker, representing the semiperipheral areas that were in the process of becoming core areas. Phelps-Brown and Hopkins suggest that one way to think of what was happening in these countries is to see that “the contraction of the [English] wage earner’s basketful was mostly due to the changed terms of trade between workshop and farm.”56 On the one hand, the changed terms of trade falls most heavily on the wage earner (either landless or whose income from land is subsidiary). Phelps-Brown and Hopkins estimate the number of such wage earners as already one-third of the occupied population in England in the first half of the sixteenth century. As they say, “the other side of the medal [of the impoverishment of the wage earner] is the enrichment of those who sold farm produce or leased farms at rents they could raise.”57 This throws some doubt on Hamilton’s argument that the wage lag was a direct source of capital accumulation, or at least alerts us to the fact that the landowner in western Europe was a key intermediary in the accumulation of capital.

Still, Hamilton’s fundamental point, endorsed by John Maynard Keynes, is well-taken. The inflation created a redistribution of incomes—a complicated one, because of the multiple layers of the European world-economy. It was nonetheless a method of taxing the politically weakest sectors to provide a capital accumulation fund which could then be invested by someone.58 The landlords in particular kept finding new ways to extract payments from the peasants.59 The argument, remember, is not only that there was a profit windfall, but that inflation encouraged investment.60

This brings us to one further objection to the wage-lag hypothesis, that of John Nef. He claims the argument falls because of the case of France, where, although it had the same wage lag as England, it did not make significant progress in industry at this time.61 Furthermore, Nef points out that he is not dealing merely with a France–England comparison, for in terms of the industrial development, France’s situation was, he asserts, comparable to that of southern Germany and the Spanish Netherlands, whereas England was comparable to Holland, Scotland, Sweden, and Liège. That is, the former all slowed down by comparison with the “age of the Renaissance” and the latter all speeded up. Yet wood and labor were cheaper, not dearer, in France than in England. Possibly the problem is that they were too cheap.62

But this comparison of Nef only undoes the Hamilton thesis if England and France are compared in vacuo. If, however, they are taken within the context of the European world-economy, this comparison merely places the French real wage level somewhere between that of Spain and England. What we could then argue is that within the world-economy as a whole there was an acute reduction of the distribution of produced income to the workers. The rates varied according to the country. The optimal situation for a local investing class would be to have access to profits from low wages in the periphery and further profits from medium (as opposed to high) wages in their own area. A medium wage level was optimum since whereas on the one hand a too high wage level (Venice) cut too far into the profit margin, on the other a too low wage level (France, a fortiori Spain) cut into the size of the local market for new industries. England and Holland came closest to this optimum situation in the Europe-wide system. The fact that it was a world-economy, however, was the sine qua non for the likelihood that inflationary profits could be profitably invested in new industries.

Inflation thus was important both because it was a mechanism of forced savings and hence of capital accumulation and because it served to distribute these profits unevenly through the system, disproportionately into what we have been calling the emerging core of the world-economy away from its periphery and its semiperiphery of “old” developed areas.

The other side of this picture, as the reader may already have gleaned from the discussion on the impact of inflation, is that there emerged within the world-economy a division of labor not only between agricultural and industrial tasks but among agricultural tasks as well. And along with this specialization went differing forms of labor control and differing patterns of stratification which in turn had different political consequences for the “states,” that is, the arenas of political action.

Thus far we have tried to explain why it was that Europe expanded (rather than, say, China), why within Europe Portugal took the lead, and why this expansion should have been accompanied by inflation. We have not really faced up to the question of why this expansion should be so significant. That is to say, why was the creation of this world-economy the harbinger of modern industrial development, whereas previous imperial creations in the history of the world, apparently based on a relatively productive agricultural sector and a relatively strong bureaucratic political machinery, failed to go in this direction? To say it was technology is only to push us to ask what kind of system was it that encouraged so much technological advance. (Remember Needham’s metaphor of the sudden spurt of Western technology.) E. L. Jones and S. J. Woolf see the distinctive features of the sixteenth century precisely as the fact that, for the first time in history, an expansion of agricultural productivity opened the way to the expansion of real income:

One of the less palatable lessons of history is that technically advanced and physically productive agricultures do not inevitably bring about a sustained growth of per capita real income, much less promote industrialization. The civilizations of Antiquity, with their elaborate agricultures, provide a starting-point. None of them, in the Middle East, Rome, China, Meso-America . . . led on to an industrial economy. Technically their farming organization was superb. . . . Equally, the physical volume of grain they produced was impressive. Yet their social histories are appalling tales of production cycles without a lasting rise in real incomes for the mass of people in either the upswings or the downswings. . . .

The common fact, notably of the empires with irrigated agricultures, was the immense power of a state apparatus based on a bureaucracy concerned with defense against external threat and the internal maintenance of its own position. Taking a grand view of history, it would be fair to conclude that these bureaucracies aimed at, and succeeded in maintaining, vast peasant societies through long ages and at all population densities in a state of virtual homeostasis.63

The authors argue that in such a system, increase in gross production results simply in “static expansion,”64 that is, an increase in the supportable population with a maintenance of the same absolute distribution of goods in the same relative proportions to different classes of society.

What was it about the social structure of the sixteenth century world-economy that accounts for social transformation of a different kind, one that could scarcely be called homeostasis? No doubt the bureaucracies of the sixteenth century did not have motivations very different from those Jones and Woolf ascribe to earlier ones. If the result was different, it must be that the world-economy was organized differently from earlier empires, and in such a way that there existed social pressures of a different kind. Specifically, we might look at the kinds of tensions such a system generated among the ruling classes and consequently the kinds of opportunities it provided for the mass of the population.

We have already outlined what we consider to be the pressures on Europe to expand. Expansion involves its own imperatives. The ability to expand successfully is a function both of the ability to maintain relative social solidarity at home (in turn a function of the mechanisms of the distribution of reward) and the arrangements that can be made to use cheap labor far away (it being all the more important that it be cheap the further it is away, because of transport costs).

Expansion also involves unequal development and therefore differential rewards, and unequal development in a multilayered format of layers within layers, each one polarized in terms of a bimodal distribution of rewards. Thus, concretely, in the sixteenth century, there was the differential of the core of the European world-economy versus its peripheral areas, within the European core between states, within states between regions and strata, within regions between city and country, and ultimately within more local units.65

The solidarity of the system was based ultimately on this phenomenon of unequal development, since the multilayered complexity provided the possibility of multilayered identification and the constant realignment of political forces, which provided at one and the same time the underlying turbulence that permitted technological development and political transformations, and also the ideological confusion that contained the rebellions, whether they were rebellions of slowdown, of force, or of flight. Such a system of multiple layers of social status and social reward is roughly correlated with a complex system of distribution of productive tasks: crudely, those who breed manpower sustain those who grow food who sustain those who grow other raw materials who sustain those involved in industrial production (and of course, as industrialism progresses, this hierarchy of productive services gets more complex as this last category is ever further refined).

The world-economy at this time had various kinds of workers: There were slaves who worked on sugar plantations and in easy kinds of mining operations which involved skimming off the surface. There were “serfs” who worked on large domains where grain was cultivated and wood harvested. There were “tenant” farmers on various kinds of cash-crop operations (including grain), and wage laborers in some agricultural production. This accounted for 90–95% of the population in the European world-economy. There was a new class of “yeoman” farmers. In addition, there was a small layer of intermediate personnel—supervisors of laborers, independent artisans, a few skilled workmen—and a thin layer of ruling classes, occupied in overseeing large land operations, operating major institutions of the social order, and to some extent pursuing their own leisure. This last group included both the existing nobility and the patrician bourgeoisie (as well as, of course, the Christian clergy and the state bureaucracy).

A moment’s thought will reveal that these occupational categories were not randomly distributed either geographically or ethnically within the burgeoning world-economy. After some false starts, the picture rapidly evolved of a slave class of African origins located in the Western Hemisphere, a “serf” class divided into two segments: a major one in eastern Europe and a smaller one of American Indians in the Western Hemisphere. The peasants of western and southern Europe were for the most part “tenants.” The wage-workers were almost all west Europeans. The yeoman farmers were drawn largely even more narrowly, principally from northwest Europe. The intermediate classes were pan-European in origin (plus mestizos and mulattoes) and distributed geographically throughout the arena. The ruling classes were also pan-European, but I believe one can demonstrate disproportionately from western Europe.

Why different modes of organizing labor—slavery, “feudalism,” wage labor, self-employment—at the same point in time within the world-economy? Because each mode of labor control is best suited for particular types of production. And why were these modes concentrated in different zones of the world-economy—slavery and “feudalism” in the periphery, wage labor and self-employment in the core, and as we shall see sharecropping in the semiperiphery? Because the modes of labor control greatly affect the political system (in particular the strength of the state apparatus) and the possibilities for an indigenous bourgeoisie to thrive. The world-economy was based precisely on the assumption that there were in fact these three zones and that they did in fact have different modes of labor control. Were this not so, it would not have been possible to assure the kind of flow of the surplus which enabled the capitalist system to come into existence.

Let us review the modes of labor control and see their relation to product and productivity. We can then see how this affects the rise of the capitalist elements. We begin with slavery. Slavery was not unknown in Europe in the Middle Ages66 but it was unimportant by comparison with its role in the European world-economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. One reason was Europe’s previous military weakness. As Marc Bloch has put it:

Experience has proved it: of all forms of breeding, that of human cattle is one of the hardest. If slavery is to pay when applied to large-scale enterprises, there must be plenty of cheap human flesh on the market. You can only get it by war or slave-raiding. So a society can hardly base much of its economy on domesticated human beings unless it has at hand feebler societies to defeat or to raid.67

Such an inferior mode of production is only profitable if the market is large so that the small per capita profit is compensated by the large quantity of production. This is why slavery could flourish in the Roman Empire and why it is preeminently a capitalist institution, geared to the early preindustrial stages of a capitalist world-economy.68

Slaves, however, are not useful in large-scale enterprises whenever skill is required. Slaves cannot be expected to do more than what they are forced to do. Once skill is involved, it is more economic to find alternative methods of labor control, since the low cost is otherwise matched by very low productivity. Products that can be truly called labor-intensive are those which, because they require little skill to “harvest,” require little investment in supervision. It was principally sugar, and later cotton, that lent themselves to the assembling of unskilled laborers under brutal overseers.69

Sugar cultivation began on the Mediterranean islands, later moved to the Atlantic islands, then crossed the Atlantic to Brazil and the West Indies. Slavery followed the sugar.70 As it moved, the ethnic composition of the slave class was transformed.71 But why Africans as the new slaves? Because of exhaustion of the supply of laborers indigenous to the region of the plantations, because Europe needed a source of labor from a reasonably well-populated region that was accessible and relatively near the region of usage. But it had to be from a region that was outside its world-economy so that Europe could feel unconcerned about the economic consequences for the breeding region of wide-scale removal of manpower as slaves. Western Africa filled the bill best.72

The exhaustion of alternative supplies of labor is clear. The monocultures imposed on the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands ravaged them, pedologically and in terms of human population. Their soils were despoiled, their populations died out (for example, the Guanches of the Canary Islands), or emigrated, to escape the pressure.73 Indian populations on Caribbean islands disappeared entirely. New Spain (Mexico) had a dramatic fall in population from approximately 11 million in 1519 to about 1.5 million in circa 1650.74 Brazil and Peru seem to have had an equally dramatic decline.75 The two immediate explanations of this demographic decline seem to be disease and damage to Indian cultivation caused by the domestic animals that the Europeans bred.76 But sheer exhaustion of manpower, especially in the mines, must also have been significant. Consequently, at a relatively early point, the Spaniards and Portugese ceased trying to recruit Indians as slave labor in the Western Hemisphere and began to rely exclusively on imported Africans for plantation slaves. Presumably, the cost of transport still did not bring the cost to a higher point than the potential cost of preventing runaways by the remaining indigenous population. Besides the latter were rapidly dying off.

And yet slavery was not used everywhere. Not in eastern Europe which saw a “second serfdom.” Not in western Europe which saw new forms of “rent” and the rise of wage labor. Not even in many sectors of the economy of Hispanic America where, instead of slave plantations, the Spaniards used a system known as encomienda. Why not slavery in all production in Hispanic America? Probably because the supply of African slaves, however large, was not unlimited. And because the economies of supervising an indigenous slave population (the amount of world-available nonindigenous slave labor making this the only reasonable other possibility), given the high likelihood of revolts, made it not worthwhile. This was especially the case since grain production, cattle-raising, and mining required a higher level of skill among the basic production workers than did sugar production. These workers therefore had to be compensated for by a slightly less onerous form of labor control.77

Since both the “second serfdom” in eastern Europe and the encomienda system in Hispanic America—synchronous be it noted—have been termed by many persons as “feudalism,” much useless controversy has been generated as to whether and in what way these systems are or are not comparable to the “classic” feudalism of medieval Europe. The debate essentially revolves around whether the defining characteristic of feudalism is the hierarchical relationship of ownership (the awarding of a fief to a vassal, an exchange of protection for rents and services), the political jurisdiction of a seignior over his peasantry, or the existence of large domains of land upon which a peasant is somehow “constrained” to work at least part of his year in return for some kind of minimal payment (whether in the form of cash, kind, or the right to use the land for his own production for use or sale). Obviously, all sorts of combinations are possible.78 Furthermore, not only the form of the subordinate’s obligation to the superordinate may vary, but the degree of subordination may vary also, and as Dobb notes, “a change in the former is by no means always yoked with a change in the latter. . . .”79

From the point of view we are developing here, there is a fundamental difference between the feudalism of medieval Europe and the “feudalisms” of sixteenth century eastern Europe and Hispanic America. In the former, the landowner (seignior) was producing primarily for a local economy and derived his power from the weakness of the central authority. The economic limits of his exploitative pressure was determined by his need to furnish his household with the limited degree of luxury determined as socially optimal and by the costs of warfare (which varied over time). In the latter, the landowner (seignior) was producing for a capitalist world-economy. The economic limits of his exploitative pressure were determined by the demand–supply curve of a market. He was maintained in power by the strength rather than the weakness of the central authority, at least its strength vis-à-vis the farm laborer. To avoid any confusion, we shall call this form of “serfdom” by the name “coerced cash-crop labor,” although the term is imperfect and awkward.

“Coerced cash-crop labor” is a system of agricultural labor control wherein the peasants are required by some legal process enforced by the state to labor at least part of the time on a large domain producing some product for sale on the world market. Normally, the domain was the “possession” of an individual, usually by designation of the state, but not necessarily a heritable property. The state could be itself the direct owner of such a domain, but in this case there was a tendency to transform the mechanism of labor control.80 Using such a definition, this form of labor control became the dominant one in agricultural production in the peripheral areas of the sixteenth century European world-economy.

Henri H. Stahl makes very clear the way in which East Elbia’s (and more generally eastern Europe’s) “second serfdom” is “capitalist” in origin.81 A number of other authors recognize that we are calling “coerced cash-crop labor” is a form of labor control in a capitalist and not a feudal economy. Sergio Bagú, speaking of Hispanic America, calls it “colonial capitalism.”82 Luigi Bulferetti, speaking of seventeenth century Lombardy, calls it “feudal capitalism.”83 Luis Vitale, speaking of the Spanish latifundias, insists they are “very capitalist enterprises.”84 Eric Wolf sees no inconsistency between a lord maintaining “patrimonial controls within the boundaries of his domain” and running his domain “as a capitalist enterprise.”85

The pattern already began with the Venetians in Crete and elsewhere in the fourteenth century86 and became widespread by the sixteenth century throughout the periphery and semiperiphery of the European world-economy. The crucial aspects from our perspective are twofold. One is to see that “coerced cash-crop labor” is not, as Pietro Vaccari puts it, “of a form that may be defined as a true reconstitution of the former feudal servitude;”87 it is a new form of social organization. And second, it is not the case that two forms of social organization, capitalist and feudal, existed side by side, or could ever so exist. The world-economy has one form or the other. Once it is capitalist, relationships that bear certain formal resemblances to feudal relationships are necessarily redefined in terms of the governing principles of a capitalist system.88 This was true both of the encomienda in Hispanic America and the so-called “second feudalism” in eastern Europe.

The encomienda in Hispanic America was a direct creation of the Crown. Its ideological justification was Christianization. Its chief function was to supply a labor force for the mines and cattle ranches, as well as to raise silk and to supply agricultural products for the encomenderos and the workers in towns and mines.89 The encomienda was originally a feudal privilege, the right to obtain labor services from the Indians.90

When the exaggeration of early encomenderos threatened the supply of labor—for example, the Indians on the West Indian islands died off—a royal cedula of 1549 changed the obligations of encomienda from labor to tribute, thus shifting from a system akin to slavery to one we may call coerced cash-crop labor. As Silvio Zavala points out, the new version of encomienda was “free,” but the threat of coercion lay in the background.91 When “freedom” resulted in a significant drop in the labor supply, a further legal shift occurred, the institution of forced wage labor, called the cuatequil in New Spain and the mita in Peru.92

Consequently, although it is true that the encomienda in Hispanic America (as well as the donatária in Brazil) might have originated as feudal grants, they were soon transformed into capitalist enterprises by legal reforms.93 This seems to be confirmed by the fact that it was precisely to avoid the centrifugal character of a feudal system that the cuatequil and mita were installed.94

Not only did the landowner have the Spanish Crown behind him in creating his capital, in coercing the peasant labor. He normally had an arrangement with the traditional chief of the Indian community in which the latter added his authority to that of the colonial rulers to the process of coercion.95 The strength of chieftaincy was of course a function of pre-colonial patterns to a large extent.96 The interest of the chief or cacique becomes quite clear when we realize how laborers were in fact paid. Alvaro Jara describes the system established in 1559 as it worked in Chile. There the Indians working on gold washing received a sixth of its value. This payment, called the sesmo, was however made not to individual Indians but to the collectivity of which they were members.97 One can guess at the kinds of unequal division that were consequent upon this kind of global payment system.

The creation of coerced cash-crop labor in eastern Europe was more gradual than in Hispanic America, where it had been instituted as a result of conquest. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, much of eastern Europe (that is, East Elbia, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, Hungary, Lithuania) went through the same process of growing concessions to the peasantry and growing transformation of feudal labor obligations into money obligations as did western Europe, and also Russia.98 The process was gone through everywhere for the same reasons: the impact of prosperity and economic expansion on the bargaining relationship of serf and lord.99 The recession of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries however led to opposite consequences in western and eastern Europe. In the west, as we have seen, it led to a crisis of the feudal system. In the east, it led to a “manorial reaction”100 which culminated in the sixteenth century with the “second serfdom” and a new landlord class.101

The reason why these opposite reactions to the same phenomenon (economic recession) occurred was because, for the reasons we previously explicated, the two areas became complementary parts of a more complex single system, the European world-economy, in which eastern Europe played the role of raw-materials producer for the industrializing west, thus coming to have, in Malowist’s phrase, “an economy which, at bottom, [was] close to the classic colonial pattern.”102 A look at the nature of Baltic trade is sufficient to verify this. From the fifteenth century on, the products flowing from east to west were primarily bulk goods (cereals, timber, and later on, wool), although the older exports of fur and wax continued. And from west to east flowed textiles (both of luxury and of middling quality), salt, wines, silks. By the end of the fifteenth century, Holland was dependent on Baltic grain, Dutch and English shipping unthinkable without east European timber, hemp, pitch, and grease. Conversely, wheat had become the east’s most important export, reaching even the Iberian peninsula and Italy.103

To be sure, this kind of colonial pattern of trade existed previously in terms of trade relations in Europe. There was the relationship of Venice and her colonies plus her sphere of influence.104 There was Catalonia as a trade center in the late Middle Ages.105 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Portugal was a primary producer for Flanders,106 as England was for the Hanse.107 The production of primary products to exchange for the manufactured products of more advanced areas was always, as Braudel says of grain, a “marginal phenomenon subject to frequent [geographical] revisions.” And, as he says, “each time, the bait [was] cash.”108 What was different in the sixteenth century was the existence of a market for primary products that encompassed a large world-economy. Slicher von Bath dates the creation of the international cereals market, centering in the Low Countries, only in 1544.109

If we take seriously Braudel’s notion of “frequent revisions,” then we must ask how an area gets defined as periphery rather than as core. In the Middle Ages, even the late Middle Ages, it was not at all clear that eastern Europe was destined to be the periphery of a European world-economy. A number of writers have emphasized the comparability of developments, east and west. Reginald R. Betts, for example, says of the fourteenth century: “Curiously [sic!], payments in specie were preferred not only by French and English large landowners . . . but by Czech, Polish and Hungarian landowners as well. . . .”110 Similarly, Zs. S. Pach argues that as late as the fifteenth century, “the trend of rural development [in Hungary] was fundamentally concordant with that of the west European countries. . . .”111

Why then the divergence? One can answer in terms of the factors—geographical and social—which accounted for the spurt of western Europe. To some extent, we have already done this. One can also answer in part in terms of specific characteristics of eastern Europe. For one thing, the weakness of the towns was an important factor.112 This was a small difference in the thirteenth century which became a big one in the sixteenth, since, as a result of the complementary divergence, western towns grew stronger and eastern ones relatively weaker. Or one can emphasize the fact that there already was a relatively more extensive cultivation of land in western Europe by the end of the thirteenth century, whereas there remained much more vacant space in eastern Europe.113 A process of coerced cash-crop labor was relatively easier to institute on “new” lands.

But then we have to ask why even the slight differences between west and east? There is perhaps a single geopolitical explanation: the Turkish and Mongol-Tartar invasions of the late Middle Ages, which destroyed much, caused emigrations and various declines, and above all weakened the relative authority of the kings and great princes.114

What is at operation here is the general principle that in the course of social interaction small initial differences are reinforced, stabilized, and defined as “traditional.” The “traditional” was then, and always is, an aspect of and creation of the present, never of the past. Speaking of the modern world, André Gunder Frank argues: “Economic development and underdevelopment are the opposite face of the same coin. Both are the necessary result and contemporary manifestations of internal contradictions in the world capitalist system.”115 But the process is far more general than Frank indicates. As Owen Lattimore puts it, “Civilization gave birth to barbarism.”116 Speaking of the relationship between the sedentary and the nomadic at the frontiers of the world, Lattimore argues that the way to conceive of their origin and their relationship is to observe

the formation of two diverging types out of what had originally been a unified society. These we may call, for convenience, “progressive” (agriculture becoming primary, hunting and gathering becoming secondary) and “backward” (hunting and gathering remaining primary, agriculture becoming secondary, in some cases not advancing beyond a desultory stage.117

Thus if, at a given moment in time, because of a series of factors at a previous time, one region has a slight edge over another in terms of one key factor, and there is a conjuncture of events which make this slight edge of central importance in terms of determining social action, then the slight edge is converted into a large disparity and the advantage holds even after the conjuncture has passed.118 This was the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. Given the great expansion of the geographic and demographic scope of the world of commerce and industry, some areas of Europe could amass the profits of this expansion all the more if they could specialize in the activities essential to reaping this profit. They thus had to spend less of their time, manpower, land, and other natural resources on sustaining themselves in basic necessities. Either eastern Europe would become the “breadbasket” of western Europe or vice versa. Either solution would have served the “needs of the situation” in the conjuncture. The slight edge determined which of the two alternatives would prevail. At which point, the slight edge of the fifteenth century became the great disparity of the seventeenth and the monumental difference of the nineteenth.119

The crucial considerations in the form of labor control adopted in eastern Europe were the opportunity of large profit if production were increased (because of the existence of a world market) plus the combination of a relative shortage of labor and a large amount of unused land.120 In the sixteenth century eastern Europe and in parts of the economy of Hispanic America, coerced cash-crop labor was thus desirable (profitable), necessary (in terms of the landowner’s self-interest), and possible (in terms of the kind of work required). Slavery was impracticable because of the relative shortage of labor. Indigenous labor is always in short supply as slaves, as it is too difficult to control, and long-distance importation of slaves was not profitable for products that required as much supervision as wheat. After all, the cost of slaves was not negligible.

While presumably the peasant prefers a system of coerced cash-crop labor to slavery because of the minimal dignity and privileges involved in formal freedom, it is not necessarily the case that the material conditions of the coerced cash-crop laborer were better than those of the slave. Indeed Fernando Guillén Martinez argues that in Hispanic America, the Indian on the encomienda was more poorly treated than the slave, largely because of the insecure social situation of the encomendero.121 Alvaro Jara argues similarly that the standard of living of the Indians on the encomienda, in this case in Chile, was “at a minimum level, using this concept in its strictest sense.”122

Thus, in the geo–economically peripheral areas of the emerging world-economy, there were two primary activities: mines, principally for bullion; and agriculture, principally for certain foods. In the sixteenth century, Hispanic America provided primarily the former123 while eastern Europe provided primarily the latter. In both cases, the technology was labor-intensive and the social system labor-exploitative. The surplus went overall disproportionately to supply the needs of the population of the core areas. The immediate profits of the enterprise were shared, as we shall see, between groups in the core areas, international trading groups, and local supervisory personnel (which include, for example, both aristocrats in Poland, and civil servants and encomenderos in Hispanic America). The mass of the population was engaged in coerced labor, a system defined, circumscribed, and enforced by the state and its judicial apparatus. Slaves were used to the extent that it was profitable to do so, and where such juridical extremism was too costly, the alternative of formally free but legally-coerced agricultural labor was employed on the cash-crop domains.124

In the core of the world-economy, in western Europe (including the Mediterranean Christian world), the situation was different in a number of respects. The population density was basically much higher (even in periods of demographic decline such as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries).125 The agriculture was hence more intensive.126 In addition, part of the land was shifted from arable to pastoral use. The result was less coercion. In part, more skilled labor can insist on less juridical coercion. Or rather, the coercion has to be more indirect, via market mechanisms. In part, it was that in cattle breeding, it was always a temptation, especially in winter, to shift food from cattle to men. A manorial system was not able to deal with this problem effectively.127 But the sixteenth century was a time of increased demand for meat, the demand for meat being elastic and expanding with a rising standard of living.128 Also given the expansion of population, there was more demand for grain as well. The consequences were simple. Cattle-raising, which was profitable, required a different social organization of work. When it did not develop, for whatever reasons, pastoralism actually decreased.129 Hence, Europe-wide, it became a matter of increased division of labor.

In the core area, towns flourished, industries were born, the merchants became a significant economic and political force. Agriculture to be sure remained throughout the sixteenth century the activity of the majority of the population. (Indeed this was true until the nineteenth century for northwest Europe and until the twentieth for southern Europe.) Nonetheless, the inclusion of eastern Europe and Hispanic America into a European world-economy in the sixteenth century not only provided capital (through booty and high-profit margins) but also liberated some labor in the core areas for specialization in other tasks. The occupational range of tasks in the core areas was a very complex one. It included a large remnant parallel to those in the periphery (for example, grain production). But the trend in the core was toward variety and specialization, while the trend in the periphery was toward monoculture.

The expansion of the sixteenth century was not only a geographical expansion. It was an economic expansion—a period of demographic growth, increased agricultural productivity, and the “first industrial revolution.” It marked the establishment of regular trade between Europe and the rest of the inhabited world.130 By the end of the century, the economy simply looked different and better.131

Thus far we have described the emergent forms of production and of labor control in the periphery and treated it in explicit and implicit contrast to the core areas. In fact, the core area structure is more complicated than we have indicated to this point. However before we treat this complexity we should look at the agricultural production of that third structural zone, the semiperiphery. We have not yet explicated the function of the semiperiphery for the workings of the world-system. Suffice it to say at this point that on a number of economic criteria (but not all), the semiperiphery represents a midway point on a continuum running from the core to the periphery. This is, in particular, true of the complexity of economic institutions, the degree of economic reward (both in terms of average level and range), and most of all in the form of labor control.

The periphery (eastern Europe and Hispanic America) used forced labor (slavery and coerced cash-crop labor). The core, as we shall see, increasingly used free labor. The semiperiphery (former core areas turning in the direction of peripheral structures) developed an inbetween form, sharecropping, as a widespread alternative. To be sure, sharecropping was known in other areas. But it took primacy of place at this time only in the semiperiphery. The mezzadria in Italy and the fâcherie in Provence were already known from the thirteenth century on; métayage elsewhere in southern France from the fourteenth. And as economic difficulties of lords of the manor increased in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the domains were increasingly leased in this form not as an entity but in smaller units, capable of sustaining a family rather than a whole village. Duby notes that by the mid-fifteenth century “the large-scale cereal-producing enterprises that were still able to exist in western Europe disappeared. . . .” He calls this “one of the fundamental transformations of country life. . . .”132

Why did the transformation, however, take this particular form? That is, why, if a transformation was threatened, did not the seignior turn to the state to force the peasants to stay on the land, as in eastern Europe? And, on the other hand, why, if there were concessions, did it take the form of sharecropping rather than the transfer of land to small farmers who either bought the land outright or paid a fixed rent, the principal (not, of course, the only) solution in northwest Europe?

Dobb, in comparing western and eastern Europe in terms of the seigniorial reaction to the phenomena of desertion and depopulation, and considering western Europe the arena of “concession” and eastern Europe that of “renewed coercion,” attributes the different reactions to the “strength of peasant resistance.”133 Ian Blanchard on the other hand agrees that the degree of peasant unrest is a factor but in a less direct way. The crucial factor was labor availability. He argues that up to the 1520s there was a labor shortage in England and that legislators did indeed seek to coerce laborers to remain on the land while landowners reluctantly enclosed faute de mieux.134 Thus coercion, Blanchard argues, was used in England as well, as long as there was depopulation. It was only when population was growing that the peasants erupted, demanding in effect land.

Whatever the case, the amount of peasant resistance explains little since we would want to know why peasants resisted more in England than in Poland—does Dobb really believe this?135—why lords were stronger or weaker, why kings strengthened seigniorial authority or weakened it. We are most likely to discover the reasons in the fact of the complementary divergence within a single world-economy, for which we suggested two explanations: the comparative strength of the towns at the beginning point of the divergence, and the degree of vacancy of land.

“Vacancy” of land can be restated in terms of a land/labor ratio. If there is plenty of land, one can make do with relatively inefficient means of production. One can engage in extensive agriculture. One can use slaves or coerced cash-crop laborers. Intensive agriculture requires free laborers. But why then sharecropping? Obviously because the situation is somewhere inbetween.

Let us note that from the peasant’s point of view, sharecropping is perhaps to be preferred to coerced cash-crop labor, but not by too much. The net return is low, although in times of prosperity it may rise. The coercion via debt mechanisms is often as real as legal coercion. For H.K. Takahashi, métayers are “semi-serfs,” working for “usurious landowners.”136 Bloch sees developments in France as a process of slipping back from the gradual liberation of the peasant from the seignior which had been taking place in the late Middle Ages:

If—absurd hypothesis—the [French] Revolution had broken out in about 1480, it would have turned over the land, via the suppression of seigniorial receipts (charges seigneuriales) almost exclusively to a mass of small farmers. But, from 1480 to 1789, three centuries passed in which large estates were reconstituted.137

Why sharecropping however and not tenantry on the one hand or coerced cash-crop labor on the other? Although sharecropping had the disadvantage, compared to coerced cash-cropping, of greater difficulty in supervision, it had the advantage of encouraging the peasant’s efforts to increased productivity, provided of course the peasant would continue to work for the seignior without legal compulsion.138 In short, when labor is plentiful, sharecropping is probably more profitable than coerced cash-cropping.139

As for tenantry, no doubt by this logic it is more profitable still than cash-cropping. However there is a proviso. Tenants have fixed contracts and gain at moments of inflation, at least to the extent that the contracts are relatively long-term. Of course, the reverse is true when the market declines. Sharecropping thus is a mode of risk-minimization.140 It follows that sharecropping is most likely to be considered in areas of specialized agriculture where the risks of variance outweigh the transactions costs.

But this was precisely a moment of high risk. Continued price inflation is very unsettling. Sharecropping seemed the remedy.141 In some areas, peasants were lucky enough to have legal defenses which make the enforcement of sharecropping too expensive for the landowner, who then found straight rental preferable. Such an instance was England. Cheung suggests that the key was freehold tenure, known in England but not for example in France.142

Legal factors are not alone determining. For we must still explain the discrepancy between northern France which moved extensively toward lease arrangements and southern France where sharecropping was the pervasive mode. The law in both areas was substantially the same. Duby locates the key differential in the relative affluence of the farmer in the north as contrasted to “the depressed economic conditions” of the southern peasant “working on land whose productivity had probably not been increased by improvement in techniques as in the north. . . .”143

If, however, it was just a question of technology, we are only pushed one step back, to ask why technological advances made in one area were adopted in another area not that distant either geographically or culturally. Braudel suggests that soil conditions in Mediterranean Europe and northwest Europe were fundamentally different, the former being poorer.144 Porchnev suggests that a further consideration is degree of involvement in the world-economy, the existence of large estates (hence the absence of sharecropping) being correlated with high involvement.145

May we not then consider sharecropping as a sort of second best? Unable to move all the way to large estates based either on enclosure and tenancy as in England or coerced cash-crop labor as in eastern Europe, the landed classes of southern France and northern Italy chose the halfway house146 of sharecropping, as a partial response to the creation of a capitalist world-economy, in the form of semicapitalist enterprises, appropriate indeed to semiperipheral areas.

If the semiperipheral areas remained semiperipheral and did not become the total satellites into which peripheral areas developed, it was not only because of the high land/labor ratio. It may also have been because the existence of a strong indigenous bourgeoisie has a particular impact on the development of agricultural production in times of distress. Duby points out that in areas where city merchants had been numerous and relatively powerful, many of the estates fell into the hands of these townsmen seeking protection against famine and the social status attached to land ownership, but not the trouble of actual farming. Giving out the land to sharecropping was a reasonable compromise.147 How “reasonable” the compromise was from the point of view of the peasants is put into considerable doubt by G. E. de Falguerolles, since the orientation of these town bourgeois was toward short-run profit from their investment which had the effect of desolating the land over the following century.148

A second paradox, then, about the most “advanced” area. We already noted the strength of town workers keeping up the wage level, thus putting northern Italy at an industrial disadvantage vis-à-vis northwest Europe. Perhaps this same strength of workers accounted for maintaining disproportionate numbers of laborers in the rural areas by using guild restrictions to prevent their entry into urban employment, that is, in the sixteenth century period of demographic upsurge. This would have the result of weakening the bargaining position of the peasant. In any case, the “strength” of the town bourgeoisie seems to have led to a higher likelihood of sharecropping, and thus to the nonemergence of the yeoman farmer who would play such a large role in the economic advance of northwest Europe.

Let us now turn to those areas which would by 1640 be ensconced at the core of the European world-economy: England, the Netherlands, and to some extent northern France. These areas developed a combination of pasturage and arable production based on free or freer labor and units of relatively efficient size. As may be noted, Spain started down this path and then turned off it to become part of the semiperiphery. The reasons for this shift in economic role we shall expound at length in a later chapter.

In the crisis of the late Middle Ages, when a decline in population led to a lowered demand for agricultural products as well as higher wages for urban workers (and hence a better bargaining position for rural workers), the great demesnes declined in western Europe, as we have already seen. They could not become cash-crop estates as in sixteenth-century eastern Europe because there was no international market in a generally dismal economic scene. They had only two significant alternatives. On the one hand, they could convert feudal obligations into money rent,149 which would reduce costs and increase income to the demesne owner, but involved a gradual transfer of control over the land. That is, it made possible the rise of the small-scale yeoman farmer, either as tenant on fixed rents or, if better off, as independent owner (who can be seen as someone who has, in the purchase of the land, paid a lump sum of rent for a number of years).150 The alternative then open to the landlord was to convert his land to pasture: cattle or sheep. In the fifteenth century, both wool prices and meat prices had seemed to resist the effects of depression more, and in addition the costs in then scarce, hence expensive, labor were less.151

At this time, both England and Spain increased pasturage. With the expanding economy of the sixteenth century, wheat seemed to gain an advantage over wool,152 but not over cattle which gave not only meat but tallow, leather, and dairy products, the consumption of all of which expanded with prosperity.153 The most important thing to note about pasturage in the sixteenth century, especially livestock, was that it was becoming increasingly a regionally specialized activity. More cattle here, an advantage to large landowners, also meant less cattle elsewhere, which often meant a reduction in peasant consumption of meat and dairy products, a deterioration in his diet.154 This overemphasis on livestock occurred in Spain, precisely. The two options—conversion of demesnes to leased land, and arable land to pasture—went hand in hand. For the latter made arable land all the scarcer, which made its rental value higher.155 Furthermore, as arable land became scarcer, cultivation had to be more intensive, which meant that the quality of labor was very important, a further inducement to moving from labor services to money rent.156

The rise of sheep farming in the sixteenth century led to the great enclosures movement in England and Spain. But paradoxically it was not the large-scale proprietor who sought the enclosures but a new type, the small-scale independent proprietor.157 It was of course the economic renewal of the sixteenth century that made possible the continued growth of these small-scale independent farmers.

For “sheep ate men,” as the saying went, the rise of sheep farming thus creating the food shortages that had to be compensated both by more efficient arable production in England (the yeoman) and by Baltic grain (coerced cash-cropping).158

Furthermore, the increased enclosures made possible the growth in the rural areas of handicraft industries.159 In Spain, however, the Mesta was too entrenched for the small-scale proprietor to make too much headway. And as we shall see later the imperial policies of Charles V gave some added strength to these large landowners. Instead of using its rural unemployed for industrial development, Spain would expel them and export them.

We must persist a little longer on this question of the development of western European agriculture and why it could not take the route of eastern Europe: large estates with coerced cash-crop labor. It was, in the end, because a capitalist world-economy was coming into existence. Paul Sweezy argues a sort of ecological continuum: “Near the centers of trade, the effect on feudal economy [of trade expansion] is strongly disintegrating; further away the effect tends to be just the opposite.”160 This is really too simple a formulation, as Postan argues and Dobb agrees.161 The Sweezy case is based on the alternatives for the peasant, the ability to escape to the city, the “civilizing proximity of urban life.”162 He neglects the possibility that in many peripheral regions, for example eastern Europe, the peasant had the alternative of frontier areas, often quite as attractive as cities. Indeed, it was precisely because the peasant used this alternative that juridical means were introduced in the sixteenth century to bind him to the land.

The difference was less in the peasant’s alternatives, though this played a role, than in the landowner’s alternatives. Where was he to draw the largest and most immediate profit? On the one hand, he could turn his land over to other uses (pasture land at a higher rate of profit or lease for money to small farmers—both of which meant dispensing with the feudal labor-service requirements) and using the new profit for investment in trade and industry and/or in aristocratic luxury. On the other hand, he could seek to obtain larger profits by intensifying production of staple cash-crops (especially grain) and then investing the new profits in trade (but not industry and/or aristocratic luxury).163 The former alternative was more plausible in northwest Europe, the latter in eastern Europe, largely because the slight differential already established in production specialties meant that profit maximization was achieved, or at least thought to be achieved, by doing more extensively and more efficiently what one already did best.164Hence, the state authorities encouraged enclosures for pasturing (and truck farming) in England, but the creation of large domains for wheat growing in eastern Europe.

As for why labor was contractual in northwest Europe and coerced in eastern Europe, it is insufficient to point to pasturage versus arable land use. For in that case, Hispanic America would have had contractual labor. Rather, demography plays the critical role, as we have already suggested. The western European alternative was one which assumed that there would be enough of a manpower pool at cheap enough rates to satisfy the landowner’s needs without costing too much.165 In eastern Europe and Hispanic America, there was a shortage of labor by comparison with the amount of land it was profitable to exploit, given the existence of world-economy. And in the presence of such a shortage “the expansion of markets and the growth of production is as likely to lead to the increase of labour services as to their decline.”166 Indeed, in Hispanic America, the decline in population was the very fact which explained the rise of cattle and sheep raising, both of which became widespread in the sixteenth century, and which took the form of large-scale enterprises with an important component of forced labor because of the labor shortage.167

Finally, let us look at what the rise of money tenancy meant. Remember that in western Europe the conversion of feudal dues to money rent became widespread in the late Middle Ages, as we discussed in the last chapter, because of population decline. One must not think of this as an either/or proposition. Feudal dues could be paid in labor services, in kind, or in money. It was often to the landowner’s advantage to switch back and forth.168 For this reason, the mere change in the form of feudal rent was not by itself critical. Indeed, Takahashi goes insofar as to argue that it is epiphenomenal,169 but this seems to me to be quite overstating the issue. Even if it might be true for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to some extent, the rise of payment of dues in money terms certainly evolved into a meaningful difference by the sixteenth century, precisely because the “extra-economic” coercive forces were pressuring not the rural laborers but instead the landowners to go further than they intended.170 Or at least they were pushing some landowners. At a time of expansion, there was competition for labor. The richest landowners could afford to buy the labor away from others. The smallest often had little choice but to settle for obtaining tenants on his land. It was those of inbetween size who may have held on the longest to the old feudal relationships.171

England and France had followed the same path in the late Middle Ages. In both there was manumission of serfdom, the rise of money tenancy, and correlatively the rise of wage labor. Yet a curious thing happened in the sixteenth century. England continued on this path. Eastern Europe moved toward the “second serfdom.” Southern France moved toward sharecropping. In northern France, transformation seemed to stop short. As Bloch notes, “villages which had not by [the sixteenth century] been able to obtain their liberty found it harder and harder to do so.”172

One way to look at this is as a limitation on the ability of the serf to free himself. Bloch regards it rather as a limitation on the ability of the seignior to force the serf into a tenancy arrangement.173 Bloch explains this crucial French–English differential in terms of prior differences. France was more economically developed than England, in the sense that the money economy had spread earlier and more extensively. England was more politically “developed” than France, in the sense that it had stronger central institutions, deriving ultimately from the fact that royal power originated in England in a conquest situation whereas French kings had to slowly piece together their authority amidst true feudal dispersion. Let us see the logic of each of these arguments.

First, France was more centrally located to the currents of European trade and technology than England, and therefore its landed classes developed earlier, the process of conversion of feudal dues to money rents also occurring earlier.174 But since the counterpressures to the breaking up of manors occurred more or less simultaneously in England and France, it follows that English manors still remained relatively more intact than French at the onset of the “long” sixteenth century. Therefore, Bloch implies, English landlords were relatively more free to take advantage of new commercialization possibilities of large domains than French landlords. The English moved to a system of wage labor and continued manumission. The French had to make the best of a bad situation and landlords sought to increase their incomes by renewed old-style pressures.

The second argument deals with the relationship of the king and the nobility as early as the twelfth century. The English had established a strong central control on the judiciary. The other side of this achievement, however, was that within the manor the lord, although he lost power over criminal offenses, obtained full authority to do whatever he wished about tenure. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the manorial courts downplayed copyhold in their interpretation of customary law. When royal justice finally was able to intervene in such questions toward the end of the fifteenth century, they discovered that “customary law” permitted variable rents.

In France, however, there was no central criminal justice. On the other hand, the lord of the manor never had exclusive authority over land law. Hence patrimoniality could not be so easily undermined. Who the true “owner” was became an obscure legal question. By the sixteenth century, there were jurists who were willing to argue the tenant could not be dislodged. Unable, therefore, to change the rents, the seignior had to reacquire the land—by judicial manipulation of documents, and by expanding via “rediscovery” the obligations of feudal dues.175 Over the long run, this difference would be crucial.176

Hence, what Bloch seems to be arguing is that because the English legal system allowed more flexibility to the landlord, money tenancy and wage labor continued to expand, allowing both great pastoral estates and the yeoman farmer becoming gentry to flourish. It also would force more rural labor into urban areas to form the proletariat with which to industrialize. In France, paradoxically the very strength of the monarchy forced the seigniorial class to maintain less economically functional, more “feudal,” forms of land tenure, which would hold France back.

Resolving the tenure issue had in turn great consequences for the role a country would play in the world-system. A system of estate management as in eastern Europe requires large amounts of supervisory personnel. Had English landlords moved in this direction, there might not have been sufficient personnel to man the many new administrative posts required in the emerging world-economy—commercial managers, eventually overseas personnel, etc. It is not that landowners ceded their personnel for these other uses, but that as these other uses expanded, there were fewer persons left for supervisory positions on estates. Tenancy was a way out.

Note then the overall picture. Northwest Europe is in the process of dividing the use of her land for pastoral and arable products. This was only possible as the widening market created an ever larger market for the pastoral products,177 and as the periphery of the world-economy provided cereal supplements for the core areas. The semiperiphery was turning away from industry (a task increasingly confided to the core) and toward relative self-sufficiency in agriculture. The agricultural specialization of the core encouraged the monetization of rural work relationships, as the work was more skilled and as landowners wished to rid themselves of the burden of surplus agricultural workers. Wage labor and money rents became the means of labor control. In this system, a stratum of independent small-scale farmers could emerge and indeed grow strong both on their agricultural products and on their links to the new handicraft industries. Given the increase in population and the decline in wages, it would then follow, as Marx said, that these yeomen farmers “grew rich at the expense both of their laborers and their landlords.”178 They usurped (by enclosure) the lands of the former, arguing publicly the need to guarantee the country’s food supply179 and then hired them at low wages, while obtaining at fixed rentals more and more land from the owners of large demesnes. We do not wish to overstate the strength of this new yeoman class. It is enough to realize they became a significant economic, and hence political, force. Their economic strength lay in the fact that they had every incentive to be “entrepreneurial.” They were seeking wealth and upward mobility: the route to success lay through economic efficiency. But they were not yet burdened down either by traditional obligations of largesse or status obligations of luxury spending or town life.180

Obviously, such a redistribution of rural economic effort had a great impact on the character of the urban areas. What was going on in the towns? We know that the sixteenth century was a time of growing population in general and of growing town sizes, in absolute terms everywhere, but relatively in core areas. We know it follows, logically and from empirical evidence, as Helleiner says, that “one has to assume that, in the [16th century], the pressure of population on its land resources was mounting.”181 In eastern Europe, some people moved into frontier lands. From the Iberian peninsula, some went to the Americas, and some were expelled (Jews, later Moriscos) to other areas of the Mediterranean. In western Europe generally, there was emigration to the towns and a growing vagabondage that was “endemic.”182 There was not only the rural exodus, both the enclosed and ejected rural laborer, and the migratory laborer who came down from the mountains to the plains for a few weeks at harvest time, the “true rural proletarians” for Braudel.183 There was also the vagabondage “caused by the decline of feudal bodies of retainers and the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to serve the kings against their vassals. . . .”184

What did all these wanderers do? They of course provided the unskilled labor for the new industries. In Marx’s view, “the rapid rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually.”185 And as we have seen, their availability was one of the conditions of the willingness of landlords to commute feudal services to rents.186

This picture of an expanding labor force, not producing food, is hard to reconcile, however, with another fact. Jones and Woolf argue that a precondition to industrial development, and one that was historically met for the first time in sixteenth century northwest Europe, is that, along with an increase in productivity and a wider market, there was “a breathing space from intense population pressure during which income rather than men might be multiplied. . . .”187

But what about the surplus population then that swelled the towns of the core states, that wandered the countryside as vagabonds? Well, for one thing, they kept dying off in large quantity. Some were hanged for being vagabonds.188 Famines were frequent, especially given “the slowness and prohibitive price of transport, [and] the irregularity of harvests. . . .”189 As Braudel and Spooner put it, an analysis of this economy “must take into account the ‘youth’ of this [vagabond] population whose life-span was on the average short because of famines and epidemics. . . .”190

This would then account for an otherwise puzzling phenomenon noted by Braudel: “The proletariat of the towns could not have maintained its size, still less have grown, were it not for constant waves of immigration.”191 It also helps to explain the puzzling circumstance noted by Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, that, despite the significant fall in wages of the workers, there was so relatively little social upheaval. They say: “Part of the answer may be that it was a fall from a high level [of the 15th century], so that great though it was it still left the wage-earner with a subsistence . . .”192

But this subsistence survival of the northwest European worker’s wage level was only made possible by having a periphery from which to import wheat, having bullion to make the flow possible, and allowing part of the population to die off; which part would be a fascinating subject to pursue. Is it not probable that, already in the sixteenth century, there were systematic ethnic distinctions of rank within the working class in the various cities of Europe? For example, Kazimierz Tyminiecki notes precisely this phenomenon in the towns of sixteenth century East Elbia, where German workers excluded Slavic migrants from higher occupations.193 Not much research seems to have been done on the ethnic distribution of the urban working class of early modern Europe, but my guess would be that Tyminiecki’s description might be shown to be typical of the whole of the world-economy. It is not only that, within this world-economy, towns were unevenly distributed, but that within the towns, ethnic groups were probably unevenly distributed. We must not forget here the concept of layers within layers.

If we must be careful to look at whom we mean by urban workers, we must be careful when we look at the upper classes. In medieval Europe, high status was held by warrior–landowners called nobles. For the most part, they were an occupationally homogeneous group, distinguished largely by rank which correlated roughly with size of domain and the number of vassals. To be sure, individuals and families moved up and down the rank scale. There were also a few towns in which emerged an urban patriciate. We have already discussed in the previous chapter some of the conceptual confusions of identity to which this gave rise.

But, in the sixteenth century, was the landowner–merchant aristocrat or bourgeois? It is clear that both generically and specifically this was unclear. The picture had become murky with the creation of a world-economy based on commerce and capitalist agriculture. Let us look successively at the international merchants and then the “industrialists,” and see both their geographic distribution and their links to landowning classes.

In many ways the techniques of commercial gain used in the sixteenth century were merely an extension of the methods the towns learned to use vis-à-vis their immediate hinterland in the late Middle Ages. The problem of the towns collectively was to control their own market, that is, be able both to reduce the cost of items purchased from the countryside and to minimize the role of stranger merchants.194 Two techniques were used. On the one hand, towns sought to obtain not only legal rights to tax market operations but also the right to regulate the trading operation (who should trade, when it should take place, what should be traded). Furthermore, they sought to restrict the possibilities of their countryside engaging in trade other than via their town. The result was what Dobb calls a sort of “urban colonialism.”195 Over time, these various mechanisms shifted their terms of trade in favor of the townsmen, in favor thus of the urban commercial classes against both the landowning and peasant classes.

But the profits in this, while important, were small by comparison with what might be earned by long-distance trade, especially colonial or semicolonial trade. Henri Sée estimates the profit margins of the early colonial commercial operations as being very high: “sometimes in excess of 200 or 300% from dealings that were little more than piracy.”196 There were really two separate aspects to this high profit ratio. One was the “monopsony” situation in the colonial area, that is, monopsony in the “purchase” of land and labor. This was arranged, as we have seen, by the use of legal force, whether in Hispanic America or in eastern Europe. The second was the effective lack of competition in the areas of sales of the primary products, western Europe. This lack of competition was the consequence, in part, of the lack of technological development, and in part of vertical linkage chains of merchandising.

To be sure, the technology of business transactions had seen some very important advances in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: deposit banking, the bill of exchange, brokers, branch offices of central commercial organizations. Chaunu estimates that these techniques enabled commercial capitalism to increase, “perhaps tenfold,” its ability to skim surplus and thus have “the ships, the men, the means needed to feed the adventure of exploration and then of exploitation of new space, in close liaison with the state.”197 Nonetheless, the sum total of these commercial innovations was insufficient to make it possible for long-distance traders to enter the world market without substantial capital and usually some state assistance. Hence, not many could so enter, and those who were already in did not actively seek to alter this situation.198

Even more important were the vertical links. The sources of capital were limited. Let us remember, even the state apparatuses were large-scale borrowers. The profits of Portuguese sugar plantations based on slave labor, for example, went not merely to the Portuguese directly involved, but to persons in the more “advanced” European economies, who provided both initial capital and an industrial outlet.199 It was not merely that northwest Europe could develop the factories, but that their vertical commercial links encouraged a financial dependence. Indeed it would not be extreme to talk of a system of international debt peonage, first perfected by Hanseatic merchants vis-à-vis Norwegian fishermen and furtrappers in the late Middle Ages200 and later by the Germanic merchants of such towns as Riga, Reval, and Gdańsk vis-à-vis the east European hinterland. The technique was known elsewhere, being used by the merchants of Toulouse, the Genoese in the Iberian peninsula, and in parts of the wool trade of England and Spain. What was the method? Very simple: it involved the purchase of goods in advance of their production, that is, payments in advance for supplies to be delivered in the future. This prevented sale on an open market. It allowed the merchants rather than the producers to decide the optimum moment for world resale. And since the money lent tended to be expended by the time of delivery of the goods, if not overspent, the producer was always tempted to perpetuate the arrangement. In theory forbidden by law, this system could only be applied by merchants who had the means and influence to be able to sustain the practice, that is “foreign merchants, or rich merchants who had easy access to foreign markets.”201 These merchants could thereby take the profits of the price revolution and multiply them. The way in which this system involved a vertical network of exploitation and profit making is clearly described by Malowist as it operated in Poland:

In the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, when the Gdansk merchants were paying less attention to the sea trade, they began to exert an increasing influence on agriculture in all parts of Poland. Towards the end of the sixteenth century when conditions for the export of grain were particularly favorable, agents of the Gdansk merchants were regularly to be seen at the markets in the towns and villages of Poland, where they bought up grain. . . . [In] the seventeenth century, the rich merchants of Gdansk, like the merchants of Riga, made advance payments not only to the lesser gentry, but even to the wealthy nobles of Poland and Lithuania. . . . This great flourishing of Gdansk trade in the extensive hinterlands can be explained by the immense increase in the wealth of the Gdansk merchants during the time of the revolution in prices. . . . The Gdansk merchants received advance payments from the Dutch, and . . . the latter sometimes collected for that purpose certain sums from merchants in Antwerp.202

This system of international debt peonage enabled a cadre of international merchants to bypass (and thus eventually destroy) the indigenous merchant classes of eastern Europe (and to some extent those of southern Europe) and enter into direct links with landlord–entrepreneurs (nobility included) who were essentially capitalist farmers, producing the goods and keeping control of them until they reached the first major port area, after which they were taken in hand by some merchants of west European (or north Italian) nationality203 who in turn worked through and with a burgeoning financial class centered in a few cities.

If the international merchants in the European world-economy were largely of certain nationalities, was this also true of “industrialists,” and what was the relation of these two groups? Industrial production existed already in the Middle Ages, but it was scattered, small-scale, and mostly geared to a luxury market. It was only with the rise of a capitalist system within the framework of a world-economy that there could emerge industrial entrepreneurs.204

It was precisely in the areas of greater agricultural specialization that there was a thrust to industrialize, not only in moments of expansion but in moments of contraction as well. Marian Malowist talks to the conjuncture in these areas of the growth of a cloth industry and agricultural crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.205 Joan Thirsk notes how the rural thrust, the need to find alternate employment possibilities for ejected rural labor, continued to operate in sixteenth century England.206

This rural pressure however did not operate in the most “advanced” areas because the fact that many of these industries were then located in rural areas was a function not only of the rural search for employment, but of the urban rejection. Many of the centers of the medieval textile industry in Flanders and northern Italy had their capital invested in luxury good production and were unable or unwilling to shift to the new market first made necessary by the monetary crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and then made profitable by the creation of a world-economy in the sixteenth century. These entrepreneurs were not concerned in this case about frontiers.207 One famous and key move of this kind was the flight of Flemish capitalists to England. What we must bear in mind is that at this stage the industries all had a shaky base. They rose and fell. They were like wanderers searching for a haven: “They resembled a thousand fires lighted at the same time, each fragile, in a vast field of dry grasses.”208 It is clear that the old advanced centers, the controllers of international trade, were not necessarily the centers of imagination and daring. It seems to bear out Henri Pirenne’s belief in the noncontinuity of capitalist entrepreneurs.209

We are thus led to be prudent in the use of our terminology. Bourgeois and feudal classes, in an explanation which uses class categories to explain social change, should not be read, as it usually is, to mean “merchants” and “landowners.” During the long period of the creation of the European world-economy, in the core countries of this world-economy, there were some merchants and some landowners who stood to gain from retaining those forms of production associated with “feudalism,” namely ones in which peasant labor was in some way systematically and legally made to turn over the largest part of its product to the landowner (e.g., corvée, feudal rents, etc.). And there were some merchants and some landowners who stood to gain from the rise of new forms of industrial production, based on contractual labor. In the sixteenth century, this division often corresponded, as a first approximation, to big and small. Big merchants and big landowners profited more from the old feudal system; small (medium-size? rising?) ones from the new capitalist forms. But the big-small dichotomy should be used with caution and nuance and it only holds at this point of historical time. Theoretically, of course, it makes a lot of sense. New forms of social organization usually tend to have less appeal to those doing well under an existing system than to those who are energetic and ambitious, but not yet arrivé. Empirically, it is complicated by other considerations.

Whatever their origins, this new class of “industrialists,” some coming out of the yeoman farmer ranks and some reconverted merchants, were committed to what Vilar terms the essential characteristic of a modern economy: “the achievement of medium-sized profits in much larger markets: selling more selling in quantity, while earning less on a per-unit basis.210 Part of the profit came from the wage-lag.211 Part were windfall profits. Part were low real interest rates. Part were profits borrowed against the future in terms of noncalculated depreciation.212 But profit there was. And the amount of profit not only created a political base for this class; it had an immediate impact on the overall economy. This was felt in many ways: as a stimulus to the production of raw materials and the mobilization of manpower, as a way of meeting a growing demand which became a mass demand. But in addition, it made possible the industry responsible for the creation of many external economies: roads, flood control devices, ports.213

It is clear, too, that the sixteenth century saw a remarkable shift of locus of the textile industry. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these industries expanded in the “old” centers: northern Italy, southern Germany, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Spanish-Netherlands, and in England only in the southwest and only in woolen cloth. Then, new centers arose, principally in England and the northern Netherlands, in countries that had been, as Nef observed, “industrially backward at the beginning of the sixteenth century. . . .”214

We have sought to present the case in this chapter of the emergence of a new economic framework of action in the sixteenth century—the European world-economy based on capitalist methods. It involved a division of productive labor that can only be properly appreciated by taking into account the world-economy as a whole. The emergence of an industrial sector was important, but what made this possible was the transformation of agricultural activity from feudal to capitalist forms. Not all these capitalist “forms” were based on “free” labor—only those in the core of the economy. But the motivations of landlord and laborer in the non-“free” sector were as capitalist as those in the core.

We should not leave this theme without looking at the objections to this analysis. Ernesto Laclau has taken André Gunder Frank to task for arguing that sixteenth century Hispanic America had a capitalist economy. He argues that this is both incorrect and un-Marxist. Without diverting ourselves into a long excursus on Marxian exegetics, let me say simply that I think Laclau is right in terms of the letter of Marx’s arguments but not in terms of its spirit. On the substance of the issue itself, Laclau’s main argument is that Frank’s definition of capitalism as production for profit for a market in which the profit does not go to the direct producer and feudalism as a closed-off subsistence economy are both conceptually wrong. He argues that Frank’s definition, in omitting “relations of production” (that is, essentially whether or not labor is “free”), makes it possible not only to include sixteenth century Hispanic America but also “the slave on a Roman latifundium or the gleb serf of the European Middle Ages, at least in those cases—the overwhelming majority—where the lord assigned part [my italics] of the economic surplus extracted from the serf for sale.215 He then suggests that, if Frank is right, “we would have to conclude that Elizabethan England or Renaissance France was ripe for socialism. . . .”216 Finally he says far from feudalism being incompatible with capitalism, the expansion of the external market in Hispanic America served to “accentuate and consolidate [feudalism].”217

Laclau precisely beclouds the issue. First, the difference between the gleb serf of the Middle Ages and the slave or worker on an encomienda in sixteenth century Hispanic America, or a “serf” in Poland, was threefold: the difference between assigning “part” of the surplus to a market and assigning “most of the surplus;” the difference between production for a local market and a world market; the difference between the exploiting classes spending the profits, and being motivated to maximize them and partially reinvest them. As for Laclau’s inference about Elizabethan England, it is absurd and polemical. As for involvement in a capitalist world market accentuating feudalism, precisely so, but “feudalism” of this new variety.

The point is that the “relations of production” that define a system are the “relations of production” of the whole system, and the system at this point in time is the European world-economy. Free labor is indeed a defining feature of capitalism, but not free labor throughout the productive enterprises. Free labor is the form of labor control used for skilled work in core countries whereas coerced labor is used for less skilled work in peripheral areas. The combination thereof is the essence of capitalism. When labor is everywhere free, we shall have socialism.

But capitalism cannot flourish within the framework of a world-empire. This is one reason why it never emerged in Rome. The various advantages merchants had in the emergent world-economy were all politically easier to obtain than if they had sought them within the framework of a single state, whose rulers would have to respond to multiple interests and pressures.218 That is why the secret of capitalism was in the establishment of the division of labor within the framework of a world-economy that was not an empire rather than within the framework of a single national state. In underdeveloped countries in the twentieth century, K. Berrill notes that “international trade is often much cheaper and easier than internal trade and . . . specialization between countries is often much easier and earlier than specialization between regions in a country.”219 This was also true in sixteenth-century Europe. We shall try to demonstrate how and why this worked in the course of this volume.

In summary, what were the economic accomplishments of the sixteenth century and how have we accounted for them? It was not a century of great technological advance, except for the introduction of coal as a fuel in England and northern France. A. Rupert Hall sees both industry and agriculture as “in the last phases of a series of changes, both technological and organizational” which had begun in the fourteenth century, with the “crisis.” But, he notes, it was in the sixteenth century that there was a “diffusion of techniques from the core to the periphery of European civilization.”220

Four things are striking about the sixteenth century. Europe expanded into the Americas. This may not have been determinative by itself, but it was important.221 The crucial fact about the expansion was captured by Braudel: “the gold and silver of the New World enabled Europe to live above its means, to invest beyond its savings.”222

To invest beyond its savings, and to increase its savings, by the price revolution and wage-lag. Whether or not the expansion of bullion was responsible for the expansion of production, and to whatever extent demographic expansion was the cause or consequence, the bullion itself was “merchandise, and a general expansion of trade underlay the ‘prosperity’ of the sixteenth century which was neither a game nor a mirage, not a monetary illusion.”223

The third striking change was the pattern of rural labor—the rise of coerced cash-crop labor in the periphery and of the yeoman farmer in the core. Takahashi may exaggerate when he calls the yeoman farmer the “prime mover”224 in the end of feudalism, but it is doubtful that one could have had a capitalist system without him. But also not without the coerced cash-crop labor.

Jean Néré attacks Dobb for putting exclusive emphasis on the availability of proletarian labor in explaining the rise of capitalism. He says one has to put this factor together with secular price movements.225 Braudel and Spooner, on the other hand, caution against confusing accidental fluctuations (the price revolution) for structural changes.226 What is clear is that in the sixteenth century a “capitalist era”227 emerges and that it takes the form of a world-economy. No doubt, “the fragility of this first unity of the world”228 is a critical explanatory variable in the political evolution. But the fact is that this unity survives and, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, did come to be consolidated.

One of the principal features of the European world-system of the sixteenth century is that there was no simple answer to the question of who was dominating whom? One might make a good case for the Low Countries exploiting Poland via Gdańsk, and certainly Spain exploiting its American possessions. The core dominated the periphery. But the core was so large. Did Genoese merchants and bankers use Spain or did Spanish imperialism absorb parts of Italy? Did Florence dominate Lyon, or France Lombardy, or both? How should one describe the true links between Antwerp (later Amsterdam) and England? Note that in all these cases we deal with a merchant city-state on the one hand and a larger nation-state on the other.

If we are to untangle the picture any further, we must look to the political side, the ways in which various groups sought to use the state structures to protect and advance their interests. It is to this question we now turn.

THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AND STATISM

It is evident that the rise of the absolute monarchy in western Europe is coordinate in time with the emergence of a European world-economy. But is it cause or consequence? A good case can be made for both. On the one hand, were it not for the expansion of commerce and the rise of capitalist agriculture, there would scarcely have been the economic base to finance the expanded bureaucratic state structures.1 But on the other hand, the state structures were themselves a major economic underpinning of the new capitalist system (not to speak of being its political guarantee). As Braudel says, “Whether or not they wanted to be, [the states were] the biggest entrepreneurs of the century.”2 Furthermore, they were essential customers of the merchants.3

There are several different arguments about the role of the state in capitalist enterprise. One concerns its extent, a second, its economic impact, and a third, its class content. The third argument we shall discuss later. First, while there is much disagreement about the extent of state involvement in the world-economy of the nineteenth century, there seems to be widespread consensus that in the earlier periods of the modern world-system, beginning at least in the sixteenth century and lasting at least until the eighteenth, the states were central economic actors in the European world-economy.

But if most agree that the states did play this role, some feel it was an unnecessary and undesirable role. For example, Schumpeter, true to his belief in the long-range superior efficiency of private enterprise, denies that the state was good for business as purchaser of goods or credit. He says it is an “unpardonable [error] to think that in the absence of the extravagance of courts there would not have been equivalent goods from the peasants and the bourgeois from whom the corresponding means were taken.”4 Unpardonable it may be, but error perhaps not. Why is it not conceivable that, to meet tax demands, a peasant produces a surplus which he might otherwise either consume or not produce? Does Schumpeter really assume that in the sixteenth century the peasants of Europe were totally oriented to a commercial market?

As for the thesis that court expenditures were vital in the creation of credit, Schumpeter has two responses. One is that any benefit obtained in developing a “credit-engineering machine” must be weighed “against all the destruction wrought and all the paralysis of economic activity spread, both by the methods of raising that revenue and by the uses it financed.”5 This involves a tremendous counterfactual argument, whose validity can only be assessed in terms of the entire argument of this book. The view expounded herein will be that the development of strong states in the core areas of the European world was an essential component of the development of modern capitalism. His second response is that the counterpart of loans to courts was economic privileges which were most probably economically unsound from the perspective of the interests of the larger community.6 No doubt this is true, but to me this seems a description of the essence of capitalism, not an accidental distortion of its operations, and hence an assertion which in fact provides a good part of the refutation of Schumpeter’s previous one.

We have already reviewed previously the various aspects of the economic crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which contributed to the slow but steady growth of state bureaucracies. We have also mentioned the evolution of military technology which made obsolete the medieval knight and thereby strengthened the hand of central authorities who could control large numbers of infantrymen. The main political objective of the monarchs was the restoration of order, a prerequisite to economic resurgence. In Génicot’s succinct summary, “by revealing the evil effects of a breakdown in authority, the troubled times established the case for centralization.”7

But why should such political regimes come to the fore at this particular time? One classic response is to talk in terms of the centrifugal phenomena of new states, an argument often used about twentieth-century new states.8 The initial thrust of the fifteenth century “restorers of order” came out of the “crisis of feudalism.” The economic squeeze on the seigniors had led to increased exploitation of peasants and consequently to peasant rebellions. It had also led to internecine warfare among the nobility. The weakened nobility looked to the kings to preserve them from the threats of greater disorder still. The kings profited from the circumstances to enhance their own wealth and power vis-à-vis this very nobility. This was the price of their provision of security, what Frederic Lane calls their “protection rent” and which he reminds us were at that time both “a major source of the fortunes made in trade [and] a more important source of profits . . . than superiority in industrial technique or industrial organization.”9

Of course, the king’s advance was not merely a function of opportunity but of the pressures he was under himself. Eisenstadt argues that what he calls “bureaucratic politics” come into existence when “the political rulers cannot rely on the facilities available to them through their own resources (e.g., the king’s domains), or through the unquestioning commitments of other groups. . . .”10 But were commitments ever unquestioning? And as for the availability of resources, the fact that the kings’ personal resources were insufficient for their objectives was a function of more ambitious objectives. We must then look to the pressures that led rulers to seek to implement more ambitious objectives.

One suggestion comes from Archibald Lewis, who ties it to the availability of land: “When . . . the sovereign has given out all the free land and none remains, it is necessary for him to begin to tax—taking back in another form the wealth he earlier showered out upon his people.”11 This need for national taxation did not immediately lead to “absolutism.” Rather, the sovereign had to create parliaments to obtain the assistance of the nobility in the taxation process but only “until such time as the rulers felt powerful enough to dispense with such assistance.”12 Dobb has a different emphasis. He sees the pressure on the king as having come not from the shortage of land but from “labor scarcity.” The growth of the state machinery served to promote “control of the labor market.”13

It might follow from this analysis that if economic crisis led to greater power for the monarchs, the economic expansion of the sixteenth century would have had the inverse effect. To a certain extent, as we shall see, this was true. The “first” sixteenth century was the era of imperial strivings, not of strong states, as we shall discuss in the next chapter. It was not until the “failure of empire,” of which we shall speak then, that strong states once again came to the fore. And indeed it would only be the eighteenth century that historians would deem “the age of absolutism.”14

In fact, however, despite fluctuations in the curve, we are faced with a secular increase in state power throughout the modern era. The capitalist world-economy seems to have required and facilitated this secular process of increased centralization and internal control, at least within the core states.

How did kings, who were the managers of the state machinery in the sixteenth century, strengthen themselves? They used four major mechanisms: bureaucratization, monopolization of force, creation of legitimacy, and homogenization of the subject population. We shall treat each in turn.

If the king grew stronger, it was unquestionably due to the fact that he acquired new machinery to use, a corps of permanent and dependent officials.15 Of course, in this respect, Europe was just catching up with China. Hence we know that a bureaucratic state structure is by itself insufficient to demarcate the great changes of the sixteenth century, much less account for them. Nevertheless, the development of the state bureaucracy was crucial, because it was to alter fundamentally the rules of the political game, by ensuring that henceforth decisions of economic policy could not be easily made without going through the state structure. It meant that the energy of men of all strata had to turn in significant part to the conquest of the political kingdom. To be sure, we are still talking in this era of a relatively small bureaucracy, certainly by comparison with contemporary Europe.16 But the difference of size and structure by comparison with the late Middle Ages represented nonetheless a qualitative jump.

How did a king acquire these men? He bought them. The problem of the king was not that he had no agents. There were persons who performed administrative and military functions in the realm, but they were not previously for the most part dependent on him, and hence were not bound to carry out his dispositions in the face of adverse pressure deriving from their own interests or from that of their peers and families. The king turned to persons, usually “of modest origin”17 to become a paid, full-time staff. The major institution which made this possible has come to be known as the “venality of office.” By contrast with bureaucracies based on a norm of financial disinterestedness and universalistic recruitment, no doubt these forms underline the limited power of the king, and the likelihood that state income would be diverted to increased payments to this venal bureaucracy. But by contrast with the preceding feudal system, venality made possible the relative supremacy of the state-system. As Hartung and Mousnier say, “Despite appearances, the venality of offices was most often favorable to the absolute monarch.”18

The political choice was made by the king between realistic alternatives. In order to establish a rational bureaucracy, the state needed a sure source of prior funds other than that which the bureaucracy would bring in. K. W. Swart suggests that what monarchs lacked in the sixteenth century, unlike later governments, was the possibility to “issue loans without assigning a special part of their income as security for the interest.”19 They were caught in a cycle because in order to acquire this possibility they first had to create a stronger state machinery. Venality of office had the virtue of providing both immediate income (sale of office) and a staff. Of course this then went hand in hand with the development of a self-interested corporate group of venal officers.20 To be sure, venality creates a “vicious circle” as Richard Ehrenberg points out, in which the increased bureaucracy eats up revenue and creates debts, leading to still larger fiscal needs by the state.21 The trick was to transform the circle into an upward spiral wherein the bureaucracy was sufficiently efficient to squeeze out of the population a surplus larger than the costs of maintaining the apparatus. Some states succeeded at this. Others did not. The crucial distinguishing factor would be their role in the world-economy.

The upward spiral operated something like this: The momentary advantages acquired by the king in the late Middle Ages because of the economic squeeze on the nobility created the funds that made it possible to begin to “buy” a bureaucracy. This in turn made it possible both to tax more and to borrow more. In those areas of the world-economy where economic transformation was proceeding in such a way as to ensure a disproportionate share of the world surplus, states found it easier to tax and to borrow, a sheer reflex of future-oriented confidence of money-possessing elements. The states used these increased revenues to increase their coercive power which in turn increased what might be termed “confidence in the coercive potential” of the state.

This made it possible for national debts to come into existence, that is, deficitary state budgets. National debts were unknown in the ancient world, and impossible in the Middle Ages because of the weakness of the central governments and the uncertainty of succession. It is only with the regime of Francis I in France in the sixteenth century that we first encounter this economic phenomenon.22 For national debts can only exist when the state can force people to delay collecting them or at opportune moments refuse to pay them, while simultaneously forcing groups to lend, in specie or by various paper transactions, the current excess. It is part of the drive to ensure increasing revenues to the Crown. The Crown needed money with which to build up its state machinery, and had enough state machinery to obtain the money. The system employed was not yet mercantilism, a policy aimed at strengthening the long run tax base of the state, so much as “fiscalism,” in Martin Wolfe’s phrase,23 a policy aimed at increasing the immediate income of the state.

At this point in time, nonetheless the lack of serious financial state machinery was still striking, “another sign of weakness,” as Braudel calls it, of the sixteenth-century state, compared to later states.24 Still, the weakness of the State as financial manipulator does not detract from the fact that national debts reflected the growing autonomous interests of the states as economic actors, as actors however with a special ability to pursue their economic ends.

Perhaps the most important use to which the surplus of money was put, once one deducted the cost of the administrative machinery used in collecting it, was in the creation of standing armies. Once again the way states got personnel initially was to buy them. The counterpart of “venal” bureaucrats was “mercenary” soldiers.

Who however was available to be purchased? Not just anyone, since being a mercenary was a dangerous albeit occasionally rewarding occupation. It was not an occupation generally speaking of choice. Those who could do better did so with alacrity. It was consequently an occupation whose recruitment was geographically and socially skewed, part and parcel of the new European division of labor.

The population growth in western Europe led as we have mentioned to the phenomenon of “vagabondage.” There was a growth everywhere of a “lumpenproletariat.” They were a threat to the not too well established order of the new states. Incorporating some of them into the armies served multiple functions. It provided employment to some, and used this group to suppress the others.25 It gave the kings new weapons to control the lords, but also to sustain them. V. G. Kiernan has indicated how many of the mercenaries came from the “less-developed” corners of western Europe: from Gascony, Picardy, Brittany, Wales, Corsica, Sardinia, Dalmatia. “Altogether, a striking number of these recruiting-grounds lay in mountainous regions on the fringes of Europe, inhabited by alien peoples such as Celts or Basques.”26 And, it seems, above all, from Switzerland.27

Kiernan argues that this pattern of recruitment was not only directly responsible for controlling the social explosion of the sixteenth century;28 it also had a second subtler impact, albeit one just as important, if we remember that, in our terms, we are dealing with a world-economy:

The reservoirs of mercenary recruitment remained politically stagnant, compared with their neighbors, somewhat as Nepal and the Panjab, two great recruiting-grounds for the British army, long did. For Switzerland the three centuries of symbiosis with despotic France had evil consequences. Cantonal politics were corrupted by the fees received for licensing the export of soldiers, and rings of patricians increased their power at the expense of common people. . . . As Alfieri was to remark bitterly, these free-men of the hills became the chief watchdogs of tyranny. European history might have taken a different turn if the Swiss had still been as revolutionary a force in 1524, when the Peasants’ War was fought, as fifty years earlier.29

The mercenaries were not even recruited directly by the state in most cases. The existing machinery did not permit it. Rather the state contracted with “military entrepreneurs,” who sought profit. Redlich is dubious that this was an optimal means of capital accumulation since if their income was “extraordinarily high . . . typically their expenditures were tremendous.”30 But it is one more piece of evidence on how state building affected the rise of capitalism. In the short run at least, “in a society where there is chronic underemployment of resources, increased military expenditure has often stimulated more production of other kinds so that the amount of surplus rose in time of war.”31 But more than commerce and production was involved in the military enterprise. The system was credit-creating. For not only did princes borrow from bankers; so did the military entrepreneurs, whose capital was supplied by the large merchant bankers such as the Fuggers. This would remain true as late as the Thirty Years’ War.32

Furthermore, it is not only that mercenary armies offered employment for the poor and entrepreneurial opportunities. Armies had to be fed. Typically, food merchants accompanied armies in the field, also serving as intermediaries for the booty.³³ Alan Everitt argues that army victualling was a major stimulus to regional grain specialization in Tudor England³⁴ and that it even stimulated the export trade.³⁵ This is all the more plausible if one takes into account that states also felt a responsibility to make sure that their growing bureaucracies had sufficient food as well.³⁶ The expansion of capitalism came thus to serve the short run needs of the state.

Here as with the civil bureaucracy the monarch was in a dilemma. The military entrepreneur was a necessary adjunct in the monarch’s search for power. He also drained a goodly part of the surplus. No doubt the military entrepreneur was a more reliable agent of the prince than a noble vassal, but ultimately he too pursued his own interests primarily. Woe to the prince whose liquidity failed!³⁷ The likelihood, however, of this happening was once again a direct function of the state’s role in the world-economy.

Up to a point, in any case, the armies paid for themselves. For they made possible more taxes. Since the “weight of [these taxes] fell almost entirely on the people—especially those who lived in the country,”³⁸ the people chafed, and to the extent that they could, they rebelled.³⁹ The armies were then there to suppress these rebellions, to the extent that they could. The easiest form of rebellion, because the most difficult for the states to counteract, was banditry, which was of course the easier the more mountainous the region.⁴⁰ The police of the state was still too thin to do too much about it, except in central areas, and this banditry often found a resonant chord in the opposition of some traditional seigniors to the new states.⁴¹

No doubt, as Delumeau puts it, “banditry was often the insurrection of the country against the city.”⁴² But who in the country and most importantly when? It is clear that peasant involvement in banditry seems to be highly correlated with moments of grain shortage.⁴³ Of course when a food riot occurred, the very poor were involved, but in banditry as a movement, especially in the Mediterranean area, it was not the very poor who made up the heart of the movement. It was more clearly the nascent yeoman farmers, who in the late sixteenth century, found in banditry their form of protest against the “refeudalization” that was occurring, against the semiperipheralization of their countries.⁴⁴ In such countries, it was particularly the small entrepreneurs, like the massari of southern Italy, who having fewer means of resistance to poor harvest years than larger landowners, feared a precipitous fall into the ranks of the rural poor, and hence employed banditry against these large landowners whom they saw as their immediate enemy.⁴⁵

The other element involved in banditry was a part of the nobility, but again which ones? It seems to be those who were squeezed out by the economic upheaval. In our discussion of mercenaries, we pointed out that the growth of population along with various thrusts toward enclosure created the problem of vagabondage, and that the rise of mercenary armies served, among other purposes, to employ some of these “vagabonds” to hold the rest in line. Mercenary armies strengthened the princes. By the same token, they weakened the traditional nobility, not only by establishing forces strong enough to enforce the royal will, but also by creating an employment vacuum for the lesser nobility.⁴⁶ There was of course an alternative for impoverished knights in many areas. They could join the king’s service. Furthermore, where the king was stronger, banditry was more difficult. But in areas where the prince was weak, his weakness made banditry more profitable and alternative service less available. It is in this sense that banditry implicitly was a demand for a stronger state rather than a flight into “traditional” resistance. It was a form of opposition, in some cases “the greatest force of opposition existing within the kingdom,”⁴⁷ but an opposition within the framework of the modern state.

It would hence be a serious error to see banditry as a form of traditional feudal opposition to state authority.⁴⁸ It was the consequence of the inadequate growth of state authority, the inability of the state to compensate for the dislocations caused by the economic and social turbulence, the unwillingness of the state to ensure some greater equalization of distribution in times of inflation, population growth, and food shortages. Banditry was in this sense created by the state itself, both by depriving some nobles of traditional rights (and hence sources of wealth) and some peasants of their produce to feed the new bureaucracies, and by creating in the state itself a larger concentration of wealth such that it became more tempting to try to seize part of it. Banditry was a symptom of the dislocations caused by the tremendous economic reallocations resulting from the creation of a European world-economy.

Political organisms are always more stable to the extent that they achieve even partial legitimacy. There is much mystification in the analyses of the process of legitimation caused by an almost exclusive look at the relationship of governments and the mass of the population. It is doubtful if very many governments in human history have been considered “legitimate” by the majority of those exploited, oppressed, and mistreated by their governments. The masses may be resigned to their fate, or sullenly restive, or amazed at their temporary good fortune, or actively insubordinate. But governments tend to be endured, not appreciated or admired or loved or even supported. So it surely was in sixteenth-century Europe.

Legitimation does not concern the masses but the cadres. The question of political stability revolves around the extent to which the small group of managers of the state machinery is able to convince the larger group of central staff and regional potentates both that the regime was formed and functions on the basis of whatever consensual values these cadres can be made to believe exist and that it is in the interest of these cadres that this regime continue to function without major disturbance. When such circumstances obtain, we may call a regime “legitimate.”

Legitimacy furthermore is not a once-and-for-all matter. It is a matter of constant compromise. In the sixteenth century, the ideology which arose as a means of legitimating the new authority of the monarchs was the divine right of kings, the system we have come to call absolute monarchy. Since absolutism was an ideology, we must beware of taking its claims at face value. It would be useful to examine therefore exactly what were the claims and how they corresponded to the realities of the social structure.

First, to what extent did “absolute” mean absolute? The theory that there were no human agencies that could, under most circumstances, make any legitimate claim of refusing to implement the proclaimed will of the monarch was not altogether new. However, it did get more widespread exposition and intellectual acceptance in this era than in earlier and later epochs. “Absolute” is a misnomer, however, both as to theory and as to fact. In theory, absolute did not mean unlimited, since as Hartung and Mousnier point out, it was “limited by divine law and natural law.” They argue that “absolute” should not be read as “unlimited” but rather as “unsupervised” (pas contrôlée). The monarchy was absolute by opposition to the past feudal scattering of power. “It did not signify despotism and tyranny.”⁴⁹ Similarly, Maravall says that “in neither the initial nor subsequent phases of the modern state did ‘absolute monarchy’ mean unlimited monarchy. It was a relative absoluteness.”⁵⁰ The key operational claim was that the monarch should not be limited by the constraints of law: ab legibus solutus.

Whatever the claims, the powers of the monarch were in fact quite limited, not only in theory but in reality. In most ways, the power of the king was far less than that of the executive of a twentieth-century liberal democracy, despite the institutional and moral constraints on the latter. For one thing, the state apparatus of the twentieth century has a degree of organizational capacity behind it that more than compensates for the increased constraints. To understand the real power of an “absolute” monarch, we must put it in the context of the political realities of the time and place. A monarch was absolute to the extent that he had a reasonable probability of prevailing against other forces within the state when policy confrontations occurred.⁵¹ But even the strongest states in the sixteenth century were hard pressed to demonstrate clear predominance within their frontiers of the means of force, or command over the sources of wealth,⁵² not to speak of primacy of the loyalty of their subjects.

The rise of the state as a social force, and absolutism as its ideology, should not be confused with the nation and nationalism. The creation of strong states within a world-system was a historical prerequisite to the rise of nationalism both within the strong states and in the periphery. Nationalism is the acceptance of the members of a state as members of a status-group, as citizens, with all the requirements of collective solidarity that implies. Absolutism is the assertion of the prime importance of the survival of the state as such. The former is by definition a mass sentiment; the latter by definition the sentiment of a small group of persons directly interested in the state machinery.

No doubt the proponents of a strong state over time would come to cultivate national sentiment as a solid reinforcement for their objectives. And to some extent they had something to work with in the sixteenth century already.⁵³ But this collective sentiment was usually primarily geared, to the extent it existed, to the person of the prince rather than to the collectivity as a whole.⁵⁴ The absolute monarch was a “heroic” figure,⁵⁵ the process of deification getting ever more intense as time went on. This was the era in which the elaborate court ceremonial was developed, the better to remove the monarch from contact with the banal work (and incidentally the better to provide employment for court aristocrats, keeping them thereby close enough to be supervised and checked).

It was only in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the framework of mercantilism that nationalism would find its first real advocates amongst the bourgeoisie.⁵⁶ But in the sixteenth century, the interests of the bourgeoisie were not yet surely fixed on the state. Too large a number were more interested in open than in closed economies. And for state builders, premature nationalism risked its crystallization around too small an ethno-territorial entity. At an early point, statism could almost be said to be antinationalist, since the boundaries of “nationalist” sentiment were often narrower than the bounds of the monarch’s state.⁵⁷ Only much later would the managers of the state machinery seek to create “integrated” states,⁵⁸ in which the dominant ethnic group would “assimilate” the outlying areas.

In the sixteenth century, a few states made substantial progress in centralizing power and achieving acceptance at least partially of the legitimacy of this centralization. It is not too difficult to outline the conditions under which this was likely to occur. Whenever the various cadres, the various groups who controlled resources, felt that their class interests were better served politically by attempting to persuade and influence the monarch than by seeking their political ends in alternative channels of action, then we can talk of a relatively effective monarchical system, a relatively “absolute” state.

“Absolute” conveys the wrong tone, the one of course kings hoped to convey. Absolutism was a rhetorical injunction, not a serious assertion. It might be perhaps wise to de-emphasize the concentration on the person of the king and simply talk of a strengthened state, or more “stateness.”⁵⁹ We might better call the ideology “statism.” Statism is a claim for increased power in the hands of the state machinery. In the sixteenth century, this meant power in the hands of the absolute monarch. It was a claim to power, the claim being part of the attempt to achieve it. Nobody, then or now, took it or should take it as a description of the real world of the time. This claim was validated up to a point in certain states, those that would make up the core of the European world-economy. It failed elsewhere, for reasons we shall elucidate later.

One of the major indications of success as well as one important mechanism in the process of centralizing power was the degree to which the population could be transformed, by one means or another, into a culturally homogeneous group. Once again it is less the masses that are relevant than the cadres in the broadest sense: the king, his bureaucracy and courtiers, the rural landowners (large and small), the merchants. In the sixteenth century, while core states are moving toward greater “ethnic” homogeneity among these strata, peripheral areas are moving precisely in the opposite direction.

Let us start by looking at the attitude of the state machinery toward the trader who belonged to a “minority” group. First, there were the Jews, a group which played a large role in trading activities throughout the Middle Ages. One of the things to note is that in both social and economic terms, there was “a steady deterioration of the Jewish status in the late Middle Ages.”⁶⁰ On the one hand, as England, France, and Spain created stronger centralized structures, they began to expel the Jews: England in 1290, France at the close of the fourteenth century, Spain in 1492. But this phenomenon also occurred in Germany, where, if not expelled, the Jews were in many ways weakened in their role as trading groups. It was Jews who had conducted much of the international trade between western and eastern Europe along the northern transcontinental route between 800-1200 A.D., and were its mainstay.⁶¹ During this period, in both regions, their legal status was reasonably favorable.⁶² In the thirteenth and fourteenth century, there is a general decline in both the legal status and the economic role of the Jews throughout Europe.⁶³ However, by the sixteenth century, we can speak of a geographical imbalance: their virtually total absence in western Europe but, on the other hand, their presence in increased numbers in eastern and parts of southern Europe, that is an absence in the core and an increase in the periphery and semiperiphery.⁶⁴

Although Jews played an ever increasing role in east Europe’s economic life, they were permitted only the role of merchant among professions above the status of working-class. For them alone, the classic route of entrepreneur to rentier was impossible.⁶⁵ Similarly in northern Italy, as a result of the decline of the financial strength of the city-states, which was due in part to their small size with consequent small tax base and inability to protect their citizens outside the country,⁶⁶ the position of the Jews began to improve somewhat, once again playing principally the role of merchants.⁶⁷ The Jewish issue, as it presented itself to rulers, was a dilemma of “fiscalism” versus nascent “mercantilism.” On the one hand, these Jewish merchants were an important source of state revenue; on the other hand, non-Jewish merchants saw them as competitors and landowners as creditors, both groups often combining in pressure on the ruler to eliminate the Jews. The former consideration prevailed at first, as often as the kings were in a position to arrange it.⁶⁸ As the indigenous bourgeoisie grew stronger in the core states, intolerance to Jews made substantial legal progress.

The Jews were an easy target for their competitors because an ideological cause could be made of them. One could argue against their economic role on religious grounds. One way monarchs handled this in western Europe was to expel the Jews, but substitute another group which was less vulnerable on religious grounds although, from the point of view of the indigenous merchants, an equal competitor. For example, P. Elman describes how, when the English monarch was finally forced to expel the Jews in 1290, he welcomed Italian moneylenders in their place. Since the king often did not repay loans, “for practical purposes, the Italian loans may not have differed greatly from Jewish tallages.”⁶⁹ Still, by the sixteenth century, the Italians were ousted from their role as entrepreneurs inside England,⁷⁰ if not in Spain,⁷¹ but the Jews were ousting Poles in Poland.⁷² How was this possible?

In western Europe, the increasingly diversified agricultural base along with the nascent industries strengthened the commercial bourgeoisie to the point where the king was obliged to take them politically into account. The other side of it was that they were able to serve as fiscal underpinning of the monarchy—as taxpayer, moneylender, and commercial partner—as well, if not better than foreign merchants. The “nationalist” reflex was thus natural.⁷³ In eastern Europe, however, the issue presented itself very differently. The monarchs were weaker, the merchants weaker, the agricultural producers stronger. The issue in eastern Europe in the sixteenth century, as in all other parts of the capitalist world system who came increasingly to specialize in the production of cash crops, was not the existence or nonexistence of a commercial bourgeoisie. If there is a money economy, there must be people to serve as funnels for the complex exchange of goods and services which the use of money encourages. The issue was whether this commercial bourgeoisie was to be largely foreign or largely indigenous. If it were indigenous, it added an additional important factor in internal politics. If it were foreign, their interests were linked primarily to those of the emerging poles of development, what in time would be called metropoles.

Was not a critical reason for the “welcome” given to the Jews in eastern Europe in the sixteenth century the fact that the indigenous landowners (and perhaps also merchants in western Europe) preferred to have Jews as the indispensable local merchants in eastern Europe rather than an indigenous commercial bourgeoisie?74 The latter, if it gained strength, would have a political base (totally absent for Jews) and might have sought to become a manufacturing bourgeoisie. The route they would doubtless have chosen would have involved reducing the “openness” of the national economy, which would threaten the symbiotic interests of the east European landowner-merchant. While we know that the early modern period was a time of decline for the indigenous bourgeoisie in eastern Europe,75 “in the countryside, on the other hand, Jews played an increasing role as both the agents of the landlords and the traders and craftsmen in the small hamlets.”76 This illustrates a more general phenomenon of a world-economy. The class alliances within the political system of the state are a function of whether the ruling group is dominated primarily by those persons whose interest is tied to sale of primary products on a world market or by those whose interests are in commercial-industrial profits.

It is not the Jews alone who were the plaything of these transnational politico-economic alliances. Merchants in Catholic countries were often “Protestants.” The central pan-European ideological controversy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Reformation versus Counter—Reformation—was inextricably intertwined with the creation both of the strong states and of the capitalist system. It is no accident that those parts of Europe which were re-agrarianized in the sixteenth century were also those parts of Europe in which the Counter-Reformation triumphed, while, for the most part, the industrializing countries remained Protestant. Germany, France, and “Belgium” were somewhere “in between,” the long-term result being an ideological compromise. Germany divided between Protestants and Catholics. France and “Belgium” came to have few “Protestants” but developed an anticlerical, free-thinking tradition to which certain groups could adhere.

This is no accident, not because, following Weber, we think Protestant theology is somehow more consonant with capitalism than Catholic theology. No doubt one can make a case for this argument. On the other hand, it seems to be true in general that any complex system of ideas can be manipulated to serve any particular social or political objective. Surely Catholic theology, too, has proved its capacity to be adaptable to its social milieu. There is little reason at the abstract level of ideas why one couldn’t have written a plausible book entitled “The Catholic Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism.” And Calvinist theology could be taken to have anticapitalist implications.77 The point I am making is a different one. By a series of intellectually accidental78 historical developments, Protestantism became identified to a large extent in the period of the Reformation with the forces favoring the expansion of commercial capitalism within the framework of strong national states, and with the countries in which these forces were dominant. Thus when such forces lost out in Poland, or Spain, or “Italy,” or Hungary, Protestantism declined too and often rapidly. The factors which favored the expansion of export agriculture favored the reassertion of Catholicism.

One must look at the Reformation as it developed. As Christopher Hill notes:

The Church had long been a source of power, patronage and wealth to rulers of major powers like France and Spain. Those governments which broke with Rome in the early sixteenth century were on the fringes of catholic civilization, secondary powers whose rulers had not been strong enough to drive so hard a bargain with the Papacy—like England, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Scotland.79

There was clearly at this point an element of the chafing of northern Europe against the economic weight of the more “advanced” Christian Mediterranean world.80 But as we know, by the end of the extended sixteenth century, northwest Europe had become the core of the world-economy, eastern Europe the periphery, and southern Europe slipping fast in that direction.

P. C. Gordon-Walker seeks to tie the evolution of Protestantism—first Luther, then Calvin—to the two phases of the Price Revolution: 1520–1540/50—mild and limited to Germany and the Netherlands (Central European silver production); 1545 on for about a century (American silver). He argues that the paired phases are further linked to the successive structural needs of the new capitalist system:

The social problem, presented by the Price Revolution, was really a problem with two parts. The first need was primary accumulation. . . . The second, subsequent, and really basic need was the acclimitisation of the classes of capitalist society into the new positions made necessary by the resources of primitive accumulation . . .

These two phases controlled the importance of various parts of Europe. From 1520–40 the leading areas were Spain (which inherited no strong middle class from the Middle Ages)81 and Germany (which had a strong feudal bourgeoisie). From 1545–80, both Spain and Germany fell away, and the lead was taken by England, the Netherlands, and parts of France and Scotland. The parallelism between these areas and the areas of the Reformation is striking; as also the parallel in time between the first phase of the Price Revolution and Luther (both about 1520–40); and between the second phase and Calvin (both about 1545–80).82

One does not have to accept all the historical details to see that it is a relevant hypothesis.

What is more, we have further evidence on the close tie of religious and politico-economic conjunctures when we turn to the triumph of the Counter-Reformation in Poland. Stefan Czarnowski makes a careful analysis of why Poland shifted back to Catholicism from a Reformation that seemed to be gaining ground, and why it shifted with great rapidity. He notes a synchronization between the moment when the landed nobility (noblesse territoriale) took over political power in what he terms a “class dictatorship” and the moment of the Catholic offensive. In his analysis, he distinguishes between the aristocracy, the landed nobility, and the lesser (petite) nobility. He argues that it was in the ranks of the aristocracy (as well as the bourgeoisie) that the partisans of the Reformation were located. He sees the aristocracy as lusting after Church lands. The smaller landowners found it more difficult to fight the local curate, supported as he was by the still powerful Catholic episcopacy. So there was less advantage to them in embracing Protestantism and, hence they tended not to do so. Czarnowski and others point out that in Poland while it was the seigniors who favored Calvinism, the king and the bourgeoisie were inclined to Lutheranism.83 This is quite a twist on the Weberian theme, but reminds us of the argument of Erik Molnar who saw an alliance of the monarchy, lesser nobility, and bourgeoisie against the aristocracy. Czarnowski further argues that the “bourgeoisie” was in this case split. The “upper bourgeoisie” of the towns, especially of Cracow (an “old” commercial center), was allied to the aristocracy. He is speaking here of the town patriciate, those who from the end of the fifteenth century to about the middle of the sixteenth century “were part of that class of money-handlers and merchants which came into existence with the rise of nascent capitalism.”84 But Poland was not destined to take the path of England as a locus of the bourgeoisie of the European world-economy. The great crisis of 1557, of which we shall speak later, ruined not only financiers in Lyon, in Antwerp, in southern Germany, but the bankers of Cracow as well:

[From] that moment on, the elan of the aristocracy and of Calvinism was weakened. . . . The goods which allowed the great commercialism of previous times to flourish: the silver of Olkusz, Hungarian copper, industrial products, continuously declined in value. The money with which the peasants paid their rent depreciated with a despairing rapidity. Meanwhile the international demand for Polish wheat, potassium, oak bark, skins, and horned beasts grew greater. The more that the producer of these latter goods could do without coins, use forced unpaid labor of serfs, and barter his products against those he needed, the better he resisted [the effects of the financial crisis]. This was precisely what the small and medium-sized landowners/nobility were able to do.85

This did not mean, notes Czarnowski, that there was no bourgeoisie in Poland. The Cracovian bourgeoisie may have been ruined, but they were replaced by Italians, Armenians, and Germans. In 1557, one international network fell and the Polish bourgeoisie–aristocracy who were tied into it fell with it. After that, another came into existence. The Poles who worked with it—the “nobility”—accepted Poland’s new role in the world-economy. They gave their children to the Jesuits to educate, to keep them out of the influence of the old aristocracy: “Thus the Church of Poland ended by being, one might say, the religious expression of the nobility.”86 And this nobility now triumphant could define Polish “national” sentiment as virtually indistinguishable from Catholic piety.

Thus it was that Poland became securely Catholic because she became definitively a peripheral area in the world-economy. The Counter-Reformation symbolized (not caused) the “social regression” that Protestants viewed it as being. But their pious shock was misplaced. For the social advance of northwestern Europe was made possible by the “regression” of eastern and southern Europe as well, of course, as by the domination of the Americas. The Counter-Reformation was directed not merely at Protestantism but at all the various forces of humanism we associate with the Renaissance. This is illustrated by the tensions between Venice and Rome in the sixteenth century. The controversy culminated in 1605 when Venetian actions in limiting certain rights of the Church led to an excommunication by Rome of the Venetian Senate. The Counter-Reformation was in Italy a Counter-Renaissance,87 and its triumph there was a function of the transformation of northern Italy into a semiperipheral arena of the world-economy.

It is because the Church as a transnational institution was threatened by the emergence of an equally transnational economic system which found its political strength in the creation of strong state machineries of certain (core) states, a development which threatened the Church’s position in these states, that it threw itself wholeheartedly into the opposition of modernity. But paradoxically, it was its very success in the peripheral countries that ensured the long-run success of the European world-economy. The ultimate abatement of the passions of the battle of the Reformation after 1648 may not have been because both sides were exhausted and there was a stalemate, but rather because the geographical division of Europe was the natural fulfilment of the underlying thrusts of the world-economy. As to the role of the Protestant ethic, I agree with C. H. Wilson:

If Protestantism and the Protestant ethic seem to explain less of economic phenomena than they seemed at one time to do, it also appears there is, in the Reformation era, less to be explained. . . . Leadership in economic matters passed slowly from the Mediterranean to the north, and as the Italian cities declined, those of the Netherlands rose; but there was little in the way of business or industrial technique in use in northern economies that would have been unfamiliar to a Venetian merchant or a Florentine clothier of the fifteenth century.88

In the sixteenth century, some monarchs achieved great strength by means of venal bureaucracies, mercenary armies, the divine right of kings and religious uniformity (cuius regio). Others failed. This is closely related, as we have suggested, to the role of the area in the division of labor within the world-economy. The different roles led to different class structures which led to different politics. This brings us to the classic question of the role of the state vis-à-vis the leading classes of the new capitalist era, the capitalist landlords and the capitalist merchants, sometimes not too helpfully abbreviated as aristocracy and bourgeoisie, since some aristocrats were capitalists and others not. Unfortunately, what role the state played, whose agent it was, the degree to which it could be thought to be a third force all are questions upon which no consensus exists. Pierre Vilar has well stated the basic underlying theoretical issue:

A question of particular relevance is how feudal revenues were divided, by means of a system of “adjudications” and in other ways, between an idle aristocracy and an intermediary class of “merchant-cultivators” or similar types who transformed seigniorial revenues and held them ready for new types of investment; in other words how feudal revenues came to be mobilized for capitalist investment.89

One aspect of this is the degree to which the absolute state should be seen to be the last resort of a feudal aristocracy facing the “crisis” of feudalism, the reduction of seigniorial revenues, and the onslaught of other classes (the commercial bourgeoisie, the yeoman farmers, the agricultural laborers). One view is that of Takahashi, who sees absolutism as “nothing but a system of concentrated force for counteracting the crisis of feudalism arising out of this inevitable development [in the direction of the liberation and the independence of the peasants].”90 This view is substantially shared by Christopher Hill,91 V. G. Kiernan,92 Erik Molnar,93 and Boris Porchnev.94

A second point of view argues that the politics of the absolute monarchy is one upon which the aristocracy had a considerable, perhaps determining, influence, but one in which the monarch was more than a simple extension of the needs of this aristocracy. For example, Joseph Schumpeter argues:

Thus the aristocracy [under the absolute monarchs] as a whole was still a powerful factor that had to be taken into account. Its submission to the crown was more in the nature of a settlement than a surrender. It resembled an election—a compulsory one, to be sure, of the king as the leader and executive organ of the nobility. . . .

The reason [the nobles did not resist, even passively, the regime] was, in essence, because the king did what they wanted and placed the domestic resources of the state at their disposal. . . . It was a class rather than an individual that was actually master of the state.95

Braudel similarly insists that the conflict of king and aristocracy was a limited one, which included an effort by the king, on the one hand, to bring the nobility under his discipline, but, on the other hand, to protect its privileges against popular pressure.96 The position of A. D. Lublinskaya seems very close to Braudel.97 J. Hurstfield emphasizes the dilemma of the monarchies which “found it hard to rule without the nobility; but they found it equally difficult to rule with them.”98

A third point of view, perhaps the most traditional one, is that of Roland Mousnier, in which the monarchy is viewed as an autonomous force, often allied with the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, occasionally mediating the two.99

But is there a necessary conjuncture of these two propositions, that of the relatively autonomous role of the state machinery and that of seeing the class struggle as one between aristocracy and bourgeoisie? Molnar does not seem to think so. In the first place, he uses more categories. He talks of a feudal aristocracy to whom the monarch was in clear opposition. In addition, there was a “nobility” and a bourgeoisie, both potential allies. The nobility seems to be smaller landowners and those more oriented to capitalist agriculture, but it is not entirely clear. He points out that while absolutism seemed to involve heavy taxation upon the peasantry, it is less clear how the money was distributed. On the one hand, the increased state budget was used to pay the tax collectors and the bureaucracy, pay off the state loans, and purchase military equipment, all of which benefited the bourgeoisie. But on the other hand, all the current expenses of the state—that is, the maintenance of court and army—were payments to the nobility. He sees this as a tactic of “maneuvering . . . between the nobility and the bourgeoisie.”100 Engels similarly points to the ways in which the state machinery comes to play, in some ways against its inner will, a mediating function, at least during “exceptional periods.”101

One source of this unclarity about the relationship of monarch and aristocracy is the vagueness that exists about the composition of the nobility. No doubt family membership in the nobility varies over time; the situation is one of perpetual mobility in all societies with a nobility. But the sixteenth century was an era in which there was not only family mobility but occupational mobility. For example, the status of noble was presumably incompatible in Western feudalism with the occupation of entrepreneur. This was probably already a myth to a considerable extent in the municipalities of the late Middle Ages. By the sixteenth century, this was simply untrue in the whole of Europe, and in both urban and rural areas. Everywhere—in Italy, Hungary, Poland, East Elbia, Sweden, England—members of the nobility had become entrepreneurs.102 This was so much the case that the nobility successfully sought to eliminate any formal impediments to this occupational role wherever it existed, as happened in Spain.103 Nor should we forget that, although in Protestant countries the Church was seeing its lands confiscated, the sixteenth century was an era of the Church as a capitalist agricultural entrepreneur, especially in Italy.104

The other side of this coin was that the successful bourgeois was constantly becoming a landowner and a noble, and thirty years later, it surely became difficult to draw clear lines separating the two. R. H. Tawney sees it as a normal process which was however much accelerated in the sixteenth century.105 Both Braudel106 and Postan107agree with the perception of a continuing pattern of transition from entrepreneur to rentier for those of non-noble status and see in it a search for long-run security. What is crucial, however, is to appreciate that despite this occupational mobility, the strength of the landowning class did not disintegrate. As Marc Bloch put it: “The seigniorial regime had not been undermined. Indeed it would soon take on a renewed vigor. Rather seigniorial property, to a large extent, changed hands.”108 It was the absolutism of the monarch which created the stability that permitted this large-scale shift of personnel and occupation without at the same time, at least at this point in time, undoing the basic hierarchical division of status and reward.

What then of the presumed key role of the state in assisting the commercial bourgeoisie to assert itself, to obtain its profits and keep them? The liaison was surely there, but it was a question of degree and timing, the mutual support of the early liaison developing into the stifling control of later years. It is no accident that the symbiotic relationship of merchant and king would come in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to seem one of direct opposition. Hartung and Mousnier see signs of this tension already in the sixteenth century.109 Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, in seeking to outline the rise of various judicial and economic institutions which had the effect of encouraging entrepreneurial activity based on rising productivity as opposed to forms of commerce which merely redistributed income,110 try to elucidate the conditions under which it made sense to have emphasized the institutional role of the state. They argue that alongside the economic distortions that state intervention brings to the market and hence to the likelihood of innovation, one must place the fact of “coercive power which permits government to undertake policies even though they may be strongly objected to by a part of the society.”111 This way of formulating the issue alerts us to seeing the functions of statism for capitalism in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. Whereas for the aristocracy the absolute monarchy represented a sort of last-ditch defense of privilege, for those deriving their income through the maximization of the economic efficiency of the firm the state machinery was sometimes extremely useful,112 sometimes a major impediment.

We have now outlined the two main constituent elements of the modern world-system. On the one hand, the capitalist world-economy was built on a worldwide division of labor in which various zones of this economy (that which we have termed the core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery) were assigned specific economic roles, developed different class structures, used consequently different modes of labor control, and profited unequally from the workings of the system. On the other hand, political action occurred primarily within the framework of states which, as a consequence of their different roles in the world-economy were structured differently, the core states being the most centralized. We shall now review the entire sixteenth century in terms of a process, one in which certain areas became peripheral or semiperipheral or the core of this world-economy. We shall thereby try to give flesh and blood to what has risked thus far being abstract analysis. We shall also hopefully thereby demonstrate the unity of the whole process. The developments were not accidental but, rather, within a certain range of possible variation, structurally determined.

FROM SEVILLE TO AMSTERDAM: THE FAILURE OF EMPIRE

The European world-economy in creation was a great prize, and it is understandable that men should seek to control it. The route of imperial domination was the classical route, familiar to the men of the era. Many dreamed of the possibility. The Hapsburgs under Charles V made a valiant attempt to absorb all of Europe into itself. By 1557, the attempt had failed. And Spain steadily lost not only its political imperium but its economic centrality as well. Many cities aspired to be the hub of the European world-economy. Seville, Lisbon, Antwerp, Lyon, Genoa, and Hamburg all had aspirations if not claims. But in fact it would be Amsterdam, an unlikely candidate in 1450, which by 1600 had achieved preeminence. We turn now to this story of the failure of empire, entailing the decline of Spain and all of her allied city-states in favor of the successful rebels of Amsterdam.

The upward economic swing beginning circa 1450 created a buzzing prosperity first of all in all the old centers of trade, in what has been called the dorsal spine of Europe—Flanders, southern Germany, northern Italy—and, of course, as a result of the discoveries, Spain. It is striking how precisely these areas came to make up the Hapsburg empire under Charles V. In this expansion, the newest significant element was the sixteenth-century transatlantic trade of Spain, centering on Seville and her Casa de Contratación de las Indias, a trade which became so important that “all of European life and the life of the entire world, to the degree that there existed a world, could be said to have depended [on this traffic]. Seville and her accounts . . . should tell us the rhythm of the world.”1

How did Spain come to play such a central role? After all, as we discussed in Chapter One, it was Portugal, not Spain, which took the lead in the fifteenth century overseas expansion of Europe. Furthermore, the fifteenth century was not a tranquil era in the history of Spain. Indeed, Jaime Vicens Vives says that “the word crisis sums up the history of Spain in the fifteenth century.”2

The crisis was political (a period of rebellion and of internal warfare) and economic (the Europe-wide recession). Spain’s reaction to the crisis in economic terms was to develop her sheep industry and to gain, as a result of low prices, a considerable share of the (reduced) world market.3 The strength of the combine of wool producers in Spain, the Mesta, was such that attempts by potential Castilian bourgeois to have the king adopt protectionist policies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all failed.4 Even under the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, presumed partisans of industrial activity, Vicens finds that the industries mentioned produced “either luxury items or had only a local market.”5 Unlike England, Spain was not moving toward developing an important textile industry.6 Ironically, it may have been the very fact of Castilian competition, combined with the depression of the late Middle Ages, that encouraged England to move on the road to industrial growth. The fact was, however, that Spain did not take this road.

But then, if the Spanish economy was structurally so weak, how do we explain the central economic position of Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century? Partly because the weaknesses were long-term, not short run, and partly because at some levels the political system was strong. Castile had a clear “national” task throughout the Middle Ages. On the one hand, there was the Reconquista, the gradual expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula, which culminated in the fall of Moslem Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, both in 1492, the year of Columbus. On the other hand, there was the drive to unify the Christian states of Hispania. This drive culminated in the union at the summit only, Aragon retaining a separate legislature, state budget, and socio-legal system.

Because Spain was built on a reconquest, feudalism as a political form was weak.7 Consequently, as José Maravall states it, “having a political and social order which was not based on the feudal structure provided favorable terrain for the development of ‘state’ forms.”8 A first-rate road system made political and economic liaison of the center and the periphery relatively easy.9 Ferdinand and Isabella aided the Mesta to create a strong system of national markets.10 They provided a system of individual mobility, albeit within a context of maintaining the values of rank and hierarchy.11 They strengthened the bureaucracy, making of it one that was “rooted in the community . . . of which it is . . . ‘pars rei publicae.’ ”12 They nationalized, so to speak, the Catholic clergy.13 Above all, they created “conditions in which Castile’s existing economic potential could be amply realized.”14

If the bullion flowed through Spain, if Castile could soar into the center of the European sky, it was, says Pierre Vilar, “consequence as well as cause.”15 But consequence of exactly what? Of in fact a long series of facts centering around the economic role of metals: the weak bullion base of the Mediterranean world, the previous centrality of the Sudan as supplier of gold, the impact of Portuguese expansion on the northern African intermediaries of the Italian city-states, the role of the Genoese in Spain, and the Genoese drive to find a non-Portuguese source of bullion (a drive which only Spain was in a position to implement).

Let us trace this complex story. We have already spoken of the role of bullion in medieval trade, and how Sudanic gold came to Europe via North Africa to the Christian Mediterranean world. Suddenly in the middle of the fifteenth century, the North African role diminished greatly. The extent of this diminution seems to be a matter of some debate. Braudel speaks of a collapse of the North African position.16 Malowist acknowledges reduction but calls it not catastrophic.17 The sudden shortage of bullion aggravated the Spanish state’s financial burden, which had been rising steadily because of growing military and court expenses, by leading to a fall of value in the money of account, the maravedi.18

The financial crisis was serious, and it caused the Genoese of Spain to react, both because they were Spain’s bankers and the purchasers of the gold. We have already spoken of Genoa’s role in Spanish commerce. The Genoese were involved in many ways, not only as financiers.19 But why could not the Genoese have gotten their gold via Portugal? Perhaps Portugal’s strength, as the lead country in exploration, meant that its terms were not as advantageous for Genoa as those Spain would offer.20 Perhaps also because its very strength led to a lack of imagination. Imagination is usually nothing but the search for middle run profits by those to whom short run channels are blocked. When channels are not blocked, imagination suffers. Portugal was already doing well enough with navigation down the African coast. It felt no pressure to set out on risky westward navigational ventures.21 Chaunu eloquently argues the sensible proposition that it was not luck that accounts for Spain’s discovery of America. She was the country best endowed in the context of the times “not only to seize opportunities that were offered, but to create them for herself.”22 England employed the Italian, John Cabot, but his second “English” expedition required Spanish support. It was not until the seventeenth century that France and England became countries of overseas exploration and not until the eighteenth that they really succeeded.23

Spain succeeded, however, in the sixteenth century in creating a vast empire in the Americas, one as large as the cost of maritime transport would permit.24 It meant a lightning growth of transatlantic trade, the volume increasing eightfold between 1510 and 1550, and threefold again between 1550 and 1610.25 The central focus of this trade was a state monopoly in Seville, which in many ways became the key bureaucratic structure of Spain.26 The central item in the transatlantic trade was bullion. At first the Spaniards simply picked up the gold already mined by the Incas and used for ritual.27 It was a bonanza. Just as this was running out, the Spaniards succeeded in discovering the method of silver amalgam which enabled them profitably to mine the silver which existed in such abundance, and which represented the truly significant inflow of bullion to Europe.28

The “lightning growth” of trade was accompanied by a spectacular political expansion in Europe as well. Upon the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, his domain in Europe included such varied and noncontiguous areas as Spain (including Aragon), the Netherlands, various parts of southern Germany (including Austria), Bohemia, Hungary, Franche-Comté, Milan, and Spain’s Mediterranean possessions (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balaerics). For a moment, this empire, parallel in structure to the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire of Suleiman the Magnificent and the Moscovite Empire of Ivan the Terrible, seemed to be absorbing the political space of Europe. The nascent world-economy seemed as though it might become another imperium. Charles V was not alone in the attempt to absorb the European world-economy into his imperium. Francis I of France was trying to do the same thing,29 and France had the advantages of size and centrality.30 But France had less resources for the attempt, and the election of Charles V over Francis I as Emperor was a great setback. Nonetheless France, located “in the heart”31 of the Spanish Empire, was strong enough to make the story of the following 50 years one of virtual constant warfare between the two imperial giants, Hapsburg and Valois, a struggle that would result eventually in the exhaustion of both in 1557, and the end for a long while of dreams of imperium in Europe.

The long struggle of the two giants, France and Spain, was fought out in military terms principally on the Italian peninsula, first in the Franco-Spanish wars of 1494–1516, and then in the Hapsburg–Valois rivalry that continued until 1559.32 The reason for the struggle over Italy, from the viewpoint of the empires, was clear. The northern Italian city-states had been in the late Middle Ages the centers of the most “advanced” economic activities, industrial, and commercial, on the European continent. If they no longer monopolized long-distance trade they were still strong in their accumulated capital and experience,33 and an aspiring world-empire needed to secure control over them. In the scattered political map of Italy,34 only Lombardy had developed a relatively strong state machinery over a medium-sized area,35 but one apparently still too small to survive politically.36

We are in fact speaking of a relatively small area, “a narrow urban quadrilateral, Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, with their discordances, their multiple rivalries, each city having a somewhat different weight. . . .”37 The political problem for these city-states (as for those of Flanders) had long been to “[emancipate] themselves from feudal interference and [at the same time to keep] at bay the newer threat of more centralized political control offered by the new monarchies.”38 One of the ways they kept the monarchies at bay was to be linked to an empire.39 So although Gino Luzzatto describes what happened between 1530 and 1539 as Italy coming under the “domination direct or indirect of Spain over the largest part of the peninsula,”40 and Paul Coles similarly says that “the dominant theme of international history in the first half of the sixteenth century was the struggle for Italy between French and Spanish imperialism,”41 it is not clear that the city-states resisted this form of “domination” all that much. They may well have considered it their best alternative. We should remember that this was a world-economy and that the economic loci of activities and the “nationalities” of key economic groups were not related in any one to one fashion with the foci of political decision-making. Within such a framework, the linkup of the city-states and the empire was primarily a “marriage of interests.”42 Whereupon metaphor became reality. Ruth Pike points out that the greatest increase of Genoese in Seville occurs between 1503 and 1530 and that by the middle of the century they “largely controlled the American trade and exerted a powerful influence over the economic life of Seville.”43 However, as the Portuguese had done to an earlier wave of Genoese, the Spaniards dissolved them by absorption: “With naturalization came stability and assimilation, which in sixteenth-century Spain could only lead to the abandonment of trade by their descendants.”44

In addition to controlling three of the four main Italian city-states (Venice remained outside its dominion), the empire of Charles V had two other economic pillars: the merchant-banking houses of southern Germany (in particular the Fuggers), and the great mart of the European world-economy of the “first” sixteenth century, Antwerp.

The situation of the merchant cities of southern Germany, on the other side of the Alps, was not really too different from those in northern Italy. R. S. Lopez, for example, notes that: “In the fifteenth century, the most rapidly advancing region lay in the towns of Southern Germany and Switzerland.”45 From 1460 to about 1500 or 1510 silver mining grew at a very rapid rate in central Europe, providing a further source of economic strength.46 The sixteenth-century expansion of trade only seemed to reinforce the German role as a conduit of trade between northern Italy and Flanders.47 At first not even the growth of Atlantic trade and the relative decline of Mediterranean trade seemed to affect their economic prosperity, especially once they were able to participate in the benefits of the Atlantic trade within the framework of the Hapsburg Empire.48

This was the era of the flourishing of those most spectacular of all modern merchant-capitalists, the Fuggers. The apogee of their strength, the era of Charles V, has sometimes been called the Age of the Fuggers. The Fuggers bought Charles’ imperial throne for him.49 They were the financial kingpins of his empire, his personal bankers par excellence. A contemporary chronicler, Clemens Sender, said of them:

The names of Jakob Fugger and his nephews are known in all kingdoms and lands; yea, among the heathen, also. Emperors, Kings, Princes and Lords have sent to treat with him, the Pope has greeted him as his well beloved son and embraced him, and the Cardinals have risen up before him. All the merchants of the world have called him an enlightened man, and all the heathen have wondered because of him. He is the glory of all Germany.50

The Fuggers and Charles gave each other their power and their base. But this also meant that they rose and fell together. For, in reality, the activity of the Fuggers was “limited to the confines of the Empire of Charles, and was international only to the extent . . . that empire can be regarded as international. . . .”51 When Charles and his successors could not pay, the Fuggers could not earn. In the end, the total loss of the Fuggers in unpaid debts of the Hapsburgs up to the middle of the seventeenth century “is certainly not put too high at 8 million Rhenish gulden.”52

But even more important than northern Italy or the Fuggers was Antwerp, which “played in the economic life of the sixteenth century a leading role.”53 J. A. van Houtte has traced the great difference between Bruges in the fourteenth century, a “national” market center (that is, primarily for Flanders) and Antwerp in the sixteenth century, an “international” market center, which linked the Mediterranean and Baltic trades with the transcontinental trade via southern Germany.54 Not only did Antwerp coordinate much of the international trade of the Hapsburg Empire, but it was also the linchpin by which both England and Portugal were tied into the European world-economy.55 It served among other things as England’s staple.56 If it was able to play this role despite the fact that Anglo–Italian trade, for example, would have been less expensive in transport costs had it transited via Hamburg, this was precisely because it offered the multiple side advantages to merchants that only such an imperial mart had available.57

In addition, at this time, Antwerp became the supreme money market in Europe, “caused mainly by the increasing demand for short-term credit, chiefly occasioned by the Emperor Charles V’s world policy. . . .”58 Antwerp not only served as the securities exchange of the empire; the city itself as a collectivity became one of Charles’s chief moneylenders.59 Since empires had no firm tax base, they found it difficult to obtain the kind of credit modern states manufacture with relative ease. A sixteenth-century empire had credit to the extent that its sovereign did.60 Thus he had to turn to the cities as “centers of public wealth”61 to guarantee his loans. But cities too were limited in credit, and they in turn needed the guarantee of some large house such as the Fugger, as this account by Lonchay illustrates:

The credit of the towns, as that of the provinces, as those of the receivers, was limited. That is why some financiers demanded the guarantee of a solvent commercial house, preferably that of a large bank, before agreeing to a loan to the government. Thus, in 1555, the merchants asked as a guarantee for a loan of 200,000 pounds letters of obligation from the states or the “responsion” of the Fugger. Maria of Hungary asked Ortel, the factor of that house to give his approval and promised to give him in exchange a counter-guarantee of income from taxes (le produit des aides).62

Thus Charles V, Castile, Antwerp, the Fuggers were all imbricated in a huge creation of credit laid upon credit, cards built upon cards, the lure of profits based on hope and optimism.

From the 1530s on, the growing trans-Atlantic trade gave Antwerp a new phase of expansion.63 The combination of the two foci of commercial expansion—the transcontinental trade in which southern German merchants were so central and the Atlantic trade of the Spanish (cum Genoese), both coming together in the Antwerp market which was also a money market created the atmosphere of “a feverish capitalistic boom.”64 This boom had its own dynamic which overwhelmed the politico-administrative framework of the Hapsburg putative world-empire. Beset by the incredible financial strains caused on the one hand by the social crisis that was raging in the Germanies and the military expenditures resulting from the desire to encompass the rest of Europe, either the empire had to go bankrupt or the capitalist forces. The latter turned out to be stronger. Let us review the two strains under which the empire operated.

In political terms, the years 1450–1500 were a time of “consolidation of the principalities” of Germany, a difficult task but one which succeeded in part. Geoffrey Barraclough writes: “The princes . . . raised Germany out of its inherited anarchy. . . .”65 The consolidation was however too partial. When the Reformation and the Peasants’ War of 1525 came along to perturb the new prosperity, the political divisions made it impossible to contain the turmoil, as other countries could do at this time.66 The failure of the German “nation” has been variously explained. Napoleon once said that it was the failure of Charles V to put himself as the head of German Protestantism.67 Engels has argued at length that it was the fear of Luther and the middle class of the revolutionary aspirations of the peasantry.68 Tawney has pointed out the contrast with England where the peasants (that is, the yeomen) found significant allies among other classes and were considered sufficiently important “to make them an object of solicitude to statesmen who were concerned with national interests.”69

What caused the social crisis with its politically self-defeating qualities, not too different in consequences from the outright subjection which large parts of Italy suffered? Probably the same factor: lack of prior political unity, that is, the absence of even an embryonic state machinery. “Germany” in the early sixteenth century is an excellent illustration of how deeply divisive “nationalist” sentiment can be if it precedes rather than grows within the framework of an administrative entity. Charles V could not lead German Protestantism because he was involved in an empire. German statesmen could not take into account the needs of the yeomen within the framework of national interests when no state existed within which to register whatever political compromise might be achieved. Men turned to the political arenas in which they might achieve their ends. These were the principalities and, since these were too small to be economically meaningful, they turned to their outside benefactors. The result was floundering and disaster.

The critical moment seems to have been in the early years of Charles V’s rule. A. J. P. Taylor argues somewhat dramatically but not unpersuasively:

The first years of Charles V were the moment of Goethe’s phrase which, once lost, eternity will never give back. The moment for making a national middle-class Germany was lost in 1521 perhaps forever, certainly for centuries. By 1525, it was evident that the period of national awakening had passed, and there began from that moment a steady advance of absolutism and authoritarianism which continued uninterruptedly for more than 250 years. . . .70

In any case, the turmoil went on in a very acute form until the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555 and its solution of a divided Germany, based on cuius regio eius religio. Nor was the turmoil to end even then. In the early seventeenth century, Germany became the battleground of the Thirty Years War, and underwent severe regression, both demographically and economically.

The social turmoil of the Germanies was however only one problem for Charles V and not perhaps the greatest. It is surely insufficient to explain the collapse of his empire. Why then did it split apart? Why was it ultimately reduced essentially to Spain plus Hispanic America? And why did this latter Spain lose its preeminence and become part of the semiperiphery of Europe? Pierre Chaunu sees the rise of the economic importance of Hispanic America, its centrality to the economic life of the Hapsburg Empire, and indeed all of Europe, as “not the consequence but the cause of the partition of the states of Charles V.”71 J. H. Elliott and Ramón Carande similarly argue that the European imperialism of Charles V came to be unduly expensive for Spain, especially for Castile.72 Indeed, Braudel argues that even the reduced empire (Spain and the Netherlands without central Europe) would turn out to be “too vast” in terms of its ability to keep its financial head above water, given the great price inflation.73 The argument seems to be that the political extremities are a financial burden in moments of inflation that are greater than their value as income, especially perhaps in this early stage of capitalism.74 Spain was an empire when what was needed in the sixteenth century was a medium-size state. The bureaucracy was inadequate because imperial Spain required a larger one than it could construct given its resources, human and financial. This is the fundamental cause of what historians have called the “slownesses” of the Spanish bureaucracy.75

Once again, the structural advantage of the world-economy as a system over a world-empire as a system seems to thrust itself upon us. For example, H. G. Koenigsberger describes Spain’s inability to exploit its Sicilian colony, attributing it to an absence of a political theory.76 This seems to me to invert horse and chariot. Spain had no theory that encouraged her to establish a trade monopoly in Sicily because, bureaucratically, she was already spread too thin to exploit her empire properly. She devoted primary energy to maintaining an empire in the Americas, as well as conducting wars in the Netherlands and governing Hispania. To maintain her empire in America, she had to invest in a growing bureaucracy to keep the Spanish colonists and their allies among the Indian nobility under control.77

Could the Spanish empire have worked? Perhaps if it was structured differently. As Koenigsberger says: “Its fundamental weakness was . . . the narrowness of its tax base. Castile and the silver financed and defended the empire; the other dominions were, to a greater or lesser degree, onlookers.”78 Ferran Soldevila documents how the Castilians deliberately excluded even such a “close” group as the Catalans from the Hispano–American trade.79 But if it were structured differently, it would not have been an empire, which is precisely our point. If the Catalans were incorporated into a single state with the Castilians, which they were not, and if Charles V’s imperial ambitions had not both drained Castile and drew him into inevitable conflicts of interest with portions of his empire, conflicts that were self-defeating,80 then Spain might indeed have had some chance of becoming a core state in the European world-economy. Instead, overextension merely exhausted Charles V and his successors.

In 1556 the empire split apart. Charles V abdicated. Philip II of Spain, son of Charles V, received the Netherlands, but the lands in central Europe became a separate realm. In 1557 Philip declared bankruptcy. Within the Spain–Netherlands, the center of political gravity then shifted back to Spain when Philip moved there in 1559. Thereupon came the Netherlands Revolution81 which ended, some eighty years later after much ado and to and fro, in the division of the area into the northern, Calvinist, independent United Provinces (more or less contemporary Netherlands) and the southern, Catholic, so-called Spanish Netherlands (more or less contemporary Belgium). But this crisis was more than a Spanish crisis, or a Hapsburg imperial crisis. It was a turning point in the evolution of the European world-economy. For a crucial element in this revolution was the peace of Cateau–Cambrésis entered into by Spain and France in 1559. To understand the import of this treaty we first must look at the other aspirant to imperial rule, France.

No country illustrates better than France the dilemmas of western European states in the “first” sixteenth century. On the one hand, probably no European state emerged from the late Middle Ages with a relatively stronger monarchy.82 We have already reviewed in a previous chapter Bloch’s explanations of the differences between France, England, and eastern Europe in terms of the tenure arrangements as they emerged in the sixteenth century, based on the differing dynamics of their juridical structures in the late Middle Ages. While the English system permitted, as we saw, a legal redefinition of tenure to satisfy the new needs of landowners in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, these definitions were more frozen in France. Hence the nobility had to be politically more militant to retain their advantages. Thus whereas Bloch rightly points to the “decadence of seignorial justice”83 in France by the sixteenth century, it is also true, as Rushton Coulbourn points out, that the political strength of the nobility led to an economic structure which was less able to maneuver in the new world-economy.84

The consequences of the fact that there was not the relative merger of the nobility and the new merchant-gentry in France as in England were many. For the moment, let us concentrate on its implications for state policy in the world-system. Edward Miller points out that the political strength of trading interests was greater in England than in France. As a consequence, French trade policy was far more open in the late Middle Ages.85 The end result was that, despite a stronger bureaucracy, France in the early sixteenth century had acquired fewer “powers of economic direction”86 than England. The pressures of fiscalism in such a situation pushed the French monarch to imperial ambitions, a fortiori because the Hapsburgs also had them. They could have tried overseas expansion as did Spain, but they lacked the backing of international capital, that is northern Italian capital, for that.87 The alternative was imperial expansion within Europe itself, directed precisely against northern Italy.

France had a competing international network of finance and trade, which centered on Lyon. In the early Middle Ages, the fairs of Champagne were for a while the great meeting point for the merchants of northern Italy and Flanders. They also served as an international financial center. Then in the late thirteenth, early fourteenth centuries, decline set in.88 In the fifteenth century, the French monarchs carefully nurtured the growth of Lyon89 and encouraged its links with Florence90 who were the great bankers of the time.91 By bringing together enormous amounts of capital in the early sixteenth century, both Lyon and Antwerp “reduced the power of the individual financiers within bearable limits [and thus] made it possible to raise large masses of capital at moderate rates. . . .”92 Lyon was not quite the international center Antwerp was because the French kings sought simultaneously to make it “their financial arsenal.”93 Nor did Lyon ever match Antwerp as a commercial center. It was in short a second best.

Nonetheless, France tried. The Hapsburg and Valois empires both failed and fell together. Not only Spain but France also declared itself bankrupt in 1557. The Hapsburg however were first as if to emphasize their primacy even in defeat. The two financial failures led very rapidly to the cessation of military fighting and the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, which was to change the political terms of reference of Europe for a hundred years. These bankruptcies thus were more than a financial readjustment. A whole world had come tumbling down.

What tumbled was not merely a particular state structure. It was more than the tragic abdication of Charles V amid the tears of his knights. What tumbled was the world-system. For a hundred years, Europe was enjoying a new prosperity. Men had tried to profit from it in the ways of old. But technological advance and the upsurge of capitalist elements had already progressed too far to make it possible to recreate political empires that would match the economic arenas. The year 1557 marked, if you will, the defeat of that attempt, and the establishment of a balance of power in Europe which would permit states which aimed at being nations (let us call them nation-states) to come into their own and to batten on the still flourishing world-economy.

Crises are symbolic turning points. As many historians have pointed out, many of the organizational features of the “first” sixteenth century do not disappear until much later: 1576, when the Spanish authority collapsed in the Netherlands, or 1588 with the defeat of the Armada, or 1598 with the Peace of Vervins (and the Edict of Nantes). It is not worth debating the most appropriate date, since a shift in organizational emphasis is always gradual, because the underlying structural factors move glacially.

But shift there was, and it is worth our while to spell out the implications this had for the European world-economy. Let us start with R. H. Tawney’s description of the organizational emphasis of the “first” sixteenth century:

In its economic organization the machinery of international trade had reached a state of efficiency not noticeably inferior to that of three centuries later. Before the most highly-organized economic systems of the age were ruined by the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands, and by the French wars of religion, there were perhaps ten to twelve commercial houses whose money-markets were the financial powerhouses of European trade, and whose opinion and policy were decisive in determining financial conditions. In the Flemish, French, and Italian cities where it reached its zenith, and of which England was the pupil, the essence of the financial organization of the sixteenth century was internationalism, freedom for every capitalist to undertake every transaction within his means, a unity which had as its symptoms the movement of all the principal markets in sympathy with each other, and as its effect the mobilisation of immense resources at the strategic points of international finance. Its centre and symbol was the exchange at Antwerp, with its significant dedication, “Ad usum mercatorum cujusque gentis ac linguae,” where, as Guicciardini said, every language under heaven could be heard, or the fairs at Lyons which formed, in the words of a Venetian, “the foundation of the pecuniary transactions of the whole of Italy and of a good part of Spain and of the Netherlands.”94

Tawney says that this system collapsed because of ruinous wars. This is true, but the causal sequence is too immediate. We suggested in the last chapter that the efficient cause was the inability to make an imperial system viable given the economic thrusts of sixteenth-century Europe but its structural limitations, that is, the relatively low level of productivity and thinness of bureaucratic framework faced with an expanding economy based on scattered medium-size enterprise.

One crucial bottleneck became the growing financial demands of imperial state machineries and the consequent inflation of public credit which led to the imperial bankruptcies of mid-century. Charles V had run through states and their merchants as sources of finance: Naples, Sicily, Milan, Antwerp, Castile.95 The classic exposition of this argument was made by Henri Hauser who argued that the European financial crisis of 1559 “probably hindered the evolution of commercial capitalism, and gave the impetus to the transformation of economic geography.”96 Hauser argues that the war between Spain and France that began in 1557 simply stretched the state credits too thin, led to defaults, and forced both states to make a hasty peace at Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559.

The consequences for the extended Hapsburg Empire were great. It led directly to the beginning of Spain’s decline.97 The crisis would lead to a definitive break of Antwerp and England, leaving the latter free to develop its new and winning economic alliance with Amsterdam.98 In Antwerp itself, the boom which was based on the axis with Spain ended. “The bankruptcy of Philip II of 1557 brought the rupture which finally decided Antwerp’s fate.”99

Throughout Flanders, the crisis would lead to a reinforcement of Calvinist tendencies, especially among the skilled workers. In 1567, the Spanish sent the Duke of Alva to repress the new socio-political unrest but this simply resulted in the long run in an exodus of the Calvinist merchants and craftsmen to Protestant countries,100 and by 1585 there was a collapse of Flemish industry and commerce, which “were at a standstill for years.”101 The Netherlands revolt, combining social and political unrest consequent on this disaster, created a viable political base in the northern half of the Low Countries for its role as the center of world commerce beginning in the late sixteenth century.102

Southern Germany was hard hit too. Luzzatto points out that “the most severe blow came to them from first the insolvency then the bankruptcy of the Spanish crown which swept totally away the personal fortunes not only of the Fuggers but of the larger part of the great merchant-bankers of southern Germany.”103 As the situation worsened economically, the former commercial allies of southern Germany and northern Italy, began to invade each other’s territory in competitive search of business, which was a mutually destructive affair.104

The political consequences of this collapse for the Germanies were enormous. What Barraclough calls the “revolutionary ferment of Protestantism which, in reaction against the decline of the empire . . ., was strongly national in character”105 swept Germany. But, as we have already mentioned, Charles V’s involvement in his empire meant that he could not invest his political fortunes in German unification, no more than he could take the perspective of a Spanish nationalist. The compromise of cuius regio entrenched the German principalities, undermined the German bourgeoisie, and put off all hope of unification for centuries. Germany would come to be largely divided into a Lutheran north and northeast, the latter at least economically part of the eastern European periphery, and a wealthier, Catholic southwest (including parts of the Rhine country). As A. J. P. Taylor says: “Both developments were a retreat from the flourishing days of the Renaissance, which had embraced all Germany. . . .”106 Even in the relatively wealthier southwest, there would come to be a reversion to handicraft industries by the seventeenth century.107 Taylor may exaggerate the extent of Germany’s prosperity and economic leadership in the early sixteenth century, but he is undoubtedly correct in noting the dramatic collapse of nascent economic development.108

The effort of Charles V. to dominate politically the European world-economy thus redounded negatively upon Spain and upon the Germanies, upon the cities of Flanders and of northern Italy, and upon the merchant houses which linked their fate to empire. The construction of an empire had seemed a reasonable thing to attempt, even a possible one. But it was not.

We have already told in large part the story of the Spanish colonial enterprise in the Americas. It would be best simply to describe here the situation as a phenomenon internal to the Spanish empire, in order to measure the impact of Spanish decline upon the Americas. Spain had established colonies in the Caribbean and some of the littoral surrounding it (contemporary Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia) as well as in Peru and Chile. These colonies were conceived as economic complements not only of Europe as a whole, but of Spain in particular.109 Spain did not have the administrative energy to create a large bureaucracy in the Americas. Therefore they used the old expedient of empires, the cooptation of local chieftains into the political system as intermediary agents of the Crown and the Spanish settlers.110

Nor did Spain have the energy to control entirely its own settlers. To keep their political loyalty, it made many economic concessions. One of these was to forbid Indians independent bases of economic power by barring them from raising cattle, the one activity in which they might have been able to compete effectively in the new capitalist economy.111 Furthermore, not only were the Indians barred from this profitable activity, but its very success weakened them economically, for sheep ate men, in middle America just as in England.112 The settlers were nonetheless dependent on continued Spanish support, not so much against Indian and African slave rebellions, as against English and other intrusions into their trade and hence their profit margins.113 Hence, though they were occasionally unhappy with the Crown and its bureaucracy, they did not organize as an autonomous force. Besides, the settlers, many of humble origin, profited from the fact that the colonies were export economies.114

Indeed, as often happens, in imperial structures, subimperialisms grew up—layers within layers. We can speak of the ways in which Mexico (that is, the Spaniards in Mexico) “colonized” Peru. Mexico had a far larger population. There was a constant disparity in price levels throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mexico exported manufactures, luxuries, and slaves to Peru and received in return specie and mercury.115 When the Philippines entered the Spanish trading sphere, the Spaniard in Mexico became the middleman between Manila and Lima, cutting out the Spanish Manileños.116 This re-export of Chinese wares via Manila from Mexico to Peru became the mainstay of the intercolonial trade.117 The Spanish Crown tried unsuccessfully to break Mexico’s role, as it was cutting into the profits of Castile.118 “No one will contest,” says Chaunu, “that during the 16th century Mexico behaved towards Peru as a metropole towards its colony.”119

One of the effects of political overextension in Europe combined with economic contraction in the “second” sixteenth century was that there was an increased emigration of Spaniards to America.120 It provided a job outlet for Spaniards who needed it and an immediate source of income for the Spanish state, since positions in the American colonial bureaucracy were sold.121 On the other hand, the growing population of Spaniards living off the land in America in the face of economic contraction, along with the disastrous demographic decline of the Indians under early Spanish rule, combined to create a “century of depression” in Hispanic America122 and as a result gradually to give rise to the system of haciendas based on debt peonage.123 But the hacienda was oriented to a smaller economic world than the plantation,124 one of relative self-sufficiency of a settler elite.125 Spain itself found the developing system of lessening economic benefit to her and of increasing political difficulty. It would be easy later for other European states to obtain the economic benefits of Hispanic America while Spain continued to bear its imperial political costs.126

Hence, in the post-1557 era, Spain not only lost the central European parts of her empire and after a long struggle the northern Netherlands. She was losing some of the benefits of her remaining colonies. Furthermore, the very fact that the Americas had become such an important source of revenue for Spain, as much as 10% of the total, led to Spain’s slowing down the process of expansion in order to consolidate the gains already won.127 But the slowdown turned out to be more than temporary.

The decline of Spain has been one of the great topics of modern European historiography. The cause, in our terms, seems to be that Spain did not erect (probably because she could not erect) the kind of state machinery which would enable the dominant classes in Spain to profit from the creation of a European world-economy, despite the central geographical-economic position of Spain in this world-economy in the sixteenth century. This indicates that the “core” areas need not be those that are most “central,” either in geographical terms or in terms of trade movements.

Spain already suffered from some underlying faults of economic structure as she entered the sixteenth century. First, as we previously mentioned, the relative organized strength of the migratory sheepherders was an important barrier to the rise of a yeomanry, because they were able to retain their prerogatives against enclosures of arable land. In England, sheep raising was less migratory and more compatible with an enclosures system which permitted the slow rise of copyhold.128 Second, there was the lack of a significant industrial sector, and such as there was (cloth and silk industries in Castile) would collapse in the crisis of 1590.129 Vicens attributes this a bit mystically to “Castile’s failure to comprehend the capitalist world.”130 In any case, his empirical description of what happened after the crisis indicates that the pattern of expenditure represents at least an intervening variable of decline:

Precisely those who did possess money (aristocrats, gentry in Andalusia and Extremadura, and retired government officials) petrified it in construction (churches, palaces, and monasteries) or sanctified it in works of art. But none of them succumbed to the temptation to engage in industry, or even simply in commerce.131

A similar shift in investment pattern affected the Catalan bourgeoisie who were far more oriented to the new capitalist economy. Braudel notes their increasing shift away from commerce to investment in cultivable land. “Is this not one of the aspects of the economic drama of Barcelona? The bourgeoisie of Barcelona began to place its money in land rather than continuing to risk it in maritime enterprise.”132 Does this not cause us to reflect: How is it that in a center of the most important empire in Europe at this time its bourgeoisie is turning from overseas investment to grain growing, instead of building up their industrial base?133 There is another puzzle. Many writers make statements similar to Vilar: “For the metals which enriched Spain parasitically . . . flowed out into those countries where its purchasing power was greatest.”134 Or Vicens: “True, Castile did rely upon the injection of precious metals from America at critical moments in the struggle with the rest of Europe.”135

Surely one factor here was the continued key financial role of foreigners: Genoese, Dutch, Portuguese Jews, French.136 Another was the unwillingness of Charles V to take a Spanish nationalist perspective and adopt a mercantilist policy137 before the Castilian bourgeoisie was overwhelmed by the impact of rising prices, luxury expenditure of the aristocracy, and the inflationary and antiprotectionist effects of the Emperor’s borrowings,138 all of which were tied to Spain’s involvement in the pan-European Hapsburg empire. The results of these two factors, the large role of non-Spanish financial interests within Spain and the unwillingness (or inability) of the government to take appropriate protective measures, led to an inversion of Spain’s economic role.139

Instead of moving against foreign merchants, Spain pursued the path of expelling Spanish non-Catholics, a self-destructive course. Spain’s international position as the leading opponent of the forces of Protestantism in Europe and of Islam in the Mediterranean, led, once having suffered the defeat of the Great Armada in 1588,140 to follow through on the logical internal conclusions of international policy. Having expelled Jews in 1492, Moors in 1502 and 1525, and having persecuted marranos and “Erasmians” throughout the sixteenth century, Spain expelled the last pseudo-religious minority, the so-called Moriscos in 1609.141 The Moriscos numbered 300,000 and were mostly agricultural workers, disproportionately located in Valencia and Andalusia.142 The explusion of the Moriscos tore at the internal social structure of Spain. It originated as a consequence in part of the economic setbacks of the first decade of the seventeenth century,143 in part as a result of the declining international situation of Spain.144 It was a move aimed at the landed aristocracy of the latifundias by the bourgeois elements of Spain, a last effort as it were to break the hold of this class not geared to capitalist growth.145 But the aristocracy saved itself by finding a compensation for its lost income in a refusal to pay its loans owed to the bourgeoisie, a move in which the state supported them.146 Pierre Vilar sums up the result by saying: “Instead of hurting the feudal economy, it thus boomeranged on their creditors: well-to-do yeomen (laboureurs riches), and bourgeois.”147 The net result was twofold. On the one hand, “the expulsion of the Moriscos had the consequence of disequilibrating for more than a century the Iberian peninsula. Decided in Castile, it broke the back of Valencia and Aragon.”148 On the other hand, it deepened the economic difficulties still more149 and sent Spain looking for ever more ephemeral scapegoats of its decline.150

Meanwhile, the government found itself ever more indebted abroad, ever more prone to meet budgetary crisis by debt repudiation (1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647) and finally “unable to raise more money and therefore unable to go on fighting.”151 And at home, the “fantastically expensive foreign policies of Charles V and his dependence on credit to finance them” had the consequence, argues J. H. Elliott, not only of establishing “the dominance of foreign bankers over the country’s sources of wealth” but also of ensuring that “within Castile the brunt of the burden was borne by those classes which were least capable of bearing it.”152 The resulting dilemma of Spain was captured as early as 1600 by a lawyer-theologian named Martin González de Cellorigo: “Thus it is, that if there is no gold or silver bullion in Spain, it is because there is; the cause of her poverty is her wealth.”153

The growing economic difficulties of Spain combined with the inability to create a strong state machinery led to extensive brigandage with which the state was not coping well.154 The “slowness” of the bureaucracy got worse, not better, as these very difficulties created a structural rigidity in which “Spanish kings were able to go on and on, and rule with a minimum of change and reform.”155 And despite the decline in state income, the state maintained, perhaps even increased, the high level of luxury expenditures of a parasitical court bureaucracy.

The crowning blow may have been demographic (which enters, when it does, as an intervening variable, as we have argued). If in the “first” sixteenth century, Spain’s population (or at least that of Castile) was large and growing,156 this ceased to be true in the “second” sixteenth century for multiple reasons: emigration to the Americas, military deaths, famine and plague in 1599–1600 in Andalusia and Castile, and, as we have seen, expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. It was not therefore that Spain was somehow less entrepreneurial than other parts of Europe.157 It is that, for reasons we have adduced, the state machinery was not adequately and properly constructed, and hence that “adverse circumstances proved too strong,” in Elliott’s phrase,158 and that Spain demonstrated a “hypersensitivity . . . to the phenomenon of secular contraction,” in Chaunu’s phrase.159 In any case, Spain did not become the premier power of Europe. On the contrary, she was destined to become first semiperipheral and then peripheral, until in the twentieth century she tried slowly to begin to move back upward. Nor had Spain declined alone. She had brought down in her wake all those parts of Europe that had been linked to her ascension: northern Italy, southern Germany, Antwerp, Cracow, Portugal. With the exception of Portugal, all of these were essentially city-states servicing both the Hapsburg (and Spanish) empires as well as the world-economy as a whole. Their prosperity did not long survive the restructuring of the world-system in the “second” sixteenth century.

The new system was to be the one that has predominated ever since, a capitalist world-economy whose core-states were to be intertwined in a state of constant economic and military tension, competing for the privilege of exploiting (and weakening the state machineries of) peripheral areas, and permitting certain entities to play a specialized, intermediary role as semiperipheral powers.

The core-states themselves had drawn a salutary financial lesson from the economic catastrophes of the Hapsburg and Valois empires. They were determined not to get caught out again in a financial maze out of their control. First, they sought to create the kind of import controls which would enable them to maintain a favorable balance of trade, a concept which came into currency at this time.160 But the states did more than worry about the balance of trade. They worried also about the gross national product, though they did not call it that, and about the share of the state in the GNP and their control over it. The result was that, by the end of the “second” sixteenth century, as Carl Friedrich points out, “the state itself had become the source of credit, rather than the financial houses which had hitherto loaned funds.”161

Thus began a period of turning inward. Overall, the following period may perhaps be considered, as R. B. Wernham does, “one of the most brutal and bigoted in the history of modern Europe,”162 but the conflicts at first were more within than between states. Between the states, there reigned for the moment a relative calm, born of weariness—“a bickering and still explosive co-existence.”163

This political turning inward of the state—that is, statism, because it was not necessarily nationalism—was intimately linked to the nature of economic development. It is important to start by remembering comparative demography. France in 1600 was estimated at 16 million population, the largest in Europe, although the various German principalities added up to 20 million. Spain and Portugal (united after 1580) were about 10 million, England and Wales 4.5 million. Densities are in quite a different order. The areas with the traditional merchant–industrial city-states headed the list: Italy with 114 per square miles and the Low Countries with 104. France had 88 and England and Wales 78. Spain (and Portugal) had only 44.164

The meaning of both absolute figures and densities is ambiguous. Numbers meant strength in war and industry. They also meant people to rule and mouths to feed. The optimal size is far from clear, as our previous discussion already indicated. For the “second” sixteenth century, Frank C. Spooner registers skepticism about the economic benefits of expanding population. He speaks of “diminishing returns.”165 At first after Cateau-Cambrésis, “the economic activity of western Europe enjoyed a period of prolonged ease and recuperation.”166 This was the period of silver inflation which undercut German mining, appreciated gold, and stimulated Europe’s economy.167 One consequence of the silver inflation was that, as Tawney observes, “by the latter part of the sixteenth century, agriculture, industry and foreign trade were largely dependent on credit.”168 A second consequence is that it definitely shifted the economic center of gravity from central Europe to the new Atlantic trade to the west. Spooner says of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis that it “was not so much the closing of a period as an opening on the future,” and he adds: “The path of the future lay . . . across the Atlantic and the seven seas of the world.”169

Economically, the most striking event of this time was however not located in the Atlantic but to the north. Astrid Friis argues it was rather “the exceptional expansion of the sea trade in the Netherlands and England coeval with a rapid rise in the imports of Baltic goods, especially grain, into other parts of Europe.”170 In her view, crises in bullion, credit and finance are not the motor of economic (and political) change, but its consequence.171 In this case, she says, it was the grain penury that was the immediate cause of the strain on the money market.172 One of the outcomes of this was to strengthen enormously the hand of Amsterdam which was already at that time the pivot of the Baltic grain market and which, thereby, was able to remain more solvent than Antwerp and other cities of the southern provinces.

Thus we go from Seville to Amsterdam. The story of the “second” sixteenth century is the story of how Amsterdam picked up the threads of the dissolving Hapsburg Empire, creating a framework of smooth operation for the world-economy that would enable England and France to begin to emerge as strong states, eventually to have strong “national economies.”

These developments were for the most part the consequence of the fact that the first expansionist phase of the European world-economy was drawing to its close in this period. It was the moment when the “great tide began to ebb, as if its rise lacked the requisite momentum to overcome the obstacles and impediments which it itself had raised.”173 We shall turn now to the responses of the traditional centers of population and finance, the Low Countries and northern Italy. Then, in the next chapter we shall deal both with the emergence of England not only as the third political power of Europe (alongside France and Spain) but as the one most rapidly advancing in the industrial sphere, and with the ways in which France, in making the shift from an imperial to a statist orientation, was constrained from obtaining the full benefits of the organizational shift.

How important were the Low Countries at this time? Lucien Febvre, in his introduction to Chaunu’s magnum opus on the Atlantic trade, suggests—no, affirms—that the trade to and from the Netherlands pales in comparison:

From the point of view of an economic history seen from on high, from the point of view of world and cultural history on a grand scale, what is there in common between this coastal trade of bulk goods, useful, but in no ways precious, going from North to South and from South to North . . . this coastal trade of foodstuffs, the barter, the modest purchases, the short-haul transport to which it gave rise—and, considering only the trade going from America to Europe, the contribution of precious metals in quantities theretofore unknown, which was to revive both the economy and the polity, the “grand policies” of European powers and, thus, to precipitate and accelerate social upheavals of incalculable scope: enrichment of a merchant and financial bourgeoisie rising, as did the Fuggers and so many others, to princely rank; progressive decadence of a nobility which maintains its status and its brilliance only by exploiting parasitically the benefits acquired by the creators of wealth; the long supremacy in Europe of the Hapsburgs, masters of the overseas gold and silver: Beside so many great things, what is the importance of this local trade (trafic casanier), this potluck trade of the Sound and its barges, dragging prudently their fat stomachs under foggy skies?174

What indeed? This is the question. Even if Febvre’s facts were totally correct—and there seems reason to believe that he has seriously underestimated the northern trade175—we should hesitate before accepting the intimidating flourish of Febvre’s prose. For this potluck local trade carried raw materials for the new industries and food for the townsmen.176 As we have seen, it ensconced and codified a new European division of labor. Precious metals after all must be used to buy real goods, and as we have also seen, the precious metals may not have done too much more for Spain than pass through its ledgers.

Nor was it only a question of the economic centrality of the trade which revolved around the Low Countries. It was also a question of specialization in the new skills required to run a financial and commercial focus of the world-economy. It was the command of such skills that enabled the Dutch to seize control of the world spice trade from the Portuguese as we move from the “first” to the “second” sixteenth century.177

The importance of the Low Countries for intra-European trade is of course nothing new. As S. T. Bindoff reminds us, “from the eleventh to the seventeenth century the Netherlands . . . were one of the nodal points of European trade. . . . 178 We have noted the key role of Antwerp in the “first” sixteenth century.179 Antwerp fell in 1559,180and the important thing to note is that the succession was by no means obvious. As we know, Amsterdam stepped into the breach, but Lawrence Stone argues that one way to read this fact is to see it as the failure of England as much as the success of the Dutch, a failure that would “retard” England’s ascendancy in the world-system.181

Amsterdam’s success then was politically as well as economically important. But what was the political framework that made this success possible? The last five decades of the sixteenth century mark not only the rise of Amsterdam but the so-called Netherlands Revolution, whose boundaries in time and space are as amorphous (or rather as contested) as its social content.

To begin with, was it a revolution? And if it was a revolution, was it a national revolution or a bourgeois revolution? And is there any difference between these two concepts? I shall not now begin a long excursus on the concept of revolution. We are not yet ready in the logic of this work to treat that question. I should like merely to underline at this point that it seems to me this question is no more ambiguous (and to be sure no more clear) in the case of the Netherlands “Revolution” than in the case of any other of the great “revolutions” of the modern era.

The historical literature reveals one very great schism in interpretation. Some consider the Revolution essentially the story of the “Dutch” nation—that is, of the northern Netherlanders, Calvinists, struggling for liberty and independence against the Spanish crown, the latter aided and abetted by the “Belgian” (southern Netherlander) Catholics. Others consider it essentially a revolt of the all-Netherlands (“Burgundian”) nation, supported by persons from all religious groups, which succeeded in liberating only half a nation. J. W. Smit ends a survey of the historiography with this very sensible comment:

These problems, however, can only be resolved if we stop treating the Revolt as a bloc and if we become aware that there were a number of revolts, representing the interests and the ideals of various social, economical and ideological groups: revolts which sometimes run parallel, sometimes conflict with one another, and at other times coalesce into a single movement.182

From the point of view of the world-system as it was developing we must ask why it was the Netherlands and in the Netherlands alone that a complex national-social revolution occurs in the “second” sixteenth century, an era of relative quiet and social order elsewhere (except, most importantly, for France) and how it was that the revolt was largely successful.183

During the era of Charles V, Netherlands internal politics was not remarkably different from the politics of other parts of Europe. The nobility was in an ambivalent relationship to its prince, fearing his growing political and economic power, seeing him as a protector of their interests both against the bourgeoisie and popular revolt, finding service for the prince a financial salvation for the “younger sons” or distressed peers, ultimately siding with the prince.184 Then, suddenly, we get a situation in which “the frustrated prosperous bourgeois of the booming towns joined the desperate declassed craftsmen and thriving or declining nobles, and local riots coalesced into a general revolution.”185 How come?

I think the key to the outbreak of revolution is not in the social discontent of artisans and urban workers, nor in the bourgeoisie who were doubtless to be the great beneficiaries of the revolution, but in the fact that large parts of the “Netherlands” nobility were suddenly afraid that the prince was not their agent, that his policies would in the short and medium run threaten their interests significantly and that it was outside their political possibility to persuade him to make alterations in his policy, since his political arena (the Spanish empire) was so much larger than one which, if established, they might control.186 In short, they had a reflex of “nationalist” opposition.187

Let us look at some of the evidence. The nobility there, as elsewhere, was in increasing debt. Furthermore, the Emperor was steadily cutting into their sources of current income.188 When Philip II came to power, he discovered sudden resistance to his fund raising.189 The last years of Charles V were trying ones—great financial demands of the Emperor combined with a decline in real income of the nobility caused by the price inflation. The bankruptcies and the economic difficulties resulting from the peace treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis made the situation suddenly worse.190

Then, on top of the economic grievances, Philip II obtained Rome’s permission in 1559 to create new bishoprics. The move was intended to rationalize political and linguistic boundaries, increase the number of bishoprics, and require that bishops be technically skilled (that is, theologians rather than sons of great lords). For good measure, the plan required that the funds to endow the new bishoprics were to be taken from the revenues of certain historic and hitherto financially independent abbeys, the new bishops replacing the abbots in the various political assemblies. No doubt, as Pieter Geyl remarks tersely it showed Philip to be a “diligent” state builder.191 Still, “it is not to be wondered at that there arose a storm of opposition to a plan which involved such a strengthening of the King’s authority at a moment when his designs were viewed with mistrust on all sides.”192

In the other direction, the nobility sought to transform the Council of State into “an exclusively aristocratic executive body.”193 Philip refused but compromised by withdrawing Spanish troops, leaving his government in the Netherlands with only forces supplied by the local nobility and the urban centers to maintain order. If one adds to this picture the general grievances of the lower classes and middle bourgeoisie brought on by the recession of the 1560s194 and the general weakness of the Church under attack now for forty years, a revolt became possible:

Religiously indifferent mobs attacked prisons, the hated symbols of oppression, and freed Protestants. Toleration became the general slogan and in conjunction with the demand for a free Estates-General, became the core of the opposition’s political program. For some time these slogans worked as perfect generalized beliefs of a national, or interprovincial, scope; they were simple principles and above all were socially neutral.195

We must not forget that this is shortly after the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, that this peace permitted the sessions of the Council of Trent to resume, and thus for the Counter-Reformation to become institutionalized.196 Hence Catholicism and the Spanish Crown were more closely identified than previously.

The “Revolution” went through a number of phases: the first uprising (in both north and south) and its suppression (1566–1572); the second uprising (more “Protestant”) of only Holland and Zeeland in the north (1572–1576) ending in the Pacification of Ghent; a radical uprising in Flanders in the south (1577–1579); a division of the country into two from 1579 on (United Provinces in the north, a loyalist regime in the south); an attempted reunification in 1598; conclusion of a lasting truce in 1609.

Over this period, what should be noticed is that the conflict—amorphous and multisided in the beginning—took on an increasingly clear form as the struggle of the Protestant, or rather “Protestantized,” north for national independence of the north with a regime in the latter consonant with the needs of the commercial bourgeoisie, whose strength on a worldwide scale grew throughout the struggle and subsequently in the seventeenth century. Once started, there probably was very little that Spain, given “the failure of empire,” could do to stop it,197 especially given, as we shall see, the new European balance of power. Indeed, the constraints on Spain are clearly indicated by the fact that virtually every major political turning point in the Spanish–Netherlands relationship from 1557 to 1648 was immediately preceded by a financial crisis in Spain.198

Though the Netherlands Revolution was a “nationalist” movement, it involved a religious component from the beginning. While the nobility sought in the beginning to monopolize the form and nature of the quarrel with the King, the Calvinist community broke through their prescribed passive role into a frenzy known as the Breaking of the Images which swept the country, north and south. Geyl describes the authorities as “paralyzed with fright” and the Calvinist leaders themselves showing “surprise and discomfiture.”199 It was religion that added the note of ideological passion to the Revolution and enabled I. Shöffer to compare the Breaking of the Images to the storming of the Bastille and the street riots in Petrograd in March 1917.200

Though this phase quickly passed, the strength of the Calvinists as a revolutionary party, as sixteenth-century Jacobins in the analogy of H. G. Koenigsberger,201 meant that they had the stamina to persist when others fell by the wayside, to use a policy of “terrorizing the population,”202 and to be able “to mobilize the mob at strategic moments.”203 When in the Pacification of Ghent, the authorities tried to solve the conflict by religious partition, they merely entrenched the Reformed party in Holland and Zeeland and reinforced the identification of the political and religious cause,204 which led eventually to the “Protestantization” of areas under Protestant control. The division of the country in 1579 led to a consolidation on each side and thus to a lasting religious polarization.205 The actual lines of administrative division were the result of geo-military factors. The southern Netherlands was open country where Spanish cavalry could prevail. The northern part was covered with waterways and other barriers to cavalry movement. It was, in short, ideal guerilla country.206 In the course of time, those to the north became Protestant, those to the south became Catholic.

Hence it is not that, as many have already argued, Protestantism is particularly consonant with social change—no more with nationalism than with capitalism. It is rather, as Sir Lewis Namier is quoted, “religion is a sixteenth-century word for nationalism.”207 Protestantism served to unify the northern Netherlands. We noted in the previous chapter how and why Catholicism became linked with Polish national sentiment. And Catholicism did the same thing for Ireland.208 Wherever a religion was not firmly linked to the national cause, it did not prove capable of surviving, as Calvinism in France.209

What was going on was that, in the maelstrom of conflicting interests, new organizational structures could only be built by strange and unstable alliances. Men sought to secure these alliances. H. G. Koenigsberger captures the point precisely:

Religion was the binding force that held together the different interests of the different classes and provided them with an organization and a propaganda machine capable of creating the first genuinely national and international parties in modern European history; for these parties never embraced more than a minority of each of their constituent classes. Moreover it was through religion that they could appeal to the lowest classes and the mob to vent the anger of their poverty and the despair of their unemployment in barbarous massacres and fanatical looting. Social and economic discontent were fertile ground for recruitment by either side, and popular democratic tyranny appeared both in Calvinist Ghent and Catholic Paris.210

If religion then serves as a national cement, it tells us little about the social content of the resulting state structures. J. W. Smit argues that the Netherlands Revolution was essentially, despite the ambiguities, a bourgeois revolution, bringing the bourgeoisie to power, and the partition of the Netherlands and the resulting state boundaries are a measure of the degree of its strength in the face of its enemies.211

To be sure, the nobility were involved at various places and times, particularly in the beginning, but they were frightened away from the nationalist cause by the recurring undercurrents of social radicalism.212 But if radical social movements had a sufficient base in the lumpenproletariat of the towns born of economic expansion cumrecession, as exemplified by the brief control of Ghent by Jan van Hembyze from 1577–1579,213 they were rapidly isolated and destroyed themselves by losing sight of the national theme and turning against the bourgeoisie, and hence, paradoxically, toward alliance with the king’s forces.214

Thus, slowly, emerged a confederation of town governments who quickly shed any “democratic” trimmings but who also were free from the economic burdens which their participation in the old Spanish system inflicted.215 The merchants created for themselves a loose confederation without the administrative apparatus of most other states. Many have termed this a weakness but Smit is closer to the point when he reminds us that the state machinery of the Dutch Republic “permitted the achievement of a higher degree of economic integration than any of the monarchies of Europe. The bourgeoisie of Holland had carried through exactly the degree of reform it needed to promote economic expansion and yet feel free from overcentralization.”216 Thus, the Netherlands Revolution may never have started without the defection of many nobles from the established order. It may never have gotten a second wind without the radical currents from below. But in the end it was the bourgeoisie who held firm to the reins and emerged the beneficiaries of the new social order.

Why, however, the Netherlands and not elsewhere? We said that the “second” sixteenth century was the era of turning inward, the rejection of the imperial ideal in favor of seeking to create the strong state. There was still, however, during part of this period one arena in which all the great powers intervened, one arena of general entanglement. It was the Netherlands. One way to interpret the Netherlands Revolution is to see it as the effort of the local dominant groups to achieve the same exclusion of outsiders from political interference, the same control of self, that Spain, France, and England at least were striving to enjoy.

Another way to interpret it is to say that because after 1559, Spain, France, and England balanced each other off, the Netherlanders had the social space to assert their identity and throw off the Spanish yoke. This was particularly true after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.217 It was not that any of these countries stood for the independence of the Netherlands. Spain did not want to lose part of her dominions. France, although it wanted to weaken Spain, vacillated because of the implications for the internal religious struggle in France. England wanted to get Spain out but not let France in, and preferred therefore Netherlands autonomy under nominal Spanish sovereignty.218 The point however is that this conflict within the world-system, this weakening of Spanish world dominance, made it possible for the bourgeoisie of the United Provinces to maneuver to maximize its interests. By 1596, they could enter as equals in a treaty with France and England, when only shortly before they had offered themselves as subjects to the one or the other. As Geyl comments: “Once more the mutual jealousies of France and England where the Low Countries were concerned proved a benefit.”219

The significance of the Netherlands Revolution is not that it established a model of national liberation. Despite the romantic liberal historiography of the nineteenth century, the Dutch example did not serve as a generator of ideological currents. The importance lies in the economic impact on the European world-economy. The Netherlands Revolution liberated a force that could sustain the world-system as a system over some difficult years of adjustment, until the English (and the French) were ready to take the steps necessary for its definitive consolidation.

Let us recall the prior economic history of Amsterdam and other towns of the northern Netherlands. The Dutch had been playing an increasing role in Baltic trade.220 They gained a footing in the late Middle Ages and by the early sixteenth century were replacing the Hanseatic cities. Their total Baltic trade was on a rising curve in the sixteenth century, reaching a point, in about 1560, when they controlled about 70% of the trade. Although the Revolutionary period interfered somewhat with the level of Baltic trade, the Dutch recouped their temporary decline by 1630.221

The effect of the Revolution was not only to ensure the economic decline of Flanders but to strengthen the north in personnel because of the migration of many Flemish bourgeois north. “If Holland and Zeeland flourished, it was partly because they fed on the best vital forces of Flanders and Brabant.”222 Furthermore, the principle of religious toleration proclaimed by the United Provinces in 1579 led to the arrival of Sephardic Jews beginning in 1597. “Bringing their riches and business acumen to supplement the prosperity of the mercantile states of the north, such an emigration became by definition a European phenomenon.”223

As soon as the political struggle within the Netherlands seemed to stabilize, the Dutch surged forward from being merely a center of Baltic trade to being a center of world trade.224 Furthermore, the new trade increased rather than decreased the importance of the Baltic trade, which the Dutch themselves called the “mother trade.” After all, eastern Europe supplied both the grain to feed Dutch cities and the naval supplies essential to Dutch fishing interests and shipbuilding.225 Shipbuilding in turn was a key to Dutch success elsewhere.226

This illustrates once again the cumulating quality of economic advantage. Because the Dutch had an edge in Baltic trade, they became the staple market for timber. Because they were the staple market for timber, they reduced shipbuiding costs and were technologically innovative. And in turn they were thus still better able to compete in the Baltic trade. Because of this edge, they could finance still further expansion.227 On this basis Amsterdam became a threefold center of the European economy: commodity market, shipping center, and capital market, and it became “difficult to say which aspect of her greatness was most substantial, or to dissociate one from dependence on the other two.”228 This process of cumulating advantage works most in an expansionist stage of economic development before the leading area suffers the disadvantages of out-of-date equipment and relatively fixed high labor costs.

There was another reason for the ability of the Dutch to prosper. Braudel poses the question of why, after 1588, the English did not come to dominate the seas, as they would eventually. He finds it in the Dutch economic ties with Spain, relatively unbroken despite the political turmoil.229 Could not England have created the same link with Spain’s American treasure? Not yet, England was still too much of a threat to Spain to be permitted this kind of relationship.230 And Spain was still strong enough to resist England. The Empire may have failed, but control of the European world-economy still depended on access to Spain’s colonial wealth. Holland, albeit in revolt against Spain, was still part of her. And in any case, Holland was no political threat, unlike France and England.

Holland thus profited by being a small country. And she profited by being a “financially sound” state.231 She offered the merchants who would use her arena maximum advantages. Her route to riches was not that of the incipient mercantilism of other states232—essential for long-run advantage but not for maximizing short-run profit by the mercantile and financial classes. Her route was the route of free trade.233 Or rather this was her route in the “second” sixteenth century when she predominated on the seas. When Amsterdam was still struggling for a place in the commercial sun, she had been protectionist in policy.234

From the point of view of the European world-economy as a whole, with its era of expansion coming to an end, Dutch world trade becme a sort of precious vital fluid which kept the machine going while various countries were concentrating on reorganizing their internal political and economic machinery. Conversely, however, the success of the Netherlands policy was dependent on the fact that neither England nor France had yet pushed their mercantilist tendencies to the point where they truly cut into the market for Dutch merchants operating on free trade assumptions.235 This may be because the Dutch still were too strong because of their relative control of the money market by their continuing Spanish links.236

If Amsterdam succeeded Seville, if the northern Netherlands became the commercial and financial center of the European world-economy in the “second” sixteenth century, how may we describe what happened to the city-states of northern Italy, particularly Venice and Genoa which seemed to expand, rather than diminish, their commercial and financial roles at precisely this time? What we may say is that this expansion was short-lived and masked a process of decline hidden beneath the glitter so that, by the end of the “second” sixteenth century, these areas were relegated to the semiperiphery of the European world-economy.

The true forward surge of Amsterdam did not occur until 1590. Between the crisis of 1557 and 1590 came the Netherlands Revolution. The Netherlands role in world commerce was necessarily less during that period. As a result, Genoa picked up some of the functions formerly played by Antwerp and, in banking, by the Fuggers.237Curiously, England which had most to lose by the fall of Antwerp, because it threatened to deprive England of access to American bullion,238 engaged in impetuous short run military seizures of treasure that led the Spaniards to ship the bullion through Genoa.239 Genoa’s strength thus partly derived from the turmoil of the Netherlands, partly from its total devotion to the primacy of economic considerations,240 partly from their continuing close ties with the Spanish monarchy and commercial system,241 ties whose origins we spelled out previously.

As for Venice, whereas the “first” sixteenth century was an era of the decline of Mediterranean trade (the impact of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and Egypt, and the new Portuguese sea routes to the east), the “second” sixteenth century saw a great revival of its trade, especially in the eastern Mediterranean.242 This revival had already begun about 1540 and was due in part to Portuguese inability to control the Indian Ocean trade,243 in part to some competitive advantages of Venice over Portugal,244 and in part to Portuguese weakness in Europe245 as well as Spain’s crisis in the Netherlands.246

But the revival of northern Italy could not last. Neither its agricultural nor its industrial base were sound, unlike the northern Netherlands and a fortiori England, and by the seventeenth century, we talk of the decline of Italy.

The weakness of the agricultural base was multifold, given the growth of population in the sixteenth century, particularly accentuated in the period 1580–1620.247 We have already mentioned the relative difficulty of soil conditions. It is true that, during the “first” sixteenth century, as profits from trade declined, there was a shift of investment to agriculture, particularly wheat.248 This was especially true of monastic orders which were not permitted to engage in urban commerce. This trend was accentuated, particularly in the Terraferma around Venice249 between 1570 and 1630, as local investors responded to the rise in agricultural prices and the decline in industrial profits.

Nevertheless, despite increased production, there was famine. Part of the explanation lies in a factor which, from the point of view of the social system, is accidental and external: a sudden increase of rain and cold in the last decades of the sixteenth century which led to the increase of swampland, and hence of malaria.250 The latter was particularly serious since Italy was already suffering from its increase as a result of the extension of land cultivation in the process of internal colonization.251 Still one would have thought that a region having so much bullion would have imported wheat. This seems to have happened to some degree, enough to spread the effects of the famine by creating shortages elsewhere,252 but not apparently enough to maintain an agricultural base for industrial production. Why not? One can speculate that the new large agricultural producers (such as the monasteries) did not lend their political weight to expanded grain imports.253 There was of course the cost factor. Baltic grain was far, and Egyptian and Syrian grain was often unavailable, either because they too were suffering shortages or because of a state of war with the Turks.254

Furthermore, to the extent that they were importing grain, it was under the worst bargaining conditions possible and via their commercial rival, the Dutch. For Amsterdam controlled the Baltic stocks and could dole them out at its pleasure.255 This conjunctural advantage of Holland over northern Italy could then be transformed into something more permanent because of the linkages created by the world-economy. Spooner notes the role of the new sophisticated credit techniques—endorsement of bills of exchange, patto di ricorsa (a form of short-term credit), and public banks—all of which were emerging just at this point. This credit system was international, and, as northern Italy began to decline, the locus of these activities was shifted without ado.256 For the merchant financiers saved themselves, in Genoa as elsewhere, without too much worry about geographical loyalties.

But industry? Was not northern Italy an industrial center, and indeed one that was infused with new life, especially in Venice? J. H. Elliott mentions new investment between 1560 and 1600, and a moment of “opulent splendour.”257 The opulence however did not last. From being one of the most advanced industrial areas in Europe in 1600, northern Italy became a depressed agricultural region by 1670. We have already suggested that the prosperity was deceiving. Domenico Sella says of Venice’s economic prosperity in the late sixteenth century that it could not “conceal the fact that the base on which it rested was somewhat narrower than in the past and that, accordingly, her economy had become somewhat more vulnerable.”258 There are two main considerations here. One is the loss of France and England as customers becauses of the rise of their own textile industries. Hence the market was now confined more or less to northern Italy and Germany. The second is that sea transport was now more and more in the hands of non-Venetian ships. As Carlo Cipolla puts it: “The whole economic structure of the country was too dependent upon its ability to sell abroad a high proportion of the manufactured articles and the services that it could offer.259

What does it mean to be too dependent on sales of manufactured goods? After all, the secret of the success of core areas of a world-economy is that they exchange their manufactures for the raw materials of peripheral areas. But that simple picture leaves out of account two factors: politico–economic ability to keep down prices of raw materials imports (which we argued was more possible for the Netherlands than for northern Italy), and ability to compete in the markets of core countries with the manufactured products of other core countries.

The story here was quite simple. While the Dutch could undersell the English in England, the Italians by contrast were probably outpriced260 and old-fashioned.261 The Italian guilds kept the labor costs up. State taxation was comparatively high. The Italians produced for the quality market. Others came along with lighter and more colorful cloths—less durable, of inferior quality, but cheaper. The secret of modern industrial success was revealing itself early. When the Thirty Years War interfered with the German market as well, disaster followed: decline in production of textiles; disinvestment of capital; migration of industries to the rural areas to escape guild labor costs and the tax collector. Since the industries were noncompetitive, they died out.262

Could northern Italy at least have played the role of the northern Netherlands? Possibly, but there was probably not room for them both, and Holland was better suited for the task for a host of reasons than Venice or Milan or Genoa. Nor could Italy follow the path of England and France, for one thing for lack of political unity.263 When the plague hit Italy in 1630,264 it reduced the pressure on food supply, but it also drove wages up still higher. It served as a last straw. Northern Italy thus completed the transition from core to semiperiphery. We already noted previously that Spain had been making the same transition at this time. No doubt northern Italy never fell as far as some other Mediterranean areas like southern Italy265 and Sicily,266 but this was to be a small consolation in the centuries ahead. R. S. Lopez in recounting all the things that went wrong for the Christian Mediterranean since 1450, concludes sadly: “Obviously the primacy of the Mediterranean peoples could not survive so many adversities.”267

THE STRONG CORE STATES: CLASS-FORMATION AND INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE

One of the persisting themes of the history of the modern world is the seesaw between “nationalism” and “internationalism.” I do not refer to the ideological seesaw, though it of course exists, but to the organizational one. At some points in time the major economic and political institutions are geared to operating in the international arena and feel that local interests are tied in some immediate way to developments elsewhere in the world. At other points of time, the social actors tend to engage their efforts locally, tend to see the reinforcement of state boundaries as primary, and move toward a relative indifference about events beyond them. These are of course only tendencies and not all actors are bound to observe the dominant tendency, nor is consistency obligatory or likely for the actors.

I should stress that I am talking of an organizational tendency, not a structural one. The issue is not whether the world-economy is more or less integrated, whether the trends are inflationary or deflationary, whether property rights are more or less concentrated. These structural variables underpin the organizational options but the correlation between the two is long run, not middle run. Organizational options are political choices, are decisions men make about the forms which are most likely to support their interests.

In the “second” sixteenth century, after the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, the economic balance would swing. Northwest Europe became the economic heartland of the European world-economy. It is now time to look at what gave England and France such fundamental strength. Since the rise of the industrial sector is an important element in this picture, let us see what kind of industrial transformation was going on and how it was that England especially seemed to benefit from it so greatly.

The most important aspect of the industrial transformation of the “second” sixteenth century is not in the novelty of its technology (although there was some), nor in its social organization. The factory and mass production were still essentially unknown. Nor did the overall level of industrial production of the European world-economy rise that much. Domenico Sella reminds us that despite all the economic development of the “long” sixteenth century, “Europe’s industrial sector as it stood in 1700 bore far greater resemblance to its medieval antecedent than to its nineteenth century successor.”1

The key change was in the geographical distribution of industry. Up to about 1550, there were nodes of industrial activity in various parts of Europe. The “industrial backbone of Europe ran . . . from Flanders to Tuscany,”2 but there was some industry everywhere. From about 1550, industrial activity began to concentrate in certain states of “northwest” Europe and decline in other European states. It is striking the extent to which this decline hit one area after another of the territories that made up Charles V’s empire.3

As industry drastically declined in some areas, it seemed to divide itself into two varieties in the remaining areas of Europe. John Nef distinguishes between northern Italy, France and Switzerland on the one hand and the “north” of Europe (England, the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Denmark, and Scotland) on the other. According to Nef:

In the [former] there was a notable growth in the products of the artistic and the luxury industries, a fresh development of art and artisanry, but only a slight increase in the output of the heavy industries, and consequently no remarkable change in the volume of output. In the [latter] there was an expansion of the heavy industries, and consequently of output, for which there had been no precedent.4

Sella draws his geographical lines a bit differently. He includes Flanders and southern Germany along with northern Italy among the areas of decline, for which as we have seen he has good reason. He makes no mention of Switzerland. He distinguishes rather between Sweden and France which show some gains and England and the Dutch Republic where the gains achieved were “far more remarkable”5 and in each of which was established “a broad spectrum of industrial activities.”6

Both authors agree however on the great rise of England. This is all the more startling when we recall that many describe the relation of medieval England to the European continent as “colonial,”7 and that Nef contends that as late as 1547 England was “industrially in a backwater compared with most continental countries, including France.” Yet, because of England’s industrial expansion, particularly between 1575 and 1620, “the positions of the two countries [came to be] reversed. . . .”8

The late Middle Ages saw a major shift in the composition and hence destination of England’s export trade. She started out as a supplier of raw materials—cereals, wool, and to a lesser extent metals and leather. By the sixteenth century, the export of these items had declined relatively, and in the case of cereals absolutely, and cloth had become the major export of England.

Cereals (in particular wheat) played a diminishing role from the fourteenth century on. This was due, partly, to the fact that eastern Europe began to export grain and came to absorb a very large part of the international grain market. This may have served to dampen any tendency to expand English production unduly.9 Instead, as we also know, England moved toward the breakup of the demesnes, a factor usually explained by demographic decline, fall in the price level (especially of cereals), and high cost of living. To be sure, the growth of the London market in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to a new demand for wheat,10 but by that time the English demesnes were broken up and the grain was supplied in part from abroad.11 Ireland and Norway became economic “colonies” of England although England was still a “colony” of the continent.12 This was the period too of the legal incorporation of Wales into the English Crown which provided England with an internal colony, devoted at this time in particular to raising cattle.13

The wool export trade was “already steadily declining”14 in the fifteenth century, because of Spanish competition, the rise of textile exports, and the absorption of the wool by the cloth industry in England itself. In particular, the export taxes on wool, used as a fiscal device by the state, “acted as a tariff shelter for the nascent English cloth industry.”15 By 1614, the export of wool was formally prohibited, at which time England attempted to regulate Ireland’s trade in wool, turning Ireland into an exporter of wool but not cloth, and only to England.16

The English textile industry had two features very important for the emergent world-economy. It was more and more a rural industry in England, and it involved England in a search for widespread export markets.

We have referred, in a previous chapter, to the theory of Marian Malowist that in England, as in some other parts of Europe, the recession of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which had caused a sharp reduction in agricultural income, led to the creation of rural textile industries to supplement income. From the point of view of the capitalists, rural industries also had the virtue of avoiding the high wages imposed by city guilds17 and taking advantage of the cheaper water power to run fulling mills.18 These rural industries produced textiles “not of the highest quality but . . . cheaper and therefore within the reach of the impoverished nobility and other less well-to-do customers.”19 This expansion of the rural textile industry in England more than compensated for any decline in the urban centers.20 But in time of economic contraction, the internal market was far too small to sustain the industry. “Hence, this industry had to look for markets abroad. This . . . it did not fail to do in England and Holland from the second half of the fourteenth century on.”21

Thus, textiles became the hub of English export trade, a shift from the thirteenth century when grain export played a larger role, and this within the context of what Postan calls “precocious mercantilism.”22 One aspect of this was the squeezing out of alien merchants, the Italians in particular, a process that was carried out in the fifteenth century,23 not to be sure without difficulty.24 It was even harder to squeeze out the Hanseatic merchants, but that too was accomplished by the sixteenth century.25

The cloth trade created great difficulties for England. The need to sell in many markets meant that England was subject to more loss as a result of competition and political difficulty than from the relatively sheltered wool trade.26 In fact, the cloth industry received a number of setbacks in the fifteenth century because of its exposed position. Both Postan and S. T. Bindoff see these setbacks as the major explanation of the creation of the new commercial organization of overseas traders, the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers of London, formally created in 1486 and monopolizing the export links with Antwerp.27 But what the English lost in breadth of market, they made up in quantity. Furthermore, they were pressed to rationalization and efficiency since, as Bindoff notes, “the new situation meant not only an increased demand for cloth, especially for the particular lines favoured by the foreign buyer, but—what was more important—a demand for more cloth to be delivered at an overseas market at a particular time.”28 In addition, the English side was more unified than the Netherlands side which was beset by intercity competition, and hence the Merchant Adventurers could engage in a “calculated avoidance of any commitment to a sole use of one of the towns,”29 remaining thereby in an economically advantageous bargaining position.

There is one further positive aspect to England’s trade position. Her taxation was less oppressive than that of some of the older centers of commerce (Flanders, northern Italy) and her technical organization was up-to-date and hence more economical, thus giving her competitive advantages as early as the beginning of the “first” sixteenth century.30 So it was that in the beginning of the “second” sixteenth century, England had a flourishing export trade, two-thirds of it going to Antwerp, the other third to France and the Iberian peninsula. Its net deficit with France was covered by the bullion resulting from its favorable balance with the Hapsburg areas. At the beginning of the Elizabethan era, England’s overseas trade could already be described in glowing terms.31

England had political as well as economic advantages as the “second” sixteenth century began. It could be argued that England internally was exceptionally unified and from a relatively early period.32 We shall not review here the reasons for this, which we discussed to some extent previously, except to notice that the explanations fall into two main camps: The form of medieval social structure was said to have lent itself particularly well to the development of a strong monarchy,33 and the natural geography of insular England posed fewer obstacles to the centralizing thrust of the monarch than areas on the continent.34

Given such explanations, let us see in what ways did the Tudor monarchs make the most of these “natural” opportunities, and thus explain England’s ability to pursue its tentative industrial advantages in the “second” sixteenth century.

One factor was what is sometimes called the Henrician or Tudor “administrative revolution” which G. R. Elton put forward as having occurred between 1530–1542 under the genius of that “most radical of modernizers,”35 Thomas Cromwell. Elton argues that this period was one of real change, one which saw the creation of the modern sovereign state: “The Tudor state was a national monarchy to a degree new in England, and while the apparent emphasis lay on the monarch the real stress was already on its national character.”36 The administrative revolution was a concomitant of the greater coordination required by emerging capitalist interests. If England were to be a coherent entity within the framework of the world-economy, it could no longer be several somewhat separate economies.37

Elton sees a series of new procedures instituted—a new mode of managing finances, the centralization of administration under the principal secretary, the organization of the privy council as a sphere of coordination, the rationalization of the king’s household—each of which involved a reorganization “in the direction of greater definition, of specialization, of bureaucratic order.”38 Elton’s work has given rise to one of those endless controversies in which historians debate, without the aid of quantitative data, the degree to which some “differences” add up to a qualitative jump.39

Was the Henrician Reformation really new or not? Was the administrative change truly revolutionary, or was it simply one more step in a process going on continuously from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries? Christopher Hill seems to me to hold a sensibly balanced view of what was going on:

Throughout the Middle Ages [the] see-saw continued: more “bureaucratic” government under baronial control when the king was weak or a minor; “Household” government under the king’s personal control when he was strong. But in the sixteenth century this cycle was broken. Departments “went out of court” without the king’s losing control over them. . . .40

This period of administrative strengthening of the state was at the same time, as Hill also reminds us, “the only period in English history since 1066 when the country had no overseas possessions (except Ireland).”41 So the administrative talent could all be focused inward. The results are very straightforward and very important.

England was able to develop a strong capital city as a cultural and economic unifying force.42 And England was able to maintain internal peace at a time of turmoil on the continent, without a standing army, which accounts in part for its industrial advance.43 Why should England have escaped the religious wars of the continent when it could be argued, as R. B. Wernham does, that in the period following the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, “the internal instability of the British Isles [caused largely by the uncertainty of the English succession] made them . . . the danger area and focal point in the rivalries of Western Europe.”44 Mainly it was this very rivalry and the relative exhaustion of the French and Spanish empires (which we already spelled out) combined with the boldness of the Act of Supremacy of 1559 in establishing England as an Anglican state45 that “made possible the emergence of a third great power in western Europe and the eventual supersession of the twin imperialisms of Hapsburg and Valois by a multiple balance of powers..”46

Relative internal peace and no standing army also meant a lower need for taxation and of a bureaucracy swollen beyond its efficient size by the sale of offices.47 The expansion of central power was by means of a more efficient bureaucracy more than through a much larger (and more burdensome) one. It was also made possible by the economic position of the monarch himself, England’s greatest landowner.48 But as greatest landowner in a relatively isolated and unified national economy whose strength was to be built on the new industries, where lay the interests of the king? No doubt the king’s interests were ambiguous, since as landowner the king sought to maximize his income from his lands, and as king he sought to maximize his income from the landowners.49 One way to try to solve the dilemma was for the Crown to try to reduce its role as a landlord. But then the monarchy had to find a substitute source of income. Toward this end, in 1610, the Crown offered Parliament the “Great Contract”—an exchange of its feudal rights for an annual allowance.50 This proposal failed because of disagreement about the size of the annual amount. As the amount of income from royal rent was then diminishing, this failure was to contribute to the political strains of the era.

Internal instability and internal peace, an administrative revolution but a relatively small bureaucracy, a national network of markets and the king as a great landowner—a curious combination, leading to G. E. Aylmer’s “paradox and truism that early Stuart England was at one and the same time a ‘much-governed’ country and a country with very little government.”51 This paradox is in fact the secret of England’s relative success. To understand it, we must turn to a central debate of modern English historiography: the nature of the English upper classes in the century preceding the English Revolution, and the role of the much disputed “gentry.”

Going through the literature of this debate, what J. H. Hexter has called “the storm over the gentry”52 gives one the sensation of watching a fast and seemingly endless pingpong volley, where each play is brilliantly riposted ad infinitum. It requires distraction rather than concentration to realize that there are two debates intertwined: one over the substantive issues of English history in the “second” sixteenth century, and the other over the fundamental lines of battle in modern social science. Armed with this insight, it then requires concentration to notice that some people are in fact switching sides very fast in the middle of the debate, thus creating the illusion of a single straightforward ball game.

If the debate is difficult to unravel, it is because the story itself is so complex. Let us start by seeing what is thought to have happened in terms of landownership.

Frank C. Spooner argues that the profound economic crisis that shook Europe from about 1540 to 1560 “was particularly severe in the case of England. . . .”53 This was no doubt one of the factors that led to the official proclamation of the Reformation which made possible the confiscation of the monasteries and of other church properties. The Crown then sold most of this land, both to provide immediate income and as a means of political consolidation, giving the purchasers what Christopher Hill calls “a vested interest in Protestantism.”54 This political decision dramatically expanded the amount of land available on the market, which accelerated the whole process of extension of capitalist modes of operation in a way and to a degree that no other European country (except possibly the northern Netherlands) was experiencing at that time.55 The lands once sold were sold again (and often a number of times over). Where did this all lead to over the next 75 years? This seems to be one of the cornerstones of the debate.

There seems to be relatively little debate about two arguments that R. H. Tawney put forward in his initial essays. One argument was “that the tendency of an active land-market was, on the whole, to increase the number of medium-sized properties, while diminishing that of the largest.”56 Note however that this does not necessarily say anything about who, peers or “gentry,” own these “medium-sized” properties.57 The second point that Tawney makes is that this land shift resulted in “a more businesslike agriculture.”58 Again, relatively little argument here.

But what was the social classification of those who controlled the land? There is the storm. It is far more than a semantic issue but semantics plays its role, as everyone proceeds to give varying meanings to aristocracy, gentry (upper gentry, lower gentry, mere gentry, gentlemen), and yeomen. It is no accident that the scholars debate furiously here, because the whole point is that this period in English history is not only a moment of economic change and great individual social mobility, but of the change of categories. Not only are we unsure how to designate the meaningful social groupings; the men of the time also were.59 To point however to the fluidity of a concept in a given epoch is not to point to its uselessness. It should urge the scholar on to skeptical boldness.

To untangle the threads, we must start by following the terms of discourse. Let us go successively through aristocracy, gentry, and yeomen. But as we do it, let us remember that “economic changes were hurrying the more enterprising among [those who controlled the land, whatever their designation,] into novel methods of estate management. . . . They stood to gain much if they adapted their farming to meet the new commercial conditions. They stood to lose much if they were so conservative as to adhere to the old methods.”60 It seems fairly clear that there was no across-the-board correlation of social status and adaptability to the demands of capitalist agriculture. Lawrence Stone paints a picture of the aristocracy as guilty of “incompetent management” on large estates and with a “spreading taste for conspicuous waste,” such that “the gap between income and expenditure grew from a tiny crack to a vast chasm.”61 In addition, the aristocracy had to bear the high costs of litigation and public service, for “the Tudors operated through an unpaid bureaucracy.”62 But their efforts to increase income were to no avail: they traded away long leases for quick cash returns; they overborrowed; they depended on state favors until the state could or would give no more. All to no avail:

The process of attrition of the economic resources of the aristocracy . . . was one that continued without interruption throughout the Elizabethan period. . . . By 1603, it would seem as if the whole hierarchic structure of Tudor society was on the verge of imminent dissolution.63

Yet it is this same author who, a few years later, sings the imagination and enterprise of these same aristocrats in this same Elizabethan era:

[I]n this period the peerage fulfilled a role that no other class, neither the gentry nor the merchants, was able or willing to rival. . . . The importance of the aristocracy at this period is due rather to their willingness to encourage and finance new ventures, which were regarded as risky and therefore failed to secure the backing of more cautious social groups. Since large-scale mining and metallurgical industries were still novelties in the Tudor period they took the lead in their expansion. Since oceanic trade and exploration were novelties they again played a prominent part.64

Nor was this initiative, it seems, absent on their demesnes:

[T]he older nobility showed a surprising readiness . . . to develop new resources on their own estates. . . . The economic and social decline of the peerage relative to the gentry between 1558 and 1642 is certainly not due to any lack of entrepreneurial initiative.65

It is hard to reconcile the two portraits by Stone. Since Stone’s statistics on the degree of financial crisis of the aristocracy have been subject to so much attack, and since he has partially but not wholly retreated,66 we may well ask with H. R. Trevor-Roper:

If “over two-thirds of the English aristocracy were in 1600, not merely living above their means but poised on the brink of financial ruin,” . . . how are we to explain the fact that they not merely recovered from this imminent ruin, but survived the far greater crisis of the next sixty years? Their extravagance did not diminish in those years. . . . How did they do it?67

Trevor-Roper’s explanation is that the predicament of the aristocracy, “though genuine, was nothing like so serious as Mr. Stone, with his swollen figures, supposes,” that they “clung” to their lands, and that the rise in value of land after 1600, did “more than King James did, or any king could do,” to sustain their fortunes.68 It turns out, however, that Stone does not disagree. Although he dates it from 1620, he says that:

Even the most incompetent [member of the landed classes] could not fail to profit from the massive rise in average rents in the early seventeenth century, and thereafter the levelling off of prices reduced the importance of inefficient estate management.69

As for J. H. Hexter who attacks both Stone and Tawney on the one hand and Trevor-Roper on the other, he argues:

Around the 1580’s the land market began to boom, and it seems to have continued to boom for the next half century. . . . [O]n the whole a general increase in land values is likely to be most profitable in gross to the men who have the most land to profit from, that is, to the very segment of the landed class which both Tawney and Trevor-Roper have consigned to economic debility.70

Aside, however, from a quibble about dates, the position Hexter takes on this item is not at variance with Stone and Trevor-Roper. Finally, let us turn to a fourth point of view, differing in many ways from the three others, that of Christopher Hill. On this question, he says:

So for a section of the aristocracy the Reformation brought economic loss, though not for the class as a whole. We should be careful not to see anything “anti-feudal” in this process [of land transfers]. Indeed, in a sense the dissolution [of the monasteries] led to an intensification of feudalism, since it multiplied tenures in chief. . . . The ecclesiastical property which passed to [the monarchy] was soon dissipated. . . . In the short run, then, the Reformation strengthened the position of the lay landed ruling class as a whole, though it weakened some of those members of it hitherto powerful.71

If then there turns out to be less argument about the aristocracy than it seemed on first glance, can we say the same about the gentry who were the original focus of the debate? Gentry is of course a much vaguer term. Cooper spells out some of the difficulties:

The peerage is a group of individuals enjoying a legally defined status which belongs . . . to only one male member of each family. Thus the younger sons of peers and their descendants will appear as gentry in Professor Tawney’s classification. Great landowners, whenever they could afford it, were usually more generous to their sons in cash or land than is sometimes supposed. . . . Such provision certainly influenced the distribution of property. . . . [T]he gentry were not only, like the peerage, recruited from below, they were also recruited from above. . . . Furthermore, the groups are non-compatible in another respect: the peerage is a group strictly defined by legal status, while the gentry is not definable in any such fashion. It is a classification by wealth and to some extent by mode of life. . . . Although peerages were sold after 1603, entry to the peerage was never by a simple test of wealth and style of life.72

Who then are the gentry? The gentry are not yet peers, and are more than “yeomen,” the latter a term as difficult to define as gentry. But then we discover that included among “gentry” are not only younger sons of peers, but various categories such as knights, esquires, and gentlemen. This should make it clear what is happening. In the hierarchical order of feudal society a large number of categories evolved which prescribed rank, duties, privileges, and honors. The ranks were constantly evolving, the family continuity of course unstable, the income correlates of rank varying. The expansion of capitalist agriculture was reflected in the stratification system by a new category of “landowner” (which to be sure might be subdivided by size of holding). Gentry emerged as a term covering capitalist landowners. The other terms did not disappear. But the “gentry” was a group label which expanded slowly to absorb and obliterate other terms. In the Elizabethan period, there were still “aristocrats” and “yeomen” in addition to “gentry” at the very least. In the twentieth century, there are only really “farmers.” We get nowhere if we reify “gentry” be defining it either as it was defined at a certain moment in time or as we determine the social reality to have been at that moment in time. The whole point about “gentry” is not only that it was a class in formation but a concept in formation. It was, however, a case of new wine in old bottles. F. J. Fisher seems to me to put it exactly right: “The effect of the economic changes of the new sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was less to create new categories of men than to offer the existing categories new opportunities and to inspire them with a new spirit.”73

Christopher Hill, by contrast, seems to me to add to the confusion in this formulation of the problem:

We must surely start from the fact that “the gentry” were not an economic class. They were a social and legal class; economically they were divided. The inflationary century before 1640 was a great watershed, in which, in all sections of the community, economic divisions were taking place. Some yeomen were thriving to gentility; others were being submerged. Some peers were accumulating vast estates; others were on the verge of bankruptcy. It is easy to argue that “the gentry” were either “rising” or “declining” if we take samples of the class; for some families were doing the one and others the other.74

Though the empirical description of the social facts seems to me faultless, the theorizing seems to me to miss the point, precisely the Marxist point. “The mark of the gentry,” says Julian Cornwall, “was the ownership of land.”75 The term gentry was coming to cover a group of men all in the same relationship to the means of production: owners of unentailed land producing for the market. The clarity of this process was confused by the fact that men still valued the social perquisites of an older legal category76 but it was the common economic thrust that was the dominant unifying theme of this category in the sixteenth century and later. Within an economic class, some can be more wealthy than others, more successful than others in the market. Variation in income does not demonstrate that a group is not a class.

What light does this then throw on the now classic debate on the gentry? Tawney’s essential point was that the gentry were a group with a style of life better adapted to survival in the age of inflation than the spendthrift peerage and the fly-by-night speculators. “Compared with the adventurers who dealt in properties they had never seen, the local gentry was a settled population confronting mere marauders.”77 Their advantage over their French counterparts was that they were “kept few and tough by the ruthlessness of the English family system, which sacrificed the individual to the institution.78 They were politically far stronger than their Dutch counterparts, “wholly severed from their rural roots”79 because they “combined the local and popular attachments essential for a representative role with the aristocratic aroma of nobiles minores, and played each card in turn with tactful, but remorseless, realism.”80 Hence they epitomize the process of succession of elites which Pirenne argues was the essence of the social history of capitalism.81 The outcome was that “political institutions [were not in] accord with economic realities,” which led inexorably to an English Revolution led by the “rising” gentry and caused by “impersonal forces too strong for both [Parliament and ruler to control].”82

The basis of Trevor-Roper’s attack, as is well-known, aside from challenging Tawney’s statistics and coding operations,83 was to suggest that the basic model of the political arena was off base:

I have already suggested that office rather than land was the basis of many undoubtedly “rising” families. I would now go further. Instead of the distinction between “old” and “new” landlords, between peers and gentry, I would suggest as the significant distinction of Tudor and Stuart landed society, the distinction between “court” and “country,” between the officeholders and the mere landlords. . . .

What fortunes were made by the officials of Henry VIII who carried out the nationalization of monastic property! Naturally the best bargains went to them and to their local agents, the office-holding gentry in the counties. . . .

But what of the mere gentry who had no such positions? As each prize came more valuable it moved farther away from their reach.84

Hence, the English Civil War can be seen, at least in part, as the rebellion of the overtaxed “mere” gentry against a Renaissance court.

Finally J. H. Hexter insists that there is a “third group of English landlords.”85 He says a look at the Parliamentary opposition to the Stuarts shows they are drawn not from the “power-hungry rural middle class” of Tawney, for they are “rich country gentry” (is that really so different from Tawney?); nor are they the “angry hard-pressed yokels” of Trevor-Roper, for they were an “unusually well-educated group of men” (is that really incompatible with Trevor-Roper?)86

However if we follow Hexter’s positive assertions, we shall in fact be led to a fairly clear picture of the social role of the gentry, though not to the one he apparently thinks he leads us. He says at one point in his critique: “We are still left with the problem that started Tawney on his quest. . . . Why at this particular historical juncture did the ‘country’ find its leadership in social strata beneath the top? Why among the gentry rather than among the nobility?”87 Hexter’s answer is essentially that the political rise of the gentry is to be explained by the growing military power of the king and concurrent decline of the military power of the territorial magnates. “Consequently the gentry of the Tudor period acted with greater independence than their predecessors in the days of Lancaster and York. . . .”88 As many have observed, who ever said otherwise? And as Stone pointedly remarks: “Mr. Hexter’s deus ex machina to explain the rise to political power of the gentry is altogether too superficial: he says that the aristocracy lost military control. Of course; but why did this happen?”89 We are thus returned to those central variables we have been discussing (as have Tawney and Trevor-Roper): the growth of a bureaucratic state machinery and the development of capitalist agriculture—and the link between the two.90

Hexter next takes off against “the myth of the middle class.” But here he is really challenging nineteenth-century liberalism and not the “unconscious” Marxism which he suggests underlies so much of modern economic history.91 In fact his own analysis is not in reality so far away from that of Tawney and Trevor-Roper. The Tudors, he says, were not promiddle class, except for “a small inner coterie of Tudor merchant-bankers,” a group of “Court-bound capitalists.”92

Tudor policy was really very consistent:

[It] was usually quite tender of vested interests. It protected old ones and created new ones in the emergent forms of enterprise. . . . It was not the policy of the Tudors either to stand mulishly athwart the path of change, or to allow it free rein, but to guide it, to bring it as they said to some rule conformable with good order.93

And, for good measure, Hexter adds, “the Tudors regarded the middle class as the milch herd of the commonwealth.”94

But it was precisely Lawrence Stone who emphasized the degree to which the Tudors exercised economic control, favored a handful of entrepreneurs, but not the bourgeois classes as a whole, and placed the strengthening of the state’s military power at a premium,95 and it is the essence of Trevor-Roper’s argument that the gentry rebelled against being a milch herd.

Finally, says Hexter, it is not the case that the capitalist spirit only emerged in the sixteenth century for it had long been in existence, nor that “the sixteenth-century landowners waited for the example and inspiration of town merchants”96 to engage in capitalist agriculture. Precisely so. But then we are back to the picture of an emerging capitalist class recruited from varying social backgrounds.97

Why should this be strange? It was, as we have seen, happening throughout the European world-economy.98 No doubt, there were varying political expressions of different subgroups within the “gentry.” Barrington Moore for example has a suggestion about the political opposition of Trevor-Roper’s “declining gentry” which makes that phenomenon totally compatible with the political opposition of Tawney’s “rising gentry.” He quotes Tawney: “There are plenty of gentry who stagnate or go downhill. It would be easy to find noble landlords who move with the times, and make the most of their properties.”99 Moore then says of those who “stagnated”:

These “growlers and grumblers” may have supplied a portion of the radical element behind Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution, though this impetus had its main origins farther down the social scale. Thus, under the impact of commerce and some industry, English society was breaking apart from the top downward in a way that allowed pockets of radical discontent produced by the same forces to burst temporarily into the limelight. . . . In this process, as the old order breaks up, sections of society that had been losing out due to long-run economic trends come to the surface and do much of the violent “dirty work” of destroying the ancien régime, thus clearing the road for a new set of institutions. In England the main dirty work of this type was the symbolic act of beheading Charles I.100

Probably Hexter is right in suggesting there were three types of landlords—“rising,” “declining,” and others. And it’s very plausible that political opposition tends to correlate with the first two types more than with the third. In an explanation of the politics of the early Stuart era these details are crucial.101 In assessing the trends of social change, it is far more important to see the rise of the gentry not as an economic force nor as a political entity but as a social category.

Concentration on detail, while it often lays bare the vacuousness of weak generalization, can also obscure secular change. Lawrence Stone, after making just such a detailed analysis of the complexities of social mobility in England at this time, points out that the form of this analysis tended to drop from view two important shifts of English society:

The first was a polarization of society into rich and poor: the upper classes became relatively more numerous, and their real incomes rose; the poor became relatively more numerous and their real incomes fell. The second a greater equality among the upper classes: firstly the wealth and power of the greater gentry increased relative to that of the aristocracy; and secondly members of the trades and professions rose in wealth, number and social status relative to the landed classes.102

J. Hurstfield makes a similar point with emphasis on its impact on the politics of the “second” sixteenth century:

In England the aristocracy never became a caste and the landed gentry never became a lesser nobility. Hence the middle and upper classes stood in much closer relation to each other than they did to the monarchy; and, in times of crisis, had much more in common with each other than they had with the Crown.103

Stone and Hurstfield are both demonstrating the crucial point here: the process of emergence of a new class category within which the “old” distinction of aristocrat–gentry was losing its significance. As Perez Zagorin sums up the situation, the general tendency of the long sixteenth century in England, “was to give to men . . . in a position to deploy capital in agriculture, trade, and industry . . . the command of social life.”104 And this combined class gained at the expense of the peasantry.105 The English situation is a good illustration of Lattimore’s generalization: “[I]n any gradually changing society it is always those who rule that hang onto the best of what is left of the old order, and at the same time take the best of what is offered by the new, [leading in time to] a considerable diversification. . . .”106

If the “gentry” were simply the name for the capitalist farmers as they became a class, what are yeomen? Yeomen is a term just like gentry, a pre-existing socio–legal term whose content was evolving in the sixteenth century. Mildred Campbell, in her book on the English yeomen, sifts through the various uses of the word and its relation to such terms as farmer, gentleman, freeholder, husbandman, and laborer, noting acerbically: “There is nothing, one may say at the outset, as explicit as the distinction just discarded.”107 Her conclusion is that

yeomen status viewed in terms of its relationship to other groups in the social structure assumes a fairly definite character. They were a substantial rural middle class whose chief concern was with the land and agricultural interests, a group who lived “in the temperate zone betwixt greatness and want,” serving England, as it was given a “middle people” . . . in condition between the gentry and the peasantry to serve.108

To appreciate the role of this group we must return to a theme discussed in a previous chapter, the evolution of the tenure system in English agriculture. Marx in his discussion of the genesis of capitalist ground rent makes a crucial point which is often overlooked in the exegesis of his views:

[A]s soon as rent assumes the form of money-rent, and thereby the relationship between rent-paying peasant and landlord becomes a relationship fixed by contract—a development which is only possible generally when the world-market, commerce and manufacture have reached a certain relatively high level—the leasing of land to capitalists inevitably also makes its appearance. The latter hitherto stood beyond the rural limits and now carry over to the country-side and agriculture the capital acquired in the cities and with it the capitalist mode of operation developed—i.e., creating a product as a mere commodity and solely as a means of appropriating surplus-value. This form can become the general rule only in those countries which dominate the world-market in the period of transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production.109

The relevance of Marx’s point is that the process of transformation in the land tenure system is not unique to England, as is obvious. But as England (and the Dutch Republic) become more and more the core territories of the European world-economy in the “second” sixteenth century (and even more in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the process goes further and faster in these areas precisely because they are the core. It is crucial that resources be used more efficiently in order to benefit from the central trading and financial position in the world-economy. In England, it paid the landed classes to move to a system of fully alienable land just as it paid the landed classes in Poland (and even say in southern France) to restrain moves in this direction.

To make land fully alienable, to have production for commodity sale as the overriding consideration of agriculture, one has to eliminate not only various kinds of feudal tenure systems. One has to eliminate also the peasant farmer, for the peasant may hold on to the land and engage in marginal kinds of production activities for considerations that do not maximize short-run profitability. How was in fact such elimination accomplished?

H. John Habakkuk points out that there are three ways of expropriating peasants: chasing them from their tenures and incorporating their land into the domain; forcing them to yield life tenures for limited rentals; whittling away at the communal rights of the peasants. He argues that in the “second” sixteenth century only those peasants who were tenants for a limited term or for life without right or renewal were effectively subject to such forms of expropriation, and he estimates that this added up to only about 35% of the peasantry.110 As for the sale of lands, the picture is far from one-sided:

During [this] period . . . there were certainly lords (seigneurs) who bought land from the peasants; there were also some peasants who accumulated so much goods that they were elevated to the rank of gentry. In both cases, the result was a diminution of peasant property. But there were also peasants who bought the great domains when they were put on sale, or who obtained copyhold lease. The net result of these transactions is not known. But it is altogether possible that those acquisitions added up to a gain rather than a loss for the peasantry; whereas, on the one hand, the lords expropriated the peasants, on the other the peasants, in acquiring goods nibbled at the domains of the lords.111

The full capitalization of agriculture was yet to come in England. In the sixteenth century, the yeoman still had his role to play. The increasing commercialization of agriculture at this time offered the small landowner not only “dangers” but “opportunities.” Campbell, who waxes a bit romantic, sees the yeomen as rather heroic:

Scheming landlords and land-hungry neighbors were ever ready to take advantage of a man’s misfortunes. Though prices in the main steadily went up, there were sometimes fluctuations that came without warning and in uncertain sequence. Other evils added to the insecurity of the times. Uncontrolled epidemics were a constant dread. Loss by fire was common, and insurance of any kind practically unknown. Either a man must have savings in hand for such rainy days or else go in debt. . . .

But when it is a case of sink or swim, unless the odds are too great against a man he usually tries to swim. . . . And despite the uncertain conditions depicted above, more than ever before in the history of English landholding the little man who had industry and an abundance of enterprise was getting his opportunity. Those who could weather the storms found in the higher prices and better market opportunities for profit that urged them on to still greater effort. Gain begets the desire for more gain.112

If the yeomen was not the direct beneficiary of the dissolution of the monasteries, he might eventually get a piece of the pie.113

As many have pointed out, there were two kinds of enclosure going on in that era: enclosure of large domains for pasture, and small land consolidation for more efficient tillage. It is in this latter process that the yeomen played the central role, a role all the more important because it had important social consequences in terms of increasing food supply without incurring the kind of political opposition which pasturage enclosures encountered.114 Part of the improvements came from other factors that increased efficiency of labor. Thirsk attributes it to:

the use of more intensive rotations, accompanied by heavier manuring; the use of improved varieties of grain; and, probably most important of all, the impressive increase in the total acreage of land under the plough as a result of the reclamation of waste and the conversion of pasture. . . . Heavier manuring of the arable, of course, was made possible by keeping larger numbers of animals, which resulted in a great increase in the supply of meat and wool and other animal products. Heavier rates of stocking were made possible by the improvement of pastures and meadows by fertilizers, by the improved supply of spring grazing, through the watering of meadows in the west country, the growing of tares elsewhere, and by the increased supply of summer grazing through the use of bogs and the reclamation of coastal marshland and fen. Thus improvements in arable and pastoral husbandry went hand in hand, each helping the other, and both serving to promote the specialization and interdependence of regions.115

The inclusion of Wales in the English division of labor at this time aided this process of agricultural improvement. For one thing, the imposition of English legal forms, particularly primogeniture, led to great uncertainty about the land tenure system. This was propitious for the creation of large domains in Wales. “From one end of Wales to the other it was a time of estate-building and the laying of family fortunes.”116 This was particularly true in the “anglicized lowlands” which showed “marked inequality in the size of holdings. . . .”117 I would suspect the landlords were disproportionately English. The degree of agricultural improvement brought about by enclosures in Wales seem to have been greater than in England. Wales had still been suffering until that time from “predatory techniques.”118 This meant, however, even greater displacements of population, who migrated to England, there most probably to become part of the lumpenproletariat, and many of them ending up as mercenaries as we have already mentioned.

Campbell says that the age was an age of “land hunger.”119 “[A]mong the land hungry none were more avaricious than the yeomen.”120 It obviously paid off by the evidence we have from rural housing in England from 1570 to 1640, the period of “The Great Rebuilding,” the work, according to W. G. Hoskins, of “the bigger husbandmen, the yeomen, and the lesser gentry, all largely of the same social origin in medieval centuries.”121 Lawrence Stone cites this same fact, however, as further evidence of the “rise of the gentry,”122 an indication once again of the fluidity of the designations we are using. Are not these yeomen simply the less well-capitalized version of the gentry who are capitalist farmers?123

This becomes clearer if we see who in fact loses out in the process of enclosures (of both varieties). As the enclosures proceeded—whether the large-scale enclosures of sheepherders or the small-scale enclosures of improving yeomen—a number of men who formerly lived on and off the land were forced to leave it, and others were reduced to the status of landless rural laborers working for wages.124 This has long been considered to be a central element in the creation of the labor surplus that is a critical element in the “commercialising of English life.”125 This shift occurred between 1540 and 1640. In the economic squeeze, some small men gained but many more lost.126 Indeed, the very process of fulfilling the liberation of the peasant from the constraints of feudalism may have served as an additional mode of impoverishment. Alexander Savine, in his article on the remains of feudal villeinage in Tudor England, notes the paradox “that for the bondman of the sixteenth century his personal dependence upon the lord became most burdensome at the moment he got his freedom.”127 The paradox is very simple to unravel. Manumission was not free. It was bought. Indeed, it must have bought high, because Savine notes:

Manumission of bondmen was regarded as a regular source of seigniorial income. . . . The enfranchisement of the last bondsmen was a paying policy. The thing was done so openly in the sixteenth century that Elizabethan courtiers could receive as a special sign a favour from the sovereign a commission to enfranchise a definite number of villein families on the Crown manors; that is to say, they were enabled to repair their fortunes with the payments for enfranchisement.128

Villeins no longer gave work-week service to the lord on the demesne.129 Rather, the “personal dependence of the bondman became a mere pretext for extortion.”130 Thus, in the process, no doubt, many became landless paupers.

We find further evidence of this pauperization in the virtual disappearance of the husbandman category. On the one hand, some husbandmen were “rising to be yeomen and the distinctions between husbandmen and yeomen were being blurred.”131 And on the other hand, the poorer husbandman was getting to be worse off than many rural laborers who were cottagers, and needed to engage in part-time wage labor to make ends meet.132 Might not husbandmen spasmodically employed have thought it desirable to become laborers regularly employed?

In any case, both these categories of farmworkers were those vulnerable to enclosure and encroachment on their commons’ right. Encroachment, in particular, led to abandonment of villages and migration.133 Everitt points out that the growing distinction between the peasant–yeomen and the “poor squatters and wanderers, virtually landless, often lately evicted from elsewhere” was a phenomenon to be observed particularly in the more recently-settled forest areas of the countryside134 and that “it was from this latter group, in consequence of their semi-vagrant origins, that the growing army of seasonal workers was largely recruited, called into being by the needs of commercial farming.”135

Thus arose the crucial political problem of begging and vagabondage, a notorious feature of Elizabethan England.136 Frank Aydelotte sees three separate factors combining to explain the upsurge of vagabondage in Elizabethan times: enclosures to be sure and most importantly; but also Tudor peace and hence the disbanding of enormous bands of retainers kept by nobles; and also the dissolution of the monasteries and the disappearance of their role as dispensers of charity. Aydelotte’s view of these vagabonds, which cannot be far different from that of the rulers of the day, is to see them as a social problem:

Far from being either an impotent or a harmless class, the vagabonds of the sixteenth century represented much of the solid strength of medieval England. Many of them came from good stock, but in the economic scheme of modern England they found no useful place. They had brains to plan villany and audacity to execute it. Their ranks contained political, religious and social malcontents and agitators. Hence it was that they were a danger as well as a pest in the England of Elizabeth. The vagabonds were menace enough to cause the lawmakers, from Henry VII onwards, to give their best thought to a remedy, both by framing statutes and providing for their execution, until the problem was finally solved, as far as legislation could solve it, by the admirable poor laws of 1572, 1597, and 1601.137

Admirable? Perhaps, although doubtless not in the simple sense Aydelotte wants us to admire them.

These laws do however throw light on the role the state machinery was playing. First let us note that “social welfare” legislation, previously unknown in Europe, appears on the scene in many places at this time. Furthermore, it is not even a matter of simultaneous invention, but of conscious cultural diffusion.138 Second, the relationship of such legislation to economic transformation is ambiguous. It was to be sure a response to a social crisis brought on by economic change, a means of averting political rebellion.139 But its economic meaning was not one of straightforward support for the capitalist classes. It was a form of political stabilization whose effect was as constraining to the employers as to the laborers, perhaps even more.140 This policy of monarchical constraint on the free play of capitalism in the sixteenth century is in marked contrast with the collaboration of the state to intervene in the process of the great and definitive enclosures of the eighteenth century.141

The Tudors and early Stuarts are often thought to have “failed,” because the ultimate outcome of their policy was the English Revolution. But perhaps the English Revolution should be viewed as a measure of the “success” of the Tudor–Stuart monarchs, in that they held off rebellion so long. Let us look at the reactions of sixteenth-century English peasants under stress. Many chose vagabondage. Another possibility was peasant rebellion, and rebellions there were, to be sure. But it should be noticed that there were fewer in England at this time than earlier, and fewer at this time in England than in France or elsewhere on the continent.

Each of these contrasts is worth looking at. R. H. Hilton argues that the sixteenth-century enclosures had a “pre-history.” The process of leaving the land goes back to the thirteenth century. There was of course the phenomenon of depopulation, but Hilton feels that poverty was a more basic explanation for the rural exodus.142 Then came the inflationary, “long” sixteenth century. Whereas in eastern Europe the landlords forced the laborers back onto the land because the expanded cash-crop production required it, England took a route of pasturage (which required less labor) and increased efficiency of arable production (which required less labor). Far from wanting to farm estates directly, large landowners sought tenants, and preferred “capitalist farmers” as tenants to “peasants.”143 Since this was to the disadvantage of many in the rural areas, why did the peasants not resist more than they did? Hilton argues that they were too weak to resist.144 Further confirmation is to be found in the observation by C. S. L. Davies that there was relatively more peasant resistance in the “first” sixteenth century than in the “second,” whereas if harshness of conditions were sufficient to explain peasant outbreaks, the opposite would have occurred. It is only after 1590 that rent rises surge ahead of price increases. Davies gives two kinds of explanations for this. On the one hand, the concept of variable rent was relatively new and therefore outrageous in the “first” sixteenth century, whereas by the “second,” the peasants were habituated to this concept.145 And second, and perhaps more importantly, the “yeomen” were not negatively affected by the enclosures.146

Let us now turn to a comparison of the lot of the “yeomen” in England and France at this same period. Here Davies notices that it was the burden of taxation which led most directly to rebellion against the central authority, and that this burden was less in England than in France because of the smaller size of the state, the relatively less venal and hence less extractive bureaucracy, and the institutional weakness of the regions which reduced the weight of state machinery as well as eliminating foci of rebellion.147

Finally, let us look at one last contrast, peasant revolts in sixteenth-century England and those of the eighteenth century. Tawney points out that this is a contrast between their “prevalence . . . in the middle of the sixteenth century” and their “comparative rarity two hundred years later,” although the same potential cause, the enclosures, was there.148 Tawney argues that the agrarian disturbances of the sixteenth century “mark the transition from the feudal revolts of the fifteenth century, based on the union of all classes in a locality against the central government, to those in which one class stands against another through the opposition of economic interests.”149

What then is it we are saying? It seems that the sixteenth century, particularly the period between 1540–1640, is a period of class formation, a capitalist agricultural class (whose wealthier members are called “gentry” and whose lesser members are called “yeomen”). The social process of land consolidation in England at this time is one of increasing income to this class as a whole including to the lesser members of it, while it involves the beginnings of the creation of a proletariat, most of whom was still not firmly settled in the towns but rather were “vagabonds,” seasonal wage workers with subsistence plots, and lumpenproletariat in the towns.

The state machinery was not a coherent strong independent force but a battleground of two conflicting trends—those persons of high traditional status who were at best partially adapting to the new economic possibilities, and those rising elements (whatever their background in terms of traditional status and whatever their relative wealth in the present) who pushed toward the full commercialization of economic life.

While both these elements sought and from time to time received the assistance of the state, neither was sure that it stood to profit from a greatly strengthened state machinery, largely because both sides feared that the other side would dominate the state bureaucracy. A policy of “social welfare” served the interests of preserving order and interfering with the full play of market forces. It eased the transition, and thus had advantages for all the forces in play.

England’s position in the world-economy precisely made this balancing game possible. It was sheltered from too much outside interference by the struggle of the two great military powers: Spain and France. It was unencumbered by imperial obligations.150 It was free therefore to pursue its economic specialization, especially with the assistance of eastern Europe’s raw materials, fed to it in part by its commercial alliance with the Dutch Republic, which also wanted shelter from the military giants, and which “paid the costs” of keeping the world trade machinery operating. The English state machinery was just strong enough to fend off baneful outside influences, but still weak enough not to give too great an edge either to “traditionalist” elements or to the new parasites of the state bureaucracy, so that neither the one nor the other were able to eat up totally the surplus of the most productive forces. In short, it was a question of optimal position: relative political insulation while having the economic advantages of the world-economy, a relative balance of forces internally which maximized internal peace, but minimized the errors of an overbearing state machinery.

How come, then, one might properly ask, the English Revolution? It might be said now that we are arguing that the proof of the “success” of England during this era is that the English Revolution occurred when it did—neither earlier nor later—and that the forces of modern capitalism emerged clearly triumphant, despite their presumed “defeat” and a presumed “Restoration” of the old. To appreciate this issue of timing, we should look at three related phenomena: the politics of alliance in this era, the patterns of migration, and the so-called commercial crisis of the early Stuart era. This will enable us to talk about the “real issues” that were the background to the English Revolution.

H. R. Trevor-Roper insists that the essential conflict is that of court and country. If this is his key point, then he has won, because this presumed opponents—for example, Stone and Hill151—have conceded the case. The issue however is not there. It is what political game was the Court playing, how was this game related to the social and economic transformation going on, and in what ways was it consequence and cause of England’s role in the European world-economy.

The state-machinery, the Court, was at one and the same time a protagonist of the drama and a mediating agency, a vector of different forces. This was true of all the so-called absolute monarchies. They balanced forces; they served as power brokers; they effected compromises. But one of the outcomes they hoped for was to strengthen themselves, to become absolute in deed rather than merely in theory and in aspiration.

Given the ambiguity of its role and its objectives, the Court was ambivalent about the onsurge of capitalist elements. On the one hand, the Crown courted the “bourgeoisie,” that is to say, the conglomerate of landed capitalist proprietors and well-to-do farmers, professional men (lawyers, divines, and medical practitioners), the wealthier merchants.152 “Haunted by the fear of feudal revolts,”153 as Tawney puts it, the State saw in them allies for its own ends. But the Court, when all is said and done, was dominated by the aristocracy, the king first among them—old aristocrats, men newly come to the titles and valuing them all the more for it, others in the service of the king aspiring to the peerage—and the Court could not be sanguine about the undermining of the hierarchical status system of which it was the apex. Nor was it sanguine. It cherished this system, reinforced it, elaborated it, paid for it. The Renaissance Court outshone all others that Europe had known.

Its need for money and political allies led the Court to further commerce and commercialization. Its need for stability and deference led it to be uneasy about the aggressive successes of the new class. To the extent that it was competent, the Court sought to apply a slow brake to an accelerating process of capitalist transformation while at the same time increasing the political centrality of state institutions. This was no different in Tudor England than in Valois France or Hapsburg Spain. What was different was both the historical background and the international position in the sixteenth century which made the new English capitalist class both relatively stronger and more able to absorb within it very large elements of the old aristocracy.

Many writers note that, about 1590–1600, there was a critical moment in the politics of England. Tawney writes:

Few rulers have acted more remorselessly than the early Tudors on the maxim that the foundations of power are economic. They had made the augmentation of the royal demesne, and the protection of the peasant cultivator, two of the keystones of the New Monarchy. By the later years of Elizabeth, the former policy was crumbling badly, and the latter, always unpopular with the larger landowners, was encountering an ever more tenacious opposition.154

Over time the weight of the Crown’s decisions was leaning toward the capitalist farmers, as opposed to the aristocracy as such.155 The latter, in order to survive, became more and more like “rising gentry” and hence, from the point of view of the peasantry, more and more exploitative.156 Hence the ties grew thinner between lord and peasant, and the latter were no longer likely to respond to regional vertical appeals of loyalty in national conflicts.157 The Crown bureaucracy itself however was becoming overblown and “wasteful,” a process which had its natural limits, as Trevor-Roper argues.158 Then, agree Stone and Trevor-Roper, by 1590, overexpenditure led to cutback. Peace in Europe (the interval between 1598 and 1618) reduced the costs for all the states.159 In England, the sale of titles by James I increased the income160 and crisis was thereby averted. Crisis averted but extravagance increased, because of the logic of the Crown’s dual-stranded policy.161

A century of Tudor rule may not have caused a sharp decline in the ownership of land by peers as Tawney originally thought. It seems in the end that all that happened is that the royal demesne was partially parceled out to non-peer capitalist farmers.162 The beneficiaries of Tudor rule were doubtless both peers and non-peers who were able to master the new economy.163 Tudor juggling kept them on top of the situation. But the “long” sixteenth century was nearing its end. And the strains of its contradictions would be felt under the early Stuarts. This is the point which Trevor-Roper makes:

Even in the 1590’s, even a far less expensive, more efficient bureaucracy had been saved only by peace: how could this much more outrageous system [of the Stuarts and other European monarchs of this time] survive if the long prosperity of the sixteenth century, or the saving peace of the seventeenth, should fail?

In fact, in the 1620’s they both failed at once. In 1618 a political crisis in Prague had set the European powers in motion. . . . Meanwhile the European economy . . . was suddenly struck by a great depression, the universal “decay of trade” of 1620.164

So we are once more back to the workings of the world-system. England’s reaction to the so-called “crisis of the seventeenth century” was somewhat different from that of others. This is why she could enter the era of mercantilism with so much greater strength. One aspect of this strength was the high degree of commercialization of her agriculture, a process we have been describing. The other side was her “industrialization.”

John Nef argues that England underwent an “early industrial revolution” in the period 1540–1640, and that by comparison France did not.165 He asserts there were three main developments in England. A number of industries previously known on the Continent but not in England were introduced (paper and gunpowder mills, cannon foundries, alum and copperas factories, sugar refineries, saltpeter works, brass making). New techniques were imported from the Continent, especially in mining and metallurgy. Finally, the English made their own positive contribution to technology, especially in connection with the substitution of coal for wood.166 Furthermore, Nef argues that “capital investment along with technical inventive ingenuity, was being oriented as never before in the direction of production for the sake of quantity.”167 If, however, one asks of Nef, why this sudden shift of England from being an industrial “backwater” to being relatively advanced, Nef offers principally a geographical explanation. The large internal market, a prerequisite for industrial concentration, was made possible “by the facilities for cheap water transport which Great Britain, by virtue of her insular position and good harbors, enjoyed to a greater degree than any foreign country except Holland.”168 No doubt this is true, but since the geography was the same in earlier centuries, we are left uncertain as to why the sudden spurt.

What does seem to be clear is that there was a spurt: in industrial technology, in degree of industrialization, and correlatively in population. K. W. Taylor, in observing the doubling of the English population under Tudor rule, offers two explanations: domestic peace and the new geography of world trade which changed England’s location in the “world” and hence ended the concentration of its population in the south and east. “Like a potted plant, long left undisturbed on a window-sill and then transferred to an open garden, the economy of England threw out new leaves and branches.”169 Taylor’s geographical explanation, because it speaks of England’s position relative to the world-economy as opposed to Nef’s argument of internal geographic advantages, is more satisfying since it deals with an element that precisely changed in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, if we remember the new importance of the Baltic as well as of the Atlantic trade, the argument is further strengthened. Still by itself, it is not enough to explain the discrepancy with France. Perhaps we shall have to look to factors within France that prevented her from taking as much advantage of the new geography as did England.

Let us further note that England’s doubling of population was selective, because it involved not only demographic growth but quality immigration and helpful emigration. On the one hand, there is the oft-noted influx of continental artisans—Flemish clothiers, German metallurgists, etc.—whose arrival is usually attributed to the upheavals of the religious wars. But, if they went to England, it is because, as G. N. Clark argues, England had become “the place where capital and management could earn a better remuneration.”170 Let us however remember that the end of the Elizabethan era was a moment of economic and social strain—too great expenditures of the court, plus population growth combined with enclosures and hence the rise of vagabondage. As F. J. Fisher reminds us, contemporaries thought of Elizabethan England “as a country in which population pressure was gradually reducing many to poverty and possibly diminishing the national income per head.”171

There are two ways to handle the problem of surplus population within a country: remove them from the cities (that is, geographically segregate them), or remove them from the country altogether. In Tudor–Stuart England, both were tried. On the one hand, the poor laws, the “laws against the poor” as Braudel calls them,172 pushed them to the rural areas to exist in a borderline fashion. On the other hand, it is just at this time that England begins to think of overseas colonization—to Ireland first from about 1590, then to North America and the West Indies. In the case of external emigration, the temptation for the emigrants was social mobility.173 Malowist suggests we look to an explanation of the second wave of European expansion which begins in the end of the sixteenth century—that of England, Holland, and to a lesser extent, France—not only in the commercial factors often cited, but in the need to dispense with surplus population. He notes that many see demographic expansion as a stimulus of economic expansion, but he reminds us that there is an optimal point. “Difficult economic situations and certain social situations unfavorable to economic progress seem therefore to create conditions which favor emigration, even the most risky.”174 Once again, only optima can be considered in a country “prematurely overpopulated.”175 Like England, France exported its population, to Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (to replace the expelled Moriscos), later to the “islands” of America, and killed many off in the persecutions of the Protestants.176 By the end of the eighteenth century, to be sure, France’s population was once more balanced.177 But it took far longer to arrive at this balance than England. And it was only at a price of internal warfare which strengthened some of the wrong forces and expelled some of the right ones—wrong and right, that is, from the point of view of industrial transformation. These pluses of English development become clear in the outcome of the European economic crisis of the 1620s. Before however we deal with that, we must look at what happened in France between Cateau-Cambrésis and the crisis.

For Frank C. Spooner, “the decade 1550–1560 is decisive [for France].”178 It is marked by a sudden gold shortage which turns France’s attention to African exploration and leads to a development of the western maritime regions. It marks the rise of Paris as a financial center (as against Lyon which definitively declines by 1580).179Furthermore, it is marked by the outbreak of the religious civil wars which were to preoccupy France for the rest of the century. This double development (of the maritime regions and Paris) and the religious wars are not unconnected.

The inflation affected the income of the nobility, particularly the lesser nobility who lived on fixed rents. But the peasants did not benefit, as might normally be expected, because of the devastations wrought by civil war. One major consequence was the vastly increased importance of the state machinery not only because of the vast expansion of tax farming that occurred at this time, but also because nobles who wished to survive economically sought financial refuge in attaching themselves to the court.180

France at this time was faced with one major problem in seeking to reorient itself to the new European world after Cateau-Cambrésis. It was neither fish nor fowl, no longer empire, but not quite a nation-state. It was geared half to land transport, half to sea transport. Its state machinery was at once too strong and too weak.

There are two arenas in which this ambiguity of option can be seen most clearly. One is in the arena of trade, the other is in politics and religion. The facts of the economic trading zones did not mesh with the political boundaries. This was to some extent true everywhere in Europe of course (and to some extent always true), but it was particularly glaring for France, especially if one compared France with what is the case for her great economic rivals-to-be: England and the northern Netherlands. Emile Coornaert describes the situation at the beginning of the sixteenth century in this way:

In the region which, in rapid outline, runs from Paris and the bend of the Loire to the Mediterranean, France was part of an economic zone which still was heavily under the influence of the Italians, the principal men of affairs, masters of commercial techniques, since the last of the Middle Ages in all of western Europe. Thanks especially to them, this zone was the most developed from the point of view of organization and modes of work. In France, the pole and, at the same time, the port of exit in this part of the country was Lyon, which put it in contact with the south and centre of the continent and contributed rather actively to its links with the north-west. The latter which included the north of France and the French maritime front of the Ponant, the Low Countries, England, and the Rhenish fringe of the Empire constituted another zone. Its pole was Antwerp, which controlled contacts with northern Europe and, in large part, with Germany. From the point of view of techniques, it was on the way to reaching the level of the Southern European zone.181

This economic split meant that France was further from having a national economy than England, far closer in this regard to Spain. But whereas Spain’s problem was that Spain was part of a larger Hapsburg Empire which, at least under Charles V, she did not really control, France’s problem was that, after 1557, she was attracted in at least three different directions. The political heart of the country—roughly the northeast and including the capital—was attracted to a continental land mass, the economy that had been dominant in the “first” sixteenth century, that is, linked to Antwerp even after her decline.182 The northwest and west of France was attracted to the new European world-economy and its Atlantic and Baltic trades.183 The south of France was developing the system of métayage we previously discussed, part of the general movement of the Christian Mediterranean toward primary production, toward export-oriented, capitalist agriculture.184

For Henri Hauser this motley assortment of activities and orientations adds up to a “happy condition in which [France] could dispense with her neighbours while they could not do without her.”185 He even wishes to call this “autarchy.” To me, it seems quite the opposite, a situation in which France is the sum of centrifugal economic forces. It is in order to counter this fractionation that the controllers of the state machinery move so strikingly to reinforce it, to create Europe’s strongest state, what will become under Louis XIV the very model, for contemporaries and for history, of the absolute monarchy.

One of the critical sources of the economic dilemma of France arises out of a change in the technological substratum of the European world-economy. To appreciate its importance, we must first dissect some conflicting evidence on the relative costs of sea and land transport in pre-industrial Europe. On the one hand, there are the frequent and seemingly obvious statements that in pre-industrial Europe, “land transport was still extremely expensive and the nations which had the best command of sea-borne trade secured the fastest economic growth.”186 Furthermore, as Kristof Glamann suggests, the theory of widening circles as a result of economic intercourse particularly applies to maritime trade. Indeed, he says, “international trade [via water routes] is in many cases cheaper and easier to establish than domestic trade.”187 On the other hand, Wilfrid Brulez points out:

In the 16th century, . . . land transport retained a primordial role. This fact is indisputable for the trade between the Low Countries and Italy: although they had Antwerp, a first-rate maritime outlet and what’s more a world center, the Low Countries undertook the overwhelming majority of their commercial relations with Italy by land route. [Shipments by sea] occurred between the two countries, but their importance remained minimal.188

The situation seemed to be different by the seventeenth century. What had happened? Very simple. It seems that, although there was technological advance in both land and sea transport at this time, the rate of improvement was different, such that it came to be the case that “for very heavy and bulky goods water transport was the most economical under all circumstances [with the exception of live cattle].”189 The development of the Dutch fluyt referred to previously was probably of central importance in this regard. Conversely, in the sixteenth century, land remained a cheaper, more efficient, and safer means of transport for men, for light and expensive manufactures, and for precious metals.190

What is the significance of this for France? We presented the politics of the “first” sixteenth century as revolving around the attempts by Spain and France to transform the European world-economy into a world-empire. Despite the Atlantic explorations, these attempts were primarily oriented to land routes. Indeed, this may be a supplementary reason for their failure. The politics of the “second” sixteenth century was oriented to the creation of coherent nation-states obtaining politico—commercial advantages within the framework of a nonimperial world-economy. These attempts were primarily oriented to the maximum utilization of sea routes (external and internal). The natural geographic advantages of the northern Netherlands and England served them well here. The politics of France was a tension, often inexplicit, between those who were land-oriented and those who were sea-oriented.191 The critical difference between France, on the one hand, and England and the United Provinces, on the other, was that in the latter cases, to be sea-oriented and to wish to construct a strong polity and national economy were compatible options, whereas for France, because of its geography, these options were somewhat contradictory.

The first strong hint we have of this comes in the religious controversies and civil wars that racked France from the death of Francis II in 1560 to the truce enshrined in the Edict of Nantes in 1598.

Let us just look briefly at some of the class and geographic coordinates of the religious struggle. As long as France was primarily oriented to a struggle with the Hapsburg empire and counted on Lyon as their contestant for chief international trading center, religious toleration was possible.192 After Cateau-Cambrésis the international financial need for religious toleration disappeared. At the same time, the prosperity of Lyon declined, both because of its lessened importance as a financial center and because it was a major battleground of the Wars of Religion.193 The wars had brought together many disparate forces whose politics often became detached from their original motivations, as usually happens in the heat of extended political turmoil. Nonetheless, it should be possible for us to disentangle some of the strands. Hurstfield’s account of the origins of the civil wars in the New Cambridge Modern History runs as follows:

In France during this period the tension between monarchy and nobility flared up into a long and bloody struggle. It is, of course, well known that the French civil wars derived from powerful secular no less than religious causes. . . . The Calvinist movement in France had first, in the mid-sixteenth century, taken hold upon the merchant and the artisan; and its early martyrs—as in Marian England—came from the humblest stock. But by the time the civil wars began in 1562 the nobility, both high and provincial, had joined in and indeed taken over control. Contemporaries in France recognized the importance of distinguishing between the wings of the movement describing the one group as “Huguenots of religion,” and the other group as “Huguenots of state.” These latter stood for much more than religious dissent. They represented the long-standing hostility of the ruling families of provincial France to the power of Paris; to the crown and its ally, the Catholic church; and above all, to the Guises, the family most closely identified with that church and most bitterly opposed to the aims and interests of those provincial and often decaying noble houses. (The traditional use of the expression “provincial nobility” in part confuses the issue: most of its members would be regarded in England as belonging not to the nobility but to knightly and gentry families.)194

Hurstfield thus draws a picture of France close to that Trevor-Roper draws of England, of the Country versus the Court. And such a picture evokes all the unclarity that the English analogy does—were nobility (or gentry) “rising” or “declining?” In whose interests did the state in practice operate?

Let us put next to Hurstfield the picture as drawn by Koenigsberger in the same volume of the Cambridge History:

After the bankruptcy of 1557, Henry II squeezed another seven million livres in extraordinary taxes out of his unfortunate subjects. Nevertheless, the limit had been reached. There were peasant revolts in Normandy and Languedoc. The nobles, though exempt from taxation, had spent their incomes and mortgaged or sold their estates in the king’s service on the heavy ransoms demanded of noble prisoners after the disaster of St. Quentin (1557). . . .

In the towns, the small artisans and shopkeepers had been hit by heavy taxation and by the periodic collapse of rural purchasing power that followed bad harvests such as that of 1557. The journeymen saw food prices rising faster than wages and found that the growing influence and rigidity of the guilds blocked the advance of the majority to mastership. . . .

After 1559 the nobility joined the movement in large numbers, especially in the south. . . .

It was only [in 1573] that Huguenot organization reached its full development, in a broad arc stretching from Dauphiné through Provence and Languedoc to Béarn and Guienne. As in the Netherlands, the successful revolution tended to become localised, both by an alliance with provincial feeling against an interfering central government and by the hopes of the military situation.195

In reaction to this, Catholic local unions arose, also emphasizing their regional identity and claims to (traditional) provincial autonomy. Paris localists sided with the Catholic League.196 Furthermore, both camps were linked to outside forces, the Huguenots to England and the Protestant princes of Germany, the Catholics to Rome and the rulers of Spain and Savoy. “Thus, all revolutionary movements of the period were linked to powers and interests outside their national boundaries.”197

King Henry III, attempting to arbitrate the struggle, in the end dealt blows to and alienated both camps. In a sense, it was a brilliant tactical coup to seek to de-escalate the conflict by recognizing the Protestant pretender, Henry of Navarre (Henry IV), as his successor, provided he became a Catholic. It was then that Henry IV issued his famous: “Paris vaut une messe.” Note that it was Paris, not France, and it was Navarre who said it.

Henry IV switched camps which was easy enough since his motivation was different from that of his mass base. The nobility then by and large withdrew from the conflict and became Catholicized. This defused the religious content of the conflict and hence weakened the strength of the political opposition.198 It also frustrated the lower classes who turned to angry but relatively ineffectual jacqueries.199 In the end, the Huguenots were more strongly regionally based than ever. They had lost their congregations in the north and east and remained strong in the south.200

One of the underlying tensions clearly was regional. On the one hand, Normandy and Brittany were pulling away; on the other hand, so was the whole of the south whose separatism had remained latent since its defeat in the thirteenth century. The reasons for the pulls were in both cases that the creation of a strong national economy served to limit rather than expand profit opportunities for the local notables: the bourgeoisie of the maritime west who sought to use their money to break into the Atlantic–Baltic trade rather than construct a state bureaucracy and army; the landed capitalists of the south who sought a free international market. The partisans of the center were not anticapitalist in orientation. They had essentially a middle-range orientation: first strengthen the state and commercial possibilities will follow.

As in England, the monarchy was caught in the contradiction of wishing to create a national economy based on new forces that could compete successfully in the new world-economy and being the apex of a system of status and privilege based on socially conservative forces. Wishing not to choose rashly, the king—in France as in England—felt more comfortable in his aristocratic penchant than in a role as the harbinger of the new. What was different however was that in England the nascent capitalist elements, both rural and urban, felt they stood to gain from a stronger national economy. France however had merchant elements who felt they were being sacrificed to a remote Paris, and capitalist agriculture in the south whose structure and hence needs were nearer to those of landowners in peripheral countries like Poland (who needed an open economy before all else) than to landowners in England within whose domains the new cottage industries were growing up. In England, there was a sense in which the king could count on his opponents to restrain themselves since his “national” stance was in their “short-run” interests. The king in France could not, and had to use sterner means to hold the country together: hence civil war in the second half of the sixteenth century, and bureaucratic centralism, which was to come in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The price however was heavy. The Wars of Religion would facilitate the rise of absolutism, to be sure. But as Mousnier adds: “Unlike in England, the development of trade, of industry and of the bourgeoisie was retarded (freiné).”201 Nor had the price been yet fully paid. The era of Louis XIII and Richelieu was to see a further cost exacted. In order, however, to assess this price, we must now shift back to the general situation of the world-economy.

The “long” sixteenth century was now drawing to an end. And, so say most historians, the evidence is that there was a crisis. Crisis or crises? For there was an economic recession in the 1590s, an even bigger one in the 1620s, and what some see as a coup de grâce around 1650. We shall not dwell too long on the debate of dates—whether the ideal cutting point for the story is 1622 or 1640 or 1650. Spooner indeed argues that one of the key phenomena to notice about this “culminating point and watershed” of the long sixteenth century was that the turning point “was spread over a fairly wide period of time.”202 We have chosen 1640 as the terminal date for a variety of reasons, and do not pledge even so not to transgress this boundary. The main point is nonetheless that, virtually without exception, historians accept the idea that there was some kind of critical turning-point somewhere around this time.203

Of what did it consist? First, a price reversal, the end of the price inflation which had sustained the economic expansion of the European world-economy. The price trend did not reverse itself all at once. It is crucial to the understanding of this period and to the subsequent development of the world-economy to see that, in general, the reversal occurred earlier in the south than in the north, earlier in the west than in the east, and earlier in areas on the sea than inland in the continent.204 There was a gap, and of not a few years.

Trouble began in Spain shortly after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Trade still had however its ups and downs. Chaunu’s data show 1608 as the highpoint of the Spanish Atlantic trade. Then a sort of plateau until 1622, which Chaunu attributes to the economically relieving qualities of temporary peace,205 followed by the definitive downturn. The military–political defeat of the Armada merely however punctured a balloon, stretched thin by the exhaustion of the resource base of Spanish prosperity. Spanish exploitation of the Americas had been of a particularly destructive variety, a sort of primitive hunting and gathering carried out by advanced technology.206 In the process, Spain exhausted the land and its men. Furthermore, Spain not only used up Indian labor; she used up, in other ways, as we have seen, her own labor.207

One very important consequence was the fall in bullion import. For example, bullion annually imported on the average into Seville from the Americas in the period 1641–1650 was 39% of that imported in the period 1591–1600 in the case of silver and only 8% in the case of gold. The output of bullion had fallen “victim to the relentless law of diminishing marginal returns and declining profits.”208 Since however trade did not suddenly diminish—indeed it was still expanding—devaluation was inevitable.

Here for the first time the existence of a single world-economy of uneven national development made a crucial difference. The countries of northwest Europe devalued far less than those of southern, central, and eastern Europe.209 These are of course bullion prices. René Baehrel has a very brilliant excursus in which he demonstrates that shifts in bullion prices bear no necessary relationship to shifts in prices and that men make their real economic decisions primarily in terms of the latter.210 It is significant, however, that he does this in a book devoted to discussing the economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A. D. Lublinskaya makes the point that what distinguishes the seventeenth from the sixteenth century is precisely the fact that, after 1615 for the first time, there is “an independent movement of prices, not dependent on the influx of gold and silver.”211 She asserts that this fact defines the end of the “price revolution.” Ruggiero Romano insists that there occurs a sudden aggravation of devaluation in the years 1619–1622: “What matters is the intensity of the phenomenon. . . .”212 There was such an abundance of money in 1619 that the interest fell to 1.2%, “the absolute minimum interest rate for the whole period 1522–1625.”213

From the general depression, only Holland and to some extent (to what extent we shall soon see) England escape.214 Indeed Romano argues that Holland not only escapes, but that plus or minus 1590–1670 are a period of Dutch agricultural expansion.215

Why should northwest Europe have been relatively so insulated against the winds of ill fortune? Chaunu has an explanation which is rather complex. In the sixteenth century, prices in northwest Europe rose less sharply than those in Spain because of the time lag in the arrival of bullion. Northwest Europe however always obtained part of its bullion in contraband. The proportion of contraband bullion rose as time went on. Hence the inflationary impact of the contraband bullion was rising in percentage of total impact just as Spanish prices were beginning to drop. “The prices of northern Europe, by a lesser receptivity to depressive factors, tend thus to come closer to the Spanish price-levels.”216 This seems a bit farfetched, since it depends for its plausibility on assuming that there was no significant decline in the absolute as opposed to relative supply of contraband bullion, which, it can be inferred from Spooner’s figures, was probably not the case.

Pierre Jeannin seems nearer the mark in analyzing the resistance of northwest Europe to depressive forces as deriving from advantages this region had within the world-economy.217 He cites geographic location (on the Atlantic at a crossroads between the breadbaskets and forests of the northeast and the countries in need of their exports); industrial aptitudes (rooted in the past, as Dutch and English textiles; or in economic potential released by the extension of the international economy, as Swedish iron). Furthermore, the very expansion of productive forces in the north meant a continued rise in population at the very moment of demographic decline in the Mediterranean region. Pierre Chaunu estimates that between 1620 and 1650 the population of the Empire went from 20 to 7 million, Italy declining by 2 million between 1600 and 1650. Relatively sheltered from the demographic decline were England and, this time, France.218

As a geopolitical phenomenon, this meant the end of the Spanish Atlantic and the establishment of a European Atlantic.219 The war whose resumption in 1624 marks in fact a crushing blow to the Spanish economy began with the Dutch attack on the Portuguese colony of Brazil, Portugal at the time belonging to the Spanish crown.220 In terms of the Asian trade, and especially pepper, between 1590 and 1600, the Dutch and English invaded what was hitherto a Portuguese–Spanish monopoly, which accounts for a collapse in spice prices.221 One can well understand how it was that the men of that era developed a mercantilist perspective that led them to feel that “the sum of prosperity in the world was constant, and the aim of commercial policy . . . was to secure for each individual nation the largest possible slice of the cake.”222

But it was not in fact constant. On the one hand, one could argue that the end of the sixteenth century meant for all of Europe “collapse of profit, the flight of rent, economic stagnation.”223 But one must be specific. Romano insists that the sixteenth century was “just like the 12th and 13th centuries, a century of large agricultural profits.”224It is the decline of the easy agricultural profits that is going to explain the increased role of large-scale capitalist agriculture based on ever more coerced and lowly-paid agricultural labor in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Romano’s comments are apt:

These vast phenomena, which Fernand Braudel has called on the one hand “faillite,” “trahison de la bourgeoisie,” and on the other hand “réaction seigneuriale,” do not seem to be, on closer inspection, two separate and distinct types, but only one: almost the very same people, or at least, the descendants of one family who betrayed their bourgeois origins (and above all their bourgeois functions), and entered the system of the réaction seigneuriale, a phenomenon which when dealing with the Italian case I have called “refeudalization.”225

But once again, as Romano observes, Holland and to a lesser extent England are exceptions.

We must not however get ahead of our story. It is crucial to understanding the subsequent era to look closely at how England and France coped with the closing convulsions of the “long” sixteenth century. The consolidation of the European world-economy which was to occur in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would center around the competition of England and France for primacy. But in a sense the crucial cards were dealt in the period 1600–1640.

When G. N. Clark seeks to explain the “remarkable” advance of industry in England in the “second” sixteenth century, he suggests that the root lay in international commerce. And when he analyzes England’s international commerce in this period, he finds three main contrasts between the end of the period and the beginning: (1) although England’s international trade expanded absolutely, it declined in relation to internal industry in providing for consumption needs; (2) although Amsterdam succeeded Antwerp as the pivot of the European world-economy, England’s relationship to the Netherlands shifted from one of dependence and complementarity to one of rivalry; (3) England’s external trade became far more diversified within Europe, and England began systematic trade with Russia, the Levant, the Indian Ocean area, and the Americas.226

Before the end of Elizabeth’s reign, however, these changes had not yet occurred to a noticeable degree. Nor did they develop in so smooth a fashion as Clark implies. For these changes upset the delicate social and political equilibrium that the Tudors had attempted with so much skill to create and laid bare the conflicting interests that were to tear the English political system apart. Let us take each of these changes in turn.

It is no doubt true that international trade declined as a proportion of the gross national product, and that this might be interpreted as a sign of England’s long-term economic health. But this misses the point that the very process of internal industrialization made England’s social structure more, not less, dependent on the vagaries of the world market. Barry Supple points out that, unlike in the period after the Industrial Revolution, fixed capital played a small role in the industrial economy and hence fluctuations in the national economy were not caused by excess capacity nor were they intensified by fluctuations of a capital goods industry. Fluctuations in credit also were a lesser factor than later. Hence the prosperity of the home market was largely a function of harvest fluctuations (induced by climate variations) and “overseas demand which was frequently the strategic determinant of alterations in internal activity.”227 And such alterations were politically critical precisely because of England’s industrial development:

Cloth production was sufficiently far advanced to have ceased, in the main, to be a by-employment for a predominantly agrarian population. Hence for the government and for the community at large the existence of the textile industry meant the perennial threat of an outbreak of distress and disorder among a landless, and even propertyless, class. The situation had helped produce the Elizabethan Poor Law and made generations of statesmen wary of encouraging industrial growth.228

What might England then do to assure economic, hence political, stability? One solution Supple indicates: It was to draw back still further. F. J. Fisher observes that “Bacon looked back on the reign of Elizabeth as a critical period during which England had been dangerously dependent on foreign grain. . . .”229 Over time, this is the path of deindustrialization which northern Italy took. Another solution might be to push outward and overcome the supply squeeze by obtaining additional sources of supply and the demand squeeze by securing new markets.230 This is the path on which the northern Netherlands was embarking. To try one or the other solution meant making critical options in terms of England’s internal social structure. These were precisely the decisions that the Tudors spent all their energy avoiding. The result was a halfway house. Lawrence Stone’s examination of the volume of Elizabethan overseas trade leads him to conclude that the “famous expansion of trade in the reign of Elizabeth appears to be a pious myth.”231

If then we turn to degree to which England had liberated itself from Dutch economic tutelage by 1600, we find to be sure that the process of growing control by the English commercial bourgeoisie over English internal trade had been more or less completed by such acts as abolishing Hanseatic privileges first in 1552 and definitively in 1598.232 This was to the advantage of closed monopolies like the Merchant Adventurers.233 The interest of such groups lay largely in the uneasy equilibrium of the halfway house.

When, under the Stuarts, other merchants obtained the legal rights to make a more forthright challenge of the Dutch role in industrial finishing of textiles—the so-called Alderman Cockayne’s Project234—they failed. For Supple this failure demonstrated that

the international division of labour by which the Dutch dyed and dressed England’s semi-manufactured textiles was not an arbitrary phenomenon sustained by artificial survivals of company regulation. On the contrary, by the early seventeenth century it reflected economic realities against which England might tilt only at her peril.235

Hence, Elizabethan constraint in hesitating to expand outwardly may not have been so unwise.236 The Tudors had been thereby postponing internal social conflict until they had strengthened the political autonomy of the state machinery from outsiders, so that England would have the strength to tolerate the explosive but inevitable readjustment of political and social forces.

Finally, to what extent was the Elizabethan era one of diversification overseas? To be sure, it was at this time that the English ships returned to the Baltic and began to make voyages to the Mediterranean, to Russia, to Africa. And this was the time of the constitution of the first chartered companies. But we must be careful not to exaggerate. On the one hand, eastern Europe was still more closely linked with the economies of France and Spain (via Amsterdam) than with England237 and, on the other hand, it is the trade with France and the rebel Dutch provinces that is still fundamental to England in the period of Elizabeth.238

The realities of the English commercial scene are both cause and consequence of the policies of the Tudor monarchs. They were straddling a fence.239 The international economic crisis of the period 1590–1640 made this fence-straddling increasingly impossible, and hence the political stability of the monarchy and the monopolies it sheltered increasingly tenuous. Stability is not always everyone’s summum bonum. To some it was “irksome.”240 By 1604, the chafing of those merchants who sought to pursue the possibilities of commercial expansion found expression in various free trade bills pushed in Parliament. The immediate impetus was probably the peace with Spain which had opened changed trade perspectives as peace is wont to do, both by eliminating certain obstructions to trade, and by dint of the unemployment, so to speak, of the previously flourishing band of privateers.241

For the next decade, things looked bright for the English cloth industry which reached an export peak in 1614. But it was to be, in Supple’s phrase, “a transitory Indian summer.”242 It was followed by an “unrivalled” economic depression, which “ensured a permanent restriction of the overseas market for old draperies.”243 What caused this sudden downfall? Actually it was not so sudden, but rather as R. W. K. Hinton says, “a sudden worsening of a situation that had been deteriorating for some time.”244 What happened was that the devaluation of continental currencies by reference to England created highly unfavorable terms of trade which “priced the [English] cloth out of [their north and central European] markets.”245 This led to an outflow of bullion which was made worse by the need for foreign grain as a result of bad harvests in 1621 and 1622.246 The dramatic loss of bullion “was of great significance in an unsophisticated economy dependent on steady supplies of a secure metallic coinage.”247

J. D. Gould argues that England now paid the price of having “wasted” her international price advantage of 1550–1600 “in a scramble for privileges.” Consequently, now that the price advantage had been reversed, “England was left saddled with a rigid, ologopolistic, high-cost economy, ill-fitted to cope with a competitor [the Dutch] who throve on low costs, adaptability, and up-to-dateness.”248 The Dutch were now able to break into England’s own import trade,249 and textile exports to Germany and eastern Europe were hit by both Dutch and local competition.250

Both the merchants and the government were alarmed. The merchants reacted by demanding more protection, such as limiting the rights of non-English to import the goods into England, increased mandatory use of English shipping, the freedom to re-export Baltic grain which both enlarge the cloth trade and bring in bullion for the grain.251The government had quite a different perspective. First, the agricultural interests well represented in parliament were pushing for a ban on the import of corn, because of their need for protection against low prices.252 Second, the government concentrated on how to reconcile its needs “to alleviate local destitution, in order to prevent riots and tumults, and to revive commerce, in order to maintain economic stability and power.”253 To do the first, the government was tempted by the solution of governments of twentieth-century underdeveloped countries, the creation of employment. But, like today, such a solution is not easy.254 Rather than provide new protection, the government moved in the direction of loosening monopolies, to see if that would revive commerce and industry.255 But they could not go very far in this direction because the arrangement of privileged companies had too many advantages for the government. It secured the loyalty of a quasi-public bureaucracy which performed consular and customs functions, was a source of income via loans and taxation, and even substituted for the navy as a protective device in international commerce.256 “The patents and monopolies, the cloaking of selfish aims beneath verbose platitudes, were an integral part of the fabric of Stuart government.”257 If the government moved at all in the direction of antimonopolism, it was in fact only under the pressure of parliament, “vociferously representative of the outports and the lesser gentry.”258

Nor was England in luck as far as the gods were involved. The trade revival of 1623–1624 was set back by the plague of 1625 as well as by a poor harvest. The resumption of war with Spain, so harmful to Spain as we have seen, was no aid to England. The renewed need for grain led to another balance of payments crisis.259 Thus the traditional heart of English industry came to find itself “in the middle of an extended history of decline, painful adaptation, and widespread redundancy.”260 Crown interference did not solve the problem; it only aggravated the situation by creating a “crisis of mercantile confidence.”261

It was apparently not so easy for the English textile industry to cut costs. It was partly that the merchants were too closely imbricated in the state-machinery for the Crown to be able to force the industrialists to run a leaner shop.262 Also it must have been that the workers were relatively strong enough to withstand the introduction of significant wage cuts.263 The only solution, therefore, other than de-industrialization, was to circumvent the vested interests by the development of new industries. It was here in fact that England found its commercial salvation, in the so-called “new draperies,”264 which saw a remarkable rise as an export item precisely as the “old draperies” fell.265

There was a second solution to the dilemma of high prices: England developed a re-export trade. And it was this aspect of England’s commercial policy that stimulated the two most striking new features of the seventeenth century: the interest in colonial expansion, and the Anglo–Dutch rivalry. Both trends would crystallize after the Civil War but both were in evidence before it.266

New products required new markets. And it was Spain and the Mediterranean area in general that provided the most important new arena of English export,267 an area relatively free from the constrictions of the old English monopolies.268 The Spanish market in particular was attractive because of “internal inflation and colonial purchases.”269 England was beginning to eat off the carrion of the Spanish Empire. And as Italian industry declined, English exports partially filled the gap.270

As for colonization, we must remember that for a long time it was not necessary for England (France, or Holland) to engage in direct colonial enterprises. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, no doubt as a sign in part of weariness with imperial expansion, included the extraordinary clause which read: “West of the prime meridian and south of the Tropic of Cancer . . . violence done by either party to the other side shall not be regarded as in contravention of the treaties.”271 This concept, popularly known as “No peace beyond the line,” was reaffirmed at Vervins in 1598. It allowed, to be sure, the freedom to create new settlements, but also the freedom to plunder. And for fifty-odd years plunder was far more profitable than settlement would have been.272 Colonization, by contrast, seemed a dubious venture. It was assumed that the Spaniards had already gotten the good spots and “even the mercurial Elizabethans—and most certainly the queen herself—were aware of the hopelessness of prospecting at random over a vast continent.”273 Besides, England had Ireland as an outlet for homestead emigrants.274

These attitudes changed in the period after 1600. England consolidated her links with Scotland by the union of the two thrones in the person of James I. The colonization of Ireland took on a new seriousness, both for England and for Scotland.275 Ireland became integrated into the British division of labor. Her woods were used up to supply England with timber.276 She would become in the course of the next 100 years the site of a major iron industry controlled by Englishmen.277 And England would begin to create settlements in North America. Parry ascribes the change to the decline of Spanish prestige, and to the search for raw materials—cheap food, especially fish,278 and strategic supplies (timber, hemp and pitch) whose Baltic sources might be cut off in wartime. In addition, they would be a new market for manufactures and a place to export paupers.279 All true no doubt but, except for the consideration of Spain’s military strength, all would have been largely true a century earlier. Is not the new scramble for colonies by the three powers of northwest Europe merely a sign of their competitiveness? Was it not largely a pre-emptive colonization, especially in the wake of Spain’s decline?

The impact of these international economic convulsions forced a political crisis in England. I think Perez Zagorin has caught quite accurately the nature of the conflict:

[T]he genesis of the English revolution is not to be found in a class struggle—for the leading sections of both sides in the Civil War included many who were drawn from the same economic class, whose development had been steadily proceeding during the preceding century. It is to be found, rather, in a conflict within this class among England’s governing groups.280

And this internecine warfare within the governing class was not merely forced by the exigencies of international economic arena but made possible by prior elimination of two great dangers to the English political system, as Stone asserts: “The ring [had been] cleared of interference by the poor or by the Spaniard. . . .”281

There are two somewhat silly arguments relating to the onset of the Civil War. One is whether it was or was not inevitable. To Tawney’s assertion that “the fall of the monarchy was hastened by the measures taken by the Tudors to preserve it,”282 Trevor-Roper asserts that the main problem was a wasteful administration, which could have been reformed by Parliament. “For, of course, monarchy itself was no obstacle. It is absurd to say that such a policy was impossible without revolution.”283

We shall see shortly the consequences for France of the administrative reforms Trevor-Roper retrospectively recommends to the Long Parliament. But “inevitability” is a pointless game to play. If one element had been different, of course the results would have been different. But if one, why not two, three? The reality is that the Civil War did in fact occur and the task of the student is to explain it.

The other silly question is whether or not the “real” issues dividing England were not beliefs about liberty and religion. Mr. Hexter insists that these were the issues and affects some surprise that so many of his partners and antagonists in the controversy agree (Hinton, Stone, Pocock, Hill, Trevor-Roper speaking for himself and Tawney.) He welcomes them to his “Whiggish” company.284 J. G. A. Pocock at least takes umbrage, insisting he is a “post-Marxist” rather than a “neo-Whig.”285 But it is a silly argument because of course the protagonists of the Civil War expressed many of their divisions in ideological terms revolving around political freedom and religious perspectives. And of course they meant it. And of course the outcome of the Civil War was to have consequences for the normative system governing English political life.

To dissect the ideological coordinates of a political and social conflict is however never meaningful unless one can root that analysis in the social relations prevailing at the time and thereby comprehend the implication of ideological demands for these relationships. The debate is really about the totality of these relationships, about whether they should remain as they are or change in some specific direction.

The English Civil War was a complex conflict, as all major social upheavals are. One major thrust of it was that between those who emphasized the role of the monarchy, who hoped thereby to hold on to a slipping system of privilege and deference,286 whose fears of social revolution outweighed other considerations, who were somewhat paralyzed before the forced choices of the world-economy, and those, on the other hand, who gave primacy to the continued commercialization of agriculture, who welcomed some change in social patterns, who saw little virtue in the extravagance of the Court, who were oriented to maximizing England’s advantage in the world-economy.

Let us turn to France, where things were the same, but most importantly were not the same. Davis Bitton says of the years 1560–1640 that they were “a crucial phase of the transition from the French nobility of the late Middle Ages to the French nobility of the Old Regime.”287 So were they in England. But what a different transition was made in France. In the great debate between Boris Porchnev and Roland Mousnier—which we shall get to in a moment—Porchnev argues in essence that what happened in France in this era was that “the venality of offices brought about not the ‘embourgeoisement’ of power, but the ‘feudalization’ of the bourgeoisie.”288 To which Mousnier replies: “There was no such thing as a ‘feudal-absolutist’ order. To the extent that there was a tendency toward absolutism, it was involved in a struggle against the feudal order. What remained of the feudal order tended to paralyze absolutism.”289 Although I think the debate is partially semantic, and that for the rest Porchnev had the better of the argument, what might be said is that Mousnier is closer to the truth if one applies his reasoning to explain England and that of Porchnev to explain France. That is to say, schematically and in an oversimplified fashion, one might assert that in England the aristocracy lost in the short run and gained in the long by transforming itself into bourgeois capitalists, while in France the aristocracy gained in the short run and lost in the long run by forcing the bourgeoisie to abandon its proper function and thus to some extent contribute to economic stagnation. Why this should have been so, we are arguing, is essentially a function of their differing relationship to the world-economy.

But first let us review once again to what extent this is a fair description of the French social system. For reasons we have already outlined, the French state in 1600 was stronger than the English state. This meant that the bureaucracy was “for the bourgeoisie the main means of rising in the social hierarchy,”290 much more so than in England. In turn this venality led to a greater direct interest of the bourgeoisie in the French monarchy.291 This leads Mousnier to argue that there was a relatively open class situation in France at this time.292 But Mousnier himself shows how difficult was the ascent. He points out that for a roturier to make it up to the status of matre des requêtesrequired normally four generations.293 I think in fact Porchnev catches the class situation with more subtlety. It is less that there is very much interclass mobility than that there exist strata of people for whom the sentiments of class attachment vary according to the concrete situation. The most significant such stratum is the bureaucracy of bourgeois origin, the noblesse de robe:

At the moment that a worker, who has retained his links to his village, loses his job in the factory, he becomes once again a peasant. In the same fashion, when one sought to take back from the officiers their property rights and privileges, that is to say deprive them of their status as privileged nobility, they automatically fell back virtually into their original status as bourgeois. . . . [The] officiers negatively affected by [the decisions of] Mazarin felt themselves to be bourgeois and, at the beginning of the Fronde, their attitude was the same as that of the whole of the bourgeois class.294

It is precisely because of the relative ease of acquiring formal aristocratic status in France (true in England under the Stuarts, too, but less so) that there arose in the sixteenth century that “ambiguity of noble status” of which the French aristocracy complained and which led to their “intense, obsessive concern with honorific privileges,”295 and also to the very great emphasis on strict rules of behavior and the theory of dérogeance.296

The traditional description of the absolute monarchy as being in alliance with the bourgeoisie against the nobility always ran up against the fact that the so-called classic regime of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV was also the prime example of the reassertion of the seigniorial privilege. Marc Bloch solved this dilemma by arguing that the seigniorial reassertion was the more fundamental of the two antipathetic phenomena, and that without the absolute monarchy, this tendency would have had full force. In other words, one could say that “the victory of the absolute monarchy limited the extent of the ‘feudal reaction.’ ”297

A. D. Lublinskaya essentially agrees,298 drawing this picture of France in the “second” sixteenth century. After 1559, the role of foreign bankers declined in France, both because of the decline of Italy and Germany and the religious wars. These wars however prevented the French commercial bourgeoisie from filling the gap. In order to obtain funds, therefore, the French government created a system of tax farming. Eventually the tax farmers became fused into the state’s financial machinery. “Tax farming was a profitable business. It was on this fact that the government founded its system of forced loans from the chief tax-farmers, turning the latter into its creditors.”299 Hence the intimate links between “financiers” and the state, so much so that their own survival depended on the strength of the state, provided that the “strong government which they wanted . . . remained strongly in need of credit from them.”300 Although it was perhaps not true that the monarchy imposed no taxes on the nobility,301 it was the very dependence on the venal officiers that made this most difficult since, Lublinskaya asserts, tax reform necessarily would have involved the cash outlay of repurchasing the offices, which was far too expensive.302 Anything which increased state indebtedness reinforced the position of these officiers. In particular, “war was very profitable to the financiers.”303

That some of the reasoning here is very ad hoc can be seen by quick reference to England where “fiscal feudalism” or revenue farming by syndicates of businessmen became common practices under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts,304 with no religious wars to explain it and no large-scale growth of a venal bureaucracy subsequent upon it. Furthermore, to the extent that tax profiteering was constrained, this was the result of administrative reform whose immediate motivation was the exigencies of war finance and the need to reduce significantly the cut of the fiscal intermediaries between state and taxpayer.305

No matter, however. There was a more fundamental attack on this line of reasoning launched by Boris Porchnev. Porchnev unleashes a full-scale assault on the argument that “venality was a form of the political supremacy of the bourgeois,”306 a theory he attributes to Pagès and then Mousnier. Porchnev wishes to argue that seventeenth century France was “in its main features, still a feudal society characterized by the predominance of feudal relations of production and feudal forms of economy.”307

Porchnev argues that capitalist forms exist but that the bourgeoisie “participated in the political power of the feudal state only to the degree that it did not act as a class of capitalist society.”308 The bourgeoisie sought titles for reasons of vanity and cupidity and also adopted an aristocratic life style. In addition, they were induced to abandon true bourgeois economic activities because of the fiscal advantages of using money as credit capital rather than as industrial or agricultural capital.309

Hence when peasant uprisings occurred in the period 1623–1648 (to which we shall come in a moment), the bourgeoisie vacillated. On the one hand, they too were unhappy about high taxes. On the other hand, they identified with the interests of the aristocracy and feared the plebeians. Some revolted; some fled the country; and others came to terms with the state by purchasing offices and putting their money into credit operations.310

If one asks how come that England and Holland produced a nobility that was “embourgeoisée” but France did not, the answer is that “in France, feudalism had a perfection and a classical vitality which prevent any embourgeoisement of the nobility.”311 It was not that France was more backward, but that “the qualitative particularities of the French economy made impossible a grouping of classes that would have permitted a bourgeois semi-revolution on the English model.”312 The lucidity of Porchnev’s arguments flounders at this crucial comparison where he has to fall back on unexplained perfections, undefined particularities, and the conceptual vagueness of “semi-revolution.”

It is just at this point in the argument that Corrado Vivanti offers a helping hand to Porchnev. Agreeing completely with Porchnev’s rejection of Mousnier’s arguments that the Fronde was an isolated element in French history, he suggests that Porchnev has not followed the logic of his own argument to the end, but instead gets bogged down in denouncing the bourgeoisie for betraying the revolution. They could do no other, for they “did not yet form a social group sufficiently strong and autonomous” to do otherwise.313 Vivanti poses this hypothesis in the form of a question:

To what extent can the “feudal reaction” or “restoration” and the very “betrayal of the bourgeoisie” in the 17th century be said to lay the base—in a different fashion from what one may find elsewhere, in analogous conditions of crisis—for that capital accumulation which the [French] economy of the 16th century had not succeeded in creating?314

That is to say, given “those objective obstacles which finally precluded the Third Estate from engaging in autonomous action in the political and social arenas,”315 was this path not second best? If it did not permit France the degree of development which England would come to have, it nonetheless prevented France from descending to the role of a semiperipheral state like Spain and Italy. Even southern France, which went down the road of sharecropping, did not regress economically to the extent of neighboring Mediterranean areas. Le Roy Ladurie insists that one can say of southern France (and Catalonia), unlike northern Italy and Castile, that the state of the economy “is becalmed and restrained, is modified and grows heavy, but it does not yet turn around. . . . The drama of Languedoc is not the fall, but the inelasticity, the rigidity of agricultural production; not regression [décroissance] but absence of marked growth.”316 It would happen to southern France eventually, but 50 years later than to other areas.

Lucien Goldmann makes a parallel critique of the theory of the alliance of the absolute monarchy and the bourgeoisie. He argues that, on the contrary, the basic alliance was between the monarchy and the nobility, with, however, the monarchy safeguarding its flank by creating a new bourgeoisie. Then, however, Goldmann argues, precisely to keep this bourgeoisie bourgeois and not pseudo-aristocratic, the monarchy introduced the reform of the paulette in the early seventeenth century.317 The paulette by instituting in effect a tax on offices kept the bureaucracy venal and hence kept the bourgeoisie bourgeois,318 and thus also dependent on the monarchy.319

Goldmann’s explanation centers on distinguishing between two varieties of state officials: an older one made up of notables and the noblesse de robe, the officiers and members of the Cours souverains and parlements, and a newer one, who were the commissaires and Conseillers d’Etat, and who served as intendants and matres de requêtes. Goldmann sees the latter as displacing the former “in the first half of the seventeenth century, and especially from 1620 to 1650.”320 Goldmann analyzes the impetus behind this new system as an attempt of the monarchy “to regain ground after the coming to power of Henry IV in 1598,”321 ground that had been lost during the religious wars.

Since the officiers had been a great aid to the monarchy during the religious wars and hence expected that their power and importance would grow not fall, they were upset both by the paulette322 and the rise of the commissaires. The tension between officiers and commissaires grew, reaching a high point around 1637–1638. This Goldmann links up with the rise of Jansenism among the officiers, an ideology that “insisted upon the essential vanity of the world and upon the fact that salvation could be found only in solitude and withdrawal.”323

While Goldmann’s portrait of the monarchy is close to that of Porchnev, his portrait of the bourgeoisie is closer to that of Mousnier, who avows “feeling an extreme repugnance to considering the 17th century as a ‘feudal’ epoch, since it was rather one in which ‘commercial capitalism’ has profoundly penetrated the country”324—the whole of the country and not just the towns. The monopolies were not a break in the rise of capitalism but “a condition of its development at this stage.”325 But Mousnier is most outraged at the assimilation of the officiers to nobility. He reacts with the flair of a true aristocrat.

An officier of some importance is judicially a noble. A noble, but not a gentleman nor a seignior (un féodal). Porchnev never makes the distinction. Would we call the Venetian nobility, those great merchants, a feudal corps? In France, the public insisted on the distinctions. An officier, ennobled by his office, remained a bourgeois. People deplored the fact that the true nobility, that of gentlemen, was without employ by the state and public office was the prerogative of those who were called ironically the “gentlemen of pen and ink.” Bourgeois, that is what one still was, whether officier or commissaire, even seated on the fleur de lys and wearing the purple of office, even rigged out in a title of knight, even baron, even president of Parliament or member of the Royal Council.326

Mousnier concludes by denying that either he or Pagès had ever suggested that the bourgeoisie controlled the monarchy. “It is the monarchy which subjected all the classes in reconstructing the state. But in this work it was aided by the bourgeoisie. . . .”327

It is important to notice that in this debate a number of issues have gotten scrambled together. One is the nature of the system. Another is the nature of the relations between the classes. A third is the role of the monarchy. We have already explained in a previous chapter why we believe the term “feudalism” with respect to agricultural production at this time (market-oriented cash crops, even if based on coerced or semicoerced labor) is confusing and unhelpful to analysis. To insist that France is primarily involved in a capitalist world-economy at this time does not necessarily entail arguing, however, that the bourgeoise wielded substantial political power. Obviously it did not. In eastern Europe, the aristocrats were capitalist farmers and the indigenous commercial bourgeoisie was on its way to extinction. Nor does it speak necessarily to the particular role the monarchy played in France as opposed to other states in this world-economy. J. H. M. Salmon observes that “like the debate over the gentry and aristocracy in England, the controversy [concerning early seventeenth-century France] is concerned with the character of early modern society and government.”328 Precisely!

Mousnier is probably more right than Porchnev in seeing the monarchy as an institution which, far from clearly dominating the situation, was struggling to assert its political preeminence, even in France. But Porchnev is more right than Mousnier in seeing that one of the developments that most clearly distinguishes France from England is the comparative political success in France of the old aristocracy whose short-run interests were not conducive to the long-run ability of France maximally to profit from the division of labor in the world-economy.

Let us now turn to the closing “crisis” of the “long” sixteenth century and see exactly what impact this had on the French political arena. We start with the fact that the fall of prices in France in the period 1600–1610 was in fact economically favorable to France and its bourgeoisie.329 Even Porchnev admits that it would be too much to argue that industrial capitalists were of no significance in France. He accepts the fact that “the evolution of capitalism continued on its path, but at a slower pace.”330

The problem was in large part in foreign trade, the importance of which to national economies we argued previously when discussing England’s reaction to the commercial crisis. Although France between 1600–1610 had somewhat recouped the losses occasioned by the disruptions of the religious wars, another great decline set in after 1610, this time largely the consequence of Dutch and to some extent English competition. And what made the Dutch and even the English able to outprice the French in this period was that, at a moment of a contracting world market, the accumulated edge of industrial capital and technology of the prior 50–60 years was critical:

France lagged behind her competitors in respect of all the important indices. The division of labour in French manufactories was at a lower level; the shortage of skilled workers did not allow the entrepreneurs to establish an adequate hierarchy of wage-levels. State subsidies, which were absolutely necessary at that time, were casual and sporadic, and small in amount, while accumulation of money was not on a large enough scale; France was excluded from that direct plundering of colonies which nourished primitive accumulation in Holland and Spain, and industry in England as well.

The consequences of this was that French industrial products were comparatively expensive. As a result, the French commercial and industrial bourgeoisie was unable to compete successfully with the Dutch and the English in its own home market, and to some extent also in foreign markets. It was obliged to use its capital in other ways. . . . French shipbuilding and navigation, and therefore also French trans-oceanic trade, was behind English and Dutch, technically and economically. . . .

For all these reasons, the French bourgeoisie was very interested indeed in increased protection, and the government of France endeavored to meet its needs in this respect.331

This then fitted France into the world-economy at a middle layer. While the French were able to exploit to some extent Spain and Germany, the English and Dutch could exploit the French market as well as that of Spain.332

The relative strength of the French state machinery compared to England and the United Provinces did not necessarily serve it well in regard to this dilemma. Had the French monarchs of the time been unreservedly committed to the development of industry and the interests of the bourgeoisie, no doubt France might have overtaken the after all not so great lead that the other two countries had. But the French monarchs were ambivalent. Their intrusion was not always conducive to maximizing national commercial interest in the world-economy. Indeed, Nef attributes one of England’s secrets of success not to a difference of royal intent but to the fact that the French were more efficient in their interference with bourgeois enterprise.333 Similarly, Nef argues, England’s comparative isolation from European wars in this period meant less emphasis on the “habits of obedience of the royal authority”334 than in France. The ability of the French monarch to tax combined with the ability of the nobility to be exempted from taxation meant a heavier burden not only on the populace, but on the bourgeoisie as well.

Finally, we must not miss the link between achieved position in the world-economy as of say 1610 and future position. The French difficulties in competing with the Dutch and the English in their home markets encouraged them to concentrate in the production of those goods in which they had some historical edge and a relatively larger home market than other European countries—luxury products, especially silks.335 But the cheaper goods for the wider markets would in the long run provide a surer industrial base.

The Thirty Years’ War placed great pressures on the French. As the military expenses rose and the armies expanded, so did the size of the state bureaucracy and, as cause and consequence, the degree of taxation, both directly by the state and de facto in addition by means of the depredations of the troops in the countryside.336 The impact of war on the price of Baltic grain and hence on food prices in general we have already mentioned. This was all considerably aggravated by the great epidemics that raged between 1628 and 1633, and especially in 1630–1631. Whether poor harvests led to the spread of disease, or disease led to a grain shortage, the two occurred together and hit France badly.337

Given this analysis, it is easy to see why peasant uprisings should have been so extensive in France at this time. Not only were state exactions of the peasantry rising but the nobility was having difficulty getting its rents and dues from the peasants because of their economic squeeze.338 No doubt this meant in many instances that the nobles and the peasants of an area were simultaneously upset with the monarchy, and that to some extent “the sense of loyalty and mutual obligation [between seignior and peasant] did persist”339 in early seventeenth-century France, but it would be an error to push this idea too far, as some are inclined to do. For surely it is not only present-day analysts but peasants of the time who could perceive that, after the Wars of Religion, the seignior, as Salmon puts it, “whether of the old noblesse or the new, was less a companion in peasant misery than its partial cause.”340 It was after all precisely the political doing of the nobility that accounts for the slow progress of economic development.341 At the same time, the partial industrialization of France ensured that such discontent spread from rural to urban areas, the two being linked by the growing numbers of persons, a sort of lumpenproletariat without fixed employment, who moved back and forth and whose margin of existence was too small to endure much aggravation of crisis.342

Robert Mandrou contributes to this debate by asking us to consider the popular uprisings of 1623–1648 in the context of the ongoing history of France which saw such uprisings both earlier and later. He reminds us that the various taxes “must be seen as the signs of a greatly deteriorated economic situation and not simply as the only or most immediate cause of the revolts.”343 Mandrou then urges us back to a most fruitful route. He asks us to be:

attentive to localizations, to cartography: the West, Normandy, Guyenne, the Center (Marché, Berry, Bourbonnais), this is the area most often affected, the most stimulated by these chain-reactions of troubles. May we see in this a consequence of the greater participation of these provinces that face the break in the rise of the “long 16th-century”: the ebb of the years 1620–1680 leading to a more evident depression here than in the areas that are more continental, more undeveloped (fruste)? But are not these zones of rural and urban agitation of the 17th century also the provinces in which the religious wars were the most ardent in the preceding century?344

This is indeed a precious clue and one that fits very well into our overall hypothesis, furthermore one on which both Mousnier and Porchnev agree. Mousnier says:

The study of each uprising cannot be separated from research on the local economies and social structures. Why did the rural uprisings occur principally in the West, the Center, and the Southwest? Would it not be possible to classify towns according to the degree of development of capitalism therein and to examine whether it does not correlate with some constants in the revolts?345

Porchnev notes that the uprisings of 1623–1648 were preceded by three series in the sixteenth century. The first two were those of 1520–1550, linked to the Reformation, and those of 1570–1590, during which the popular movements “placed their hopes in the Catholic League of which they declared themselves to be partisans.” Then, from 1590–1600, there was a last wave which had now become non-religious in format.346 Indeed, Porchnev argues further that the popular disgust with the religious wars led to the desanctification of authority, which in turn accounts for the great need felt to reassert state authority in the early seventeenth century.347

This argument of Porchnev raises once again some questions about the meaning of religious movements and affiliations in early modern Europe, their links to the assertion of national entities and conversely to religious centrifugal forces. We have earlier spoken of Koenigsberger’s treatment of the Huguenots as a French national revolutionary movement.348 It is certainly within the realm of reasonable speculation that the Huguenots might have consolidated in the south and west of France in a manner parallel to the consolidation of the Calvinists in the north of the Netherlands, which could have resulted in a partition as in the Netherlands. This was certainly a fear at the time.349Within the framework of such a perspective, it is not surprising that the Huguenots at one point called upon Catholic Spain for aid. The liquidation of the Huguenots was then part and parcel of the drive to maintain the integrity of France as a state,350 and Mousnier points out the role that the venality of office played after 1620 in buying off the Calvinist cadres.351

That the regionalism was more fundamental than the religious schism is clearly indicated in the way in which southern France, the Occitania of old, switched from being a Huguenot stronghold. Henri Espieux speaks of the Reformation finding its strongholds “both in Occitania and in the fringes of the ancient Roman Gaul of the 6th century, while Catholicism is essentially northern. . . .”352 But, he notes, when Henry of Navarre becomes king “to the detriment of the Occitan cause,” then “by a singular turnabout, Occitania became sympathetic to the League (ligeuse)—the only way remaining to it to pursue its difference. . . .”353 Finally, Espieux argues, the Occitans embraced Jansenism in the same “non-conformist spirit,” a cause that “contributed to the maintenance of their rebellious attitude (humeur frondeuse).”354 Espieux sees this rebelliousness as Occitania’s method of resisting the integration into France imposed upon it in the sixteenth century, achieved and reinforced by the fiscal burdens it was made to bear, and made more unpalatable still by the economic decline of Marseilles and Bordeaux in the “second” sixteenth century, not only with regard to Paris, but even in relation to Barcelona and Genoa—once again layers within layers.355

Porchnev’s description of the uprising in Normandy in 1639 records similar themes. As he traces the story, peasants in Normandy had a heavier seigniorial burden in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than elsewhere in France. Because of this fact as well as the destructions of the Hundred Years’ War, peasants fled, thus creating an acute labor shortage, which led to the relatively rapid decline of perpetual leases in favor of term leases more favorable to the peasantry. The price revolution, and France’s emerging role in the world-economy, led to a setback for the peasant proprietors—higher rents, smaller plots, the partial return to a natural economy, in short, a brake on capitalist development.356 At a time when the English yeoman farmer was benefiting from the enclosures of arable land, his Norman equivalent was losing out. As for the bourgeoisie, Porchnev points to the division between its two segments: the magistrates, tied to local interests, and hence playing with rebellion; and the financiers, firmly tied to the state and hence bent on sustaining the local aristocracy.357 The rebellion can be seen as discontent with the politics of the center which was depriving the Norman peasant proprietor (and local bourgeois) of the benefits of fuller participation in the new world-economy.

In the west as in Occitania, the monarchy was being viewed as pursuing a French “national” perspective that was economically regressive. In the name of the traditional, the outer provinces were demanding more not less economic progress.358 It was no accident then that the Normandy uprising of 1639 was followed by uprisings in Provence, Bretagne, Languedoc, and Poitou.359 Nor was it an accident that the immediate background of the Normandy uprising was the monarch’s unwillingness to relieve the tax burden of Normandy in the wake of the economic difficulties following upon the epidemic of 1632–1633 because: “His Majesty being burdened by too heavy expenses cannot relieve his people as he would wish.”360 This he could not do, because the money was being spent on creating the French national entity.

Suppose—great historical game—that France had been a differently shaped geographical entity, covering only the north and west of France with Rouen as the capital. Suppose Occitania had been a separate state from the thirteenth century on. Might not such a truncated France have found that the national interests of the central state machinery and the commercial interests of the bourgeoisie were somewhat more in harmony one with the other? Might not such a France, seemingly weaker, have been able to do what England did—respond to the emerging world-economy by creating an industrial base? Perhaps.

But such a France did not exist. The France that did exist was, as we said, neither fish nor fowl, and rent by religio-regional strife. The pressure toward a one-religion state was as powerful in sixteenth-century Europe as the pressure toward a one-party state in twentieth-century Africa, and for the same reason, the need to combat centrifugal forces. But the price was heavy. For France the price was coming to terms with the aristocracy largely on its terms—the “réaction seigneuriale,” the “féodalisation” of the bourgeoisie. There was to be no civil war in the seventeenth century, only the Fronde. The bourgeois revolution would come in 1789, at another epoch, for another purpose, and in some ways too late. In the seventeenth century, the French administrative bourgeoisie, the noblesse de robe, was constrained to remember that it could not afford the luxury of pursuing its narrow interests too far since, if it did, the integrity of the state and hence the economic foundation of this administrative bourgeoisie was threatened.

The differing roles (roles, not intents) of the monarchies in England and France was in the end a critical factor. One way to look at this is to define the political struggle as one in which the monarchies of the era were trying to erode the privileges of all non-state groups and to observe, as Cooper does, that by and large they succeeded better against the towns (and hence segments of the bourgeoisie) than against the landed classes.361 Braudel speaks of the towns being “held in check” or “disciplined” by the monarchies.362 In this view, the landed classes were seeking to use the state to aid them to stay out in front in the swift currents of economic expansion. In this perspective, the Frondeurs, though they lost, won, whereas the English aristocracy, though there was a Restoration, lost. In the end, Braudel argues, English primacy in the world would be that of London, “which constructed England to its requirements (à sa guise) after the peaceful revolution of 1688.”363

In the vacillation between the demands of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, the monarchies of both England and France moved ever closer to the demands of the aristocracy. The difference was that in England the interests of the commercial bourgeoisie were linked with a strong center, whereas in France to some extent they were linked to the national periphery. This difference was a consequence of geographical considerations within the framework of the European world-economy.

One consequence was that, in order to hold an intrinsically more rambunctious bourgeoisie in check, the French monarchy had both to strengthen itself and to buy them off by the venality of office, which in turn diverted them from industrial investment. In England, the aristocracy to survive had to learn the ways of and partially fuse with the bourgeoisie. In France, the pressure was on the bourgeoisie to survive. In France and England, the center won out against the periphery. But in England, this meant furthering the cause of the national bourgeoisie, whereas in France it was a setback for the bourgeoisie.

The English Civil War occurred at the last possible moment. The resurgence of the landed classes in the next 150 years was to be great everywhere, even in England. But there at least the bourgeoisie had won droit de cité. And the landed classes meant less the aristocracy and more the gentry who were in the end bons bourgeois. In France, the bourgeoisie was far too weak in the seventeenth century to produce a Cromwell. It would not be until 1789 that they would find their interests consonant with those of the state as state. By then, the world-economy had evolved and it would be too late for France to achieve primacy within it.

THE EUROPEAN WORLD-ECONOMY: PERIPHERY VERSUS EXTERNAL ARENA

The boundaries of an entity defined in political terms are relatively easy to ascertain. If we want to know the territory covered by the Chinese empire in the year 1600, we need to consult some archives which tell us of the juridical claims as of that date. To be sure, there will always be marginal regions, where sovereignty is contested by two rival state structures, or one in which the imperial authority can scarcely be perceived as existing de facto which may lead us to consider the claim to be juridical fiction. But the criteria are fairly straightforward: The combination of asserted authority with some measure (however gross) of effective authority (however thin) will generally give us what we need.

But what shall we say of the boundaries of a social system not defined in political terms, of a “world-economy” such as we have been dealing with here. By saying that in the sixteenth century there was a European world-economy, we indicate that the boundaries are less than the earth as a whole. But how much less? We cannot simply include in it any part of the world with which “Europe” traded. In 1600 Portugal traded with the central African kingdom of Monomotapa as well as with Japan. Yet it would be prima facie hard to argue that either Monomotapa or Japan were part of the European world-economy at that time. And yet we argue that Brazil (or at least areas of the coast of Brazil) and the Azores were part of the European world-economy. There was a transit trade across Russia between western Europe and Persia.1 Yet we argue that Persia was certainly outside this world-economy and so even was Russia. Russia outside, but Poland inside. Hungary inside, but the Ottoman Empire outside. On what basis are these distinctions determined?

It is not a question of the simple volume of trade or its composition. Celso Furtado says:

Apart from gold and silver, little that could be produced in the Americas during the first century of colonization was marketable in Europe. Unlike the East Indies, which produced articles of great value per unit of weight, such as spices, silks and muslins, the Americas produced nothing that could become the basis of a lucrative trade.2

Nonetheless, the Americas inside, and the East Indies outside, or at least so we contend.

We shall denote this distinction as one between the periphery of a world-economy and its external arena. The periphery of a world-economy is that geographical sector of it wherein production is primarily of lower-ranking goods (that is, goods whose labor is less well rewarded) but which is an integral part of the overall system of the division of labor, because the commodities involved are essential for daily use. The external arena of a world-economy consists of those other world-systems with which a given world-economy has some kind of trade relationship, based primarily on the exchange of preciosities, what was sometimes called the “rich trades.” We shall try to demonstrate this distinction primarily by analyzing the differences between Russia and various parts of eastern Europe and those between the Indian Ocean area and Hispanic America in the sixteenth century.

At first glance, both Russia and eastern Europe seem to have great similarities. They both seem to experience the rise of large domains engaged in cash-crop production and based on coerced labor. Indeed, as Braudel points out, this occurs also in the Ottoman Empire at this time.3 In both areas, the coercion of the peasants is primarily the result of actions by the state authorities. In both areas, the landlord class seems to emerge from this era greatly strengthened and the bourgeoisie weakened. Furthermore, both areas seem to be affected by the Price Revolution and to conform to its general parameters with reasonable faithfulness. Yet a closer look will reveal some differences.4

We shall treat the differences between Russia’s relations with western Europe and eastern Europe’s relations with western Europe as coming under three principal headings: (a) a difference in the nature of the trade, (b) a difference in the strength and role of the state machinery, and (c) as a consequence of the two prior points, a difference in the strength and role of the indigenous urban bourgeoisie.

The great prerevolutionary Russian historian, V. O. Kluchevsky, constructed his history of Russia on the assumption that “the principal fundamental factor in Russian history has been migration or colonisation, and . . . all other factors have been more or less inseparably connected therewith.”5 To the extent that this is true, it is a phenomenon of the sixteenth century when, just as the rest of Europe, Russia “entered upon a new era of economic growth. . . .”6 It is commonly asserted that the conquest of the Volga khanate of Kazan in 1552 followed by that of Astrakhan in 1556 was a turning point.7 In the following century Russia colonized the forest-steppe zone to the south, along the Don to the Azov Sea and along the Volga to the Caspian. It also pushed a large part of the way across Siberia. At that same time, the Ukrainians (then under Polish rule) advanced along the Dnieper, all of which would become part of Russia in 1654. The expansion southward and eastward by Russia was an important event in modern world history and it is important to note that the direction of the expansion is a function of the strength of the regimes in the regions surrounding Russia. As George Vernadsky reminds us, it was at “the very time when the Russians were checked and thrown back in the west [that] they started advancing in the east toward Siberia.”8

Hence, in the case of Russia, Western traders were faced with a country far more immense than Poland or Bohemia or Mecklenburg, and one that was itself clearly an imperial structure. Whereas the external trade of Poland was almost exclusively with western Europe, Russia traded both westward and eastward and, as Jerome Blum says, the “Eastern trade was probably of more importance to Russia than her commerce with the West.”9

It is not only that the trade eastward was larger in volume but that it was of such a nature and volume that it tended to create a world-economy, or as some writers put it, working in a slightly different theoretical framework, a national market. A. G. Mankov points to the crucial role of grain production, a concept with which we are already familiar: “One cannot speak of the effective development of commercial relations within feudal society before the time when cereals become merchandise—which testifies to a certain level of differentiation between agriculture and crafts (métiers).”10 Let us therefore examine the phenomenon of expanding wheat production, known both in Poland and in Russia in the 15th and 16th centuries. Poland, as we have already argued, is by the sixteenth century integrated into the European world-economy, on whose markets wheat is sold, and for whose markets wheat is grown. As Braudel and Spooner put it: “The dominating feature of the end of the [sixteenth] century is clearly the fact that Polish wheat is now absorbed into the general pool of European prices.”11 This was crucial both for Poland and for the rest of Europe, for which Poland had become at that time “the greatest exporter of cereals.”12

The rise of a Polish wheat-exporting economy meant, as we have seen, the rise of large domains with coerced cash-crop labor. It meant also the rise of the political strength of the nobility, whose economic interest in removing obstacles to trade matched that of western European merchants. Their combined efforts maintained Poland as an open economy.13 How dependent the prosperity of the Polish nobility was on this open trade was clearly illustrated by the economic difficulties provoked by the blockade of the Vistula by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden between 1626–1629, who sought thereby to “cut the nerve” of Poland.14 The fact that “cereal export via the Baltic ports had rapidly taken on [in Poland] proportions such that it dominated the entire economic structure of the country”15 is used by Jerzy Topolski then to explain the devastating effects of seventeenth-century regression in Poland, effects that varied in different parts of Poland according to the degree to which the local economy was export-oriented.16

It may be objected that the value of the wheat involved is rather small as a proportion of the total product of the European world-economy, but Boris Porchnev replies that “it is not the quantities of merchandise exported (not too great in point of fact) which ought to be the object of the attention of scholars, but rather the rate of profit which was shared between the merchant middlemen and the landed proprietors exploiting the labor of the serfs.”17 And Stanislaw Hoszowski points out that in the overall inflation of the sixteenth century, not only did Polish prices start to rise even before those of western and central Europe, before the impact of American treasure on prices,18 but also, within Poland, it was the “landed proprietors who obtain(ed) the maximum benefit of [the rise in prices] while peasants and the townsmen only los(t) by it.”19 The counterpart of this economic squeeze of the peasants was the frequency of peasant revolts.20

Let us now compare the role of wheat production in Russia at this time. Let us start with Mankov’s assertion about sixteenth-century Russia: “one can speak at this time only of an internal cereals market.”21 That is, although almost no wheat is exported, “there existed already, in the sixteenth-century, a link between local markets, sometimes very far apart from each other.”22 Thus capitalist agriculture emerged at this time, and in similar forms, both in Poland (and other countries of eastern Europe) on the one hand, and Russia on the other. But whereas the former produced for an expanding west European market, in Russia, “seigniors produced for the expanding domestic market.”23Indeed, in the sixteenth century, “special permission was required of the tsar to ship [grain] out of the country.”24 The specialization of the sixteenth-century European world-economy was being replicated in smaller form within the Russian world-economy. The core of the Russian world-economy was exporting manufactured goods (metal wares, textile products, leather goods, weapons, and armor) in return for luxury goods, cotton cloth, horses, and sheep.25 In addition, they reexported Western manufactured goods eastward, “though this activity was apparently not of much significance in the sixteenth century.”26 Russia was feeling the happy effects of being the focal point of an economic community: “Furs, salts, hides, and other wares streamed into the older regions from the colonies, creating new wealth and stimulating commercial and industrial activity.”27

But what about Russian trade with the West? Did it not parallel Polish trade? We must be careful not to read back into the sixteenth century phenomena of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by which time a separate Russian world-economy had indeed disappeared and Russia had become one more peripheral area of the European world-economy.28

It is true, on first glance, that what was happening in the sixteenth century was that “in her trade with the West, Russia exchanged raw materials and semi-finished goods for manufactured wares.”29 Russia exported various raw materials used for naval stores (flax, hemp, grease, wax) plus furs and imported luxury articles and metal goods (including munitions). But in neither direction does it seem the trade was critical. For western Europe, not until the seventeenth century could it be said that Russia was important as a “reservoir of grain and forest products.”30 T. S. Willan sees Russia’s chief value for England, the western country with which Russia traded most in the sixteenth century, “as a source of essential materials for the navy.” But he adds:

It is a little difficult to say whether the trade was equally valuable for the Russians. Their equivalent for the naval stores exported to England was perhaps the arms and munitions which the company was alleged to be sending to Russia, especially in the “fifties” and the “sixties.”31

“Especially in the ‘fifties’ and the ‘sixties’ ”—we shall return to that observation. A. Attman suggests that the crucial import was not the metal goods but rather silver in form of bullion and of art objects. He offers as verification of this hypothesis the extraordinary accumulation of silver in the churches, monasteries and palaces as well as important finds of metal bars.32 If one remembers that a major export was that of furs, “then the livery of dignity and wealth,”33 one of the so-called “rich trades,” we can consider the major portion of Russian–Western trade in the sixteenth century to be an exchange of preciosities, a method of consuming surplus rather than producing it, hence dispensable at moments of contraction, and consequently not central to the functioning of the economic system. This is not to say it was unimportant. Middlemen profited by it. No doubt the state obtained some customs revenue from it. No doubt also it reinforced the system of social prestige accumulation. The point however is that if a blockade had occured equivalent to that of Gustavus Adolphus of the Vistula in 1626, the impact on Russia’s internal economy would have been far less than on Poland’s.

We have been using Poland as our example of a country in the periphery of the European world-economy (as opposed to being in the external arena). But Poland was in many ways an extreme case. Would there be any difference if we looked at other countries in the periphery? The answer is there would be some but it does not seem crucial.

For example, in both Bohemia and Hungary, the “forced labor” of the “serfs” was not always exclusively in the form of the corveé but sometimes in the form of “forced wage labor.”34 Josef Válka notes that this intermediate form of labor service in Bohemia is linked with the fact that agricultural production is diversified and directed to an internal market.35 Josef Petráň similarly points out in various of the smaller territories of central Europe (Bohemia, Silesia, Saxony, Austria), there was less of a tendency for the growth of large estates and he suggests that we are witnessing the birth of specialization not only between agriculture and industry but within agriculture itself, where however “naturally the specialization could not be complete.”36 Malowist points out that agricultural specialization in Denmark parallels that of eastern Europe, for, during the sixteenth century, the Danish and Holstein nobility “developed an economy based on the labour of serfs, as well as on the trade of agricultural and dairy products, and also on the product of their serfs, whose chances of engaging in commerce were limited to a minimum.”37 But he says that this social process of aristocratic appropriation “which can be seen most clearly in Poland, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg and Livonia, showed itself more feebly in Denmark.”38

What we can say about these examples is that they show the texture of the European division of labor to be getting more complex already in the sixteenth century. However, the meaning of a low export ratio for Bohemia, a small country surrounded by the rest of the European world-economy and a similar low ratio for Russia, a large empire on the edge of the European world-economy, must have been quite different. Bohemia’s freedom of political action was ultimately far smaller and hence her economic dependence ultimately far greater. This is a case where the analyst must look at absolutes for minima and proportions for maxima.39 Bohemia had less give in case of a trade cutoff than Russia. Therefore its economic activities had to be developed more consciously within the framework of the needs of the European world-economy.

Let us now return to the remark of Willan about the 1550s and 1560s. It should be obvious from our exposition thus far that the line between periphery and external arena is fluid, both in the sense that it is hard for an analyst to fix it and in the sense that it shifts easily. One way to look at the history of Russia in this period is to see it as reacting to a tentative attempt of Europe to include it within the world-economy. This attempt failed then because Europe’s technology and economy was not yet sufficiently strong. Eventually, in a later era, it would succeed. Robert Reynolds states this process somewhat ethnocentrically:

As far as we can tell, it was the English who opened a gateway and detonated Russian expansion. . . . England’s opening of the [northern] route [in 1553] gave Russia a tremendous market for furs, which stimulated the Cossacks on the frontier and the Stroganovs with their capital and managerial talent to push as fast as possible to the eastward and the northward. Each year they took up new sections for the fur trade, exactly as the French and English furtraders, and then the Americans, pushed farther and farther to the west in North America. With the great market for fur, the possibility was opened to buy fine textiles, metal goods, and other things from western Europe.40

How did this English thrust into the Russian world fit in with the latter’s internal political developments? It is to this picture we must now turn, to see how Russia reacted to “bringing it into Europe” and how this reaction further differentiated Russia from eastern Europe. Malowist notes that the grain grown in central Russia was sold in the north and northeast of European Russia and in Siberia.41 Thus the development of Russian wheat production “had facilitated the colonization and conquest” of its own very rich territories of the north and east which in turn “furnished immense riches, first of all for the treasure of the Czars, and later, for the merchants.”42

To appreciate the role of the Russian state, we should recapitulate what we argued in the previous chapter about the role of the state in the core states of western Europe, proceed to look at the role of the state in the peripheral states of eastern Europe, and then compare both with the role of the state in Russia. We presented the absolute monarchy as a structure in which the king and his entourage aspired to political primacy with the direct assistance of a patrimonial and venal bureaucracy and mercenary standing armies. On the one hand, the king sought the assistance of favored segments of the urban commercial bourgeoisie who supplied him with money and some political counterweight to the centrifugal tendencies of the old nobility. On the other hand, the king was the pinnacle of the system of traditional social status and was ultimately the protector of the nobility against the corrosive effects of the developing capitalist system.43

In terms therefore of the two social strata, the old nobility and the commercial urban bourgeoisie, the absolute monarchy was for each a lesser evil, and its strength grew on the basis of their lack of alternatives. For it served them both well by creating the possibility of enabling the country as an entity to get a disproportionate share of the surplus product of the entire European world-economy. In the sixteenth century, we can speak at most of state “fiscalism” or “precocious mercantilism.” From about 1650 on, the Western states engaged in a full-scale mercantilist policy designed to strengthen their relative position in the world-economy even further.

While the sixteenth century was a period of the rise of state power in western Europe, it was an era of decline for state power in eastern Europe, both cause and consequence of the latter’s economic position. This is a further instance of the cumulative impact of social changes. As the landed aristocracy of Poland grew stronger through its profitable role in international trade and the indigenous bourgeoisie grew weak, the tax base of the state frittered away which meant that the king could not afford to maintain an adequate army.44 The magnates then needed to assure their own protection, but this in turn made for the possibility of private wars.45 Some of these private armies equalled in size that of the Crown.46 The king became an elected king, and the central legislature, the Seym, began to turn over much of its authority to local diets.

From this point on, disintegration of the state machinery proceeded apace. Janusz Tazbir shows how one step led to the next:

From 1613 decisions concerning taxation were, as a rule, transferred to the local diets. This decentralization of the fiscal system led to a situation in which some districts had to pay bigger taxes than others. The chaos was further deepened when the local diets were entrusted with the voting of taxes even for the defense of the State (1640). All this was bound to result in a decline of the revenues of the treasury which, in turn, rendered payments to the army virtually impossible.

The soldiers, who [were] owed arrears of pay, organized military leagues or confederations which ravaged the country constituting dangerous centres of political ferment.47

In western Europe, royal property grew at the expense of church property, even in Catholic Spain, but not in Poland. During the first impact of the Reformation some parochial Church lands were confiscated by Protestant gentry, but even then the bulk of major Church property was untouched. Then the Counter-Reformation triumphed for reasons we have already elucidated. However because of the very weakness of the State, royal property declined.48

Similar processes were occurring elsewhere in eastern Europe. Most people today associate the state of Prussia with two phenomena: the strong state and a strong Junker class. The sixteenth century precisely saw the rise of a strong Junker class in the areas that would later constitute Prussia. But it was also a century in which the state grew weaker, not stronger.

For one thing, the system of estates based on tiny cottage holdings and corvee49 which grew up in east Elbia at this time and was called Gutsherrschaft, replacing the older feudal form called Gutswirtschaft, differed from the older form most markedly, as the very name would indicate, in the internal system of authority. In the new system, as Friedrich Lütge puts it, “the estate [was] something like a small political unit within the State: its inhabitants [were] only indirectly subjects of the territorial prince.”50 Second, as in Poland, the Hohenzollerns were using their crown estates and even the former church lands51 as security for loans, a process which steadily undermined their strength. These measures, taken in extremis by the Crown, were extremely beneficial to the Junker class.52

This process of decline of princely power in Germany continued throughout the sixteenth century and reached a low point in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years’ War, a peace which A. J. P. Taylor argues was “not the cause of German decline and weakness, but rather the result. . . .” Although peace was “imposed” by foreign powers, without their intervention matters would have been still worse. “The only alternative in 1648 was not less foreign interference but more—the continuance of the war until most of Germany was actually partitioned between Sweden, France, and the Habsburgs.”53

The position of Sweden is worth brief attention, as the evolution of Sweden’s state machinery approached the model of western Europe rather than that of the periphery, although it was economically very underdeveloped at this time. It was strong, not because its commerce and industry was strong, although iron production grew steadily beginning in 1540;54 it was paradoxically rather that its agriculture was weak, and its aristocrats wished to take hold of the profits of other lands for want of being able to create them on their own. Or, so at least, Malowist argues:

[I]t would be worth our while to go over certain aspects of Swedish domination of the Baltic. In fact, the beginnings of Swedish expansion, modest at first, are also to be found in the 15th century. Furthermore, Sweden in the 15th and 16th centuries was economically a very backward country, not only by comparison with western Europe, but even by comparison with east Germany or Poland. . . . Thus it should be noted that there was nothing in the situation of the Swedish merchants which can explain Sweden’s aggression against its neighbors, since these merchants made infinitesimal profit out of Sweden’s conquests and even, on occasion, sought to oppose the policy of conquest, considering it to be rather a source of ever-increasing taxation.

On the contrary, the group which strongly supported expansion was the aristocracy, the nobility, unable to increase its income, rather small at that time, at the expense of a peasantry that was strong and well-organized. And it was precisely to the great lords and the nobility that the conquests and the administration of conquered territories brought important sources of new revenue.55

And if we ask why the peasantry was so strong, may it not be precisely the fact that Sweden at that time was endowed with “an agriculture which could barely supply its own needs,” and hence its only real source of immediate wealth was to be “something of a parasite living on the weakness of her neighbours, a consequence of the enormous growth in the power of the nobility.”56

Sweden as a mild deviant case thus illustrates the process well. As a peripheral state with a weak bourgeoisie, it was an arena in which the political power of the aristocracy grew with the economic expansion of the sixteenth century. But the growth of wheat was hindered by the climatic downturn of the time which affected negatively in particular the Scandinavian countries.57 The nobility hence needed conquest and for that they needed a strong, not a weak, state. Once they had the strong state, they would be able in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to use mercantilism as a lever of industrial advance, and hence be spared the fate of Poland.

We are now ready to look at Russia. One key piece of evidence for the hypothesis that Russia was not part of the European world-economy is precisely the growth of the absolute monarchy in Russia in a manner that bears substantial parallels to developments in western Europe and is strikingly different from eastern Europe.

What are the facts? The rise of coerced cash-crop labor in sixteenth-century Russia was the product of state intervention in the economy, directly linked to the creation of military benefices called pomestia, used to reward supporters of the tsar. In a sense, there is some parallel here to the encomiendas in Hispanic America. Unlike in Hispanic America, however, the system of coerced labor could not be as suddenly introduced because land first had to be expropriated from the old nobility (the boyars) and the monasteries. Nor was there any equivalent to the cacique as an intermediary, except insofar as the Russian Orthodox priest might be considered to play an analogous role in some areas. Rather, legislative enforcement of “serfdom” came at the end of a process in which the “refeudalization” had been set in motion by a process of growing peasant debt. V. O. Kluchevsky describes how this worked:

[T]he landlord’s loan gave rise to relations wherein the seigniorial peasant had to choose between a definite term of insolvent peasanthood and an indefinite term of slavery [that is, working off the debt in the form of personal labor]. Yet this restriction was not [a] police attachment to the place of domicile . . . but a mere industrial dependence, through debt, upon an individual (i.e. upon the landowner) under the general civil law of the country. Thus the close of the sixteenth century saw the peasant’s right of removal expire of itself, and without any abrogation by law. . . .

[The] peasant, when bargaining with the landowner for a plot and a loan, of himself, and in perpetuity, renounced (through his tenancy-contract) the right of ever, or by any means whatsoever, terminating the obligations which by that contract he assumed.58

Voluntary enserfment, however, became insufficient in Russia when the military successes of Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the sixteenth century led to the incorporation of large vacant lands in the southeast of what is today European Russia. To keep the peasant population from running away to these new lands, which meant for the holders of pomestia losing their manpower and thereby for the government its taxpayers, “restrictions on peasant liberty to move were introduced.”59 As Alexander Gerschenkron remarks, “the process of enserfment is almost inconceivable without the power of the state. How else could it be achieved in a country so open towards the vast empty space in the south and the east as was the great Russian plain?”60 The active role of the state machinery was hence very closely linked with the fact that Russia was involved in a conquest operation.

So of course was Spain. But Spain, because of the bullion, the Italian creditors, and the Hapsburg links, was and remained intimately linked with the European world-economy. Russia sought to create its own world-economy. Nonetheless the original process of Russian state creation had some parallels to that of Spain. Spain was created as the result of a reconquista of its territory by a Christian crusade against Moslem conquerers from North Africa. Russia was created as a process of overthrowing the “Tartar yoke,” of reconquering its territory by a Christian crusade against Moslem (or Islamized) invaders from Central Asia. Muscovy’s role paralleled that of Castile and the élan of a common struggle greatly aided Muscovy’s triumph.61

As part of the price of getting the assistance of the traditional warrior class, the boyars, in this reconquest, the Muscovy tsars had to concede to them a claim to perpetual primacy according to a rank order early in historical time.62 This system, known as mestnichestvo, was one of those important traditions created by the process of change. In order to balance off this new strength of the aristocracy, Ivan III in the late fifteenth century created a new system of nonallodial fiefs called pomestia which were granted as a prebend in return for military service. The pomestia were created out of conquered frontier lands, from land confiscated from monasteries and errant boyars, and also from free peasant land.63

For lack of a Reformation, however, the Church was able to fight back and the existence of two kinds of land tenure, pomestia and the old manorial form known as votchina, gave the monasteries a great opening, as owners of votchini began to sell or donate their lands to the Church, especially after 1550, in return for life tenancies. There were religious justifications to be sure, but the key factor seems to be socio–political.64

It was the creation of new forms of tenure, the pomestia, not based on traditional reciprocal feudal obligations and often in frontier areas, combined with the fact of territorial expansion and hence the ready availability of land, that led the government down the path of making peasant work and residence obligations increasingly compulsory throughout the sixteenth century, beginning with the Code of 1497 and culminating in the Assembly Code of 1649.65 Without such restrictions, the peasants would have refused service. The political strength of the Church meant that the state was unable to stem this drain of land out of the taxation system. The only alternative was to increase the taxes on the remaining land, further squeezing the peasants.66 Since, in addition, peasants were offered more favorable terms on monastic lands, increased taxation served as a further impetus to peasant emigration.

This is the background to the question of “the fifties and the sixties.” The reign of Ivan IV (the Terrible) from 1547–1584 was a critical period in Russian history, for Ivan by a single-minded concentration on the objective of increasing state authority crystallized the form of internal social structure that Russia was to know for several centuries to come, while trying to establish the autonomy of the Russian state from the European world-economy. As we shall see, he was successful in the latter goal in the short run. Or to put it another way, he held off the wolves at the door long enough to make it certain that when Russia would later be absorbed into the world-economy, it came in as a semiperipheral state (like seventeenth and eighteenth century Spain) rather than as a peripheral state (like Poland).

Within Russia, the main weapon of the tsar in increasing state power was by the creation of a patrimonial state machinery (as in western Europe), linked in the case of Russia even more than in the case of France and England to the redistribution of land rights. One key reform was the abolition of the kormlenie system of regional administration, a system of tax-farming prebends, and replacing it with a bureaucracy paid partly in cash and partly by the grant of land.67 This reform not only created a central bureaucracy; it created at the same time its tax base.68 This was combined with the creation of local government institutions firmly in the hands of local gentry whose rise was favored by and part of the expansion of the tsar’s authority.69 It was at this time (1556) that military service was firmly linked to the holding of pomestia, thus giving the tsar an assurance of a relatively loyal standing army.70 The growing of pomestia and hence the growing complexity of supervising the operations of the system led to the creation of a central land office in Moscow for the pomestia.71

Meanwhile, externally Ivan IV was pursuing a policy of expansion not only toward the frontier lands in the south (at the time, the Crimea) but in the west toward the Baltic, the so-called Livonian war which dragged on for twenty-five years (1558–1583). Its object was to establish Russia as a Baltic power. It was a long and essentially inconclusive war.72 Had it been more conclusive, Russia might have been definitively drawn into the European world-system at that time.

One can understand why expansion westward tempted the tsar in his capacity as entrepreneur. Unlike the rulers of the various countries of eastern Europe, the tsar was in a position to profit directly from the expansion of trade because of the already stronger state machinery. In Poland it was the aristocracy which managed to gain a monopolistic control on the export trade; in Russia it was the tsar. He reserved these rights for himself and those he favored.73 Thus foreign trade was of interest to the tsar not only as a source of customs revenue but as an outlet for the very large amount of goods delivered to him in kind by his peasants. As the city served the medieval feudal lord, so Ivan IV sought to use all of Europe. Since the enterprise was vast, he found it convenient and profitable to enlist the cooperation of a commercial bourgeoisie (both foreign and indigenous) to handle the merchandise. When Polish aristocrats eliminated Polish commercial middlemen, they thereby escaped paying certain taxes on their goods. Thus the state lost revenue and the Polish bourgeoisie declined. When the landlord is the sovereign, any taxes dispensed or saved are simply bookkeeping transactions. Ergo, in Russia, there were no great financial advantages in making the individuals who supervised the transfer of goods members of the firm’s staff as opposed to independent entrepreneurs. Since they were the latter to start with, it was easier to let them remain that.

Hence, in Russia as in western Europe, the indigenous commercial bourgeoisie survived, and the state machinery was strengthened at the same time.74 Had Tsar Ivan IV succeeded, it is not certain that the Russian merchants would have fared quite as well as they anticipated. We shall never know, since when the Livonian war ended in stalemate externally, all that had really been accomplished was to bring to a head an internal social and economic crisis within Russia.

In the intrinsically unstable political arenas of the time, lack of continuous success by a state in the international area led to open clashes of interest at home which always bore the risk of disintegration of the state. To counteract this inner turbulence, Ivan IV resorted to strong police measures—the notorious Oprichnina for which he earned the title of “the Terrible.” It essentially involved the creation of a special palace guard, with the aid of which the tsar drastically purged his enemies, especially among the aristocracy. The weapons were two: death and confiscation of property, the latter enabling the tsar to redistribute land to those whose loyalty he hoped to keep.

It was politically successful in that it ended the fear of coup d’état. But, in the opinion of many, it backfired. Blum for example says:

The shock of the Oprichnina, together with the steady drain of the long and unsuccessful Livonian War . . . upon the country’s resources, deranged the social and economic structure of the realm. . . . The confiscation of the great landed complexes and their subdivisions into pomestia did violence to the agricultural system upon which the nation’s economy was based, setting back techniques, cutting down on production, and creating new tensions between seigniors and peasants.75

Blum also blames the heavy taxation combined with plagues, crop failure, and invasions for mass flights of peasants.76 A sharp and sudden inflation between 1575 and 1590 reflected these happenings and accentuated them. A. G. Mankov, on the basis of his study of Russian price movements in the sixteenth century, is willing to go so far as “to see in the crisis of the years 1580–1590 a generalized crisis of the national economy,”77 a view he asserts he shares with Soviet historical writing generally.78

Vernadsky argues in a similar vein that the Livonian War was a dreadful error, because Russia had no choice but to continue fighting on the Crimean front and hence by opting to fight in Livonia, Russia was opting for a two-front war, a policy with disastrous results.79 This seems to me to miss the crucial point that Russia may equally well have had no choice in Livonia. Vernadsky views the Livonian War as a failure, one in which the Russians were “lucky to be able to conclude an armistice with Sweden on August 5, 1583, even though the terms of it were highly unfavorable.”80 Perhaps, alternatively, we could think of it as a gigantic success. Russia was not pulled into the European world-economy. Her bourgeoisie and her monarch were spared, at least for the moment, the fate of their Polish counterparts.

This is not entirely fanciful. Boris Porchnev analyzes the grand pattern of international relations in Europe in the sixteenth century as one in which the opponents of the Hapsburg–Catholic objective of creating a single imperial system sought to encourage the creation of an eastern barrier of states—Sweden, Poland (later Poland-Lithuania), and the Ottoman Empire, “directed primarily against central Europe” but which also became “a barrier isolating, from the rest of Europe, Russia which was becoming ever stronger.”81

As Catholicism regained ground in Poland, however, the state of Poland-Lithuania became an ally of Spain. When, in the years following Ivan IV, the Russian state was rent by internal quarrels culminating in the so-called “Time of Troubles” (1610–1613), Poland, secretly supported by the Hapsburgs and, for separate motives, Sweden, engaged in an “attempt to dismember and subjugate Russia,”82 an attempt which failed. Furthermore, Vernadsky asserts there was also English interest at this time in establishing “a protectorship over all or part of Russia.”83 No doubt a major contributing factor to the failure was the existence of the sharp divisions of the Thirty Years’ War which constantly diverted Russia’s immediate enemies into more pressing tasks.

But Russia was coming ever nearer to absorption by Europe. Ivan IV’s “disastrous” policies delayed this. See Kluchevsky’s description of what was happening at the end of the “long” sixteenth century:

We see England and Holland helping [Tsar] Michael [1613–45] to become reconciled to his enemies, Poland and Sweden, for the reason that Muscovy was a valuable market for the former, and also a convenient road to the East—to Persia, and even to India. Again, we see the French King proposing to conclude an alliance with Michael, in order to meet the commercial interests of France in the East, where she was the rival both of England and of the Dutch. . . . The Empire of Tsar Michael was weaker than the Empire of Tsar Ivan [IV] and Theodor [1584–98], but far less isolated in Europe.84

Should not the “but” read “and therefore?” What Ivan had been seeking was the creation of a Russian Empire, not a piece of the European pie. That was to be the objective at a later time of Peter the Great.

The third great difference between Russia and eastern Europe was, as we have indicated, the direct consequence of the different structure and direction of commerce and the differing strengths of the state machinery. In Russia the cities and the indigenous bourgeoisie survived the “long” sixteenth century whereas in eastern Europe they very largely did not. And the land, although for the most part in the same large estate form as developed in eastern Europe, was in Russia in the hands of “new men,” sometimes called “gentry,” sometimes “lesser nobility” (we have already seen how little relevant this distinction is). These were men descended not from the old boyar class, but drawn from two groups, the dvoriane (a sort of court nobility) and the so-called “sons of boyars” who were in earlier epochs minor and outlying aristocrats. Those boyars who survived were largely “non-royal kinsmen of the tsar.”85 Thus, especially after the Time of Troubles, when Tsar Michael was able to carry through to their logical conclusion the policies of Ivan IV, a new class of magnates emerged.86 Eventually the new aristocracy took over all the formal appurtenances of the old. Mestnichestvo was abolished in 1682. The pomestia became de facto transferable by sale and inheritance, thus vitiating the distinction from the votchini.87 The Code of Laws of 1649 lessened considerably the distinction between the two forms of property88 and in 1731 the two forms would be legally merged.89

The rise of “new men” of course occurred everywhere—certainly in western Europe as we have seen, in many ways in eastern Europe as well. But Blum catches the essential point:

The Russian experience . . . differed in one important respect from the rest of Eastern Europe (and resembled that in the West). In the other Eastern lands the ascent of the lesser nobility was made possible by the decline in the powers of the sovereigns. In Russia the gentry owed its rise to the increase in the tsar’s power. It was the tail of the kite of the new absolutism.90

Finally, the contrast between eastern Europe and Russia is clear in the urban areas. Towns declined more in eastern Europe, the indigenous urban bourgeoisie declined more and native industry declined more. It was to be sure a relative matter. Russia in comparison to western Europe may be considered to have declined, relatively if not absolutely. And the decline was not total in eastern Europe. Yet the evidence seems to indicate a qualitative gap between eastern Europe and Russia.

The difference may have been less in the “first” sixteenth century.91 But as the landed proprietors engaged more and more in direct trade, they pursued openly “antiurban” activities in eastern Europe.92 With the rise of “kinglets” in Poland and Gutsherrschaft in east Elbia, the prince as landowner found little in his own immediate needs to make him sympathetic to townsmen.93 And as the towns declined the nobility grew still stronger.94 In Russia, Kluchevsky might speak of the “extraordinarily slow and painful growth of Russian towns and town industries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,”95 but at least it was growth not decline. Blum is more positive. He says:

The new importance of exchange in economic life [in the 16th century] was signalized by the reemergence of the city as a center of industry and commerce and as a market for farm goods and other wares produced in Russia and in foreign lands. Old towns were revivified, new ones established, and some rural settlements (as Novgorod land registers show) began to abandon agriculture for trade and industry.96

Along with the strength of the towns went the strength of the indigenous commercial bourgeoisie. The local aristocracies not only took over the export trade from the local merchants, “depress[ing] them into the role of agents”97 but shared the import trade with a foreign bourgeoisie.98 The indigenous bourgeoisie of one country was the foreign bourgeoisie of another. German merchants who could find no place in the economies of east Elbia were more than welcome in Poland, and were appropriately grateful politically.99 Indeed one might speculate as to whether the later recuperative power of the German bourgeoisie is not due to the fact that they survived in places like Poland and Slovenia. In Russia, on the contrary, though indigenous merchants ran into competition from large landholders, including the monasteries, and most especially the tsar himself, they nonetheless survived.100 One factor that helped was that the leading merchants, known as gosti, were allowed to play the double role of agents of the tsar, both commercial and fiscal, and merchants on their own account.101 Eventually then they could break away from their connections with the tsar, even became effective rivals to him. And in the end, “private enterprise did carry, in point of fact, a large share of the Russian expansion to the Pacific, though rarely supported by the state, but rather competitive with it.”102

As for the handicrafts industries, these seemed to decline everywhere, largely because the absence of tariff barriers allowed the ever more economical products of western European industry to outsell the local products.103 To the extent that local industries survived, as for example lace in Czechia, it was by serving as rural cottage industries for merchant houses outside their area.104 Still and all, this made some difference as it encouraged a diversification of agriculture and prepared the way for the later industrial development of Bohemia.105 In Russia, however, because it was its own world-economy, some of the accumulated capital went into industrial development.106 Even in the case of the most important export industry of the European world-economy, textiles, where one would have thought the Russian industry would have collapsed before the competition, the local industry retained most of the mass market and even a part of the quality market.107

We could make a similar analysis of why the Ottoman Empire was not part of the European world-economy.108 It is perhaps more to the point to turn our attention to the issue of the Portuguese Indian Ocean trade and how that differed from the Spanish Atlantic trade.

We must begin by dispensing with the myth of the role of the Turks in the rise of the Portuguese Indian Ocean trade. Far from the rise of the Ottoman Empire having led to a closure of the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe and hence having motivated Portugal’s search for the Cape route to Asia, it is now generally recognized both that Portugal’s overseas explorations predated the rise of the Ottomans and that the decline of the eastern Mediterranean spice trade predated Portugal’s entry into it. Indeed, A. H. Lybyer precisely attributes the Levant’s “decline” not to cultural resistances to modern technology, but to the structural diversion of trade and hence its noninclusion in the expanding European world-economy.

[The Turks] were not active agents in deliberately obstructing the routes. They did not by their notorious indifference and conservatism greatly, if at all on the whole, increase the difficulties of the oriental traffic. Nor did they make the discovery of new routes imperative. On the contrary, they lost by the discovery of a new and superior route. Had there been no way around Africa the whole story of the Levant since 1500 might have been very different. In the first place, the Mameluke sultans might have found in their uninterrupted trade sufficient financial support to enable them to resist successfully the attack of the Turks in 1516. But if the Turks had conquered Egypt while the full steam of oriental trade still ran through it, they must either have been deprived far sooner than was actually the case of the control of these routes, or they would have had to accomodate themselves to the great and increasing trade through their dominions. In the latter case they might have been forced into adopting modern ways, and into adding to their wonderful capacity for territorial unification a parallel scheme of organizing their trade. . . . The shifting of the trade-routes was done, not by the Turks, but in their despite and to their disadvantage.109

We have, in an earlier chapter, sought to explain the complex of forces within Portugal (and Spain) which led to the explorations of the fifteenth century and the overseas trade and empires of the sixteenth. It is striking when one reflects upon how the economic motivations of the Iberian expansion pointed heavily to Atlantic areas (the Western Hemisphere, though they did not know it, and West Africa) but not to Asia, even though the ideology of the explorations set great stock on the search for a route to the Indies. For example, when Vitorino Magalhães-Godinho makes a long list of the factors which dominated the early phase of Portuguese expansion (from the lack of gold, to the grain shortage, to land and slaves for sugar production, to the need for fishing areas), there is no mention of pepper or spices or drugs, of silks or porcelain or precious stones, in short, of all that the Portuguese would in fact import from Asia in the sixteenth century.110 But in the last quarter of the fifteenth century Portuguese interest in the spice trade awakened,111 and the search for Prester John became linked to this interest in the mind of King John II, “for [the] kingdom [of Prester John] would serve him as a way-station on the route to India, from whence Portuguese captains would bring back those riches heretofore distributed by Venice.”112 And the gold of West Africa plus the pepper and spices of Asia would in fact make up more than half the revenue of the Portuguese state by 1506 with the portion of the Asian trade growing thereafter, constituting thus the “underpinning of the imperial economy.”113

Vasco de Gama came, saw, and conquered far more and far faster than Julius Caesar. It is indeed extraordinary that, in a very few years, Portuguese ships comletely dominated the extensive trade of the Indian Ocean. What was the structure of this enterprise and how did it come to be so quickly established?

The answer to the latter is relatively easy: the technological superiority of the gunned ship that had been developed in Atlantic Europe in the two prior centuries, and to which a crucial technological innovation—the cutting of ports for guns in the actual hulls of the ships as opposed to the superstructure—had been achieved in 1501.114 Was this technological advantage enough to explain Portuguese success, or must we add thereto the belief that Portugal “went to Asia in a spirit of determination to succeed, which was stronger than the will of the Asiatic peoples to resist,” as George B. Sansom insists?115 Perhaps, although I tend to feel that cultural qualities, such as a spirit of collective psychology, are the product of very specific social structural conjunctures and do not long outlive their base.

In any case from about 1509 when the Portuguese defeated the Egyptian fleet at Diú, the Portuguese navy held “uncontested hegemony”116 in the Indian Ocean. In addition, during the sixteenth century (but only until 1570 for the Straits of Malacca) Portuguese traders were to be found not only there but in the China Sea, on the coasts of Africa east and west, in the south Atlantic, in Newfoundland, and of course in Europe. “Thus, present everywhere, a Portuguese economy.”117

The Portuguese system of control in Asia was basically very simple: a fleet of two squadrons (one to block the Red Sea and one to patrol the western coast of India), a Governor-General at Goa and seven fortresses on the periphery.118 For commercial purposes they maintained a series of trading posts (feitoria) and established three great intermediate markets: Malacca, Calicut, and Ormuz, and a subsidiary stop at Aden.119 The greatest of them was Malacca which became a giant store house and entrepôt, located there almost obligatorily because the monsoons forced the sailing ships coming from points east to unload there.120 This structure was evolved by Portugal’s leading figure on the scene, Affonso Albuquerque, who worked it out as a solution to the military dilemmas of the enterprise.121

By and large the trade was in the hands of the state,122 and when Portugal’s role began to wane in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the private sector pulled out of the reduced trade entirely because of the increased risk.123

In a few small areas, the Portuguese exercised direct sovereignty. In several areas, such as Cochin or Ceylon, the local ruler was under Portuguese “protection.” But in most places, the Portuguese made no pretense at political rule, instead “circulating and trading in conformity with the laws, usages, and customs of the states in which they found themselves.”124 As Donald F. Lach puts it, the Europeans at that time were “mainly interested in those countries where effective unity and central authority help(ed) to provide stable conditions for trade and a favorable climate for evangelizing.”125

To appreciate why we do not consider the Indian Ocean trading area to be part of the European world-economy despite the fact that it was so completely dominated by a European power, we must look successively at the meaning of this dominance for the Asian countries affected, its meaning for Europe, and how it compares with those parts of the Americas under Iberian rule.

There seems little doubt that a major element in Portugal’s lightning ascendancy first in the Indian Ocean then in the China Sea, was the “vacuum in sea-borne trade,” as Trevor-Roper calls it, that existed at this time in both areas: “The vast trade of Asia—of which the long-distance trade with Europe was but a fragment—lay open to the first comers. The Portuguese came and took it; and while the vacuum lasted—until Europe overtook them or Asia resisted them—it was their monopoly.”126 The vacuum was not economic but political, for it is central to the understanding of the situation that the Portuguese did not create the trade. They took over a pre-existing trade network, in the hands at that point of time of Moslem merchants (Arabs and Gujeratis) in the Indian Ocean and Wako pirates in the China Sea.127 The ouster of the Moslem traders, which comes first in time, was “by brute force and not by peaceful competition.”128 It was primarily due to politico-naval superiority.129

The great import from Asia to Lisbon was pepper, or pepper and spices. Already at the end of the fifteenth century before Portugal was in the picture, Europe probably consumed a quarter of Asia’s production;130 and, to meet the increased demand of Europe, Asian production doubled over the course of the century.131 In return, what Asia principally got from Europe was bullion, silver and gold.132 The silver came largely from the Americas and Japan.133 The gold seems largely to have come at first from West Africa,134 then from southeast Africa, Sumatra and China.135

Given Europe’s passionate hoarding of bullion, it is strange indeed that this kind of formal imbalance of payments should persist for so long. But if Europe wanted Asia’s offerings, it seems that this was the price they had to pay. This points to one fundamental sense in which Asia was not part of the European world-economy at this time, since from 1500 to 1800 Europe’s relations with Asian states “were ordinarily conducted within a framework and on terms established by the Asian nations. Except for those who lived in a few colonial footholds, the Europeans were all there on sufferance.”136 And this despite Europe’s military superiority. For we must remember that this military superiority was only a naval superiority.137

From an Asian point of view, the Portuguese traders differed in one fundamental respect from those that had preceded them historically. The buyers were “not merchants—private entrepreneurs—but a formidable naval power, acting, in the name of a foreign state, on behalf of its merchants and itself.”138 This meant that trade relations—indeed prices—were fixed by treaties recognized under international law. But states had to deal with states. And it took the Portuguese a while to accustom themselves to the high level of state dignity they encountered.139 Initially, the Portuguese were willing to make the enormous profits that seizures would bring, but after 10 short years, they realized this was a very shortsighted policy.140 They turned instead to becoming the arbiters of and intermediaries for intra-Asian trade, the profits from which they used to capitalize the Cape route trade, bringing both spices and bullion to Portugal. It was, as Godinho says, a “grandiose dream,” an “enterprise beyond her possibilities (démesurée).”141 They sacrificed the bullion (and more) for the spices, but they did achieve a “centralized intra-Asian trade,” and that was “something quite new in Asia.”142 Translated into terms of the European world-economy, the Portuguese role as middlemen meant that “a good deal of European imports derived from invisible exports of shipping and commercial services.”143 The degree to which intra-Asian trade was central to the economics of Portuguese involvement in Asia is highlighted by the fact that it was only after 75 years, in 1578, that the first nonstop express ship (une ‘carrière’ de droiture) went from Lisbon to Malacca.144

Thus, for Asia, Portuguese traders meant two things: Asian traders had to deal with a state as the agent for traders, and intra-Asian trade was rationalized. Yet J. C. van Leur does not think this adds up to enough to warrant the designation of social change:

The Portuguese colonial regime . . . did not introduce a single new economic element into the commerce of Southern Asia. . . . The Portuguese regime only introduced a non-intensive drain on the existing structure of shipping and trade. The next period [that of the Dutch] would in its time organize a new system of foreign trade and foreign shipping, it would call into life trenchant colonial relationships, and it would create new economic forms in Europe—not perhaps as a direct result but rather as a parallel development bolstered by the system. . . .

The international Asian character of trade was maintained, while the political independence of the Oriental states remained practically uninfringed upon by European influence. The great intra-Asian trade route retained its full significance.145

The literature tends to support van Leur’s assessment.146 The Portuguese arrived and found a flourishing world-economy. They organized it a little better and took some goods home as a reward for their efforts. The social organization of the economy as well as the political superstructures remained largely untouched. The major change occurs in the production of pepper, the only spice which “gave rise to mass production.”147 But the technology of pepper is so simple that it required very little labor to expand production by more extensive production, for pepper has an important quality: “Once planted, it does not need to be cared for.”148 Hence, a century of Portuguese dominance meant for most of Asia principally that Portuguese rather than Arabs made the profit. The Indian historian K. M. Pannikkar sums up this perspective by saying:

It made no difference to Indian rulers whether their merchants sold their goods to the Portuguese or to the Arabs. In fact, the Portuguese had an advantage in that they were able to sell to Indian rulers arms and equipment that they required. So far as the Indian merchants were concerned, very soon they worked out a system of permits by which they were able to carry on their trade without the competition of Arab merchants, and in that sense the Portuguese monopoly may be said to have helped them.149

This is why despite the fact that “the enterprises of the Portuguese kings . . . combined monopolies of protection, of transportation, and of products transported,”150 Charles Boxer can call Portuguese maritime dominance an “inherently brittle superstructure.”151 Asia, or even Indian Ocean border regions, did not become part of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. Asia was an external arena with which Europe traded, on somewhat unequal terms to be sure. That is to say, elements of monopoly imposed by force intruded on the market operations. There was, in Chaunu’s phrase, a “thalassocratic Conquista”152 by Portugal. But Asia’s inner life remained basically unchanged by the contact. Surely it would be hard to argue that Asian primary production was an integral part of this time of the European division of labor.

Further evidence can be found if we look at the impact of Portuguese Asian trade on Europe. Europe did not conquer Asia in the sixteenth century because she could not. Her military advantage was only at sea.153 On land she was still retreating in the face of Ottoman attack,154 and this military balance would only change with the Industrial Revolution.155

What Asia provided for Europe at this time was luxuries. Now luxuries are important and not to be sneered at, but they take second place to food (grain, cattle, fish, sugar) and the manpower needed to raise them. They took second place also to bullion, not hoarded bullion but bullion as money (although it was only magic that bullion could be used as money, the magic lying in the possibility of its eventual use as a commodity, if need be). Compared to food and even to bullion, a world-economy can adjust relatively easily to the shifts in luxury supply.

Pepper, it may be argued, was not quite a luxury, nor even spices, for they were essential to the preservation of food and as medicine.156 Once again, it was a matter of degree. The food that was preserved was largely meat, not quite a luxury but not quite destined either for those on subsistence diets. Likewise the medicines.157 Of course, as Chaunu argues, with a rising standard of living in Europe and a changing balance of power in the world, pepper was becoming less of a luxury. The question, I suppose, is how much less:

When does [pepper] first appear in West? Traditionally one points to several turning-points [jalons]. The first of them are the contacts between East and West in the 12th and 13th centuries in the Mediterranean, at the time of the Crusades. To tell the truth, two factors must be taken into account. The rise of the consumption of pepper must certainly be tied to the increase in the 14th and 15th centuries of meat consumption, a phenomenon that has been clearly established. Much more lasting however the development of consumption-patterns involving far-off and costly products seems to me inseparable from the shift in the power-situation from the 12th and 13th centuries. The spices procured in the conditions of the 13th [century] constituted a luxury. To get them required developing that power which would permit Western Christianity to develop slowly its potential [le lent décollement de ses moyens]. This power allowed the West to come to have one after the other those various stimulants to the taste-buds and the nervous system that Latin Christianity had been less clever in producing than Oriental civilizations.158

In any case, to the extent that pepper was not a luxury but a seminecessity, it was precisely the malaguette of West Africa, not Asian products, which was the most important in quantity, if not in price.159

There is of course no question that the Asian trade was profitable to Portugal. That after all was the point of it. Godinho spends 25 pages evaluating this. One example, perhaps spectacular, will suffice. The merchandise which returned was evaluated in 1512 by Albuquerque as eight times the worth in Portuguese currency of that sent out.160 It is easy to see therefore why pepper was “the most notable speculative commodity of the [sixteenth and seventeenth centuries], attracting the attention of the greatest merchants and capitalists of the age.”161 The divisibility and durability of pepper, as well as its profit margin, “rendered it an excellent object for speculation.”162

This speculation was not simply that of the capitalists as individual entrepreneurs. It was preeminently that of the Portuguese state which sought “to increase national wealth by the use of military power,” in the formulation of Frederic Lane.163 We shall consider below the costs of this policy. It is pertinent however at this point to insert Lane’s evaluation of this collective “speculation”:

In the long run of fifty or a hundred years, a more peaceful policy, fostering a greater development of the Eastern trade, might have made the nation richer. Although the conquest of India increased Portuguese national income for a time, it was followed by a decrease later in the productivity of the nation’s labor. It does not therefore supply a clear case of success in using armed force to increase the nation’s prosperity.164

But could Portugal have pursued a “more peaceful policy?” This is doubtful, partly as Lane himself suggests, because of the kind of capital and labor that existed in Portugal in 1500.165

Nonetheless, the discussion on profitability makes clear the limitations to profit by trade in an external arena. The profits, when all is said and done, are those of plunder. And plunder is over time self-defeating, whereas exploitation within the framework of a single world-economy is self-reinforcing.

Perhaps this will be clearer if we now seek to compare systematically Iberia in Asia and Iberia in the Americas. A word should be said first about the relations of Portugal and Spain. The papal bull, Inter Coetera, in its second version of June 1493 drew a famous line, supposedly allocating various parts of the non-European world to the care of Portugal and Spain for the purposes of evangelization.166 For the Atlantic regions, this came to mean that Portugal’s sovereignty was recognized over Brazil and the Atlantic non-Caribbean islands but that of Spain over the bulk of the continent. Presumably Asia was “allotted” to Portugal. But Magellan convinced Charles V to reinterpret the map, it being difficult in the sixteenth century to estimate longitudes, and he laid claim on behalf of the Spanish Crown to the Philippines in 1520,167 which however was not in fact occupied until 1564. Indeed it is only when Portugal begins to falter as a source of pepper supply because of the revival of Venice’s role that Spain sends her expedition to the Philippines in search of pepper, there and in China.168

Thus we have a largely Hispanic role in the Americas with a Portuguese corner, and a largely Portuguese role in Asia with a Spanish corner. It is striking how Iberian policy was roughly similar in both areas. For in the sixteenth century, Iberia establishes colonies in the Americas, but trading-posts in Asia.169

We have already written of Spanish policy in the Americas and Portuguese policy in Asia. It is noteworthy that each sought to generalize from its dominant experience to the other area but, realizing its error, each came to adapt itself to the requirements of the area. The Portuguese sought to limit their involvement in Brazil to an entrepôt arrangement, but were forced to colonize it as a preemptive measure as of 1530.170 Similarly the Spaniards sought to utilize an encomienda system in the Philippines, but the international commerce was insufficient to sustain the costs and they reverted to the Portuguese pattern. “The trade of Manila thus settled down to a straight exchange of silver from New Spain against Chinese wares.”171

The reasons for the two different policies seem to be, as we have already hinted, twofold. On the one hand, the rewards of American colonization were in some sense greater. On the other hand, the difficulties of colonizing Asia were much greater. The combination of the two meant that the Americas became the periphery of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century while Asia remained an external arena.

By rewards we do not mean short-run profit, although even here the Americas seem to do better than Asia by about 50%,172 but long-run profits in terms of opportunity costs. The Asian trade was an import trade, especially that part of it which bypassed the Levant.173 Indeed one of the reasons Spain eventually gave up the Manila Galleon was precisely opposition at home to the bullion drain it represented.174 To be sure, this is not, as we have indicated, without some exceptions. It seems for example that Indian teak forests were to some extent incorporated into the European world-economy as suppliers of timber for ships built in dockyards at Goa.175

But this is minor compared to the harvest of bullion, wood, leather and sugar from the New World, which evolved during the century from a gathering technique to a stable form of production using cheap labor and European supervision,176 and thus transformed the social structure of the areas involved, incorporating them into the European world-economy.177

It is only when Europe had no choice, could not get a product within the framework of its own world-economy that it went to the outside arena to get it at higher cost. Take for example silk. Woodrow Borah has described the reasons for the collapse of Mexican raw silk production in the late sixteenth century.178 It is just then, as Chaunu points out, that we have “the apogee of the Galleon trade, the massive, brusque and ephemeral arrival of Chinese silk on the Indies market.”179 Of course, when the Spaniards have no more American silver to offer the Chinese, they cannot buy the silk and the Manila Galleon trade collapses about 1640.180

As a general rule, the geographical bounds of a world-economy are a matter of equilibrium. The dynamics of forces at the core may lead to an expansionist pressure (as we saw happened in Europe in the fifteenth century). The system expands outward until it reaches the point where the loss is greater than the gain. One factor is of course distance, a function of the state of the technology. Early on, we mentioned the concept of a sixty-day world. There are many ways of estimating time. Compare Chaunu’s description of time from Iberia to the Americas, and time from Iberia to Asia. Of the first he says: “Outward passage one month, return six weeks, round trip including loadings and unloadings, in an annual cycle including everything between the winter dead periods.”181 Of the other he says:

At the point of maximum distance—let us say the Seville-Manila axis as of 1565—the universe born of the long transformation of the 15th and 16th centuries is a five-year universe. That is, five years is the average time necessary for a round trip from Spain to the Philippines.182

Clearly the difference was considerable.

But the resistance of distance was compounded by the resistance of estabished authority. The Americas were easily conquered. Even the structured states, like the Aztecs and the Incas, were no match for European arms. Asia was another matter altogether. Neither Portugal, nor even its seventeenth-century successors, were able to summon the firepower to make significant land conquests. For lack of this, they could not establish a system, as in the Americas or eastern Europe, where a little force permits a large expropriation of surplus. On the contrary, it required a lot of force (the Portuguese against their maritime rivals) to achieve the acquisition of a lesser amount of surplus (because the local rulers could insist on a far larger percentage). One way to look at this is to estimate the profitability of alternative uses of force. Frederic Lane conceptualizes it thus:

I venture to propose as a hypothesis that the [colonial] enterprises which used force to plunder and to prevent the trade of rivals [for example, the Portuguese in Asia] were in general subject to diminishing returns, but that many enterprises using force to create protection [against the destruction or seizure of its capital and the disruption of its labor force], including many that imposed forced labor [for example, the Portuguese in Brazil], enjoyed the advantage of increasing returns.183

Handling oneself in the periphery and in the external arena are different skills. It is only in the periphery that the economically more powerful group is able to reinforce its position by cultural domination as well. The Portuguese understood this far better than the Spanish. The latter took Christian evangelization as a greater priority than did the Portuguese, who were more sensitive to the limits of their power in this great Christian–Moslem encounter in sixteenth-century Asia. Chaunu points out that the Spanish put great effort into stopping Moslem penetration of the Philippines. They succeeded to some extent, but they paid an economic price: “This deep-seated hostility to Islam, this inability to make deals with the Moslem princelets of the Moluccas, is this not the true explanation, far more than Portuguese hostility, why the Spaniards in the Philippines could not make a success of the spice trade?”184 Compare this with the Portuguese decision in the Kongo where first they played with evangelization, colonization, even cash-crop agriculture, then later realized the costs were too high and retreated to an entrepôt relationship in which they sought primarily slaves and ivory.185

In Asia, the Portuguese dominance of the Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca faced increasing challenge as the “long” sixteenth century went on—from the Arabs cum Venice (the old Levant route), from the rising stars of northwest Europe (England and Holland), and from resurgent indigenous forces in Asia.

In an earlier chapter, we already treated the revival of the Eastern Mediterranean in the “second” sixteenth century. Thus, let us merely briefly review the matter here. To cut off the Levant required a costly blockade. The core of the matter was that the “Portugal was not rich enough to maintain this vast network, its fortresses, its costly squadrons, its functionaries.186 By the 1530s, the Turks were once again able to land in the Persian Gulf, and from that point on the Portuguese share of the trade declines.187 By 1560, Alexandria was exporting as much spices to Europe as in the late fifteenth century,188 though, to be sure, it was proportionately less. The Portuguese furthermore were unwilling or unable to lower their prices to meet Venetian competition.189 And of course we are only referring to the pepper trade, since the trade in drugs seems at no point to have become a Portuguese monopoly.190 Indeed Portuguese decline is to be measured by the fact that eventually, after 1580, they sought for a cut in the Venetian trade itself.191 The decline of Portugal was therefore very real. Godinho warns us not to go to the other extreme and see a rosy picture for Venice in its upswing,192 a view we have already had occasion to expound. For Venice could not pick up all that Portugal dropped.

An even more effective rival was northwest Europe. We should not forget that when the Crowns of Spain and France both declared bankruptcy in 1557, the Portuguese Crown followed suit in 1560. We shall not review the reasons for the rise of Holland and England. But we should take note of one crucial factor in the spice trade, which is that there were in fact two spice trades, often called “the Asian contract,” and “the European contract.” That is to say, there were profits on the spices brought from Asia to Lisbon (or Venice or later Amsterdam) and there were profits on these same spices as they were resold to their ultimate European consumers, who were principally to be found in northern Europe.193

The Portuguese did not have the network to sell the pepper in Europe, especially after the decline of Antwerp, with whom they had had close relations. Chaunu says of Portugal in 1585:

Cut off from the North, the king of Spain, who rules in Lisbon since 1580, offers in vain the contract of Europe. Italy is not strong enough [n’est pas du taille]. No one in Spain can dream of it. He must substitute for Antwerp all the strength of German capitalism, that of the Welsers and the Fuggers.

How can it be said more clearly? The contract of Europe in the end takes priority over the contract of Asia.194

But the Welsers and the Fuggers, in turn, are not strong enough to stand up to the English and the Dutch.195 And the rise of the Dutch is in fact the final blow to Venice because Amsterdam, “more efficient than [Lisbon], breaks the neck of the old Mediterranean commerce.”196

The Dutch (and English) not only had advantages in Europe. Their naval superiority in the Indian Ocean had an extra financial advantage. They could make profits not only from the trade but from plundering Portuguese ships as well.197 Even so, the Dutch (and English) did not yet intrude a new element on the Asian scene. They continued the Portuguese role of middlemen.198

This brings us then to what is happening in Asia. As the Portuguese collapse, some control is recovered by Asian rulers. For example, from 1570 on in the Straits of Malacca, the Javanese take over the spice trade, at least until the intrusion of the Dutch in 1596.199 For a while the Portuguese compensated for this by their new monopoly of carrying trade between China and Japan.200 But as the Japanese came to overcome internal anarchy, they no longer needed the Portuguese. Originally the Ming Emperors had forbidden the Japanese to trade because of anger at the Wako pirates. Once the Wako were under control, direct trading was once again possible. Furthermore, now the Dutch and English came on the scene with no kind words for Spain(–Portugal). The Japanese grew uncomfortable with the Jesuits, and it was possible now for Japan to withdraw from the world, especially since indigenous manufacturers were eliminating the need for Chinese silk.201

It is perhaps the case that Japan’s withdrawal was occasioned by the evangelistic overaggressiveness of the Christian Church, as C. R. Boxer asserts.202 One has to take seriously an hypothesis which comes from Boxer, whose breadth of knowledge and historical judgment command respect. However, there is little concrete empirical evidence presented by him to back up this judgment. Might they not have withdrawn in any case, given their growing internal strength and the thinness of the links they had to any world-economy?

Portuguese citizens themselves drew the lesson of the decline of the entrepôt boom. They began to cut themselves off from the home country, and adjust to survival in Asia. They became, in economic terms, largely Asians of European extraction, though less so in political terms and doubtless not at all in cultural terms. J. B. Harrison describes the ever-increasing military and political autonomy of the Estado da India in the course of the sixteenth century, a process that went along with the growing importance for the Portuguese of the intra-Asian trade.203 With the growing conflict of interests between the Portuguese at home and in India,

the Portuguese encrust themselves into the worlds of the Orient, installing themselves everywhere as casados [literally, those who maintain a household], fit themselves into local or regional interests, give themselves over to local or inter-regional operations.204

When Spain absorbs Portugal in 1580, this accentuates the process further. The local Portuguese do not wish to cut the Castilians into their market, and the King of Spain has not got the strength to force them.205 But this means that instead of edging into the status of a peripheral area, a century of Iberian involvement pushed Asia further away. It would not be until a century or so later that Europe would be strong enough to begin to incorporate these regions.

THEORETICAL REPRISE

Theorizing is not an activity separate from the analysis of empirical data. Analyses can only be made in terms of theoretical schema and propositions. On the other hand, analyses of events or processes must include as a starting point a whole series of specific values of certain of the variables, on the basis of which one can explain how the final outcomes were arrived at. In order to convey the historical explanation with clarity, it is often the case that one has to assume or glide over the exposition of the formal interrelations between variables.

Consequently, it often makes sense to review the material a second time more briefly and abstractly at the conclusion. No doubt this should be useful to the reader. But it is even more important for the author, in forcing a degree of rigor in the analysis whose absence might readily pass unnoticed amidst the complexity of detail. The empirical material treated thus far has surely been complex—indeed, far more complex than it was possible to portray. Hence, I propose to review what I have been arguing in this book.

In order to describe the origins and initial workings of a world system, I have had to argue a certain conception of a world-system. A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension, and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning.

What characterizes a social system in my view is the fact that life within it is largely self-contained, and that the dynamics of its development are largely internal. The reader may feel that the use of the term “largely” is a case of academic weaseling. I admit I cannot quantify it. Probably no one ever will be able to do so, as the definition is based on a counterfactual hypothesis: If the system, for any reason, were to be cut off from all external forces (which virtually never happens), the definition implies that the system would continue to function substantially in the same manner. Again, of course, substantially is difficult to convert into hard operational criteria. Nonetheless the point is an important one, and key to many parts of the empirical analyses of this book. Perhaps we should think of self-containment as a theoretical absolute, a sort of social vacuum, rarely visible and even more implausible to create artificially, but still and all a socially-real asymptote, the distance from which is somehow measurable.

Using such a criterion, it is contended here that most entities usually described as social systems—“tribes,” communities, nation-states—are not in fact total systems. Indeed, on the contrary, we are arguing that the only real social systems are, on the one hand, those relatively small, highly autonomous subsistence economies not part of some regular tribute-demanding system and, on the other hand, world-systems. These latter are to be sure distinguished from the former because they are relatively large; that is, they are in common parlance “worlds.” More precisely, however, they are defined by the fact that their self-containment as an economic-material entity is based on extensive division of labor and that they contain within them a multiplicity of cultures.

It is further argued that thus far there have only existed two varieties of such world-systems: world-empires, in which there is a single political system over most of the area, however attenuated the degree of its effective control; and those systems in which such a single political system does not exist over all, or virtually all, of the space. For convenience and for want of a better term, we are using the term “world-economy” to describe the latter.

Finally, we have argued that prior to the modern era, world-economies were highly unstable structures which tended either to be converted into empires or to disintegrate. It is the peculiarity of the modern world-system that a world-economy has survived for 500 years and yet has not come to be transformed into a world-empire—a peculiarity that is the secret of its strength.

This peculiarity is the political side of the form of economic organization called capitalism. Capitalism has been able to flourish precisely because the world-economy has had within its bounds not one but a multiplicity of political systems.

I am not here arguing the classic case of capitalist ideology that capitalism is a system based on the noninterference of the state in economic affairs. Quite the contrary! Capitalism is based on the constant absorption of economic loss by political entities, while economic gain is distributed to “private” hands. What I am arguing rather is that capitalism as an economic mode is based on the fact that the economic factors operate within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control. This gives capitalists a freedom of maneuver that is structurally based. It has made possible the constant economic expansion of the world-system, albeit a very skewed distribution of its rewards. The only alternative world-system that could maintain a high level of productivity and change the system of distribution would involve the reintegration of the levels of political and economic decision-making. This would constitute a third possible form of world-system, a socialist world government. This is not a form that presently exists, and it was not even remotely conceivable in the sixteenth century.

The historical reasons why the European world-economy came into existence in the sixteenth century and resisted attempts to transform it into an empire have been expounded at length. We shall not review them here. It should however be noted that the size of a world-economy is a function of the state of technology, and in particular of the possibilities of transport and communication within its bounds. Since this is a constantly changing phenomenon, not always for the better, the boundaries of a world-economy are ever fluid.

We have defined a world-system as one in which there is extensive division of labor. This division is not merely functional—that is, occupational—but geographical. That is to say, the range of economic tasks is not evenly distributed throughout the world-system. In part this is the consequence of ecological considerations, to be sure. But for the most part, it is a function of the social organization of work, one which magnifies and legitimizes the ability of some groups within the system to exploit the labor of others, that is, to receive a larger share of the surplus.

While, in an empire, the political structure tends to link culture with occupation, in a world-economy the political structure tends to link culture with spatial location. The reason is that in a world-economy the first point of political pressure available to groups is the local (national) state structure. Cultural homogenization tends to serve the interests of key groups and the pressures build up to create cultural-national identities.

This is particularly the case in the advantaged areas of the world-economy—what we have called the core-states. In such states, the creation of a strong state machinery coupled with a national culture, a phenomenon often referred to as integration, serves both as a mechanism to protect disparities that have arisen within the world-system, and as an ideological mask and justification for the maintenance of these disparities.

World-economies then are divided into core-states and peripheral areas. I do not say peripheral states because one characteristic of a peripheral area is that the indigenous state is weak, ranging from its nonexistence (that is, a colonial situation) to one with a low degree of autonomy (that is, a neo-colonial situation).

There are also semiperipheral areas which are in between the core and the periphery on a series of dimensions, such as the complexity of economic activities, strength of the state machinery, cultural integrity, etc. Some of these areas had been core-areas of earlier versions of a given world-economy. Some had been peripheral areas that were later promoted, so to speak, as a result of the changing geopolitics of an expanding world-economy.

The semiperiphery, however, is not an artifice of statistical cutting points, nor is it a residual category. The semiperiphery is a necessary structural element in a world-economy. These areas play a role parallel to that played, mutatis mutandis, by middle trading groups in an empire. They are collection points of vital skills that are often politically unpopular. These middle areas (like middle groups in an empire) partially deflect the political pressures which groups primarily located in peripheral areas might otherwise direct against core-states and the groups which operate within and through their state machineries. On the other hand, the interests primarily located in the semiperiphery are located outside the political arena of the core-states, and find it difficult to pursue the ends in political coalitions that might be open to them were they in the same political arena.

The division of a world-economy involves a hierarchy of occupational tasks, in which tasks requiring higher levels of skill and greater capitalization are reserved for higher-ranking areas. Since a capitalist world-economy essentially rewards accumulated capital, including human capital, at a higher rate than “raw” labor power, the geographical maldistribution of these occupational skills involves a strong trend toward self-maintenance. The forces of the marketplace reinforce them rather than undermine them. And the absence of a central political mechanism for the world-economy makes it very difficult to intrude counteracting forces to the maldistribution of rewards.

Hence, the ongoing process of a world-economy tends to expand the economic and social gaps among its varying areas in the very process of its development. One factor that tends to mask this fact is that the process of development of a world-economy brings about technological advances which make it possible to expand the boundaries of a world-economy. In this case, particular regions of the world may change their structural role in the world-economy, to their advantage, even though the disparity of reward between different sectors of the world-economy as a whole may be simultaneously widening. It is in order to observe this crucial phenomenon clearly that we have insisted on the distinction between a peripheral area of a given world-economy and the external arena of the world-economy. The external arena of one century often becomes the periphery of the next—or its semiperiphery. But then too core-states can become semiperipheral and semiperipheral ones peripheral.

While the advantages of the core-states have not ceased to expand throughout the history of the modern world-system, the ability of a particular state to remain in the core sector is not beyond challenge. The hounds are ever to the hares for the position of top dog. Indeed, it may well be that in this kind of system it is not structurally possible to avoid, over a long period of historical time, a circulation of the elites in the sense that the particular country that is dominant at a given time tends to be replaced in this role sooner or later by another country.

We have insisted that the modern world-economy is, and only can be, a capitalist world-economy. It is for this reason that we have rejected the appellation of “feudalism” for the various forms of capitalist agriculture based on coerced labor which grow up in a world-economy. Furthermore, although this has not been discussed in this volume, it is for this same reason that we will, in future volumes, regard with great circumspection and prudence the claim that there exist in the twentieth century socialist national economies within the framework of the world-economy (as opposed to socialist movements controlling certain state-machineries within the world-economy).

If world-systems are the only real social systems (other than truly isolated subsistence economies), then it must follow that the emergence, consolidation, and political roles of classes and status groups must be appreciated as elements of this world-system. And in turn it follows that one of the key elements in analyzing a class or a status-group is not only the state of its self-consciousness but the geographical scope of its self-definition.

Classes always exist potentially (an sich). The issue is under what conditions they become class-conscious (für sich), that is, operate as a group in the politico-economic arenas and even to some extent as a cultural entity. Such self-consciousness is a function of conflict situations. But for upper strata open conflict, and hence overt consciousness, is always faute de mieux. To the extent that class boundaries are not made explicit, to that extent it is more likely that privileges be maintained.

Since in conflict situations, multiple factions tend to reduce to two by virtue of the forging of alliances, it is by definition not possible to have three or more (conscious) classes. There obviously can be a multitude of occupational interest groups which may organize themselves to operate within the social structure. But such groups are really one variety of status-groups, and indeed often overlap heavily with other kinds of status-groups such as those defined by ethnic, linguistic, or religious criteria.

To say that there cannot be three or more classes is not however to say that there are always two. There may be none, though this is rare and transitional. There may be one, and this is most common. There may be two, and this is most explosive.

We say there may be only one class, although we have also said that classes only actually exist in conflict situations, and conflicts presume two sides. There is no contradiction here. For a conflict may be defined as being between one class, which conceives of itself as the universal class, and all the other strata. This has in fact been the usual situation in the modern world-system. The capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) has claimed to be the universal class and sought to organize political life to pursue its objectives against two opponents. On the one hand, there were those who spoke for the maintenance of traditional rank distinctions despite the fact that these ranks might have lost their original correlation with economic function. Such elements preferred to define the social structure as a non-class structure. It was to counter this ideology that the bourgeoisie came to operate as a class conscious of itself.

But the bourgeoisie had another opponent, the workers. Whenever the workers became conscious of themselves as a class, which was not too frequently in the sixteenth century, they defined the situation as a polarized two-class situation. In such circumstances, the bourgeoisie found itself in a deep tactical dilemma. To the extent that they maintained their own class-consciousness, they abetted by this fact workers’ class-consciousness, and thereby risked undermining their own political position. To the extent that, in order to deal with this problem, they muted their class-consciousness, they risked weakening their position vis-à-vis the tenants of traditional high rank.

The process of the crystallization of class-consciousness of a bourgeoisie, thinking of itself as a universal class, drawing its members from all social ranks, has been illustrated in our discussions of the emergence of the gentry as a social category in Tudor England or the rise of the burghers in the northern Netherlands. One of the ways they supported their claim to be a universal class was by the development of national sentiment, which gave a cultural veneer to their claim.

The deep dilemma of a bourgeoisie trapped by insurrection on the left, so to speak, and fearing an alliance between its two sets of opponents taking the form of regionalist claims, has been illustrated in our discussions of France in the “second” sixteenth century. The bourgeoisie there opted for temporary retreat. They perhaps had no viable alternative. But this retreat was to have its long term consequences in the later social radicalism of the French revolution (however momentary), and in the long-run lag in economic development of France behind England.

Our examples here are of bourgeoisies that became conscious, but conscious within the bounds of a nation-state. This was clearly not the only choice. They could have become conscious of themselves as a world class. And many groups pushed for such a definition. On the one hand, there were the various communities of international merchant–bankers. On the other hand, there were the many sets of capitalist farmers in the peripheral areas.

In the heyday of Charles V, there were many in the Low Countries, in southern Germany, in northern Italy and elsewhere who tied their hopes to the imperial aspirations of the Hapsburgs (some prudentially keeping a foot in the door of the Valois as well). If these groups remained a social stratum and did not yet form a conscious class, they were moving in that direction, and it seemed only a matter of time. But with the failure of empire, the bourgeoisies of Europe realized that their economic and social future was tied to the core-states. And those who, by virtue of their ethnic–religious affiliations, could turn to the national state as their arena of political operation did so.

As for the capitalist farmers of the periphery, they would gladly have thought of themselves as part of an international gentry class. They willingly sacrificed local cultural roots for participation in “world” cultures. But to constitute an international class, they needed the cooperation of the capitalist strata of the core-states, and this was not to be forthcoming. So increasingly these peripheral capitalist farmers became the antiquated and snobbish Spanish-American hacenderos or east European nobility of later centuries, retreating from potential international class-consciousness into local status solidarities—which served well the interests of Western European bourgeoisies.

Geographic concentration of particular economic activities serves as a continuing pressure to status-group formation. When the local dominant strata are threatened by any incipient class-consciousness of lower strata, emphasis on local culture serves well to deflect local internal conflict, creating instead local solidarity against the outside. If, in addition, these local dominant strata feel themselves oppressed by higher strata of the world-system, they are doubly motivated to pursue the creation of a local identity.

Obviously, one does not construct an identity out of thin air. One builds on what one finds—in terms of language, religion, and distinctive life-styles. Nonetheless it is quite clear that both linguistic and religious homogeneity and passion (a fortiori devotion to separate life-styles) are social creations which cannot be accounted for as simple continuities of tradition eternal. They are social creations molded with difficulty in times of travail.

The sixteenth century was such a time of travail in much of Europe. It was of course the era of the Reformation and the Counter–Reformation. It was the era of great religious civil wars. It was the era of international religious “parties.” But in the end, as the dust settled, all the religious upheaval resulted in a pattern of relative religious homogeneity of the various political entities within the framework of international laissez-faire—cuius regio eius religio.

We have tried to indicate in our discussion of various specific developments why various forms of Protestantism ended up as the religion of the core-states (except France, and again why) and Catholicism as the religion of the periphery and semiperiphery. We have been skeptical that the tenets of the various theologies had too much to do with it, although they may have facilitated the task. Rather the tenets of the theologies, as they evolved in practice as opposed to their original conception, reflected and served to sustain the roles of the various areas in the world-system.

It is often said that Charles V missed a great opportunity of creating a united German Protestant state by attempting to remain an arbiter of the religious split instead of a protagonist. But such a critique neglects the fact that Charles V sought to create a world-empire, not a core-state within a world-economy. Empires thrive on multiple religions reflecting multiple roles, few of which are concentrated within specific political boundaries. National homogeneity within international heterogeneity is the formula of a world-economy.

At least this is the formula at the simple beginnings. Core-states because of their complex internal division of labor begin to reflect the pattern of the system as a whole. In the sixteenth century, England was already moving in the direction of becoming Britain, which would have regional homogeneity within a relative heterogeneity for the nation as a whole.

Religion does not have to be the defining cultural trait of the major status-groups; one can use language. Language indeed began to play such a role in the sixteenth century, and its importance was to increase as the centuries passed. Religious reinforcement of role specialization in a world-economy has, however, advantages over linguistic reinforcement. It interferes less with the ongoing communications process within the world-economy. And it lends itself less (only less) to isolationist closures, because of the underlying universalist themes of world religions.

The European world-economy of the sixteenth century tended overall to be a one-class system. It was the dynamic forces profiting from economic expansion and the capitalist system, especially those in the core-areas, who tended to be class-conscious, that is to operate within the political arena as a group defined primarily by their common role in the economy. This common role was in fact defined somewhat broadly from a twentieth-century perspective. It included persons who were farmers, merchants, and industrialists. Individual entrepreneurs often moved back and forth between these activities in any case, or combined them. The crucial distinction was between these men, whatever their occupation, principally oriented to obtaining profit in the world market, and the others not so oriented.

The “others” fought back in terms of their status privileges—those of the traditional aristocracy, those which small farmers had derived from the feudal system, those resulting from guild monopolies that were outmoded. Under the cover of cultural similarities, one can often weld strange alliances. Those strange alliances can take a very activist form and force the political centers to take account of them. We pointed to such instances in our discussion of France. Or they can take a politically passive form that serves well the needs of the dominant forces in the world-system. The triumph of Polish Catholicism as a cultural force was a case in point.

The details of the canvas are filled in with the panoply of multiple forms of status-groups, their particular strengths and accents. But the grand sweep is in terms of the process of class formation. And in this regard, the sixteenth century was indecisive. The capitalist strata formed a class that survived and gained droit de cité, but did not yet triumph in the political arena.

The evolution of the state machineries reflected precisely this uncertainty. Strong states serve the interests of some groups and hurt those of others. From however the standpoint of the world-system as a whole, if there is to be a multitude of political entities (that is, if the system is not a world-empire), then it cannot be the case that all these entities be equally strong. For if they were, they would be in the position of blocking the effective operation of transnational economic entities whose locus were in another state. It would then follow that the world division of labor would be impeded, the world-economy decline, and eventually the world-system fall apart.

It also cannot be that no state machinery is strong. For in such a case, the capitalist strata would have no mechanisms to protect their interests, guaranteeing their property rights, assuring various monopolies, spreading losses among the larger population, etc.

It follows then that the world-economy develops a pattern where state structures are relatively strong in the core areas and relatively weak in the periphery. Which areas play which roles is in many ways accidental. What is necessary is that in some areas the state machinery be far stronger than in others.

What do we mean by a strong state-machinery? We mean strength vis-à-vis other states within the world-economy including other core-states, and strong vis-à-vis local political units within the boundaries of the state. In effect, we mean a sovereignty that is de facto as well as de jure. We also mean a state that is strong vis-à-vis any particular social group within the state. Obviously, such groups vary in the amount of pressure they can bring to bear upon the state. And obviously certain combinations of these groups control the state. It is not that the state is a neutral arbiter. But the state is more than a simple vector of given forces, if only because many of these forces are situated in more than one state or are defined in terms that have little correlation with state boundaries.

A strong state then is a partially autonomous entity in the sense that it has a margin of action available to it wherein it reflects the compromises of multiple interests, even if the bounds of these margins are set by the existence of some groups of primordial strength. To be a partially autonomous entity, there must be a group of people whose direct interests are served by such an entity: state managers and a state bureaucracy.

Such groups emerge within the framework of a capitalist world-economy because a strong state is the best choice between difficult alternatives for the two groups that are strongest in political, economic, and military terms: the emergent capitalist strata, and the old aristocratic hierarchies.

For the former, the strong state in the form of the “absolute monarchies” was a prime customer, a guardian against local and international brigandage, a mode of social legitimation, a preemptive protection against the creation of strong state barriers elsewhere. For the latter, the strong state represented a brake on these same capitalist strata, an upholder of status conventions, a maintainer of order, a promoter of luxury.

No doubt both nobles and bourgeois found the state machineries to be a burdensome drain of funds, and a meddlesome unproductive bureaucracy. But what options did they have? Nonetheless they were always restive and the immediate politics of the world-system was made up of the pushes and pulls resulting from the efforts of both groups to insulate themselves from what seemed to them the negative effects of the state machinery.

A state machinery involves a tipping mechanism. There is a point where strength creates more strength. The tax revenue enables the state to have a larger and more efficient civil bureaucracy and army which in turn leads to greater tax revenue—a process that continues in spiral form. The tipping mechanism works in other direction too—weakness leading to greater weakness. In between these two tipping points lies the politics of state-creation. It is in this arena that the skills of particular managerial groups make a difference. And it is because of the two tipping mechanisms that at certain points a small gap in the world-system can very rapidly become a large one.

In those states in which the state machinery is weak, the state managers do not play the role of coordinating a complex industrial–commercial–agricultural mechanism. Rather they simply become one set of landlords amidst others, with little claim to legitimate authority over the whole.

These tend to be called traditional rulers. The political struggle is often phrased in terms of tradition versus change. This is of course a grossly misleading and ideological terminology. It may in fact be taken as a general sociological principle that, at any given point of time, what is thought to be traditional is of more recent origin than people generally imagine it to be, and represents primarily the conservative instincts of some group threatened with declining social status. Indeed, there seems to be nothing which emerges and evolves as quickly as a “tradition” when the need presents itself.

In a one-class system, the “traditional” is that in the name of which the “others” fight the class-conscious group. If they can encrust their values by legitimating them widely, even better by enacting them into legislative barriers, they thereby change the system in a way favorable to them.

The traditionalists may win in some states, but if a world-economy is to survive, they must lose more or less in the others. Furthermore, the gain in one region is the counterpart of the loss in another.

This is not quite a zero-sum game, but it is also inconceivable that all elements in a capitalist world-economy shift their values in a given direction simultaneously. The social system is built on having a multiplicity of value systems within it, reflecting the specific functions groups and areas play in the world division of labor.

We have not exhausted here the theoretical problems relevant to the functioning of a world-economy. We have tried only to speak to those illustrated by the early period of the world-economy in creation, to wit, sixteenth-century Europe. Many other problems emerged at later stages and will be treated, both empirically and theoretically, in later volumes.

In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe’s credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been.

It is also to Europe’s credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: “Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. . . . Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.”1

The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.

Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following persons read one or more chapters of the manuscript and gave me the benefit of their detailed comments and/or objections: Perry Anderson, Sven-Erik Åström, Nicole Bousquet, Stuart Bruchey, Aldo de Maddalena, Emiliano Fernández de Pinedo, André Gunder Frank, Walter Goldfrank, Terence K. Hopkins, Hermann Kellenbenz, E. H. Kossmann, Witold Kula (and associates), Hans Medick, Birgitta Odén, and C. H. Wilson. I thank them all.

Previous versions of the following chapters have appeared elsewhere: Introduction and Chapter 1, in French, in Annales E.S.C. (1979); Chapter 2, in Maurice Aymard, ed., Capitalisme hollandais et capitalisme mondiale (1980); part of Chapter 4, in Caribbean Yearbook of International Relations (1978).

PROLOGUE TO THE 2011 EDITION

This volume starts with the question of how to describe what was going on in Europe during the seventeenth century. The great debate of the 1950s and 1960s about the “crisis” of the seventeenth century laid a great deal of emphasis on the “feudal” character of its processes. Most authors interpreted this to mean that there was a “refeudalization” of Europe. Volume 2 is an attempt to refute these characterizations and to insist once again that the European world-economy had become definitively capitalist during the long sixteenth century. In many ways, volume 2 is the crucial volume of the whole set in that it makes the case for a certain vision and definition of capitalism as a historical system.

Many readers have found this aspect of the work the hardest part to accept. It seems perhaps useful, therefore, to try to restate this argument more theoretically, and to indicate why I believe that what we call feudalism in Europe of the late Middle Ages is fundamentally different from the so-called second feudalism of early modern times.

The second new and important theme developed in this volume is that of hegemony. Here, too, many persons, even those sympathetic to the overall effort undertaken by world-systems analysis, have misunderstood the argument about the concept of hegemony. So it is perhaps useful also to try to restate exactly what I mean by hegemony and why I think it is a crucial concept in understanding how the modern world-system operates.

Was Europe a World-Economy in the Period 1450–1750?

The intellectual question is whether one can argue that there existed a European world-economy that was a capitalist world-economy in the period 1450–1750. Actually, this constitutes two questions, not one: whether Europe (or some part thereof) constituted a singular economic entity in this period with a singular axial division of labor, and whether this entity can be described as capitalist.

The argument starts from a premise, which is both conceptual and empirical. The premise is that there are phenomena known as “logistics” (Rondo Cameron’s phrase), which are more frequently called in the French literature “trends séculaires.” These are presumably very long cycles, consisting of an inflationary A-phase and a deflationary B-phase. That such logistics exist seems to be widely, but not universally, taken for granted in the literature of European economic historians concerning both the late Middle Ages and early modern Europe. Empirically, the dating most frequently found in the literature is as follows:

I am going to take the existence of these logistics and their dating as givens.

The logic of the argument is essentially the following: There are certain basic similarities between the medieval logistic and the early modern logistic, which permits us to call both of them logistics with A and B phases. However, a careful comparison of the two will show certain significant qualitative differences, such that one can deduce from these differences that Europe had an axial division of labor in the later but not in the earlier period.

The basic pattern of a logistic involves, minimally, a triple expansion and contraction of population, economic activity, and prices. They are presumed to show long-term steady rises and falls, the three moving in unison. This ignores short-run fluctuations. There has been considerable debate about which of these three phenomena is the primary determinant of the expansion and contraction. I consider this debate largely futile.

Of course, these phenomena are in turn complexes of variables. Prices do not constitute a simple overall series. The leading series in what was still an agriculturally dominant Europe has been considered to be the price of wheat. It is, however, not only that wheat prices rose and fell in absolute terms. They rose and fell comparatively to other grain prices. And cereal prices as a group rose and fell comparatively to prices for pastoral products and prices for industrial products. There were also those prices we call rents and wages. The price of wages—that is, real wages—ran in inverse relation to other price series.

The concept of economic activity is also composed of many variables, such as the quantity of commercial transactions, total production, land area in use, yield ratio, and monetary stock. These were closely related to variables of the social structure such as the agronomy, the patterns of land tenure, the degree of urbanization, and the strength of guilds.

The essential point about such logistics is that there is thought to have been a fairly systematic correlation in the cyclical movements of these variables, most of them in direct correlation with each other, but some in inverse correlation with the majority.

Generally speaking, in most analyses by economic historians there is no overall consideration of how “political” and “cultural” variables related to this schema—that is, whether there were or were not some further systematic correlations. I believe this omission to be a mistake, since I do not believe we can understand how the overall system functioned without seeing the intimate interrelation of all the arenas of social action.

Late Medieval Europe, 1000 / 1100–1450

We talk of the “feudal system” to describe this period. I wonder about the word system, since feudal Europe was neither a world-economy nor a world-empire. As a “system,” it can be at most described as the remains of the disintegration of the short-lived Carolingian world-empire. It is perhaps better to call it a “civilization,” which would mean it was a series of small systems (or divisions of labor) linked, to the extent that they were linked, by a shared religious structure and to a limited extent by the lingua franca of Latin.

The geography of feudal Europe consisted of a multiplicity of manorial structures, each the center of a small division of labor with a surrounding zone, variously ensconced in multiple loose and wider political structures. Many of these local zones were involved in long-distance trade networks as well. But could these local zones be said to have been part of some larger economic entity, some singular division of labor? Few would claim that this was the case.

And yet, these separate zones seem to have resonated to the same pulsations, such that we talk of a logistic. Everywhere, more or less, the population began to expand in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. European agricultural production expanded, because there were both more people to engage in it and more demand for the products. Each local zone/village reclaimed wasteland at its edges (forest, swamp, moor, fen, marsh), and logically this had to be on the whole less fertile land than what they had been previously cultivating. This expansion occurred not only at the edges of each local zone, but at the frontiers of “Christian Europe” as a whole: the Crusades, the beginning of the Reconquista in Iberia, the retaking from Moslem rulers of the islands in the western Mediterranean, the “German” colonization of the “East,” the Scandinavian push northward, the English push westward and northward into Celtic lands.

Because cereals were in high demand and therefore profitable, not only was “wasteland” reclaimed, but there was a shift from pasturage to arable cultivation, and from poorer grains to the richer ones (primarily wheat, secondarily rye). It became worthwhile to invest in soil nutrients and improved technology, and yields rose (despite the decline in the median quality of the soils cultivated).

Given the overall expansion and inflation, those systems of tenure that involved money rent to a landlord were seen by the landlord as less desirable. Fixed rents lagged behind inflation. Ergo, landlords sought to reduce the length of tenures, or, even better, to turn money rents into labor rents (serfdom), thereby guaranteeing the supply of labor in an expanding market. The labor could always be profitably used. On the other hand, tiny units of production might also show positive returns, and more and more persons “entered” the market as cereals producers, multiplying the number of economic actors and “deconcentrating” production. Indeed, one of the motives of instituting serfdom was precisely to contain this deconcentration.

The general expansion of the economy involved also, and correlatively, the expansion of the industrial sector (principally textiles and metalware) and its concentration in urban areas (which reduced the transactions costs). The urban location made possible the emergence of a reasonably strong guild structure. Overall, there was increased specialization of economic activity and expanded local divisions of labor.

Although the local division of labor could make a place for some long-distance “luxury” trade, there does not seem to have been much middle-distance division of labor. The high cost of transport militated against it. In any case, local zones did not generally depend on or count on such “regional” (i.e., middle-distance) supply sources.

The politics of feudal civilization was essentially a local politics, in which the landlord/seignior sought to duplicate his economic dominance of his locality with a political dominance. This was true even when the landlord was a church figure, as many were. Kings, dukes, and counts were primarily powerful landlords/seigniors, with their own direct properties from which they drew their revenues, and secondarily war chieftains who constituted their armies out of their vassal nobility/other landlords. In the period of expansion of the economy, all landlords strengthened their political hold over their peasant populations, first of all by instituting and extending serfdom, but also by augmenting the number of their retainers. At the same time that the landlord’s power over the direct producers in his locality grew, the strength of higher-ranking “rulers” (kings, dukes, counts) grew over that of the local nobility. The “households” of the rulers grew in size, and small bureaucracies came into existence. The “outer” expansion of Europe was the doing of these rulers, and enabled them in turn to become still stronger. However, one should not exaggerate. There were no really strong states, and the nobility fought back (viz. the Magna Carta of 1215 in England). But that there were “states” at all was an achievement of this period.

Culturally, this was a period of efflorescence. The material base was there and the cultural confidence as well. The “outer” expansion of Europe led to the admission of new cultural currents, which, however, at this point were well assimilated into the existing Weltanschauung. The Summa Theologica of Aquinas was just that, a summation.

The overall rise in population, the urbanization of industry, and the expansion of the political and cultural arenas meant a rise in the number and size of cities. This permitted the emergence of a small stratum of intellectuals, and the first universities were founded.

Circa 1250–1300, the expansion ended, and a long-term regression set in. Essentially, everything that had gone up went down. The “outer” frontiers receded. The Crusaders were expelled, the Byzantines reconquered Constantinople, the Moors rallied in Granada (at least for a while), the Mongols invaded from the Asian steppes.

Population declined, most notably because of the Black Death. Instead of putting new land into cultivation, land was taken out of cultivation (the Wüstungen). To some extent this was the very same land that had been brought into use two centuries earlier. This reduction in the areas under cultivation occurred in part because of the decline in population (epidemics, famines, and local wars), in part for reasons of security, in part because of enclosure and engrossing by landlords.

The price inflation was reversed. Rents declined. The price of wheat declined. There was a shift of land use from cereals either to pasturage or to vineyards (depending on the climatic zone), both because fewer cereals were needed and because cereals production required a larger workforce. The “noble” cereals gave way to the poorer ones. There was less investment in technology and in soil nutrients, and hence yields were lower.

The squeeze on seigniorial rents was further complicated by the population decline, which increased the bargaining power of the direct producers. As a result, serfdom declined, and in the end largely disappeared. On the other hand, landlords sought to compensate for their declining incomes by engrossing and enclosing land, which resulted in some reconcentration. The combination resulted in economically weakened landlords with too small a workforce, and a strengthened layer of “kulak” farmers with multisibling, multigenerational holdings. Capital moved away from investment in land.

The market for industrial goods of course declined as well. Real wages rose. In the search to reduce costs of production, industries tended to move to rural zones, primarily to reduce labor costs (a consideration that now took priority over keeping transactions costs low, especially since the number of transactions was declining).

Politically, the outcome was a decline in the local authority of the landlord/seignior over the direct producers of the locality. The rulers lost in the same fashion. The “states” began to come apart, the rulers losing their hold over the landlords/nobility. As a result of the “crisis of seigniorial revenues,” there was considerably increased violence internal to “Europe,” as opposed to violence at the outer edges. There were many revolts of the peasantry, who were taking advantage of the decline in political authority. Rulers and nobles fought with each other more extensively and more intensively in a search for increased revenues. This mutual bloodletting of the upper strata weakened them still further vis-à-vis the direct producers.

Culturally, this was an era of questioning of authority, of iconoclasm, and of turmoil. The central authority of the Papacy weakened. Many new Christian religious movements, egalitarian in emphasis and quasi-heretical, spread. The cultural “center” was not holding. Intellectuals were becoming more independent.

What should be noted, by summary of this whole logistic, is its symmetry. The economic variables went up and then went down. The social structures changed first in one direction, then in the reverse direction. The political hierarchies (landlords over direct producers, rulers over nobles) first grew stronger, then grew weaker. The central culture first affirmed itself, then was widely questioned. In addition, this symmetry was true not merely for European feudal civilization as a whole, but for the various localities. On the whole, there was not too much variation on these themes in different parts of “Europe.” It was as if each local zone reproduced the general pattern. Feudal Europe seemed to be a model of what Durkheim described as mechanical solidarity.

Early Modern Europe, 1450–1750

What changed essentially in the logistic of early modern Europe is that the pattern lost a great deal of its symmetry, both the symmetry between the A- and B-phases, and the geographical symmetry. There was again an expansion followed by a contraction, but the pattern of each phase was more complicated. There was once again a correlation with political and cultural developments, but the pattern here, too, was more complicated. To say that the pattern was more complicated is not to say that a pattern cannot be discerned. But to make sense of it, we have to intrude spatial patternings, or the core–periphery antinomy.

Furthermore, there was a difference in the nature of the B-phase. Whereas in the medieval logistic the B-phase was marked by a regression in population, economic activity, and prices, in the early modern period the B-phase, as measured Europe-wide, was not a regression but a stagnation or a slowdown in the rate of expansion. This can be seen quite clearly in the population figures. The big upward thrust of 1450–1600 became the flatter curve of 1600–1750. There was no equivalent to the Black Death. Furthermore, there was geographic variation. There was no significant slowdown of population growth in northwestern Europe, but there was a downturn in central Europe (primarily the result of the Thirty Years’ War) and a flattening of the curve in eastern and southern Europe.

There was once again expansion in land use, not only internally to Europe, but at its outer frontiers. The A-period was the period of the great explorations and the incorporation of part of the Americas into the production map of Europe. The B-period, by contrast, marked a slowdown of further incorporations, but not a retrocession.

If we look at the land-use patterns, it is true that once again in the A-phase there was a shift toward arable production, and in the B-phase a shift away. But in detail, what happened in early modern times looked quite different from what had happened in the late Middle Ages. In the shift of land use, northwestern Europe moved toward a pattern of complementary arable/pastoral production (up-and-down husbandry and Koppelwirtschaft in the A-phase, and the even more intensive convertible husbandry of the B-phase). Europe-wide, this was compensated for by maintaining specializations in either arable production or stock raising in the peripheral zones, combined with extensive export by them for the use of urban centers of northwestern Europe. Hence, this involved the creation of larger units of production everywhere—the reconstitution of great estates in northwestern Europe via more extensive enclosures and/or the reinvention of “feudal” rights, and the constitution of Gutswirtschaften and plantations in peripheral zones.

On the one hand, European commodity price gaps were reduced considerably. Whereas in late medieval times there were at least three distinct price zones, the gap between them went down from six-to-one to two-to-one between 1500 and 1800. But, on the other hand, there was more commercial activity between the different parts of Europe, and these depended on significant differentials in the price of labor. Thus, while price gaps declined, welfare gaps began to increase. As in the Middle Ages, the A-period was one of increased specialization and the B-period of reduced specialization, but the unit within which this could be measured had changed. In the late Middle Ages, we are talking of specialization within relatively small geographical zones. In early modern Europe, we are talking of specialization within a very large geographical area.

Similar things were happening in industry. The A-period was one of urbanized industry, and the B-period one of more ruralized locations (viz. what has been described as “proto-industrialization”). In the late Middle Ages there was, to be sure, some degree of locational concentration of industry in the old dorsal spine, but this was minor in comparison to the degree to which in early modern Europe there emerged a concentration of industry in northwestern Europe. Furthermore, when there was some despecialization in the early modern B-period via the reemergence of ruralized industries in peripheral zones, this was primarily in the lowest-value textiles. The more profitable, higher-value textiles remained largely in core zones.

The geographically uneven pattern was to be found once again in the modes of labor control. Whereas in the late medieval logistic the A-period essentially meant the institution of serfdom and the B-period its dismantling, more or less everywhere, in the early modern logistic we get very clear geographic variations. The core zone, with more specialized agriculture, did not move back to serfdom, but rather toward a triadic model of landlord, fermier, and subtenant direct producer. This became even more accentuated in the B-period, with the “disappearance” of the yeoman farmer. Most agricultural production was placed for sale on the market.

In the periphery, large-scale units with coerced cash-crop labor emerged—serfs on Gutswirtschaften in eastern Europe; slaves and, for a while, indentured laborers on plantations in the extended Caribbean; successive models of coercion for labor of indigenous peoples in American mines. A significant part of this production was for the market—sold to the core zones in the A-period, sold to “regional” markets in the B-period when the core-zone markets were “closed” to them. These areas also produced for their own needs.

When the profitability of the large estates of the peripheral zones declined in the B-period, the owners compensated by increased exploitation of the labor force. It should be noted that there was probably a steadily increasing pressure on the workforce with the establishment of the capitalist world-economy, shifting from the medieval norm of sunup to noon to the early modern pattern of full-day work, which was de facto further extended in peripheral zones in the B-period.

Furthermore, when the specialization moved from the level of intralocal zones to intra-European, it was possible to have more than two zones. In fact, a third zone appeared, the semiperipheral zone, with its own distinctive patterns—the prevalence of sharecropping, the role as intermediary location in the trading patterns of the world-economy, a combination of core and peripheral economic activities, state structures and wage levels (over the long run) in-between the patterns of core and peripheral regions.

There was one last major difference in the economic landscape of the early modern logistic from that of the medieval logistic. Braudel’s upper story of monopolizing multisector enterprises, cutting across political boundaries, emerged during the early modern period as key economic actors, becoming the key locus of the accumulation of capital.

The politics of a capitalist world-economy were quite different from the politics of a feudal civilization. The states became the key unit of political organization, rather than the local unit with a manor at its center. The states began to take their modern form. The first problem was the creation of significant bureaucracies, both civil and military, such that the rulers were no longer primarily dependent for their revenues on their personal landholdings, but instead had a taxation base. As part of the transition from the feudal system of a ruler’s household to a fully developed bureaucratic system of the kind that Weber described, the states of early modern Europe invented an intermediate system in which the bureaucrats were partially independent entrepreneurs, engaged in “sharecropping” the state. These were the systems of venality of office and tax-farming. As transitional mechanisms, they proved remarkably resilient and successful.

The states were located within, and constrained by, a new institution, the interstate system, which crept surreptitiously into existence during the sixteenth century and was consecrated only in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. In theory, all the states within the system were sovereign, independent, and equal. In practice, there was a hierarchy of state power, one that tended to correlate with the position of the state in the world-economy. This combination of the greater importance of states and the creation of an interstate system modified seriously the impact of each phase of the logistic on the distribution of power.

In the medieval logistic, in the A-period there had been an increase in the power of the seigniors over the direct producers and of the rulers over the nobility, and in the B-period a corresponding decline. In the early modern logistic there was an increase in the power of the ruler over the nobility in the core zones (absolutism) but a steady decrease of such power in the periphery (e.g., the enormous increase in the power of the Polish Diet), with the situation in semiperipheral states being in-between. The story is somewhat different with regard to seignior/dependent relations. Whereas the power of the seigniors clearly grew in the periphery, especially during the B-period, the situation was more balanced in the core zones, where the rulers were seeking to gain direct political control over their subjects, and to gain an ever larger portion of their monetary payments. In order to do this, they had to try to diminish the political power of the seigniors over the direct producers. While this was a steady process in the A-period, it slowed down in the B-period. Nonetheless, one may argue that, in general, seignior/dependent relations evolved in the direction of the lessening of seigniorial power—a process that would bear its fruit only in the nineteenth century, when the citizen finally came fully under the direct control of the state without any significant local intermediaries. This was not, however, true of peripheral zones, and is not even to this day.

One other political difference is to be noted. The development of a capitalist system brought with it, obviously, a growing sector of bourgeoisie. Once again, this was not at all evenly spread throughout the European world-economy. The bourgeoisie was disproportionately located in the core zones and virtually eliminated in peripheral zones (at least bourgeois of local origin). Furthermore, as a result the national politics of each zone changed correspondingly.

Finally, briefly, in the cultural arena, the same spatial differentiation may be noted. Whereas feudal Europe was up to a point culturally homogeneous (at least in terms of the dominant cultural entity, the Church), early modern Europe developed a major religious schism, which over the period comes to correlate highly, albeit imperfectly, with the basic economic schism. It does not seem that the correlation is accidental.

The early modern logistic does repeat itself. Of course, there are certain processes of development of the system—spatial expansion and incorporation of new zones into the world-economy, the repeated demonopolizations and the search for new technologies on which to base new monopolies, the steady processes of urbanization, proletarianization, and political co-optations—which seem to change their shape but do not in fact change the basic spatially asymmetric, inegalitarian structure of the world-system.

This then is the basic difference between the two logistics: symmetry versus asymmetry, multiple local divisions of labor versus a singular world-economy-wide division of labor, an A/B that is up-down versus one that takes a steplike form (or a ratchet effect). This is what Durkheim calls the difference between mechanical and organic solidarity. To be sure, the crucial debate concerns the degree to which the relatively slight differences within Europe at the beginning of the long sixteenth century (and subsequently within the geographically widening capitalist world-economy) became a much wider gulf by the twentieth century. Some argue that this was only partially true, the quantitative difference being insufficiently great. This position seems to be hard to sustain. Others argue, however, that it became true only in the nineteenth century or even only in the twentieth. It is of course possible to make such a case, since the polarization has been steady and increasing in rate. But it seems implausible to date the life of an organism only from its most fully ripened stage, the point at which it is about to die. Youth has its claims to reality.

The Concept of Hegemony in a World-Economy

One of the key concepts in world-systems analysis is that there are two different kinds of world-system that the world has known up to now—a world-economy and a world-empire. A world-empire is defined as a structure that has a single overall political structure and a single overall division of labor. Han China and the Roman Empire are two good examples of a world-empire. The concept of hegemony refers to an attribute that a state may have in the interstate system of a world-economy.

A hegemonic power is quite different from a world-empire. The political superstructure of a world-economy is not a bureaucratic empire but an interstate system composed of allegedly sovereign states. And a hegemonic state is not simply a strong state, not even simply the strongest single state within the interstate system, but a state that is significantly stronger than other strong (strong, not weak) states. This describes a situation that has occurred repeatedly but not at all continuously. That is to say, there are periods when a hegemonic power exists within the interstate system of a world-economy, and others when there is no hegemonic power but rather a “balance of power” among multiple strong states.

What does it mean to say that there exists a hegemonic power? It means that one state is able to impose its set of rules on the interstate system, and thereby create a world political order as it thinks wise. In this situation, the hegemonic state has certain extra advantages for enterprises located within it or protected by it, advantages not accorded by the “market” but obtained through political pressures.

I think it is useful to think of hegemony not as a structure but as a process in time. Furthermore, I think it is a process that doesn’t have just two moments in time (rise and fall) but, by analogy with how Schumpeter conceived of Kondratieff cycles, four moments in time. If one starts the story when there is an uncontested hegemonic power, the first moment occurs in the period immediately thereafter. It is the moment of the slow decline of the hegemonic power, during which two powers emerge as contenders for the succession. The moment after that is when the decline has become definitive. We can think of this second moment as one in which there is a “balance of power” in the world-system. During this moment, the two contenders for hegemony struggle to secure geopolitical and world-economic advantage. The third moment is when the struggle becomes so acute that order breaks down and there is a “thirty years’ war” between the contenders for hegemony. And the fourth moment is when one of the contenders wins definitively and is therefore able to establish a true hegemony—until, of course, the slow decline begins.

Up to now, there have been three hegemonic powers in the history of the modern world-system. The United Provinces was the hegemonic power in the mid-seventeenth century, briefly, from 1648 to the 1660s. The United Kingdom was the hegemonic power for a slightly longer time in the nineteenth century, from 1815 to 1848, perhaps a little longer. The United States was the hegemonic power in the mid-twentieth century, from 1945 to 1967/1973.

After Dutch hegemony, the two powers contending for the succession were England and France. After British hegemony, the two powers were the United States and Germany. After U.S. hegemony, the two powers were an emerging northeast Asian structure (Japan-Korea-China) and a still only partially stabilized European Union.

Slow but Inevitable Decline of the Hegemonic Power

Hegemonic powers decline because they cannot sustain forever their quasi monopoly of world geopolitical power. This is because in pursuing their economic interests, they eventually undermine their economic advantages. And in pursuing the maintenance of their political-military power, they eventually undermine their political-military power.

The ambiguity of the relationship of the hegemonic power and its allies is clearest in the economic sphere. On the one hand, the hegemonic power seeks to restrain the economic strengthening of its allies in order to maintain its own “extra” advantage. On the other hand, the hegemonic power needs markets, and it also needs allies strong enough to help keep the “enemy” at bay. Both of these requirements inevitably lead to the economic strengthening of the allies. The productive superiority of the hegemonic power over other strong powers disappears or at least is much diminished.

So inevitably, hegemony undermines itself, first of all economically—a decline caused directly by the economic strengthening of the allies. In this period, the declining hegemonic power has to use its politico-ideological wiles to maintain economic extra advantage, something that it can do at first but that becomes increasingly difficult as the years go by, particularly insofar as the “enemy” seems to become less dangerous. The legitimacy of the extra advantage begins to be questioned. The hegemonic power has to resort to asserting the validity of its ideology. And the very act of asserting the validity of an ideology not only serves as proof of its decline but has a further negative impact on its appeal.

Furthermore, as part of its efforts to maintain the world order it has established, the hegemonic power begins to invest much in military structures. It finds that, from time to time, it needs actually to use its military forces. Using the military is costly and diverts finance from economic investments.

To be sure, in this period the hegemonic power still has immense military power. But in the period of real hegemony it seldom needed to use the military power, because everyone assumed it was there and was overwhelming. In the period of decline, it begins to need to use it, and even if it wins the military struggles, the very use of the military power undermines its long-range effectiveness. It means that others are daring to challenge the hegemonic power militarily. And one dare leads to another.

The Balance of Power

There seem to be some patterns in what happens as the two contenders for hegemonic succession grow stronger and more assertive. In each case up to now, one contender has been primarily land based and the other primarily sea based (or today, sea/air based). And in the two first hegemonic cycles, the land-based power sought to gain dominance by transforming the world-economy into a world-empire. Napoleon tried to conquer all of Europe, and Hitler tried to conquer the world. In response, the sea-based power sought to become not an imperial but a hegemonic power.

To do this, the sea-based powers constructed grand alliances, and first of all an alliance with the erstwhile hegemonic power—England with the United Provinces, the United States with Great Britain. By analogy, we might expect that the putative northeast Asian structure will seek an alliance with the United States. In the past two cases, the erstwhile hegemonic power became the junior partner of the rising sea (or sea/air) power.

In the beginning, the rising sea-based power has tended not to have a significant land army, which would be constructed only at a later stage. The absence of an army at this early stage had one clear advantage: it saved a great deal of money, money that was invested instead in the economic infrastructure of the country, enabling it to win the crucial struggle to be the most competitive power in the sphere of production for the world market.

In the previous two instances, productive advantage led to commercial advantage, which in turn led to financial advantage. It was the point at which the rising power had all three advantages that corresponded to the moment of true hegemony. This sequence in the Dutch case is discussed in this volume. It was also true, as described for the Dutch and as would again be the case for the British, that decline repeated the same order—the declining hegemonic power first losing productive advantage, then commercial advantage, and guarding financial advantage the longest.

The process of decline is not disastrous for the erstwhile hegemonic power. It remains for a long time the strongest country, with all the prestige that has accrued to it as the hegemonic power. It remains normally an extremely rich country, even if it is comparatively less rich than before. There is still a lot of fat in its national wealth, which allows its residents to lead a very comfortable existence. The decline is a slow process at first, and of course there is an attempt to deny its reality, to others and even to oneself. But eventually decline takes its toll.

This period of decline is not one in which the previous hegemonic power is weak. Quite the contrary. It remains for a long while the most powerful country in the world, politically and militarily (but no longer economically), but it is no longer hegemonic. That is, it begins to benefit less and less from the “extra” advantages of hegemony. This period of slow but steady decline can be considered a period of slow but steady disintegration of world order, the previous order.

It was during the period of the “balance of power” that the declining hegemonic power began to invest significantly in the economic activities of the rising power to which it was becoming allied as a junior partner. It thereby preserved for a time its strength in the financial sphere, and found a fruitful outlet for its surplus capital.

Disorder in the world-system tended to grow. The erstwhile hegemonic power showed itself to be incapable of ensuring order. The two rivals for the hegemonic mantle became more and more vigorous in their attempts to ensure their primacy by acquiring appropriate geopolitical alliances and trying to create the bases for new leading products on the basis of which they could create powerful monopolized sectors of production. The “balance of power” began to seem unacceptable to both rivals. Order then broke down definitively.

The “Thirty Years’ War”

Eventually, we reached the moment of total disorder, the moment of “world war” or, as I prefer to think of it, of a “thirty years’ war.” The original Thirty Years’ War was from 1618 to 1648, out of which the United Provinces emerged hegemonic. The second one was the Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars of 1792–1815, out of which the United Kingdom emerged hegemonic. And the third was the period 1914–1945, out of which the United States emerged hegemonic.

There was a relatively common pattern in the three “thirty years’ wars.” Each of them involved warfare throughout most of the relatively well-developed areas of the world-economy of the time, and each was immensely destructive to the physical infrastructure and to the populations in the area. These “world wars” were not, however, continuous. They were conducted, if you will, in fits and starts.

Each “thirty years’ war” was ambiguous ideologically. The Dutch allied with Catholic powers. Great Britain allied with the most autocratic powers in Europe. The United States allied with the Soviet Union. During each “thirty years’ war,” the emphasis was not on ideological purity but on defeating the other contender. In each case, the eventual hegemonic power developed a strong land army during the course of the world war, and by the end this land army of the winning rival had become a significant element in its military victory. And in each case, the erstwhile contender was definitively defeated and lost its vigor (at least for a while), both militarily and economically, as well as politically of course.

Finally, in each case, the hegemonic victor was largely spared from physical destruction during the war. The combination of being spared from destruction and the wartime development of the economic infrastructure meant that, at the end of the world war, the hegemonic power had an enormous economic advantage over all other major powers. It could produce the most profitable products of the era more efficiently than all others—not only the producers in peripheral zones but producers in other erstwhile or future core zones.

True Hegemony

The end of the world war signaled the beginning of real hegemony, the last stage in the cycle, or the first. Weary of war, weary of the breakdown of order, weary of political uncertainty, the world welcomed, or seemed to welcome, the “leadership” of the now hegemonic power. The hegemonic power offered a vision of the world. The Dutch offered religious tolerance (cuius regio, eius religio), respect for national sovereignty (Westphalia), and mare liberum. The British offered the vision of the liberal state in Europe based on a constitutional parliamentary order, political incorporation of the “dangerous classes,” the gold standard, and the end of slavery. The United States offered multiparty elections, human rights, (moderate) decolonization, and the free movement of capital.

These visions were ideology, not necessarily practice. As Sir George Downing said in 1663 about the Dutch vision: “It is mare liberum in the British seas, but mare clausum on the coast of Africa and the east Indies.”1 (That is where the Dutch held the advantage.) Hegemonic powers have never allowed ideology to interfere with the pursuit of their interests. Nonetheless, these visions were the basis on which the hegemonic power claimed legitimacy for its hegemonic position, and this vision no doubt played a major role in its ability to maintain world order.

In the period of true hegemony, it was essential for the hegemonic power to construct both an “enemy” to its world vision and a network of alliances. It was less that the alliances were constructed in order to combat the enemy than that the enemy was constructed in order to control the allies. The hegemonic power sought to ensure that the allies bent their immediate economic interests to those of the hegemonic power, thus creating those “extra” advantages that are the purpose and perquisite of hegemony.

The Dutch forged a Protestant alliance with England against the French. The British in the period after 1815 forged the Entente Cordiale with France against the authoritarian trio of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. And the United States created NATO (and the U.S.–Japan Defense Treaty) against the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. In each case, the allies were economically hampered by the alliance, at least until the period of decline of hegemonic power (and to some extent even then).

The leadership that the hegemonic power offered was not only politico-economic but cultural as well, and not only in the arts but, more important, in the structures of knowledge. This was true of the Dutch, who provided for a long time the locus where intellectuals could congregate when forced into exile from their own countries. How the British and then the Americans forged a certain version of the structures of knowledge is something to which volume 4 devotes much space. This control of the cultural sphere is, along with control of the financial sphere, the last redoubt of hegemonic advantage. But it, too, passes in the course of time.

Hegemony is a critical mechanism in the functioning of the modern world-system. The cycles of hegemony are crucial markers in the cyclical rhythms of the capitalist world-economy. In a sense, it is the rise and fall of the hegemonic powers that prevented the transformation of the world-economy into a world-empire—something that had happened regularly before the creation of the modern world-system. The mechanism of hegemony allowed the modern world-system to become the first world-economy in the history of humankind to survive, flourish, and expand to encompass the entire globe. Without it, capitalism as a historical system would not have been able to survive, and thereby to transform the world.

INTRODUCTION: CRISIS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY?

I went to see the square where the merchants assemble about the affairs of their trade from noon till half past one o’clock. This square, which is longer than it is broad, is surrounded by a large open gallery or corrider, supported by stone pillars, which serves as shelter in case of rain. This place is called the Exchange, and here are to be seen merchants of all nations, the diversity of whose clothes and language is no less pleasing than the beauty of the place. Above all, nothing is more interesting than to witness the hurrying of those who are called brokers, who are the men employed by the great merchants to traffic for the bills of exchange, or to transact their other affairs to see them scurrying from one part to another all over this square, anyone would think that they were mad.

The work of historians of European price trends between the two world wars1 along with the theory of secular economic cycles (trends that go up and down over approximately 250 years) with its two phases (A and B), elaborated by François Simiand2 have bequeathed us a generalization about early modern European history that still seems largely accepted: There was expansion in the sixteenth century (phase A) and contraction, depression, or “crisis” in the seventeenth (phase B). The dates that demark these phases, the nature of the changes that occurred (even if we limit the discussion to economic matters), the regional variations, and above all, the consequences and causes of the flows are matters of much debate; but the generalization remains.

In 1953, Roland Mousnier wrote a large tome on these two centuries (which has since seen four revised editions), and he opened the part on the seventeenth century, defined as the period between 1598 and 1715, in a dramatically tremolent tone:

The seventeenth century is the epoch of a crisis that affected man in his entirety, in all his activities—economic, social, political, religious, scientific, artistic—and in all his being, at the deepest level of his vital powers, his feelings, and his will. The crisis may be said to be continuous, but with violent ups and downs.3

A year after this was written, E. J. Hobsbawm published an article in Past and Present that launched an important scholarly debate. The thesis was that “the European economy passed through a ‘general crisis’ during the seventeenth century, the last phase of the general transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy.”4

The same theme is found in the major surveys of European agriculture by Wilhelm Abel and B. H. Slicher van Bath. For Abel, “the dominant tendency of prices in Europe, during the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, was downward.”5 To be sure, Slicher van Bath hesitates at using the word crisis, asserting that the period between 1650 and 1750 was “more truly an unusually prolonged depression”;6 but is that so much less? In any case, he does not disagree with Abel’s assertion that the period represented a “reversal of the secular trend.”7 We could enlarge the scholarly consensus further if we used still more cautious language. Pierre Vilar speaks of “the relative retreat (recul) of the seventeenth century”;8 and Pierre Chaunu defines the difference between periods A and B not as “growth [versus] decline (décroissance)” but rather as “growth [versus] less growth.”9 René Baehrel is the most reluctant to see any crisis at all; but even he accepts the concept for the very limited period between 1690 and 1730.10 As the terms get weaker and the time shorter, we may wonder if much is left. Ivo Schöffer begins his article on this period on a note of doubt:

It sometimes seems as if the seventeenth century, wedged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, has no features of its own. With Renascence and Reformation on the one side, Enlightenment and Revolution on the other, for the century in between we are left with but vague terms like “transition” and “change.”11

Perhaps this is only because, as Jean Meuvret argued in 1944, “we have much less information” about the period between the two moments of clear price rise.12 Shall we then refuse to characterize this period and allow it to slip away in the complexities of blurred and sometimes confusing data? Or shall we say, with Schöffer: “It may be traditionalism, against our better judgment, but we simply have to give the seventeenth century a place of its own. Our imagination needs it.”13

We could leave such a decision to the whims of literary fashion were it not for the important theoretical issues behind the fuss about nomenclature. There is, first of all, the question of whether such things as “secular trends” of the economy exist at all,14 and if so, how they relate to politics and culture. If there are secular trends, does each successive pair of phases (from the Middle Ages to the present) reflect a different kind of economy, as Gaston Imbert argues?15 or are they all part of one long period of “indirect agricultural consumption” running from about 1150 to about 1850, as Slicher van Bath argues?16 or is there a crucial rupture somewhere in the middle? If there is a crucial rupture, we are faced with the additional question of when it occurs.

There are several familiar positions on this last question. One is that the fundamental break, the significant rupture, occurs with the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. To Carlo Cipolla both this “event” and the Agricultural Revolution of the eighth millenium B.C. represent “deep breaches in the continuity of the historical process.”17 D. C. Coleman makes the same point in a different way and says there is more continuity than change in European economic development from 1500 to 1750: “Where light breaks through, the technology of 1500–1750 is revealed to be, on the whole, more static than mobile.”18 Similarly a whole school of Marxist thought arrives at the same conclusion regarding the timing of any rupture, insisting, as does Balibar, that period between 1500 and 1750 is the period of the “transition to capitalism” and that after 1750 is the period of capitalism proper.19 In the same spirit as Balibar is G. N. Clark’s distinction between the “early capitalism” of the later Middle Ages and the “fully developed capitalism” of the nineteenth century, the limits of the first stage being clearly demarked “from Machiavelli to Burke, from Columbus to Warren Hastings, from the Fuggers to the decline of Amsterdam, from Giotto to Tiepolo. It stops short of Adam Smith, James Watt, the Rothschilds, Napoleon, Robert Owen.”20

To another school of thought, the rupture involves not the Industrial Revolution, but the expansion of Europe, the creation of a world market, and the emergence of capitalism—occurring more or less in the long sixteenth century. Simiand, for example, marks the sixteenth century as the beginning of the period of long waves.21 Paul Sweezy attacks the Marxist tradition represented by Balibar and argues that for Marx “the period of manufacture proper” (from about 1500 to 1750) and “the period of modern industry” were not “two different social systems but rather two phases of capitalism.”22 The rupture thus comes in the sixteenth century. Fernand Braudel makes essentially the same point, although spreading the period over more time:

It is clear, in fact, that from an economic point of view, the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries constitute more or less a period of European and world history which effectively challenges [met en cause] a kind of economic Ancien Régime.23

A third group offers a point of rupture between the period marked by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, on the one hand, and that marked by the long sixteenth century, on the other. They suggest the mid-seventeenth century as the turning point of modernity. Hobsbawm seems to be in this camp, and Pierre Chaunu makes this position virtually the theme of his synthesis regarding “classical Europe.” In the introduction to his book, he specifically rejects the points of view of scholars who fail to see that the “intellectual origins of the French Revolution” are to be found in Spinoza and who forget that the “quantitative and spatial expansion” of the sixteenth century was not a truly profound change but merely the “end result of a revolution begun in the twelfth century.” For Chaunu, “the most important qualitative changes occurred in the seventeenth century,” the first among them being the “mathematization of the world.”24 As proof that one can find Marxists on every side of every question, one advocate of this third possible rupture point is Academician E. M. Zhukov of the USSR, who asserted to assembled world historians in Stockholm in 1960:

The conventional and terminal boundary of the medieval era, in the opinion of Soviet historical Science, is the middle of the seventeenth century. This is because feudalism began outliving itself economically by that time and was already a handicap to the development of productive forces.25

Three dates, then, for a rupture: around 1500, 1650, and 1800; three (or more) theories of history: 1800, with an emphasis on industrialism as the crucial change; 1650, with an emphasis either on the moment when the first “capitalist” states (Britain and the Netherlands) emerge or on the emergence of the presumably key “modern” ideas of Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke; and 1500, with an emphasis on the creation of a capitalist world-system, as distinct from other forms of economies. It follows that the answer one gives to the query, “crisis of the seventeenth century?”, is a function of one’s presuppositions about the modern world. The term crisis ought not to be debased into a mere synonym for cyclical shift. It should be reserved for times of dramatic tension that are more than a conjuncture and that indicate a turning point in structures of longue durée.

Crisis would then describe those infrequent historical moments in which the usual mechanisms of compensation within a social system prove so ineffective from the point of view of so many important social actors that a major restructuring of the economy begins to occur (not a mere redistribution of advantage within the system), which is later seen in retrospect as having been inevitable. Of course a given crisis was not truly inevitable; but the alternative was a collapse of the old system such that many (most?) social actors considered this even more traumatic or disagreeable than the structural revolution which did take place. If this is what we mean by crisis, then “crisis of the seventeenth century?” becomes a significant intellectual question. It really means, from this perspective: When and how did the world-historic “transition from feudalism to capitalism” occur? The answer requires a definition of capitalism as a social system, as a mode of production, and, indeed, as a civilization as well. As we choose our dates, so we choose our scale of similarities and differences.

The argument of this work is that the modern world-system took the form of a capitalist world-economy that had its genesis in Europe in the long sixteenth century and that involved the transformation of a particular redistributive or tributary mode of production, that of feudal Europe (Braudel’s “economic Ancien Régime”) into a qualitatively different social system. Since that time, the capitalist world-economy has (a) geographically expanded to cover the entire globe; (b) manifested a cyclical pattern of expansion and contraction (Simiand’s phases A and B) and shifting geographical locations of economic roles (the rise and fall of hegemonies, the movements up and down of particular core, peripheral, and semiperipheral zones); and (c) undergone a process of secular transformation, including technological advance, industrialization, proletarianization, and the emergence of structured political resistance to the system itself—a transformation that is still going on today.

In such a perspective, the seventeenth century, taken to cover a period running approximately from 1600 to 1750, is primarily an example of the cyclical pattern of expansion and contraction. In terms of the overall geography of the world-system, the boundaries created circa 1500 did not significantly change until after 1750. As for the ongoing secular processes of change, no marked qualitative leap is observable in the period from 1600 to 1750. We are arguing, therefore, for the essential continuity between the long sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, with the one great difference of expansion (a) and contraction (B), of growth and less growth. How shall we provide evidence for this way of summarizing reality? At one level the answer is quite simple. We shall try to identify the empirical differences between expansion and contraction, to suggest why this cyclical pattern occurs, and to outline the consequences in terms of class-formation, political struggles, and cultural perceptions of the turn in economic fortune. From this empirical description, we shall try to specify more clearly the theory of capitalist development as part of a larger theory of sociohistorical change.

We are arguing that although the boundaries of the world-economy remained largely the same in the period from 1500 to 1750, there was a difference between the periods of 1450 (or 1500) to 1650 and 1600 to 1750 (the overlap in dates is deliberate) regarding allocation of resources, economic roles, and wealth and poverty and location of wage employment and industrial enterprise. To demonstrate this assertion is not easy; a convincing proof requires the construction of several entirely new series of economic indicators, which would be intrinsically difficult and extrinsically perhaps impossible. We might want a series of successive synchronie maps at intervals of 25 years that would show the volume, value, and direction of trade in both luxuries and essentials and “cumulative” maps for 1500–1650 and 1600–1750. Presumably, if our guesses are correct, such maps should show that European trade involving primarily essentials rather than luxuries was carried on within boundaries that lay between eastern Europe, on the one side, and Russia and the Turkish Balkans on the other, and between the Christian and the Moslem Mediterraneans; and these boundaries would include the Americas but exclude Africa and Asia.

Above all, the maps should show no significant differences of pattern between the period of 1500 to 1650 and that of 1600 to 1750 with regard to external boundaries, except for the inclusion of the Caribbean, as we shall see. On the other hand, we should find certain significant changes with regard to economic, political, and cultural patterns within the boundaries of the European world-economy between the two periods. The location and concentration of industries should be different (or at least in the process of changing), as should the terms of trade between industry and agriculture, the percentages of wage employment in the various zones, and the real wages of wage earners. Different state-machineries should be getting stronger and weaker, and the rates of increase in agricultural, industrial, and demographic production should shift. The areas that were core, semiperipheral, and peripheral should change somewhat, and most importantly, the relative degree of world surplus appropriated by each of the regions should shift.

Even before specifying the anticipated directions of change, given our theory of capitalist development, it should be clear to the reader that quantitative data of the kind required are scarce—at best, partial and sporadic. Particularly lacking are overall data on the world-economy that would permit testing relational statements. If one dreams of making firm statements regarding variables of the social structure, the situation is even worse. We ought to find shifting patterns of class-formation and changes in the definition of ethno–national boundaries between the two periods of 1500 to 1650 and 1600 to 1750, especially within the world-economy as a whole rather than within the boundaries of particular states, and here our data are even thinner. At this point, all we can do is analyze scattered data, sketch out what seems more and less solid, review explanatory models that encompass the data, suggest a theoretical view, and arrive at some notion of our empirical lacunae and theoretical conundrums. It is in this spirit that we look at what the historical literature has meant by the “crisis,” the “relative retreat,” or the “lesser growth” of the seventeenth century.

THE B-PHASE

For Slicher van Bath, the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of the periods of agricultural expansion and contraction in Europe since the Carolingian era is the rise and fall in the price of cereals, vis-à-vis other merchandise and wages. It was a question of favorable or unfavorable terms of trade for cereals. He sees a contraction, meaning unfavorable terms of trade, for cereals in the period from 1600 (or 1650) to 1750.1 It is important to underline this definition of contraction, because the relative decline of the price of wheat in Slicher van Bath’s belief, is far more important than its absolute decline.2 Side by side with a shift in the terms of trade (avoiding, for the moment, all suggestion of causal sequence) is what K. Glamann calls a turning point around 1650 in “the great east–west grain trade,” apparently occurring because “southern and western Europe [seemed] to have become more self-sufficient in grain.”3 This self-sufficiency is attributed to an “increased production of foodstuffs in western Europe during the second half of the seventeenth century, coinciding with a general stagnation of population,”4 resulting presumably in oversupply. However, Glamann also notes that at this same time “Europe was glutted with pepper.”5

But how can oversupply be suggested when the problem of the times was presumably too little food? Schöffer speaks of “permanent, sometimes latent, structural phenomena” existing in Europe “from the disasters of the fourteenth century until far into the eighteenth century,” primarily “the continuous tension between food production and food distribution on the one hand and the population’s food requirements on the other.” The result was “a situation where malnutrition was endemic, hunger often epidemic.”6 Domenico Sella sees the well-being of the early modern period as dependent “on whether food supplies kept pace with population,”7 yet others speak of production rising faster than population. Clearly we have an anomaly that can only be resolved with a clearer notion of the sequence of events. Let us see first what other events occurred.

Certain agronomic shifts are reported for the seventeenth century: the process of land reclamation was at least slowed down, probably stopped, possibly reversed. Unlike the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which “invented land” (in Chaunu’s felicitous image), the seventeenth century, especially after 1650, was a time of “consolidation,” but a consolidation “without merit.”8 In addition to the cessation of expansion of land area, the average yield ratio of cereals fell throughout Europe in the period between 1600 and 1699, to a greater degree for barley and oats than for wheat and rye, and fell more sharply in central, northern, and eastern Europe than in western Europe.9 De Maddalena calls this fall of yield ratios “a remarkable phenomenon.”10 Another major agronomic shift was in the choice of crops to be cultivated: first, a shift in the use of land for cereals to its use for pasturage in the cooler areas and for wine in the warmer areas;11 second, a shift from the cultivation of cereals to increased production of forage crops, vegetables that require intensive labor, and commercial crops (flax, hemp, hops, rapeseed, madder, and pastels);12 and third, a shift from high-priced cereals (rye and wheat) to low-priced ones (barley, oats, and buckwheat)13 and a reduction in the purchase of fertilizer (both humus and marl) for the production of cereals.14

Alongside the purely agronomic changes, a number of shifts in the social organization of agricultural production occurred. De Maddalena speaks of a general “degredation of the peasant class”15 during the seventeenth century, during which “the landowners, adducing ‘urgens et improvisa necessitas’ proceeded to confiscate farms formerly owned by peasants.”16 He notes also the “expropriation—it might better be termed usurpation—of a third of the communal property (hence the term ‘triage’),” which affected the peasants by reducing the area in which they had rights for pasturage and wood gathering.17 Slicher van Bath agrees that the rural population suffered for the most part more than the urban population, but he distinguishes between the small farmers and the cottagers on the one hand and the laborers and house servants on the other; the former pair having “had it relatively worse” than the two wage-earning categories.18 Meuvret finds a very obvious explanation for this:

For every cultivator-owner/tenant (laboureur) who complains of his small profit because of the price of wheat, how many laborers (manoeuvriers) or artisans rejoice at the lower price they have to pay on those few occasions when they must purchase it.19

In general, Slicher van Bath argues that the unfavorable financial position of the peasant owners and tenants (fermiers-propriétaires) went along with a reduction in tenancies (fermages) and especially in the number of small tenant-farmers (petits fermiers).20 The two reductions were paralleled by the fact that in general the size of the agricultural unit (exploitation agricole) became larger.21 Nonetheless, despite larger units and more costly labor there was less improvement in agricultural equipment in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, although there were more innovations in the tools used in dairy farming, such as the improvement in the churn.22

Industry, like agriculture, is said to have lost its “force of acceleration” in the seventeenth century, although somewhat later.23 It is not clear what this meant in terms of total European production. Sella argues that the fluctuations were relatively small because when population expanded in the sixteenth century, real wages declined, and thus things were “basically unchanged”; when there was a rise in per capita incomes after 1650, however, the increased individual demand “may have been offset [globally] in part by sagging population figures.”24 The uncertainty of such an analysis is stated bluntly by Hobsbawm: “What happened to production? We simply do not know.”25

What we do seem to know is that there was a shift in the location of industry. For Slicher van Bath, it is “well known that during periods of agricultural contraction—end of the Middle Ages and of the seventeenth century—rural industry appears on the scene, especially the textile industry.”26 This occurred, it is argued, because of the cheapness and attractiveness to industry of underemployed rural labor. Since such industry was based on a low ratio of fixed capital, at least until the mid-eighteenth century, Romano argues that “consequently, it was extremely easy to liquidate a business, taking out one’s capital”;27 this may have been true of the textile industry, but the argument is difficult to apply to the other two of the three major industries of the time (according to Romano’s own list)—mineral extraction and shipbuilding.28 This shift of textile production to the rural areas was combined with the installation of the only significant new industries—brewing, distilling, and paste manufacture, which were all bared on the transformation of cereals.29

Apparently, the counterpart of declining cereal prices were rising real wages. “In the second half of the seventeenth century, . . . as food prices tended to fall . . . wage-rates held their own or failed to drop to quite the same extent.”30 This is of course the inverse of what happened in the long sixteenth century.31 Presumably, this resulted in part from the relative “stickiness” in wages, but even more because “all over Europe there was a marked labor shortage from 1625–1750.”32 If this is so, how do we reconcile it with the fact that the seventeenth century has been thought to be a period of relatively high unemployment of underemployment? As Glamann notes:

The wage-earning labourer may have enjoyed some increase in real wages. This presupposes, however, that he was in employment, which cannot be assumed in an age such as this which is characterised by disturbed economic conditions. Many of the economic writers of the seventeenth century, at any rate, based themselves on the assumption that large-scale under-employment prevailed in their communities.33

Any discussion of prices (whether of cereals or wage labor) is especially bedeviled in this period by the relation of nominal prices to prices in bullion.34 It is generally agreed, as Mousnier notes, that “the decline is greater than it seems for many countries, if instead of looking only at nominal prices calculated in money of account, one calculates the price in its corresponding weight in precious metals.”35 Therefore, if we look at metallic prices, as Vilar says, there is “one sure fact: internationally, prices, in terms of silver, collapsed around 1660 and hit a first low point in 1680 and doubtless a second about 1720–1721.”36 The decline in metallic prices must be set beside a decline in the quantity of bullion in circulation.

Geoffrey Parker summarizes the overall situation:

On balance it seems safe to assume that Europe’s net stock of precious metals augmented moderately between 1500 and 1580; that it increased rapidly between 1580 and 1620; and that it probably declined from the 1620s, when silver mining in Europe collapsed and the remittances of American silver fell sharply, until the arrival of the Brazil gold after 1700.

There is no doubt that the growth in the volume of money available in Europe was extremely important. Europe’s trade in 1700 could clearly not have been carried on with the slender monetary resources of 1500. A crucial question, however, remains: was it enough? Was the net increase in Europe’s monetary stock, substantial as it was, equal to the rapidly rising demand for means of payment? There are several indications that it was not, particularly after 1600.37

Not only was there a shortage of monetary stock, but there was a corresponding shortage of credit such that for at least the half-century running from 1630 to 1680, as Spooner notes, the total available quantity of “silver, copper, gold, credit [taken together] barely suffice, resulting in an uneasy and mediocre monetary life that was both reflection and consequence of a general slowdown of material life in the world.”38 This explains the wave of counterfeit money, the “pervasive plague of the seventeenth century.”39 What did this shift of prices mean for the global quantity of trade? As in the case of European industrial production, virtually no global data are available.

A construct by Frédéric Mauro of what he calls intercontinental trade relations divides the world into five continents: Europe, Africa, Temperate America, Tropical America, and Asia. In our terms, these are not entirely appropriate geographic categories because Africa and Asia are external to the world-economy while the Americas are peripheral to it and because Mauro places in one category both the core and peripheral areas of Europe and thereby loses crucial data.40 Nonetheless, it is useful to look at his estimates in Table 1; the layout has been altered by me in the interest of clarity. Assuming the correctness of the comparisons in the table we note that trade to and from Europe and worldwide trade moved in parallel directions, and in the seventeenth century, both indicate an interim of stability as opposed to earlier and later periods of expansion.

TABLE 1

Comparison of the Extent of Intercontinental Trade to and from Five Areas and Worldwide in Relation to the Previous Century^a

Turning to the one remaining significant variable, population, we find that estimates of demographers tend to vary within narrow limits. The seventeenth century was characterized by Reinhard and Armengaud as “stagnation, if not . . . slight decline (recul)” but not a “catastrophic [crisis] of the kind that occurred in the fourteenth century”;41 and Fr. Roger Mols says that “despite the terrible crises which wracked it, the seventeenth seems also to have experienced a slight gain in population.”42 Slight decline, slight gain—in short, a leveling off.

What emerges from this survey of general European economic patterns for 1600 to 1750 (period B) in comparison with the period from 1450 or 1500 to 1650 (period A) and indeed with the period following 1750 is a picture of an economic plateau, a time of respite, concern, reshuffling; but was it a “crisis” in the sense that there was a “crisis of feudalism” from 1300 to 1450?43 It seems not, for although “its chief symptoms were the same,” the 1650–1750 “depression was of a far milder sort than the serious economic decline of the late Middle Ages.”44 If this is true, this is precisely what must be explained, and the explanation we offer is that the contraction between 1600 and 1750, unlike that between 1300 and 1450, was not a “crisis” because the hump had already been passed, the corner turned, and the crisis of feudalism essentially resolved. The contraction of the seventeenth century was one that occurred within a functioning, ongoing capitalist world-economy. It was the first of many worldwide contractions or depressions that this system would experience; but the system was already sufficiently ensconced in the interests of politically dominant strata within the world-economy, and the energies of these strata turned grosso modo and collectively not to undoing the system, but instead to discovering the means by which they could make it work to their profit, even, or perhaps especially, in a period of economic contraction.

The capitalist strata were in the seventeenth century a mixed bag, hardly yet a coherent class-formation and certainly not yet constituting a class that was totally conscious of itself and certain of its right to rule, to reign as well as to gain; but they were very capable of making a profit against great odds. As Jeannin says of the Danzig merchants, after explaining some of the very complex calculations they had to make circa 1600: their “mode of reckoning shows that the merchants understood the profit-mechanisms. They traded in such a way that one can actually ascribe to them an understanding of the concept of the ‘terms of trade’ in its most concrete meaning.”45 A consideration of the profits that could be derived from the shifting terms of trade leads us to the central explanation for the economic behavior of this period. As Vilar suggests, it is less on the ups and downs of prices that we should focus than on the “disparity in the movements” of prices.46

These disparities involve both time sequences and geographical locations, and their significance is not merely in the profits that could be made, but in their effect on the system as a whole. Topolski says that the contraction was not a “general economic crisis in the sense of a stagnation, lull, or recession caused by a weakening of economic activity”; it was rather a period marked by an “increasing disequilibrium”47within the system as a whole. Increasing disequilibrium is not something to be placed in contrast to contraction; in a period of contraction disequilibrium is in fact one of the key mechanisms of capitalism, one of the factors permitting concentration and increased accumulation of capital. Vilar’s explanation is a good one: “In every general conjuncture, different countries react differently, whence the inequalities of development which, in the end, make history.”48

Let us turn to what Sella calls the “dramatic shifts in the geographical distribution of economic activity,”49 but not in the conventional mode of scholarly despair whereby we must “avoid generalizations.”50 Rather let us bear in mind Fernand Braudel’s adjunction to precision; “for there is no single conjuncture: we must visualize a series of overlapping histories, developing simultaneously.”51 The main geographical distinctions are a matter of general agreement, albeit there is much scholarly nit-picking about details. Hobsbawm’s discussion of “general crisis” notes “the relative immunity of the States which had undergone ‘bourgeois revolution’,”52 by which he means the United Provinces and England. In another discussion, however, he divides “the European economy” into four zones, three of which are said to have declined economically in some sense (there is no attempt to rank them vis-à-vis each other). The zones are “the old ‘developed’ economies of the Middle Ages—Mediterranean and South-West German”; the “overseas colonies”; the “Baltic hinterland”; and the “new ‘developed’ areas.” In this fourth zone, which has a “more complex” economic situation, we find not only Holland and England, but France as well.53

Romano’s geography is more stratified:

In England and the Low Countries the crisis had essentially liberating effects; in France, it did not release energies, but it certainly sowed the seeds which were to bear fruit later; in the rest of Europe, it meant nothing but involution. Italy is undoubtedly to be included in this last part of Europe, under the label of involution.54

Cipolla adds a nuance to Romano’s geography: “The seventeenth century was a black century for Spain, Italy and Germany and at least a grey one for France. But for Holland it was the golden age, and for England, if not golden, at least silver.”55 Topolski draws the map of stratification in a slightly different way, distinguishing between zones of great dynamism (England the the United Provinces), less rapid development (France, Scandinavia, Germany, and Bohemia and the other states in eastern and central Europe, with the exception of Poland), and stagnation or regression (Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Poland).56 As a group, the geographical classifications seem concordant, although varying in detail.

Let us now look at the temporal classifications, where the confusion is greater: dates for the contraction vary among countries and there is variation in nominal and silver prices; and even for particular countries and particular kinds of prices, the analysts seem to disagree. In Braudel and Spooner’s review of the price data, their theme is simple: “The end of the sixteenth century is as hard to ascertain as its beginning.”57 For bullion prices, they find a reversal of the upward secular trend “in the south between 1590 and 1600; in the north, between 1620 and 1630 and perhaps even by 1650.” But for nominal prices they find a quite different pattern of three successive movements: one around the 1620s in Germany; one around mid-century for cities as different as Siena, Exeter, Ragusa, Naples, Amsterdam, Danzig, and Paris; and one in 1678 for Castile, which is “very much out of line.” “Nominal prices,” they say, “exactly followed silver prices only in the case of England, and very closely in the case of Holland.” Note how our pair of countries reappears. In all other countries there is a gap ranging from a decade to as high as three-quarters of a century for Castile. “Successive inflations . . . are what kept nominal prices up in these various countries.”58

Here we have a precious clue to pursue. Can inflation be one of the modes of relative decline when there is contraction in the world-economy? Can one say that the degree of nominal inflation, especially if measured in relation to bullion-prices, is a measure of relative decline? This question should be borne in mind as we review the various datings (for which the criteria of placement are often not explicit). According to Slicher van Bath, depression began in Spain around 1600, in Italy and part of central Europe in 1619, in France and part of Germany in 1630, in England and the United Provinces in 1650. It was worst in central Europe between 1640 and 1680 and in the United Provinces between 1720 and 1740. It ended in England and France in 1730, in Germany in 1750, and in the United Provinces in 1755. “The economically more highly developed lands like England and Holland could resist longer. The primary producers—in the seventeenth century these were the cereal-producing areas in the Baltic zone—were almost completely defenseless.”⁵⁹

Vilar, using silver prices, finds two main patterns—one in Spain and Portugal, whose decline started earlier (between 1600 and 1610) and also ended earlier (between 1680 and 1690), and one in northern Europe, which started between 1650 and 1660 and went on until between 1730 and 1735. France appears in this classification as a split country, where the Midi, “linked to the conjuncture of Marseilles, of the Mediterranean, was closer to Spain than to the Beauvaisis.”⁶⁰ Chaunu sees the same two patterns: a “precocious trend of the Mediterranean and Hispano-America, and a tardy one, that of the North and the Baltic, to which is linked, rather paradoxically, Brazil and the Indian Ocean.”⁶¹

Abel, however, comes up with a somewhat different grouping on the basis of 25-year averages of silver-prices for cereal, which he summarizes as, in general, a downward trend “during the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries.”⁶² This, he says, holds true for England, the Spanish Netherlands, France, northern Italy, the United Provinces, Denmark, and Poland, but not for Germany and Austria, whose “price curves are upward from the last quarter of the seventeenth century.”⁶³ In fact, a close look at Abel’s chart shows a far more complex picture, in which two facts stand out. First, the largest price gap may be seen to occur in 1650, when Poland is markedly high and Germany is markedly low. Second, Poland shows the widest variation in prices over time, going from the highest prices anywhere in 1650 to the lowest anywhere in 1725. (The degree of Germany’s deviation from the norm is much smaller.) This remarkable swing of Poland should not be overlooked in seeking a general framework for an explanation; but for the moment, let us deal with Germany, since a large literature has emerged on the question of the role of the Thirty Years’ War in the “decline” of Germany.

Theodore Rabb, in reviewing the literature as of 1962, described two schools of thought, the “disastrous war” school and the “earlier decline” school (who see the Thirty Years’ War as merely the final blow).⁶⁴ Friedrich Lütge stands as a good example of the former school. For him, Germany’s economy between 1560 and 1620 was flourishing. She was involved in overseas trade, and manufactures were extensive and profitable. After 1620, this was no longer so, and hence he concludes that the Thirty Years’ War was the key intervening variable.⁶⁵ To this the response of Slicher van Bath is typical: “The Thirty Years’ War cannot be responsible, since the decline in Germany started already in the second half of the sixteenth century.”⁶⁶ Several attempts have been made to settle this debate. Carsten, for example, throws a skeptical eye on the thesis of prewar decline:

Even if it could be established that the majority of German towns declined already before 1618, this would not necessarily entail a general decline, for economic activity might have shifted from the towns to the countryside. Indeed this was the case in north-eastern Germany where the sixteenth century was a period of peace and prosperity, of growing corn exports and quickly rising corn prices.⁶⁷

The decline of towns is thus not necessarily to be taken as a negative economic sign. Of course not! It is a sign of peripheralization.⁶⁸ Carsten finds, in addition, that the period before 1608 in Upper Bavaria, an area he has looked at closely, was “a time of slowly growing prosperity.” He advised prudence, therefore, until there was “more detailed investigation and research.”⁶⁹ Whereas Carsten mediates by insisting on our collective ignorance, Rabb mediates by insisting that our collective knowledge “shows both absolute prosperity and decline within Germany [prior to the Thirty Years’ War], often side by side.” He also concludes on a note of prudence.

The fact that areas of decline were in a decided minority . . . makes it impossible to conclude that the struggle before 1618 was any worse than diverse. . . . At best, the Thirty Years’ War started a general decline that had not previously existed; at worst it replaced prosperity with disaster.⁷⁰

A third variant of mediation is Kamen’s. He acknowledges that “there can be no doubt at all that the war was a disaster for most of the German-speaking lands,” but he argues that “the controversy is to some extent a false one” because there was “no single economic or political unit called Germany” and it was “often unrealistic to distinguish between prewar and wartime decline.”⁷¹

All these national “economic” measurements fail to take into direct account the degree to which the Thirty Years’ War was itself both the political consequence and the sign of a general economic contraction throughout Europe. One major attempt to view this war in a totally European context has been made by J. V. Polišenský, who says the war is to be

seen as an example of two civilizations in ideological conflict. The clash of one conception, deriving from the legacy of Humanism, tinged with Protestantism and taking as its model the United Netherlands, with another, Catholic-Humanist, one which followed the example of Spain, becomes thus the point of departure for the development of political fronts and coalitions of power.⁷²

This war throughout Europe might then be thought of as the first world war of the capitalist world-economy. Polišenský makes the point, albeit in somewhat prudent terms.

A precondition for the generalizing of the conflict was the presence in early seventeenth century Europe, if not of an economic unity, at least of a framework for exchange and the first signs of a world market, whose centre of gravity was the whole area between Baltic, Atlantic and Mediterranean.⁷³

To his central argument that “what is beyond dispute” is Vajnshtejn’s thesis that “the Thirty Years’ War belongs intimately with the story of the Dutch revolution and the movement for liberation from Spain,” Polišenský adds: “We need to know precisely how an internal bourgeois-led revolution could become a bogy for its adversaries throughout Europe.”⁷⁴ For him, not only did the “Dutch factor” play a key role in the generalization of the conflict, but the most important outcome was in fact the victory of the Dutch throughout Europe. He notes that the war wound up precisely when the Dutch were ahead:

In 1645 the Dutch fleet, for the first time, gained control of the Sound and the trade routes of the Baltic. The merchant patriciate of the province of Holland and the city of Amsterdam could now see no reason for continuing a war with Spain from which only France could be the victor. . . .

The separate peace [of the United Provinces and Spain in January 1648] was at once a triumph of the Republic over Spain and of Holland over the Prince of Orange and the rest of the Netherlands. It can equally be seen as an outright victory of Amsterdam over all other Dutch interests and the ending of the war confirmed the privileges of that same urban oligarchy which Maurice of Orange had brought low thirty years earlier.⁷⁵

A crucial question intervenes regarding how we explain that the Dutch war of independence, the Netherlands Revolution, which began as early as 1566, did not spill over into a conflagration throughout Europe until 1621—the beginning of what Polišenský called the “Dutch period of the war” (from 1621 to 1625).⁷⁶ Has it not something to do with Romano’s crisis of 1619–1622?⁷⁷ It is more than likely that it does. For the contraction throughout Europe that was signaled by the acute crisis of those years⁷⁸ meant that the stakes of political control were higher; and the costs of military destruction seemed lower to the participants than the potential losses from a weak commercial position at a moment of contraction. In this sense, the United Provinces gambled and won. Especially since many of the costs of the war, in terms of destruction, were in fact paid by Germany and, let us not forget, by Bohemia.⁷⁹ Kamen is thus correct in seeing the controversy about Germany as a “false one.” The question is not whether Germany would or would not have declined if the Thirty Years’ War had not intervened—this is a largely meaningless hypothetical consideration. Its intervention was one response to a reversal in trend in the world-economy, and hence the war became one of the modalities by which reallocations of economic roles and intensifications of economic disparities occurred.

Summarizing the various studies and syntheses, we have the following picture. In the years around 1600 to 1650 (as in those around 1300 to 1350), a period of economic expansion seemed to end. Descriptions of this expansion primarily in price terms, the approach of the price historians of the interwar period, are not wrong, but they are very misleading because prices are, by definition, relative. A price has significance only within the context of the whole synchronic series of prices of a given market. Prices never go up or down in general; some prices go up, which therefore means that others go down. The expansions that came to an end did not involve merely the ethereal measure of nominal prices; they involved real material products. The first and perhaps central expansion was in the production of cereals both in the yield per acre and in the total acreage devoted to cereals. This latter expansion was achieved by the reclamation (bonification) of land and also by the shift from the use of land from pasturage and wine growing to its use for cereals. These various expansions took place, of course, because the terms of trade became more profitable for cereals vis-à-vis other products.

In addition, there were expansions in at least four other real areas: (a) population, whose rise and fall in that era could not long be out of line with food supply; (b) urban “industry”, relatively monetized in both its forward and backward linkages, creating high rates of wage employment, and never too far out of line, therefore, with relatively low or at least declining real wages; (c) the stock of money in its multiple forms (bullion, paper, credit); (d) the number of marginal entrepreneurs, rural and urban. All these involve expansions in terms of measures of the economy as a whole, and they are never uniform throughout the many sectors of the economy. Measuring them within the boundaries of political units rather than within the boundaries of global economic markets will therefore give only a partial picture in which economic meaning is incomprehensible; and political consequences are thus inexplicable unless one takes into account the larger whole.

In about 1300/1350 and 1600/1650 these expansions came to an end for largely similar reasons. What differed greatly, however, were the systemic responses to the end of expansion. In quantitative terms, we can see the difference quite easily. The period from 1300 to 1450 involved a fall in the various measures, roughly comparable to the previous rise, whereas the period from 1600 to 1750 represented a stabilization in the measures. The curve for 1450 to 1750 looks like a step rather than like the mountain peak of the curve for 1150 to 1450. This is only the outer shell of the difference in structure, however. The recession of 1300 to 1450 led to the crisis of a social structure, that of European feudalism, whereas that of 1600 to 1750 led to “a period of solidifying and organizing,” in Schöffer’s phrase;⁸⁰ it marked what Chaunu called the “end of easy growth and the beginning of fertile difficulties.”⁸¹ Solidification and fertile difficulties regarding what? The capitalist world-economy as a system is the only plausible answer.

Let us note some of the systemically constructive features of the contraction between 1600 and 1750. In the first place, and overemphasizing this fact is difficult, this period saw a strengthening of the state structures, at least in the core states and in the rising semiperipheral ones, as a way of coping with the contraction; the comparable contraction between 1300 and 1450, on the other hand, led precisely to acute internecine warfare among the landed nobility, a virtual Götterdammerung of feudal Europe. Not that wars and destruction were unknown in the seventeenth century, quite the contrary; but they did not have the same character of massive bleeding of the ruling strata. The modes of warfare had changed; the use of mercenaries was widespread; and above all, the struggles of the seventeenth century were interstate rather than interbaronial and thus could serve to the accretion of someone’s economic strength. As Elliott put it in his discussion of the so-called crisis: “The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did indeed see significant changes in the texture of European life, but these changes occurred within the resilient framework of the aristocratic monarchical state.”⁸² Resilience is precisely what keeps contractions from becoming crises.

In the second place, there was constant economic activity somewhere, activity that from close up seemed to be the sign of prosperity. I pass over the most obvious instances: Holland’s Golden Age, the German upturn from the late seventeenth century, the steady improvement in English agronomy, and in short, “throughout this somber and difficult seventeenth century, the accumulation of an infinity of minor improvements.”⁸³ Such less frequently observed phenomena include the fact that land reclamation never really ceased, as Romano reminds us:

Land reclamation (bonifiche)? It still went on in the seventeenth century; it was simply not paid for with money, but rather by means of corvées, service, abusive exactions (soprusi), etc. It is in this sense that it can well be said that “agricultural production, unlike other kinds, hardly diminished in the seventeenth century.”⁸⁴

It should not surprise us that there seemed to many entrepreneurs in the seventeenth century “an absence of safe and productive outlets for investment”;⁸⁵ this is, after all, one of the meanings of contraction. When Chaunu describes the seventeenth century as one in which “profit retreats but . . . victorious rent triumphs,”⁸⁶ he is thus misleading us. He is, in fact, describing the shift toward agricultural investment in the corecountries of the capitalist world-economy.

Hobsbawm finds a paradox in the history of capitalism:

We are therefore faced with the paradox that capitalism can only develop in an economy which is already substantially capitalist, for in any which is not, the capitalist forces will tend to adapt themselves to the prevailing economy and society, and will therefore not be sufficiently revolutionary.⁸⁷

But is it really a paradox that a predominantly industrial capitalist world-economy can only emerge out of a capitalist world-economy already in existence—which is exactly what happened? The way in which the capitalist world-economy persisted and stabilized in the period between 1600 and 1750 it was unable to do between 1300 and 1450 (precisely because the expansion between 1150 and 1300 had not yet broken the binds of the feudal structure of Europe); and for this reason the seventeenth century could prepare the way for the spurt of the so-called industrial revolution—economically, politically, intellectually, and socially.⁸⁸

We must not overlook the revolution of mores, for example, which had no counterpart in the late Middle Ages, the steady rise of an ascetic sexual morality from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and all that it imposed on family structures to make them adapt to a capitalist world. Chaunu, as usual, is a bit swept away with his idealist imagery; but he is not really off the mark in his argument:

The seventeenth century is, in terms of mores, the great, perhaps the only revolutionary century, with respect to traditional civilization, the iconoclastic century par excellence! It thus achieved, paradoxically, one of the preconditions for the Malthusian revolution.⁸⁹

Again we ask, wherein is the paradox? Indeed we can raise the question of whether the Industrial Revolution was not already going on in the seventeenth century. Charles Wilson is daring enough to suggest this:

Was there an absolute difference between the economic development of the later, so-called, Industrial Revolution and that of seventeenth-century Holland? Most historians would probably say yes there was. But can we be so sure? . . . Dutch shipbuilding was itself, in contemporary terms, a basic industry, as transport engineering was to be in the nineteenth century.⁹⁰

Let us not forget that the period from 1600 to 1750 continued and furthered one crucial process of the world-economy: the steady breakdown, as the survey by Braudel and Spooner demonstrates, of price differentials in the three basic price zones of Europe.

The unmistakeable closing of the gap between [maximum and minimum prices] from the early eighteenth century shows how far prices throughout Europe had begun to converge. . . . By over-exploiting . . . price differentials, merchant capitalism contributed to a process of levelling out, to the creation of channels of communication, and in turn to a diversion of interests looking elsewhere for more favourable conditions.⁹¹

That is the point. There was a capitalist process going on from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century that made possible the industrial spurt, and the leveling of prices was an essential element in this.

One crucial difference remains, it seems to me, between the period from 1450 to 1750, when a capitalist world-economy was created and alternative historical possibilities progressively eliminated, and the period from 1150 to 1450, when, it might be argued, a similar attempt was made but failed because the political coherence of the feudal economy had not yet fallen apart through its internal contradictions. This crucial difference is to be found in the pattern of distribution of income within the overall economy.

Wilhelm Abel’s major point in his book on mass poverty in preindustrial Germany was that Friedrich Engels’s argument in Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844 that conditions of the workers deteriorated with industrialization was totally wrong. According to Abel, who cites the work of Bruno Hildebrand, “poverty was greatest [in Germany] precisely in those regions where there was no industry.”⁹² In fact, says Abel, mass poverty predated industrialism, going back to the sixteenth century:

The severest decline [in real wages] occurred in the sixteenth century. Subsequently real wages rose in Germany soon after the Thirty Years’ War and elsewhere in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, these wages . . . were not much higher than those of the second half of the sixteenth century (and very much lower than the wages of the fifteenth century). The Age of Pauperism (1791–1850) completes this series with a renewed decline, but least of all in early-industrializing England.⁹³

The point of Abel’s book was to argue that the Industrial Revolution meant a rise in the standard of living for the working classes. This question falls outside our present context, although his own reference to the period between 1791 and 1850 indicates that this might not be so for the world-economy as a whole. What is pertinent to our present discussion is his argument that there was an overall decline in the income of the lower strata in the period from 1450 to 1800. This argument finds confirmation in other writings. Minchinton, taking the period between 1500 and 1750, hazarded a few generalizations about the “structure of demand” in Europe: “It was better to be rich in 1750 than in 1500,” he says, and “the gulf between rich and poor widened.”⁹⁴ Braudel and Spooner came up with similar conclusions by looking at the price data:

From the late fifteenth century until well into the beginning of the eighteenth century, the standard of living in Europe progressively declined. It would be interesting to make a close analysis, where possible, of conditions before this time, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Broadly speaking, conditions then were better. Did this time constitute a golden age for labour, as so many excellent historians have claimed, before the repeated and violent upsets which we have noted?⁹⁵

In a table that I constructed from Slicher van Bath’s data, the real wages of an English carpenter from 1251 to 1850⁹⁶ show a steady rise from 1251 to 1450, with a doubling over that period and a more or less steady decline after that, returning in the end to the starting point (with one exceptionally low period between 1601 and 1650). To interpret this, we must look again at the so-called crisis of feudalism. Perry Anderson has correctly stated that “a full awareness of the dynamism of the feudal mode of production has been one of the most important gains of medieval historiography in the last decades.” This crisis then does not build on failure but on success, on “the remarkable overall economic and social progress that [feudalism] represented.”⁹⁷ Yet by the thirteenth century, following three to four centuries of steady expansion, the system found itself in crisis.

I have previously explained⁹⁸ why I believe this resulted from a conjuncture of a cyclical economic regression, climatological changes, and secular exacerbations of the basic contradictions of a feudal structure. Anderson’s subsequent and somewhat detailed analysis of this historical conjuncture places central emphasis on the fact that “the basic motor of rural reclamation, which had driven the whole feudal economy forwards for three centuries, eventually overreached the objective limits of both terrain and social structure.”⁹⁹ While emphasizing what might be called the socio-economic exhaustion of the system, Anderson criticizes the “empirically questionable and theoretically reductionist” explanation advanced by Dobb and Kosminsky that the crisis resulted from “a linear escalation of noble exploitation,” because it “does not seem to square with the general trend of rent relationships in this epoch.”¹⁰⁰

The confusion here is worth taking some time to untangle. Some empirical evidence for the hypothesis of linear escalation is in fact to be found in Anderson’s own book, where he noted, for example, that the average size of peasant holdings in medieval Europe dropped “from perhaps some 100 acres in the ninth century to 20 or 30 acres in the thirteenth century.”¹⁰¹ He also noted that the stratum of smaller nobles and ministerial intermediaries between magnates and the peasantry “tended to rise steadily [in social and economic importance] throughout the whole medieval period.”¹⁰² Presumably, this must have meant an increased percentage of the economic surplus was going to nonproductive workers and, therefore, that there was a linear escalation of noble exploitation. In this case it would be the combination of the steady socioeconomic exhaustion and the increased exploitation (did not the former lead to the latter partly as a way of equilibrating the individual incomes of members of the upper strata?) that brought on (along with reinforcement, as I noted, from other factors) the famous crisis of seigniorial revenues resulting from the “widening scissors in the relationship between urban and agricultural prices.”¹⁰³

One of the consequences of this “scissors” was the general change in rent relationships that occurs precisely in the period of economic downturn. Anderson says:

Far from the general crisis of the feudal mode of production worsening the conditions of the direct producers in the countryside, it thus ended by ameliorating it and emancipating them. It proved, in fact, the turning point in the dissolution of serfdom in the West.¹⁰⁴

The impression here is of economic “scissors” followed by seigniorial reaction followed by relatively successful peasant resistance that ended in the dissolution of serfdom. “The demesne tilled by servile labour was an anachronism in France, England, Western Germany, Northern Italy, and most of Spain by 1450.”¹⁰⁵ I see the sequence somewhat differently. The socio-economic crisis weakened the nobility such that the peasants steadily increased their share of the surplus from 1250 to 1450 or 1500. This was true throughout Europe, west and east.¹⁰⁶ It was the increase in the standard of living of the lower strata moving in the direction of relative equalization of incomes, rather than the prior condition of “exhaustion,” that for the upper strata represented the real crisis and the dilemma they had to face.

There was no way out of it without drastic social change. This way, as I have previously argued, was the creation of a capitalist world-system, a new form of surplus appropriation.107 The replacement of the feudal mode by the capitalist mode was what constituted the seigniorial reaction; it was a great sociopolitical effort by the ruling strata to retain their collective privileges, even if they had to accept a fundamental reorganization of the economy and all the resulting threats to familiar modes of stratification. There would be some families, it was clear, who would lose out by such a shift; but many would not.108 Additionally, and most importantly, the principle of stratification was not merely preserved; it was to be reinforced as well.

Does not the discovery that the standard of living of the European lower strata went down from 1500 to at least 1800 despite the fact that this period included both expansion (phase A) and contraction (phase B)? demonstrate how successful was the strategy, if such it could be called, of economic transformation? It should be noted that the empirical argument for income decline is made not by a critic of capitalism, but by an Abel correcting Engels. (Abel’s mistaken belief that this decline was arrested after 1800 indicates only that he failed, for whatever reasons, to make his post-1800 calculations within the correct unit of analysis, that is, for the capitalist world-economy as a whole, the outer boundaries of which had expanded precisely at that point.)

We now return to our interpretation of the contraction between 1600 and 1750. To analyze the period from 1450 to 1750 as one long “transition” from feudalism to capitalism risks reifying the concept of transition, for we thus steadily reduce the periods of “pure” feudalism and “pure” capitalism and sooner or later arrive at zero, being left with nothing but transition. Fair enough—all is transition; but whenever we expand a partitive into a universal attribute, we merely displace the issue terminologically. We still want to know when and how and why major alterations in social structures occurred. The ideological descriptions that systems convey about themselves are never true. It is always easy to find presumed instances of “non-capitalist” behavior in a capitalist world—all over Europe in 1650 and 1750 but also in 1850 and 1950. The mixture of such “noncapitalist” behavior, firms, and states with “capitalist” behavior, “capitalist” firms, or (the least happy usage of all) “capitalist” states within a capitalist world-economy is neither an anomaly nor transitional. The mixture is the essence of the capitalist system as a mode of production, and it accounts for how the capitalist world-economy has historically affected the civilizations with which it has coexisted in social space.

I have said that capitalism represented a solution for the crisis of feudalism; but solutions are the result of choices that have rallied the majority by overcoming resistance in individuals and groups who stand to lose by any given solution. Since losers are many and manifold, strange alliances are made, and the process is drawn out and unclear. Other “solutions” may be attempted. Charles V tried to recreate the universal monarchy, but he did not succeed.109 The lower strata might have taken advantage of the cyclical downturn from 1600 to 1750 to create havoc with the system, thereby achieving a major reallocation of a now much bigger absolute surplus; but this did not happen because of the strengths of the state-machineries in the now core countries of the capitalist world-economy. Seeking in complicated ways to reconcile opposing forces, they survived and flourished in the long run only to the extent to which they promoted the interests of dominant economic strata in the world-economy as a whole. For Anderson, “absolutism was essentially . . . a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position—despite and against the gains they had won by the widespread commutation of dues.”110

I could accept Anderson’s entire statement if the adjective feudal were dropped. To me, the redeployment precisely involved substituting capitalist domination for feudal domination, whatever the outer shell of public terminology. Even Anderson himself admits that there is an “apparent paradox of Absolutism”; he states that while absolutism was protecting “aristocratic property and privileges,” it “could simultaneouslyensure the basic interests of the nascent mercantile and manufacturing classes.” To explain this paradox, Anderson invokes the fact that in the period before “machine industry” (thus, before about 1800), “merchant and machine capital” did not need a “mass” market and could therefore avoid a “radical rupture with the feudal agrarian order.”111 This is true; however, within the capitalist world-economy taken as a whole, it remains true in the twentieth century. That is, the “need” of the mass market still encompasses less than the entire world population.

From the foregoing, we can understand why not all absolute monarchies were strong states and not all strong states were absolute monarchies. The key element is how strong the state was and not how absolute the form of government was. Of course we must explain the form, and we will then notice that in the seventeenth century the strongest states were those which dominated economically: the United Provinces were in first place, England was second, and France was only in third place. The English Revolution strengthened the English state, while the assertion by Louis XIV, l’Etat c’est moi, was a sign of the relative weakness of the state.

The seventeenth-century contraction was not a crisis in the system. Quite the contraty, it was a period of its consolidation. Schöffer catches the spirit of this when he suggests there was a positive side to the decline in the import of silver from Hispanic America in the late sixteenth century. The result, he suggests, is that in the seventeenth century “in general the price average remained at the same level,” and this was “a stabilizing factor for economy, which had been ravaged by an all too extravagant inflation.”112

The long sixteenth century had not merely been an inflationary era. It had been a structurally revolutionary one, not the least of which was the willingness of large groups of people to adopt new and radical ideas. The ideas of humanism and the Reformation had a heady quality to them that risked getting out of hand. The seventeenth century represented a period of calming down and cooling off. Classicism, like absolutism, was not a description of reality, but a program—a program of returning the political and cultural initiatives to the upper strata, the better to digest the fundamental social change that was represented by the genesis of a capitalist world-economy. William Bouwsma characterizes the essential intellectual thrust of the seventeenth century as

the recovery everywhere of the systematizing mentality, which rested on a positive estimate of man’s intellect very different from the view that underlay the secularizing movement, and which insisted on relating all aspects of human experience to a central core of universal and therefore abstract truth.113

Politically and culturally, the seventeenth century represented a search for stability in form and structure that was concomitant with the moment of slowdown in the rate of development of the world-economy. Without such a period, the next qualitative leap forward would not have been possible. This makes the seventeenth century not a “crisis” but a needed change of pace, not a disaster but an essential element in furthering the interests of those who benefited most from a capitalist system.114 Because the period from 1600 to 1750 was so important in the consolidation of the European world-economy, it is worthwhile to make a careful analysis of why this was so. We will then be able to understand what mechanisms the capitalist strata use to cope in recurrent periods of contraction in the world-economy.

DUTCH HEGEMONY IN THE WORLD-ECONOMY

“In the North a phenomenon like Rubens . . . was unthinkable.”

—Pieter Geyl1

The core of the European world-economy was by 1600 firmly located in northwest Europe, that is, in Holland and Zeeland; in London, the Home Counties, and East Anglia; and in northern and western France.2 The political units in which these core areas were located were rather different in size, form, and politics, and they underwent significant changes in the following century and a half; but economically these zones were more alike than different. As observed in the previous chapter, 1600 to 1750 was a period of consolidation in which there was a slowdown in the rate of the development of the world-economy. This was true overall; but the hallmark of a capitalist economic system is that the overall central tendency is the composite of strikingly different trends of the component sectors. With slowdown and consolidation, difficult economic decisions are forced, and hence political (and cultural) convolutions are fostered. Nowhere was this truer than in the core countries of the seventeenth century, among whose entrepreneurial strata there was acute competition for survival in a situation where some had to be eliminated to leave enough profit for the others.

History books call the period from 1600 to 1750 the age of mercantilism. I have no intention of reviewing the multiple meanings given to this term or the definitions that constitute its “essence.”3 The debate about mercantilism largely concerns the truth-value of arguments put forward by theorists of the seventeenth century. Obviously, their themes in some ways reflected reality and in some ways were designed to act on reality. This is true of all theories. But in the present context we are interested in the actual practices of the states of the time, whatever the ideological justification. These practices are not unique to the time but were utilized by some states at almost every moment of the history of the capitalist world-economy, although the ideological justifications have varied. In the vast welter of explanations of mercantilism in the seventeenth century, two aspects of this concept are agreed upon by virtually everyone. Mercantilism involved state policies of economic nationalism and revolved around a concern with the circulation of commodities, whether in terms of the movement of bullion or in the creation of balances of trade (bilateral or multilateral). What the facts were regarding the true relation of “profit and power” is what the debate is about—among men of the time and among analysts of today.

To argue that economic nationalism is the state policy of the weaker against the stronger and of competitors against each other is merely to accept an orthodoxy. What will perhaps be somewhat different in this book is the assertion that success in mercantilist competition was primarily a function of productive efficiency and that the middle-run objective of all mercantilist state policies was the increase of overall efficiency in the sphere of production. The story must start with the United Provinces because for at least part of the seventeenth century this “sand and mud dump left over from the ice age”4 with a jerry-built and seemingly ineffectual state machinery was the hegemonic power of the capitalist world-economy. The United Provinces (or should we say Holland?) was the first such hegemonic power after the collapse of the attempt on the part of Charles V to convert the world-economy into a world-empire. Hegemony is a rare condition; to date only Holland, Great Britain, and the United States have been hegemonic powers in the capitalist world-economy, and each held the position for a relatively brief period, Holland least plausibly because it was least of all the military giant of its era.

Hegemony involves more than core status. It may be defined as a situation wherein the products of a given core state are produced so efficiently that they are by and large competitive even in other core states, and therefore the given core state will be the primary beneficiary of a maximally free world market. Obviously, to take advantage of this productive superiority, such a state must be strong enough to prevent or minimize the erection of internal and external political barriers to the free flow of the factors of production; and to preserve their advantage, once ensconced, the dominant economic forces find it helpful to encourage certain intellectual and cultural thrusts, movements, and ideologies. The problem with hegemony, as we shall see, is that it is passing. As soon as a state becomes truly hegemonic, it begins to decline; for a state ceases to be hegemonic not because it loses strength (at least not until after a long time has elapsed), but because others gain. To be at the summit is to be certain that the future will not be yours, however much the present is; but it is sweet nonetheless. The pattern of hegemony seems marvelously simple. Marked superiority in agro-industrial productive efficiency leads to dominance of the spheres of commercial distribution of world trade, with correlative profits accruing both from being the entrepôt of much of world trade and from controlling the “invisibles”—transport, communications, and insurance. Commercial primacy leads in turn to control of the financial sectors of banking (exchange, deposit, and credit) and of investment (direct and portfolio).

These superiorities are successive, but they overlap in time. Similarly, the loss of advantage seems to be in the same order (from productive to commercial to financial), and also largely successive. It follows that there is probably only a short moment in time when a given core power can manifest simultaneously productive, commercial, and financial superiority over all other core powers. This momentary summit is what we call hegemony. In the case of Holland, or the United Provinces, that moment was probably between 1625 and 1675. Dutch productive efficiency was first achieved in the historically oldest form of food production, that of gathering, in this case the gathering of fish, particularly (but not only) salted herring, the “Dutch Gold Mine.”5 The origins of this efficiency are to be found in the invention around 1400 of the haringbuis, or buss,6 a fishing boat whose high length-to-breadth ratio offered “greater maneuverability, seaworthiness and speed without great losses in cargo space.”7The two great advantages to the buss were that its design made possible the use of a large dragnet for herring, first noted at Hoorn in West Friesland in 1516,8 and that its wider decks made curing possible on board. The new technology of curing, or gutting and salting the fish immediately and thus ensuring its preservation, had been developed in the thirteenth century.9 The creation of this “factory ship”10 enabled ships to go far from Dutch shores, staying out from six to eight weeks. The busses transferred their cargo to ventjagers, or sale-hunters, fast ships that returned to shore with the produce.11

Not only did the Dutch dominate the North Sea herring fishery, the so-called Grand Fishery,12 but they dominated the Iceland cod fishery and the Spitzbergen whale fishery as well.13 Whales were in fact not wanted as food but as an industrial product. The whales supplied “train oil”, used for soap and lamp fuel, and bone, used in connection with clothing.14 The fishing industry was important not only for such forward linkages, but also for backward linkages such as net making, creating a situation “unique in Europe” in the proportion of the population “involved with fishing at least tangentially.”15 In the seventeenth century, it was “galling”16 to the English that the Dutch could fish off English shores and sell fish competitively in English ports and, upon this advantage, build their “mother trade” in the Baltic. The English were very aware of this at the time. Sir George Downing wrote to Clarendon on July 8, 1661: “The herring trade [of the Dutch] is the cause of the salt trade, and the herring and salt trade are the causes of this country’s having, in a manner, wholly engrossed the trade of the Baltic Sea for they have these bulky goods to load their ships with thither.”17 The control of the Baltic trade being precisely one of the factors that contributed to the efficiency of Dutch shipbuilding, the Dutch found themselves for some time in the happy circumstance of the spiral effect: circular reinforcement of advantage.

Despite Sir George Downing, herring cannot explain everything. The Dutch showed equal superiority in agriculture, the most fundamental productive enterprise of the time; and this was a prodigious achievement, both in the breadth of the consequences18 as well as in the depth of effort, for the Netherlands was not at all well suited geologically for cereal growing19 nor for most other forms of agriculture. Weakness was turned to strength in two ways, however. First, the process of pumping water out of the country in order to create land (poldering) led to the invention of windmills and the flourishing of the science of engineering, so that in many ways Holland became “the centre of the wood mechanical era.”20 Poldering went back to 1250, but its highpoint was during 1600–1625, when there was a sudden quantitative spurt; this high level was largely maintained from 1625 to 1675.21 Hence Andrew Marvell’s ill-placed sneer in Character of Holland: “So rules among the drownéd he that drains.” The second result of difficult natural conditions was perhaps still more important. Necessity pushed the Dutch into intensified agriculture, first in about 1300, when earlier hard times and low prices had led to inventiveness, and later, between 1620 and 1750, when a greater expansion of intensive agriculture occurred.22

Since the soil was particularly bad for arable agriculture,23 increased production could most easily be achieved by shifting to industrial crops such as flax, hemp, hops, horticulture, fruit culture, and to the very important production of dyes, of which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch were the “most advanced growers in the world, meeting little competition.”24 Along with horticulture and arable crops went a sizeable increase in livestock husbandry.25 Part of what made this concentration on industrial crops possible was the very large import of grain, which was no marginal matter. De Vries estimates that in the mid-seventeenth century, half the inhabitants of the provinces of Holland, Utrecht, Friesland, and Groningen were being fed from grain imports.26 The other contributing factor was improvement in agricultural techniques—the disappearance of fallow,27 the related cultivation of fodder crops, bed and row cultivation, the use of simple and inexpensive tools, and high yields through heavy fertilizing and much careful labor devoted to small areas.28 The sowing of grasses and systematic fertilization also permitted larger herds and higher milk yields.29 All this intensified agriculture both permitted and was fostered by increased urbanization and industrialization. “By the mid-seventeenth century most cities had franchised men to collect [industrial] refuse [such as ash] and sell and deliver it to farmers.”30 No wonder Romano calls the period from about 1590 to 1670 the “Dutch agricultural century” as compared with the European agricultural sixteenth century.31 The gap grew wider as the Dutch became ever more efficient and most of the rest of Europe stood relatively still in agricultural techniques.

The United Provinces not only was the leading agricultural producer of this time; it was also, and at the same time, the leading producer of industrial products. So much ink has been spilled to explain why Holland did not industrialize that we tend to overlook the fact that it did do so. To his credit, Charles Wilson has consistently insisted on this point throughout his large corpus of writings on the Netherlands.32 Industrial advance is to be noticed first of all in textiles, the traditional leading sector. The northern Netherlands began to profit in the 1560s from the flow of refugees northward, brought about by the Netherlands Revolution. Textile production centered in Leiden,33 where the “new draperies” (bays, says, camelots, fustians, etc.) for which England became famous, got their start. Over a hundred-year period, industrial production surged forward, and it reached a peak in the 1660s. (An index calculated for 1664 is 545 as compared with 100 for 1584, and 108 for 1795).34 Not merely did production expand quantitatively, but until the 1660s, the chief industrial textile rival of Leiden, the “new draperies” of East Anglia, “had to fight an uphill battle.”35 Åström, assessing the source of Dutch strength in seventeenth-century Baltic trade, gives efficiency of textile production as his first explanation and the fact that they were intermediaries for English cloth (and southern European salt) as his second36—a productive advantage first and a commercial advantage second, following upon and abetted by the first.

This advantage is clearly demonstrated in the history of the Alderman Cockayne’s Project, by which England sought to reverse a situation where English undyed and undressed cloth was sent to Holland for finishing. In 1614 James I forbade the export of cloth “in the white,” and the Dutch retaliated by prohibiting the import of finished goods; to which James I retorted by prohibiting, once again, the export of wool. It was, as Supple says, a “gigantic gamble”37 and one that abysmally failed. Over a three-year period, English exports fell by a third, and the Project died in 1617. The stake had been high. Wilson has calculated that 47% of the value added was in the process of dyeing, and this was done in Holland.38 The reason England could not have won this gamble leaps into view, for we have already noted the enormous advantage Holland enjoyed at this time in the production of dyes and hence the cost of dyeing. In the first half of the seventeenth century, therefore, English competition with the United Provinces in cloth trade, as with fisheries, reflected “mercantilist hopes unfulfilled.”39

The second great industry of early modern times was shipbuilding, and here too the lead of the United Provinces is common knowledge.40Less widely acknowledged but essential to a clear analysis is the fact that the Dutch shipbuilding industry was “of modern dimensions, inclining strongly toward standardised, repetitive methods.”41 It was highly mechanized and used many labor-saving devices—wind-powered sawmills, powered feeders for saws, block and tackles, great cranes to move heavy timbers—all of which increased productivity.42 The linkage with an industrial-commercial complex is striking. There were a series of ancillary industries in Amsterdam—rope yards, biscuit bakeries, ship chandlering, and the construction of nautical instruments and sea charts.43 To build the ships themselves, wood was required—a lot of wood. It is estimated that one warship required 2000 oak trees that needed a century of maturation so the wood would not split too easily; and 2000 oak trees required at the time 50 acres of woodland.44 One major source of this timber was the Baltic, and one major reason the Dutch cornered this trade was their efficiency in textile production. The consequence, of course, was efficiency in shipbuilding, which, as we shall see, was largely the reason the Dutch could dominate world commerce. Furthermore, since other Dutch industries in addition to shipbuilding were “wholly dependent” on supplies brought by water, the ships “must be seen as a genuine factor of production.”45 Hence, shipbuilding was production of the means of production.

Textiles and shipbuilding were not the only industries of significance. Holland was a leading center of sugar refining, at least until 1660.46There was a “powerful boom” in distilleries beginning shortly after 1600 and lasting through the century. Other industries were a paper industry; sawmills; book production; a brick and lime industry, expanding about 1500 and still “reasonably prosperous” in the eighteenth century; crockery; tobacco and pipe-making factories; very large tanneries directed toward export, especially in the seventeenth century; breweries, reaching their height at the turn of the seventeenth century; oil and soap production, whose greatest prosperity was in the middle of the seventeenth century; of course a chemical industry, whose primary function was to provide dyestuffs;47 and one must not omit the munitions industry. Spurred by the Eighty Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War, the import of war materials was encouraged by the government, and the industry steadily expanded. A large export trade existed by the end of the sixteenth century; as of 1600, the structure of production had shifted from artisanal guilds to manufacture and the putting-out system.48

It is not that in the hundred years between 1575 and 1675, the United Provinces excelled in every industrial field or had no effective competition; but if it is to be asserted, as it is by North and Thomas, that the Netherlands was the “first country to achieve self-sustained growth,”49 it is primarily because no other country showed such a coherent, cohesive, and integrated agro-industrial production complex—and this despite the economic complications of fighting an eighty-year war of independence.50 There were no more careful observers of the Dutch scene in the seventeenth century than the English. In 1673, Sir William Temple, the English Ambassador, published his Observations upon the United Provinces, in which he said:

I conceive the true origin and ground of trade to be great multitudes of people crowded into small compass of land, whereby all things necessary to life are rendered dear, and all men who have possessions are induced to parsimony; but those who have none are forced to industry and labor. Bodies that are vigorous fall to labor; such as are not supply that defect by some sort of invention and ingenuity. These customs arise first from necessity and grow in time to be habitual in a country.51

Sir William wished that as much might have been said of the English.

Confirmation of this vitality can be found in the figures of population movement and urbanization. It is well known that there was a major migration, especially of artisans and burgesses, from the southern to the northern Netherlands, above all from Antwerp52 to Amsterdam and Leiden53 in the late sixteenth century. In 1622, 60% percent of the population of the United Provinces were townsfolk; and of these, three-quarters were in towns with over 10,000 people.54 The population of Amsterdam quadrupled—from 50,000 in 1600 to 200,000 in 1650,55 and it served as a veritable “melting pot,” turning Flemings, Walloons, Germans, Portuguese and German Jews, and French Huguenots into “true Dutchmen.”56 Most writers concentrate on the merchant and artisanal strata who migrated; it is at least as important to observe the growth, especially but not only in Leiden, of a mass of urban proletarians who were living in slums, many of the workers employed being female and child labor. As Jeannin says so aptly, “the tensions and the conflicts have a modern resonance.”57 Of course they do, because we are in the presence of industrial capitalism. In summary, it can be said that in the late sixteenth century, the northern Netherlands was set firmly on the path of a productive efficiency that enabled the United Provinces to flower in about 1600 into the principal (though of course not the only) production center of the European world-economy. In the agricultural sector it specialized in products that required high skills and made high profits58 and in the industrial sector, Holland took a commanding lead in textiles and shipbuilding, the two major industries of the era, and played a major, sometimes dominant, role in other industries as well. It is on the basis of this productive efficiency that the United Provinces was able to build its commercial network and establish itself as the “pack-house of the world.”59 It is to this somewhat more familiar story that we now turn.

Dutch shipping dominated the world carrying trade in the seventeenth century. It grew tenfold from 1500 to 1700. As of 1670, the Dutch owned three times the tonnage of the English, and more than the tonnage of England, France, Portugal, Spain, and the Germanies combined. The percentage of Dutch-built ships was even greater. Dutch shipping reached its heyday, in fact, only in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch having used the occasion of the English Civil War to establish “undisputed ascendancy in the world’s carrying trade.” While Dutch ships carried all Dutch textiles, English ships, despite monopolies and chartered companies, had to share with Dutch ships the carrying of English textiles, indeed had the lesser share.60 As late as 1728, Daniel Defoe was still referring to the Dutch as “the Carryers of the World, the middle Persons in Trade, the Factors and Brokers of Europe.”61 What is so impressive about the Dutch in the seventeenth century is that they “spread everywhere”62—to the East Indies, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Caribbean, while still holding on to the Baltic (Eastland) trade; they expanded their share of the trade of northwest Europe and seized the river trade inland to the continent.

The story of the East Indies trade is of course the story of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). It was a model of a capitalist trading company, part speculative enterprise, part long-term investment, part colonizer.63 It had sober directors in Amsterdam, De Heeren Zeventien, the seventeen gentlemen, and hard-to-control proconsuls in Batavia, first among them Jan Pieterszoon Coen.64 In some ways the Dutch backed into the East Indies trade. When Antwerp fell to the Spanish in 1585, the European spice market was transferred to Amsterdam. But since Spain had annexed Portugal in 1580 and Lisbon was the European port of entry for spices, the Dutch sought to bypass the Spanish.65Thus Cornelis de Houtman was sent on his mission to the Indies in 1592, the first trading fleets sailed in 1598, and by 1602 the States-General had chartered the VOC, in part to contain ruinous competition among the Dutch, in part to provide a stable outlet for the smaller investor, in part to create an economic and political weapon against Spain, and in part simply to get more spices than were available then in Europe.66

It was, in fact, a good moment to get into the sea-borne spice trade; the most important blockages of the overland trade across the Levant occurred not, as is often said, between 1450 and 1500, but rather between 1590 and 1630.67 The opportunity was therefore great, and the Dutch seized it. The principal shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean shifted from the northern half (the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf) to the southern half (the Cape route). The Dutch were able to exploit this opportunity because they had the technology with which to do so. As Parry puts it, “the square sail triumphed over the lateen, the trade wind over the monsoon”;68 but as soon as the Dutch were into this trade, they encountered the basic problem of trade with an external arena. Because it was a trade in luxuries, profits were high and competition keen; but because it was a trade in luxuries and not necessities, the market was inherently small, and glutting the market was a serious possibility—Scylla and Charybdis.69 There were only two ways to handle the dilemma. Either one transformed the nature of the trade by incorporating the Indies as a peripheral zone of the capitalist world-economy or one had to resort to “administered” trade in the traditional fashion of the long-distance commerce between world-empires. Which path to follow was in fact the subject of the ongoing debate between Coen and De Heeren Zeventien. Coen, the “partisan of a strong manner in Asia,”70 pushed for the first option; his superiors in Amsterdam for the second.

Coen said that the peripheralization of the East Indies would require a policy of colonization in two senses: establishing political control in order to constrain relatively strong Asian potentates and reorganize the system of production; and exporting a white settler class, both to help with supervising cash-crop production and to provide a secure initial market for European exports other than bullion. He said that such a policy was incompatible with administered trade, and required the operation of a market principle. The terminology in which this was discussed is often referred to, somewhat misleadingly, as free trade versus monopoly;71 but in fact Coen was not opposed to the VOC monopolizing in the market(and indeed with a judicious assist from time to time of brute force); nor were De Heeren Zeventien unaware of the limits of their ability to restrict access to their administered trade over such great distances.72 It was a matter of what made most sense to capitalist entrepreneurs in the short run—the profits of exploitation or the profits of speculation. In the short run, those who were in favor of speculation prevailed;73 but in the long run, as we have previously argued,74 the profits of productive exploitation are the only solid base on which to stay ahead in the capitalist world-economy. The core powers (not only the Netherlands, but also Britain and France) launched in the eighteenth century the peripheralization of the Indian Ocean arena, which really took root after 1750.75

Were the policies of the VOC in the seventeenth century “shortsighted,”76 as Masselman asserts? I do not think so, because one has to look at the alternatives. Were there greater exploitative profits to be had elsewhere, especially in an era of relative overall stagnation of the world-economy? The answer is surely yes—in the Eastland trade, in northwest Europe itself, in the Americas, all nearer at hand. Why bother with the East Indies at all? One wonders whether the overall century-long negative balance of the VOC did not mask a gigantic process of internal transfer of income and concentration of capital within the United Provinces, from small investors to big.77 If so, the VOC could be said to have functioned as a kind of stock exchange, very useful for those with superior access to information, such as De Heeren Zeventien themselves; but then its history, at least until the turn of the eighteenth century, belongs more properly to the financial side of the story than to the commercial and distributional side. Nonetheless, the story of the VOC illustrates well how dominance in one area is linked to dominance in the other.

The East Indian trade may have been the most dramatic and even spectacular branch of Dutch commercial expansion in the seventeenth century, but it is not the most important, nor does it account for Dutch hegemony. At the time Dutch traders appeared in the Indian Ocean, they first began to ply the Mediterranean. The turning point seems to have been shortly after the Dutch–Spanish Truce of 1609.78 Two areas of trade ought to be distinguished, however. There was first of all the trade with the Christian Mediterranean in general and northern Italy in particular, where it was a matter of supplying grain, chronically needed but now even scarcer due to bad Italian harvests, epidemics, and political cut-offs from the Levant, while simultaneously, northern Italian industry was undercut by the export of cloth to this formerly textile-exporting area and Venetian shipping was displaced.79 In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, along with the Dutch, English, French, and Hanseates all competed for the Mediterranean trade; but the Dutch came to carry the largest share, primarily because of their superiority in “technical matters of ship design and commercial organization,”80 which gave them the double advantage of being able to carry grain (and other products) from northern Europe to the Mediterranean and to secure the grain in the first place in the Eastland trade.

After obtaining the larger part of the trade with northern Italy, “the Dutch stayed to seize a great part of [a second area of commerce, that of] the ‘rich trades,’ also, accompanying their commerce by acts of violence as efficient as they were ruthless.”81 One followed upon the other, for the commerce in “rich trades” in the Mediterranean was not new. Essentially, the Dutch were taking over the traditional Venetian role in the trade with the Levant. In this era, the Levant was ready to import more real goods (as distinct from bullion as luxury goods) from northwestern Europe than was the East Indies, but they probably exported more luxury items over the period 1600–1750 than did the Indian Ocean area, where, as the period progressed, there was an increased export of tea, coffee, calicoes, and other items that eventually became staples rather than luxuries. Was the Levant still then part of the external arena? It is hard to say; the transition to peripheral status was beginning, though perhaps it would await the late eighteenth century to be fully realized.

The Atlantic trade—to both the Western Hemisphere and to West Africa, which was its appendix—moves us still closer into the heart of the Dutch commercial network. Much has been made of the difference between the two great Dutch companies, the VOC and the “much later and less successful” West India Company.82 For one thing, their social basis of support was different. The VOC (the East India Company) was controlled by Amsterdam merchants—who were Remonstrants and partisans of peace.83 But the West India Company was largely the fruit of the efforts of their opponents—the “party” of Orangists, Calvinists, Zeelanders, and southern Netherlander migrants resettled in the north—who were Gomarian, colonizing, and warlike.84 When it was founded, on June 3, 1621, a few weeks after the Truce ended, Amsterdam capital entered the company too; and the idea of a “missionary-colonizing corporation” became transformed into a “privateering institution.”85 The struggle between different interests took place inside the West India Company, largely between the economically weaker Zeelanders, with their reliance on the Company’s monopoly in privateering, and the Amsterdam merchants, who were willing to take a cut off the privateering of any Dutch entrepreneur.86

The West India Company was thus a “belligerent mixture of trade and religion” and consequently, we are told, “a dreary tale of muddle and near bankruptcy.”87 No doubt this is so; but this allegedly political effort in fact laid the basis of one central pillar of capitalist trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the so-called triangular trade, which provided Europe with its cotton, sugar, and tobacco, all grown of course with African slave labor plus the silver Europe used to obtain the spices and tea from the East Indies.88 The Dutch were the pioneers of this structure, and if the profits went largely to the English and the French, it was primarily because the initial “social investment” was heavy and time consuming and, in bookkeeping terms, borne by the Dutch, with the profit just ready to be reaped after the end of Dutch hegemony in the 1670s by the subsequently productively more efficient English (and to some extent by the French).

What happened was simply that after the founding of the West India Company in 1621, the Dutch sought to expand in the Atlantic during the next quarter-century. They founded New Amsterdam, conquered north-east Brazil, taking it from the Portuguese (Spanish), and on a second try captured Elmina in West Africa and then Luanda in Angola. In the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), however, the Portuguese (now free again from the Spanish) recaptured Brazil; and in the second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch lost New Amsterdam and some West African forts. What was accomplished then during this brief period corresponding with Dutch world hegemony? First, the Dutch held the Spanish at bay in the Americas, providing the “naval screen”89 behind which the English (plus the Scots) and the French built up colonies of settlement. Second, sugar cultivation was launched in the Americas in Brazil, being shifted, after the expulsion of the Dutch, to Barbados, the first great English Caribbean plantation colony. Third, the Dutch conducted the first serious slave trade in order to furnish the manpower for the sugar plantations; when they lost the plantations, they tried to remain in the field as slave traders, but by 1675, Dutch primacy ended, yielding place to the newly founded Royal African Company of the English.90

The Atlantic era of the Dutch no doubt made a great contribution to the growth of the European world-economy; but how much did it do for the Dutch? Surely not as much as was done by the Baltic trade, which had already been the “mother trade” in the sixteenth century, when Dutch ships were carrying about 60% of the total. In the seventeenth century, at least until 1660, the Dutch continued to maintain the same dominance91 despite the serious efforts of the English to break into their market. Here then is the evidence for Dutch commercial supremacy. In a key arena, where both the English and Dutch and indeed even the French (not to speak of the northern countries) all considered control of shipping to be important and lucrative, the Dutch alone carried off the lion’s share.92 Looking closely at the impact of the emerging stagnation of the world-economy on Anglo-Dutch competition in the Baltic, both Supple and Hinton explain the Dutch advantage by the same two factors: cheap freights and the control of a sufficient supply of silver for export.93 Morineau attributes their advantage in addition to their willingness to buy more grain than the Eastland Company bought.94 Perhaps their ability to sell fish at such a low price that it virtually constituted dumping played a role too.95

Having silver to export was an advantage acquired through productive efficiency in shipping and textiles, which made it possible to obtain silver from the Spanish and others. Why was it an advantage to have silver in the Baltic trade? It was because economic contraction plus the Thirty Years’ War resulted in what the English called the “rising of the moneys” (and the Germans the Kipper- und Wipperzeit), which involved a devaluation of small coins vis-à-vis silver. The rixdollar, a transportable silver coin whose silver content remained constant, was worth 37 groschen in 1600 and 90 by 1630; its biggest jump, from 45 to 75 occurred between 1618 and 1621. These shifts came about by reducing the silver content of the groschen while proclaiming a change in its value in terms of the rixdollar.96 The question is why the effect of this on the Dutch was different from its effect on the English. Presumably both could now obtain products in the Baltic at a lower cost in silver; but to do this, one had to have “ready money” to export, which the Dutch had and the English did not. In addition, when there was a depression in trade generally, having cheap imports mattered less than having cheaper imports.

The basic problem for the English was that Dutch merchants could sell Baltic goods in England more cheaply than English merchants could.97 The Eastland merchants in England thought the solution might be to obtain permission to reexport Baltic corn to the Mediterranean as the Dutch did; but they ran afoul of the strong opposition of the English wheat merchants, who succeeded in maintaining the ban on export whenever price was above a rather low figure because of the fear that English cereals were not sufficiently competitive internationally.98 As a result, the English could not earn the silver in the Mediterranean that they could have used to take advantage of the cheap prices of the Baltic, which in turn would have enabled them to obtain the products to earn more silver, and so on. The devaluation in the Baltic was therefore more profitable to the Dutch than to the English in terms of their domination of Baltic trade and thereby of Mediterranean trade; and it also permitted the Dutch to begin “to encroach on English merchants’ trade in England itself.”99

The one last element in this picture is the river trade inward, which had belonged to Antwerp until the Revolt of the Netherlands. When the Dutch closed off the River Scheldt, the trade passed to Amsterdam, after which there were two ways by which it might have returned once more to Antwerp: by extending the United Provinces to include Antwerp or through peace and free trade. The first never occurred. Smit suspects that, despite the proclaimed objectives of the United Provinces (and the real intent of the Orangists and the Calvinists), the failure was due to lack of effort: “Holland did not want a restitution of the southern provinces, with the accompanying risk that trade would flow back to a liberated Antwerp.”100 When peace finally came in 1648, prohibitive taxes on any trade that would pass the Scheldt estuaries to Antwerp were written into the treaty.101 So much political effort was the consequence of the importance of the entrepôt trade in general; one would have thought that by 1648 Amsterdam would have felt secure against a resurgence of Antwerp, but there was one crucial item needed for production on which no chances could be taken: peat. Originally dug for Antwerp and the Brabant market, it was reoriented after the 1570s to the area between the Ij and the Maas Rivers in Holland proper. The use of peat was a key to the efficiency of the urban industries of Holland, and it “had an impact on the economy that can be compared to the impact of coal in nineteenth-century Europe.”102 In addition, the river trade carried urban manure in the other direction, which helped achieve the “uniquely high yields of Dutch cereal farming.”103

From the 1580s on, a network of regular services on the improved canal system linked the cities of Holland with each other and with the hinterland of the other provinces and Brabant as well—all centered on Holland. Beginning in 1632, a further technological advance occurred with the construction of the first trekvaart, a straight canal with a towpath for passenger boats that required much capital.104 Dutch shipbuilders created vessels that were able to distribute and assemble cargoes on the streams and lakes with great dispatch.105 The result was the most efficient internal transportation network in Europe; it reached a peak of traffic in the 1660s. If we put the pieces together, we can conclude that the furthest trade routes—the East Indies, the Levant, and even the Christian Mediterranean and the Atlantic trade—were important, to be sure; but they were secondary. The key to Dutch commercial hegemony in the European world-economy from the 1620s (perhaps already from the 1590s) to the 1660s “remained the ancient trade between northern and western Europe”;106 and the reason the Dutch could achieve commercial supremacy had to do with their prior agro-industrial efficiency. This was transposed into commercial efficiency mainly through freight rates, insurance costs, and general overhead.

Why were Dutch freight rates so cheap? The biggest factor was the low cost of ship construction. Parry lists six cost advantages: skill of Dutch shipwrights, economy in the use of materials, labor-saving devices, large-scale standardized production, large-scale purchasing of materials, cheap transportation of construction materials in Dutch ships. The result was an overall cost of production, as late as the mid-seventeenth century, that was 40–50% cheaper than in England, their nearest competitor.107 Of these advantages, the first three may be seen as the technological advance of the Dutch, and the second three as the cumulative advantage of being ahead on the first three. In addition to being constructed more economically, Dutch ships were constructed in such a way as to require a smaller crew—normally 18 hands instead of the 26–30 used on ships of other countries.108 This enabled the Dutch to feed their crews well, probably better than other shippers;109 they thereby presumably obtained higher productivity for a lower overall wage outlay. The higher productivity was to be seen in port as well as at sea. The “greater durability and speed” of Dutch ships was a function of “regular maintenance”110 as well as of design. Furthermore, the fact that Dutch ships were “cleaner, cheaper, and safer”111 had a spiral effect: cheaper freights led to control of the Baltic trade, which led to cheaper timber, which led to cheaper costs in shipbuilding, which led to cheaper freights. Cleaner, cheaper, and safer ships also meant an increase in total shipping, which made it possible to have lower insurance rates—in part a function of scale, in part the result of a more efficient financial structure,112 which we will shortly discuss. Lower insurance costs are also cumulative; they lead to lower freight rates, which leading to increases in scale and in transactions skills, which lead to lower insurance costs.

If “the foundation of [Dutch] trade was shipping,”113 the biggest profits were made through marketing and stapling114 in the great Amsterdam entrepôt, the success of which was due to the superiority of the Dutch form of commercial organization. Heckscher says the “greatest peculiarity” of the Netherlands of the seventeenth century was its “capacity . . . to make shift with fewer and simpler commercial organizations” as compared with those of other nations.115 But what did this mean? First, it meant the pooling of savings in the partnership system,116 which of course was not original with the Dutch; but they extended it to encompass, along with a thin commercial aristocracy, a large number of smaller merchants.117 Second, it meant the creation of a system of buffer stocks, which considerably reduced risks for the merchant, especially since it was organized monopolistically, and which reduced the dependence of the staple market on fluctuating supply (and costs) while enabling the merchants to make speculative profits on the sales.118 Thirdly, it meant a network of commission agents, who found the customer for the producer, obtaining goods on consignment and receiving a commission on the bill paid by the purchaser to the producer.119Thus the Dutch entrepôt trade developed in the wake of Dutch shipping, itself the outgrowth of Dutch industrial efficiency.120 Once again we have the spiral effect: the strength of the Dutch entrepôt trade “tended to ruin”121 English shipping. Of course, being the entrepôt created a large amount of steady employment122 which, especially in the seventeenth century, sustained the internal demand for Dutch products.

We have argued that the sequence of Dutch advantages in the world-economy is productive, distributional, financial. If the first part of the sequence is controversial, the second is conventional wisdom; but it is often presented as something a bit shameful, the transformation of the noble, ascetic (commercial) entrepreneur into an ignoble, luxury-loving rentier, the betrayal of the Protestant Ethic in Zion itself, the explanation why Holland was cast out from the Garden of Eden. There has been a healthy reaction against such nonsense in recent years, but I wish to go further. The turn to finance is not a sign of decline, much less of decadence; it is, in fact, a sign of capitalist strength that the Amsterdam stock exchange can be considered “the Wall Street of the seventeenth century.”123 What was the origin of such strength? It was the result of three steps in a sequence: One, productive and commercial strength in the world-economy created the basis for sound public finances. Two, sound public finances, combined with a worldwide commercial network, allowed Amsterdam to become the locus of the international payments system and money market, especially given the world-economic slowdown and hence monetary instability. Three, productive and commercial strength, combined with control over the international money market, permitted the export of Dutch capital that brought in remittances, which enabled the Dutch to live off productive surplus far beyond what they created themselves, and for long after the epoch of their own major productive contributions.

In a world-economy whose expansion had slowed, the fact that the United Provinces was “always solvent”124 and was the major exception in the seventeenth century to “the dismal succession of defaults”125 is both cause and effect of general economic hegemony. It is effect insofar as the commercial advantages in maritime freight and insurance alone sufficed to create a surplus in the balance of payments;126 and it is cause because the reputation of sound finances enabled the Dutch government to borrow more cheaply,127 because the excellence of Dutch state credit accounted for “a good part of [its] military success,”128 and because it could therefore probably attract sufficient financial flows as a safe place of deposit to enable the United Provinces to have an overvalued currency. This last advantage meant that the United Provinces could balance a deficit of current account with incoming financial flows.129 Sound finances are, however, only a prerequisite for the level of general capitalist confidence that is needed for an effective flow of financial operations. Sound finances permit large-scale credit operations at low rates and make possible the profit of high overall income composed of low returns per financial operation.

In 1609, the Year of the Truce, De Wisselbank van Amsterdam was founded; it quickly became the great center of European deposit and exchange because it “provided a security and convenience rare in the annals of seventeenth-century banking.” Over the century, deposits rose from under 1 million to over 16 million florins,130 and it became the place of retreat for owners of capital who feared for the safety of their wealth.131 Once enough bullion and coin was deposited, Amsterdam held “the key, so to speak, to Europe’s international payments system.”132With the currencies largely in its coffers, Amsterdam developed a system of bills of exchange that permitted multilateral settlements to expand. It took time, of course, to develop the confidence and the flows; but by 1660, at the latest, Amsterdam played an undisputed role as the center of a multilateral payments system, and it would remain so at least until 1710.133 Regarding restrictions placed on the export of bullion, the United Provinces was the great exception among states in the era of mercantilism: bullion could flow out of the United Provinces quite as easily as it could flow in. This is precisely why so much of it flowed in,134 and of course this policy was only possible when bullion did flow in. The phenomenon then, like so many others, was spiral in form, each act contributing to making the next more possible, until a peak was eventually reached.

Solidity in deposit and exchange made possible a credit function that began for the Wisselbank in 1683. First there were “advances” for depositors and later, “acceptance credits,” operations no longer tied to the entrepôt functions of Amsterdam and essentially credit on operations in distant centers.135 The Dutch developed credit based on specific deposits that was “uncommonly stable” because the “costs of replacing bills of exchange by a shipment of precious metals in any desired coinage were much reduced”136 since the Wisselbank was precisely the storehouse of such precious metals. Finally, the stability of Dutch currency made its trade coins (negotiepenningen), both silver and gold, to be of such “guaranteed quality” that they became the preferred specie of world trade, making a dent even on the Spanish reales de ocho.137 The financial flows in turn created and sustained the low interest rates, which attracted further flows. The rate in Holland declined by more than half over the course of the seventeenth century, forcing rates down in England, France, and even Sweden; but these latter never came down low enough to compete effectively.138 Low interest rates, in turn, lead us to the subject of investments, the other source of financial profit. Being both the chief money market of Europe and the chief commercial entrepôt, Amsterdam was able to lower significantly the search, negotiation, and enforcement costs of lending capital, and thereby to encourage investment in general.139 Being the most technologically advanced society of the time, the United Provinces could also export its technologies, another facet in assuring inward financial flows.140

The expansion of investment at home and abroad was profitable to Dutch capitalists and aided the balance of payments of the state; but did it aid the overall economy of the state? There has been a curious debate in recent years, with mercantilist overtones, suggesting that the “decline” of the Dutch was due in some way to the placing of investments outside the United Provinces, especially in England. This is to neglect the fact that the concern of the investor is to maximize profits, not to support the state.141 We shall talk of this again in discussing the rise of English finance. For the moment, let us content ourselves with Van Dillen’s reminder that the creation of capital was of “great importance . . . to the political and economic position of the Republic. One need only think of the acquisition of allies by means of subsidies,”142 a form of state investment that reinforced that of private parties. Indeed, we cannot complete this story of Dutch hegemony without looking directly at the role of the state. The United Provinces seemed to be the great exception to the predominance of mercantilist ideology in the seventeenth century. From this fact, many persons draw the curious inference that the Dutch state was weak. It seems to me that exactly the inverse was true: in the seventeenth century, the Dutch state was the only state in Europe with enough internal and external strength such that its need for mercantilist policies was minimal.

Let us review, briefly, the nature of the ideology and practices and then look at these internal and external strengths of the United Provinces. At earlier points in history, Amsterdam had of course pursued a vigorously protectionist line,143 which at the level of the towns did not disappear entirely even in the seventeenth century.144 Furthermore, there were many who raised objections to the lack of protectionism at the level of the federation. As the century went on, the agro-industrial sectors lost their edge and appealed for tariffs, albeit with limited success.145Nor were the Estates-General above tariff retaliation in their struggles with the English and the French.146 The role of the state was clear in matters other than protection; it created the conditions for the success of private enterprise. As soon as there was an autonomous government in the Netherlands, “the fisheries came in for the Government’s most earnest solicitude.”147 In order to control quality, William of Orange in 1575 called together the representatives of the five fishing ports and by a series of statutes from 1580 to 1582 created a collegiate organization to control the herring industry.148 Even more important was the creation of the Dutch East India Company, which was to an important degree a response to the anarchy of the free world market in colonial goods and to the dumping that ensued. Stols argued that their key importance was the “intervention of the State in trade and economies” and that the creation of the two Companies “could almost be called nationalization ‘avant la lettre’,” a mode of seeking to unite a previously international trade under one national monopoly.149

The Dutch state defended the interests of its entrepreneurs and worried little about ideological consistency in doing so. The ideology of Dutch hegemony was mare liberum, most cogently expressed by Grotius in his book published in 1609, the Year of the Truce. However, as Sir George Downing bitterly wrote to Lord Clarendon on November 20, 1663: “It is mare liberum in the British seas but mare clausum on the coast of Africa and in the East Indies.”150 There is nothing surprising in all this.151 The United Provinces were dominant, and “liberalism suits dominant economies well”:152 but whenever liberalism conflicts with the possibility of continued dominance, it has a way of not lasting. This is why the “liberal” decentralized structure of the Dutch state can be taken as an indicator of strength rather than of weakness. It is not that decentralized structures are always a sign of strength. In a peripheral zone such as Poland, the rise of the local diets and the kinglets was the measure of peripheralization. In the hegemonic power, however, such a structure is the sign of strength relative to other core powers, who precisely need to increase their administrative centralization in order to try to overcome the economic advantage of the hegemonic power.

What was the structure of the United Provinces? The details changed from the time of the Union of Utrecht in 1579 to the time of downfall of the decentralized state with the creation of the Batavian Republic in 1795; but the reality of each successive variation was not too different. Already in 1576, seven states (or Provinces)—Gelderland, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel, and Groningen—had agreed to send delegates to an Estates-General. Each state had one vote therein, and decisions had to be unanimous. There was in addition a rather weak executive organ called the Council of State. The fleet, the key military institution, was under the daily direction of five separate Admiralty Colleges. The most important state, Holland, itself had a cumbersome governmental structure; its central legislature, the States of Holland, were composed of 18 representatives of the various towns and one representative of the nobility as a whole. There was no monarch in the United Provinces. The nearest equivalent was the Stadholder, a provincial official. The princes of Orange were usually the stadholder of various (but not all) provinces simultaneously, except of course in the two so-called “stadholderless periods.” One would be hard pressed to invent a structure seemingly less likely to work efficiently or indeed to work at all.

In fact, it did work quite well, although not without frictions and violences. (On an individual level, few events of the time match the lynching of Johan de Witt in The Hague in 1672, a year known in Dutch history as the “Year of Disaster.”) Still, if we compare the internal dissensions of the United Provinces to those of England and France, no reasonable analyst can fail to see that the Netherlands was less turbulent than the other two; the internal divisions of the ruling strata rent the society apart far less, and the lower strata were less rebellious. To explain this, we note, first of all, that the formal structure of government masked (and only lightly) another real structure. Financially, Holland paid almost 60% of the costs of government, and Amsterdam half of that. The chief provincial administrative official of the States of Holland was the Land’s Advocate. The office was later renamed the Council Pensionary and called the Grand Pensionary by foreigners, and the official came to be a virtual prime minister of the United Provinces as a whole and acted as president in the “stadholderless periods.”153

The power of this official resulted from the fact that the Estates-General and the States of Holland met in the same building in The Hague, from a continuity provided by the unusual practice whereby the Grand Pensionary stayed in the Estates-General year after year, from Holland’s being the economic and cultural heart of all Dutch activity, and from Amsterdam’s control of the import of grain, which fed nearly half the population.154 If there was any doubt of Amsterdam’s preeminence in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it disappeared entirely in the first “stadholderless period” of 1650–1672, when the ascendancy of Holland became “the cement that held the state together” and when foreign policy “was made subordinate to the interests of trade,”155 as befits a hegemonic power. Amsterdam paid the piper, and in this period especially, she “felt entitled to call the tune.”156 Why then should one worry about centralizing the state if one gets what one wants without it? What Renier, and Wilson after him, called the “social dictatorship of the upper middle class”157 was no doubt jostled occasionally by its internal opponents—the Contra-Remonstrants versus the Remonstrants, the Orangists versus the Loevesteiners; and it was perhaps sapped by a slow process of “aristocratization,”158 although the interests of the ruling stratum were never really threatened by more socially conservarive peers. As Kossmann correctly perceives: “the princes of Orange were rarely willing and never able to supersede the Holland plutocracy.”159

Nor was this stratum really threatened from below; its members paid the price of social peace. Dutch social welfare, and that of Amsterdam in particular, aroused the “unqualified admiration” of foreign visitors, who were perhaps unaware that the money came in good part from the confiscated properties of the Roman Catholic Church.160 No matter—other countries also confiscated Church properties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even without having “provided so amply for the poor.”161 We should be under no illusions about the social reality of the Dutch welfare state. The overall profits of Dutch capitalism “hardly benefited the majority of the people.” Real wages, which at most rose slightly at first, declined over the century;162 national prosperity went hand in hand with “greater poverty among many groups of workers,” and about half the population of Amsterdam were living in “squalid back premises, cellars, and basements.”163

How was it possible that there was nonetheless relative social peace? One major factor was that for some people, declining real income was balanced by social welfare payments, which were higher than elsewhere in the core states.164 A second factor was that the reputation of Amsterdam for its benefits made it a “lode-star to the unemployed and underemployed of neighboring countries.” This secret was rediscovered in a later era by New York. Once the belief was allowed to develop that “the streets of Amsterdam were paved with gold,”165 workers migrated from everywhere—just enough to worsen the labor situation for working-class residents in the city of light, to make those with a few extra crumbs cherish them, and to make every migrant concentrate on the possibilities of individual advancement. All that was needed was power, prosperity, a small amount of largesse, and a soupçon of social mobility—in short, the typical social policy of a hegemonic power.

Strength at home was paralleled by strength abroad. In the first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch fleet ruled the seas, to the extent that it is possible for a fleet to rule seas.166 Spain, of course, had been the previous dominant naval power. The Dutch had assisted the English in bringing to an end the “invincibility” of Spain in 1588; still, as of 1600, Spanish naval strength remained stronger than that of the Dutch and English combined.167 Successive naval victories changed that. The “naval screen” in the Caribbean, mentioned earlier, was anchored in 1634, when the Dutch seized Curaçao. In 1645 the Dutch fleet gained control over the Sound for the first time.168 Thus it was, as the great theorist of sea power Admiral Mahan wrote, that “the United Provinces owed their consideration and power to their wealth and their fleets.”169 This power, to be sure, was challenged in the period between 1651 and 1678, at the height of Dutch hegemony; and by the time of the wars of the turn of the eighteenth century, the Dutch had become a secondary military power in comparison to France and England. But this was precisely the consequence of Dutch economic hegemony. There came a point in the mid-seventeenth century when cumulative economic advantage seemed so incapable of being undercut that both England and France decided that the “Dutch must be driven from the field by force.”170 In fact, of course, even in purely economic terms, hegemony cannot last in a capitalist system; but one cannot blame the English and the French for chafing at the bit. We contend, then, that the state was an essential instrument used by the Dutch bourgeoisie to consolidate an economic hegemony that they had won originally in the sphere of production and had then extended to commerce and finance. The states of competing core and semipheripheral powers would be equally essential instruments in the later process of destroying this hegemony.

What of the cultural sphere? Was there no place for ideas, values, science, art, religion, language, passion, and color? Of course there was, for cultures are the ways in which people clothe their politico-economic interests and drives in order to express them, hide them, extend them in space and time, and preserve their memory. Our cultures are our lives, our most inner selves but also our most outer selves, our personal and collective individualities. How could there not be a cultural expression of hegemony? Such expression would not be in all cases cultural dominance. Core powers often dominate peripheral areas, imposing a sense of inferiority on people regarding their own culture; it is, however, unlikely that a hegemonic power would be able to do the same with other core powers. At most, in the latter case, the culture of a hegemonic power can serve as a model,171 especially a technological model; but cultures are precisely arenas where resistance to hegemony occurs, where appeals are made to the historical values of established “civilizations” against the temporary superiorities of the market. This is true today and was no less true in the seventeenth century.

On the other hand, hegemonic powers do tend to shine culturally, and their critics often proceed from sour grapes. First of all, they have the material need and material means to be productive scientifically, and such productivity carries over into the arts. Second, the politics of liberalism is nourishing to a cultural explosion, and all the more so because the resulting open door policies often lead to the arrival of cultural personalities from elsewhere. Third, wealth breeds luxury, which feeds on cultural artifacts even as it undermines the material base of the wealth itself. Obviously, applied science was of central concern to Holland. The technological advances of previous centuries were precisely one of the key factors in Dutch agro-industrial efficiency. Indeed, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch were busy exporting this technology, and we have already mentioned this transfer as a source of inward financial flows. It was, of course, also a sign of cultural impact. All over the European world, in England, France, Italy, Denmark, Prussia, Poland, there were “Hollandries,” villages of Dutch migrants working on dikes and drainages.172 As they exported their agricultural skills, the Dutch invested much energy in improving their shipping technology—seeking to reduce costs, especially by improving the techniques of navigation.173

In describing how English sovereigns encouraged Dutch skilled artisans to migrate to England between 1669 and 1750, Clark says one reason the Dutch came was that they faced the heavy competition of peers at home, which compared unfavorably to “the easier opportunities of a backward country” like England. For it was the case in the seventeenth century that “however obscure the employment, if it demand[ed] ingenuity, . . . we are not surprised if we find a Dutchman in it.”174 Nor are we surprised, if we think about it, that there were “special bonds” with Scotland.175 Commercial ties were reinforced by religious affinities, with the result that generations of Scotsmen went to the Netherlands for their university education. This is another link in the chain that explains the Scottish Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, itself a crucial factor in the British industrial surge forward. Scientific advance is not dependent on intellectual liberty; but that is surely one mode of nourishing it, and it is a mode congenial to hegemonic powers. A curious paradox, however, is that intellectual liberalism always has its dangerous side, and most especially internally. Its logic may not respect political compromises among factions of the ruling strata; its slogans may encourage rebellion by the lower strata. So it is the way of hegemonic powers to encourage a culture of liberty but to constrain it, to indicate its limits (particularly internally) by erecting untouchable ideological flagstones in order to garner the political and economic advantages for the prevailing dominant interests without reaping the whirlwind.

Let us look at what this meant for the United Provinces. On the one hand, Holland was “a haven for philosophers”176—including Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, the three great luminaries of seventeenth-century thought. Descartes found a tranquility and certainty in Holland that had escaped him in France. Spinoza was driven by excommunication from the Jodenbreestraat, the quarters of the Sephardic Jews, to the friendlier districts of Dutch burghers. Locke sought refuge from the wrath of James II until the happier era when a Dutchman sat on the English throne. Of course, there were many more persecuted intellectuals, such as Comenius, Jurieu, and Bayle, who blessed the existence of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.177 It was a land of exile for French Huguenots to be sure; but the Dutch were liberal and welcomed both Huguenots and Jansenists; Puritans, Royalists, and Whigs; and even Polish Socinians. All were beneficiaries of Holland’s commercial axiom: “forbid as little as possible, accept inputs from everywhere.”178 Nor did this attitude represent merely gratuitous appreciation by the Dutch of high culture; it was good business, and for everyone involved. On the one hand, Holland attracted intellectuals by its “large salaries and good working conditions”179—the brain drain being no recent invention.180 On the other hand, the freedom of the multiple national oppositions of the European world-economy to print whatever they wanted in Holland181 meant that the Regents “realized the economic advantages to be derived from the sale of books and pamphlets”182; thus the “providential alternative medium of expression”183 of the ones was the commercial profit of the others.

There was another side to this coin, however. In 1592, just when the transition of the United Provinces to the status of world power began, the first Arminian controversy broke out. In the high days of Protestant theology when all was grace and all was salvation, Jacobus Arminius was to grasp the most nettlesome branch of the Calvinist logic, the paralogic184 or psycho-logic of predestination, the doctrine of positive reprobation. Arminius rejected the view that grace is salvation, a view espoused by his chief opponent, François Gomar. He proposed as an alternative that grace is the indispensable prerequisite for salvation, the necessary instrument of salvation. This may seem, to the jaundiced eyes of twentieth-century persons, a picayune distinction, but it led to the greatest theological debate of seventeenth-century Holland, and probably of Christian Europe.185 Despite the strong support the Arminians seemed to have had at first in political and economic circles in Holland, it was a debate they lost in the short run when, at the Synod of Dordrecht in 1619, the Contra-Remonstrants (Gomarians) carried the day against the Remonstrants (Arminians) and had the latter excluded from the state. Of course, the Arminians didn’t really lose in the long run. The whole story is there.

What was at issue? According to the Dutch historian G. J. Renier, the Arminian formulation meant that an individual could withstand grace or lose it, and thus “a fragment of human freedom and dignity was preserved by the Remonstrants. They were the true children of humanism.” Perhaps, but who supported humanism?186 The Arminians were clearly a social minority, but a powerful one because their political base was the product of social links to the merchant-patricians.187 On the other side were the orthodox puritanical predikants recruited from modest homes and backed by the petty bourgeoisie in the consistories and excited crowds in the towns, with the support of Prince Maurice and the Orangist camp.188 The Gomarians accused the Arminians of being “soft” on Catholicism, and this perhaps brought the Arminians some tacit Catholic support; but Catholics were oppressed, and being in the “lowest strata of society,”189 could offer little in the way of political strength.

This locating of social groups in the two camps is crude but not inaccurate. What does it tell us about the meaning of the debate? First we must see why the debate turned against the Arminians. The second Arminian controversy began in 1602 and reached a climax in 1608. The second debate caused much more fuss than the first one, although both the main protagonists and the theological issues were identical. What had changed was the political situation. What was to become the Truce of 1609 was then under discussion between the camp of continued war and the camp of truce. The first included the Orangists, who wished to strengthen further the hero-stadholder and achieve glory; the Protestant proselytizers, who still hoped to incorporate the southern Netherlands and extirpate Catholicism; some merchants, who drew their profits from privateering; and segments of the popular strata, attracted by opportunity and xenophobia. The camp of truce was led by the Land’s Advocate of Holland, Johan van Olden-barnevelt, who spoke for all those who saw the possibilities of hegemony. Their point of view was to be summed up later in the century by William Bareel, who wrote to the moral successor of Oldenbarnevelt, Jacob de Witt, on December 18, 1654: “The best possible maxim and wish for the sovereign Republic seems to me to be Peace in our days and Peace everywhere, since our Trade extends everywhere.”190

On October 30, 1608, when the political debate about the truce was at its “intense peak,”191 Arminius delivered his Declaration of Sentiments. The two debates became inextricably intertwined. Oldenbarnevelt got his Truce, but Gomarus was to get his Synod of Dordrecht. Was one the price of the other? It is surely true, as Boxer suggests, that the regent class was able to keep Calvinist zealots from “sacrificing gain to godliness.” Since their attitude to religious tolerance was “essentially utilitarian and self-interested,”192 a few Arminians thrown to the wolves in a timely way might not seem an unreasonable price—if not to Oldenbarnevelt (who was executed in 1619, the same year as the Synod of Dordrecht), at least to others of his class.193 This particular dramatic plot is a familiar scenario of the modern world-system. Cultural tolerance had its limits, particularly its internal limits. It could not be permitted to sow subversion. It could not even be permitted to create a fundamental split among the ruling strata. Descartes and Locke were welcomed, but Grotius was imprisoned for life. A ban was placed on the principal works of Spinoza, who was an internal exile, although he was allowed to live and write; and when he died, his funeral was accompanied “by six carriages and a large number of well-to-do people.”194 Not merely liberalism but liberality.

In 1618 a Venetian remarked that Amsterdam was “the mirror-image of the early days of Venice.”195 By 1672 a lifetime had passed. The fruit of hegemony is “decline,” but the process is not as painful as one might think because it is scarcely perceived until long past the peak. In later centuries, we may argue about when decline set in. At the time, however, the English and French as well as the Dutch saw Holland as the kingpin, and at least until 1763, if not until the French Revolution, it was materially very satisfying, and no doubt morally too, to be a Dutch burgher. Decline can only be analyzed as rise, the rise of others within the framework of the efficiencies of profit. To pursue further our discussion of the limits of hegemony, we must thus turn from this hitherto Hollandocentric presentation to a systematic discussion of the parallel developments and interrelations between the United Provinces, England, and France.

The situation began to change in mid-century. The Thirty Years’ War ended; the Eighty Years’ War ended. The United Provinces at last began to feel the pinch of economic contraction, which the other states had been feeling for from 30 to 50 years. The English Civil War was over—not yet liquidated, but over. The century-long period of acute internal strife in France had just about ended. The battles between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, between the “puritan” and the “proto-liberal” (or “tolerant”) versions of Christianity, were publicly contained and largely privatized. The states breathed again, and public administration could begin to be the central concern of rulers.196

In a sense, we move from an era where the cleavages were primarily intrastate, the turning inward of European wars and politics after Cateau-Cambrésis, to an era when the cleavages were once again primarily interstate. This latter period runs from 1651, the time of the start of the first Anglo–Dutch War, to 1763 and the close of the Seven Years’ War. In a sense, the distinction between intrastate and interstate cleavages is both arbitrary and fuzzy; but nonetheless, it may be useful in underlining the dominant tone of an epoch. Class struggles in a capitalist world-economy are complex affairs and appear sinuously under many guises. The period leading up to the dominance of a hegemonic power seem to favor the intrastate form, as those that seek class advantage on the market seek to eliminate internal political constraints left over from earlier eras. The period of the decline of hegemony seems to favor the interstate form, as those who seek class advantage on the market strive to eliminate interstate political constraints left over from earlier eras.197

In the mid-seventeenth century, it was clear that both England and France were interested in forcibly eliminating certain Dutch advantages and substituting their own. Because the market superiority of the one over the other was not so clear-cut and the Dutch were still very strong, and because rising semiperipheral powers such as Prussia, Sweden, and Austria sought to profit from the absence of a militarily preponderant state, it took over 100 years to clarify this situation. By 1763 the English edge over France (and the Dutch) would be clear and Britain could move forward to becoming the next hegemonic power. By 1763 the success of Prussia in the semiperipheral game of moving to the head of the line was clear, and it determined the future course of central European politics; the contraction and reorganization of the periphery was complete and the world-economy was ready for further geographic and economic expansion.

STRUGGLE IN THE CORE—PHASE I: 1651–1689

When Trade is at stake it is your last Retrenchment; you must defend it or perish.

—William Pitt the Elder1

Dutch hegemony was first really challenged in 1651. Why only then? Surely not because England and France did not want to do it earlier. It was rather because they were too preoccupied with their internal problems to carry through “any vigorous effort at breaking the hegemony of Holland.”2

The half-century after 1650 throughout Europe was a period of cessation in population growth only, either through decline or leveling off, and the curves started to go up again at the end of the century.3 No doubt this can be explained by the combination of the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, the ecological stress that led in some areas to local shortages (and therefore epidemics), and the overproduction of cereals in the world-economy as a whole leading to declining world prices.4 It is, however, the regional variation that is most pertinent. It is quite striking that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the areas of the highest population density tended to be located primarily in the old dorsal spine of Europe (from Flanders to northern Italy) and in the new core areas of the European world-economy (western part of the United Provinces, southeast England, and northeast and west of France).5 The main impact of the Thirty Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, and the epidemics of the early seventeenth century was to dramatically reduce the population of the old dorsal spine, and of northern and central Spain, which was previously a medium density area.6

By contrast, in the new core states there was little decline. In the United Provinces, the situation was confused from 1650 to 1680 and generally stable after that, until an upswing occurred around 1750.7 In northern France, there was an “absence of major catastrophes.”8England’s picture is considered “unclear”9 and “still little known,” but there may have been a “modest” increase in population at this time.10

It is quite understandable, given this link between core status and resistance to population decline, that the “optimistic” theory of population should prevail in the seventeenth century, the belief that populousness leads to national strength whereas sparse habitation means that a country is “necessarily poor and weak.”11 How to strengthen their state as compared with others was what preoccupied the core states. It was the Depression of 1622 that inspired Sir Thomas Mun’s mercantilist classic, England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade.12 To be sure, mercantilism was nothing new in England. Grampp dates it back to 1500,13 and Unwin describes an extensive protectionist movement under James I;14 but as the crunch came to England and France, mercantilist policies were adopted with “more force and coherence.”15 Yet, as we discussed before, the Alderman Cockayne’s Project turned out to be premature. What had changed by mid-century that made it possible for mercantilist policies to succeed? What in fact made it essential that they succeed?16

In the acute struggle of the core, the English Navigation Act of 1651 was the opening gun. What precipitated it? The end of the Thirty Years’ War and the final recognition of Dutch independence by the Spanish both occurred in 1648. The English Commonwealth was proclaimed in 1649, and the stadholderless period of the United Provinces began in 1651. In terms of Europe’s great religious struggle, the bounds of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had more or less been reached (with the exception of the expulsion of the French Huguenots). Hence there was peace, and yet there were wars—or really a long “cold war” that occasionally involved interludes of fighting to punctuate the “venomous trade-rivalry” of the core powers.17 The end of the various continental wars was no advantage to England. Quite the contrary, for English shipping had benefited from England’s neutral status, and “the coming of peace meant a reversion to the Dutch entrepôt.”18Furthermore, after 1632, because of wartime insecurity, the Spanish asientistas used English ships to carry their bullion to Flanders. This had a very important side advantage for England because, by agreement, two-thirds of the bullion was unloaded at Dover and coined at the Mint in London before proceeding. This provided significant state revenue, useful to Charles I and later to the Long Parliament.19

On the Dutch side, the war’s end was followed by the Redemption Treaty between the Dutch and the Danish in 1650, allowing the Dutch to farm the Sound tolls on their own ships for a fixed annual sum, which saved money and, “no less important,” time.20 On April 7, 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established the first Dutch outpost on the Cape of Good Hope, which dominated the route to the East Indies. In general, Dutch prosperity was reaching a new peak and by contrast, “the English position had never been worse.”21 Corn prices had reached their peak for the century in 1649. The French were prohibiting English imports. The merchants were paying the costs of civil war, at home (via taxation) and abroad (because of the absence of a diplomatic corps and the coastal preoccupations of the navy). It was under these circumstances that the arch-Protestant regime of the Commonwealth was to break the historic, closely interwoven pattern of Protestantism and patriotism.22 Indeed, Lichtheim sees Cromwell as having made “the decisive break” in the history of British overseas expansion. He secularized foreign policy, as he “nationalized” the Puritans.23

Since the Dutch were in fact hegemonic, there were only two possible ways of enhancing English commerce: state assistance to English merchants or state constraint on foreign merchants. In 1621 the English, fearing to antagonize the Dutch by adopting the latter policy, opted for the former, in the form of regulated companies.24 This served the companies well, but did not serve the English bourgeoisie as a whole. Over the objections of the regulated companies,25 but in the line of “the forward march of economic forces as a whole,”26 the English moved directly against the Dutch by putting restrictions on imports in 1651. The Navigation Act of 1651 decreed that goods entering England had to be shipped either in English ships or in ships of the country of production (defined as being the country of first port). This was designed precisely “to cripple the carrying and entrepôt trade of the Dutch.”27 Must we then choose between Adam Smith’s interpretation that the Act was a result of the interested counsel of merchants and Schmoller’s that it was an aspect of state building?28 Not at all—since what was of interest at this point to merchants (some merchants) and manufacturers was precisely the strengthening of the state in ways that could help them engross not merely the Baltic trade but also the about-to-expand and ultimately more important transatlantic trade.29

It is difficult to see how a military test of strength could have been avoided. The provocation to the Dutch was too great, even if the English thought they were being defensive. In early 1651, the Dutch rejected a proffered treaty, and relations with England rapidly deteriorated.30 Once a war started in 1652, it rapidly turned against the Dutch, largely because their navy was in surprisingly bad shape.31 One war in a sense led to another. The “jingoists” in England were waiting for “another smack against the Dutch.”32 Their chance would come—years later, and this time as quite open aggression. If “Cromwell wished to defend himself against the Dutch, Charles II wished to make himself their master.”33 But by the time of Charles II, the Dutch fleet had improved, having learned its lesson, and English morale was low (because of administrative incompetence and the plague in London); hence there was stalemate and peace.

In some ways, the Treaty of Breda in 1667 was a Dutch victory, or at least a compromise. The Dutch exchanged the “expensive liability” of New Amsterdam for Surinam, and for Pulo-Run in the East Indies.34 The English agreed that goods from the natural hinterland of the United Provinces (such as the German linens treated and/or stapled in Holland) would be considered Dutch. Since they were the bulk of Dutch exports to England, this vitiated some of the point of the Navigation Acts.35 Nonetheless, Breda is seen by Wilson as “a real turning-point in Anglo—Dutch relations” and by Carter as the “downturn of the Dutch Republic’s prosperity.”36 Obviously, something must have been going on below the political surface, and it must have been more than the mere advantage the English obtained by acquiring New Amsterdam and thereby plugging a major Dutch smuggling hole in English mercantilist restrictions.37 Was it not that English hatred of the Dutch had in fact been coordinate with a “reluctant admiration for Dutch economic skill”38 and “a desire to emulate them?”39 and that important changes in the agro-industrial efficiencies of England were taking place that could render the setback of Breda essentially unimportant and turn the Dutch into England’s junior partner?

No doubt France’s entry into the rounds of warfare was the consequence of, and also facilitated, this shift. The French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands in 1667 was a “crucial event,”40 hastening the Treaty of Breda and promptly leading to the Triple Alliance of England, the United Provinces, and Sweden (the fourth significant military power in Europe at that point). Louis XIV was forced to backtrack and the Dutch “boasted with some justification in 1668 of being the arbiter of Europe and of having subdued five kings.” No wonder Louis would have a “Dutch obsession.”41

In 1672 matters came to a head. The Dutch found themselves in separate wars with the English and the French. The Third Anglo—Dutch (naval) War was relatively inconclusive, although the English won their way on the symbolic salute issue.42 The French land campaign, by contrast, seemed to be spectacularly successful, at least at first. In the Year of Disaster, 1672, all of Holland was nearly conquered by the French; in the consequent political turmoil, Johan de Witt was murdered and the regime of the Dutch Republic was terminated. Yet the near victory turned to failure. (Hence the other Dutch appellation for 1672, the Year of the Miracle.) Far from the French taking over the Dutch trading system, the Treaty of Nijmegen that finally terminated the long and ultimately inconclusive war in 1678 and required that the French revoke the tariff of 1664.43

The real significance of 1672 is that from 1651 to then, both the English and the French saw the Dutch as the great rival. They now turned primarily on each other, and the Dutch suddenly became a secondary factor despite continuing Dutch economic strength.44 In a sense, what was happening was that the cost of warfare was steadily rising. Although the technology of weapons would remain basically similar throughout the early modern period, there was a steadily declining role for the cavalry45 and for the siege warfare in which the Dutch excelled.46 By the end of the seventeenth century, the demographic consequences of the partition of the Burgundian state had begun to take their military toll. The United Provinces, despite its wealth, was “too small to carry indefinitely the insupportable burden of military and naval defence they had to bear.”47The English navy surpassed that of the Dutch in the end largely because England “commanded larger resources.”48 France did too, of course, but they used their resources on land and not at sea; and in the long run they got less return for their military investment.49

The growing English and French military strength had its roots in important shifts in the economic base. One of the problems of discussing the comparative efficiencies of the agro-industrial production of the core powers between 1650 and 1750, and especially the comparison of England/Britain with France, is that almost all the research has been done within national bounds. Such works often contain comparative statements, which quite frequently represent prejudices rather than sober assessments. The scholars of the world, including the French, tend all too often to read the differences of the nineteenth century back into the earlier period, and thereupon make assiduous efforts to explain facts they have not yet empirically verified. My strong suspicion is that there was far less of a difference between the real agro-industrial efficiencies of England and France in this period than we tend to assume. The small differences that emerged as of 1763 were magnified politically into the significant differences of a century later, by which time they had been economically institutionalized. It is the first half of this argument that we shall try to outline at this point.

One of the basic problems of comparison is what areas to compare. The political unit of France was about four times that of England in size and population (hence roughly the same density). If we add Scotland and Wales, to use Great Britain as a unit of comparison, this a little less than doubles the area and reduces the population ratio. Considering only the Five Great Farms of France, which represented a unified tariff zone, gives us roughly the same area as Great Britain. If we had the data neatly divisible by these various units, which we do not, we would come up with different results depending on our choices. The outer political boundaries are quite meaningful for assessing military possibilities and indicating areas within which government policy could affect economic life, even though, in each of the three core powers, the central government was constrained, in varying ways, by the nature of its constitutional structure (not to speak of its internal politics).

Jacquart says of France that agriculture was in the seventeenth century “the most important source of wealth, and by far.”⁵⁰ Is this not equally true of England? In the period of economic stagnation, part of the arable land was used for animal husbandry in England, but for wine growing in France. In each case it was a return to the usage of the period prior to the sixteenth-century expansion. The variation in response between the two countries was primarily a function of climate and pedology. Goubert paints a dark picture of France’s agriculture in the seventeenth century in comparison with England’s, Holland’s and some of Europe’s other areas as well; but Le Roy Ladurie sees France’s agricultural expansion, at least in the far north (the best arable area), as starting at precisely the same point as England’s—in 1690. Imbert argues, from a third position, that French cereal production improved only slightly, but wine production much more.⁵¹

A century-long decline in the prices of cereals occurred in all three core countries from 1650 to 1750. Prices of other agricultural products declined as well, but not always at the same rate.⁵² In each of the countries, the response was to try to maintain profit levels by turning to other enterprises or lowering the costs of production through increased efficiency and organizational restructuring. The Dutch had long led the way in agricultural diversification. The others would now emulate them.⁵³ For Fussell the “most important novelty” in England was the introduction of turnips and clover in arable rotation, and for Jones the “crucial innovation pertained to the supply of fodder.” Wilson stresses the role of assarting, the “process of winning new land from old waste and heath,” whereas for Habbakuk, it was less the use of new techniques that mattered than “the spread of the best existing [ones].”⁵⁴ Whichever of these four emphases is correct, two main facts are noticeable. The “improvements” essentially made possible the cultivation of areas that had been previously low in productivity or totally unused;⁵⁵ and they were a direct response to the weakness of the cereals market since, in order to maintain profit levels, farmers had to obtain a larger share of a relatively stagnant market⁵⁶ or turn to other products.

The story of English agricultural improvements in this period is the subject of a vast literature, so persuasive as perhaps to cause us to lose perspective. De Vries reminds us that at least for the seventeenth century English agricultural improvement “served mainly to bring her up to a standard already achieved in the Netherlands and Northern Italy and not to leave them behind in a trail of smoke.”⁵⁷ In a somewhat bold statement in light of the hesitancies of even the French scholars,⁵⁸ Roehl insists:

Modern [agricultural] techniques were introduced as early in France as elsewhere. Particularly the area west of Paris toward the Channel and north toward Flanders is structurally and climatically quite similar to the best agricultural regions of England. It is not surprising, therefore, to note that the ‘agricultural revolution’, which was as uneven in its incidence in France as in England, began in and was for long largely confined to these same types of agricultural regions in the two countries.⁵⁹

What do we know about the increase in productivity? Slicher van Bath puts England, the Netherlands, and France all in his phase C (average yield ratio on grains being 6.3–7.0), dating the period for the first two at between 1500 and 1699 and that for France as between 1500 and 1820—the same starting date but a different terminal one. For England and the Netherlands, he calculates a move into his phase D (average yield above 10.0) after 1750 (leaving us uncertain what he believes occurred between 1700 and 1750.⁶⁰ Hoskins sees no discernible rise in yields in England from 1680 to the end of the eighteenth century, and Wrigley estimates a 10% rise in per capita yield from 1650 to 1750; but Fisher says that as of the later years of Charles II, presumably circa 1680, “the flow of produce from the land was to become so great as to inflict upon men the horrors of plenty.”⁶¹ As for Scotland, commercialization of agriculture (arable and pastoral) was “one of the most striking characteristics in the seventeenth century.”⁶² In France, cereal productivity remained stable from the fifteenth century to 1840 when measured by yield ratio or production per hectare,⁶³ but not in terms of the workday or workyear, both of which grew longer.⁶⁴

If we look at cereals production in isolation, we miss part of the point, for the “crux of agricultural improvement was the combination of animal and arable husbandry.”⁶⁵ This was what the new grasses—hay, lucerne, clover—permitted. This was what the English learned from the Dutch.⁶⁶ This was what permitted the substitution of labor power for space and allowed for high productivity pastoralism without nomadism.⁶⁷While this was going on in England, a similar flourishing of wine production was going on in France. In the seventeenth century, Chaunu remarks somewhat austerely, the Occident began to catch up with the Orient “on the road of artificial paradises.”⁶⁸

Taking the European world-economy as a whole between 1650 and 1750, there was a striking shift of the locus of cereals production, from the periphery to the core. We shall discuss this at length when we treat what happened to the eastern European periphery; but since much of the southern half of France was really semiperipheral, or even peripheral, the same phenomenon occurred there.

Perhaps the way to picture what happened is to say that although England and northern France as core areas both significantly increased their percentage of world cereals production at this time, in the case of England, the new surplus was exported across national boundaries,⁶⁹ but in the case of northern France the new surplus was “exported” internally.⁷⁰ If this analysis is correct regarding the broad outlines, the explanation of later differences between England and France are not to be found in differing levels of agricultural productivity in the seventeenth century. They can perhaps be located rather in the different organization of agricultural production. To make a sensible comparison of developments in English and French land tenure in this period, we must bear in mind that they each had two major modes of utilizing the land, but they only had one in common—cereals. The second mode in England was animal husbandry, which lent itself more to economies of scale than did wine production, the second mode in France; and animal husbandry required more capital investment. This simple economic fact may explain more about the differences in land tenure developments than is explained by laws, traditions, attitudes, prior class structure, or the presumed heritage of “feudal” rights.

One of the basic phenomena of modern capitalism is the slow but steady growth of the large estate, a process of increasing concentration.⁷¹ A principal method was the enclosure of commons, which seems not to have abated significantly in this period.⁷² It took money and effort to create such estates in difficult times. Increasingly, land was transferred by sale into non-noble hands, although in France, this fact is less noticeable in retrospect because the same wealth that enabled a non-noble to purchase land enabled him to purchase also a title of nobility (with significantly more facility than in England). These large estates were in part put together piecemeal, and therefore some of the concentration of ownership was just “bookkeeping centralization.”⁷³ By definition, such bookkeeping centralization entailed consequently increased absenteeism. In addition, with a decline in grain prices, there was a decreased advantage to direct farming and an increased advantage to leasing.⁷⁴ The steady growth of the state attracted more and more of these landlords to life in the capital. Whether they left to be courtiers or to be participants in the money market, there was an increase in their physical distance from agricultural production.⁷⁵

To preserve large estates, individuals had to be competent entrepreneurs; there was ample room for such talents, but families sought to protect themselves against the incompetence of particular heirs. In England this gave rise to a new juridical form—the strict settlement.⁷⁶ This was helpful, as were lowered interest rates, which made it more possible to carry debts and were reinforced by the constraints on borrowing that the strict settlement entailed.⁷⁷ In France, family inheritance faced the additional problem of compulsory partibility of estates. But the French estate owners were as astute as the English and used the legal loophole of rentes constituées, which could be assigned to heirs, as distinguished from rentes foncières, which could not. They were willing to accept low rates of interest rather than to recover capital for the purposes of creating perpetual lineage property. Venality of office provided a key form of such investment.⁷⁸

The next two categories, the prosperous and non prosperous producers, are confused because although some were owners, most were tenants, and because some tenants de jure were owners de facto;⁷⁹ the owner–tenant distinction did not correlate with groupings of economic strength, social standing, or political outlook. Below the level of the great estate owner, it was possibly better in a time of economic difficulties to be a tenant than to be an owner.⁸⁰ The evolution of these two categories should be seen as a process in two stages. In the first half of the seventeenth century, rents were still rising and taxes had begun to rise, but profits from wheat production were already declining.⁸¹ This created a squeeze on the smaller products of cereals. Many independent producers had to yield their independent status.⁸² So did smaller tenant-farmers.⁸³

The consequence seems to have been the rise of the prosperous tenant cereals-farmer in the subsequent period of stagnation at the expense of the nonprosperous farmers, whether owners or tenants. This was equally true in England⁸⁴ and in northern France.⁸⁵ It was also true to some extent of dairying, the other main agricultural activity of these areas.⁸⁶ One of the reasons for the rise of the prosperous tenant-farmer was precisely the growth of the great estate as a capitalist structure that needed intermediaries to oversee the direct producers, whether they were laborers or subtenants.⁸⁷ Such intermediaries were not easy to find, and the period of low cereals prices enabled these intermediaries to get better terms from the landlords. The better terms might be in reductions in real rents⁸⁸ or in the degree to which the landlord would assume the cost of improvements.⁸⁹

In the period of 1660 to 1750, it is generally agreed the small peasant or yeoman farmer or “owner-occupier” was disappearing in England; but was he surviving in France? We have been suggesting that in very broad outlines, the answer is negative for northern France (or at least as negative as for England) but positive for southern France. What kind of evidence is there concerning France? Let us start with terminology. The nearest French term for a yeoman farmer is laboureur, which connoted not land tenure but capital stock. A laboureur, says Goubert, “habitually designates someone [in eastern and northern France] who possesses the farming implement known as the great northern charrue.”⁹⁰ Now a charrue is to be distinguished from an araire, although in English both are often translated as plow.⁹¹ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, a charrue was a far heavier instrument than an araire, plowing more deeply and containing more iron. Hence it required horses or oxen to pull it. A laboureur therefore was “a rather large owner or controller of land (exploitant) who stood out among the population of the village by the importance of his means and by the number of persons he could employ.”

Moving south to lands with only an araire and not a charrue, instead of laboureurs we find smaller and weaker farmers called métayers and closiers.⁹² Dupâquier and Jacquart calculate that between 1685 and 1789 in the Véxin francais, a northern area, the percentage of the population who were petits laboureurs, called haricotiers or sossons, went from 9.9% to 3.0%, whereas the percentage of more wealthy fermiers laboureursonly changed from 10.2% to 8.4%. We find, by contrast, that in wine country, “small peasant property is clearly dominant,” five times as important as in the northern areas of large-scale cultivation.⁹³ As these petits laboureurs were squeezed, many crossed the line to become primarily manoeuvriers (laborers). Le Roy Ladurie suggests, and I agree, that we should not overdo this distinction even for the sixteenth century, since the real line was between both these groups taken together and the gros fermier, the large tenant-farmers.⁹⁴ This is true for England, too. However, what happened in the period of stagnation is that although this line became socially and politically more distinct in England, the situation was less clear-cut in the areas of rural France that did not grow cereals.

What, then, of the argument that Brenner puts forth (and he is not alone) that it was “the predominance of petty proprietorship in France in the early modern period which ensured long-term agricultural backwardness.” We have suggested our skepticism about both assumptions—the predominance of petty proprietorship (not true of northern France), and the agricultural backwardness of France relative to England (doubtfully true of northern France, at least up to 1750). Brenner says that in England, agrarian advance was possible because “the landlords were able to engross, consolidate and enclose, to create large farms and to lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capitalist investments.”⁹⁵

Jacquart, describing changes in northern France as the old families begin to sell their lands in the “second” sixteenth century, says:⁹⁶

What matters . . . is the behavior of the new controllers of the land (maîtres du sol). Of bourgeois origin, they retained something of the profit mentality of their merchant ancestors, even if they sought to make them forgotten. They understood the key role of the reserve in seigniorial revenue, the advantage of the concentrated large estate, the greater revenue furnished by woodlands and meadows. There was a whole conscious policy which involved, over generations, the acquisition of lands, their improvement, their development (mise en valeur).

Side by side, Jacquart notes, there also developed medium-sized, market-oriented farms of 15–50 hectares, which represented typical modest bourgeois investments, “viable and profitable.” This growth of both large estates and medium-sized units involved a “slow process of peasant expropriation” that resulted in a “real pauperization of the rural masses.” Is this really different from England?

Brenner admits that French landlords might have wished “to consolidate holdings” as much as their English confrères. But alas they could not! For if in England the laws permitted the landlords to “raise rents or fines to impossible levels and thus evict the small tenant,” in France they might instead have had “to buy up countless small peasant holdings in order to amass a consolidated unit.” This, we are led to infer, was an impossible burden on French protocapitalist landlords. But we have seen that buying up properties, far from being implausible, was a prime method of concentration both in England and in France. Indeed, Brenner implicitly admits it when he says that in France, “throughout the early modern period, many peasants were indeed forced deeply into debt and were ultimately obliged to sell their holdings.”⁹⁷ If so, then who bought these holdings? Brenner concludes that at the end of the seventeenth century, “some 40–50 percent of the cultivated land was still in peasant possession” in France, but “no more than 25–30 percent” in England. What, however, was the percentage in northern France?

Our argument is that in land organization and agricultural productivity differences between England and northern France in the period of 1650 to 1750 were relatively minor. Seen from the point of view of the capitalist world-economy as a whole, the two areas were more alike than different. They were both expanding their percentage of the world’s production of cereals in order to maintain overall profit levels in a time of stagnation; this enabled them to catch up partially with Holland’s net advantage. Regarding the industrial sector, the seventeenth century was a time when the protection of industry was a prime concern of both the English and the French government. This protection in England is considered by Lipson to be one of the three pillars of English mercantilism, along with the Navigation Acts and the Corn Laws; the “Age of Mercantilism,” he says, was the “Age of Enterprise.”⁹⁸ As for France, “Colbertism” stands out as one of the major phenomena of the century, although in fact protectionist intervention is already important in the days of Richelieu.⁹⁹

Efforts at industrial protection, or perhaps we should say promotion, were focused primarily in textiles. Let us look first at the results and second at the explanations. French textiles were located essentially in the far north and to a lesser extent, in the Midi.¹⁰⁰ The traditional silk industry of Lyon had a “remarkable rise” in the seventeenth century.¹⁰¹ Wool and cottons did less well. They were at their height from 1625 to 1635, then declined, then were “stagnant at a lower level”¹⁰² under Colbert (and despite Colbert?) and finally picked up and were partially reconverted in the period of 1680 to 1705,¹⁰³ (as a result of Colbert?). The reconversion involved a significant “ruralization” of industry.¹⁰⁴England’s crisis in textiles started earlier, and was perhaps overcome earlier, with the rise of the new draperies. From 1660 to 1700, cloth production increased, exports doubled, and there was a growing variety in the cloth products.¹⁰⁵ Here too, textile production was ruralized, perhaps “more precociously and more radically than in continental Europe.”¹⁰⁶

Compared to England and even to France, the Dutch textile industry in the second half of the seventeenth century was running into trouble. For one thing it was located in the towns, and labor costs were high.¹⁰⁷ The Dutch therefore declined in all fields of worsteds except camelots (greinen), but not in woollens. In camelots and woollens, they retained the advantage of privileged access to the necessary raw materials—Spain for wool, and Turkey for the material needed for camelots; and they maintained the advantage of techniques of dyeing with indigo and cochineal. The camelots and the woollens were high-value, high-quality goods, but they were not intended for a wide market. Such a shift in orientation was the consequence of a “generally weaker position,”¹⁰⁸ and thus it is quite understandable that in the second half of the seventeenth century, Dutch capital was shifting out of industrial investment to mercantile enterprises with a higher rate of return.¹⁰⁹

In other industries, less was happening. However, English shipbuilding did rise “more or less steeply, perhaps about 1670,”¹¹⁰ at the very moment that Dutch shipbuilding was reduced in volume.¹¹¹ What really must be kept in the forefront of one’s attention is that in the world-economy as a whole, demand was lethargic. Even in sectors in which demand was expanding, it could not keep pace with the agro-industrial efforts of the United Provinces and its mercantilist rivals, England and France. The major concern of England and France was to findemployment for its workers; that of the United Provinces was to keep it.¹¹² So long as the mercantilist could create such employment, says Pares, he was “indifferent to the productivity of the labour employed.”¹¹³

This struggle of core powers to export unemployment to each other is a recurrent phenomenon of the capitalist world-economy in its moments of stagnation. What made it even more acute in the period of 1660 to 1763 is that England and France both faced, in addition, a “chronic problem of poverty” affecting one-quarter to one-half their population, including not only the paupers proper, but the large (and growing) number of part-time workers. Wilson says of England that there was “an army of workers partly or wholly dependent on a great but unstable manufacturing export industry.”¹¹⁴ The same was true of France, with perhaps a lesser emphasis on the export. The question, then, was what would maximize the desired employment. Here the controversy was acute about the role of wages. On the one hand, it is said, and was said at the time, that a disadvantage of the Dutch was high wages, which “were unique in resisting the massive erosion of purchasing power experienced elsewhere.”¹¹⁵ This may be attributed to the urban location of industry and hence to the syndical strength of the workers, which led to the social welfare policies of the government, one explanation of high taxes. High wages and high taxes presumably were making Dutch products relatively less competitive, and this explains the relative decline.

However, English and French wages may in fact have been rising. There is some suggestion of this for France, both in agriculture and industry.¹¹⁶On the other hand, to know what was really happening, we would have to know more about labor productivity and the percentage of wages that were paid in money. Hill says that in the seventeenth century “English laziness was a bye-word with foreigners.”¹¹⁷ Presumably the chief comparison was with the Dutch. Lipson tells us that in these harder times, artisans were often obliged either to take part of their wages in kind at an overvalued rate or to have wages deferred in the form of a promissory note, which the worker then sought to transform into cash by selling it at discount.¹¹⁸ The last is particularly interesting since this would mean that rising wages, although a real cost to the employer, benefited not the worker but some petty banker.

We come thus to the contradictory needs of the mercantilist core powers fighting the hegemonic core power in a time of contraction. On the one hand, they had to try to be cost-competitive. On the other hand they had to locate demand for their products. The pressure to be cost-competitive put pressure on the workers regarding labor discipline. Furniss describes the rise of this concept in England in the context of ideas about the “duty to labor,” said to be a correlate of the “right to employment.”¹¹⁹ Thompson speaks of the image of clockwork that spread during the seventeenth century “until, with Newton, it . . . engrossed the universe.”¹²⁰ Nef notes that in this same period Scottish coal miners and salters were “reduced to slavery” as a result of early industrialism.¹²¹ We are so used to associating the rise of free wage labor with the rise of capitalism, especially in the core, that the word slavery startles, even amazes. The same thing happened in the royal manufacturies of France, where the workers were virtually imprisoned in their work places; yet they received relatively high wages.

Let us put this side by side with the debate on high wages. The majority of mercantilists, like most capitalist entrepreneurs, were in favor of low wages as a way of improving competitive costs; but the most sophisticated mercantilists were not. In 1668 Josiah Child in his new Discourse on Trade explained Dutch advantage in the following way: “Whenever wages are high, universally throughout the whole world, it is an infallible evidence of the riches of that country; and wherever wages for labour run low it is proof of the poverty of that place.”¹²² Thus Josiah Child anticipated by 300 years the argument of Arghiri Emmanuel.¹²³ Although to be sure Child did not persuade everyone, his views reflected structural pressures.

Labor discipline and increased wages are complementary in a time of world economic stagnation, and the two thrusts combined increase employment regardless of true unit productivity: that is, labor discipline (even including near slavery) as a way to increase output (was this not the real motivation in the Scottish coal mines and the Gobelins in Paris?) plus increased wages to attract skilled workers (the Gobelins again) and also to expand the internal market and thereby expand demand. A system in which increased “wages” transfer income to the petty banker instead of to the worker might have done as much, perhaps more, to increase demand as a system in which the workers were truly well paid. However, too much of an increase in labor costs too early (regardless of who benefited) would have jeopardized competition with the Dutch; so a balance had to be reached.

We can now evaluate the success of efforts in the second half of the seventeenth century to promote agriculture and industry in England and France. The classic comparison of liberal historiography is that made between Whig England as it moved toward privately controlled mass industries of the future and bureaucratic Colbertist France as it fell into a luxury-industry rut. As a consequence, it is argued, England was moving towards liberalism, Parliamentary controls, and progress; whereas France was reinforcing aristocracy, “feudalism,” and waste—in short, the Ancien Régime. As in so many other arguments concerning this period, the modern locus classicus of these prejudices is Heckscher:

Not only was there no counterpart in England to the établissements of the luxury industry in the hands of the [French] state, but also—and what is much more important—the numerous and extensive private manufactures royales endowed with every possible privilege . . . were absent in England. . . .

This difference is vital. Thus if the technical changes had consisted, as those of the previous period did, mainly in improved manual dexterity, cultivated taste, and artistic plasticity, in other words if it had belonged to that technical sphere in which production was determined by the Royal Family, the Court, the aristocracy and other wealthy producers, France would then have had every prospect of beoming the leading industrial country north of the Alps. But things turned out differently. “Industrialism” or “capitalism” meant mass production for mass consumption, and here the luxury industries were entirely subordinate. The leadership was thus transferred to England.¹²⁴

The first question to ask about Heckscher’s explanation is whether the facts are correct. Pierre Léon, for one, although agreeing that Colbert promoted some luxury industries, doubts its accuracy.

The main thrust was, in fact, directed towards mass industries: woollen and linen textiles (Elbeuf, Sedan, Languedoc); steel, the basis of the armaments industry (Valenciennes, Cambrai); paper-manufacturing. More than 400 endowments (fondations), including 300 in textiles, were created through his efforts. No doubt [Colbert] did not create an “industrial base,” which had already existed for centuries, but he did try to reinforce it and to concentrate it. . . . There is no doubt that the Royal Manufactures . . . first implanted . . . the “form” of the factory of the future.¹²⁵

As for the stifling effect of Colbertism on capitalist enterprise, we must not forget that, like the venality of office and mercenary soldiers, Colbertism represented a step toward nineteenth-century forms, not a step away from it. Colbertism had originated with Richelieu, and John Nef argues that two of its positive effects must be appreciated:

First, within the system, economic adventurers gained more freedom than they had been ordinarily allowed before the time of Richelieu. . . . Second, the mercantile system of regulation . . . actually constituted a step toward granting merchants the political recognition, the rank, which Eon [a cleric whose writings became influential in the time of Colbert] had insisted they so badly needed.¹²⁶

If there is less of a difference between the seventeenth-century mercantilist efforts of England and France than is frequently contended, why does Goubert (like so many others) talk of the “global failure of Colbert”?¹²⁷ Why is it said that the main effect of Colbert’s tariffs was merely “to retard for a while” the upward trend of English cloth production?¹²⁸ If the context was unfavorable, as Deyon suggests,¹²⁹ it was as unfavorable for England as for France. Wilson hints that the French were not mercantilist enough, that their mercantilism, unlike England’s, “was to remain relatively incoherent and unformulated, even in Colbert’s day,” because France lacked “that combination of expanding commercial capital and government influence represented by the Westminster-City axis in London.”¹³⁰ This suggestion pushes us to see how interest groups pursued their economic objectives within the framework of the two mercantilist core states—remembering that France was four times the size of England and contained within its frontiers very large regions that were not core regions.¹³¹

To compare them adequately, we must first survey the commercial and financial scenes, beginning with overall assessments. It is generally thought that 1660 to 1700 was the period of England’s “commercial revolution,”¹³² at a time when England was first becoming “a world entrepôt on its own.”¹³³ What is usually emphasized about this period is the percentage of world trade the English gained vis-à-vis the Dutch, reflection of the successful aspects of the Navigation Acts.¹³⁴ But what of France? According to Crouzet, “there is no parallel in France [for] the fast and prolonged growth during the seventeenth century [especially after 1660] of English foreign trade;”¹³⁵ but Delumeau, surveying the whole period of 1590 to 1690, presents the quite different picture of a distinct strengthening of French foreign trade: “progress . . . was slow, unequal, beset by setbacks, but decisive.”¹³⁶ Richet agrees with this, seeing an “absolute growth” that had an effect “well beyond the coastal regions” and enabled textile producers and others to “reach, in the years 1680–1690, a level they had never known even in the best years of the previous century.”¹³⁷

What explains the failures, if there indeed was one, of French companies and the greater reluctance of French capitalists to invest as compared with their English and Dutch counterparts? Explanations that say it was because of “the French temperament and its defects”¹³⁸ or because the offspring of French merchants gave up being businessmen¹³⁹ are answers I cannot take very seriously. Even if truer than elsewhere, which is doubtful, why should either have been so? In any case, one would still have to account for the investment patterns of the fathers of the offspring in question. Perhaps a closer look at world trade by sector will clarify matters for us.

We begin with the total tonnage and the value of English shipping by geographical sector, which have been calculated in Table 2. (Unfortunately, I know of no parallel calculation for France.)

Three facts stand out in this table. Areas of nearby Europe, which are largely those of the other core powers, accounted for more than a third of the tonnage and nearly half of the value. Baltic trade accounted for another good third of the tonnage but for very little of the value, which was good for the shippers, but not too important for the traders. The East Indies accounted for very little shipping and very little total value, but the value per ton for this area is by far the highest (whereas the Baltic trade is by far the lowest), and high value per ton means a high profit ratio per ship. In the case of Asian trade, these facts imply that although it may have been important to the East India Company, it was not yet very important for the world-economy as a whole. This perhaps explains the ability of the East India Company to resist attacks on its violations of mercantilist logic through its unfavorable balance of trade.¹⁴⁰ The damage such trade really cost was limited. The counterpart, of course, was that the English government was expected by the East India Company “to fend for itself in Asia.”¹⁴¹

TABLE 2

English Foreign Shipping in 1700^a

Imports were on the rise—861,000 pieces of calico in the year 1700 (of which two-thirds were reexported), compared to 240,000 in the year 1600;¹⁴² but the export market for European goods in Asia was still so limited that “any attempt to overstock the goods led to a drastic shortage in demand and fall in the prices.”¹⁴³ At a time when demand was the chief collective concern of the mercantilist powers, East Indian trade offered no solution. Indeed, to make this trade “useful,” India would have to be peripheralized, and to do this was considered not worth the effort by the English, and even less so by the French, until the post-1750 upturn. It was, in fact, at that time that the British began the political conquest of India and its economic peripheralization.¹⁴⁴ Mediterranean trade was in many ways in between on all the dimensions, that is, in the degree to which the Mediterranean was a periphery rather than an external arena,¹⁴⁵ in the quantitative importance of the trade,¹⁴⁶ and in its decisiveness in terms of English–French rivalry.¹⁴⁷

When we speak of Anglo–Dutch rivalry and England’s rise at Holland’s expense, we think primarily of two things, the English home market, in which the Dutch had had a significant role, and Baltic shipping, which was Holland’s “mother trade.” What can get lost from view when we emphasize the flag of the ships is the nature of the cargo, which changed radically in the course of the seventeenth century. In the long sixteenth century, Baltic trade consisted primarily of the westward flow of grain (and here Gdańsk was crucial) and the eastward flow of textiles. The stagnation of the seventeenth century brought this trade to an end, but only in the middle decades, which saw a veritable “disintegration of the Baltic area.”¹⁴⁸ The decline of grain exports was the consequence of the collapse in world prices and, consequently, the withdrawal from the international market of the Polish and east Elbian grain-producing areas. This meant, in turn, a decline in the market for cloth in precisely these grain-producing areas, because of less hard currency being available (remember the Kipper- und Wipperzeit) and because of the reemergence of local artisanal production in eastern Europe, by which the landlords sought to redress somewhat their losses from the collapse of their grain markets.¹⁴⁹

The marginal efficiency of English textiles vis-à-vis Dutch textiles and locally produced textiles was not so great that it could survive in the Baltic zone, where demand was reduced, “short of out-and-out price cutting, which was out of the question.”¹⁵⁰ The Eastland Company had received vital support from the Crown precisely because it exported dyed and dressed cloth and thus provided employment.¹⁵¹ When it shifted its emphasis from export to import, it doomed its privileged role, especially as England turned more and more to reexport and the entrepôt role. But import what? Grain, the traditional import, had collapsed. Since the cause of the collapse of grain trade, stagnation of the world-economy, led to acute commercial rivalry among the three core powers, and since their rivalry degenerated frequently into wars (especially naval wars), a double demand arose that the Baltic zone could supply: naval stores and iron.

Naval stores, of course, had been imported for a long time from the Baltic, but “the problem of supply before 1650 [had] never [been] acute.”¹⁵² Now it was, and for three reasons: shipbuilding expanded, house building expanded (especially after the Great Fire of London), and previous construction had so depleted English timber supply (and by the end of the century, Irish timber supply), that the shortage had “reached . . . the dimensions of a national crisis.”¹⁵³ Here we come to a crucial difference between England and France: Because France was so much larger in size, it had a considerably larger supply of timber, and as late as the time of Colbert, it seemed comfortably ahead of England in this regard.¹⁵⁴To be sure, the French timber suffered from being of poor quality in terms of shipbuilding, whereas northern European masts were of top quality; but France did have its own timber. The question for the French was whether the difference in the quality of masts was sufficient to make it worth the extra effort in time, money, and politico-military resources to obtain timber from elsewhere. The answer seems to have been largely negative.¹⁵⁵ The English did not have the luxury of this choice; they had to obtain the timber from outside. Hence they made a great effort in the Baltic and a greater effort than the French in North America.

France’s greater internal supply of timber had two important far-reaching side effects. It pushed the Baltic trade geographically eastward, from Gdansk to Königsberg, then to Riga, then to Narva, eventually beginning to incorporate Russia and Finland via the ports of Stockholm and Viborg.¹⁵⁶ The second, more far-reaching consequence was that England was pushed to develop its coal resources. A recent conservative estimate says that coal production rose about 60% over the century as a whole and rose 370% from the low point in 1650 to the high point in 1680.¹⁵⁷ The impulse to replace wood by coal for heating and cooking was first made fashionable by James I, but it got its real impetus as a result of the interruptions of imports caused by the Anglo–Dutch wars. Later, manufacturers began to look for processes that would permit the use of coal, and by 1738 a French observer wrote that coal was “the soul of English manufactures.”¹⁵⁸

In addition to naval stores, the other new import from the Baltic was iron. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, iron represented 2% of English imports from the Baltic, at the end 28%.¹⁵⁹ Iron meant Sweden, and iron was an industrial product, the result of the transformation of ore. Why did Sweden at this time have such an important role in the production of iron? One must remember that before the end of the eighteenth century, charcoal was the crucial source of energy in iron smelting. Since both the metal and the energy were expensive to transport, the optimal situation was to have both elements in one place. (Iron was in fact more widely available and abundant than forests.) In Sweden there was both a good quality of the mineral and a large quantity of the charcoal.¹⁶⁰ England and France also had major smelting operations—France’s probably larger, primarily because of a “lesser penury of fuel.” The result was that England became a major importer of Swedish iron in order to supplement its own production, whereas France “neither imported nor exported this metal.”¹⁶¹ That is, France produced what it needed and therefore did not “need” the Baltic trade. Swedish iron played a major role in her rise as a semiperipheral power in the world-economy. We shall discuss this part of the story later. For the moment, the point we are trying to underline is the consequences of the comparative sizes and resources of England and France for their patterns of foreign trade. Manufacturing was expanding in both countries; more and more iron was needed,¹⁶² and more iron required, in turn, more fuel. The reason England had to turn to coal as fuel and to the import of iron earlier than France did¹⁶³ was more a matter of different ecologies than different levels of industrialization.

It is perhaps in the Atlantic trade that the most striking and important differences between England and France developed. The quantity of transatlantic trade was far greater for England than for France. In addition, England developed settler colonies in the Western Hemisphere during this period, whereas French settlement was comparatively dilatory and unsuccessful. The two phenomena are in fact linked. By 1700 England was the country “with the greatest stake in the Atlantic.”164 Why was this so? We have already discussed how the Dutch dominated European trade; and it seemed more sensible for them to pursue their strong suit rather than to cultivate new and difficult ones. Why was it, however, that the French did not turn, along with the English, to the Atlantic trade? Or rather, why, especially from 1660 to 1700, did the English do so much better than the French? The facts seem to be clear. In the seventeenth century, 28 new separate units of colonization were established in the Western Hemisphere; 3 Dutch, 8 French, and 17 English; as of 1700, the English had 350,000–400,000 subjects (including slaves) as against 70,000 for the French, and in the flourishing Caribbean colonies there were twice as many Englishmen as Frenchmen.165 French Canada and Louisiana could not begin to match British settlements in North America in terms of size of population or production output. Between 1600 and 1700, a major European reexport trade of colonial products was developed by England, a vast new profitable entrepôt trade.166 Indeed one of the most important results of the Navigation Acts was the success with which English carriers monopolized the trade to their own colonies, to which must be added their widespread success in smuggling in Spanish America.167

The French, of course, shipped tobacco and sugar across the Atlantic just as the English did, except that the total quantity was less and the French home market largely absorbed what was imported, leaving less over for reexport. As compared with the English, the French had fewer producers in the Americas—colonists, indentured servants, and slaves; and hence they produced less.168 The question of why they had fewer producers is not easy to answer. We know that the two countries had somewhat different attitudes toward the emigration of dissident religious groups. In effect the British encouraged such emigration, or at least did not discourage it, whereas Louis XIV forbade the Huguenots to settle in the Americas, saying he “had not made his realm Catholic in order to deliver up his colonies to heretics.”169

We seem to be back to the usual explanation of differences between the two countries—England was constitutional and relatively liberal and France was absolutist and authoritarian. A curious fact, however, intrudes. In 1687–1688, shortly after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the King of France threatened that Huguenots caught “escaping” across the borders (presumably to other European countries) would be deported to Mississippi, Canada, Martinique, or elsewhere in the Americas. This was a meaningful threat, according to Scoville at least, because “the threat of transportation across the Atlantic appalled Huguenots and converts much more than the possibility of being chained to the galleys for life.”170 In view of these facts, it seems that religious considerations were not what was keeping the French from sending more settlers. Perhaps it was that the French weren’t as interested in settler colonies as the English.

England developed such colonies and France did not. Is the explanation that France needed markets less or that she found her markets in different places? Once again, we return to the factor of size. Was not France able to sell more of its products internally?171 England needed Europe as a market (for a long time via the United Provinces),172 and also needed to create its North American colonies.173 It is all a relative matter. Faced with the same problem of worldwide contraction, both England and France had mercantilist reactions, directed first against the United Provinces, then against each other; but everything in England pushed toward some concentration on foreign trade. This was self-reinforcing: as a result of their need for trade, they needed ships, then naval stores, then products with which to buy the naval stores, then colonial purchasers of expanding manufactures. Quantity may even explain why the British developed the triangular trade and the French did not. More ships led to more concern with one-way traffic and with the underutilization of ships, to which the triangular trade was a solution;174this, of course, further reinforced the usefulness of the settler colonies. As a final twist, the larger Atlantic trade of Britain led to a larger reexport trade, which created a significant antimercantilist pressure group in England;175 this perhaps explains different developments in the eighteenth century.

It is often argued that another major factor in England’s economic advance was the combination of an absence of tolls, and improvement of the internal transport system (removing weirs, strengthening banks, deepening beds, constructing locks, and shortening routes by digging cuts).176 Although the increase in costs resulting from tolls in France was relatively small, and let us not forget that this applied only to trade outside the Five Great Farms, on the whole transport in France was costly, say Léon and Carrière. They are puzzled: “It is difficult for us to say more about a very difficult question.”177

Would it not be proper to look at the problem this way? The costs of transport within England may not have differed greatly from the costs of transport within the northern tariff zone of France. Since from England one went out by sea, and from France’s northern tariff zone one went at least in part, if not primarily, by land, and since it is just at this time that sea transport became significantly less expensive then land transport, England’s dilemma about the lack of a sufficient market internal to its frontiers turned into an advantage.178 Perhaps the point is that France was better off economically than England. It had fewer needs pushing it into the development of “foreign” trade. The development of foreign trade may have made no real difference in the long period of contraction, but it may be what prepared Britain better—economically, politically, and militarily—for taking advantage of the renewed economic expansion of the mid-eighteenth century.179

We must now turn to the question of how England and France coped with the problem of financing the flow of production and trade. Discussion is required regarding three knotty problems: the role of bullion in trade in this era (presumably the great mercantilist concern); the availability and flows of bullion in this era; and the impact of public finances on the operation of the system as a whole. Geoffrey Parker argues that the period from 1500 to 1730 saw a “financial revolution” that was the essential prelude to the Industrial Revolution and that meant two things in terms of private finance—the concentration of credit facilities in a few centers and, “associated with this, the evolution of an international system of multilateral payments.”180 Behind the ambiguous meanings of evolution, a noun denoting process, lies a major controversy. To what extent were payments in fact multilateral? Or perhaps more accurately, when did the multilaterality of payments become sufficiently prevalent such that traders, and governments as well, counted on it in their calculations?

The debate was formulated in a well-known exchange that started because Charles Wilson was unhappy with Eli Heckscher’s dismissal of mercantilist logic (as indeed he had every right to be). Wilson argues that since the shift from a bilateral to a multilateral system of payments occurred only in the eighteenth century, the mercantilists’ concern in the seventeenth century with the availability of coin had been a rational one.181 Heckscher replies that “multilateral trade and arbitrage existed already in the Middle Ages—perhaps even before then”—and that the means “by which . . . this multilateral trade was effected” is a “subordinate question.”182 The flow of bullion was only one means of achieving multilateral settlement; there was also the flow of bills of exchange, without the “universal use” of which multilateral trade “could not go on.” Wilson’s response is as follows: of course there had been some multilateral trade and some use of bills of exchange, but it was on the “link” of bullion or specie that the volume of trade depended (notably in the Baltic), and, without bullion, trade would have been “restricted by a relapse into more or less bilateral conditions.”183

Commenting on this debate, Jacob Price accuses both sides of “imprecise historicity” and of seeing the whole mercantilist period as static. Bills of exchange he said, had originated in the Middle Ages not simply for reasons of security or simplicity of payment, “but in part to compensate for the relative scarcity of currency.” He argues that from the mid-sixteenth century to 1660, the world silver supply boomed, allowing trade to expand, but that after 1660, the silver supply contracted, which led to both the increased use of bills of exchange and to the expansion of commodity flows in order “to balance the trade.”184 Price thus offers to split the difference, awarding the first half of the seventeenth century to Wilson and the second half to Heckscher. For Price, the difference is explained by the quantity of bullion available. Sperling seconds Price, agreeing that 1660 is the crucial moment of the shift, after which there existed an Amsterdam–London international clearing center that “expanded to meet the needs of a growing system of world trade”185 and thereby made possible the Industrial Revolution. Into this controversy Rudolph Blitz adds the useful reminder that bullion is a commodity as well as a currency:

If one country produces nothing but gold, which it exports to the rest of the world in exchange for consumption and investment goods, it is more meaningful to regard these gold exports as “gold commodity exports” than as a measure of an unfavorable balance.186

This statement is entirely correct, and therefore the question of why bullion flowed in some channels more than in others in the seventeenth century is as important as where it flowed. Reviewing the different trading zones, we note that the original Wilson–Heckscher debate centered around the Baltic trade, Wilson arguing that “the Baltic was the drain down which disappeared much of American silver which Spain mortgaged to Amsterdam for Dutch exports.”187 On closer look, however, it was not true that Baltic trade as a whole required silver export. Hinton sees three English trades as requiring silver export circa 1660—East India, Turkey, and Norway—a requirement “not necessarily true of the Eastland trade.”188 Commenting precisely on Wilson’s statements about the Baltic, Åström argues that silver coin was exported to Norway and Russia but not at all, or much less so, to the areas of high trade turnover, the East Country and Sweden proper.189 Furthermore, Sperling insists that there is “abundant evidence” for the use of bills of exchange in the Baltic, and both Hroch and Glamann suggest that the Baltic trade deficit may have been compensated for by a reverse trade balance on the overland east–west trade.190 Where, then, did bullion flow? It seems to have flowed to Norway and Russia and perhaps to Turkey and, most importantly, to East India and to one other place—to Holland. East India and Holland—a curious pair! These two bullion flows were quite different in form and purpose.

Dales argues that Wilson is right, but not about the Baltic; he says Wilson’s arguments hold true primarily about trade between Europe and the “Orient.”191 Chaudhuri’s work seems to leave little doubt that there was a persistent outflow of bullion from England to India between 1600 and 1750. But what did this mean? About the early seventeenth century, Chaudhuri says:

Since the Company had become local traders in the markets of Asia, it may be argued that the export of treasure was half in the nature of export of capital, which when invested in the Company’s Asiatic factories produced a high profit from which at least part of the purchases for Europe could be made.192

However, the subsequent import presumed that some goods (primarily spices) would be purchased cheap in Asia and sold dear in Europe. In currency terms, Chaudhuri finds “the root cause for the drain of precious metal . . . in a marked and wide disparity in the value of gold and silver in terms of commodities in the two Continents.”193 But why this disparity?

When Chaudhuri comes to discuss the period from 1660 to 1720,194 he suggests that the East India trade was “also becoming multilateral in character.” Nonetheless, the data he presents show no significant decline of bullion export—indeed, quite the contrary. In general, he says, treasure continued to be 70–90% of the total annual export value, which suggests that “the basic economic factors underlying the trade between Europe and the Indies did not fundamentally change in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.” As for Holland, figures indicate that from 1672 to 1695, she received 70–90% of all the bullion and coin exported from England195 and that from 1699 to 1719 she still received England’s “largest movements of treasure.”196

An additional detail to be noted is that bullion means both silver and gold, and these clearly did not move indiscriminately. There were gold–silver ratios, and they varied; but are there any patterns to observe? Herbert Lüthy suggests a very important one in which both gold and silver arrived from outside Europe proper, at least for the most part. Europe then reexported its largely American silver to Asia, “almost entirely monometallistsilver.”197 Gold played, however, a different role in the European world-economy. It “arrived in Europe to remain there, serving primarily as a mass of maneuver for large-scale commercial clearance and payments by States among European countries.”198

Let us now return to the distinction between trade within the capitalist world-economy and trade between any particular world-system and its external arena. In this case, the world-system is the European world-economy and the external arena is primarily the East Indies, and also Norway, Russia, and perhaps Turkey. To facilitate exchanges for trade within the system, currency is required (in the case of the European world-economy, silver and copper on a daily basis, backed by gold). Obviously, paper (bills of exchange) also serves this purpose. We would expect such exchanges to be basically multilateral and to be conducted primarily by paper with occasional settlements by gold transfers in the international financial center (which in the seventeenth century was Amsterdam). In an exchange between two economic arenas, each external to the other, “currency” is not used. Exchange is relatively bilateral and is conducted in commodities that are inversely valued—in this case, the silver of Europe was exchanged first for the spices, and later for the calicoes of the East Indies. The coin or bullion brought into Asia (and Russia) was largely used “for hoarding or jewelry”;199 and the “balance of trade” (if one refuses to think of silver as a commodity) was persistently unfavorable and largely bilateral for a long period of time. These two facts are precisely evidence that the East Indies remained external to the European world-economy. The fact that the trade of western Europe with the Eastland (and Sweden) was largely regulated multilaterally and in bills of exchange is on the other hand evidence that both trading zones were part of one economic system.

The production of gold and silver as a commodity made the Americas a peripheral area of the European world-economy insofar as this commodity was essential to the operation of this world-economy, and it was essential to the extent that it was used as money. Had the bullion of the Americas all flowed out to Asia, the Americas would have been just another external arena and Europe would have been merely an axis of three arenas—America, Europe, and Asia—obtaining its Asian luxuries at the price of the goods sent to the Americas. But the Americas were not interested in exchanging their bullion, and surely not in mining it. Therefore, the Europeans first seized Inca gold, then mined Potosí and Mexican silver, seeking ever-new mining areas (of which Brazilian gold would soon be the most important). They sent settlers to control the area of the Americas politically and to supervise the economic operations, and they imported labor as well. In short, they incorporated the Americas into their world-economy, primarily because they needed a solid currency base for an expanding capitalist system and secondarily to use the surplus in trade with Asia. When in 1663 the English revoked penalties on the export of bullion to the Baltic,200 was it not because the Baltic was in fact safely encapsulated in a system of multilateral payments?

Was there then any justification for mercantilist concern with the flow of bullion? Yes there was—because the flow of bullion as currencywas one of the mechanisms by which the hegemonic power assured extra advantage to itself. By worrying about the flows of bullion, were the English mercantilists (and to a lesser extent the French) not worrying about the flows of currency to Holland and the flows of commodities through Holland?201 If the silver flowing out to the East Indies were the real problem, why was there never a serious attempt to stem it? The flows of bullion internal to the European world-economy depended, in turn, not only on the mechanisms of financial clearance, but also on the control of the creation of the commodity as well as the total available supply. It is in this regard that the issue of the so-called penury of precious metals in the seventeenth century presents itself to us.

It is argued that world production of silver declined in the seventeenth century and that production of gold stagnated while imports of bullion from the Americas to Spain dropped precipitously.202 Morineau, in a reevaluation of the Spanish bullion flows, is skeptical of the received facts, and even more doubtful of the interpretations built on these facts:

In any case, . . . we can no longer envisage the seventeenth century in terms of a general and generalized crisis; and even less in terms of a famine of gold and silver, either at the source in America or upon arrival in Europe. The true problems are different.203

Morineau does not wish to deny a fall in the quantity of bullion that arrived in Spain, although he believes the usual figures are exaggerated; but he doubts that this was the result of a long-term trend. He argues that it was the result of a series of accidental economic factors, and he doubts even more that the economic contraction of the European world-economy (to the extent that he admits there was one) can be accounted for by shifting bullion supply.

Both issues are worth discussing. Why did the bullion imports decline? Obviously, it had to be because of a decline in either supply or demand. The most frequent explanation is a decline in supply. The easy sources of bullion had been exhausted, overexploited. It was now more costly to mine the precious metals. It would take time to uncover new sources. One argument is that sixteenth-century expansion had used up this key resource at a certain level of technology, and that there was, consequently, a shortage capital and hence a depression. To this, Morineau responds that around 1620, “when the arrivals of gold and silver started to become scarce,” it was men “in conjunction with . . . the elements, who created this trend.”204 To him it was a case of men “perhaps following upon the elements,” and not vice versa.

Bullion, like any other commodity, has its price, and a general price inflation, the major financial characteristic of the sixteenth century, often means a lowering of the price of bullion. But bullion as money is only one element in a real exchange.205 Bullion import at the time slowed down. It was the “Drake effect,” says Morineau “the ‘modern’ version of the sword of Damocles.”206 If the privateers intercepted relatively few convoys, they had nonetheless, as Morineau says, a “more subtle, more efficacious, more pernicious” impact: they caused delays, which ultimately caused bankruptcies. In addition to the “Drake effect” of the late sixteenth, there was the “Blake effect” of the mid-seventeenth century, which “killed off the Carrera.”207

However, these military depredations merely raised the cost of bullion. If bullion was needed as much as before, why could this cost not be passed on to the consumer? Why weren’t more ships sent out? It will not do to ignore the realities of the contraction; it was not primarily caused by declining bullion supplies, but by a lessening demand for these supplies. A declining supply served the hegemonic power well in the early seventeenth century because Holland, by its productive and commercial advantage, could attract the existing bullion disproportionately.208When the supply became really short, bullion became the base of a system of lucrative investments. By mid-century, Dutch merchants were leaving in London the bullion they were receiving in payment from their English clients, and they were beginning to lend it out at rates of 5–7%, thereby creating a mechanism “which in time was to relieve the pressure on capital in its ‘solid’ forms.”209

We have taken a circuitous path to come to our subject, the availability of bullion in the second half of the seventeenth century and its meaning in terms of the Anglo–French rivalry. Since the production rate was less for bullion than for other commodities, the scarcity of precious metals grew as the century went on. The shortage was beginning to be felt, which led to a renewed search for gold and silver.210 Lüthy doubts that France was any worse off than other countries in this time of shortage, and notes that, in the years of peace, France had a very positive balance of trade. He says that considering France both as a state and as an arena of monetary exchange, its specie hunger was, unlike that of Holland and England, “not tempered by any institution that could mobilize for it readily and in insignificant quantities the other means of circulation or savings or—not least important—hoarded wealth.”211

As usual, such an explanation only pushes us one step back. The old dorsal spine of Europe had long since developed banking structures. In the seventeenth century, Holland followed suit, the natural outgrowth of her hegemony. Why was England more capable than France of going down this path in the late seventeenth century? I have no clear answer, but I offer two observations side by side. First, within the European world-economy, the social usage of the three currency metals was (indeed still is) more or less as follows: gold for international clearance and affairs of state (also for hoarding), silver for large-scale internal commerce, and copper for household and petty commercial needs. Since, as we have already explained, French production was largely sold on a French market and English (and Dutch) production were sold more in export markets, the two rivals moved toward ”de facto monometallism”—silver for France and gold for England.212

The second observation has to do with the role of copper coin, or rather with its multiplication, “the nightmare of the century.”213 Spooner argues that there was an inverse relationship between the degree to which gold and silver circulated (as opposed to their being hoarded) and the circulation of copper coin and credit. The latter two went hand in hand,214 in terms of the world-economy; but were they not alternatives in terms of a national policy? The French state throughout the seventeenth century sought to avoid devaluation of the livre tournois at all costs,215but was relatively successful only during the era of Colbert.216 May we not have here one more example of how the size of a state is a factor in the world-economy? The French state, looking inward economically but outward politically, was oriented to silver; and it was unable to stem a plague of copper expansion at a time of silver shortage, except at the one point when it tried to shift politico-economic gear (the era of Colbert). The English state, looking outward economically (because it had to) but inward politically, was oriented to gold; it was open, therefore, to an international gold banking network, and was able to utilize paper rather than copper.

Which, then, was the “strong” state? The question is not normally in doubt. Was not Louis XIV the absolute monarch incarnate? And did not France’s dilemmas result because state and aristocracy jointly stifled bourgeois enterprise? I see the situation quite differently, however. At the beginning of our period, in 1651, the United Provinces was the “strong” state. By the end, in 1689, England and France were both “stronger” than the United Provinces and about equal to each other. In the eighteenth century, Britain would become stronger than France, and it would be the weakness of the French state and not its strength that would impel the revolutionaries of 1789. To be sure, this argument revolves around what one means by the strength of a state.

All these measures are political and not economic because they are not measures of productive efficiency. Ultimately, of course, political and economic measures are linked reciprocally because productive efficiency makes possible the strengthening of the state and the strengthening of the state further reinforces efficiency through extramarket means. States where the most efficient producers are located have less need to intervene actively in the world market than states where moderately efficient producers are located. Since efficiency of production is linked to the ability of the state-machinery to intervene in the world market, states where the least efficient producers are located are incapable of being “strong.” The role of the state in the world market (which of course includes the internal market) is in curvilinear relationship to the economic role of the owner-producers located within the state. The state is most “active” in states of moderate strength. The rhetoric of strength (“l’Etat, c’est moi”) is frequently a substitute for the reality.

The Whig interpretation of history sees modern times as encompassing one long historical quest for the weak state, a quest viewed as synonomous with the advance of human liberty. This perspective stops short of theoretically embracing anarchism, but only just. Insofar as many Marxist historians have seen the English Revolution in this same light, they share the mystification.217 I see the modern history of the state rather as one long quest to create structures sufficiently strong to defend the interests of one set of owner-producers in the world-economy against other sets of owner-producers as well as, of course, against workers.

Military strength is one key to efficacity in this regard. J. H. Plumb rightfully reproaches those Dutch historians who see the extension of Dutch power in the period from 1580 to 1640 as a “miracle” because of the absence of centralized state-machinery. He very correctly observes:

The miracle lies in the fact that in spite of intense rivalry between state and cities, and the constant obstacle of entrenched rights and privileges, the Dutch were able to mount great navies and armies and pay for them mainly out of taxation. And this was achieved largely through the dedication of the Calvinist oligarchies who possessed a strong and viable sense of their own destiny as a class and as a nation.218

It was a miracle only if one regards absolutism as the optimal road to a strong state rather than a pis aller. A self-aware and self-confident bourgeois class can agree to the necessary collective adjustments that elsewhere require a strong king to impose, with none of the dangers of the latter format whereby the strong king might delude himself into the possibility of recreating the “universal monarchy” in the capitalist world-economy. It was precisely of this sin, that of imitating Charles V, that Burckhardt accused Louis XIV, and later Napoleon.219 It was a folly that derived from weakness.

We have already discussed how and why the three core powers turned upon each other as a result of the economic difficulties of the seventeenth century and how, once England and France turned their energies to reinforcing their military structures, England confounded the United Provinces at sea and France confounded her on land. The Dutch suffered from two problems. They were defending an advantage rather than seeking one, which meant that for at least a good part of the Regent class, the costs of military preparation often seemed more horrendous than the potential losses from lack of preparation.220 This is the perpetual dilemma of the wealthy vis-à-vis insurance policies; and in military affairs, one has to run even to remain in place. Worse yet, this particular period was one of significant upgrading in the size of military units.221This created a major problem of provisioning these enlarged armies since “the numerical growth of the armies far exceeded progress in the means of production.”222 It became much more demanding for the United Provinces to compete with England and France at a moment when Dutch will was perhaps sliding.

Quite aside from previously discussed considerations of what pushed France toward a continental (land) perspective and the English and the Dutch towards a maritime one, the purely demographic advantage of France tended to confirm such a military orientation, particularly since the absolute size of armies was growing throughout Europe. This purely military consideration also explains the inevitability of the Anglo–Dutch reconciliation at the expense of the French.223 The shock of 1672 is what seems to have led to a Dutch perception that France was the primary enemy,224 and the accession of William III to the English throne in 1688 finally reconciled the merchants of Amsterdam to the junior partnership with England.225

The seeming military strength of France notwithstanding, Tapié talks of France’s having reached its apogee in 1679226 and Bourde, reproaching Louis XIV for fixating on a southern continental axis rather than attending to a northern maritime one, speaks of the “failure of Louis XIV” that resulted therefrom.227 It is then to nonmilitary factors that we must turn—the question of mercantilism and its vagaries—if we are to explain the ultimate228 military defeat of the French.

Mousnier says that from the time of Henry IV to that of Louis XIV, Colbertism was a permanent feature of French policy, the objective of which was “above all, political.”229 What can this possibly mean? Presumably, the strengthening of a state is seen by Mousnier as an end in itself, an objective that a sovereign can in fact pursue. No doubt he can, as an aberration, but will he in fact succeed? The French kings clearly did not. In fact, the states in Restoration England and Colbertian France both sought consciously and actively to support their producing classes against foreign competitors, to build up their merchant marine, to work out a viable sharing of the total national product between the state and the owner-producers. Léon and Carrière note the increase in the number of large ships under Colbert but say we should not credit him alone since it in fact resulted from “the importance of the wars.”230 Delumeau notes the general improvement of the economic situation under Colbert but says that it is less to his credit than due to the “political stabilization” resulting from the defeat of the Fronde.231 In short, these authors are suggesting that the deliberate policy of a small group was not the key factor, that we should turn to underlying pressures. I agree; but then we could apply the same analysis to England, which also had the spur of wars to stimulate shipbuilding and which also experienced a calming of political violence after 1660.

Wilson suggests a difference between England and France in the form of a metaphor: “Between English ‘mercantilism’ and Colbertism and its derivatives, there was all the difference between a tailor-made suit and a readymade.”232 Let us look at this metaphor as it might apply to the system of public finance and to administration in general. The “institutionalisation of war”233 in the seventeenth century meant a greatly increased scale of public expenditure for the core powers. It was eventually too much for the Dutch Republic. But what about for England and France? The increased money had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere had to be the moneyed classes. The reason was simple. Insofar as capitalism as a system already involved an increased levy on the productive output of the worker, any increase in public taxes on the worker meant, in fact, less profit for the moneyed classes, either because they would not obtain the same rents on their land or because they would have to pay higher wages in consequence.234

The problem for the state was a double one: raising the money and spending it well. Spending it well did not mean spending it honestly, but spending it productively, using as a gauge the degree to which the increased profits of the national bourgeoisie in the world market exceeded the indirect costs to the bourgeoisie of such state expenditures. The problem was the same for the English and French states; and for the period of Restoration England and Colbertian France it is not clear that there was much difference in their ability to respond.

It was not only necessary to raise the money; it had to be raised rapidly, which meant borrowing from somewhere. This was still the forte of the United Provinces, whose “healthy public credit . . . lay in the fact that the chief investors ran the government.”235 Both England and France were searching in this period for ways of coping with the need to borrow.

Febvre says of Colbert that he was “an alchemist, who had to find gold for his king. And who searched, who never ceased to search.”236 But Colbert felt that the state was already borrowing too much, in the form of tax-farming. To increase total revenue, he reduced the role of the tax-farmers (which in reality transferred a larger percentage of the taxation of the peasants to the state) and simultaneously kept “nonproductive” state expenditure in check (which reduced the amount of tax money simply redistributed to the same moneyed classes) in order to spend it on mercantilist ends.237

Colbert was moderately successful. He probably doubled the king’s revenue.238 The state of Louis XIV was possibly the only one in the period able to support major military efforts without excessive difficulty.239 Yet Colbert’s suit was ready-made, if you will, in its clarity and visibility: tax more directly and balance the budget (that is, redistribute more directively). His methods were not popular, and geared as France still was to an expensive continental military expansion, they could not be sustained.

The English suit was tailor-made, creating new mechanisms of long-term public borrowing that involved less visible taxation and was no less heavy on the moneyed classes in the long run. This met less resistance and was to become in the eighteenth century more productive of state income that was to a greater degree well spent. Although England, as late as the Protectorate, was “relatively backward”240 in its modes of public borrowing compared not only to the United Provinces but to France, the base of the so-called financial revolution after 1689 was created during the Restoration. The experiments of Sir George Downing in 1665, which involved appeals to small individual investors to lend directly to the government, only lasted until 1672, but they created an important precedent for the ascendancy of the Treasury as the controlling department of finance and they prepared for later techniques.241

The more straightforward approach of the French, as it may be described, extended to various aspects of administration. Once again, effective administration does not necessarily mean absolutist administration. To Swart’s assertion that the Dutch government was ineffective, an “antiquated, semi-medieval patchwork” that was an obstacle to further economic advance, Smit responds with total disagreement (as do I):242“In the seventeenth century, it was precisely the decentralization of the Dutch government that made it efficient compared to the centralized monarchies.” Indeed, a sign of the decline of administrative efficiency is to be found in the “aristocratization” of the Dutch burghers, which led some of their supporters to propound absolutist political theories for the Dutch Republic and gave rise to complaints that the Regents had lost interest in overseas trade.243

The French path to strengthening the state is well known: centralization and uniformity. Indeed, this has come to be considered the classic path. Of course, centralization did not only involve the mere creation of the central administration per se, which was the accomplishment of an earlier era; it also involved the creation of direct lines of authority from center to locality, the system of intendants. This new mode of localadministration was “the true absolutist revolution.”244 We may call it a revolution, but Colbert created a unified tariff only in the Five Great Farms. Heckscher says that this “proves that he never intended a general unification.”245 How uncharitable. I believe Meuvret to be more fair when he says: “Probably it was better that Colbert was only a hard-working and tenacious administrator and not an audacious and original innovator. Neither the situation nor the attitudes of the time permitted radical changes.”246 To realize the upward battle Colbert fought to bureaucratize the state, one has only to look at the resistance of both the gens de mer and the naval officer corps to Colbert’s desire to create a reserve of naval sailors that, in times of peace, could serve the merchant marine.247 During the same period of time, the 1670s and 1680s, “the core of the [English] government was growing both stronger and more efficient in spite of the wild conflicts of political life,”248 but with far less fanfare and therefore far less opposition.

Why did the French and English affect such seemingly different styles in the parallel search for the strong state? Why was the English path more fruitful? It is in the minor variations in the class structure that we will find our answer. We must start with what was the same in England and in France. Both countries were thriving centers of agricultural and industrial production in the European world-economy of the time. In both countries the feudal aristocracies had largely reconverted themselves into capitalist farmers and were playing a large role in nonagricultural activities. In both countries those who were not aristocrats also played significant roles as capitalist entrepreneurs in agriculture, commerce, and industry, and the economic success of these nonaristocratic bourgeois was sooner or later rewarded with access to higher status. Because the line one drew between noble and commoner was lower in France than in England, technically, persons of medium-high status who would be nobles in France (noblesse de robe) were commoners in England (gentry); but the social status and social roles of the two were in fact comparable. Because the French state was historically weaker than the English (more because of its size than anything else and because of the consequent centrifugal economic forces), the noblesse de robe were incorporated into the political structure as national officials, the gentry more frequently as local officials; but in both cases their new roles represented real, if limited, political participation in the government.

Furthermore, both countries were the arena of a fundamental political conflict within the upper strata that went on from the sixteenth century to at least the eighteenth, and perhaps the nineteenth. The struggle was between those who had high status, in terms of the surviving juridical structures of feudal times, and those who were more or less successful capitalists. The key to the struggle is the fact that at any moment in time, the majority of the members of each group demonstrated both traditional status and high achievement in the economy, and they could therefore opt to think of themselves either as aristocrats or as capitalists, depending on their immediate interests. If one adds to this the constant historical process of translating market achievement into social status by means of “aristocratization,” there were bound to be many ambiguities. It must be said, however, that the men of the time navigated these ambiguities and understood the realities of the struggles better than do the scholars of later times looking back at the struggles.249

In all of this, I repeat again, there was no significant difference between England and France in the whole period of around 1500 to 1800. R. H. Tawney is credited with the sally, “Bourgeois revolution? Of course it was a bourgeois revolution. The trouble is the bourgeoisie was on both sides.”250 But this was as true of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as it was of the revolution of 1640; and it was true of the Fronde as well, and even of the French Revolution in 1789. This takes away none of their “revolutionary” character. It means we must do away with the ahistorical idea that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy were two radically different groups, particularly in this period of time. They were two heavily overlapping social groups that took on somewhat different contours depending on whether one defined the dominant stratum in terms of social status or in terms of social class. It made a lot of difference which definition was used. The social and political struggles were real, but they were internal to the ruling strata.251

Having emphasized the similarities between England and France, we must note that there were differences of detail that must be analyzed in order to understand the divergent paths of the two countries in the nineteenth century. For it is the small differences of the earlier period that enabled England after 1763 to pull ahead of her rival significantly in terms of economic productivity and dominance.

In a book revolving around the concept of political stability, Theodore Rabb draws a picture in which early modern Europe is essentially politically unstable after 1500, the “balance” between king and noble, central government and region being “uncertain” until the mid-seventeenth century, “when the problems ceased to polarize society for over a hundred years.” Rabb says that although there were “after-tremors” following mid-century, no one “fundamentally questioned . . . the very organization of politics. That was the crucial change.”252 Is that a reasonable description of political reality? If it is, what would it imply for the struggle between England and France? We notice immediately that Rabb’s dates correlate roughly with the long-term economic trends. It appears at first glance to be the classic Weberian correlation: expansion and political instability, stagnation and political stability.

I do not think Rabb is wrong, provided we specify more clearly what kind of stability we are talking about and what our timing is. I think what happened is that the economic expansion of the sixteenth century permitted the clear emergence of the bourgeoisie as a social class whose relationship to the dominant status-group was unclear. It was a situation that did not need to be clarified as long as the rate of expansion stayed high. Once the economic limits of the expansion were in view, the struggle of defining who had a right to control the state-machinery became acute. However, the continuing economic difficulties forced a de facto compromise between the two factions, lest the political strife get out of hand, and the lower strata (both urban and rural) begin to assert themselves, not only vigorously, but independently and directly. Hence there followed, as Rabb suggests, a period of relative stability in which the internal conflicts of the dominant strata were put under wraps, or institutionally contained.

I have no intention of analyzing here the complex story of the political struggles of the mid-seventeenth century in England and France; but let us quickly outline where matters stood when they ended. The monarchy was challenged in both countries, more dramatically, to be sure, in England. In the end, the Fronde was put down in France, the monarchy restored in England. To be sure, there was a major constitutional difference in the role of Parliament, which was augmented in England and eliminated in France. In England the “administrative absolutism of a king” was replaced by the “legislative omnipotence of a Parliament.”253 But what was the content of the social compromise? We can find remarkably different summary statements of the upshot of the English Revolution. Two will suffice. Stone says: “England at the end of the revolution in 1660 was barely distinguishable from England at the beginning in 1640.”254 Hill says: “the old state was not restored in 1660, only its trappings.”255

May I suggest that neither summary strikes the right note. There was a real difference between 1660 and 1640, but I believe, contrary to most arguments, that it was the social difference and not the political difference that mattered. The open social warfare came to an end. The bourgeoisie as a social class gained its droit de cité, but the leading position in this class were in fact securely in the hands of the old families. The basis of the social compromise was the working out of a policy of economic nationalism that could serve former Cavaliers and Roundheads alike: “Nothing is more typical of this quest than the government committees and boards of the trading companies of the Restoration, where princes and tradesmen sat side by side in conspiracy that was expected to be mutually advantageous.”256 Nothing proves better that this solution was a compromise than the murky complexities in which the issue of restoration of confiscated lands was shrouded. It was a hot potato that Charles II tossed to Parliament and that Parliament tossed to a committee, and finally, the issue was largely resolved by private arrangements.257

Lawrence Stone suggests that preindustrial England’s reputation as an “unusually mobile society is largely an illusion,”258 except possibly for the period from 1540 to 1640. Is not the compromise of 1660 an agreement to halt, to stabilize the unsettling mobilities of the sixteenth century, to freeze matters more or less where they were?259 Was not the great social change in England in 1660 the agreement among the dominant strata that there was to be no more internal social change, that the English state (whether king or Parliament, it mattered little) was to concentrate on promoting economic development at the expense of the rest of the world-economy?260 And did not the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 confirm this?261 For a whole host of minor reasons, did not some groups in the 1680s threaten to reopen the questions that the Restoration had resolved? These groups were squelched.

If the Marxist Whigs look to the English Revolution as the moment of great triumph over “feudalism,” the Glorious Revolution was always the preferred moment of the liberal Whigs. As Trevelyan says,262 the “keynote of the Revolution Settlement was personal freedom under the law, both in religion and in politics. The most conservative of all revolutions in history was also the most liberal.” Is Trevelyan caught short by the suggestion that the revolution was aristocratic? Not so, he says: “It was effected by the whole nation, by a union of all classes”; it is just that an additional factor has to be considered:

In a society still mainly agricultural, where the economic and social structure rendered the landlords the natural and accepted leaders of the countryside, noblemen and squires like the Tories Danby and Seymour, the Whigs Devonshire and Shrewsbury took the lead when resistance to government had to be improvised.

Behind the rhetoric of a union of all classes lies the reality of these “natural and accepted leaders of the countryside.” To be sure, an “arbitrary” king was forever eliminated from the scene; but as Pinkham says, what this fundamentally meant was that the royal powers which the king had hitherto been able to use in the interests of whatever group he pleased, sometimes even—God save the mark—the common people, those powers now passed into the control of the landed aristocracy which could control Parliament.263

This triumph of the landed aristocracy was in fact the triumph of the capitalist classes. The political compromise would hold until the mid-nineteenth century, and it would serve England well because it would permit aristocrat and squire to join with merchant and financier in order to outstrip their French rivals in the race to exploit the riches of the European world-economy.

In what way did the story differ in France? We come back once again to the peculiar geography of France. England had its peripheral regions and a fortiori Great Britain. These peripheral regions, located within a core state, were fearful of two trends: the gradual strengthening of this English–British state, which threatened them politically, and the triumph of capitalist elements, which threatened them economically. In Great Britain these two threats were coordinate; and it is no surprise that peripheral areas tended to be more hostile to the English Revolution264 or that “the revolutionary decades completed the unification of England.”265 The situation in France was quite different, as we have discussed previously.266 There, the forces of centralization and the forces of capitalist enterprise were not as geographically coordinated as in England, and the forces of the center found themselves facing resistance, not necessarily coordinated, both from economically peripheral and from economically central but politically peripheral zones. This made the internal strife of the dominant strata much more drawn out (going from the Religious Wars to the Fronde) and far more politically unclear.

Whereas the Restoration involved a calming of the tensions, if you will, because a compromise seemed to be evolving between the two factions, the equivalent period in France, the Colbertian era of Louis XIV, involved a sort of imposed truce. The truce depended on the political strength of the monarchy to contain forces still playing for high stakes, or let us say more ready and able to play dangerous games than their equivalents in England. The political structure of the country reflected this: The west, the south, and the borderlands of the northeast were all juridically (and economically) outside the “center.” Not only were these areas deprived then of the advantages of being in customs union with the rest, although there were disadvantages as well, to be sure, but they were taxed more heavily.267 Those bourgeois who were not aristocrats gained access to high status as individuals,268 but not collectively, which left them permanently uncomfortable and potentially restive.269

The contradictions come out in the whole question of the Huguenots. Presumably the Edict of Nantes had been a step toward the resolution of the internal divisions of the dominant strata. Why was it revoked in 1685? There is no really good answer to this question in the literature. The Huguenots were not particularly antiroyalist.270 Why should the king have been anti-Huguenot? Lüthy sees it as the act of a France “dedicated to the cult of the State” in reaction to the humiliations of the earlier civil wars.271 Robert sees it as the act of a king waiting for his chance, which came after the glorious peace of Nijmegen: “This great success in foreign policy . . . convinced the king that henceforth he could try almost anything.”272 Le Roy Ladurie sees it as the way to get the Church at last on the side of the throne. “Fair exchange (donnant donnant). The parish priests, so ready for confrontation under the League and the Fronde, became thereafter, despite the Jansenist quarrels, pillars of the established order.”273 None of these explanations suffice. Perhaps it was like a pointless exchange in chess, a hope that by reducing the pieces, one might improve one’s position. In chess, if an exchange is not clearly advantageous, it simply brings stalemate closer. The king sought to strengthen the state. It was harder to do than in England. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes did not help matters, but it may not have hurt them either.

There is one more important piece of evidence for the general explanation we are giving of stabilization in England and France as of the mid-seventeenth century. The stabilization, which was more effective in England than in France but which occurred in both countries nonetheless, was the result of a compromise within the dominant strata. If this be so, then we should see a shift in attitude of the lower strata, for the split in the ruling classes offered them space whereas a compromise would have constricted their political margin. We have some evidence of the latter. There was a decline in the frequency of peasant revolts, and such as there were tended to be more moderate.274 Since this was presumably a time of some economic difficulty, it seems probable that the explanation lies in the political difficulty of rebellion rather than a lack of incentive.

In the earlier period, peasants were able to attach themselves to a fraction of the dominant strata in revolt. In the late seventeenth century this was no longer possible.275 How bitter for the peasants and the urban workers must have been the great compromises! A Chartist in 1837 looking back on the English Revolution said: “For the millions it did nothing.”276 To be sure, there was unrest, especially in the towns, where it was difficult to suppress;277 but once the compromise among the bourgeoisie was achieved, they turned to holding back the unrest. It was at this time that the two concepts working classes and dangerous classes began to be linked, developing “in the minds of the ruling classes” an association “between poverty and crime.”278

One can, if one so desires, repeat old saws about commerce being incompatible with absolutism because the merchant might “eclipse the Roi Soleil.”279 But Schumpeter’s adjunction is more to the point: “[Feudal] fetters not only hampered [the bourgeois], they also sheltered.”280 They did so in England and they did so in France;281 but for the various reasons we have adumbrated, the policy was slightly more successful in England.

PERIPHERIES IN AN ERA OF SLOW GROWTH

Periods of expansion of the world-economy are relatively easy to summarize. Production is expanding overall and in most places. Employment is extensive. Population is growing. Prosperity is the sign of the time. That real wages for large numbers of people may in fact be declining is less visible in the steady inflation of nominal prices. There is considerable social ferment, but it is a ferment nourished by optimism, even daring. Individual mobility seems to be the order of the day. Progress seems to be the gift of Providence.

Periods of downturn are much more complex. First of all, they are much more visibly uneven. There is regression, stagnation, withdrawal, bad times—but not bad for everyone. Total production, that of the world-economy taken as a whole, may remain steady in some calculation of overall value or per capita quantity; but this may be the result of a rise in some areas of the volume of production or the rate of productivity or both, balanced by a decline in other areas. The real wages of those employed may rise, but the percentage of unemployed may rise as well.

A particularly somber picture may be expected in the peripheral areas of the world-economy. They are the politically weakest arenas. It is to be expected that the ruling groups in core and semiperipheral areas will seek to maintain their levels of production and employment at the expense of the peripheral areas. And yet the periphery does not drop out of the world-economy entirely—for many reasons. For one thing, its capitalist cadres wish to remain in the world-economy; they struggle to remain there. For a second, the cadres in the core must be concerned with the eventual cyclical upturn of the world-economy as a whole, for which they will need the physical areas and energies represented by the land and population of the peripheries. For a third thing, the core countries continue to need, even at moments of downturn, certain of the products of the periphery—partly because due to ecological considerations they cannot be supplied elsewhere, partly because the cost of labor is more than ever lower than in the core.

What needs to be underlined most of all is that a downturn is a slowdown of activity, not a stoppage. It represents, in economic terms, a set of obstacles in the search for profit that, if you will, weeds out the capitalist sheep from the goats. The strong not only survive; they frequently thrive. For the peripheries, therefore, a downturn in the world-economy occasions both involution and evolution; both a seeming decline in the monetarization of economic activity and the emergence of new enterprises; both abandonment and restructuring or relocation; both a decline in their specialized role in the world-economy and a deepening of it. To evalute this apparent paradox, we must start at the beginning. What causes a secular reversal of trends in the world-economy? A capitalist system involves the market mechanism. The market is not free—far from it—since the market is affected by political adjustments and cultural slownesses and preferences. If, however, there is no market response whatsoever, it is difficult to talk of a capitalist system.

The market responds, as we know, to variations in supply and demand. To be sure, these are not some mystical forces that meet in unpredictable ways in the agora. Supply and demand are reciprocally and institutionally determined; but if there is too great a disparity over too long a time, the market is bound to take notice of it. An era of expansion tends to create, over time, more supply than demand—for the very simple reason that supply is determined by the individual entrepreneur (for whom, in an era of expansion, increased production shows good prospects of profit) and demand is collectively determined (via the political machinery that has arranged the distribution of income). Sooner or later, given the existing worldwide distribution, there comes to be insufficient worldwide demand for the constantly expanding production. Two things can eliminate the disparity: The expansion of production can be reversed, stopped, or at the very least slowed down; and the distribution of income can be rearranged such that there is increased global demand, permitting eventually a new expansion.

Both things do in fact occur, and in that order. Production stagnates, and then later there is a political redistribution of income. This is the social profile of an era of downturn, but specifications must be added immediately. Production stagnates more in the old peripheries than elsewhere; and the political redistribution of income occurs more in core and semiperipheral areas (or at least in some of them) than in the peripheries. This, as we shall see, is precisely the story of the long era of downturn of the seventeenth century, of the period from 1600/1650 to 1750. There is another specification of this model based on lack of effective demand. We have dated this period of downturn as beginning between 1600 and 1650. This ambiguity, found throughout the book, is not an ambiguity of inadequate knowledge, but the expression of the normal mode of shift from expansion to downturn. Normally, there is a long moment during which expansion continues but downturn has already begun, and this therefore is part of the story of both eras.

We have already discussed that this particular reversal of secular trends seems to have been composed of three successive commercial shockwaves: one in the 1590s, one in the 1620s, and one in the 1650s.1 This is the same period when the European world-economy was affected with monetary instability—the Rising of the Moneys in the Baltic, the inflation of copper coin in Spain, the sudden decline in the production of precious metals in the Americas. It was also the moment of various population disasters caused by wars, epidemics, and famines. The combination was not fortuitous. What does a producer of export crops in the periphery do when there is suddenly an unfavorable market? There are two responses that make sense from his point of view. He can try to maintain his net income by expanding the volume of his export and/or by diminishing his production costs. Either or both often work in the short run for the individual entrepreneur, but they worsen the collective situation of peripheral producers in a given area in the medium run. Expansion of production of the export crop increases global production still more in a market where demand is already stretched. Diminishing production costs exhausts the potential of future production if it is achieved, as is most likely in peripheral areas, by intensification of exploitation of natural or human resources.

We shall try to show that in the principal peripheries of the sixteenth-century world-economy, this is precisely what happened. The weak markets of the 1590s and the 1620s led to increased volume of production and/or increased rate of exploitation of resources. By the 1650s, if not earlier, peripheral producers were forced by the consequences of this first tactic to turn to the only other sensible response, partial withdrawal from production for the market—at least for that particular part of the world market in which they had found their niche in the sixteenth century.2 Let us start with the eastern European periphery. Its export products fell in price, in productivity, and in total value and quantity exported in the seventeenth century, most notably (but not only) for Polish grains and Hungarian cattle. The story of prices is the most familiar because it is on the break in agricultural prices that the basic image of a seventeenth-century depression is built. Polish wheat prices fell as of 1615–1620, then saw a temporary rise followed in the mid-seventeenth century “by a violent drop and price depression of long duration.”3 The rise in Hungarian cattle prices slowed down as of the beginning of the seventeenth century, only “to stop altogether after another brief boom in the 1620s.”4 By the middle of the seventeenth century, the price of Hungarian cattle in Vienna had declined “considerably.”5 For Czech agriculture too, the 100 years following 1650 was “a century of stagnation.”6

Not only did the prices of the exports go down in absolute terms, but they may have gone down relatively, that is, the terms of trade became “more and more disadvantageous” for the peripheral exporters.7 At the same time, there was a “rapid increase of the volume of imports of luxury articles,” especially in the second quarter of the seventeenth century8—a kind of last fling of the peripheral gentry. The combination of declining exports and increasing imports (at least in the period of transition) resulted in a dramatic shift in the balance of trade. For example, Poland’s sea trade in the Baltic shifted from a 52% surplus in 1565–1585 to 8% in 1625–1646 and then to an adverse balance of trade in the second half of the seventeenth century.9 Mczak speaks of Poland’s passive trade balance resulting from “the fateful decade of the 1620s.”10The shifting trade balance was aggravated by the inability of Poland’s weakly protected economic enterprises to resist the negative effects of the monetary instability resulting from price inflation. Dutch merchants required Gdańsk merchants to accept part of their payment in weak money (for example, Loewenthalers) alongside the harder ducats and thalers. Of course, this money could have been barred by political authorities; but there was much opposition to any such preventive measures by the Gdańsk merchants themselves, who both “feared grave pertubations in external trade”11 and did not find such protection essential, since they could pass along this burden, foist upon them by the Dutch, “onto the shoulders of the middle bourgeoisie, the nobles, and the peasants.”12

The measurements of eastern European grain yield ratios have been extensive, and the consensus is that there was a definite fall in the seventeenth century. How much is a matter of some debate. The more optimistic see grain yields as merely stagnant at the time the yields of northwest Europe were rising. The less optimistic see a significant drop.13 The general explanation of the decline of wheat yields is the “domination of commodity production by landlords using forced labor to the utmost,” the same explanation Pach gives to explain the decline of Hungary’s cattle exports.14 But why should this domination lead to a decline in yield ratios? Two reasons are offered. One is that the increasing exigencies of corvée labor “led many a peasant to stop keeping draught animals and pass over to the rank of cottars”; and since the yield ratios of peasant farms was generally higher than that of the aristocracy, the overall yield fell.15 The second reason is that production was increased “by deviating from the fundamental principles of rotation in tilling the soil,”16 which over time exhausted the soil. Exhausting the men and the soil maintained a level of total production for 50–60 years, but it was a self-consuming method. This can be seen since, despite all these efforts to increase production and lower costs, the total of exports declined. In the end of the sixteenth century, 100,000 lasts of wheat were shipped from Gdańsk annually; in the seventeenth, 30,000; in the beginning of the eighteenth, only 10,000.17 Abel shows a break point in 1620,18 but Jeannin points out that the records of the Sund show 1649 or 1650 as “a record year, outdoing 1618,” and suggests we think of the turning point as 1650 rather than 1620.19

The story on cattle export is the same. In Hungary, 1550–1600 was the “Golden Age,”20 after which there was a decline. The Polish cattle trade to Silesia, Saxony, and the Rhine “lost its importance” with the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War because of the dangers of cattle driving.21 The same was true of Danish cattle export, which in this context is part of the same picture.22 Pach argues that the decline in cattle trade was more severe than the decline of the wheat trade, and hence that Hungary suffered even more than Poland because whereas the wheat was sold to “the Atlantic centre of the rising modern-type international trade,” the cattle was sold to the South German towns who “fell themselves victims to the shift of international trade routes.”23 The third major export of eastern Europe in the sixteenth century had been copper. Here too there was a marked decline as of the 1620s.24 In each of these cases—wheat, cattle, copper—the explanation lies in worldwide overproduction. In the case of wheat, there had been a rise, albeit “a small rise,” in cereals production in southern and western Europe, but large enough, says Faber, to account for “the disastrous recession of the Dutch grain trade” in the second half of the seventeenth century.25 For cattle, it was the “decreased demand which brought down the prices.”26 In the case of copper, the main factor was the “glut of Swedish copper [that] came on the market.”27

In each case the export situation was worsened, but not caused, by war and devastation at home—in particular by the Swedish invasion of Poland (1655–1660), by the century of intermittent fighting in Hungary, going from the Fifteen Years’ War (1591–1606) to Rákoćzi’s war of independence (1703–1711), and by the Danish–Swedish war (1643–1645).28 But the devastations of war, which involve the reduction of total supply, are no explanation in themselves. As Vera Zimányi reminds us: “The sixteenth century knew, throughout Europe, wars that were no less devastating, but in that era they served only to stimulate production, to create favorable conjunctures, etc., and consequently to raise prices.”29What then had changed from the sixteenth century? The European world-economy had moved from a situation of less total supply than demand to the reverse. In the former, destruction tended to make the demand more acute. In the latter, destruction tended to offer a good excuse to reduce overall production.

How was such an overall reduction distributed? This is the key issue, as it determined, or rather restructured, the social relations of the peripheral zones. We have already seen that in eastern Europe, coerced cash-crop labor (the so-called second serfdom) had spread in the sixteenth century as a mechanism of labor control of the expanding capitalist domains. What we must now explain is why the demands on the serfs grew even more intensive in the receding export markets of the seventeenth century. We must begin with the fact that in the sixteenth century, cash crops were produced both on the seigniorial domain and on the peasant’s plot at approximately the same level of efficiency.30Nonetheless, the seventeenth century is marked by a considerable concentration of land throughout eastern Europe, that is, more of the total cultivated area and more of the crops produced for the market were in the hands of seigniors and less were in the hands of peasants. This is reported for Poland,31 Czechia,32 and Livonia.33 Indeed for Poland, Mczak specifically contrasts the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the sixteenth, noting that “the small group of prosperous yeomen-peasants . . . completely disappeared . . . as a direct victim of the avarice of the landowners.”34

Let us be clear on what happened. The expansion of total cultivated land area, a phenomenon of the sixteenth century in response to a favorable world market, ceased, even was partially reversed; but within the land area under cultivation, an increasing share was held by the direct reserve of the seigniors. That is to say, the challenge to expand market production had been met in two ways in eastern Europe in the sixteenth century: by the farming of the large domains of the magnates with coerced labor and also by some development of farming by rich peasants. “By the early seventeenth century, however, the fight ended with the victory of the ‘Gutsherr’ trend relying on the use of forced serf labor.”35

The advantages of the large domain over the peasant farm, indeed over the medium-sized domain, were several. Unpredictability of crops favored larger units because they had a kind of internal insurance against bad harvests by the variety of areas they controlled.36 In addition to this advantage on the supply side of the equation, there was an advantage on the demand side. At that end, their direct access to the market, the fact that they could transport their goods to the port themselves without an intermediary, was “a considerable economic privilege,” which Kula believes was “partially responsible” for the process of land concentration.37 That these advantages became all the greater as times grew harder is made clear in the remarkable table (see Table 4.1) in which Kula calculates the terms of trade (the purchasing power of the products they sold in relation to those they bought) for three different social groups in Poland over time. While one shouldn’t overinterpret such shaky data,38 the use of two different index dates, 1550 and 1600, makes possible some tentative suggestions. The period of maximal expansion, 1550–1600, was good for the magnates but also good for the peasants—for both, it seems, at the expense of the nobles. As soon as bad times set in, the peasants felt the brunt of it. Both the nobles and the magnates did well. While starting from a 1600 index, it is clear that the nobles did relatively better than the magnates for a while (but only for a while); it is also clear, using the 1550 index, that in absolute terms the magnates were always way ahead of the nobles.

TABLE 3

Changes in Terms of Trade for Social Groups in Poland^a

Why should this be so? May I suggest a very simple mechanism. When times are hard, there are two ways to maximize sales for a producer—reduce costs and eliminate competitors. The magnates (and the nobles) sought to reduce costs by increasing corvée labor, as opposed to wage labor.39 This not only reduced average cost but increased total production, a second means of compensating for losses growing out of reduced market prices40; and to make sure the increased production on the seignior’s land found a market, the seignior bought out the peasants and even the nobles,41 many of whom were ready to sell because of de facto bankruptcy. Even if the seigniors didn’t put the new land into production, they at least kept it from producing goods in competition with their old land. This very plausible process of investing in land, even if it was not intended that it immediately bring in money from export crops, was no doubt abetted by the financial crisis of the early seventeenth century, which pushed the magnates into a “psychologically understandable race to hoard goods as insurance against the insecurity of the money market.”42 Goods, including land, seemed safer as stored value than did coins if their “storage” was to extend over a longer time period.

What happened on these lands that were acquired to put them out of competition? They no doubt represented “a shift oward subsistence production,”43 involution if you will, but not a negation of the capitalist mode of production. They represented precisely an intelligent adjustment to market conditions, a way for the capitalist entrepreneurs (the magnates and the nobles) to optimize profits (or minimize losses) in a weak market—a global reduction of inventory and an overall stagnation in production. The peasants may not have expanded or contracted their efforts in response to the fluctuations of the world market, but peasants were not the entrepreneurs; they were semi-proletarians, whose labor input was largely a function of the entrepreneurs’ reactions to the world market.44

Retrocession did not mean abandonment of capitalist production as is shown by the survival, even the thriving, of regional markets as opposed to the decline in export of products to core countries. Špiesz points out that already in the sixteenth century the territories of central Europe were producing for regional markets and that this accounts for the ways in which they differed from the areas of eastern Europe exporting to western Europe. He calls the productive relations in central Europe—Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Lower Silesia, Lower Lusatia, Austria (not including Tyrol), Saxony, Thuringia, and western Hungary—Wirtschaftherrschaft as opposed to second serfdom. Even in these countries, conditions worsened for the peasants in the seventeenth century.45 What is to be noted however is that in the seventeenth century, some of the market centers in Poland that formerly served transcontinental trade, such as Cracow and Poznań, ceased this role because of the combined effects of the Thirty Years’ War and the Swedish wars; but they flourished nonetheless as regional market centers as of the second half of the seventeenth century.46 The increased concentration of land went hand in hand with an expanded extraction of days of corvée labor. Obviously, if the seignoir had a larger reserve he needed more labor; and if the peasant had less land, he had more time to devote to corvée labor—that is, he presumably still tilled enough to feed himself,47 but no longer tilled very much of his own land for cash-crops. We have reports of an increase in the amount of corvée labor in the seventeenth century for Poland,48 east Elbia,49 Hungary,50 Bohemia,51 Rumania,52 and Denmark.53

There is one final question about the relations of production. If an increase in corvée labor was rational in the seventeenth century, why was not the same high level already reached in the sixteenth? One answer might be that it took time. Another answer would be that a high rate of corvée labor was rational in times of market downturn for the various reasons adduced, but a medium rate more suitable for times of market expansion because there was a negative side to a high rate. After a certain point, corvée labor was exhausting and reduced productivity. Rusinski asks: “At what moment did corvée labor begin to show economically retrogressive features? . . . The latest research permits us to fix this moment with extreme precision.” It is, he says, between 1580 and 1620 for central Poland and a little later for Silesia and Bohemia.54 This brings us right back to our period of transition (1600 to 1650). We may resume the situation as follows: In the sixteenth century, corvée labor was economically productive. It involved the same labor in which the peasant would have engaged in any case because of the strong market; but the seignior appropriated part of the surplus for himself, from the peasant, by instituting corvée labor. As times became difficult, the seignior’s demands on the peasant’s labor time increased. At that point, the peasant was beginning to give labor that he might not have otherwise expanded at all. In the long run, this excess-output would tend to exhaust the peasant’s labor potential and be counterproductive; but it would nonetheless in the medium-run ensure that the bulk of the loss from a weak world market was borne by the peasant and not by the seignior.

Naturally, the peasant was not happy with this situation. “The bigger the estate, the greater the contrast between the reserve and the peasant plot (Guts- und Bauernwirtschaft).”55 The result was peasant flight and sabotage. We thereupon run into another seeming paradox. There occurred simultaneously an increase of both corvée labor and wage labor. This paradox is not difficult to resolve if we remember that there were in fact three modes by which the east European seignior related to the rural laborer: corvée wages, and quit-rent (cens). It was quit-rent, as opposed to both corvée and wages, that was the principal formula of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in eastern Europe. In the sixteenth century the expansion of the world-economy led to the reinstitution and expansion of corvée labor in place of quit-rent. In fact, in those areas closest to export ports, for example, West Prussia, north “Great Poland” and Kujawy, the peasants had been better able to resist the institution of corvée labor in the sixteenth century and to keep more of the market profit for themselves by retaining the quit-rent system.56 This was presumably because their nearness to ports made it relatively easy for them to dispose of their produce at competitive costs. In the seventeenth century, however, given the tighter market, the ability of the remaining east European tenant-farmers to resist the pressures of the seigniors crumbled, and quit-rent began to diminish even further—now to be replaced by both corvée and wage labor.57

From the rural laborer’s point of view, wage labor was not necessarily preferable to a system of corvée labor. In fact, on the reserve, the wage laborers were largely either servants or day laborers, and the latter “found themselves in a still more dependent situation” than the serfs owing corvée labor.58 The serfs not only had more security than the day laborers, in the sense that they could not be let go, but more status and more real income. Strange as it may seem, they also had more alternatives. The fact was that despite the legal constraints on them, “the serfs whose seigniors sought to impose too high dues could always change their seignior” because of the weakness of the public authorities.59 In this conflict between seignior and peasant, which was really a class conflict between bourgeois and proletarian, the peasant was not totally bereft of ability to defend his interests, even in these hard times. The seignior/bourgeois thus had to find other means than the mere reduction of real wages via legal devices in order to extract surplus. He turned, as was logical, to industrial production so that the peasant would relate to him not merely as an employee but as a consumer as well.

If there was a pauperization of the peasants in the seventeenth century, what could they buy? Such urban industries as existed were dying out by the end of the sixteenth century because of “the pauperism, already widespread, of the principal masses of the population.”60 What then could the seigniors produce that the peasants could afford? Occasional simple textiles, some glass and metalware, and grain in lean years. There seems in any case to have been a movement of artisans from the towns to large estates to work on the manufacturies of the estates.61 The most successful industry was unquestionably that which produced the perpetual standby of the poor who get poorer—alcohol. We associate gin with the new urban factories of England in the late eighteenth century, and whiskey with the uprooted indigenous populations of nineteenth-century frontier areas. Similarly, it was vodka and beer in Poland and wine in Hungary for the pauperized peasantry of the seventeenth century. The key institution was called the propinatio, the “invitation to drink,” which meant in fact the monopoly of the seignior in the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.62 In the period from 1650 to 1750, the propinatio often became the nobles’ main source of income.63

The net result of the concentration of land, the further decline of quitrent, plus the propinatio meant that despite the weak world market for their export crops, despite the destructions of wars, the east European upper strata managed to survive the period in reasonable shape. No doubt they may not have been as flourishing as the Amsterdam regent class or as the seigniors of northern France, but the severe reductions in net revenue of the eastern European periphery took its toll first of all on the lower strata.64 The urban artisans and richer peasants went under, and the poor peasants got poorer. As the social cleavages polarized more, some also moved upward in status. These were the clientele of the courts—not so much of the king, as in France, but of the many seigniorial potentates.65 This has been termed refeudalization, but Makkai insists rightly that it is a misnomer; it should be called, he says, an “inflation of the nobility.”66

In the previous chapter, we drew a picture of the social compromise reached in England and France between the new capitalists and the old aristocrats, two categories that overlapped far more than contemporary opinion or that of the times acknowledged; but they overlapped imperfectly and therefore with considerable friction in the era of expansion of the world-economy. The conflict grew most acute in the period of transition, the last period of inflation that went hand in hand with the levling off of the worldwide expansion; but in the period of 1650 to 1750, the realities of an era of downturn and mercantilism forced a coming to terms with each other of the two overlapping strata, which was crystallized by the end of the seventeenth century in new constitutional arrangements (using the expression broadly). Did anything comparable happen in the east European periphery? There were two factors present in the core that were absent in the periphery. First, for those strata located in the core, the prospects of capitalist profit remained on the whole relatively better, and this must have tempered the bitternesses of making mutual concessions. It was somehow worth it. Second, being in the core, the upper strata profited collectively, if not individually, from the strengthening of the state-machinery; but in turn this state-machinery could act as an institutional brake on internal conflicts among the upper strata.

The peripheral areas had neither the economic compensations nor the strong state-machinery. The monarchy was getting ever weaker in Poland. Hungary was divided into three parts, two of which were under foreign rule, and ultimately all three would be. Czech lands were also under foreign rule. Indeed, with the exception of Brandenburg-Prussia, a special case which we shall discuss subsequently, the seventeenth was a century of the further collapse of the indigenous national authorities. The Polish state, the only one to have an indigenous sovereign over all its ethnic territory, was in fact called the Rzeczpospolita, a term derived from the Latin Respublica, and it was commonly referred to as the Commonwealth of the Gentry. Foreign states, however, regularly interfered with the choice of the king, who was elected; and frequently, someone other than a native Pole was chosen. Three leaders in seventeenth-century Hungary (Gabor Bethlen, Zrínyi, and Ferenc Rákoćzi II) sought to “create a Hungarian state strong enough to bear the burden of changed European conditions”67 and tried to create a strong army and, as a prerequisite, obtain taxes.68 They failed because of the combined opposition of the Hungarian aristocracy and the Habsburg monarchs, who reached a mutually convenient and lasting arrangement after the failure of the Hungarian war of independence in 1711. “In Hungary, the tax exemption of the nobility was prolonged for another century, the copper trade fell into the hands of the Dutch, while the middleman’s profit was invested by the Habsburg state into the modernization of Austrian mines.”69

In the core countries, the newer, rising strata, whether gentry or noblesse de robe, could count on the fact that the state-machinery could place some check on the pretensions of the old aristocracy, and especially on those who could not perform well in the market. But in eastern Europe this possibility barely existed. These strata sought to substitute for the strong state the “commonwealth of the gentry,” that is the imposition by legal and moral pressures of equality within the upper 5–10% of the population, although the social and economic inequality and conflict withinthis upper group was in fact quite marked70 and was accentuated by the economic difficulties of the time.71 In Poland, the efforts of the middle gentry to obtain justice in the tribunals against abuses of the magnates or legislative redress were nonetheless in vain. The magnates bribed the courts and broke up the Seym and the local diets whenever they got out of hand.72 In Hungary, the “gentry” tried a war and lost. In Poland, they reshaped the Sarmatian myth—originally intended simply to argue that the ethnically diverse populations of the Polish–Lithuanian realms descended from a common proto-Slavonic ancestor, the Sarmatians—into one that accounted for the origins of a conquering nobility, founders of the ruling class.73 In that way, “the gentry, and only they, were identified with the Polish nation, excluding other social classes, allegedly of different origin, from the national community.”74 Defenders of the Christian faith and xenophobic, the gentry pushed this doctrine zealously and in extreme ways75 and were no doubt guilty of “megalomania”76 and “morbid mythomania.”77 But if one has no possibility of a Glorious Revolution, one has to make do with Sarmatism, even if it implies “cultural stagnation and an atrophy of creative intellectual activity.”78

While the period of world economic downturn led the core countries along the path of nationalism (mercantilism) and constitutional compromise within the upper strata, with the consequence of a lowered ability of the lower strata to rebel, the weakness of the east European states meant that they could neither seek the advantages of a mercantilist tactic nor guarantee any compromise within the upper strata. This led the peripheral areas in the direction of sharpening class conflict,79 increased regionalism and decreased national consciousness,80 the search for internal scapegoats,81 and acute restiveness of the peasantry.82 Mutatis mutandis, we shall see that the same thing was true of the old peripheral areas of southern Europe and the Americas. A rapid overview of the Christian Mediterranean shows that the same patterns prevailed for a seventeenth century that was characterized by “stagnation in business.”83 The prices of primary exports fell. In Spain, wheat prices declined after 1585, and they remained stagnant throughout the seventeenth century, as did prices for wine, rice, and oil.84 In Sicily, the export of silk declined, as did the export of wheat and wine after 1640; but Aymard notes that the reduction in exports was compensated for by a continued increase in population that increased “internal” consumption.85 This may mean, however, that the per capita grain production was falling, a phenomenon we have already encountered in eastern Europe.

What is the explanation? Cancila speaks of the “intensive works of colonization” in Sicily from 1573 to 1653.86 DaSilva reports that a worried writer in Spain in 1609–1610 noted that abuses were multiplying, triennial rotation was no longer being observed, and thus the producers “were exhausting the fields.”87 DaSilva says that this situation led, in the years from 1570 to 1630, to the search for new domains, which were then similarly exhausted. This “aridification” of the land hit particularly the small producers88 and led to further land concentration. While this process of exhausting the land led to inability to export, land concentration that resulted from it led to a further monetarization of productive relations, since “the inability of the peasants (contadini) and villagers to provide for their own subsistence by working their own land enlarged the internal market.”89 We saw the same expansion of the regional markets in eastern Europe as world trade declined. Demography followed suit. The Spanish population declined—plagues in the last years of the sixteenth century and the expulsion of the Moriscos. There was a 35% reduction of the population of Valencia from 1609 to 1638, but this “violent demographic crisis” followed rather than preceded the stagnation.90

Regarding southern Italy, there was population decline in Naples. Sicily, according to Aymard, experienced only a “slowing down” of demographic expansion (rather than a decline); but he adds that the figures for Sicily hide a “clear regional differentiation”; the island was split in two, with the north, northeast, and center stagnating and no longer self-sufficient in food supply.91 One wonders if there wasn’t, in addition, some hidden demographic decline. Verlinden reports that the incidence of slavery in southern Italy and Sicily declined in the seventeenth century from its high point in the fifteenth and sixteenth, because trade in African slaves (who were formerly imported to the Mediterranean by the Portuguese) was diverted to the Americas and the supply of Turkish and other Moslem slaves was much smaller.92 Does this not imply a decline in overall population that may not be caught up in the other statistics? The “undoubted contraction” of the economy is said to account for the riseof local manufactures from Aquila to Salerno in the state of Naples;93 however, this was true not only for Naples but for all of Italy as well as Languedoc. Might this be, asks Braudel, “the demonstration of a discomfort, a diffuse reaction to the insufficiency of trade”?94 The results of this squeeze on the small rural producers, who were the real losers in the period of regression, led to acute class conflict. Speaking of the peasant’s revolt in 1647–1648 in Naples, Emilio Sereni writes that it was “the response of rural populations to feudal oppression and abuse, now aggravated by the mercantile avidity of the new barons.” He says, “rather than speaking of ‘refeudalization’, we might properly talk of the commercialization of the fief.”95 Economic regression, increased pressures on land and labor power, concentration, further commercialization of land and labor—all in fact went hand in hand in southern as in eastern Europe.

Let us now turn to Hispanic America, where the “depression of the seventeenth century” has long been a subject of major controversy, and let us start with the rise of the hacienda as the key agricultural institution of this peripheral arena of the world-economy. How is the hacienda to be defined and perceived? When did it arise? We have already encountered a debate in the context of the sixteenth century about whether to describe land structures as “feudal”96 or “capitalist.” It is possible to argue, as does Frédéric Mauro, that whereas in Hispanic America the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries at least “increased the importance of the speculators, the merchants, the mine-owners, the urban bourgeois and . . . even the royal bureaucracy,” the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries represented the triumph of “patriarchal society.”97 From this perspective, capitalism and feudalism are seen as competing tendencies linked with very long A and B cycles of the world-economy. The key debate thus turns out to be about the seventeenth not the sixteenth century. The triumph of a self-sufficient “noncapitalist” hacienda is the basic theme of François Chevalier’s work, a triumph said to be the consequence of the retraction of the world-economy:

In the early decades of the seventeenth century the silver boom collapsed, smothering in its passage the first stirrings of a barely nascent capitalism. Land became the sole source of income. . . . The largest estates were self-sufficient. The big sugar refinery, the plantation, the harvest estancia, and the smelter with its farm annexes supplied nearly all their own needs. . . . We have frequently had occasion to recall the Middle Ages. . . . [The hacienda owners] constituted an aristocracy in fact; some succeeded in obtaining titles. The state of the Marqueses del Valle, finally, is a pale replica of the Duchy of Burgundy.98

An alternative perspective on the Mexican hacienda in the seventeenth century is stated with great vigor by André Gunder Frank:

The growth of the latifundium in seventeenth-century Mexico was not a depression-induced retrenchment of the economy into what has come to be called a feudal hacienda, but on the contrary the hacienda grew and flourished at this time, as at all other times and places in Latin America, because events elsewhere in the national and indeed in the world economy rendered latifundium production highly profitable.99

It would aid our ability to assess these contrary perspectives if we analyzed some of these historical processes in closer detail. The first issue is the timing of the downturn. Lynch says the peak of Mexican silver production was in the 1590s, and that “after this, the boom was over.”100However, for the Indies trade in general, he accepts Chaunu’s view that a mere “reversal of major trend” occurred between 1593 and 1622 and that the great depression occurred between 1623 and 1650.101 MacLeod, in turn, speaking of Central America, calls the period between around 1576 and 1635 a “half century of transition” and dates the depression as occurring somewhere between 1635 and 1720.102 Berthe dates the profound crisis for Mexican agriculture between 1630 and 1680.103 Finally Mellafe, speaking of Spanish America in general and Chile in particular, says that “the true crisis begins after 1650,” adding that “the fall of Cartagena, in the year 1595, was the first warning of the cruel and destructive struggle that would last two centuries.”104

As usual, scholarly quibbles about dating reflect the complexity of a reality in which downturns seem to begin before upward cycles end. It seems fairly clear that there was a period of cyclical overlap (or transition) in Hispanic America beginning perhaps as early as the 1570s but more plausibly in the 1590s and ending somewhere between 1630 and 1650. What we should expect to find in such a period is a crisis in profits in the leading sectors and resultant efforts by large-scale proprietors and investors to recoup losses by short-run actions, which in fact make the long-run situation worse. This is what occurred. Silver, the major export of Hispanic America in the sixteenth century, reached a plateau between 1590 and 1630, and after that the figures show a sharp and sudden decline. The official trade statistics here may be misleading because there was a growing clandestine trade; nevertheless the descriptive evidence from the mining areas seems to indicate that there was indeed “a real fall in production.”105 Why should this have occurred? One argument is that it was caused by a labor shortage. However, despite the decline in overall population and the slightly higher costs of labor, the mine owners seemed to get the labor they needed. In Mexico they resorted to wage labor, and in Potosí they simply drew the forced labor from farther distances. The point is that production declined even when labor was available, as Davis argues: “Indeed in the mid-seventeenth century many Potosí mine operations were accepting Indian monetary tribute in place of the mitaor forced labour they were entitled to, preferring this certain income to whatever profits mining might bring.”106

Was it then the shortage of mercury? It is clear that there was such a shortage between the 1630s and the 1660s. Bakewell calls the difficulties of mercury supply the “single largest determinant of variations of [silver] output”; but Davis does not believe they were “decisive.”107 The question is why was more mercury available in the 1660s than in the 1630s. It must have been profitable to do what was necessary to get mercury in the 1660s but not in the 1630s. Let us remember again that although the supply of bullion was a principal factor in price formation in that epoch, “gold and silver too [had] their price” and “moneys in general, and particularly in a metallic system, were but a commodity like any other.”108 André Gunder Frank agrees with the foregoing and explains the fall in production as the long-term result of price inflation:

Did not, then, fixed prices for silver mean a falling return, even if costs had remained fixed as well? To say that in an inflation the prices of goods and services increased is to say, in other words, that the value or the price of money decreased. And was it not money that the mine-owners were producing in their mines since the price of silver was fixed? The implication is that they faced both an increase in costs and a decrease in returns—enough reason for any capitalist to reduce his output and put his money into some other business, if possible.109

The decline of bullion exports, the leading sector, affected the other “export crops” in turn. Regarding indigo production in Central America, MacLeod argues that the state of shipping technology in the seventeenth century created a shaky rate of profit for primary products shipped across the Atlantic. “In favorable times indigo survived on the margins of gold and silver. In harder times [indigo] was too far from Europe to show consistent profits.”110 This point about indigo can also be applied more generally.111

Two powerful groups suffered immediately from the decline in export prices: the Spaniards who controlled the productive enterprises and the state that taxed these Spaniards. The rate of taxation had already climbed remarkably in the second half of the sixteenth century;112 but the onset of economic difficulties in Spain and its empire coincided with a period of great military activity (the Revolt of the Netherlands followed by the Thirty Years’ War). Faced with the growing gap between diminished revenues and increased expenditures, the Spanish state resorted to “unbridled coinage of vellon” in the beginning of the seventeenth century,113 and when that was not enough it tried “to squeeze the last drops” from the empire.114 Thus in Mexico and in Peru the Spanish state both increased taxes and sought to enforce taxation more efficaciously.115This was in fact self-defeating. When in 1620 Philip III confiscated one-eighth of the bullion shipped privately (offering in its stead vellon or juros), he most assuredly directly deprived merchants of their capital; but more importantly, they consequently became reluctant to ship back their bullion at all (no doubt another factor in reducing silver production). As a result, the Crown’s income from the avería, the ad valorem tax that paid for the cost of escorts, went down. To maintain the fleets, the Crown had to raise the avería rate still higher, which was, as Lynch says, “a further incitement to fraud” and turned the Crown into a “parasite [living] on the American trade and colonies.” The Crown also compensated by granting more mercedes to Spaniards. It was a spiral. “Plunder and parasitism made fraud and contraband a way of life”116—and the latter two, as we shall see, advanced still further the semiperipheralization of Spain.

While some of the Creoles were smarting from the effects of the economic difficulties and seeking salvation in public office,117 thus multiplying the parasitism of the state bureaucracy, others were in fact adapting quite well to the vicissitudes of the world market. The production of bullion, up to then the major export crop, went down; and the production of grains went up. It is at this point that the confusion arises. Since American grain (unlike east European grain) did not serve as a peripheral export to core regions, it is often assumed that such production was noncapitalist. Bazant says that it was quite the contrary: “The production [of wheat] on a large scale was without doubt production for the market and using capital.” He reminds us that although wheat was not consumed by peons who ate tortillas, “there was nonetheless an appreciable market: the white population of the cities.”118 Furthermore, this production required much capital in the form of mills, animals, and food for the work force.

It may be argued that this is true for wheat but not for maize. Here too, however, commercialization was central:

The workers (Indians, mulattoes, Negroes, mestizos) as well as the mules and horses that moved the machines, the entire work force employed in the mines depended on corn (maize). To service them, beginning in the end of the sixteenth century, there grew up around the mines a belt of agricultural and cattle haciendas specially devoted to their provisioning.119

This is not to suggest that these haciendas were unaffected economically; bad times of the mining areas led to “difficult years, sometimes recession”120 that was often exacerbated by the creation of new competitive haciendas. However, it is to suggest that the market had a regional limit and that it was not profitable to go beyond that limit in the world economic contraction.121 This is no doubt the conjunctural origin of the classical description of the structural difference between haciendas, which supplied small-scale markets, and sugar plantations, which supplied large-scale ones.122 Within the regional limits, hacienda production was quite profitable. One may call this self-sufficiency if one wishes, but to me it seems more plausible that it was, as Bakewell says, “the result of fashioning in the New World a diversified and, in contemporary terms, capitalist economy of the European type; and of using this economy to exploit the rich assets of Middle America for Middle America’s advantage.”123 The resulting advantages could not affect an abstract entity called Middle America but they did affect a concrete social group who were the landowners of Middle America.

As in eastern Europe, however, the slowdown of the world-economy as a whole required intensified use of the basic resources (land and labor) to maintain the level of profit. The precipitous decline of the Indian population in all parts of Hispanic America is a tale now quite well known,124 and the role of disease epidemics therein clearly established.125 This decline created both opportunity and dilemma for the Spanish landowners. The decline of Indian producers (by death and by land ouster) along with the growth of the Spanish and mestizo population in the urban and mining areas, created the regional market and its high prices for the hacienda owner. On the other hand, the owner needed laborers. It is here that we find the crux of the struggle over who is to accumulate the capital. The fact that there was a slowdown worldwide in capital accumulation meant that the capitalist sectors in Hispanic America were in acute competition with those in Spain for a reduced economic pie. We have already mentioned increased taxation by the Crown which transferred surplus from the Americas. From the point of view of New Spain, the erstwhile most dynamic region of the Americas, what hurt most was the attempt by the Spanish Crown to reduce Mexico’s direct ties with Peru and the Philippines. No doubt there was widespread smuggling but no doubt too the Crown’s policy had “a serious adverse affect on Mexico City.”126

The tension over profits manifested itself not merely in disputes about the control of trade routes but about control of labor supply. The system of repartimiento had been in effect from the middle of the sixteenth century, and it was quite frustrating from the point of view of large agricultural producers. While it amounted to forced wage labor, the laborers were transitory and returned regularly to maintain their traditional productive activities.127 The supply was mediated by the Spanish bureaucracy, particularly by the corregidores, with the firm support of the friars, who argued for it as a means of protecting the Indians from Spanish rapacity. The interests of the “protectors” was quite transparent, as Israel explains it in the Mexican context:

The corregidores . . . regularly made large fortunes by their various methods of extortion including the forced purchase of Indian crops at minimal prices in order to sell at great profit in the towns, conducting compulsory sales of goods at exorbitant prices, taking fees for favours from Spaniards, and making astute use of the repartimiento. . . . Thus the Indians were in effect supporting two separate economies, that of the Spanish settlers on the one hand and that of the Indian districts functioning chiefly in the interests of the corregidores, friars, and Indian hierarchy on the other.128

This double burden on the Indians was surely part of the story of their demographic decline; and it surely created, in addition, an impossible strain on the political system as soon as there was an economic crunch.129

In 1632 the Crown finally brought about the suspension in New Spain of compulsory wage labor outside the mines. Because of the continuing tension, this merely speeded up the evolving tactic of the Spanish landowners (now hacendados) of attracting permanent laborers known as gañanes or laboríos. The corregidores responded at first by not exempting these gañanes from the repartimiento, which meant defacto that, in order to weaken the Creoles as a stratum, the corregidores forced an Indian to leave one Creole and move under the control of another. When the Crown tried the alternate tactic of abolishing compulsion altogether, the Indian faced the increased possibility of not working at all; at which point, the large agricultural producer resorted to the creation of debt peonage as a way of holding labor on the land.130 Land expropriation reinforced this control even further;131 thus the encomienda became the hacienda,132 and the forced laborer became the debt peon. In terms of remuneration, which is calculated on units of time, it is possible that the worker’s situation might even have improved. The labor shortage had given the worker some bargaining power;133 but did he not pay for this higher level of remuneration with the increased total time he was obligated to offer? Was there not, in fact, an increase in the rate of work and a probable shortening of his life span? Were they not here, as in eastern Europe, eating up the capital of the labor force itself to maintain the level of production?

The sequence was probably this: The high prices and short supply of agricultural goods at the end of the sixteenth century led to land appropriation and production speedup. Chevalier, for example, speaks of the degree to which cattlemen were willing “to sacrifice many animals even at the risk of depleting their herds.”134 The mine owners, the townsmen, the bureaucrats—in short, those who constituted the regional market for agricultural goods—tried to control the level of profit of the producers by using mechanisms of price control, such as the alhóndiga, a municipal granary with fixed prices from which, however, Indian produce was exempt.135 The smaller Spanish agricultural producers tended to go under because of the squeeze, as did the mestizo producers, many of whom “were reduced to a miserable peasant existence.”136 Conversely, the larger ones became still larger, expanding at the very moment of price decline. The logic of such seeming perversity is caught by Morner:

Haciendas often had to reduce their production due to the limitations of the market and the drastic fall of prices when harvests were plentiful. Why then did they bother to expand? Because by depriving their neighbors of their lands, the hacendados wiped out competing production or forced hitherto self-sufficient small producers to become consumers of hacienda products instead.137

The large, so-called self-sufficient hacienda was precisely a mechanism that enabled subtle adjustment to market forces. It could contract and expand production in function of shifting profitability and speed up or slow down resource utilization, thus maintaining the link between agricultural production and the world-economy over time. Furthermore, the hacienda was the locus of new textile production. Its emergence is analogous to what in later centuries would be known as import substitution, the notorious consequence of worldwide contractions. Bakewell argues that “trade probably declined, in large part, because New Spain no longer needed imports from Europe.”138 He draws the conclusion that “the economy of New Spain, far from suffering any decline in the early seventeenth century, became more healthy”;139 but this is to misconceive the situation. There is no such thing as an economy of New Spain that can be compared to an economy of Spain. Some entrepreneurs in Hispanic America transferred investment, inter alia, to textile production because of the shifting state of the market (the increase of the Spanish and mestizo populations, the decline of silver export, and the economies of labor scale of the hacienda system) and thereby hurt the export potential of Spanish textile producers.

Worldwide contraction did not imply a decline of capitalist economic activity. Indeed, it probably signaled the increased strength of locally-based bourgeois enterprise.140 Furthermore, as with Europe, the point is not that there was any decline in overall textile production but that this production was moving to the rural areas, the haciendas and Indian villages, and that “fine clothes were being produced for the most part in obrajes.”141 Nor were textiles the only growing industry. The iron and bronze industries expanded at the beginning of the seventeenth century to provide for the building of “large churches, with Renaissance grating on doors and windows (verjas y rejas).”142 When the chief export crops of Hispanic America (particularly silver) suffered a decline on the world market, the producers in these old peripheral areas turned their attention to other ways of making profit. They focused their productive activities on growing regional markets, which, from the point of view of transatlantic trade, represented a relative withdrawal; but it can scarcely be described as the rise of autarky. Meanwhile, within core countries, the high level of demand created expanding markets for the export of sugar (and to a lesser extent of tobacco). To some extent, this meant involving new peripheral areas in the world-economy—the Caribbean islands and their extension, and the southern mainland colonies of British North America. It is to this story that we must turn to complete the picture.

Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, most Caribbean islands were not under European control. The Spanish had taken over primarily the large islands of Trinidad and the so-called Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico). They did some cattle raising and grew some food crops and a little tobacco and sugar; but their main concern was simply to control the trade routes to their areas of prime concern in the Americas. Suddenly, between 1604 and 1640, the English, French, and Dutch invaded the Caribbean and took over all the minor islands. From 1625 to 1654, the Dutch controlled part of Brazil. In 1655, the English seized Jamaica from the Spaniards. In 1629 some French buccaneers landed in Tortuga off Hispaniola, and by 1659 they controlled the latter definitively; they soon moved onto the western half of the larger island, today called Haiti (although France’s sovereignty was not to be formally recognized until 1697). Then from the 1650s until 1763, there was a relative stability of colonial allocation. Why was there a sudden upsurge of intrusion by the northwest European powers into the extended Caribbean? Why did it stop substantially short of taking over the Spanish and Portuguese territories? And why was the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, and particularly in the 1660s and 1670s, the haven of pirates and buccaneers, the Wild West of the era, “promising far more in the way of glamor, excitement, quick profit, and constant peril than the prosaic settlements” of the rest of the Americas?143

Pierre Chaunu says that somewhere between 1619/1623 and 1680, “at a date it would be fruitless to seek to make too precise,” there was a change in the very nature of the Spanish Carrera. Bureaucratic rigidities replaced the supple mechanisms that had characterized the triumphant Carrera of the sixteenth century. “From the second half of the seventeenth century, the Atlantic of Guadalquivir had become only one Atlantic among several.”144 Chaunu’s dating is later than that of some men of the time. In 1619, Sancho de Moncada, Professor of Holy Scripture at the University of Toledo and a Spanish mercantilist thinker, asserted (no doubt with some exaggeration) that nine-tenths of the commerce to the Indies was in the hands of foreigners, “such that they have the Indies, and Your Majesty the title.”145 He would be proven essentially right. In the seventeenth century, the century of mercantilism, Spain and Portugal failed to be, were unable to be, mercantilist, and thus they became transformed into semiperipheral states, conveyor belts for the interests of the core powers in the peripheral regions. As a story of the semiperiphery we shall speak of this at some length in the next chapter; as a story of the periphery, we must tell it now.

In an era of overall contraction, some arenas of economic activity must be contracting. Seeking to minimize contraction in their economic activities, the core powers compete acutely among themselves, partly by seeking preemptive control of peripheral areas. They both colonize and seek to keep each other from colonizing, which leads to acute colonial wars, and they seek to shape the world market to favor more controllable areas over less controllable ones (the Americas versus eastern and southern Europe). In addition, they seek to feed off weaker colonial powers when it proves too expensive to seize their territory outright, as was largely the case for the Spanish and Portuguese empires.146 Thus, as the world contraction began, the English, French, and Dutch all turned to the Caribbean to preempt it. They colonized the zones that were easy to take and then, by seizing the trade, sought to obtain the economic advantages they would have had by direct colonial rule in those areas still controlled by Spain and Portugal. The chief mechanism of doing this in the seventeenth century was contraband.

To understand how contraband worked, we must first look at the social origins of the buccaneers. In the sixteenth century, cattle roamed Central America and the Caribbean islands. Some of it was wild. Some of it was controlled by Indians, but less and less as the century went on, and some ranched by the Spaniards. We have already described the demographic shifts of Hispanic America: the steady decline of the Indian population, combined with a steady growth not only of Creoles, but of mulatto and mestizo groups. The seventeenth-century contraction of the mining areas caused a tightening of opportunities in the urban areas for the poorer Creoles and for the socially intermediate mulatto and mestizo populations. Many of them migrated to rural areas. Some found placement in the growing network of haciendas and ranches. Others did not. Members of the intermediate strata who did not find employment risked “inferiorization,” reduction to the status of mere cultivators of food crops. In the frontier atmosphere, however, they did have an alternative. They became cowboys of wild animals, slaughtering what they needed for survival. Their ranks began to be swelled by runaways from ships. Dutch captains began to trade with them for the hides of cattle, and this increased the rate of slaughter even more. “Obviously such practices were very wasteful”;147 In time, from the point of view of settler populations, “this waste went too far.”148

In roughly 1640, Spanish authorities began trying to clear the islands and Central American coastal areas of these boucaniers.149 One way the Spanish did this was to kill the cattle themselves in order to discourage the cowboys. The English joined the game in order to discourage the Spanish. By now the cattle had virtually disappeared, at least from the islands, and the buccaneers in desperation took to the sea as pirates. The pirates would never have survived, however, had not the Dutch in Curaçao, the French in St. Dominigue (western Hispaniola), and especially the English in Jamaica “offered them secure outlets for their booty.”150 Jamaica was the key. It was under Cromwell that the island was seized from Spain and under the Restoration that it became so much the base of the buccaneers that one of their number, Henry Morgan, would rise to become Lieutenant-Governor and be knighted. Only with the Glorious Revolution did piracy die out completely. Cromwell’s aim was to break Spain’s monopoly of trade to the West Indies. He first tried diplomacy and failed, thereupon resorting to plunder. Strong writes: “Cromwell was Elizabethan. He belongs with Raleigh, Gilbert and Hakluyt. The whole aspect of the West Indian expedition is Elizabethan.”151 The policy was not only Cromwell’s, however, for the career of Jamaica as a “state piratical venture” continued unabated under Charles II.152 In theory, piracy was outlawed in the Anglo–Spanish Treaty of 1670, but in practice, it went on in great strength until at least 1685, and really until the earthquake that destroyed the great buccaneer redoubt of Port-Royal in 1692, finally being interred by the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697. In Jamaica there was a growing contradiction between the island’s role as a sugar colony and its role as a base for plunder and contraband; but even more there was a diminishing need in the core states for piracy as a way of primitive accumulation.

The pattern of contraband trade had been initiated by the Dutch in the last decade of the sixteenth century as a very practical matter. The wars with Spain cut off Dutch shipping to the Iberian peninsula and therefore interfered with the purchase of salt, so necessary for the herring industry. The Dutch turned to illicit purchase from the salt pans of Venezuela. This emergency procedure became permanent policy because of the basic structure of world prices. The United Provinces was a far more efficient agro-industrial producer than Spain. “The Seville monopoly could not supply sufficient goods [to Spanish America] at reasonable prices.”153 The Dutch could. Smuggling thereupon became a way of life that linked the merchants of the core countries to the producers of peripheral countries they did not directly control.154 Each time relations between Spain and a core power were bad, and most of all in times of war, new colonies were founded “destined, in part, to serve as privateering bases,” which, Pares observes, is a partial explanation of their chronology.155 It may also explain why there were eventually more English than French colonies, since France was frequently in alliance with Spain against England.

Jamaica represented the culmination of the system of contraband. It became the emporium of Caribbean contraband trade, which “the English would not stop . . . and the Spaniards could not.”156 At first the existence of pirates aided this process. They were, after all, not true pirates since they pillaged only the Spanish and often did it with the authorization of their own government.157 But sugar planting became more important on Jamaica, and when the Spanish in 1670 finally renounced their ancient claim to the exclusive right of settlement, the buccaneers came to be seen by the English as a nuisance, especially since their numbers were growing and their desperation increasing as poor whites were being forced off Jamaican land by expanding plantations.158 Buccaneers were no longer needed. The producers on the Gulf of Honduras were happy to deal directly with the Jamaican merchants, who had taken “much of the risk out of smuggling goods into Central America.”159

The buccaneers had plundered.¹⁶⁰ The English (and the French) were now ready to settle for illegitimate trade, since this involved the same transfer of surplus, but at the same time guaranteed continued production, which the plundering of the buccaneers did not. Once the bases of the buccaneers were closed down, “it was possible for Spanish planters again to begin flourishing in the islands and along the coastlands.”¹⁶¹ It was also possible for the English and French to negotiate directly with the Spanish for a “legitimate” trade in slaves, the so-called asiento.¹⁶²Contraband in Spanish America was only the smaller part of the picture. The bigger part was sugar, which had long been one of the basic products of peripheral countries. Sugar production had steadily moved westward because of a continuing process of soil exhaustion,¹⁶³ and it had reached Brazil (and to a lesser extent, Mexico) in the late sixteenth century. It was to move to the Caribbean islands in the seventeenth. Unlike wheat, cattle, and silver, sugar was not involved in the problem of oversupply in the world-economy around 1600 that caused a basic contraction in peripheral exports to core areas. Sugar was more like wood, the continuing “growth” crop of the Baltic. Its eternal problem was ecological exhaustion and the necessity to find virgin zones to exploit; but the profits were consequently high.¹⁶⁴

For sugar, absolute demand grew as the seventeenth century proceeded because of the creation of new food tastes in the core countries. In the Middle Ages, Europe’s desire for sweets had been satisfied largely by honey and must (unfermented grape juice), both naturally sweet. Now, new drinks had been discovered and new desserts invented that required the addition of sugar to make them palatable.¹⁶⁵ Sugar production had shifted in a big way from the Atlantic islands to Brazil in about 1580.¹⁶⁶ As the signs of secular downturn began to appear in Hispanic America, there seems to have been an upturn in Brazil. Chaunu explains that this “tardy turning point” occurred in Brazil around 1630/1650 rather in 1580 due to the fact that in the period from 1570 to 1620, Brazil, unlike Hispanic America, “was still benefiting from the easy growth of youth.”¹⁶⁷This seems to me factitious. Is it not easier to explain this expansion by the previously discussed relationship between the fairly rapid rate of ecological exhaustion and world demand and conclude that as a product of the world-economy, sugar was less subject to secular swings than were wheat and silver? The downturn of 1630/1650 that Chaunu sees would then be precisely the factor of reduced productivity intruding itself once again.¹⁶⁸

It is in any case the Dutch entrepreneurs who introduced sugar to Barbados at the very point when Dutch exports from Brazil were at their maximum and before the Pernambuco revolt of 1645 that was to lead to Dutch expulsion from Brazil. Why? Dunn offers two reasons for this: First, the craving of Europeans for sugar was presumably “great enough to warrant expanding the supply by adding Barbados to Brazil.” Second, the Dutch were able to profit from middleman services at a point when “English overseas trade was distracted by the civil war at home.”¹⁶⁹Perhaps; but perhaps also the Dutch were knowledgeable about the exhaustibility of sugar cane plantations.¹⁷⁰ The fact that the Dutch were seeking optimal conditions is clear in the very choice of Barbados over other islands. Generally speaking, Barbados had better climate and better soil than other Caribbean islands and a better physical location in terms of security from plunder.¹⁷¹ In fact, such considerations would apply to all the early sugar islands (of which Barbados was only primus inter pares), as Sheridan points out:¹⁷²

Small islands were initially favored over large islands in the establishment of plantations. From the standpoint of transport and defense, the distance from northern Europe was less, islands to windward were more easily defended than those to leeward, and the high ratio of coastline to land area enabled most plantations to have direct access to sea-going vessels.

And, Sheridan adds, there was more wind for windmills, a less enervating climate, and less possibility of slave insurrections and escape.

When sugar production reached Jamaica, a very large island, it stopped the process of territorial expansion, at least for England, because Jamaica provided substantial acreage and the English sugar interests feared that “any further cane fields would glut production and drive down prices.”¹⁷³ In this sense, the absence of further expansion was an expression of newly acquired mercantilist strength. The same is true with the French attitude after their acquisition of St. Domingue.¹⁷⁴ Expansion at Spanish expense was no longer necessary because the sugar acreage under English and French rule was quite sufficient for another century. But mutual destruction of each other’s property remained a major objective for England and France during the three Anglo–French wars in the Caribbean: 1666–1667, 1689–1697, and 1702–1713. If this mutual destruction died down after 1713, it was because world demand had by now expanded enough to accommodate the sugar industries of both countries, which were booming. “The sugar planters had discovered El Dorado after all.”¹⁷⁵

There is a sense in which tobacco was always the poor relative of sugar—an early starter and an early loser. It was an early starter because it was a beginner’s crop. It came up within a year and required little special equipment. But it had certain great disadvantages, at least in the period we are discussing. Tobacco “murdered the soil,”¹⁷⁶ even more than sugar did. It had to move on every 25 years or so, and hence it was only really feasible to grow it on large islands or in areas with expanding hinterlands like Virginia and Maryland.¹⁷⁷ In addition, tobacco had a smaller world market and a smaller profit margin than sugar. It “did not lend itself to bonanza agriculture, as did sugar . . . where fortunes could be made in a decade.”¹⁷⁸ Like sugar, it had been thought to have therapeutic properties; but sugar became a staple instead of a drug somewhere in the early seventeenth century, and tobacco did not seem to do this until a century later, perhaps even two centuries. Why this should have been so is not entirely clear, although there are two obvious facts: Sugar has nutritive value whereas tobacco does not, and expanding sugar consumption complemented the expanding consumption of coffee, tea, and cocoa.¹⁷⁹

Furthermore, since tobacco, unlike sugar, could be grown in nontropical climates, it represented an agricultural option for much of Europe. Cane sugar production was only possible on the Mediterranean islands, and it had “passed through” these areas already. Hence, despite the rapid soil exhaustion tobacco caused, world supply exceeded world demand more frequently in tobacco production than in sugar production. The tobacco situation was further complicated by the policies of most European governments, which seized upon this luxury item as one easy to tax, indeed to tax farm through state monopolies. This was not true everywhere to be sure. The United Provinces, as befit the world’s leading tobacco market, imposed no taxes,¹⁸⁰ and inland tobacco production flourished there, especially during the difficult years for cereals.¹⁸¹ In addition to regulating and taxing tobacco, most countries tried to prohibit national production. This was particularly true of England and France, the most probable motive being fiscal control. “It was easier to collect customs duties on tobacco imported into London or La Rochelle than [to collect] excises upon an article grown in Gloucestershire or Gascony.”¹⁸²

At first, state taxation hurt the tobacco industry of the Americas. Its main result was “to raise prices and restrict the markets,”¹⁸³ especially since the imposition of customs duties in turn fostered domestic European production and thereby worsened the “besetting economic problem” of Western Hemisphere production, the “costs of labor and transportation.”¹⁸⁴ However, by the early eighteenth century, a particular combination of factors turned the whole picture around. First, state suppression of European tobacco production had come to be relatively successful. Second, among Western Hemisphere producers, the English colonies in the Chesapeake Valley turned out to produce a superior crop at lower prices. Third, the English developed their reexport of various tropical goods (including tobacco) as one of their central economic activities. Hence the English came to regard tobacco primarily as a source of commercial revenue instead of as a source of fiscal revenue.¹⁸⁵ At the same time, France took precisely the opposite tack and turned tobacco duties into a “major branch of state revenues.”¹⁸⁶ After 1720, with government encouragement, France became the largest single purchaser of the Virginia and Maryland tobacco reexported from England, purchasing in one fell swoop a quarter of the total production and thereby accounting in large part for the boom (at long last) and for the increasing concentration of production and merchandising.¹⁸⁷

In the very last years of the seventeenth century, probably between 1693 and 1695, gold was “found” in Brazil.¹⁸⁸ This was the start of a gold export boom, and the official figures show an increase of from 725 kilograms in 1699 to 14,500 kilograms in 1712, the top year. Boxer estimates, however, that this was only one-tenth to one-third of the real export, the rest being contraband.¹⁸⁹ Why was Brazilian gold “discovered” just then? Vilar notes the coincidence of the onset of Brazil’s “gold cycle” and the monetary inflation in England resulting from the wars from 1689 to 1713; he suggests, most pertinently, that it is not the discoveries that account for England’s commercial expansion and inflation, but rather the other way round: the expansion, “requiring or favoring the exploitation of new mines, explains the onset of the ‘gold cycle’.”¹⁹⁰ Supporting this view is the fact that contraband trade was scarcely secret; rather, it was systematically organized to bring Brazil’s gold to England, virtually bypassing Portugal’s economy altogether.

In war and peace alike Brazil gold went to England on board Royal Naval vessels and by the weekly Falmouth–Lisbon packet boat service. Both warships and packet boats were immune from search by the Portuguese customs and all other officials. Naturally, the merchants at Lisbon, both British and foreign, preferred to remit their gold to England by this means, since the export of specie and bullion from Portugal had been strictly forbidden since the Middle Ages.¹⁹¹

The foregoing events indicate that the long contraction of 1600 to 1750 did not involve a simple involution of peripheral areas. What occurred was a relocation of some former peripheral activities (particularly cereals production and pasturage) from the periphery to the core (thus forcing production in eastern Europe and Hispanic America to reorient itself toward regional markets) plus the creation of a new peripheral region, partly directly colonized and producing only goods that could not be produced in core countries. This new peripheral region was the extended Caribbean, stretching from northeast Brazil to Maryland, and its three principal products were sugar, tobacco, and gold. The United Provinces, England, and France, the three core states, shared the economic benefits—the Dutch more so up to 1650, the English more so later on and especially after about 1690.

Let us look now to the process of class-formation in this new periphery, particularly to the forms the bourgeoisie and proletariat took. The bourgeoisie located in peripheral regions were primarily that classic duo of “merchants and planters.” In the seventeenth century, in the “old” peripheries of the east and extreme south of Europe (Sicily plus the southern parts of Italy, Spain, and Portugal) and of Hispanic America, involution prevailed, manufacture regained a role, and the market orientation became regional. Thus it seems clear that the importance of the merchant class declined as compared with the importance of the productive entrepreneurs, that is, the planters, using as a measure the percentage of total capital concentrated in the hands of a group or the rate of profit of their activities or their political influence (both local and worldwide). The elimination of much of the long-distance trade must have hurt the merchant groups severely, particularly in their bargaining power vis-à-vis landowning cash-crop producers. The whole system of international debt peonage (of planters to merchants) must have declined, as local debt peonage (peasants to landowners) expanded.¹⁹²

But what about the “new” periphery of the extended Caribbean? Is this not the locale par excellence of “merchant capitalism”? It is worth taking a careful look at what was happening, starting with the conclusion of Richard Pares’s detailed analysis of capital investment and flows between the British West Indies and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

Thus it was the planter who was paying, so to speak, for his own enslavement. The profits of the plantations were the source which fed the indebtedness charged upon the plantations themselves. In this sense Adam Smith was wrong: the wealth of the British West Indies did not all proceed from the mother country; after some initial loans in the earliest period which merely primed the pump, the wealth of the West Indies was created out of the profits of the West Indies themselves, and, with some assistance from the British tax-payer, much of it found a permanent home in Great Britain.¹⁹³

How did this system work? Let us be clear that what I am discussing is not how much the exploitation of labor in the Caribbean contributed to the accumulation of capital in England; the question is how the internal conflicts among the bourgeois strata affected the ways in which the surplus-value was distributed among them and eventually channelled from periphery to core.

The sugar “interest” shifted to England from the end of the seventeenth through the eighteenth century. Dunn, however, has skipped a step. Dunn notes that although the Caribbean sugar planter was “a large-scale entrepreneur” and a “combination farmer–manufacturer,”¹⁹⁴ by the end of the seventeenth century “absentee ownership was becoming a major problem.”¹⁹⁵ In the beginning, the usual pattern was that planters with small landholdings and limited capital started in a region to which they had emigrated. They obtained needed investment capital from merchants in European port cities such as London and Dieppe. Instead of obtaining an unencumbered loan, a merchant entered into a partnership with a small planter (a mateship, or matelotage in French). The planter was given passage money for himself and his indentured servants, plus money for tools and initial provisions. The merchant thus placed his capital and received his returns in kind. This system, as opposed to one of direct ownership in which the “planter” would be an “agent,” was of great advantage to the merchant, who “was partly protected against the unfaithfulness of agents—the chief risk in all colonial enterprise—by the partnership which gave the planter an honest interest in the prosperity of the business.”¹⁹⁶

Once the plantations had been launched in given islands, however, a process of concentration occurred because of the greater resilience of larger-scale producers in the face of acute world competition. As the plantations grew in scale, the planter’s importance vis-à-vis his merchant partner also grew. This can be seen in the conflict over the Navigation Acts. Mercantilist legislation protects manufacturers and merchant reexporters. It is seldom useful to peripheral primary producers. In the mid-seventeenth century, when British Caribbean sugar production was strong relative to that in other regions and English home consumption was relatively small, the small planters of the British West Indies tried their best to circumvent English merchants by selling to the Continent via merchants in North America, the Dutch and French West Indies, and even Ireland and Scotland. By the eighteenth century the routing was reversed. Sugar production expanded in other areas, the English home market prices rose because of protection, and English demand increased because of a rising standard of living and population growth. It was the planters in non-English areas who then sought to pass their goods via merchants in the British West Indies. This weakened the position of English planters and strengthened that of London merchants.¹⁹⁷

We must thus distinguish three phases. In the first phase, the Caribbean planter was small and weak vis-à-vis a relatively large merchant. As a result of concentration, the planters grew stronger and bigger and achieved local political power in the islands.¹⁹⁸ Even more important, the commission system developed; instead of the planter being the “agent” of the merchant, the merchant now became the “agent” of the planter. The commission system worked to eliminate the small island-based merchants (as opposed to the large English factors).¹⁹⁹ This had the secondary advantage of reducing clandestine trade between the islands. By 1707 the West India interest was strong enough to create a “forced” market in Scotland and, by means of the notorious Molasses Act of 1732, in Ireland and British North America.²⁰⁰ Through the direct relationship between planters in the Caribbean and merchants in England, the commission system eliminated the peripheral merchant middleman. It moved the location of the primary market for sugar from the Caribbean to Europe. Two factors created the conditions for the emergence of the commission system, which first appeared in connection with Barbados sugar production: the increasing strength of the planters through concentration and the pressure on them of falling prices since they needed a larger percentage of the profit to retain the same level of income.²⁰¹ The system spread to other islands, and by the 1690s, it was used in tobacco production as well.²⁰² It shifted the locus of entrepreneurial investment from merchant to planter. “The planter sent his produce home to Europe to be sold on commission by the merchant as his factor, and this same factor bought, once more on commission, the plantation stores at the planter’s order.”²⁰³ The commission system was not universal. It was used by English sugar planters but not by French planters. In the case of Virginia tobacco, the shift to this system was temporary, and in the 1730s planters reverted to the type of arrangements they had used earlier. We must answer three questions: Why did this system occur in English and not in French islands? Why did Virginia tobacco planters revert? How do we interpret the shift in terms of the locus of profit?

Speaking to the question of why the system was used by the English and not the French, Pares first notes Davies’s explanation that the commission system originated because large planters had to pay for their slaves. In London, factors could utilize bills of exchange to make these payments, being repaid through consignments in sugar. The commission system thus created credit for the large planter–entrepreneur. Pares says, however, that since large French planters also needed credit for slaves and did not create a commission system, an additional factor was at work—the fact that owner absenteeism started earlier and was more extensive in the English islands than it was in the French islands.²⁰⁴ But what does absenteeism signify? It came about because successful entrepreneurs were profiting from their good fortune, and it is evidence of the strength of their enterprise. Their role shifted from that of foreman to that of financial executive; and because of the scale of their accumulated capital, they could afford to specialize in the latter task (and incidentally to devote more personal time to consuming their profits). Absenteeism (and the resulting commission system) occurred in the English and not in the French islands, and more in connection with sugar than with tobacco, precisely because of the higher profitability of the English zones and of sugar.²⁰⁵

The question of why Virginia tobacco planters reverted is thus partially answered. Tobacco planters could not as easily be absentee entrepreneurs because of the emergence of the French monopsonistic buyer. French market purchasers sought large-scale suppliers, and Scottish firms on the west coast of Scotland offered themselves in this role. Although their sailing distance to French ports was no greater, they had the advantage (over other British merchants groups) of nearness to Virginia and lower labor costs (because of Glasgow’s semiperipheral status). Scottish firms, having a large market to supply, sent their agents to the Chesapeake Valley, bypassing the large planters who had commission agents in London and reaching the smaller interior farmer with credit that could be repaid in kind.²⁰⁶ Thus the balance of strength shifted back in this case to the buyer’s end of the exchange. Finally, to answer the question about the shift of the locus of entrepreneurial risk and profit, we must look at the meaning of debt. Since the fall of sugar prices was one of the precipitants of this shift, Pares suggests that “the position of entrepreneur was not a proud and profitable one which the planter had seized from the merchant, but a humble and unrewarding one into which the merchant had shoved him.” However, the role was clearly not a humble and unrewarding one, as Pares himself notes: “The absentee sugar planters were, with the East India Nabobs, the most conspicuous rich men of their time.”²⁰⁷

Let us put this fact together with a second one, the growing indebtedness of the English planter throughout the eighteenth century, increasingly to English merchants. Does this not represent a shift once again, now against the planter toward the merchant? Perhaps, but there is another way to interpret the financial arrangements. The usefulness of this structure of indebtedness to factors worked only while the sugar industry flourished. Clearly, however, absentee planters were beginning to live beyond their current income. “Nearly every great debt . . . started as a debt or account-current and ended as a mortgage. . . . In the end, . . . many West India estates proved to be worth less than the amount of their mortgages.”208 We know that sugar (and tobacco) exhaust themselves. After an initial stage of merchant-aided enterprise and a second stage of land concentration and planter domination of the realization of profit, was there not a third stage in which plantations, given their inevitable decline, were bled by absentee owners who failed to reproduce capital at the same level? To be sure, these owners shared these super profits with their factors; but such an arrangement is an instance not of the dominance of merchants in a preindustrial era, but of the form of profit in the period following that of maximum productivity and relative efficiency.209

We must now turn to the other half of this equation: the supply of labor that created increased efficiency of production. That sugar and slavery were “intimately linked”210 is virtually a truism. The fact is, however, that the first attempts to grow sugar and tobacco in the Caribbean were almost always based on using indentured labor, not slaves. It was only toward the end of the seventeenth century that slaves became the characteristic labor force of the islands, and only in the early eighteenth century can this be said to have become the case for the southern mainland colonies of North America.211 The degree of juridical difference between the two statuses is a matter of verbal jousting between scholars who emphasize that indentured service was temporary slavery, such as Ralph Davis,212 and those who remind us that it was only temporary slavery, such as K. G. Davies.213 The real issue is an economic one. What were the long-term cost advantages and disadvantages of each? It is easy to see why early Caribbean entrepreneurs would have preferred indentured labor to slaves. The first and probably determining reason was the much lower initial capital outlay. At the time, an indentured servant had to be advanced from about 5 to 10 pounds for passage, whereas an African slave cost 20 to 25.214 Even if the subsequent expenditure for food and clothing were less for a slave, and even if the outlay for the indentured laborer were amortized over a period of only three or four years, there was still the issue of initial capital liquidity.

Of course, there had to be a supply available. Who in fact came to the Western Hemisphere as indentured laborers (engagés)? Generally speaking, these persons were quite young, most often adolescents, children of wage laborers or poorer middle strata. To the extent that they were not pressed into service, what attracted them to the rigors of uncertain climes and certain hard work was the possibility of upward social mobility via a grant of land following their service. It is sometimes suggested that they were more skilled than African slaves; but this is doubtful, considering their age and experience. Indeed, one could make a case for the opposite position. It would take several years to train a worker to be efficient, and just when indentured laborers had “acquired some skill,”215 they would leave their employers. African slaves, on the other hand, would remain once they were trained. Is this not what is at issue when we say that the decision of Barbados to utilize slave labor is explained by the search for “a more settled, more dependable work force?”216

What was it that shifted the balance of factors from favoring the use of indentured labor? In the first place, “good unappropriated land,” on which the arrangement was based, gave out217 because of the combination of land turnover, due to soil exhaustion, and increasing land concentration. Slavery thus came to sugar plantations earlier than to tobacco plantations and came to the West Indies rather than to southern mainland North America.218 If an indentured laborer could not look forward to his reward, why would he suffer the brutal service on the plantation? When the decline in labor supply was matched by a simultaneous rise in demand, slavery was sure to be adopted. Even when it wasn’t “necessarily the cheapest or most efficient mode of operating sugar plantations, . . . it was the only one available when white servants could no longer be attracted.”219 It is no accident then that the substitution of slaves is regularly associated with boom periods.220 The reasons that slaves replaced European indentured servants as the labor force are relatively straightforward. But why Africans? Why not Indians as slaves? And why was the system of Indian (and mestizo) debt peonage not utilized in the extended Caribbean as it was in much of Hispanic America?

In fact, Indians were used as slaves in the beginning, but it is widely reported that they “died fast in captivity,”221 showing “an inability to adapt . . . to the living conditions of sugar mills.”222 They were also used at first as slaves in mines in Chile,223 but they were replaced after 1589 by African slaves, which Mellafe says was “one of the fundamental factors that permitted the survival of the [Spanish settlement] in Chile.”224 In areas where African slaves were used instead of Indian labor, either the Indian peoples had been primarily hunters and gatherers (as in the Lesser Antilles) or the agriculture had not yet developed clear class structures (such as the Arawak, or Taino, in the Greater Antilles). It was such peoples who were “inadapted” to disciplined labor and who “died out.”225 However, where redistributive modes of production had existed, the Indian populations stratified by class and lower strata were already producing a surplus that was appropriated hierarchically. They could therefore be pressed with relative success into continuing this in a modified form on behalf of European expropriators, especially if their previous overlords cooperated—hence the repartimiento, the mita, and the eventual evolution of debt peonage, especially in New Spain, Guatemala, and Peru.226

If African slaves replaced Indian labor only where Indians could not be successfully pressed into one version or another of coerced labor, then it must be that slavery was a pis aller; and the only possible explanation is that it cost less to use coerced cash-crop labor—whether in agriculture, mining, or industry—than to use slaves.227 How is it that labor that received “wages” for only part of their work, such as coerced cash-crop labor, cost less than labor that was only remunerated in kind, and not generously at that? If it were only the difference in initial outlay on the part of the employer, this might have been amortized over time; but it was also that the coerced cash-crop workers and their cousins produced part of their “wages” in the form of food crops on land outside the control of the employer, which were thereupon deducted from the labor costs of the employer. The total of the recurrent cost of labor was higher if one used slave labor than if one used coerced cash-crop labor.228

Thus it was that in the extended Caribbean, the new periphery of the period from 1600 to 1750, the basic form229 in which proletarian labor was organized was slavery rather than wage labor, tenantry, or coerced cash-crop labor. Slavery, given the political conditions of the epoch, was economically optimal for the bourgeois producers who shaped, via the legal system as well as the market, the basic relations of production in the region.

Semiperipheries at the Crossroads

One constant element in a capitalist world-economy is the hierarchical (and spatially distributed) division of labor. However, a second constant element is the shifting location of economic activity and consequently of particular geographic zones in the world-system. From the point of view of state-machineries, regular, but not continuous, alterations in the relative economic strength of localities, regions, and states can be viewed (and indeed most often are viewed) as a sort of upward or downward “mobility” of the state as an entity, a movement measured in relation to other states within the framework of the interstate system. In the twentieth century, one talks of the “development” of states. In the seventeenth century, one talked of the “wealth” of the kingdom, but the people of the seventeenth century often saw more clearly than we do today that the measurement was ordinal and not cardinal, at least within the constraints of the modern world-system. Alterations of status occur particularly in moments of overall downturn or stagnation; and for those in the middle of the hierarchical continuum, the semiperiphery, movement is primarily effected and affected by state action. Semiperipheral states are the ones that usually decline and ascend.

This sounds voluntaristic, and to some degree it is. Intelligent state policies have much to do with what happens. But two caveats must immediately be added. First, state policies are not prime movers but intervening processes. Secondly, not every state machinery can utilize any given set of policies with the same expectation of happy result. Indeed, quite the contrary. Many may try, but only a few succeed in significantly transforming the rank of their state in the world division of labor. This is because the very success of one eliminates opportunities and alternatives for others. In the seventeenth century, there were many semiperipheral areas which lost ground—Spain, Portugal, the old dorsal spine of Europe (from Flanders through the western and southern Germanies to northern Italy); but there were a few areas that gained ground: notably Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia, and the “northern” colonies of British North America (New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies). The former set underwent many of the same processes we have already described for peripheral areas, although for various reasons they retained important structural differences from these areas. The latter set had only just begun their struggle to become part of the core areas of the world-economy in this epoch. For these latter entities, it was an achievement even to start on this path, let alone to be able to turn the overall difficulties of the world-economy to their own profit rather than suffer still more distancing from core areas, as happened to most peripheral and semiperipheral areas.

In this regard, the “decline” of Spain was the most spectacular phenomenon of the seventeenth century—visible even to the men of the time. As we have previously seen, the causes lay deep in Spain’s economic and political structures, and the relative weakness was already there to a considerable extent in the sixteenth century.1 These weaknesses had been partially hidden by Spain’s military power and sheer wealth in bullion; but the economic reversals of the world-economy as a whole tore the covering from the Spanish facade and exposed the weaknesses to the Spanish themselves as well as to the world. If we wish a date, perhaps 1596, the time of the second bankruptcy of Philip II, will do as well as any. This bankruptcy “meant more than the end of northern Castile’s financial preeminence: it meant also the end of Philip II’s imperial dreams.”2 The traditional historiographic picture of seventeenth-century Spain was one of economic decadence. For Earl Hamilton, this picture was an exaggeration, but nonetheless, he adds, the seventeenth century represented “one of the lowest ebbs in the economic annals of Spain.”3 What do we know of agricultural production in Spain during this period? Not as much as we might.4 The seventeenth century became a period of “uncultivated and unirrigated fields [and] acute scarcity of livestock.”5 As of the first third of the seventeenth century, there was much contemporary discussion regarding the overuse of land, of annual planting instead of triennial rotation and the consequent exhaustion of the land. The coarser grains—millet, sorghum, and barley—as well as maize were substituted for wheat,6 which reminds us of developments in the peripheral areas. The expansion of wine production at the expense of cereals, as in southern France, was so widespread that people began bartering wine for wheat.7

Along with a shift in crops came a decline in the quantity of exports. In general, “as an exporter of raw materials, Spain’s performance [in the seventeenth century] was not impressive.”⁸ However, Spain in the sixteenth century had not been a peripheral country, restricted to the export of raw materials. It had been a center of manufactures, and the decline was even more striking in this sector. Spain declined most severely in the textile industry. Toledo, the center of Spanish silk and linen production, was virtually wiped out in the 20 years from 1600 to 1620.⁹ So were Segovia and Cuenca. It was not only the textile industry that declined but the metallurgical industries and shipbuilding as well. In all three of these “growth industries” of early modern Europe, Spain “lost her export markets, [and] also lost a large part of her domestic and colonial markets; she lost them to the English, the French, and the Dutch.”¹⁰ Thus, in this era of stagnation, Spain suffered not only the agricultural involution of peripheral areas but also deindustrialization. The consequences were twofold: on the one hand, there was increased polarization and regional conflict within Spain; on the other hand, Spain had to spend her colonial patrimony to survive.

Already in the sixteenth century, Spain had witnessed a widening gap between Castile and the other regions of Spain. “Everything conspired to give Castile an overwhelming, and increasing, predominance.”¹¹ The economic difficulties in general, plus the expenditures required by Spain’s heavy involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, led to a steady increase in taxation. To be sure, Castile bore the burden as well as the rest of Spain, perhaps even more so; but as Jaime Vicens Vives notes, Castile had “colossal compensations . . . : exploitation of the American continent; cultural and political primacy within the heart of Spain.”¹² Probably the gap was growing wider still. In any case, Catalonia and Portugal, the two principal regions that had maintained relative economic parity with Castile up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, felt the breadth of new economic pressures on behalf of Castile.¹³ Thus, when the government, in the person of Olivares, wanted more money, “it was quite logical for [the Catalans] to fortify themselves, distrustfully, behind the solid ramparts of Ferdinand’s autonomous legislation”¹⁴—and not only the Catalans. There had been antifiscal risings in Oporto in 1628 and in Santarém in 1629 and the “Salt Mutiny” in Basque country in 1632, the primary cause of which was new taxes—”the last drop of water which caused the patience of the people, already exhausted from other forms of exploitation, to overflow.”¹⁵ What was particular to Catalonia was not that popular resentments “burst suddenly and explosively to life,”¹⁶ but that this popular resentment combined with the “disenchantment of the bourgeoisie,” and the ambivalence of the “governing classes of Catalonia.”¹⁷ These combined sources of discontent were what made the Revolt of the Catalans so long and so threatening.¹⁸

It was precisely at this moment of reorientation of the European world-economy from an era of expansion and inflation to one of stagnation that Portugal became legally part of Spain—in the Iberian Union, or what the Portuguese would later call the Sixty Years’ Captivity. A dynastic gap in succession plus a military defeat of the Portuguese by the Moroccans in 1578 at Alcazar-el-Kebir permitted the King of Spain to enter Portugal with his army and become the King of Portugal in 1580. Opposition had been weak because the Union had some clear advantages to the Portuguese. One was the abolition of customs frontiers on the peninsula, giving Portugal duty-free access to Spanish wheat.¹⁹ A second was that the Union gave the Portuguese bourgeoisie access to the Spanish empire, which in 1580 “had reached its zenith and strongly appealed to the Portuguese initiatives, accustomed as they were to different cultures and odd methods of trading, eager to expand their markets everywhere, well aware of the immense possibilities such ties offered them.”²⁰ From the Spanish point of view, the Union had the economic advantage of allowing access to new financial networks at the moment of an increasingly greater financial squeeze on the Castilian state administration. Portuguese bankers were now able to enter the Castilian financial circuit—officially after 1606 but unofficially before that.

The Portuguese were favored by Olivares, who was seeking to solve the financial problems of the monarchy. Portuguese bankers were linked to the Amsterdam exchange and may have been using Dutch funds.²¹ (They were in fact almost all marranos, that is, Jewish conversos.)²² They were, furthermore, merchant-bankers,²³ and for them access to Spain was access as well to Hispanic America—Buenos Aires, Rio de la Plata, Terraferma, the Antilles.²⁴ In addition, the Portuguese could profit from their flourishing Brazilian sugar colony²⁵ with the protection of the Spanish flotillas.²⁶ Thus, partly through the advantages of the Union, the Portuguese protected themselves against the first chill winds of the seventeenth century; but it could not last. On the one side, the Spanish began to react against this Portuguese advantage,²⁷ which easily took the cover of anti-Jewish xenophobia.²⁸ On the other side, the Portuguese also came to be unhappy, since the Spanish were increasingly less able to offer them the protection they needed. The Dutch occupation of Brazil was attributed by the Portuguese in part to the continuing Dutch–Spanish conflict.²⁹ In any case, the Luso–Atlantic trade, which had in the period from 1600 to 1630 maintained itself far better than the Seville–Atlantic trade, began to turn down.³⁰ These difficulties in Brazil were compounded by the loss of the West African maritime gold trade to the English and Dutch as of 1638.³¹

The Portuguese rose up in 1640, at the same time as the Catalans but without the internal class divisions of the latter, which “made it easier for [the Portuguese bourgeoisie] to accept the transition from the Spanish connection to independence.”³² Portugal reclaimed its independence and started down the road to the English connection. It lost its trade empire in Asia to the Dutch in the beginning of the seventeenth century, says Boxer, because the latter “were vastly superior in actual and potential strength to the impoverished Kingdom of Portugal.”³³ As we have seen, it had found some compensation in union with Spain; however, the squeeze of the downturn of the European world-economy was eliminating even the compensation. For Braudel, “the big question is: was not Portugal for Spain the companion of good times, economically speaking?”³⁴ While Spain was thus tearing itself apart to little material profit, it was simultaneously suffering the beginning of the bleeding of the colonies. First of all, there was the great recession of American traffic with Spain, which Chaunu dates from 1622 to 1680.³⁵ Secondly, there was the development of contraband as a major facet of European-American exchanges, first by the Dutch,³⁶ then by the English and French.³⁷ Gradually, through the seventeenth century, it came to be the case that the direct relations of the core states with Hispanic America “supplied the largest part of the basic needs of the latter via the route of contraband.”³⁸

Thus over the seventeenth century Spain came to be at best a rather passive conveyor belt between the core countries and Spain’s colonies. Spain imported textiles and dried Newfoundland fish from core countries, consuming them at home and, when not bypassed entirely by the contraband trade, passing them on to the colonies. Spain paid partly in exports of raw materials from the peninsula, in dyes from the colonies and, above all, in American bullion—”the essential attraction of the trade with Old Spain.”³⁹ The constant wars—with the United Provinces, France, Catalonia, Portugal—in a time of financial squeeze led to successive inflationary coinages of vellÓn, especially acute after 1650. This resulted by the 1680s in “Castile’s total administrative and economic collapse.”⁴⁰ In such circumstances, the Spanish monarchy was scarcely in a position to resist the encroachments and depradations of the core powers in the Americas or of even the steady expansion of the sale of manufactures from northwest Europe in Spain itself.⁴¹ Rambert summarizes: “At the end of the seventeenth century, Spain occupied a special place in the world economy: it was a vast and virtually unexploited market upon which converged all the covetous European powers. . . . [Spain] lived in a narrow dependence [on the more advanced countries].”⁴²

Portugal faced, more or less, the same situation. From the perspective of English textiles in the Restoration period, both Portugal and Spain “opened up prospects of vast overseas markets, though English merchants could only trade with South America through intermediaries.”⁴³ In fact, the successive Anglo-Portuguese Treaties of 1642, 1654, and 1661 involved England even more heavily in Brazil than in Spanish America.⁴⁴ English insertion into Portuguese triangular trade (making it quadrangular) would make Portugal “more and more peripherical.”⁴⁵When the temporary economic uplift that began circa 1650 in Europe generally and in Portugal in particular came to an end in 1670,⁴⁶ Portugal made a valiant effort to extricate itself from this middleman, conveyor-belt position by adopting the universal remedy of the seventeenth century—mercantilism—the avowed policy of the Marquis of Fronteira and the Duke of Ericeira, Secretaries of State from 1675 to 1690. The Portuguese consciously thought of this as an imitation of Colbert’s policies. They imported French technicians to help them build industries that could compete with English and French industries⁴⁷ and created a merchant company for African slave trade to try to get Spanish business. At one point, they raised the nominal value of currency by 20%, hoping to attract bullion, especially from Spain.⁴⁸

It was also as a result of this crisis of the 1670s that Portugal renewed the search for bullion in Brazil,⁴⁹ although it would not be until 1693-1695 that a significant amount of gold was in fact discovered.⁵⁰ The crisis led in addition to a search for new export markets, and it was just at this time that a wide export market opened for madeira wine. The English discovered that “madeira was the best wine for keeping and for carrying to a hot climate.⁵¹ The English thought so well of it, in fact, that in the Navigation Act of 1663 wine imported from Madeira and the Azores was one of three exceptions to the requirement of staple, which stated that goods from Europe had to pass through England to get to British colonies in the Americas.⁵² The British West Indies and New England rapidly became the major market for these wines,⁵³ and the importance of wine growing steadily increased in Portugal.⁵⁴ Ericeira died in 1690, and by 1692, Portuguese mercantilism had collapsed. What had happened? Godinho gives three explanations:⁵⁵ first, the fact that the general commercial crisis in 1690, which raised the overall price of sugar and tobacco, and the advantage to the Portuguese of the temporary difficulties of the Dutch both came to an end; second, there was a constant rise in the sale of wines to the British Americas, reinforced by the fact that, as a result of the Anglo–French war, England prohibited the import of French wines and turned to Portuguese wines as a substitute;⁵⁶ third the Brazilian gold rush began.⁵⁷

Mercantilism had been adopted as a policy response to an acute commercial crisis;⁵⁸ but the indigenous antimercantilist forces were already too strongly entrenched, and it was impossible to prevent them from reasserting themselves politically the minute the climate was slightly favorable to their interests once again.⁵⁹ The Portuguese eased into the Treaties of Methuen in 1703 and 1713 which, in Godinho’s words, “essentially confirmed a defacto situation⁶⁰ already created in 1692 and deriving from all the developments of the seventeenth century. The famous treaties, the model for Ricardo’s theory of the blessings of the international division of labor, did not create English privileges, but recreated those enshrined in the treaties of 1642, 1654, and 1661.⁶¹ English cloth for Portuguese wine was to become the glorious symbol of Whig commercial policy.⁶²

If the period of mercantilism under Ericeira (1675 to 1690) was the brief moment of resistance by the Portuguese to their increasingly subordinate role in the world-economy in this epoch, the War of the Spanish Succession may be interpreted as a parallel, equally frustrated, attempt at resistance by the Spanish. The Spanish state had become so weak in the seventeenth century that, beginning with the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697, France, Austria, England, and the United Provinces dickered over the partition of the Spanish empire. By 1702 Spain had cast its lot with France against all the rest of Europe, including Portugal, who signed the Methuen Treaty the following year.⁶³ From the British point of view, the French had long had too large a share of the Spanish pie, and a Bourbon succession threatened to cut the British share further—not so much in the Americas, where the British already had outmaneuvered the French, but in Spain itself and in the Mediterranean generally.⁶⁴ The war as fought by France and Britain ranged far beyond Spain and represented an attempt to destroy each other’s trade networks, especially by privateering.⁶⁵ As Arsène Legrelle put it, “the history of the War of the Spanish Succession [was] not the internal history of Spain.⁶⁶ The French found out soon enough that the prime concern of their Spanish allies was not to promote the interests of France, but to get Spain out from under the economic constraints in which it found itself.⁶⁷

The revolt in Catalonia must be seen in this same light. Catalonia had undergone a slow recovery economically after 1670, largely because “the burden of taxation was lighter and . . . economic prostration had been less complete” than in Castile.⁶⁸ This moderate prosperity was based on a commercial intermediary role. A mercantilist and centralized Spain would not have served “this developing class who . . . dreamed of ‘free trade’ and of becoming another Holland.⁶⁹ In addition, “France, as a power, was the enemy,”⁷⁰ that had seized Catalonian territory in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. Hence the Catalan Movement—a movement of the ruling groups and not a popular revolt as in 1640—”offered itself to the Anglo–Austrian ‘allies’ to bring about the reconquest of the French-aligned Peninsula.”⁷¹ This time it was less a separatist movement from Spain than a movement that wished to preserve the Catalan bourgeoisie’s economic interests by preventing the coming to power within Spain of groups with a mercantilist outlook.⁷² And a mercantilist outlook was in this context a progressive, worldly outlook.⁷³ What was the outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession? Spain was forced to give up her territories outside the peninsula. Even more important, Spain had to sign the Asiento Treaty with England, giving England the right, formerly held by France, to bring slaves (a minimum of 4800 per year) to the Spanish Indies; two features not part of the previous French Asiento were an English settlement on Rio de la Plata and an annual English “permission ship” of 500 tons, which was allowed to carry a general trade in Hispanic America.⁷⁴ The multiple treaties that settled the war were “an incontestable victory for the coalition against Louis XIV,”⁷⁵ but in particular for England.⁷⁶

However, internally in Spain, the Catalans were abandoned by their allies, and Philip V could proceed to the centralization of Spain. Aragon and Catalonia lost their privileges and institutions with the Nueva Planta enunciated in 1716.⁷⁷ The furs of Valencia had already been revoked in 1707.⁷⁸ Only Navarre and the Basque country, which had remained loyal to Philip V, conserved their fueros, and were henceforth known as the Exempt Provinces.⁷⁹ In the context of the overall interstate settlement and the Asiento Treaty, this centralization of Spain could not accomplish the objectives that were intended.⁸⁰ By the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain was not permitted to alter duties to the disadvantage of Great Britain. Furthermore, the conversion ratio of silver duties into current money (vellÓn) was fixed at that prevailing at the end of the reign of Charles II in 1700. This “effectively precluded genuinely protective duties.”⁸¹

There is no doubt, as Romero de Solís emphasizes, that the triumph of the Bourbons in the War of the Spanish Succession “was the triumph of the middle classes and of the lower nobility against the Church and the seigniorial aristocracy.”⁸² Nor is there any doubt that Philip V would try “within the limits permitted by the Treaty of Utrecht” to end Spain’s semiperipheral role.⁸³ But is it true, as Kamen argues, that: “Shorn at Utrecht of the burden of Italy and the Netherlands, the country could devote itself to internal recuperation and external resurgence?”⁸⁴ No doubt the Bourbons tried. But, as Kamen himself argues, the credit for starting the attempt goes back to Charles II and 1680, the same time that Portugal was making its attempt. “Philip V entered a Spain substantially removed from the monetary chaos that had been its hallmark for nearly a century.”⁸⁵ It is clear that, whatever the vigor of Bourbon efforts, Spain would not substantially change its economic role in the eighteenth century; it would, in fact, during the renewed expansion of the world-economy after 1750, lose its American empire. Should one not compare what the Bourbons accomplished with what they might have accomplished if Utrecht had not ended with the Asiento Treaty and the crippling of Spain’s ability to pursue mercantilist tactics? Philip V may perhaps be credited with halting a still further decline in Spain’s world-economic role, at least for a time; but it can hardly be said that he reversed the trend. To the extent that Spain achieved any success in redeveloping an industrial base, it was at the expense of France, not England.⁸⁶

The key problem was the Asiento. There was immense profit for the English in the slave trade to be sure. In addition, the Asiento made it possible for this legal trade to “be used as a screen behind which to import forbidden commodities into the Spanish colonies.”⁸⁷ The extent of this illegal trade under the aegis of the South Sea Company became immense by the 1730s.⁸⁸ “Contraband trade was an integral part of every phase of the South Sea Company’s operations.”⁸⁹ It became a major cause of the War of Jenkin’s Ear in the 1740s.⁹⁰ The contraband trade operated primarily from Jamaica and from Barbados and Buenos Aires as well.⁹¹ It succeeded in significantly diminishing the traffic through Cádiz.⁹² What advantage the English did not get out of the direct English–Hispanic American trade,⁹³ they got through indirect trade via Cádiz, in which Spain ultimately used American bullion to cover their payments deficit with England.⁹⁴ Spain’s bullion loss was matched by a chronically and increasingly unbalanced state budget that resulted precisely from Bourbon centralization, which involved a threefold rise in Crown expenditure from 1701 to 1745.⁹⁵ French efforts to counter the British in Spain and worldwide gave Spain some small breathing space; but finally, at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, when France was “practically eliminated as a factor in the American colonial situation, Spain was left to face the English menace for the next two decades alone.”⁹⁶ In the long sweep from 1600 to 1750 or 1763, Spain proved itself unable to stem the tide of what has come to be known as Spanish “decadence.”

Alongside their flourishing licit and illicit trade with Spain and Hispanic America, England’s licit and illicit trade with Portugal and Brazil was even greater yet.⁹⁷ The effects of Methuen were immediate. In one decade, Portuguese imports from England more than doubled—but her exports went up only 40%. The treaty wiped out the “infant” textile industry.⁹⁸ This was paralleled by a fivefold increase in Portuguese wine production from 1670 to 1710, which “absorbed most of the available Portuguese capital, and even more important, an increasing amount of Portuguese labor.”⁹⁹ The advantages to England of Portuguese wine over French wine was that, although it was more expensive, it did not have to be paid for in bullion, as in France, because of the quantity of English textile exports to Portugal.¹⁰⁰ It may have cost the English customer more, but the bourgeois interests located in England were better off. The wine trade was not in fact very advantageous to Portugal. In addition to its negative impact on manufactures, the trade itself was “largely controlled by English interests which took most of the profits.¹⁰¹ It was thus not without reason that the Duc de Choiseul, France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, would say in 1760 that Portugal “must be regarded as an English colony.”¹⁰²

Still, there was far less wine exported, in terms of value, than textiles imported. The balance of trade deficit with England, negligible as late as 1700, grew to about one million pounds annually.¹⁰³ Fortunately for Portugal, she was still at least a semiperipheral country. She had her own colony, Brazil, and it was a wealthy one.¹⁰⁴ It was Brazilian gold that permitted Portugal to balance its trade with England from after 1710 until mid-century.¹⁰⁵ The Portuguese historian J. P. Oliveira Martins noted acerbically in 1908: “The gold of Brazil merely passed through Portugal and cast anchor in England to pay for flour and textiles with which England fed and clothed us. Our industry consisted of operas and devotions.”¹⁰⁶ England, on the other hand, got a very much needed infusion of bullion that allowed her money supply to be adequate for her growing share in the overall production and trade of the world-economy.¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, England thereby got a corner not only on the licit gold trade, but on the bullion-smuggling trade as well.¹⁰⁸ The English historian, Charles Boxer, finds in these arrangements one solace for Portugal: “One benefit which Portugal did derive from her overseas possessions was that, by virtue of them, and the resources she derived from them, she was able to escape the fate of Scotland and of Catalonia.”¹⁰⁹ From the vantage point of the twentieth century, Portugal might have been better off to have been poorer (by Brazil) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The story of Scotland and Catalonia is complex, and their later development of industry is beyond the bounds of this discussion, but it may not have hurt these two countries that they did not have a Brazil that permitted the unequal exchange with England, profitable to certain Portuguese groups, to occur without political upheaval at home. It was the Brazilian direct producer who paid the price, but there was then less internal pressure within Portugal to seek structural changes.

If the Iberian states, which in the sixteenth century were the glorious colonizers and controllers of bullion, were in the seventeenth century to decline so ignominiously into the role of mere conveyor belts of northwestern European manufactures, what of the areas that had been the great industrial centers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? The dorsal spine of Europe—northern Italy, the southern and western Germanies, and the southern (Spanish) Netherlands also declined, and dramatically, but in a different way. Having no colonies and therefore no bullion sources or indeed tropical raw materials with which to buy imported goods, they had only their own industry and agriculture on which to survive, and their long-cultivated commercial and financial expertise.

The key to their survival was the putting-out system (Verlagssystem). This system was basically defined by the following features. The actual producer worked in his domicile with his own equipment. He used his own tools. Either he was a master with a few apprentices, or he worked alone or in small family groups. He received the necessary raw materials for his transformational task from a merchant-entrepreneur (Verleger), who thereby received the right to “purchase” the transformed product at a fixed price and who took charge of transporting the product to a market. If the producer worked alone or in a small family group, he normally worked only part-time and combined this productive activity with some other economic role. Often the operation of the system resulted in the chronic indebtedness of the producer to the merchant-entrepreneur, which resembled the debt-bondage situation prevalent at the time in various kinds of agricultural production.

The putting-out system was already known in the Middle Ages, but it first spread significantly in the sixteenth century, primarily at that time in urban industry.¹¹⁰ This system has often been identified with the textile industry, but it was used in almost every kind of industrial production.¹¹¹ In the stagnation of the seventeenth century, the putting-out system spread even more than it had in the sixteenth, with one important modification. Everywhere in Europe the putting-out industries shifted location into the rural areas. The primary motive was to increase the profits of the merchant-entrepreneur. Braudel tells us: “Wherever [the putting-out system] was introduced, it struck a blow against the guilds.¹¹² As long as the production process remained in the towns, however, the guilds were in a political position to fight back within the putting-out system, especially in good years, by regulating through contracts the relationship between merchant-entrepreneur and artisan-producer.¹¹³

Once the industry was located in the rural areas, the merchant-entrepreneur escaped the guilds,¹¹⁴ replacing guild craftsmen with the peasantry who “constituted a much cheaper labor force.”¹¹⁵ A rural location also guaranteed the physical dispersal of the work force, minimizing the risk of worker organization while still concentrating distribution in a few big merchant-entrepreneurs.¹¹⁶ Kellenbenz stresses how important it is to realize that this system was in no way static,¹¹⁷ but responded to the evolution of the economic situation. One of the ways in which it evolved was toward an ever-spreading permanent dependence¹¹⁸ of the workers on their merchant-entrepreneurs. In semiperipheral countries especially, the putting-out system had a further feature that should be noted. It was often in the hands of foreign merchant-entrepreneurs. The Dutch, as befit the hegemonic power, were everywhere: in the North Sea and Baltic city-states; in Brandenburg, Scandinavia, Kurland, and Russia; in the Rhineland and northern Italy. But the English and the French were also installed in many of these areas. In the seventeenth century, old entrepreneurial groups like the Italians were playing a diminished but still significant role. And “minority” foreign groups also flourished: the Huguenots in the Germanies, North America, Switzerland, Holland, and England; the Jews everywhere; the Mennonites in a number of key German areas.¹¹⁹

The putting-out system marked the beginning of proletarianization in the same way that the venality of office and the use of mercenary troops marked the beginning of bureaucratization (that is, proletarianization) of state employment. Under putting-out, the direct producer formally owned the means of production but de facto became an employee of the merchant-entrepreneur, who controlled the producer’s real income and appropriated his surplus-value without being yet in a position to ensure his maximal efficiency by direct supervision at the workplace.¹²⁰ (By analogy, the situation was the same in the state bureaucracy.) That semiperipheral states had putting-out industries at all was what marked them off at this time from peripheral areas. The fact that the putting-out industries of the semiperipheral areas tended to be partly under the control of nonindigen-ous groups and so found it difficult to secure protectionist legislation was what marked them off from the industries of the core areas at this time. The putting-out system is what is described in Mendel’s popular phrase as protoindustrialization,¹²¹ although I do not think it useful to think of this industrialization as proto-, which implies it is not the real thing. The putting-out system was less efficient but in fact more exploitative of labor than a factory system,¹²² and hence it was ideal for an era of relative stagnation.

The old industries of the dorsal spine areas all underwent a decline in the seventeenth century. This was particularly dramatic in northern Italy, but substantially the case in the Germanies and in the southern Netherlands as well. Romano sees the situation in northern Italy in bleak terms. He sums it up as four trends: decline in urban (but not total) population; decline in industrial production in classic centers (Florence, Milan, Venice; and also Naples), especially in the cheaper textiles; decline in distributive trades; and decline of prices and money in circulation but fairly static wages (resulting in unemployment and therefore in an increase in the number of paupers and vagrants). Thus the urban economy is said by Romano to have been in “an extremely depressed state” between 1620 and 1740. In addition, Romano speaks of “the general involution of Italian agrarian economy.”¹²³ He sees Italy as unquestionably part of that majority in seveenth-century Europe who (unlike those in England, the United Provinces, and to some extent France) were living “under the sign of involution.”¹²⁴ For Romano, Italy therefore missed a “great historical opportunity for renewal,” just as it had in the fourteenth century, because it had a “whole ruling class ready to withstand” the crisis and “come through the long night” weakened but intact.¹²⁵ Procacci attacks the voluntarist assumptions of the concept of missed opportunity;¹²⁶ and Sella atacks the empirical description, arguing that it is overstated. Sella believes that by the end of the seventeenth century the northern Italian industrial scene was “far from barren” and that manufactured goods still had a “conspicuous place” in export trade.¹²⁷Furthermore, he argues, the countryside (at least in Lombardy) fared better still—the seventeenth-century story being one of “remarkable endurance, adaptation, and resilience” in the face of adversity.¹²⁸

We find a similar mixed evaluation in the literature on the western and southern Germanies. Already in the nineteenth century, Schmoller had emphasized the “unconditional dependence” of this area on Holland in the period from 1600 to 1750.¹²⁹ A 1770 source cited by Beutin notes that at that time Frankfurt was “nothing but a big entrepôt, dominated by the Dutch.”¹³⁰ Anderson speaks of a “thwarted Rhenish economy,”¹³¹the result of Dutch control of its outlets to the sea. Kuske sees an “era of passivity” in the Rhineland beginning at the end of the sixteenth century,¹³² and Liebel describes the “devastating effect” of seventeenth-century wars on the imperial towns of Swabia—Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremburg.¹³³ Kisch speaks rather of “the leavening influence of neighboring Dutch buoyancy,”¹³⁴ viewing this as an explanation of why the Rhineland “escaped the depression” that hit most regions in Germany in the seventeenth century.¹³⁵

When we turn to the southern Netherlands, we find the same debate. We have the classic view of Pirenne—economic decline resulting from the closing of the Scheldt and the inability to procure protectionist measures from either the Spaniards or the Austrians.¹³⁶ This is reinforced by Stols who argues that the Flemish were unable to profit vis-à-vis the Dutch even with their continued Spanish link in the seventeenth century because of Spanish suspicions about their possible pro-Dutch sentiments.¹³⁷ Brulez, on the other hand, insists that the situation in Antwerp in the seventeenth century was “less bad than we have believed up to now.”¹³⁸ Brulez explains this in terms of Antwerp’s continuing role as a Dispositionshandel, where decisions about European trade and commercial deals were made and Flemish merchants profited from their historically acquired business connections.¹³⁹

Let us look more closely, therefore, at what we know of the actual economic structures in these zones at this time. The decline of urbanindustry was indeed unmistakable in the northern Italian centers. Whether the breaking point should be taken at 1619 or 1636 is a matter of debate.¹⁴⁰ In any case, Milan wool production went from 60 to 70 enterprises producing 15,000 panni annually in 1619, to 15 producing 3,000 panni in 1640, to 5 in 1682, to 1 in 1709 producing 100 panni.¹⁴¹ Bulferetti attributes this decline to French mercantilism in the seventeenth century, which he sees as having “struck a vital blow” to both manufacturing and artisanal activity in Lom-bardy (and Tuscany as well); but he also blames the resistance of the workers to technological change.¹⁴² De Maddalena adds that the de facto incorporation of Milan into the Austrian empire in 1706 can be considered the definitive “widening of the secular downward tendency.”¹⁴³ Lombardy, having emerged from Spanish domination, was “reduced to extremities [stremata].¹⁴⁴ The same was true of the wool industry in Genoa,¹⁴⁵ and of the industrial sectors of Venice.¹⁴⁶ Liebel reports a similar decline of crafts in Württemberg, “the most bourgeois territory of the Holy Roman Empire” as of the Thirty Years’ War, especially in woolen and linen weaving.¹⁴⁷

As for the Swiss, they seem to have made a virtue out of necessity, and transformed their special link with France into a mechanism of semiperipheralization. The origins of this special link began in the sixteenth century with the Swiss role of supplying mercenaries, which Swiss authorities used to bargain exemptions from French tariff walls. The French market thus became “the principal stimulant of Swiss industry.”¹⁴⁸In spite of being fortified by this link, the Swiss, during the Thirty Years’ War, commenced their classic stance of neutrality, which enabled them “to oust France from the German market”¹⁴⁹ and use this as a basis of developing an export industry.¹⁵⁰ When France incorporated Franche-Comté in 1678, however, the dependence of the Swiss dairy industry on salt imported this region reinforced Switzerland’s political dependence on France.¹⁵¹ Accepting the combination of economic antimercantilism¹⁵² and political protection by France and parlaying their growing cottage industry in clockmaking and dairy products, Switzerland became by the end of the eighteenth century “the most industrialized land on the European continent.”¹⁵³

As the foregoing discussion indicates, it cannot be said that industry disappeared from the dorsal spine of Europe in the seventeenth century. What happened was that industry, especially wool and cotton textiles, moved into the countryside. This is reported to have been true everywhere: in Venice, Genoa, Aachen, Flanders, Zurich, and, in the late seventeenth century, even in Holland.¹⁵⁴ In each case, reduction of the high wage costs, resulting from the strength of urban guilds, is adduced as a key motive. On the other hand, the luxury silk industry continued to flourish in the cities, where silk mills became veritable factories.¹⁵⁵ A second urban luxury “industry” that expanded in this period was the production and export of art.¹⁵⁶ In the countryside, we find that simultaneously and in the same places there was a trend toward the worsening of peasant exploitation and the creation of putting-out industries. There was a usurpation of communal lands in northern Italy in the seventeenth century.¹⁵⁷Beltrami characterized noble property in the Terraferma as having “henceforth the character of true latifundia.”¹⁵⁸ The Venetian Senate in 1633 expressly forbade peasants to emigrate, even without their animals and tools of production. Borelli asks: “How can one not think . . . of the resurrection in more modern dress of the old institution of serfdom of the glebe?”¹⁵⁹

Throughout the seventeenth century, as the power of landowners over peasantry was strengthened in northern Italy (a result of “downward” semiperipheralization) and as the power of the state was strengthened in east Elbia (a result of “upward” semiperipheralization), the social structures of the two areas grew closer, so that by the early eighteenth century, Piedmont and Brandenburg-Prussia, the organizing units of the future Italian and German states, showed some remarkable similarities.¹⁶⁰ Similar developments seem to have occurred in the southern Netherlands (and Liège), where the power of the large landowners grew in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century and where many peasants lost a degree of independence by moving from the status of tenant to that of sharecropper.¹⁶¹ The literature on the southern and western Germanies often emphasizes the degree to which peasants retained control over the land;¹⁶² however, one should not overlook changes in rural structures in these areas that led German scholars to invent a new term, Wirtschaftsherrschaft, designating new structures somewhere between the traditional Grundherrschaft and the east Elbian Gutsherrschaft.¹⁶³ As noted earlier, Wirtschaftsherrschaft was a system prevalent in the more semiperipheral zones of central Europe.

The decline of a geographical area normally means that holders of capital in these areas begin to shift the location of their investments, so that collective geographical decline does not mean personal or family decline. There are two forms of capital transfer—transfer to a geographical zone with better economic prospects, which frequently takes the form of physical movement, and transfer in the same zone to units of production with a higher rate of return, often because of higher rates of exploitation. During the seventeenth-century stagnation, capital transfer within a zone took the form of investments in the land. Capitalists located in the dorsal spine engaged in both kinds of transfer at this time. Banking operations gradually moved from such centers as Genoa to Amsterdam,164 and industrial tradesmen emigrated—the Flemish to England, the Germans to Holland, The Venetians to Lyons, and so on. Rapp is quite right to insist that these industrial workers were not searching for higher pay since they were emigrating after all from the high-wage zones. This movement represented an “entrepreneurial exodus” of small capitalists who risked emigration in order “to gain enormous profits.”165

The transfer of capital from industry to land at this time has been studied most extensively for northern Italy, perhaps because it occurred most dramatically there. Bulferetti calls this a shift to “safe investments on the land”166 but this gives, I believe, a false image. Woolf reminds us that the evidence in Piedmont “points fairly conclusively to efficient methods of estate management”167 of both old and new landowners in this period. Sereni speaks of the “relative continuity” of agricultural improvements in Italian agriculture and indicates that from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, there was “a mercantile development of agriculture, which the economic depression [of the seventeenth century] was not great enough to interrupt.”168 Clearly capitalist agriculture in northern Italy was an intelligent place for an entrepreneur to place his money when the wool industry was doing badly. The greater self-sufficiency of the northern Italian food supply, aided and abetted by the “march of rice”169 planted in otherwise unused land, was part of the world overproduction of staple foods that led to the dramatic decline in eastern European grain exports in the seventeenth century.

Northern Italian capital found other ways to protect itself. One was the rise, particularly in Tuscan silk production, of the commenda (or commandite), a form of limited responsibility partnership, that da Silva says we should regard as “a form of centralization of capital.170 A second was the rise of tax-farming (appalti di gabelle), which was linked to state loans.171 The rise of state debts in northern Italy is seen by some to have served over the seventeenth and eighteenth century as an “incessant drainage of money out of productive activity.172 Perhaps, but into whose hands? Into the hands of the entrepreneurs who made the loans in the first place—collective decline, but individual capitalist survival (even flourishing).

Let us now turn to the noncore areas that found the long stagnation of the seventeenth century a moment of opportunity rather than of decline. Of these, Sweden clearly heads the list. Sweden was a minor state and was backward politically, economically, and culturally when Sigismund was dethroned in 1599 and Charles (later Charles IX) became Regent. Yet by 1697, and the accession of Charles XII, Sweden had become a great military power in Europe and, relatively speaking, an important industrial power. How had such a transformation come about? In the later Middle Ages, Stockholm was listed as a Hanseatic town, and in general, up to the sixteenth century, Sweden “occupied the position almost of a German colony.”173 Although this had begun to change during the reign of Gustav Vasa (1523–1560), as late as 1612 political demands were still being made to exclude Germans from municipal offices.174 The other side of this coin was, however, that the guilds never quite took root in Sweden. They were an “exotic growth imported from Germany,” and to the extent they did exist, they were restricted to Stockholm.175

Somewhere in the middle of the sixteenth century, the volume of trade began to increase. The German monopoly was broken and Dutch and Scots trades entered the picture. Foreign textile imports expanded.176 Swedish exports grew too, with particular emphasis on minerals.177 The process of peripheralization seemed to be occurring, and yet the outcome was different from the one in eastern Europe.178 It is well known that in Sweden the peasantry was juridically very strong. The term for Estate (stånd) first came into common Swedish usage during the reign of Erik XIV in the mid-sixteenth century,179 as did the term for parliament (riksdag). When after long negotiations the arrangements concerning these houses were finally fixed in 1617 by the riksdagsordning, Sweden emerged with the unique number of four, the fourth being the Peasantry, defined as those who owned their farms.180 I have previously explained this curiosity as being a result of the economic weakness of Swedish agriculture due to pedological and climatic reasons, which meant that the aristocracy saw relatively little profit in “(re)feudalizing” land relations in the sixteenth-century expansion of the European world-economy.181 As a result, the interests of the aristocracy were not as directly opposed to the state-building centralization of the Vasa dynasty as the great landowners of eastern Europe were to their rulers.182

When the first signs of economic downturn began to hit Europe in the seventeenth century, a strong personality like Gustavus Adolphus (1611–1632) was able to use the crisis to strengthen the Swedish state still further and launch an economic transformation. He mobilized Sweden’s resources to fight the Thirty Years’ War. He increased taxation and made taxes payable in coin. He instituted tax-farming. He squeezed money out of Prussia (the so-called Prussian licences, or tolls at ports). He created royal monopolies, which failed in the salt and grain trades and more or less succeeded in copper and iron. In short, as Michael Roberts sums it up:

The peripheral and primitive position which Sweden had occupied under Gustav Vasa . . . was now forever abandoned; with Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden’s economic interests became fully European, and his policy in economic matters conformed to the mercantilist patterns of the age.183

The secret in many ways was copper. “Copper was the poor man’s gold;184 and the poor man who needed copper most was that rich man, Spain, which had largely monopolized silver sources in the sixteenth century. The financial strains for Castile of trying to maintain Hapsburg domination in the Netherlands led the Duke of Lerma, who led Philip III’s government, to authorize in 1599 a vellon coinage of pure copper. Thus began the great Spanish inflation, born of the fact that “the temptation to make money out of money proved to be too strong for a perennially bankrupt Government.”185 The issuance of vellon started and stopped throughout the seventeenth century in continuing devaluations, until the inflation was finally halted in 1686.186

Though Spain was the main victim of copper-based devaluations and therefore the main stimulus to an augmented world demand for copper,187 it was not the only victim. There was the Kipper- und Wipperzeit in the Germanies from 1621 to 1623 and an extensive French copper coinage from 1607 to 1621.188 Sweden itself sent on a copper–silver standard in 1625.189 Furthermore, currency was not the only use to which copper was put at the time. It was needed for the kettles and brassware produced in Holland; and since the mid-fifteenth century, it had been used for bronze cannon founding. Bronze cannon, which gave way to iron cannon in the course of the seventeenth century, was at the height of its use in 1600.190 In the sixteenth century, the main sources for copper had been the Tyrol, Upper Hungary, and Thuringia. Whether these sources declined because of exhaustion or were effaced by Swedish output,191 Sweden rapidly became Europe’s leading producer, and copper mining became the key economic activity of Sweden.192

In this first great leap forward—starting in the time of Gustavus Adolphus and continuing under the administrative hand of Axel Oxenstierna during the reign of Queen Christina—the link to the Dutch was crucial. We can talk of Swedish economic development being largely (at least up to 1660) “under Dutch auspices,” as does de Vries;193 but this is a bit ambiguous. Treue expresses the phenomenon more carefully: “It was very meaningful in world-historical terms . . . that Sweden in the various years of its struggle for existence and of becoming a great power had the international merchants and entrepreneurs of Holland and Hamburg on its side.”194 It was Amsterdam (and also Hamburg) that bought Swedish copper, both for reexport as the basis of coinage and to supply the “considerable copper-working industry in the towns of the Netherlands.”195Under Gustavus Adolphus, we see the start of foreign investments (largely Dutch and Flemish) and a considerable direct foreign managerial involvement in the Swedish mining and metallurgical industries.196 Extensive Dutch loans, were made on the condition that “repayment was effective in copper.”197 The familiar pattern of international debt peonage was taking hold.

Gustavus Adolphus tried to eliminate this threat in 1619 by creating the Swedish Trading Company to control the marketing of Swedish copper.198 The king sought to combine the fiscal advantages of greater short-run income and structural change. The original charter granted a monopoly to the Company on condition that it establish brassworks and copper refineries in Sweden within three years. Foreign capital was to be welcomed in the company, and indeed it was successfully attracted. The Company tried to play off the Hamburg against the Amsterdam markets; but the world copper market suddenly fell, and by 1627 the Company was dissolved. Was this perhaps manipulated by Dutch capitalists? We do know that the Trip firm, a major investor in Swedish copper, also had links with the VOC (Dutch East India Company), which ordered copper from Japan in 1624. Trip purchased the whole of the VOC’s Japanese copper imports in 1626 and 1627. We also know that the Trips after 1627 granted new loans to the Swedes, again repayable in copper, and hence recreated the Amsterdam copper staple.199

The failure of this putative attempt to effect Swedish economic independence from the Dutch will not stretch our credibility if we remember Alderman Cockayne’s Project, a comparable English failure, that was roughly contemporaneous (1614–1617). We are, after all, discussing the era of Dutch hegemony. What is striking about the efforts of Gustavus Adolphus was not his inability to best Dutch entrepreneurs but the degree of his success in building Sweden’s military strength and industrial strength—and the two went together, for as Nordmann says, Sweden in the seventeenth century was “a nation in arms, living off war, and making [war] its national industry.”200 Gustavus Adolphus was the leading military innovator of his time. He took the organizational methods of Maurice of Nassau, improved them, and created a pattern for European armies that would last until the French Revolution. He emphasized training and discipline and made tactical reforms that restored to all the arms an emphasis on offensive action. Perhaps his most important innovation was that his army consisted of peasants in arms. “Its modernity,” says Nordmann, “lay in its being a national army and not an army of mercenaries.”201

Mercenaries, let us not forget, were the great advance of the sixteenth century. Gustavus Adolphus was not able to dispense with mercenaries altogether, but he reduced their role. He was able to build on the weakness of the feudal tradition in Sweden and on the fact that the heavily armed cavalry of the Middle Ages had never been adopted in Sweden, due partly to topographical considerations and partly to the strength of the peasantry, which was, in part, also a consequence of soil conditions.

Here, more than anywhere else in Europe, the primitive Germanic military tradition had persisted; and the invader who ventured into the Swedish forests was met by a levée en masse of the population, fighting mainly on foot, and grouped, if the country were open, in large irregular masses.202

The conscript army was based on provincial regiments, which preferred craftsmen and young peasants, and, unlike other armies of the time, rejected “scum.” Central clothing depots were created. The army was paid regularly in a decentralized system of assigning income from taxpaying households. Weapons and munitions were standardized and great emphasis was placed on artillery.

Gustavus Adolphus built up an arms industry so that Sweden became self-supporting.203 One crucial feature he added to his military organization was to shift a large part of the costs outside of Sweden. A famous instance is the role of the so-called Prussian licences in the financing of Sweden’s military role in the Thirty Years’ War. These licences were authorized by the Truce of Altmark, signed by Poland and Sweden in 1629. They permitted Sweden to lay tolls on ports in Brandenburg and Courland, and what was most valuable, on Gdańsk. The yield was large, equivalent to about 20% of Sweden’s recorded war costs. When these privileges ended in 1635, they were replaced in the Treaty of Stuhmsdorf with the right to secure tolls in Livonia.204 Essentially, Sweden was getting a cut of the surplus-value being transferred from eastern to northwestern Europe and using it to create a semiperipheral status for herself.

The army was a crucial tool for this rising semiperipheral state, but the payoff was to be in industrialization—and copper was not enough. Over the seventeenth century, copper gave way to iron as the pivot of Swedish mining and industrial production. For one thing, iron was replacing copper as a material in the world market—not only in artillery,205 but also in household ware.206 From Sweden’s vantage point, however, the difference between copper and iron was that she owned a disproportionate share of the available world copper ore at this time, whereas iron deposits were widespread in Europe. To compete as an iron producer, Sweden could not bank on having a near monopoly of ores and on techniques of protection alone. Yet compete it did, very effectively, by taking a piece of resource luck and transforming it into a socioeconomic advantage. The luck was that Swedish iron ore was “of unusually high purity,” which, given the technology of the time, made a great deal of difference and put Sweden in an “extremely strong marginal position.”207 Sweden’s “emphasis on quality” in production208 was the chief selling point of Swedish iron throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Swedish iron mining went back at least to the twelfth century. Even then, the fine quality of her malleable iron, osmund, was known throughout Europe.209 It was Gustav Vasa in the first half of the sixteenth century who first chafed when low-priced osmund was exported to Germany for hammering into high-priced bar iron. To end this resource outflow, he imported German technicians and established Swedish forges. Nonetheless, more osmund continued to be produced than bar iron. Osmund accounted for two-thirds of the production until between 1600 and 1650, when the ratio changed to equal amounts of each. A steel industry was launched. The shift from mining osmund to forging bar iron required a considerable amount of capital investment, much of which the king provided. This investment, in turn, required the expansion of mines and the concomitant colonization of remote areas that had large ore deposits, such as Varmland.210 By now, the Swedish iron industry was of sufficient importance to tempt Dutch entrepreneurs. In the 1580s, Willem van Wijck had acquired a lease of the royal mines in Uppland and an interest in the copper monopoly. Under Gustavus Adolphus, the state divested itself of direct management, and with the rise of the arms industry, foreign capital became even more interested. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutchman, Louis de Geer, played a central role.211While the actual control of the industry moved back and forth between the state and foreign entrepreneurs, the relationship was more one of symbiosis than of conflict.

Nordmann speaks of a take-off in iron production and a “first industrial revolution.”212 The state encouraged iron production and was the chief customer, using the products for its military equipment. The role of traditional small ironmakers was preserved—that is, to engage in iron mining and the making of pig iron—while foreign entrepreneurs with large ironworks were “given a monopoly of refining processes plus guaranteed access to cheap raw materials and semimanufactures.”213 In these large ironworks, the labor power was largely made up of persons recruited from Sweden’s peripheral zones—Finns, and peasants from Swedish regions where there was grain deficiency—as well as of persons seeking exemption from military service and fugitives from justice. In short, the foreign entrepreneurs were supplied with cheap labor.214 The role reserved for small ironmakers did not constitute the preservation of space for Swedish entrepreneurs, but quite the opposite, the reduction of these ironmakers to semiproletarian status through a Verlagssystem, by which they were indebted to foreign merchants. The Swedish iron story paralleled the general European story in textiles:

Foreign importers made advances to the exporting merchants in Stockholm and Göteborg, who in turn gave credit to the ironmasters who, as the last link in the chain, made advances to the workers. . . . All parties were bound to their creditors. . . . The workers generally drew their credits in the form of commodities from the master’s store. That could hardly be avoided as the works usually were situated in isolated places in the country.215

It may be wondered whether the picture of copper and iron production that has been drawn is one to boast about, for foreign domination seems to be the leitmotiv. Two things must be borne in mind however. First, for Sweden, unlike let us say for Poland, the seventeenth century was a time of the development of new export industries. This was in addition to the export of tar and other naval stores, which would be more comparable to Polish grain and wood exports.216 Second, Sweden could eventually “nationalize” the industries by ennobling the entrepreneurs.217 The crucial element was the conscious use of the state machinery. In effect the Swedish state had three near monopolies in the European world-economy of the seventeenth century—copper, high quality iron, and tar. Linking itself at first to the hegemonic power, and later profiting from and maneuvering between rival core states, the Swedish state machinery pursued a mercantilist policy comparable to that of England and France at the time.218 Sweden was in a sense the OPEC of its day. It used the three quasimonopolies to create a strong bargaining position, “without which the political–military expansion would have been unattainable.”219 The political–military expansion in turn made it possible to develop the transformation industries.

Gustavus Adolphus laid the base for Swedish military power, and allowed his successors to reign over what Anderson calls the “Hammer of the East,”220 at least until Sweden reached the limits of its power by its recognition in 1721 of nonvictory in the Great Northern War. As long as the Dutch remained a hegemonic power, Sweden did well.221 Sweden acquired Scania from Denmark by the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658. Not only was Scania the “key to the Baltic,” by virtue of having command of the Sound (Öresund), but a century later it turned out to be Sweden’s breadbasket.222 By mid-century, Sweden had acquired Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, and Kexholm, turning this eastern Baltic area into “colonies of the Swedish–Finnish motherland”;223 it also acquired Bremen-Verden, Pommern, Halland, and Jämtland farther west. In short, by the 1650s, the only way to describe Sweden’s Baltic policy was that it was one of “conscious economic imperialism.”224 Side by side with the politico-commercial expansion went the rise in size and importance of Swedish merchant shipping225 and naval fleets226 in the Baltic.

The creation of a relatively strong and efficacious Swedish state-machinery depended on curbing the power of the nobility. This was possible because of Sweden’s class structure at the time and because of her roles in the world division of labor and the interstate system. The policy of avsöndring (severance) of Crown properties and revenues to the nobility, which had begun in the sixteenth century, accelerated in the first half of the seventeenth century. This policy “encompasse[d] a rather wide range of historical phenomena in terms of state finance.”227 It included the process of tax-farming, started by Gustavus Adolphus, as well as the alienation of Crown land and of the revenue of freehold land to nobility by sale and donation in return for civil or military service.228 These were means of obtaining rapidly liquid resources for the Crown, as well as of enlarging the monetized area of the Swedish economy; but the advantages for the Crown were bought at the price of increasing politico-economic power for the upper nobility. The new power was codified in the ridderhusordningen (Nobility Matriculation Law) of 1626 (reconfirmed in 1644), which limited the right to vote in the Estate of the Nobility (created in the riksdagsordning of 1617) to 126 matriculated noble families, thus excluding the poor petty nobility (knapar). This “high nobility were by Swedish standards extremely wealthy, and were probably growing wealthier—both absolutely, and relatively to the crown.”229

The peasantry was strong too, however, and it had also been organized as an Estate in the riksdagsordning of 1617. There were in fact three kinds of peasants: kronobönder, or peasants on Crown lands; frälsebönder, or peasants on noble lands; and skattebönder, or taxpaying, that is, freehold, peasants. The freehold peasants paid in taxes approximately what the Crown–peasants paid in rent, but they of course had a more secure legal position. The frälsebönder were exempt from state taxation and paid to the noble only about half of what the other two types paid, but their position was highly insecure. They could be evicted easily, were subject to the lord’s juridical authority, and had to do about 30 days service a year for the noble.230 Furthermore, when the Estate of the Peasantry was established, the frälsebönder were excluded from membership.231 In general, although there seemed to be little overall difference in the economic rewards of the three kinds of peasant status, it was generally felt that the insecurity of tenure of the frälsebönder was “a considerable disadvantage.”232 The avsöndring had the effect of making some former Crown–peasants into frälsebönder; and de facto, if not de jure, this was also happening to many freeholders.233 The figures are dramatic. By 1654 land controlled by the nobility had risen from 21.4% to 63%.234 The peasants reacted. By 1634 the Estate of the Peasantry, fearing that the peasantry was on the road to servitus, was “clamouring for a curtailment of noble privileges.” A peasant spokesman in 1650 said: “They know that in other lands the commonalty are slaves; they fear the like fate for themselves, who are nevertheless born a free people.”235

The problem with the sale of tax income to raise revenue is that it solves one year’s budgetary crisis at the cost of exacerbating budget crises of future years. We must bear in mind that while Sweden’s mercantilist efforts involved heavy military expenditures for constant expansion,236she was a country poor in natural resources (which were being used up) and small in population (which was about a million Swedes and a half-million Finns and others in the mid-seventeenth century). This led to a “condition of strain” on state finances, which prevailed throughout the seventeenth century.237 The need to finance the Polish War in 1655 precipitated the first so-called reduktion, or return of land from the control of the nobles to the crown.238 The reduktion of 1655 was relatively minor. Former crown lands in so-called inalienable areas were taken back, and exactly one-quarter of other lands “donated” since 1632 were handed back (fjärdepartsräfsten). Any land given away in allodial tenure since 1604 in defiance of the decisions of the Diet of Norrköpping that donations could only be made on “feudal” terms were to be redesignated as being held on such “feudal” terms. Although the 1655 reduktion was neither massive in scope nor vigorously enforced,239 it was nonetheless a start; and combined with the demographic growth of the nobility, it put a squeeze on them that pushed them to seek a larger proportion of income through government office.240

We have already mentioned the role of the Prussian licences in the search for revenue sources. They came to an end in 1635, and they were replaced between 1637 and 1679 by French subsidies. These subsidies were so important that Aström calls Sweden in this period “virtually a French satellite” and Swedish armies a “direct instrument of French foreign policy in central and eastern Europe.” The sums involved in French subsidies were less than those involved in the Prussian licences, however; no doubt, as Åström observes, “the mulcting of the Baltic trade was to be preferred to dependence on French subsidies,”241 but they were better than nothing. Of course the French, whose Baltic trade was minimal,242 were quite willing to build Sweden up as a potential commercial rival to the Dutch and English. This dependence on French subsidies also served the interests of the high aristocracy, who sustained their “expensive aristocratic style of living” by use of revenue from the subsidies plus revenues from the hypothecation or sale of royal lands. In effect, the high aristocracy bought the royal lands and then spent the revenue on themselves in their capacity as members of the council of state during the de jure and de facto regencies of the middle and late seventeenth centuries—more than half the period between the death of Gustavus Adolphus in 1632 and the effective assumption of power by Charles XI in the late 1670s.243

The “great” reduktion came in 1680, and it does not seem difficult to explain it in economic terms. Growing state expenditures in a time of overall stagnation,244 increasing diversion of state revenue to the nobility,245 and the ending of the French subsidies246 combined to produce a financial crisis for the Crown, which was resolved by a political decision, made possible by the fact that the Crown had far more allies than the high aristocracy. The decision was two successive acts of reduktion. In 1680 the Diet resolved to return the so-called Norrköpping-resolution estates, which were held on “feudal” terms from the Crown, (except for those worth less than 600 silver daler, which thus exempted the property of the lesser nobility). In 1682 the Diet further agreed that the medieval Land Law gave the king not only the power to create fiefs but to revoke them; this in effect gave the king carte blanche to proceed on reduktions as he wished.247 There seems little doubt that much land was in fact transferred to the Crown and that the Crown emerged richer and with gains that were the nobility’s loss.248 Furthermore, much of this land was later sold by Charles XII to civil servants, to bourgeois, to nobility—but under terms such that it became taxable land.249

On the other hand, one should not exaggerate the decline of the nobility. For in the period prior to the reduktion, in addition to the steady rise in the percentage of noble-owned (frälse) land at the expense of both crown land and freeholds, a second shift had been occurring. Within the category of frälse land, there was a subcategory of ypperligt (or supremely) frälse land, which referred to the manorial home farm, the säteri, and its immediate surroundings as opposed to strögods, or scattered lands, farmed by frälsebönder. Although the latter lands had some minor obligations to the Crown, the former had none whatsoever. In the century prior to the reduktion, ypperligt frälse land had been growing as a percentage of frälse land; that is, there had been increasing concentration of noble land.250 When the reduktion occurred, the nobles had the right to choose which lands to return. In general, they chose the strögods and retained the manors, thus increasing still further the concentration of their land at the expense of the frälsebönder.251

The state nonetheless secured more from the reduktion than increased income in general. Specifically, it achieved a more secure basis for financing the army through the revision in 1682 of the system of payment known as indelningsverket (allotment system). The farms of the whole country were now divided into groups of from three to four farms (rote), out of whose revenues the soldiers would be paid and on whose area they would be quartered in cottages (soldattorp). The officers were settled on land confiscated from the nobility in the reduktion. Bigger farms (rusthåll) had to maintain a cavalryman; farms on the coast had to support seamen (båtsmän). A system of “substitution” for conscription meant that the soldiers, cavalrymen, and sailors were no longer recruited from the class of peasant landowners but rather from among unpropertied rural laborers “accustomed from childhood to obey their temporal and spiritual superiors”; and the officers were now “paid servants of the crown, with no other profession than the army.”252 This more rational system was made possible by the reduktion; before this the Crown did not have sufficient farms to form the basis of such a system.253

In terms of the degree to which the state–machinery was consistently strengthened over the seventeenth century, the Swedish state stands out among noncore areas. It created an army to be feared. It contained the rapacity of the landowning classes and channeled them into state service.254 It built up an iron industry of some importance and a respectable merchant fleet. It prevented England from succeeding, at least immediately, to all the prerogatives of a declining United Provinces in the Baltic.255 Compared to Spain and Portugal, not to speak of Poland and Hungary, the Swedish state was strong—in many ways almost as strong as the French state although still far weaker than the English state or that of the United Provinces. In fact, from the point of view of the latter two, it was Sweden and France who were the two great expansionist military states of the seventeenth century. Yet just when the strength of Sweden seemed to reach its apex under Charles XII, it was revealed as “a colossus on feet of clay.”256

Sweden had a quite small population by European standards and hence basically a small financial base for its state machinery. As Lundkvist puts it, the resources of the Swedish empire “were inadequate to sustain its position in the long run.”257 Economically, Sweden rose to the position to which Spain and Portugal declined—that of a middleman between the periphery and the core. She profited not merely from her strategic location in the Baltic but from the increased weakness of the peripheral zones of eastern Europe in the seventeenth century. Marian Małowist, looking at it from the perspective of a Pole, saw Sweden as a parasite:

In the seventeenth century, Sweden profited from industrial weakness of her neighbors and also from the weakness of their governments, a consequence of the enormous growth in the power of the nobility. In fine, Sweden was something of a parasite living on the weakness of her neighbours, and it was largely due to this weakness that, for a hundred years, she would become the most powerful country in the Baltic region. But she, in turn, had to give way to Russia.258

To Russia, and be it added, to Prussia.

In 1696–1697, before the onset of the Great Northern War, Finland had been decimated by famine and lost perhaps a third of its population. Nonetheless, the state was not strong enough to prevent the burghers of Scania from exporting grain to outside the kingdom.259 Furthermore, Sweden’s role as middleman was for the first time attacked not only by the core powers, but by Russia—the other end of the commodity chains. England, the United Provinces, and Sweden had limited success, at best, in their attempts throughout the seventeenth century260 to incorporate Russia into the world-economy. In 1695 Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) assumed the reins of power in Russia and started on his great campaign of reform and “Westernization,” which included his visit (“great embassy”) to western Europe (where he concentrated on learning shipbuilding), his foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703 (to be Russia’s Baltic port), and his challenge to Sweden. From the point of view of the world-system as a whole, Peter’s efforts may be seen as an attempt to participate fully in the world-economy—but as a semiperipheral rather than a peripheral area (which Poland had become). To do this, it was essential, though clearly not sufficient, to break Sweden’s intermediary role. Sweden saw this as clearly as did Peter: “Sweden’s conquests along the eastern Baltic were, with good reason, regarded as the bastions of her great-power position, to be defended at all costs.”261

The Great Northern War started in 1700 with an attack on Livonia by the Polish–Saxon King, Augustus II. Peter joined the war. Seeking to use the occasion to break the Russians, Sweden resisted attempts to end the war,262 but she was nowhere near strong enough to break Russia militarily. Peter employed the scorched-earth retreat policy, which was destined to become Russia’s classic defense against invasion; eventually, logistics plus the onset of winter led to disaster for the Swedes at Poltava in the Ukraine in 1709.263 Charles XII’s political imperialism, says Nordmann, “upset the equilibrium” established by Charles XI.264 What equilibrium? The excessive internal costs of Charles XII’s imperial drive were not acceptable to the Swedish people; it was the same equilibrium Charles V had upset in Castile in an earlier century. The indelningsverk system had created an “indissoluble tie between the source of revenue and the item of expenditure,265 and while this balanced the state budget more or less, it was difficult to sustain the system in a long war, especially without foreign subsidies and recruits. In the Great Northern War, the army of 80,000 “had mostly to be raised from the heart of the empire”; and once the Russians had really mobilized for war, “Sweden had no choice but to give up the game.”266

Does it make sense to debate whether continuing the war was bad judgment on Charles XII’s part? whether it was hybris that brought disaster? Scarcely, since Sweden had little choice.267 In a sense, her bluff was her strength; but once her bluff had been called, her position was “revolutionized.”268 In 1721, Sweden lost Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, Karelia—most of the eastern Baltic—to Russia. She also ceded parts of her possessions in Germany to Prussia. Sweden thus lost land, population, state revenue, control over her “breadbasket”269—and most of all, her monopolistic position in the Baltic.270 Since the strength of the Swedish colossus was based on her being a quasi-monopoly, this “German–Slav push” succeeded in turning Sweden into a second-rank power.271 The internal consequences for Sweden were dramatic. On the surface, it seemed that absolutism had given way to parliamentary freedom. The period from 1718 to 1772272 is known in Sweden as Frihetstiden, the Age of Liberty. The essential compromise of 1680–1682 had consisted of a strong central government and the politico-economic merger of old aristocracies, newer nobilities, and bourgeois, and this compromise was consummated and fulfilled by the Age of Liberty in the same way that the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 and the Age of Walpole in England consummated and fulfilled the English Revolution. The only difference was that in the eighteenth century, England was on the way to becoming a world hegemonic power, whereas Sweden was beset by the dilemmas of her failure to make it as a strong semiperipheral state with pretensions to eventual core status. Hence England enjoyed stability under what was de facto a one-party regime, and Sweden publicly displayed an intrabourgeois quarrel of the finest two-party variety.

During the first years of the Age of Liberty, Sweden’s key problem was state bankruptcy. Count Arvid Horn led a government that concentrated on peace273 and “moderate mercantilism.”274 In 1738 a strong mercantilist party known as the Hats emerged and overthrew Horn, but in essence they continued the same policies.275 The Hats remained in power until 1765, being replaced in the moment of British world triumph by their opponents, the Caps. The policies of Hats were pro-French, mercantilist, and inflationary; they represented the large exporting, ironmaking, and textile manufacturing interests, and their slogan was Svensker man i svensk dräkt (Swedish men in Swedish clothing). The policies of Caps were pro-English, free trade, and deflationary; they represented the importing sector and the smaller merchants and industrialists, and they presented themselves as the radical party of the socially underprivileged.276 But did real choices lie behind this game of what Anderson calls “corrupt aristocratic parliamentarianism”?277 Probably no more than in Bourbon Spain. The Great Northern War was for Sweden what the War of the Spanish Succession was for Spain: an attempt to break out of the structural constraints the world-economy had imposed on her. Neither effort succeeded, but each may have prevented worse things from happening.

As long as it was not entirely clear who would win the competition between England and France, that is, up to 1763, Sweden (like Spain) could still utilize her margin of maneuver and reach for a greater role than she could grasp.278 Sweden’s moment of reckoning came later, in the period between 1763 and 1815, when England called in its chips, due to the last-stage resistance of France. Sweden was as strong a state as her economy would permit. That the strength of the state machinery had little to do with the formal powers of the king can be seen by comparing Sweden to Denmark, which was absolutist earlier and longer than Sweden but nonetheless far weaker, reflecting Denmark’s peripheral economic role as compared with the semiperipheral role Sweden’s policies enabled her to assume. Denmark is often thought of as a “unique constellation,”279 not fitting into any general model of the division of labor of early modern Europe. We indicated in chapter IV that we considered Denmark a part of the periphery, which was primarily oriented to the export of low-wage commodities, in Denmark’s case, grain and cattle exports. Unlike most other peripheral areas in the seventeenth century, however, Denmark instituted an absolutist monarchy in 1660. What we must explain is why this political change was not sufficient to catapult Denmark into the category of semiperipheral countries like Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia, and also why the change occurred at all.

How did the economic structures in Denmark compare to those in eastern Europe on the one hand and Sweden on the other? Petersen emphasizes the advantages Denmark had over eastern European countries because it exported both grain and cattle, which meant it had greater flexibility in difficult times.280 This may explain in part why Denmark was less affected than eastern European countries by the first phase of European regression (1600–1650); indeed the 1630s and early 1640s were an “Indian summer” for Danish profits on the world market.281 The extreme closure plus the tax exemption of the Danish nobility enabled them to increase land concentration steadily in this period.282 The king, however, was a very large landowner283 himself, and this plus his ability to increase Sound dues during the Thirty Years’ War assured him of a considerable state income.284 Sweden’s economic system was different in that agriculture was not the main source of income and its production and export items were primarily minerals, which, as we have seen, were the basis of Sweden’s industrial growth. Furthermore, the ecological weakness of agriculture in Sweden reinforced the social strength of the peasantry and prevented the growth of anything resembling a Gutswirtschaft.

Denmark was the opposite extreme in terms of the social structure of the countryside. The organization of Danish agriculture involved large demesnes surrounded by peasant farms that owed the demesne owner not rent but labor services. The groups owing such services, the ugedagsbønder, or weekday farmers, were expanding in number, accounting for 40% of all bønder by the mid-seventeenth century: “Boon work [corvée] was used not only in the fields but for cartage, building, handicraft labor, and even for loading and discharging in port.”285 During this same period, the role of Danish merchants was diminishing radically. German and Dutch merchants were ousting Danes from the export trade, especially during the “Indian summer” from 1630 to 1645.286 In the Peace of Christianopel in 1645, the Swedes (in concert with the Dutch) forced a reduction in Sound dues so that Crown revenues became “an inconsiderable remnant”287 of their former size. Thus when the good times of the Thirty Years’ War came to an end,288 Denmark was the very model of a peripheral area: it had export-oriented demesne farming with widespread corvée; its commerce was in the hands of foreigners; its state-machinery had a weak financial base (the wealthiest land being tax-exempt; and the Sound dues were no longer significant).

The Danish crown made an attempt to recover its lost strategic–economic advantage by declaring war on Sweden in 1657, when Sweden was already engaged in other wars. It hoped for aid from the Netherlands, which it did not get. The Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, which brought the war with Sweden to an end, precipitated Denmark’s political crisis. Denmark had to cede to Sweden the provinces of Scania, Halland, and Bohuslän—that is, the whole right bank of the Sound itself and the approaches on each side of the Sound.289 However, later that year, when Charles X of Sweden renewed the war and tried to incorporate all of Denmark into Sweden, he was rapidly faced by the opposition of the Dutch, the English, and the French, who joined together in the so-called Concert of the Hague (May 11, 1659), in which the three core powers dictated peace to the combatants and vetoed “the sealing of the Baltic against the fleets of non-riparian States.290 Denmark was saved from extinction because the core powers wanted to check Sweden. The core powers were thus interested in ensuring that Denmark had the tax base to maintain an army strong enough to play this geopolitical role which was obviously not the case in 1657–1660.

Furthermore, Denmark’s state debt was considerable. It was over four million rigsdaler in 1660, of which 38% was owed to foreign interests, a quarter of this to the States–General of the Netherlands, another quarter to Dutch houses, and the remainder to merchant houses in Hamburg and Lübeck. The Dutch state and foreign private creditors thus had considerable direct and immediate interest in the ability of the Danish state to get out of its extremely difficult financial situation, as Jørgensen notes:

The precise role played by the creditors of the State in the constitutional upheaval of 1660 and immediately afterwards is difficult to define . . . but in the short run it must have had a considerable bearing on political developments. . . . Danish state bankruptcy would have had unpleasant consequences for considerable sections of the merchant class of northern Europe. . . . To a large extent, settlement was in fact achieved by giving creditors a charge on crown land.291

This was the setting for the seemingly hard-to-explain sudden introduction of absolutism in Denmark. What did absolutism mean? It meant the monarchy had became hereditary and “sovereign,” and it meant administrative reforms—which involved the creation of a privy council and more direct control over local bureaucratic structures. It meant the end of the closure of the nobility, and it meant increased taxation. It meant, in short, a state able to play some role in paying its external debts and checking Swedish expansion.

Did it, however, mean changing the basic economic structures? Not to any significant degree. The nobility still had a tax exemption, although now they were required to aid the state in collecting taxes from the free peasants. The king could now sell his own land to the newly immigrated German service nobility, who promptly emulated the old nobility in creating export-oriented demesne structures. The emphasis was now toward monoculture (grain rather than cattle), thus reducing the previous small difference between the economic structures of Denmark and eastern Europe.292 Within 30 years, the amount of land owned by the nobility had increased—at the expense of both the Crown and the free peasants.293 The economic and legal position of the peasants, on the other hand, worsened, culminating in a decree in 1733 binding peasants to the land.294 As for the state, to be sure, it had more purchasing power295 than before; but while Sweden reinforced the role of its indigenous militia, Denmark abandoned it in favor of relying upon mercenaries.296 There was some feeble effort at mercantilist legislation,297 but the strength of Denmark’s state was largely a facade and bolstered by outside interests. The economic role of Denmark remained the same. Indeed, if anything, it became increasingly peripheral in the period from 1650 to 1750.

It is not really surprising that Denmark remained a peripheral zone despite the formal institution of an absolute monarchy. What is far more surprising is that Brandenburg, an insignificant peripheral zone, was able, first, to develop into a semiperipheral power, Prussia, by the eighteenth century,298 and then to surpass and eventually leave behind far more likely candidates—Sweden to the north and Saxony and Austria to the south. There is no reasonable explanation of this unless one takes into account (1) the continuous interaction within the interstate system as an expression of economic forces and (2) the range of economic roles (a limited range, however) that particular areas are able to play at given points in history. The key to Prussia’s development was that, from the perspective of the core powers, there was room for one major semiperipheral power in central Europe. When Sweden faltered, Prussia fit into that slot. How and why are questions we must explore. But we cannot understand the process unless we realize in advance that two states in the same region could not simultaneously have succeeded in doing what Prussia did.

In the seventeenth century, the German lands east of the Elbe underwent most of the same processes as Poland and other regions of eastern Europe did in terms of the social organization of agricultural production. This was the zone of Gutswirtsschaft and Gutsherrschaft, as opposed to Grundherrschaft (and/or Wirtschaftherrschaft) in the western and southerm Germanies.299 The large estates developed in east Elbia in the sixteenth century through a process of engrossment (often forced purchases) combined with the removal of peasants from the land, Bauernlegen.300 This process was considerably accelerated in Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, and Pomerania301 after the Thirty Years’ War. The corvée was increased, going from an average of two to three days a week to six.302 As the land shifted hands from peasant to noble lord, it became tax-exempt which meant that the remaining peasants became “all the more heavily burdened.”303 In the Hapsburg lands, there were similar developments in Hungary and Bohemia, but Austria proper remained a zone of Grundherrschaft.304 If one compares east Elbia with other peripheral zones in eastern Europe, the oppression of the peasantry was the same; indeed, if anything, worse.305

How then did eighteenth-century Prussia come into existence? One consideration is that although the oppression of the peasant was greater in east Elbia than in Poland, the concentration of land was less. It was more Gutsherrschaft than Gutswirtschaft. Lütge reminds us of the aphorism of G. N. Knapp: “The lord [Gutsherr] did not become more well-endowed economically [begüterer]; he became more powerful.” Lütge draws the inference that this was the source of the rise of the prince’s power (Fürstenmacht).306 The lack of real land concentration, the medium size of most estates, and the absence, therefore, of a “stratum of great magnates” were striking differences between east Elbia and other peripheral areas, including most of Europe.307 It meant that vis-à-vis potential central authorities, the Junker class was economically less able to seize the political reins than were landlords elsewhere in the peripheral areas of seventeenth-century Europe. This weakness, a necessary condition for the rise of Prussia, was scarcely a sufficient one. It was combined, however, with a favorable geopolitical conjuncture.

Prior to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the Elector of Brandenburg was “scarcely more than a super-Junker,”308 in a dispersed, defenseless land without great resources or commercial wealth and containing “some of the most stubbornly independent towns and insubordinate nobility in Europe.”309 The Thirty Years’ War was at one and the same time the nadir of Hohenzollern power and its great opportunity, partly through sheer luck.310 The luck was that the Elector of Brandenburg inherited certain lands collaterally: in 1609, the Duchy of Cleves (an area adjoining the United Provinces at the northern end of the Rhine); in 1625, Prussia (which was on the Baltic Sea, adjoining and indeed under the suzerainty of Poland); and in 1637, Pomerania. Thus Brandenburg found itself in two of the main war arenas, the Rhineland and the Baltic. Brandenburg had acquired lands of “great strategical importance” that were “coveted” by various European states, and had done this “without any military exertions” of its own, of which, at the time, it was incapable.311 Furthermore, Brandenburg was allowed by the great powers to keep these coveted lands. Farther Pomerania, which had been under Swedish occupation at the moment of Brandenburg’s claim in 1637, was recognized as part of the Brandenburg domains as a result of French support at the Peace of Westphalia.312 Brandenburg was in this way the beneficiary—one of the first—of the balance of power. It was in order to check Swedish power that other states supported the expansion of Brandenburg; and it was in order to prevent the Swedish king from ending this happy state of affairs that Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg, the Great Elector, turned his thoughts to creating a bureaucracy and an army that could maintain this expanded territory.313

At this moment, the Junkers may not have been economically strong enough to create mini-armies, although their compeers, the Polish magnates, were. However the Elector of Brandenburg was not strong either; and he was seeking taxes to build up an army powerful enough to tax the Junkers against their will.314 The Great Recess of 1653 was the first step in an ingenious compromise in which the Great Elector in effect gave the Junker class the full incomes from their estates (which were not, remember, all that much) plus new incomes, via the state bureaucracy, in return for the power to squeeze the peasantry and the urban populations heavily. He was thus allowed to establish a strong bureaucracy and army, which safeguarded the state externally and eventually allowed his successors to institute a policy of industrial growth at home (without the Junker class wanting or being able to prevent it). Such a compromise might have seemed reasonable to princes elsewhere—the King of Poland, the Hapsburgs in Austria, the Bourbons in Spain. Why could Brandenburg alone make it work? Let us review what happened. Up to 1653, the major tax was the so-called (military) contribution, a land tax. The nobles were exempt from this tax. In the rural areas, one noble appointed by the others assigned rates among the peasants to meet the gross tax for the district. The income derived for the state in this fashion was rather small.

In 1650 the Elector convened the Estates, hoping to persuade them to let him imitate the Dutch and institute an excise tax (that is, an indirect tax on commodities) from which no one would be exempt. However, what a core state, such as the United Provinces, could do proved politically impossible for a peripheral state, even one led by an intelligent, ambitious ruler. The nobility refused to vote an excise. Still, the need for an army in those troubled times seemed obvious. Both sides thus agreed on the Recess of 1653, which was an interim solution. The Elector got an additional half-million thalers in taxes over six years, but no excise; and he conceded to the Junkers, to a considerable degree, the further institutionalization of serfdom. The most important clause was that making a legal presumption that peasants were leibeigen (serfs), unless they could prove to the contrary. Had this been all, we would scarcely remember today the Recess of 1653. It would have seemed one more noble victory in one more peripheral state of the seventeenth century. But the Recess of 1653 represented for the Great Elector “the thin edge of the wedge,”315 which was then utilized during the Northern War of 1655–1660. We have already discussed this war as the moment in which the Swedish military role in the Baltic reached its high point. Sweden defeated Poland and Denmark, stopped Russian expansion, and acquired Scania and thereby one side of the Sound.

Where did Brandenburg fit into these events? Brandenburg sided with Sweden against Poland until 1657 and then switched sides—with Dutch encouragement. Hence it prevented Sweden from swallowing up Poland, or at least the Polish coast, and acquired for itself full sovereignty over Prussia. Thus Brandenburg served the Dutch (and the English) by setting limits to Swedish power. Brandenburg was the only state able to do this at the time because it had an army created with the taxes obtained by the Recess of 1653. Within Brandenburg, the Great Elector could turn this geopolitical success to his immediate advantage, which is why Carsten considers the Northern War, rather than the Recess of 1653, the turning point in the increase of state power.316 To review the details of the Great Elector’s successive political moves thereafter—various meetings of the Estates of various areas, various decrees, the crushing of the burghers revolt in Königsberg in 1674—is less important than to review what had changed by the time the reign of the Great Elector ended in 1688, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution and the Nine Years’ War.317

The Great Elector had reorganized the Privy Council as an agency of central administration and created three bureaucracies—financial, military, and judicial—to implement central decisions.318 These bureaucracies, while comprehensive in scope, were and would remain in the eighteenth century “surprisingly small”319 in size. The increased revenue, 3.3 million thalers in 1688 as compared with 1 million in 1640,320was spent primarily on maintaining a paid volunteer army, partially composed of foreigners. In 1653 the permanent force was 4,000 men; in 1688, 30,000.321 The authority of these bureaucracies, however, ended at the gate of the Junker estates, within which the Landrat (County Commissioner), elected by fellow Junkers, reigned supreme.322 The Brandenburg-Prussian state had however one lever vis-à-vis the estate owners that rulers in Poland, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden did not have—the fact there were few large-scale estates. This, combined with bad times,323 extensive war devastation,324 and the meager natural resources of the soil,325 meant that “work for the King of Prussia could be most gratifying to material ambition. . . . Under the conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was one of the best and shortest ways either of getting rich or of adding to one’s riches.”326 Since there were no owners of great estates it was not merely the “best and shortest” way, it was virtually the only way.

Hence, the Junkers were both hard-working on their estates327 and desirous of strengthening the state bureaucracy of Brandenburg-Prussia as a necessary employment outlet for them.328 This in turn made it possible for the state to create a modern bureaucracy without any significant use of the expensive intermediate form of venality of office.329 It permitted the retention of some closure330 of the nobility (which France could not do) while still maintaining a frugal, efficient state machinery. Brandenburg-Prussia went as far as any state in Europe in this period, both in augmenting the “feudal” rights of nobles over peasants and in incorporating the nobles into the state bureaucracy. Yet because the Junker estates were only medium in size at best and comparatively poor, the state structure331 steadily grew stronger—first as a military force and later as a force acting on the world-economy—so that by the early eighteenth century, Prussia became a semiperipheral state.

In some ways, of course, Austria was much better placed to play the role Prussia was seeking to play. At the start of the seventeenth century it was a major military power. The Hapsburgs incarnated the Counter-Reformation and achieved the reconversion of Austria, Czechia, and most of Hungary to Catholicism by the mid-seventeenth century. After the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the Hapsburgs crushed the Bohemian state, and “reduced [it] to the status of a province.”332 The upheaval transformed the Bohemian aristocracy from an independent landed class to a court nobility and liquidated the indigenous bourgeoisie.333 Furthermore, the Hapsburgs were able to recruit an officer corps that was not confined to the nobility, as in Brandenburg-Prussia.334 Yet the Hapsburgs could never transform their domains into a coherently integrated state that could function adequately within the interstate system. Only a relatively homogeneous state structure was likely to thrive in the capitalist world-economy.335 The Austrian Hapsburgs suffered from the same dilemmas faced on a larger scale by their ancestor, Charles V.

The key stumbling block to achieving such integration in the Hapsburg domains was Turkish military power. The seventeenth century was a century of Austrian struggle with the Ottomans culminating in the Türkenjahr of 1683 when the Hapsburgs successfully resisted the second siege of Vienna.336 While the Hapsburgs emerged triumphant, the victory involved a price—concessions over this period to the Hungarian nobility, who always had a Turkish card to play and thus laid claim to their autonomous rights within the Hapsburg realms.337 The Turkish threat with its direct economic implications, plus its indirect consequences for the structure of the state, made the Hapsburgs suffer, “more perhaps than any other sovereigns”338 in the seventeenth century, from an inability to raise sufficient money for their treasury, making them “distinctly underendowed.”339 By the reign of Charles VI (1711–1740), Austria could sustain, on the basis of its revenue, an army only half the size of France, and indeed only slightly larger than that of Prussia.340 Consequently, in terms of the efficacy of its mercantilist endeavors, Austria, with twice the army and far greater wealth and population, could achieve little more than Prussia.

One should have clearly in mind the difference between the mercantilism of core powers, such as England and France, and the mercantilism of semiperipheral powers. Treue points this out:

While [mercantilism] corresponds basically and among the great powers to an economic policy of aggressiveness and expansion, it bore in Germany the defensive objective of self-assertion; more holding onto markets than conquering them; more repelling the domination of others, most especially that of the Western neighbors, than the aspiration to dominate.341

The whole period from the Thirty Year’s War until the end of the Napoleonic era was an age of mercantilism (cameralism) in all the Germanies, indeed in all of central Europe.342 The Hapsburg mercantilist policies can be traced to about 1660.343 The Hohenzollerns, beginning with the Great Elector, made it central to their governmental practice.344 The real question is what was achieved by these mercantilist policies. On the one hand, it is probably true that the results of state encouragement of manufacture in the period from 1650 to 1750 were “not very satisfying” anywhere.345 Indeed, von Klaveren argues that mercantilism in backward countries was “pseudomercantilism”, whose true objective was “the enrichment of local dignitaries,” and that “nobody really expected mercantilism to succeed.”346 To say nothing but this, which is to some extent true, is to ignore the difference between the semiperipheral countries, which could be at least pseudomercantilist, and the peripheral countries, which could not even be that.

It is equally clear that the mercantilism of semiperipheral countries in this long period of downturn laid the foundations347 for the significant development of manufacturing activities in the period of the expansion of the world-economy after circa 1750. What should be looked at closely, therefore, is what was happening in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Sweden had been knocked out of the competition, so to speak, and when Prussia and Austria were in fact vying for being the power in central Europe that could most take advantage of a further expansion of Europe. Charles VI ascended the Hapsburg throne in 1711; Frederick William I came to the Prussian throne in 1713. In 1713–1714, with the Treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt, the War of the Spanish Succession came to an end. Austria acquired the Spanish (now Austrian) Netherlands, Milan, Naples, and Sardinia (traded with Savoy in 1720 for Sicily). In 1718 Austria obtained from the Ottomans, in the Peace of Passarowitz, Serbia, Banat, and Lesser Wallachia (having already obtained Hungary and Transylvania in the Treaty of Carlowitz of 1699). Austria recreated the Wiener orientalisch Handelskompagnie (the first one having failed in 1683) in order to profit from the new possibilities of Balkan trade. In 1719, Charles VI finally was able to have Trieste and Fiume declared free ports, the idea having first been broached in 1675.348

In Austria’s “Drang Nach Meer,” 1719 was thus the turning point. Austria now had access both to the Atlantic (at Ostend) and the Mediterranean (at Trieste). It could pretend to compete with Venice and Hamburg.349 It seemed at last to be a great power.350 Suddenly it found itself “at odds simultaneously”351 with England, Holland, France, and Spain—for they all were threatened by Austria’s new commercial pretensions. Prussia, to be sure, also emerged greatly strengthened at this time. In the Treaty of Stockholm (1719), it had acquired the last of Sweden’s German possessions. It was now stronger militarily than Sweden, and by the reign of Frederick the Great, it would succeed to the “reputation for military prowess in Europe” that had been Sweden’s until the death of Charles XII.352 Still, as of 1713, Prussia was still “a mainly agricultural country”353 whose resources were “contemptibly small.”354 By the middle of the eighteenth century, nonetheless, Austria was confined to being the kind of second-rate world power it would remain up to 1918, while Prussia was on the road to being a real world power. The particular internal structure of Prussia that made this possible we have already reviewed;355 but the tilt of the Prussian–Austrian rivalry in favor of Prussia cannot be explained without taking into account the course of English–French rivalry, which we shall discuss in the next chapter.

Barraclough feels that at this time the two rivals “tended to cancel each other out;”356 This is not quite the way to put it. Prussia was used to cancel Austria out, and got Silesia as its reward. Silesia was valuable politically, economically, and strategically. It had been fought over since the tenth century, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was what preoccupied most of Brandenburg’s diplomacy.357 Silesia was the “true industrial zone of the East, . . . [the] ‘jewel’ among the [Austrian] Hereditary Lands.”358 To be sure, Silesian linens were marketed by English, Dutch, and Hamburg merchants, and Silesia may be said to have reflected “a classic pattern of colonial penetration.”359 Production was local, however. It developed especially after the Thirty Year’s War in a Kaufsystem form at the village level, the village merchants then selling to larger merchants who engaged in centralized quality control.360 In many cases, there were manufactories on the estates, with the landowner as entrepreneur and serfs working for wages.361 The extensiveness of these industrial activities may be what accounts for the fact that among the three Bohemian Lands of the Hapsburgs—Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia—Silesia was known for “the relative mildness of its serf–lord regulations.”362 When in 1748 Prussia acquired Silesia as its prize in the War of the Austrian Succession, it therefore acquired “the most prosperous and industrialized province”363 of the Hapsburg domains.

This was a “staggering blow” to Austria, not only because of Silesia’s industrial output, but because it was the “principal commercial intermediary” of the Hapsburg monarchy with the outside world.364 The effects of its loss reached also to Bohemia and Moravia, since the spinners and weavers of the latter had sold their wares up to 1742 to Silesian merchants. Were this to have continued, as permitted by the peace treaty, it would have made these laws “economically dependent on the whims of Prussia.”365 Austria was forced into reconversion. The acquisition of Silesia by Prussia was thus a major event, aiding substantially the industrialization of the nineteenth century.366 It had been made possible by the creation of a Prussian army and state plus the needs of the English (and Dutch) to check Sweden and then frustrate Austria; and the creation of the Prussian army and state had been rendered possible by the peculiar weaknesses of the landed nobility as compared to other peripheral states. It was this sequence of conjunctures over a century that made it possible for Brandenburg, a very insignificant peripheral area, to become by 1750 the semiperipheral power in Europe with the greatest potential for transforming its role in the world-economy.

The last semiperipheral area created in this era, one rather different from the others, was that composed of the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies of British North America. Their colonization only began in 1620, and with the exception perhaps of New Amsterdam as a strategic and commercial outpost of the Dutch world network, these areas were not even part of the capitalist world-economy before 1660.367Indeed, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were only colonized by the English in the Restoration period.368 The turning point in North America was 1660 because that was the turning point in England. It marked the institutionalization of the mercantilist doctrine that “the interests of the colonies [were to be subordinated] to the good of the nation.”369 The various English Navigation Acts of the 1660s, by making the most important colonial products—sugar, tobacco, dyewoods, and so on—“enumerated” products, which therefore had to be shipped on English ships and sold to English buyers, affected markedly the West Indian and Chesapeake Valley producers. At first, these acts had hardly any negative affect on the northern colonies, partly because they were little enforced, and partly because these colonies did not produce many enumerated products.370 Indeed, the impact might be said to have been positive, in that the Navigation Acts stimulated shipbuilding in these colonies by driving the Dutch out of North America “before English shipping could meet the full needs of the colonies.”371

These colonies produced little of use to sell to England in the seventeenth century and were too small to be much of a market for English goods, but they competed in the carrying trade and thus seemed to be almost a liability to England. If England held on to them, it was partly for fear of France’s taking hold of them. It was in a sense preemptive retention.372 The Stuarts moved to revoke charters and gain most effective control over these problem child colonies by the creation in 1684 of the Dominion of New England. These areas might have been effectively peripheralized had not New England resistance to Stuart policies coincided with the internal revolt in England that culminated in the Glorious Revolution, which “ended, or at least postponed, the threat to the colonists.”373 Thus it was that because of what Eleanor Lord calls the “inadvertent neglect of these colonies,” but what might better be called the internal difficulties of carrying out England’s mercantilist grand design, New England and Middle Atlantic merchants were by 1700 “making great strides” not only as shipbuilders but as commercial middlemen.374

These merchants were involved in the so-called triangular trade, of which there were in fact many variants. In the triangle with Africa and the West Indies, West Indian molasses went to the northern colonies, whose rum and trinkets went to Africa, and African slaves went to the West Indies. In the triangle with England and the West Indies, provisions and lumber went from the northern colonies to the West Indies, West Indian sugar and tobacco went to England, and English manufactures went to the northern colonies (or the northern-colony ship was sold in England). In a third and lesser triangle with southern Europe and England, wheat,375 fish, and lumber from the northern colonies went to southern Europe; southern European wine, salt, and fruits went to England; and again English manufactures went to the northern colonies. Two things must be underlined about these famous triangles. They are in large part analytic constructs. They represent flows of commodities far more than movements of ships. The ships from the northern colonies concentrated on the West Indian shuttle run, doing only a little travel across the Atlantic to England, and very little to Africa.376

Secondly, the English pressed the northern colonies to maintain an unfavorable balance of direct trade, which meant the latter had to procure coin if they wished to obtain manufactures. To the extent that the triangular trade did not procure the bullion necessary, they had either to expand their own manufactures (and hence reduce imports from England) or find a staple.377 The political struggle of the northern colonies with England in the first half of the eighteenth century centered around which of these two alternatives was to be pursued. In the seventeenth century, the northern colonists came to be competitors of English producers as shipbuilers, ship conveyors, and suppliers of provsions to the West Indies and Europe. They were, by mercantilist doctrine, “more a competitor . . . [than] an asset” and thus “the least valuable of British possessions.”378After 1689 the English made a conscious effort379 to redress the situation; they tried to expand their function as a market for English manufactures by encouraging a new staple (naval stores) and by stifling the incipient industrial production.380 How does one “create” a market in a particular zone? By involving the people therein in production for the world-economy; and if there aren’t enough such people of a high enough income level, one encourages “settlement.” It is the latter tack that the English took, and which distinguished them significantly from the French, the Dutch, even the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas.381

There is in fact a particularly important stream of migrants, especially to the Middle Atlantic states, between 1713–1739. Since Englishmen were not willing to emigrate in significant numbers, at that time the English accomplished this by opening up British North America to non-Englishmen: Scots, Ulstermen, and the so-called Dutch (who were in fact Germans and Swiss).382 The English hoped these new migrants would be engaged in the production of the new staple—naval stores. This promised not only economic advantage to the English, but also a military advantage. The one “serious deficiency”383 of English colonial trade had long been naval stores, and it had been a “standing aim”384of her policy throughout the seventeenth century to remedy this. This deficiency was made more acute by the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War in 1689. Almost all the production or transiting of English naval stores were in the hands of the Swedes, who were neutral but pro-French; and this was a “constant cause of uneasiness.”385 The obvious alternative source was the northern colonies (and also Ireland). In 1696 England created the Board of Trade and Plantations, and one of their first concerns was to free England from dependence on Sweden. They attempted to create a monopoly to do this, but this approach ran into much resistance.386

The War of the Spanish Succession made the issue once again acute, and the situation was compounded by the formation of the Stockholm Tar Company as a monopoly. This led to the Naval Stores Act of 1705, in which it was decided to rely on bounties as an inducement for production in the northern colonies.387 Extrication of England from dependence on Sweden was clearly not the only motive for the Naval Stores Act. Nettels gives three reasons that the creation of markets in the northern colonies was a central objective, even the primary motive. First, while the dependence on Sweden really applied only to pitch and tar, the Naval Stores Act gave bounties as well for resin, turpentine, hemp, and ship lumber—all of which could be obtained from a number of countries. Second, Navy officials seemed most unconcerned by this dependence, which throws doubt on the reality of the shortages. They consistently opposed obtaining pitch and tar from the northern colonies because of poor quality. (Nettels reminds us, however, that officials of the Board of Trade accused Navy officials of interested collusion with Eastland merchants.) Third, the Board of Trade was not interested in obtaining pitch and tar from the Carolinas, even though the quality was superior to that from the northern colonies. (The Carolinas, of course, already produced staples.)

Nettels argues further that the most consistent supporters of the naval-stores program were precisely those English merchants trading with the northern colonies.388 In any case, the northern colonists remained more interested in the production of lumber than of tar and pitch;389 and the lumber went not to England but into the indigenous shipbuilding industry.390 The fact is that the development of a shipbuilding industry did at least as much for the development of a market for English goods, as a successful naval-stores production program would have done. This may be the fundamental reason that under the Navigation Acts, “for most practical purposes,” the ships owned by the colonists were never excluded from the privileges of British-owned vessels.391 Because of this, it made economic sense to build the ships in the northern colonies, where wages were high, but the costs of lumber were low enough to more than compensate the wage factor.392 This comparative advantage was intensified by steady increases in the productivity of American colonial shipping in the period from 1675 to 1775.393 The result was that by 1775 nearly a third of all ships that were registered in Britain as British-owned were built in the northern colonies—“an important source of colonial prosperity.”394

As for colonial manufactures other than shipbuilding, the English did indeed try to discourage them, but in a desultory way. In 1699 they passed the Woollens Act, forbidding shipment beyond the borders of a colony. In 1732 they passed the Hat Act, with similar constraints. In 1733 the Molasses Act sought to restrict the production of rum. In 1750 the Iron Act forbade the erection of further mills.395 All these acts were largely unenforced.396 For one thing, the English were far more actively concerned with Dutch, German, and French competition than with colonial manufactures.397 In addition, as Bruchey argues, “the shortage of skilled labor and both the scarcity and preferred allocations of capital funds” in the northern colonies acted as a “natural” constraint.398 Whether natural or not, this factor did contribute to the low intensity of English enforcement, at least until the era after 1763. How can we summarize the experience of the northern colonies? They were triply fortunate. They were poor in natural resources, yet they were a colony of the rising world industrial and commercial power with enough geographic distance to make it economically highly profitable to exploit their one major resource, lumber, for a shipbuilding industry. Shipbuilding was a start, and a crucial one. The conditions were created whereby in the changed situation of the last half of the eighteenth century there could be an American Revolution, and in the nineteenth century, the rise of a major industrial power.

The period from 1600 to 1750 was dominated by the efforts of England and France first to destroy Dutch hegemony and then to succeed to the top position. In this long period of relative stagnation (relative, that is, to the marked economic expansion of the long sixteenth century), the peripheral areas suffered greatly exacerbated exploitation of the direct producers and reduced advantage of the indigenous exploiting strata (reduced, that is, by comparison with similar strata in the core countries). The story of the semiperipheral countries was a far more complex one. The core countries sought to make them intermediaries with the periphery, conveyor-belts of surplus value. They largely succeeded; but in a situation where there was great inter-core rivalry, some zones could improve their relative status. This was the case at first of Sweden and later of Brandenburg-Prussia, and on a lesser scale this was true also of the northern colonies of British North America.

STRUGGLE IN THE CORE—PHASE II: 1689–1763

One cannot analyze social phenomena unless one bounds them in space and time. We have made the concept of spatial boundaries a central axis of the analysis in this book; but what of time and the perennial issues of periodization on which the writers of history are so much divided? We have asserted that the meaningful unit of time to cover in this volume is approximately from 1600 to 1750. This is seen as a period in which the European world-economy went through a long relative stagnation of the total production of the system as a whole. (Stagnation was correspondingly manifested in the relative stability of overall population growth, physical expansion, and velocity of transactions and in a global price deflation.) To sustain this assertion, we have presented throughout this book such evidence as we have.1 In our analysis, we have subdivided the discussion of core rivalries into two phases, 1651 to 1689 and 1689 to 1763. This set of dates is not perfectly consonant with the 1600 to 1750 period mentioned above. Unfortunately, the real world does not consist of clearly etched dividing lines that serve all purposes. While the dates 1651 to 1689 and 1689 to 1763 reflect a changing world economic situation, they emphasize the political consequences of these changes.

In the first period (1651–1689), as we have already discussed, Dutch hegemony was successfully challenged by the English and the French, who by 1672 came to feel that the Dutch state was no longer the unquestioned giant it had been. I believe that by 1689 even the Dutch agreed. The accession of William and Mary to the throne of England seems, therefore, a reasonable breaking point.2 It follows then that the period of 1689 to 1763 is chosen because it bounds a time of unbroken Anglo–French rivalry. One might regard 1763 as the moment of the definitive triumph of England after what has been called the second Hundred Years’ War, even if the French were not ready to acknowledge defeat until 1815.3 It was by no means clear as of 1689 that England was going to succeed in its struggle with France. France had four times the population of England and a far larger army. She was rich in natural resources with excellent ports and naval bases. Furthermore, her industrial production was growing, whereas “in England the rate of growth slackened after the Civil War.”4 Thus it is not unreasonable to argue, as Charles Wilson does, that “from 1689 [England] was faced by a hostile power [France] far more formidable than Spain or Holland had ever been.”5 The rivalry seemed a round of almost unending wars over the issues of land, allies, and markets in Europe and over supplies (of slaves, of tropical and semitropical products such as sugar, and of furs and naval stores) in the periphery and the external arena (the Americas, West Africa, India).6

In 1689 William of Orange became King William III of England, Scotland, and Ireland.7 France’s war with the Dutch, which had begun in November 1688, thus became France’s war with England.8 This marked for England the resumption of a “foreign policy of Cromwellian scope.”9 This was only possible because of the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution, a settlement further entrenched during the era of Walpole and the Whigs. In the struggle against France, the English military needed larger sums than they had been allotted in the past. This required parliamentary assent, ultimately in the form of guaranteeing public loans. The settlement of 1689, which ended the antagonistic relationship of Crown and Parliament, made the necessary cooperation possible. The question for England in 1689, one that would remain a question throughout the eighteenth century, was whether the central military effort was to be on land or on sea. This was a debate between two schools of thought, the Maritime School and the Continental (or Military) School. In analyzing strategy, they debated whether entering the Continent with land forces during war would strengthen the English cause (because it would bolster allies) or weaken the English cause (their armies being basically too weak to win over French armies but their navy being more than a good match for the French navy).

Behind the debate on strategy lay a debate on economics. Since the Maritime School saw the wars primarily as a struggle for new markets and for the removal of competitors, they said the wars had to be fought on the seas and in the periphery. They saw land warfare as leading to taxation that was too high and thus indirectly hurting commerce. The Continental School argued that unless the English committed themselves to land warfare in Europe, the French would bring the other European states (and their colonies) within their orbit and thus be able to exclude England from a continental tariff system.10 The economic debate was reflected in a sociopolitical one. The Whigs were the heirs of those who had made the Glorious Revolution, and one of its tenets had been “no standing army.” Yet by 1694 the Whigs had ceased mouthing such a slogan and had in fact become the protagonists of the dramatic expansion of the army (which increased its numbers from 10,000 in 1689 to at least 70,000 by 1711).11 As J. H. Plumb says: “A strange Whiggery this! . . . From [1694] the Whigs, in constitutional principles, became deeply conservative. . . . They wanted to capture the government machine and run it. . . . They felt that, given the King’s full patronage, they could make the government work both in the national interest and their own.”12

What the Whig Parliaments did not explicitly authorize, they would come at least to condone. By simple mechanisms, the Army and the Navy began to avoid Parliamentary limits during the Anglo–French Wars. The Army withheld pay and diverted the sums, presenting Parliament with post hoc deficits that the latter felt forced to meet; the Navy ran up debts for goods, services, and victuals, and also presented Parliament with faits accomplis. Roseveare says of this system, somewhat disingenuously, “It seems remarkable that Parliament should have tolerated these practices, but it did.”13 The early acceptance of this system was facilitated by a shift in social structure. After 1689 the Whig forces represented a coalition of the larger landlords, the growing bureaucracy, and the merchant classes as against a primarily “country party” of minor gentry who were hostile to taxes, to a standing army, and to a “corrupt” government. In the expanding army, commissions were bought; and those who had the money to buy them were mostly the younger sons of Whig families. Thus this army “was officered and commanded by an extension of the very same families who controlled Parliament.”14

That England created a large army is not the point however. The point is that in the Nine Years’ War, that “national ordeal”15 for England, a qualitative transformation occurred in both army and navy.16 Of course the transformation was even greater for the navy than for the army since European statesmen now felt that unlike the land, where a balance of power was possible, “the sea is one.”17 The sea, as we shall discover, became England’s. Yet in 1689 the French navy was as strong as the navies of either England or Holland, and it was expanding at a more rapid rate. Colbert, in the 20 preceding years, had created it “virtually ex nihilo.”18 He had built a chain of naval bases in the Atlantic (the principal one at Brest) and in the Mediterranean (the principal one at Toulon); and he had divided the navy into two squadrons for the two zones.19Furthermore, the French navy at this time was technologically more advanced than the navies of either England or Holland. The ships had larger and heavier guns, yet they were less weighed down, faster, and more maneuverable. The French had developed a new, advanced ship, the bomb ketch, a small vessel good for bombarding coastal cities and fortresses. (It had already served Louis XIV well in the attack on Algiers in 1682.)

Even though the English navy had been neglected under the Stuarts and the Dutch navy had become obsolescent,20 in the crucial Battle of Barfleur in 1694, the French fleet found itself outnumbered (44 French to the 99 Anglo–Dutch line ships), outgunned (3240 to 6756),21 and outmaneuvered.22 In Admiral Mahan’s pungent prose, the French navy “shrivelled away like a leaf in the fire.”23 It was a turning point, not only for this war but for wars in the century to come: “Command of the sea had passed in one blow to the Allies, and in particular to England”24—and one wonders why. Symcox suggests that the agrarian crisis of 1693 and the languishing of French overseas trade led to a fiscal crisis in the French state that made it impossible for the French to “maintain something close to parity with the Allies.”25 Part of the fleet had to be laid up to save money for the army. This points to the same problem the English grappled with in the debate between the Maritime and Continental Schools. Neither England nor France, in this time of overall world economic stagnation, could bear the costs of military preparations on all fronts at once. A choice had to be made. It was natural for the English to tilt to the navy and the French to the army.

Given France’s sprawling size and relative lack of internal integration, both in political and economic terms, she seemed to have had little choice,26 even though control of the seas in the capitalist world-economy has consistently been the “central link [in] the chain of exchange by which wealth accumulates.”27 Whatever the explanation of this great naval defeat, it changed the naval tactics of France from being those of a guerre d’escadre to being those of a guerre de course. No longer was destroying the enemy’s fleet and winning control of the seas the primary objective; now the focus was on capturing and destroying the enemy’s merchantmen and harassing the enemy’s commerce, and both naval vessels and vessels of privateers were used toward this end. Such tactics were not unknown before 1694, but now they became the primary mode of operation.28 “Commerce destroying,” G. N. Clark says, “is the natural weapon of the weaker party in anaval war.”29 The natural weapon yes, but a second-best one; for it was difficult to coordinate the actions of ships commanded by individual entrepreneurs. Symcox calls the overall French effort “only a qualified success” and points to the underlying contradiction of the mode: “If the government could not pay the piper, it would not be permitted to call the tune.”30 Furthermore two could play at the game. For example, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the privateers of England’s Channel Islands operated so effectively that they “caused serious alarm to the French [and] were able, above all, to inflict wounds on French port-to-port trade.31

The Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, which ended the Nine Years’ War, marked only a respite. It was important largely because it marked “the first retrograde step France had taken” since Richelieu.32 France was forced to recognize William III as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland and to recognize Anne as his heiress. This recognition had been the primary war aim of William III. Furthermore, all lands that had been acquired by France since the Treaty of Nijmegen were to be restored (except Strasbourg and the Alsatian “Reunions”). Thus France yielded zones on all her frontiers—parts or all of Flanders, Luxembourg, Lorraine, the Rhineland, Pinerolo, and Catalonia.33 In the minor adjustments overseas, Fort Albany was restored by France to the Hudson Bay Company, and Pondicherry and Nova Scotia were regained by the French—status quo ante bellum. The Dutch also got what they wanted: a favorable commercial treaty with the French restoring the French tariff of 1664, and the acceptance by the French of the so-called Netherlands Barrier.

The concept of a military barrier between the United Provinces and France has a long history. It started, perhaps as early as 1635, as the idea that the southern (Spanish) Netherlands should be a scheidingszone, or buffer state. The Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, however, ceded 16 fortresses in the southern Netherlands to France, although small contingents of Dutch troops were permitted to be placed in adjoining areas. By 1684 the French had seized Luxembourg, a situation that the Dutch were forced to accept in a Treaty of Truce. All this changed as a result of the Nine Years’ War; and in the Treaty of Rijswijk the concept of a barrier took a new clear form, the Dutch receiving the right to garrison a series of fortresses returned by the French.34 The Nine Years’ War confirmed the new alignment of power in Europe. After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the power struggle between the states had been essentially a three-sided one between the United Provinces, England, and France. But the three sides were now, for all effects and purposes, reduced to two, with the Dutch becoming a more or less permanent ally of the English, indeed a junior partner.

J. R. Jones dates the Dutch “abdication of great power status”35 as occurring already in May 1689, when William III arranged for the Dutch fleet to be subordinated to the English. It is not that the Dutch did not chafe at this new role—the Dutch–English alliance was “from the beginning, an uneasy partnership.”36 On the one hand, they did not want the mere fact that they were allied with the English to disturb their trade relations with France, especially since their profitable Baltic trade “depended on a continued supply of French goods.”37 The Dutch consistently argued throughout the seventeenth century that neutral states (as they often were) should not be interfered with in their maritime commerce. Their slogan had been “free ships, free goods,” whereas the English had maintained the right to search neutrals’ ships and the French had even argued for the right to confiscate a neutral’s ship that was carrying goods to the enemy.38 War was an undesirable last resort for the Dutch. When in 1702 the war resumed as the War of the Spanish Succession, it was the Dutch who kept pushing the English to arrange for peace, provided the Dutch could keep the Netherlands Barrier.39 In the end, the English were willing to support the Dutch drive for the Barrier, even though it involved commercial dangers for them, as the necessary quid pro quo for the Dutch guarantee of English Protestant succession, the issue that hung over English (and Scottish) politics.40

It was in the middle of the War of the Spanish Succession that the crisis in English–Scottish relations came to a head and was resolved. By the settlement of 1688, France had effectively lost its ability to interfere in the internal politics of England, and by the so-called Union of Parliaments of 1707,41 it would lose the same ability regarding Scotland. The political negotiations and maneuvering of the final arrangements in 1707 were complex,42 but the real story is how core rivalry in the world-economy created pressures on Scotland that led to the Union of the Parliaments. For Scotland (as for other peripheral zones), the whole second half of the seventeenth century had been a long period of “economic stagnation punctuated by crisis and decline.”43 Scotland’s main trading partner was England; but this was scarcely true vice versa, and as stagnation continued, Scotland moved toward ever-greater dependence on England.44 The Scots, like others, tried mercantile measures of resistance. In 1681 the Duke of York, as the king’s representative in Scotland, summoned various merchants to consult with him and the Committee of Trade that he had created in the Privy Council about Scottish foreign trade patterns (with England, Norway, France, and the Baltic), inland trade, shipping, and Scottish desires for a Carribbean colony. The Scottish Estates then enacted various protectionist measures. Soon thereafter, the New Mills Cloth Manufactory was created, which led the Estates that same year to pass the Act for the Encouraging of Trade. The shelter of the act allowed the company to thrive—until the Treaty of Union.45

In 1695 the Estates passed an Act for a Company Tradeing to Affrica and the Indies, which created the Company of Scotland. The Company represented a conjuncture of three interests: Edinburgh merchants seeking to participate in the Africa trade; Glasgow merchants hoping to find a market for their linen in a new Caribbean colony; and some London merchants, who were eager to circumvent the monopoly of the English East India Company.46 The creation of this new company, which came to be known as the Darien Company, probably had much to do with building up the pressures that led to Union in 1707. On the one side, it had become clear that “an independent Scotland endangered the whole [English mercantile] system.”47 The dangers of the Jacobite claims of the Old Pretender were real.48 Furthermore, it was not Scotland alone that was at stake, but Ireland as well.49 Thus England had long-term interests in pressing for Union.

On the Scottish side, on the other hand, while feelings were very divided, the Darien scheme turned out to be a fiasco. The Company of Scotland sought to establish a major entrepôt of world trade on the Isthmus of Darien (located in what is today Panama). It was to be more than a mere haven for interlopers. The Company intended to create an overland route (secured by a colony to be named Caledonia) that would substitute for the Cape of Good Hope route (a foreshadowing of the function of the Panama Canal). The ambitious scheme failed because neither Amsterdam nor Hamburg merchants would invest the necessary capital, and the actual expeditions of 1698–1700 collapsed.50 Lenman argues that the Scots had aimed too high:

Scotland did not have the power to protect an empire of monopolistic trade or settlement against rival European powers, all predatory, most much larger. The only worthwhile objective for her in the colonial field was other nations’ colonists. Trade with these was feasible and could be so lucrative as to easily cover the marginal risk of its technical illegality [i.e., the fact that Spain had legal claims to Darien]. Glasgow in the late seventeenth century was flourishing partly because of a brisk illegal trade with the English Empire. A fraction of the capital thrown away in Darien, applied to honest smuggling to semi-independent American colonies, would have yielded solid dividends.51

Once again, we are seeing that mercantilism in a time of stagnation is a weapon that can be employed successfully only by the fairly strong.

Perhaps it is true, as Riley argues, that the Union of 1707 was due “directly to English rather than Scottish politics;”52 but the English would not have been able to carry it off without substantial Scottish acquiescence. Where did this come from? There was strong support from that large segment of the aristocracy in Scotland who were Episcopalians, or those who had been involved in the Glorious Revolution and were anti-Jacobite, or those who had those with land interests in England who had been threatened by the English Alien Act of 1705. Another even more important Scottish group were the burgh merchants. Daniel Defoe had led a pamphlet campaign designed by the English government to persuade the burgh merchants that England was and should continue to be the main market for Scottish export and that the road to prosperity was to emphasize the export to England of Scottish cattle and linen (and potentially of corn, wool, and salt) because the balance of trade with England would then be favorable. In 1704, the Scottish Parliament passed the Act of Security, providing for the ending of an automatically unified monarchy after the death of Queen Anne. In retaliation, the English Parliament passed the Alien Act providing that unless the Scots repealed their Act, all their exports would be excluded from England.53 History never tested English resolve in this regard.54

As might have been predicted, the burghs were split between those whose trading interests lay primarily in the English trade and those who did a large amount of trading outside of England and her colonies; and of course the craft guilds felt threatened by English competition. Smout adjures us to note that an increasing number of landowners, particularly the nobility, were in fact “trading men” involved in the export trade. As we have seen time and again, the dividing line between aristocracy and bourgeoisie was more blurred than we usually think. So it was in Scotland at this time. “The coincidence that for a large number of the nobility an enlarged trade with England was important and that, when it came to vote, 70 percent of them were found in favor of Union is too striking to be overlooked.”55 What actually were the economic provisions of the Act of Union, and cui bono? The Act contained two economic provisions of advantage to Scotland. First, the shareholders of the Company of Scotland were to be bought out at cost plus interest by the English Parliament in return for the dissolution of the Company, which of course encouraged business revival in areas affected by the previous loss of investments in the Darien scheme, particularly in Edinburgh.

Secondly, the so-called plantation trade was for the first time legally opened to the Scots, which particularly benefited the merchants of Glasgow and elsewhere on the Clyde in the west of Scotland. In addition, and presumably as an outgrowth of Union, Parliament in 1727 created a Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures, which promoted the expansion of the Scottish linen industry.56 Was all this Scotland’s bitter cup or her opportunity? Therein lies a still-burning debate. Union in any case it was, and the new state of Great Britain went on to win the War of the Spanish Succession. The war had been fought of course over who would rule in Spain, but more fundamentally over what would happen to the commerce of the Spanish empire. In 1701 the King of Spain turned over the Asiento, the monopoly for slave trading in Spanish America, to the French Guinea Company, whose shares were owned by the Kings of France and Spain as well as by leading French capitalists. The Asiento had been previously held by a Portuguese company. It was this act, more than any other, which outraged English and Dutch merchants and led to the resumption of war.57

The Peace of Utrecht gave the Spanish succession to the Bourbons but the Asiento to the British.58 The South Sea Company obtained the sale rights to import 4800 slaves annually to Spanish America for 30 years. In addition, the Company could send one vessel and 500 tons of goods each year to sell in Spanish America. As for the Dutch, the Emperor of Austria may have gotten the Spanish Netherlands, but the Dutch got their Barrier. According to the Treaty, Dutch troops were to be stationed in all the districts restored by France to the House of Austria—Namur, Tournay, Menin, Furnes, Warneton, Ypres, Knoque, and Dendermonde (and 60% of the costs of the garrisons were to be borne by the Austrians). This arrangement not only gave the Dutch security, but it “acted also as a cover for Dutch penetration into southern Netherlands markets.”59Each of the maritime powers had thus gotten their share of the Spanish pie. It remained for them to profit from it. In the 25 years of relative peace that followed, the victorious English were not sure that peace was serving their interests—as Plumb points out:

From 1713 to 1739 there was peace; peace which to many was degrading, a peace which made Britain the dupe of France which, under the cloak of friendship, was steadily rebuilding its maritime and industrial strength for inevitable clash. Large sections of mercantile opinion howled for war.60

The war did come. It was the War of the Austrian Succession between Prussia, allied to France, against Austria, which was eventually allied to Britain and the Netherlands. When it ended in 1748, with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, “the settlement was very nearly a return to the status quo ante bellum.”61 Yet this fruitless war served British commercial interests very well. Temperley goes so far as to say that it was “the first of English wars in which trade interest absolutely predominated, in which war was waged solely for the balance of trade rather than for balance of power.”62 This could be seen on many fronts. Despite their alliance, the British and the Dutch carried on a running quarrel over the southern (now Austrian) Netherlands. The Austrians were tired of paying for the Netherlands Barrier and of not being allowed an expansion of their own trade at the Barrier, in Britain, and in the Netherlands. Indeed, Britain was threatening to remove the drawback whereby Silesian (still Austrian) linens were allowed to be sold in the West Indies via Britain. Furthermore, Flemish merchants were tired of the political constraints on their competing with Dutch merchants.63

As for Spain, it was tired of the excessive British illicit trade in their colonies—“the real secret of the Spanish fury against English vessels”;64 while the British government was wary of reviving an active Bourbon alliance of Spain and France.65 The South Sea Company, on the other hand, was powerfully and narrowly defending its own interests and serving as a vigorous pressure group in Britain.66 Nor was the South Sea Company the only beneficiary of an aggressive policy. The sugar planters of the British West Indies found that the war ended the acute sugar depression of the 1730s;67 and English marine insurance companies “insured French vessels against capture at sea by the British navy.”68 Indeed, so central were commercial interests to the policies of the British government that a convoy system was applied throughout the war and “the safety of the convoy was to be made the first consideration” of the accompanying vessels.69 While on the land the French and Prussians outnumbered the British and the Austrians at this time,70 the British navy was twice the size of the French navy. The Spanish navy plus the French navy was the same size as the navy of Britain, but if one added Dutch ships to those of the British, the latter pair had a slight numerical superiority, and more importantly, a unified command. The war reconfirmed British command of the sea, despite the French maritime rebuilding that had been going on since 1713. France lost half her ships of the line in the war and over 1000 merchant ships. “The sea-power of France had been shattered to its foundations.”71

Peace once again was a short respite, and war broke out again in 1754 in the Americas and 1756 in Europe. The continual commercial conflict of Britain and France in the Americas “merged almost imperceptibly, but none the less certainly,”72 into the culminating struggle that was the Seven Years’ War. The Dutch tried to remain neutral but were constrained by British force to limit their trade with France.73 The Spanish were tempted into joining France as a way to abolish British privileges at last,74 but it did France no good. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 marked Britain’s definitive achievement of superiority in the 100 years struggle with France. “In Europe, a long period of sickness, comparable to Spain’s, was in store for France.”75 The British thus won a century-long struggle for the eventual succession to the Dutch hegemony of the mid-seventeenth century. This victory of certain segments of the world bourgeoisie, who were rooted in England, with the aid of the British state, can be adequately accounted for only by an analysis of how the state of Britain was politically able to help create and enlarge the socioeconomic margin British entrepreneurs had over competitive forces rooted in France.

Let us start with a demographic overview. The problem is that a great debate rages, not only about the causes of demographic shifts but also about the data to be explained. Some believe that the rate of population growth in England from 1600 to 1750 was slow76 and some even believe that it was “practically stationary”;77 others argue that it rose by 50% in that period.78 For France there seems to be a consensus that population remained more or less stable from 1500 to 1750,79 and at a figure over three times as great as that for England and more than double that of Great Britain. Some see a low point for France in 1700 and a slight rise between 1700 and 1750.80 Some see all of the years between 1700 and 1750 as “abnormally low”81 for England. The presumed rise for France between 1700 and 1750 is all the more surprising in that France suffered a very severe famine in 1693–1694 unlike England but like most of Europe,82 and another in 1709–171083 Furthermore, in 1720 Marseille experienced the last great European plague.84 By 1740, however, the population figures for England and France, and indeed for most of Europe, turn upward quite definitively.85

The crucial variable, Hufton argues, was overall food supply. “A starving population, generally speaking, cannot reproduce itself; an undernourished one has no difficulty in so doing.”86 Whence the increase in overall food supply? It was not a result of climatic change, or at least not that alone. Since the whole period from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century is known as the little ice age,87 it is unlikely that any great improvement occurred circa 1750. It is more probable that developments in the agricultural production systems of England and France (the north and the southeast) were the crucial elements in the picture. The potato is given high credit by some, who argue that population increase in the eighteenth century varied “according to [the potato’s] diffusion and consumption.”88 Others see the potato as only one element in a generally better diet. Tea replaced alcohol, and rice and, above all, sugar were increasingly consumed, the latter in fruits, jams, and desserts that helped vary the diet, especially in winter.89 We have described the social context of agricultural improvement, that is, the increased concentration of agricultural land by the squeeze on nonprosperous producers.90 Enclosure, an important technique that had begun well before 1750,91 was made possible partly by legislation and partly by the owners’ efficiency and profits.92 What kinds of efficiency could larger landowners effect? For one thing, there was the improvement of agricultural implements, primarily because iron was used in place of wood.93 In addition, temporary grasses and fodder were found particularly useful to owners of livestock, who tended also to be the larger farmers.94

What was central, however, to the picture of the steady trend toward concentration was the long-term low price of cereals.95 In the whole period from 1600 to 1750 there were very few prosperous years for grain.96 It has been argued that the misfortune of low prices was in fact the fortune of England, since it led to agricultural innovation.97 One wonders why this should be true only or primarily in England when low grain prices were a pan-European constant in this period. What is remarkable is that it was precisely when prices were at their lowest, in the first half of the eighteenth century, that Britain became the leading exporter of grain in Europe. The most obvious explanation is that the Corn Bounty Act enacted by the British government in 1688 to encourage the export of grain98 created the “generally propitious”99 conditions for agricultural expansion. There is little doubt that the bounty led to increased grain production in England, and it may indeed have contributed to the further depression of domestic grain prices by causing more grain to be available on the home market than would otherwise have been the case.100 The obvious intent was to help the British agricultural entrepreneur increase his profit margin.

Where was the market for this increased British grain supply? Outlets were in the making of gin and brewing; and the market for these products was the urban work force, which in a period of secular stagnation had seen an increase in real wages.101 Gilboy, for example, notes that the rise of real wages in London was used up, so to speak, by the “gin epidemic.”102 This was also true in the Netherlands, where the increased import of British grains was in particular that of malt and barley for the use of Dutch distillers and brewers.103 British bounties led to an ever-greater export to the Dutch,104 who in turn inspired more British production because of the rise in grain prices in the Netherlands from 1700 to 1720.105 The British were able to squeeze the Baltic producers out of the Dutch market106 because they could outsell them. This was not only because of lower British transport costs (which existed, after all, previously), but because of the bounty that accounted for about 16.5% of the real value of cereals shipped abroad.107 A London pamphlet on bounties written in 1768 explained it as follows: “We took upon ourselves to rival the Polanders in their employment as ploughmen to the Dutch. . . . And at the same time we likewise allowed our bretheren the Irish to rival the Danes in the office of being cowkeepers to them.”108 That the bounty was effective overall and its impact felt in all zones of British agricultural production is indicated by the increased uniformity in the prices of wheat throughout Britain in this period of high export.109

The British state thus sought to capture a Dutch grain market for its entrepreneurs, both as a supplement to other opportunities for profit (in an era when such opportunities were constrained) and as a way of providing profit through linkage effects. For example, the British supplanted the Dutch in the grain-carrying trade as a result of having supplanted Baltic producers.110 Others, of course, also sought to do the same. Indeed, in the half-century from 1650 to 1700, the southern Netherlands and France had augmented their exports to the Dutch, and the Dutch had increased their own production;111 but the British bounty caused these producers to lose ground in the period from 1700 to 1750 by underselling them.112 Thus Britain secured its own position by capitalizing on the world grain market, in some ways faute de mieux, and contributed to the recuperation throughout Europe of the ager over the saltus between 1700 and 1750.113 However, since the overall world-economy was still weak, it led rapidly to an overproduction of cereals and another agricultural depression between 1730 and 1750.114 In the general world upturn after 1750, Britain would once again reduce its role as a world grain producer in favor of a greater specialization in industrial production.115

The French picture, as we have already argued, was less different from the English than we think. When we examine the changes that occurred in the period after 1690, we ask, first of all, why the French did not institute bounties. France may not have needed them because it was so much larger than England. The wars from 1688 to 1713 had cut off such grain imports as France had previously made and thereby “created a situation that favored cereal farming in southern France.”116 In addition, the wars having caused destruction in Spain and thus cut off the Spanish market for cattle and wine products, and the blockade having cut off the English and Dutch markets for linseed, producers in southwest France returned markedly to wheat production.117 There was a steady concentration in land from this period on, until by the mid-eighteenth century, the Midi-Pyrénées area had become a “zone of cereals monoculture producing for export in the Mediterranean.”118 Meanwhile, agriculture was flourishing in Languedoc because of the transport revolution (the Canal du Midi was opened in 1680 and new roads were built beginning in 1725); improved transportation made it possible for wheat products to reach Marseille at prices that were low enough to be competitive in the Mediterranean market.119 Thus the increased production of cereals in France paralleled the increased production of wheat in England and had roughly the same effects in terms of rural social structure and in terms of its meaning for the world-economy. That is, core zones were reclaiming profit-making “peripheral” tasks in an era of overall stagnation.

In view of the foregoing, why is there a widespread historiographic impression that the English had an agricultural revolution circa 1650 to 1750 and the French did not? To answer this, we must look at what happened in the nonagricultural industries. Metallurgy and textile production in England after 1700 showed “a general tendency towards recovery, but not yet clear growth.”120 The price trend of manufactures, like that of agriculture, would remain “mildly downward” until 1750, with a “mildly upward trend in both real wages and market demand.”121 This increased demand represented, first of all, export demand, especially colonial demand, which we have previously argued was one of the main objectives of British policy in the northern states of British North America. It also represented domestic demand, a result of the increase in agricultural wealth in this period.122 The large landowners were among the first to profit from their own increased demand. Between 1700 and 1750, the usually low land rents were compensated for by increasing sources of estate profits from the sale of timber and from the leasing of land for coal and other mining as well as for quarrying, ironworks, and limekilns.123

The expansion of agricultural production was a major impetus to the metallurgical industries,124 and the constant wars with France were also a significant stimulus.125 The wars created a demand for metals inarmament, made imports more difficult (at least in wartime), and used up wood through expanded shipbuilding. The increased level of domestic demand brought about an expansion in construction that stimulated lead production; lead prices remained low, however, which may indicate that output was in fact expanding too fast for the slowly rising demand.126Gould makes the guess that the real importance of low food prices in the period from 1600 to 1750 lay in the reduction of the costs of producing textiles.127 Here, as in the case of wheat export, the crucial element in the expansion of production was government intervention in the world market. The British government initiated what would today be called an “import substitution” policy.128 As early as 1675, the competition that English weavers felt from the India trade had been discussed in Parliament, and some duties had been placed on calicoes.

The particular economic crisis of the 1690s led to the so-called calico controversy of 1696 to 1700, which culminated in an act in 1700 prohibiting imports of printed calicoes from Persia, India, and China. This was done despite opposition from the East India Company and from those who sold or worked up Indian goods for the English market. This did not aid woollens manufacturers, however, since calicoes could be printed in England. Weavers’ riots in 1719 (resulting from unemployment) led to the sumptuary law of 1720 prohibiting the use and the wear of printed calicoes (with a few exceptions). To be sure, the efficiency of enforcement was limited. Since muslins could still be imported, many calicoes were imported under the name of muslins, and chintz was smuggled in. In 1735 the Manchester Act backtracked and specifically excluded from the sumptuary laws printed goods of linen yarn and cotton wool manufactured in Great Britain, in effect at last giving cotton and linen textiles droit de cité provided they were manufactured in England.129 The overall impact of the legislation was thus that it “encouraged the manufacture of calico substitutes”130 within England.

We still had not arrived at the age of cotton, however, because until 1773 so-called English cottons were in fact a fabric in which a cotton weft, or transverse thread of the web, was combined with a linen warp, or longitudinal thread.131 The linen continued to be largely imported, principally from Germany, Ireland, and Scotland.132 German linens steadily lost place over the eighteenth century to Scottish and Irish linens, again the result of government policy that began in 1660 and was made steadily more stringent thereafter.133 After 1707, of course, Scotland was part of Great Britain. The basic effect of the Union was that English woollens displaced Scottish woollens (except for the most coarse variety); but in return, Scottish linen was allowed to thrive in England.134 How beneficial this was to Scottish landowner–entrepreneurs135 has long been a matter of debate. The Irish situation was more one-sided. The Williamite War of 1689–1691 had ended with the Treaty of Limerick, which asserted that the Crown’s authority was the same over Ireland as it was over the colonies.136 The impact on Irish productive activity had been immediate. The Restoration period had already seen measures to reduce Irish industries by forbidding most direct trade relations with the American colonies.137 The Great Cattle Act of 1666, by excluding Irish produce from the English market, had forced a concentration on wool exports to England.138

In the period after the Glorious Revolution, the British went much further. They destroyed the Irish woollen manufactures by the Irish Woollen Act of 1699.139 This act pushed the Irish toward linen production via the medium of cottage industries with very low wage structures.140 James claims this was not so bad for Ireland because they were permitted in the eighteenth century, as was Scotland, to export to England and to the British colonies, the West Indies becoming a prime market for Irish provisions.141 This leaves out the fact, however, that the chief beneficiaries of this export trade were the large English landowners in Ireland. Hill’s assessment seems more reasonable: “After Negro slaves, Ireland was the principal victim of the navigation system which gave England her world hegemony.”142 What we see then is a pattern whereby the British government actively used mercantilist measures in the period from 1650 to 1750 (and especially after 1689) to expand Britain’s share of world metallurgical and textile production.143 Woollens and cottons were reserved for England, but Scotland and Ireland were allowed to share in linen production.144 The question remains, how does this undoubted growth in British industrial production compare with what happened in France?

Imbert says that French industrial capital made unquestioned progress in the three last centuries of the Ancien Régime, but less progress than English industrial capital made.145 France had been ahead at the outset, and Men-dels thinks that in the period from 1700 to 1750 it was still the first industrial power in the world.146 Léon points out that although the percentage of French exports that were manufactures remained the same during the course of the eighteenth century, the absolute amount quadrupled, and he says that this export-oriented industry was the most technologically advanced sector.147 Nef argues that the volume of French production grew at a more rapid rate between 1640 and 1740 than between 1540 and 1640 and that the English rate of growth slackened with the Civil War and only picked up again in the 1750s. He thus feels that the two rates of economic growth converged.148 The quantitative data are weak, and the scholars contradict each other, which means we should proceed with caution. Perhaps it is best to make a qualitative or structural comparison of English and French production in this post-Restoration, post-Colbert period. Cunningham in 1892 made this comparison:

During the greater part of [the period from 1689 to 1776] a very remarkable policy [the system of bounties] was in force [in England] with regard to the export and import of corn. . . . A great interest attaches to this masterful stroke of policy, since it appears to have occasioned the great advance in agricultural improvement which took place while it was maintained. . . . This appears to have been the one point of the scheme known as the Mercantile System which was original to England. The French had fostered industry, and the Dutch shipping. The English took a line which promoted the development of agriculture. . . . In the eighteenth century this measure was proving itself the cornerstone of English prosperity.149

Two questions spring to mind. Is it correct to see the difference between English and French governmental policy in this period as a difference in emphasis on agriculture as opposed to industry? Does this account for Britain’s later greater prosperity? A recent study by Markovitch tends to confirm Cunningham’s generalization by looking at the terms of trade of agriculture and industry in the two countries in the eighteenth century. He finds that in France industrial prices were high in relation to agricultural prices and that precisely the reverse was true in England.150 Why should this have been so? Perhaps it was because the respective governments wanted it so; and if they did, may it not have had something to do with the size of the two countries in the context of the long-term stagnation of the world economy? Neither the domestic market of England nor the domestic market of the Five Great Farms of France was large enough to sustain a major drive toward the mechanization of industry. For England, this meant conquering external markets; for France this meant achieving the economic integration of the state.151

Given the slack in world demand in this period, exporting grain rather than manufactured goods may have seemed to the English a surer way to gain access to, and ultimate control of, major foreign markets. The government thus emphasized the corn bounty, although not to the exclusion of other tactics. The French situation was different. A good portion of French industry was in the Ponant, an area outside the Five Great Farms and one that had the closest commercial ties to the Americas. Entrepreneurs of the Ponant found selling their goods in the rest of France more difficult than selling in Holland. In order to maintain commercial links with Holland, they began to renounce such industries as sugar refining and sell Holland West Indian unrefined sugar in return for printed cottons and hardwares.152 This began to put the Ponant in a position vis-à-vis Holland that was analogous to the position of Portugal vis-à-vis England.

The Colbertian policy did not succeed in “incorporating” the Ponant, but it did rescue France from Portugal’s fate by picking up in other regions the industry the Ponant was dropping. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ponant was the rich region, a region of cloths and linens; with Colbert this began to shift, and industry rose both in the northeast (within the Five Great Farms) and in Languedoc.153 In the period from 1700 to 1750, 55% of the wool industry was in the northeast, 28% was in the south, and the west was down to 4%.154 The French emphasis on industry responded to an urgent need, and in the long run it was successful. When Colbert’s policies were finally fully implemented in the Napoleonic era, the industrial base needed to make such policies feasible had been preserved. “Laissez-faire, laissez-passer” referred originally to the ideal of abolishing barriers within mercantilist France.155

Can Britain’s greater emphasis on agricultural exports in the period from 1700 to 1750 be what accounts for her economic triumphs in the century thereafter?156 Perhaps, but only indirectly. It was the emphasis on foreign trade (which happened to be mostly grain trade at this moment) that led to Britain’s emphasis on the navy and the colonies, which, in turn, permitted her the military triumphs of the long struggle with France. While the French state strained to overcome its internal obstacles, it was outmaneu-vered by the British state. Far from being the triumph of liberalism, it was the triumph of the strong state, whose strength, however, was the result of necessity. The productive strength of Britain and France can best be appreciated in relation to that of the former hegemonic power, the Dutch Republic. Throughout the seventeenth century, the costs of Dutch production rose relative to those of England and of France, and a difference was clearly visible by 1700.157 Rising costs were a result of two features that normally accompany hegemony: rising taxes158 and rising wage levels,159 the latter especially hurting the labor-intensive sector (in this case, textiles, shipbuilding, breweries).160 To the degree that Dutch products were less competitive in the world market, Dutch capitalism could still live off its income from foreign investments. Thus Dutch decline was not absolute, but only relative to England and France.161

The slow shift in the production patterns of Britain and France (and the continued relative decline of the Netherlands, not to speak of that of Spain and Portugal) led to new commercial patterns, or at least to the accentuation of some previous tendencies. In the period from 1660 to 1700 England emerged as a major entrepôt for the reexport of colonial products; but it was still the case that seaborne commerce in the world-economy was “preponderantly European in character” and was still largely in the hands of the Dutch. However, the direction of economic expansion, especially after 1700, was markedly westward in the new colonial trades, and in this way England was seeking to be successful in supplanting the Dutch.162 The period of the English–French wars, from 1689 to 1713, marked the emergence of open debate in England on the benefits of mercantilist policies for trade. On the one hand, the English Navigation Act of 1696 and the establishment of the Board of Trade marked a new level of seriousness in government direction of the trade process.163 On the other hand, demands were being made for freer trade and for modification of mercantilist policies.164 Neither position was strong enough to prevail, reflecting precisely the fact that England was getting stronger in the world-economy but was still far from hegemonic.165

In the westward trade in the first half of the eighteenth century was first of all sugar,166 and second of all the slaves who made the sugar possible.167 Britain clearly dominated world commerce in sugar as of 1700, but by 1750 primacy had passed to France.168 This change can probably best be explained by comparing Jamaican production, where there was an increase in costs because of the exhaustion of the coastal zones, and French-controlled production sites, which were relatively new.169 Does this mean that France was out-competing Britain? Not quite, for as Vilar notes, while French foreign trade became “Americanized” in the eighteenth century, British foreign trade became “globalized.”170What Britain lost on the sugar trade, she made up elsewhere—and first of all, on the slave trade. In the seventeenth century scramble for the African slave trade, the Dutch were initially the most powerful contender,171 as befit their role then. The key market was the Spanish colonies; hence the competition for the Asiento, an institution revived in 1662.172

In England, the Royal Africa Company had a monopoly of slave trading beginning in 1663.173 At first, the profits were low because of the depression in world sugar, but this changed as a result of the war in 1689.174 This English company had a monopoly for sales in English colonies and also an exemption from the Navigation Act that allowed them to sell slaves in English Caribbean ports to Spanish purchasers (Spanish ports being closed to the English slave traders), who took away their purchases in Spanish ships. This opened the Company to attacks by English planters who saw Spanish sales as raising the price of slaves and increasing the Spanish ability to compete.175 The planters called for free trade in slaves, and the Company’s monopoly was in fact ended in 1698 despite its claim that the African slave trade was in the nature of a public utility.176 Still, the profits from slave trading seemed as legitimate a cause for the British government to defend as were profits from sugar growing. The only way the government could please both sides was by securing “a separate contract for the supply of slaves to Spanish America”177—in short, the Asiento, which, as we have seen, was acquired in 1713.

English planters got their free trade in slaves but English slavers got their Spanish market. The planters felt that this compromise leaned to the side of the slavers.¹⁷⁸ Furthermore, all those on the island of Jamaica who had benefited from the fact that it had been the slave entrepôt now bewailed the direct access of the South Sea Company to Spanish ports.¹⁷⁹ The Asiento also cut seriously into French illicit trade in the Americas, and the French were forced back into an earlier and less profitable mode of trade with Spanish America, the consignment of goods to merchants in Spain who reexported them in Spanish bottoms.¹⁸⁰ By contrast, the English had three different modes of tapping Spanish trade. Like the French, they traded via Spain, but they also traded by means of the annual ship of the South Seas Company, and through the illicit but semiprotected trade via Jamaica.¹⁸¹ The Spanish commercial fleet was disappearing,¹⁸² and to the extent it survived, the English now profited from the invisible item of bottomry loans.¹⁸³

In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the French played a larger role than the English in Mediterranean commerce (Masson calls it preponderant¹⁸⁴). England’s participation steadily increased throughout the century,¹⁸⁵ but declined in the war period of 1689 to 1713. On the one hand, there was France’s successful diplomacy. In 1690, France signed a treaty with Algiers that eliminated attacks on French commerce by Barbary corsairs, who continued at the same time to menace the trade of other European powers.¹⁸⁶ France also acquired a privileged position in Egypt (which they lost when Louis XIV signed the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697 without consulting his Turkish allies).¹⁸⁷ Overall, there was a clear upsurge of French participation in the Levant trade.¹⁸⁸ The basic reason seems to have been the good quality of French textiles, or at least the higher quality of French as compared with English middle-level textiles being offered in Levant at this time.¹⁸⁹ The French trade was monopolized, both formally and de facto, by Marseille,¹⁹⁰ which thereupon could also become a center for reexport of various products of the Levant and North Africa.¹⁹¹ Despite this, the Ottoman Empire was still basically an external arena,¹⁹² and its trade was therefore growing less rather than more important as a percentage of France’s (and indeed western Europe’s) overall commercial activity.¹⁹³

In late seventeenth-century Asian trade with Europe, a slow shift began from pepper and spices to other luxury products: Indian textiles; Chinese, Bengal, and Persian silks; chinoiserie (lacquer, porcelain, etc);¹⁹⁴ and tea and coffee, which were also luxury products at first.¹⁹⁵ This growing trade still did not in itself peripheralize the Indian ocean area. For one thing, the increase in textile production was not “accompanied by any significant changes in the technique of manufacture”¹⁹⁶ or therefore by any significant change (as yet) in the social relations of production. To be sure, the European powers were beginning to place themselves in a position to force a change. In 1674 the English East India Company entered into an alliance with the Mahrattas; and in 1684 they fortified Bombay, ending the policy of “fenceless factories,” (factories in the sense of trading posts). Sutherland says this was “the thin edge of a great wedge.”¹⁹⁷ This increased European interest led to increased intra-European competition, which took a warlike form after 1746 with the capture of Madras by the French from the English. After this, and despite momentary peace in Europe, underground conflict was continuous;¹⁹⁸ it ended with definitive British supremacy only after the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

Nonetheless, despite the growing European interest in Asian trade,¹⁹⁹ Asia remained an external arena. The core states were all dragged bit by bit into becoming colonial or semicolonial powers in vast regions of the world from 1600 to 1750. While they were positive about North America (being able to expand their markets via settler colonies)²⁰⁰ and about the West Indies (being able to obtain lucrative sugar supplies), they were most reluctant about the Indian Ocean area, the coasts of Africa, and the Moslem Mediterranean. Even in these latter areas, direct European political authority sometimes intruded, usually to preempt a rival’s claim or threat. Slowly the produce exchanged became less of a luxury from the European perspective. It would not be, however, until the world economic upsurge of the mid-eighteenth century that true peripheralization would begin, and even then it first occurred in the most economically promising areas such as India and Indonesia.²⁰¹ It is in the Baltic and White Sea trade that one sees most sharply what it means to speak of the end of Dutch commercial hegemony in the world-economy in the period after 1689. To be sure, the Dutch position declined elsewhere as well, in the Caribbean and Atlantic, generally, and in the Asian trade;²⁰² but the northern trade was Holland’s mother trade, and it was here that English and French rivalry hurt Holland most.

As with India, trade with Russia was becoming more intense without yet peripheralizing Russia.²⁰³ The bulk trade (items such as grain, hemp, and potash) was distinctive for its irregularity at this time, grain being imported to western Europe from Archangel only when prices in the European market were particularly high; but the luxury items such as wax, caviar, and furs, “in the selling price of which the cost of transport was of subordinate importance,” were regularly shipped.²⁰⁴ The Dutch, to be sure, retained an important segment of Russian trade,²⁰⁵ but slowly, after 1700, the English took over the Dutch role,²⁰⁶ particularly as an importer of timber masts.²⁰⁷ The English also began to dominate the import of Swedish iron.²⁰⁸ France increased her trade in the north at this time, less than England did, but once again at the expense of Holland.²⁰⁹ Wilson says that Holland’s “practical monopoly” of European transport and commerce “stood intact until about 1730”²¹⁰ and that only after 1740 was there a serious attack on the Dutch entrepôt function.²¹¹

Perhaps Wilson is right, but there are two facts that might induce us to see the end of the practical monopoly as even earlier. First, in the seventeenth century, English goods were stapled in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and sold on commission, but by the eighteenth century the situation was reversed: London was the entrepôt and Dutch linen was accepted in England only on commission.²¹² Second, there is evidence that perceptive English people of the eighteenth century no longer thought of the Dutch as hegemonic; rightfully, in our view, they saw the French as more serious competitors than the Dutch.²¹³ It was, of course, in the realm of finance that the Dutch lead still held. But even here, striking changes eventually occurred in the English and French positions. The second Hundred Years’ War, which began in 1689, posed great financial problems to both England and France, but especially to the latter.²¹⁴ As the “continental” power, France had to supply endless funds to sustain its mercenary forces and its diplomacy throughout Europe. The French state first sought to meet these growing costs by a series of devaluations²¹⁵ effectuated between 1690 and 1725.²¹⁶ These devaluations aided the state in several ways in the short run,²¹⁷ but the cost was high in the medium run,²¹⁸ since the nominal price rise papered over acute cyclical crises, a general reduction of production, and an increase of taxation.²¹⁹

The English were able to weather the financial pressures of these wars better, partly because their sheer military costs were lower and partly because their bullion situation was more favorable. In the late seventeenth century, all of Europe suffered a silver crisis. England, to be sure, was no exception, and in the 1690s they imposed a partial prohibition on exports, exemptions being permitted for trading with the East Indies and the Baltic.²²⁰ We have already argued that since French production was largely sold on a French market and required the currency of internal commerce (silver) and since England (because of its size) was oriented significantly to an export market that required the currency of international clearance (gold), England moved toward de facto gold monometallism and France toward silver.²²¹ This was reinforced by the nature of the bullion trade links: France obtained silver from Mexico via Spain, whereas England would monopolize the gold coming via Portugal from Brazil.²²² England used the period of wars, from 1689 to 1714, to ensure its gold supply.²²³ Thus the silver crisis affected England less severely than France. At the very moment when France was weakening its state structure through manipulations of an overburdened silver stock, England was strengthening its state structure through its commercial control over an expanding gold stock.

No doubt, the importance of bullion was not intrinsic but the reflection of the price weakness of other commodities;²²⁴ but in such an era, control of an adequate bullion stock was nonetheless a crucial variable in the struggle between core powers. Both countries sought to place their state finances on a sounder basis. In both states there was the growth of specialized organisms, an expansion of taxation, the rise of paper money, an increase in public borrowing.²²⁵ However, the wars of 1689 to 1714 led to “impossible chaos”²²⁶ in French public finances by 1715 and to relative solvency in English public finances. What was the difference? Van der Wee says French mercantilism “was placed too much at the service of a policy of military expansion during the politique de grandeur of Louis XIV,” whereas English mercantilism “was systematically made to serve a policy of economic expansion.”²²⁷ Van der Wee thus contrasts a military expansion (implicitly an unproductive use of state funds) with an economic expansion (more meritorious). This is a standard view, but it does not explain why such a difference should exist.

We have already argued that the different geographies of France and England forced the former into their costly efforts at land-based economic expansion—first of all, the effective economic unification of France itself. France’s relative success as a land power is to be measured not by comparison with England but by comparison with Austria. “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, although the Austrian monarchy had territories as extensive and almost as heavily populated as those of the French Kingdom, his revenue from taxes was five times less.”²²⁸ It was not France alone but both England and France that were required to live beyond their incomes, which in a capitalist system is always possible provided confidence reigns. Confidence largely reflects economic reality. Success breeds success, and failure breeds failure. The French state, as we have seen, used devaluations as a mechanism of debit-financing. Even more important, the French state developed a form of borrowing against future tax income. In the late 1690s, merchant bankers began to sell discounted securities based on Treasury expectations of future tax income. As this process extended itself, the reality was that the merchant-bankers were in fact issuing a form of fiduciary currency based on unreliable wartime government promises. This credit edifice collapsed in 1709. The state authorized a moratorium on repayments to the merchant-bankers. As Lüthy says, “the state was in reality according itself the moratorium.”²²⁹

Meanwhile affermage, or tax-farming, became a central mechanism of raising royal revenue; it accounted for half the total from the time of Colbert to the French Revolution.²³⁰ Affermage was an expensive mechanism from the point of view of the state; Léon says the financiers, an expensive corps of intermediaries, were indispensable “in a weakly developed state,” where direct appeal for public loans “seemed difficult, if not impossible.”²³¹ In England, the developments in this period were quite different. It is true that there were similar difficulties of state financing in earlier times. Clapham speaks of “the hand-to-mouth finance of the late Stuart period.”²³² Yet in the period of wars, 1689 to 1714, which in England was during the reign of William and Mary and then of Queen Anne, the English took the decisive step of creating a system of long-term public borrowing, and therefore of public debt, which placed the state on a secure financial base at relatively low cost. The Bank of England was founded in 1694. In addition, this period saw the establishment of a reorganized United East India Company and a newly established South Sea Company. All three companies were granted their privileges in return for long-term loans to the state.²³³ The loans of those three corporations “played a crucial role . . . in the transition from floating to consolidated national debt.”²³⁴

To be sure, these loans were a good trade-off. For the authorities, the loans were perpetual though redeemable, and for the shareholders the rates of interest were good and the shares could increase in value. It still required a certain confidence. Carter says that after William and Mary came to power, the moneyed interests felt they could trust government. “The effects on financial development were dramatic.”²³⁵ Who was it that invested? Besides city dwellers (and even a certain country element), Carter speaks of a foreign element, a Sephardic element, and a Huguenot element.²³⁶ It seems quite clear on closer investigation that the crucial confidence on which the English National Debt could be built was the confidence of Dutch bankers and their financial allies, including those who made up what has been called the Huguenot international.²³⁷It is obvious why Huguenots preferred to bank in England rather than in France in the immediate aftermath of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes²³⁸ and why the Dutch who were allied with England against France in wars would feel the same. But why not invest the money in Holland? The English may have taken the risk, after 1689, of living beyond their income by borrowing, and it may be true, as Charles Wilson puts it, that “with the borrowed profits from Holland’s Golden Age, Britain gambled on an imperial future, and gambled successfully”;²³⁹ but the Dutch had to be willing to lend.

If Dutch banking showed a “particularly lively”²⁴⁰ interest in the English national debt in the eighteenth century, there must have been a reason. I think the reason has less to do with England than with Holland.²⁴¹ We start with two facts. In the eighteenth century, the English national debt was largely owed to foreigners,²⁴² and after 1689, England came to be the “preferred field of investment of Amsterdam capital.”²⁴³ The net result of English and French mercantilist policies in the seventeenth century was to eliminate Dutch advantage in the spheres of production and even to a large extent in commerce. Dutch wage costs had risen. The Dutch technological lead had disappeared, and state taxation rates were exceptionally high, partly because of the high cost of debt servicing.²⁴⁴ The low interest rates, which had been a consequence of the strength of the Dutch position in the world-economy, now seemed to be maintained by a “languishing business climate that would justify transferring funds to foreign assets.”²⁴⁵ With an interest rate in the United Provinces that had dropped from 6¼% in the early seventeenth century to 2½% by the mid-eighteenth, the 6% offered by the Bank of England (and the 5% in annuities and colonial mortgages) seemed very attractive to Dutch investors.²⁴⁶

There was, in short, no real choice. It was neither a “feudal business” mentality nor of a lack of patriotism that caused the Dutch placed their money in England. “Comparative costs, comparative returns on capital, and fiscal policy all favored [Dutch] investment in rentier stocks, home and foreign, as against industry.”²⁴⁷ Sombart analyzed this shift as evidence that the bourgeois always “degenerates,” but the Dutch liberal historian, A. N. Klein, takes issue with this “debatable” expression of Sombart, preferring Marx’s explanation that every capitalist is a “Fanatiker der Verwertung des Werts,” a fanatic of the valorization or self-expansion of capital. Klein argues that this characterization fits the Dutch case perfectly:

The Dutch merchant of the seventeenth century and his rentier descendant of the eighteenth century fit this conception, provided we realized that the economic possibilities of the latter had been limited to the much less spectacular terrain of financial investments. If one fanatic attains his objectives more rapidly and effectively than another, that is perhaps due to his greater possibilities, but certainly not to his greater determination.²⁴⁸

The Dutch financial shift was neither sudden nor total. Rather it was a gradual process. Dutch banks were still a solid conservative place in which others could place their bullion,249 and the rate of minting continued to rise in the eighteenth century.250

It would not be until 1763 that European confidence in Amsterdam as the financial center of the world would be shaken;251 but already at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Dutch were moving their money to where it could be most remunerated, and this was England. It was “a straightforward business arrangement,”252 in which the high return for the Dutch investor helped the English state keep down its cost of borrowing. Ultimately, the English could have raised their money at home as the French did, but Dutch investments “enabled England to fight [its] wars with a minimum of dislocation to her economy.”253 The symbiotic arrangement between a formerly hegemonic power and the new rising star provided graceful retirement income for the one and a crucial push forward against its rival for the other. The pattern was repeated later, in the period from 1873 to 1945, with Great Britain playing the Dutch role and the United States in the English role.

After Utrecht, the French made one strong effort to undo the incipient English advantage in world finance. Harsin puts his finger on France’s problem. “The absence of true public credit up to 1715 had been the most serious lacuna in the French financial system.”254 John Law’s “private” bank255 was intended to fill this lacuna. What Law attempted was to reestablish the credit of the French state by creating a bank that would be the recipient of state income; on this basis it would issue valid currency notes convertible into gold. The long-run object was to ensure monetary stability, increase liquid currency, lower the interest rate, improve the rate of exchange with foreign currencies, and perhaps above all, reduce state expenditures (in terms of both the public debt and the continuing drain by the intermediate bureaucratic strata on state income). All this would make possible a program of considerable maritime and colonial expansion. To achieve these ends, Law proposed primarily two things: the expansion of money in the form of paper and fiscal reform.256 It seemed an attempt to complete Colbert’s work, an imaginative leap forward that might restore to France a clear lead in the struggle with England. The project failed abysmally. After obtaining its initial capital, Law’s bank created the Compagnie d’Occident to explore and exploit the Mississippi Valley (known as Louisiana) with a state monopoly. The bank proceeded to absorb other trading companies (Sénégal, Indes orientales, Chine) and to create in 1719 the Compagnie des Indes.

At the same time, Law’s bank took over the payment of public debts against repayment out of tax receipts. Law also sought to reorganize and rationalize the tax system, but was never able to carry out this program amidst the immense speculative fever the inflation of the stocks and paper money had aroused. Suddenly there was a crisis of confidence. Attempts to deflate the stock backfired, and the system collapsed in the so-called Mississippi Bubble. Why? Deyon and Jacquart say that despite the “admiration” that the “scope of the project” arouses, Law did not possess “the art of execution, the patient mastery of time, on which depends the success of even the most brilliant strategies.”257 Harsin says that Law had constructed a system that was “sturdy [but] probably premature” and that it failed in the last analysis because of “the temerity of his initiatives and the too fast implementation of his proposals, rather than to their lack of logic and the coalition of his enemies.”258 For Max Weber, however, Law’s fall was inevitable simply because “neither Louisiana nor the Chinese or East India trade had yielded sufficient profit to pay interest on even a fraction of his capital.”259

Perhaps we can appreciate Law’s failure better if we look at the concurrent speculation in England, which led to a similar crisis called the South Sea Bubble. (Of course, speculation was not limited to England and France but was actively abetted by bankers and investors in Geneva, the United Provinces, Hamburg, and northern Italy.)260 John Law’s “system” had involved a putting together of three state monopolies: a bank of issue (Banque Royale), a trading company (Compagnie des Indes), and a centralized depot for indirect taxes (Ferme générale des impôts). In October 1719, when Law offered to refund the remaining national debt of 1.5 billion francs, the demand for stocks was far more than anticipated, in England as well as in France. The English thereupon copied the scheme, using the already existent South Sea Company.261 There too, the demand exceeded expectations. In both cases, the crucial element was that the individual government creditor was induced, not forced, to purchase the stock.262 However, in France, after such inducement under pressure, the rules of the game were changed and the bank notes were reduced in terms of money of account by 50%. As Hamilton notes:

Inasmuch as both Law and the Regent had solemnly and repeatedly promised that Bank notes would never be changed in terms of money of account, panic reigned. Since one stroke of a pen that the Crown was honor-bound not to make had taken away half the nominal value of Bank notes, holders tried to spend or invest them before the second stroke!263

The “Great Crash” spread from Paris to London. No doubt it “provided a graphic demonstration of the fragility of the new financial edifice,” but no doubt too it showed “the resilience of the new financial techniques.”264 Both England and France then emerged into a period of long-term financial stability that continued right up to the French Revolution.265 In this sense, the outcome was happy. However, the attempt by France to use the System of John Law to overcome the growing gap in the financial power of the two states had backfired. England’s previously created central bank survived the South Sea Bubble, but the similar structure in France led to the Mississippi Bubble and therefore died with it. “The reign of Law, extremely brief, had shook up everything without achieving anything.”266 In England, Parliament backed the bankrupt South Sea Company; it “saved appearances,” and thereby saved English credit.267 This was not politically possible in France. The direct negative effects of John Law’s System have been much exaggerated,268 and there were even positive effects.269 The true negative was the failure to succeed, and thereby to recoup the process of falling behind.

As the eighteenth century proceeded, the financial centrality of England in the world-economy increased while France’s decreased270because the French state was not as strong as the English state. The question before us then is how the English state became so much stronger than the French state. For those who measure the strength of a state by the degree to which individuals are protected against arbitrary decisions of the government or by the size of the public bureaucracy, this may seem an absurd question. But we have already made clear our position that a state is strong to the extent that those who govern can make their will prevail against the will of others outside or inside the realm. Using such a criterion, we believe the English state had clearly outstripped the French state by the early eighteenth century. The truly strong state seldom has need to show its iron fist. Temperley notes that, if the Age of Walpole was “one of peace [and] uneventful,” it was because of past prowess: “The Methuen Treaty with Portugal in 1703, the commercial clauses of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, were universally regarded as concessions to English trade which only arms, or the threat of arms, could have extorted.”271 Nor was strength of arms sufficient; there also had to be efficiency of administration. Plumb says that “by 1714, Britain probably enjoyed the most efficient government machinery in Europe.”272

We have taken the position that the social compromises effectuated in late seventeenth-century England and France were less different than is sometimes suggested and that in both cases they resulted in relative internal stability during the Anglo–French wars between 1689 and 1763. The eighteenth century was the “epoch of reconciliation between monarchy and nobility throughout Europe,”273 and this reconciliation was based on strong government support for the incomes of the landed classes. While this is commonly admitted for France, was not England the home of a triumphant merchant capital? No doubt, but was this so separate from landed income?274 Quite aside from the overlap of personnel, the governments on the one hand aided commercial, industrial, and financial enterprises in all the ways we have already described; but they simultaneously allowed the landed classes to appropriate a vast part of the surplus. Once again, this is commonly admitted for France. The nobility, which paid no taxes, and the venal noblesse de robe are central to our image of the Ancien Régime,275 but was this so unknown in England? In this “age of the great estate” with an “aristocratic monopoly of land,”276 what was the effect of Walpolian stability? E. P. Thompson suggests acerbically:

Political life in England in the 1720s had something of the sick quality of a ‘banana republic’. . . . Each politician, by nepotism, interest and purchase, gathered around him a following of loyal dependents. The aim was to reward them by giving them some post in which they could milk part of the public revenue: army finances, the Church, excise. . . . The great gentry, speculators and politicians were men of huge wealth, whose income towered like the Andes above the rain forests of the common man’s poverty.277

Was this version of “state banditry”278 in England so markedly different in its consequences for landed wealth than the slightly different version in France? We must return to our question of what made the English state stronger than the French. Perhaps the simplest answer is that it was the result of their military ability to contain France in the wars of 1689 to 1714; and their ability to win those wars was the result of the Anglo—Dutch alliance, not so much because of the military assistance of the Dutch (though this was not unimportant), but because of the financial underpinning Dutch investment gave the English state. The Dutch interest created a level of confidence that made it possible to create the Bank of England, and that made it possible for the Bank of England to survive the South Sea Bubble. Above all, it was finally possible to resolve in the Walpolian one-party state the split in the English ruling classes that had begun in the period of the early Stuarts and had continued in a different form in the acute Tory–Whig party struggles of 1689 to 1715.279 It was not because England was more democratic than France, but because in some sense it was less280 that the English state waxed strong and the English entrepreneur went on to conquer the economic world. Overnight, the atmosphere changed from one of political violence to one of political stability.281

The political reconciliation of the upper strata, the stuff of English eighteenth-century stability, was accomplished only partly in France. Just as in England, the newer segments of the upper strata had gained droit de cité in the political structure and had ceased to be an oppositional force;282 so had the comparable group, the noblesse de robe, in France.283 Nonetheless, unlike in England, the executive never came to be in total control of the state. The “gulf between theory and practice [of absolutism] remained extraordinarily wide.”284 To explain the incompleteness of the reconciliation of the upper strata in France, let us return to the question of the Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The “Protestant party” in the sixteenth century had the support of half the French nobility, especially its medium and lower ranks. The curious consequence of this was that the lesser nobility, suffering the pressures of the officers of the king, fell back on “a relative and paradoxical tolerance for their peasants.” When the political compromise of 1598 was turned into the royal victory of 1629, however, the social consequences were immense: “The defeat of the Protestant party was first of all the defeat of the nobility,”285 Slowly after 1598 and precipitately after 1630, the nobility abandoned Protestantism; this is what made possible the Revocation in 1685.286

With the Revocation, there was a dispersion, largely of urban burgher elements;287 but this amounted to only 10% of the French Protestants. Many others converted.288 What was left?

Royal severity had thus destroyed that Protestantism—centralized, institutional, clerical, and bourgeois—which had covered over, during the seventeenth century, the Protestantism of the Reformation. In adversity, the latter was recreated. Without pastors at first, following simple laymen, the predicants. . . . Thanks to those noblemen and peasants [ruraux] who had been the principle strength of the Reformed Churches in the sixteenth century. When the Revocation forced them to reinvent a technique of resistance, their first instinct was to rebel.289

The crucial features of this reconstituted Protestant church were “congregationalist, federalist, secular, parliamentary, and egalitarian.”290Egalitarian and rebellious! The French state had on its hands a potential class uprising of middle strata—poorer nobles and richer peasants—which was serious. It had got into this difficulty because of the historic dilemmas posed in the sixteenth century by a state size that was too large and too economically disparate to permit the rapid creation of a strong state structure.

The sectors that might cause an upheaval had to be mollified and contained, and so they were, partly by the lowering of taxes on the peasantry after 1720291 and partly by the spread of primary school education in the rural areas as a mode of acculturation by a triumphant Counter-Reformation.292 However, lowering taxes simply expanded the already growing gap between the strength of the English and French states.293 The educational and religious evolution, although it may have held in check “radicalism” and “criminality”294 in eighteenth-century rural France was clearly insufficient to eradicate the sense of political exclusion of the larger farmers, the group who in England were called the gentry, or at least the lesser gentry. Without the political incorporation of this group, the state was unable to grow really strong.295 France’s internal struggles were not totally unrelated to the creation of the crucial Anglo–Dutch alliance. It was by no means obvious in the mid-seventeenth century that in the eighteenth the Dutch would prefer an alliance with the English to one with the French. The English were their major commercial foe, whereas they had many links with France. Indeed, as we have seen, they were in the process of turning the Ponant into an economic conveyor belt similar to the one that Portugal and Spain were becoming.

French internal dilemmas, however, forced them into their position as a land-oriented militarily expansionist power that suppressed its Protestants. To the Dutch holders of capital, whether republican or royalist, a deal with England must have seemed less disconcerting than did a deal with France. France threatened to embrace the Dutch and smother them. The English offered the slow osmosis of two capitalist strata. The accession of the House of Orange to the English throne only confirmed the Dutch preference for the English. Thus, as often happens, strength led to strength and weakness to weakness. The difficulties of creating a state structure in the sixteenth century tore France apart, festered, and ultimately resulted in the incomplete integration of eighteenth-century France. Sixteenth-century England was a compact state. Having been forced by the turmoil of the Civil War to recreate a unified ruling class, England was able to absorb and incorporate its Celtic fringe; and it was able to attract enough Dutch capital to support the creation in the eighteenth century of a stable Walpolian one-party state. It was this steady increase in the relative strength of the English state—rather than significant differences in how French and English production was organized in the period from 1600 to 1750 or in their value systems—that accounted for the ability of England to outdistance France decisively in the period from 1750 to 1815.

Throughout this volume, we have stressed the similarities in the organization of English and French production. As for technological and intellectual innovation, it all depends on whose history books you read. Bourgeois, capitalist values no doubt began to pervade the United Provinces and England; but we must not forget Paul Hazard’s classic demonstration that the ideas of the Enlightenment came to dominate France not with the Revolution or even with the Encyclopedists, but in the period from 1680 to 1715.296 As Labrousse says, “the eighteenth century [in France] thought bourgeois.297 This was true not only of France. Although the ideological facades of an earlier world still reigned throughout the European world-economy, more and more groups tended to act primarily and ultimately in the manner of bourgeois and proletarians pursuing their interests and defending their stakes in a capitalist system. This is indeed the heart of what we have been arguing. Neither bourgeois nor proletarian culture had yet emerged; but bourgeois and proletarian praxis were already forming the central constraints on social action.

The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy 1730–1840s

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of colleagues have consented to give a critical reading to one or more chapters of this book. Though many of them demur on some major propositions, they each gave me the courtesy of identifying errors or quarreling over emphasis. I thank them each for their valuable assistance and absolve them of all those matters on which I declined their good advice: Perry Anderson, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Rondo Cameron, Ferenc Fehér, Walter Goldfrank, Patrice Higonnet, Keith Hitchins, Eric J. Hobsbawm, Terence K. Hopkins, Charles Issawi, Reşat Kasaba, Hans-Heinrich Nolte, Patrick K. O’Brien, Madhavan K. Palat, Donald Quataert, George Rudé, and Charles Tilly.

Part of Chapter 2 appeared in Thesis XI (1986), and an earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Studies in History (1988).

PROLOGUE TO THE 2011 EDITION

There are three controversial questions in my treatment of the period running from 1730 to the 1840s. For many analysts, perhaps the majority, this period represents the great turning point of the modern era, the moment when capitalism as a system, or modernity as a mode of existence, came into being. Readers of the first three volumes will know that I do not agree, since I think the great turning point was in the “long sixteenth century.”

The second controversial question concerns the concept of “incorporation” into the capitalist world-economy of zones that were previously part of what I have been calling the “external arena.” This assumes that a distinction can be made between the modern world-system (which is a capitalist world-economy) and other parts of the globe, especially in the period 1500–1750. It further assumes that there is a significant difference between being a zone outside the capitalist world-economy and being a peripheral zone within the capitalist world-economy.

A third issue is the concept of cyclical processes within the longue durée, and their role in explaining historical processes. These cyclical processes are what are called in French conjonctures (and cognate words in other Romance languages as well as Germanic and Slavic languages; the main exception to this usage is English, in which the word conjuncture is very much not a conjoncture). The principal economic cycle is what is often called Kondratieff long waves—a concept employed in this volume, but one whose very existence is often contested by others.

It is perhaps useful to restate the basic arguments for all three concepts—the absence of a turning point in this period, the process of incorporation into the modern world-system, and the nature of the Kondratieff long waves. This is particularly important since I believe there has been considerable misunderstanding of what I have been trying to argue.

The Great Turning Point

Social scientists of all kinds like to designate turning points. It is a device that clarifies immensely the story they are trying to tell. It becomes a basic building block of their analyses of the immediate phenomena they are studying. The choice of turning points constitutes a basic framework within which we all operate. But choosing different turning points can change entirely the logic of the analyses. What are considered to be the “turning points” can mislead as readily as they can clarify.

If one reads the major works of the historical social sciences over the past two centuries, one will readily see that a strong favorite in the collective literature for what is the major turning point in the past five hundred (or five thousand) years has been precisely the period 1730–1840s. Whether one is using the framework of “modernity” or “capitalism” or “industrialism” or “Western dominance of the world,” most persons have dated its true onset to this period—or at least most persons until the last forty years or so, during which there has come to be a growing questioning of this period as the “great turning point.” This entire work revolves around a rejection of this period as that turning point in favor of the “long sixteenth century” as the moment of the creation of the “modern world-system” as a “capitalist world-economy.”

In a sense, the entire first three volumes make this case. But allow me to repeat the argument in condensed form. We have argued that the essential element of capitalism as a system is not, as is often contended, proletarian wage labor or production for the market or factory production. For one thing, all of these phenomena have long historical roots and can be found in many different kinds of systems. In my view, the key element that defines a capitalist system is that it is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital. This is not merely a cultural value but a structural requirement, meaning that there exist mechanisms within the system to reward in the middle run those who operate according to its logic and to punish (materially) those who insist on operating according to other logics.

We have argued that, in order to maintain such a system, several things are necessary. There has to be an axial division of labor, such that there are continuous exchanges of essential goods that are low-profit and highly competitive (i.e., peripheral) with high-profit and quasi-monopolized (i.e., core-like) products. In order to allow entrepreneurs to operate successfully in such a system, there needs in addition to be an interstate system composed of pseudosovereign states of differing degrees of efficacy (strength). And there also have to be cyclical mechanisms that permit the constant creation of new quasi-monopolistic profit-making enterprises. The consequence of this is that there is a quite slow but constant geographical relocation of the privileged centers of the system.

All of this did occur in the modern world-system, which was initially located primarily in most (but not all) of Europe and in parts of the Americas. It was, in Braudel’s words, a world and not the world. But by its internal logic, the capitalist world-economy expanded its boundaries as a system. It did this most spectacularly in the period treated in this volume, and we have tried to tell this story, describing which new regions this involved and why they came to be submitted to this expansion.

There are two forms of arguing against this position. One is to assert a process of gradual expansion in the globe of intercourse of various kinds (trade, communications, culture, conquest). This is seen as a multimillennial process, in which case neither the long sixteenth century nor the turn of the nineteenth century is so dramatic a moment as to constitute a turning point per se. Recent arguments about the long-standing centrality of China in the trade patterns of the Eurasian landmass are a variant on this argument. Capitalism as a concept largely drops out of the discussion when the issue is framed in this manner.

Or one can argue that the emergence of an industrial bourgeoisie and landless industrial workers, engaged in class conflict with each other, is the crucial defining characteristic, and that this appears only in this period and only in a few countries (perhaps only in England). That makes this period the “turning point.” The interstate system and the existence of core–peripheral exchanges largely drop out of this discussion. This argument can be formulated either in “Marxist” language or in “Weberian” language. Either version essentially dismisses the notion of a world-system and its mode of constraining action.

Incorporation into the World-System

In volume 1, we distinguished between the external arena and the peripheral zones of the modern world-system. While parts of the external arena engaged in trade and other forms of interaction with the capitalist world-economy, the trade, we argued, was largely in “luxury” goods and was therefore not essential to the functioning of either party. As a result, the trade was relatively equal in the sense that each side was exchanging items that it considered of low value for items that it considered of high value. We might call this a win-win situation.

We suggested that peripheral products were traded with corelike products in a form of unequal exchange in which there was a complicated but real transfer of surplus value from the peripheral zones to the core zones. The exchanges were in essential goods, which each side needed to maintain itself. This trade could not be cut off without negative consequences for one or both sides. It was, however, possible for short periods to establish blockages to the free movement of goods, and we discussed the political circumstances in which such “protectionism” was practiced.

The cyclical processes within the capitalist world-economy led repeatedly to situations in which, in order to maintain the low production costs of peripheral goods, it was necessary to involve new regions within the world-economy—that is to say, to “incorporate” them within the division of labor.

Of course, the process of incorporation might receive resistance. It was argued, however, that the technological development of the capitalist world-economy, itself a process internal to that system, led over time to strengthening the military capacity of strong states of the world-economy compared with the military capacity of parts of the external arena. Hence, for example, whereas in the sixteenth century pan-European military strength was perhaps insufficient to “conquer” India, by the late eighteenth century this was no longer true.

Finally, how much expansion occurred at any given time was a function of how much new territory the capitalist world-economy was able to integrate at any given moment. It was also a function of how distant and therefore how difficult it was to incorporate manu militari certain regions. Hence, it is argued in this volume that whereas what we now call India was incorporated during this period, this was not true of China, which would be incorporated at a later time.

We then argued that incorporation was a process. It did not occur in a day or even a decade, but over a substantial period of time. However, we tried to show, by comparing four different regions—Russia, India, the Ottoman Empire, and West Africa—how “peripheralization” was a homogenizing process. That is, although these four zones were quite different from each other at the beginning of the process, the pressures of the world-system acted to make them more similar in their characteristics. For example, these pressures weakened the state structures in some zones and strengthened them in others, so that they would perform optimally in terms of the modalities of the modern world-system.

There have been two forms of arguing with this distinction. One has been to assert that the process of incorporation is a much more gradual one, with multiple stages. I am perfectly willing to entertain this amendment to the argument, the result of more empirical research into the matter.

The second has been to cast doubts on the distinction between luxury goods and essential goods. It has been asserted that what are often thought of as luxury goods are essential, at least as prestige items. It is further argued that the perspective on luxuries is culturally grounded and different peoples would define it differently.

I agree that this is a difficult distinction. But the fact that the concept of luxury is culturally grounded is part of my own argument. And although peacock feathers may seem essential to some groups, I find it difficult to accept that this is the same kind of necessity as the need of grains for human consumption. Furthermore, grains are bulk goods, and diamonds take up very little space in transportation. This seems to me to make a lot of practical difference.

So, I persist in feeling that the “equal” exchanges of two regions external to each other and the “unequal” exchanges within the capitalist world-economy constitute a crucial theoretical distinction. The capitalist world-economy is by its very mode of functioning a highly polarizing system. This is its most negative feature and, in the long run, one of its fatal flaws. Capitalism as a system is very different from the kinds of systems that existed before the long sixteenth century. It is not helpful analytically to lose this basic reality from view.

Kondratieff Cycles

Kondratieff cycles are named after Nikolai Kondratieff, a Russian economist who described them in the 1920s. He was not in fact the first scholar to have described such cycles. And his descriptions of both how the cycles work and when they first occurred are no longer widely accepted. But the most widely used name for such cycles continues to be his. My own view of how they operate derives from my understanding of how producers in a capitalist system make profits from their enterprises and thereby are able to accumulate capital.

Capitalism is a system in which the endless accumulation of capital is the raison d’être. To accumulate capital, producers must obtain profits from their operations. However, truly significant profits are possible only if the producer can sell the product for considerably more than the cost of production. In a situation of perfect competition, it is absolutely impossible to make significant profit. Perfect competition is classically defined as a situation with three features—a multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and universally available information about prices. If all three features were to prevail (which rarely occurs), any intelligent buyer will go from seller to seller until he finds one who will sell at a penny above the cost of production, if not indeed below the cost of production.

Obtaining significant profit requires a monopoly, or at least a quasimonopoly, of world-economic power. If there is a monopoly, the seller can demand any price, as long as he does not go beyond what the elasticity of demand permits. Any time the world-economy is expanding significantly, one will find that there are some “leading” products, which are relatively monopolized. It is from these products that great profits are made and large amounts of capital can be accumulated. The forward and backward linkages of these leading products are the basis of an overall expansion of the world-economy. We call this the A-phase of a Kondratieff cycle.

The problem for capitalists is that all monopolies are self-liquidating. This is because there exists a world market into which new producers can enter, however politically well defended a given monopoly is. Of course, entry is not easy and takes time. But sooner or later, others surmount the obstacles and are able to enter the market. As a result, the degree of competition increases. And when competition increases, prices go down, as the heralds of capitalism have always told us. However, at the same time, profits go down. When profits for the leading products go down sufficiently, the world-economy ceases to expand, and it enters into a period of stagnation. We call this the B-phase of a Kondratieff cycle. Empirically, the A- and B-phases together have tended to be fifty to sixty years in length, but the exact lengths have varied. Of course, after a certain time in a B-phase, new monopolies can be created and a new A-phase can begin.

A- and B-phases of Kondratieff cycles seem, therefore, to be a necessary part of the capitalist process. It follows that they should logically be part of its operation from the very beginning of the existence of a capitalist world-economy. In the argument of this work, this means that they should be found from the long sixteenth century forward. And indeed, economic historians have regularly described such conjonctures during all this time, as can be seen in the many references to such descriptions in this and other volumes. To be sure, these economic historians did not call them Kondratieff cycles. But they may be found as a regular phenomenon in the system as a whole within the geographic boundaries we have been insisting were those of the capitalist world-economy in this period.

A few economic historians have described such cycles for the late Middle Ages in Europe, although this is a more contentious proposition. Were it to be established, it would give some support to those who wish to date the beginning of the modern world-system to an earlier date than the long sixteenth century.

INDUSTRY AND BOURGEOISIE

Although Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) began his career as a portrait painter, he is most famous for paintings which express his interest in science and technology. His participation in the Lunar Society, a group of enlightened industrialists and scientists whose meetings were held when there was sufficient moonlight for making one’s way along dark country roads, inspired his interior scenes illuminated by moonlight or artificial light. The family setting of the “Experiment with the Air Pump (1768),” emphasizes the egalitarian attitude that scientific concepts and discoveries could be presented to those outside the laboratory such as women and children.

The tale grows with the telling.

—Eric Kerridge1

We are accustomed to organizing our knowledge around central concepts which take the form of elementary truisms. The rise of industry and the rise of the bourgeoisie or middle classes are two such concepts, bequeathed to us by nineteenth-century historiography and social science to explain the modern world. The dominant view has been that a qualitative historical change took place at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This was an age of revolutions when both the “first”2 industrial revolution in Great Britain and the “exemplary”3 bourgeois revolution in France occurred. No doubt there have been voices to challenge this consensus. And there has been incessant quibbling about the details. Nonetheless, the imagery of these two revolutions remains deeply anchored in both popular culture and scholarly thought.4 These concepts are in fact the lodestars by which we usually navigate the misty and turbulent waters of modern historical reality. Indeed, as I shall indicate, the two lodestars are but a single one.

The term “revolution” connotes for us sudden, dramatic, and extensive change. It emphasizes discontinuity. There is no doubt that this is the sense that most of those who use the concept of “industrial revolution” intend.5 Coleman speaks of a “comparatively sudden and violent change which launched the industrialized society,”6 and Landes of “a far more drastic break with the past than anything since the invention of the wheel.”7 Hobsbawm similarly insists: “If the sudden, qualitative, and fundamental transformation, which happened in or about the 1780’s, was not a revolution, then the word has no common-sense meaning.”8

Of what is this revolution supposed to consist? Toynbee (to whom we owe the classic analysis of the industrial revolution as such), writing in 1884, finds its “essence” in the “substitution of competition for medieval regulations.”9 Hartwell, writing 80 years later, defines its “essential character” somewhat differently: “the sustained increase in the rate of growth of total and per capita output at a rate which was revolutionary compared with what went before.”10

The two emphases—freedom from “medieval” constraints (or social revolution) and the rate of growth (or economic revolution)—are, to be sure, not incompatible. Indeed, the heart of the traditional argument has been that the former led to the latter. But in recent years it has been the rate of growth that has been the focus of attention, with one after another factor invoked to explain it. Nor is this surprising. The continued development of the capitalist world-economy has involved the unceasing ascension of the ideology of national economic development as the primordial collective task, the definition of such development in terms of national economic growth, and the corresponding virtual “axiom . . . that the route to affluence lies by way of an industrial revolution.”11

The two “essential” elements—growth and freedom—remain too vague. Each must be translated into more specific concepts. Growth seems very closely linked conceptually to the “application of mechanical principles . . . to manufacturing,”12 what the French often call “machinisme,”13 and the “revolution” of mechanization has usually been attributed to “a cluster of innovations in Schumpeter’s sense of the term.”14

The analysis of mechanization places the development of the forces of production in the foreground. The increase of “freedom” (or social revolution) refers, on the other hand, primarily to the relations of production: who may produce what, who may work for whom, and on what terms. Two phenomena are central to this part of the discussion: the factory (locus of concentration of the machines) and the proletarian or wage laborer (employee of the factory). The modern factory is said to have “originated in England in the last third of the eighteenth century.”15 For many authors, it is the factory, and all that it implies in terms of the organization of the work force, that is thought to be the crucial innovation in the organization of work, requiring a salaried work force. Hobsbawm insists that the industrial revolution “is not merely an acceleration of economic growth, but an acceleration of growth because of, and through, economic and social transformation.”16 The transformation refers, above all, to the rise of an urban proletariat, itself the consequence of a “total transformation of the rural social structure.”17

Much of the discussion on the industrial revolution, however, assumes both the processes of mechanization and the process of “liberation”/proletarianization and concentrates instead on the question: what made these processes occur “for the first time” in Great Britain, what made Britain “take off”? Take off is, in fact, an image which aptly reflects the basic model of the industrial revolution, however much Rostow’s detailed hypotheses or periodization may have been the subject of sharp debate. To this question, a series of answers, which are not by any means mutually exclusive, have been given, although various authors have insisted on the centrality of a given factor (which other authors have in turn duly contested). Placing them in an order of chronological immediacy, and working backward, these are the factors of increased demand (which is said to make mechanization and proletarianization profitable), the availability of capital (which in turn makes the mechanization possible), demographic growth (which makes the proletarianization possible), an agricultural “revolution” (which makes the demographic growth possible), and a preexisting development of land-tenure patterns (which makes the demographic growth possible). Furthest in the rear, and most difficult to pin down, is a presumed attitude of mind (which ensures that there will be entrepreneurs who will take advantage of all the many opportunities this revolutionary process offers at its many junctures, such that the cumulative effect is “revolutionary”). Obviously, this chronology of factors is a bit abstract, and various authors have argued a different sequence.

Demand, as the explanation of innovation, is an old theory (“necessity is the mother of invention”) and Landes makes it central to his analysis: “It was in large measure the pressure of demand on the mode of production that called forth the new techniques in Britain.”18 But which demand? There are two candidates: foreign trade and the home market. The argument for exports centers on the fact that their growth and acceleration were “markedly greater” than those of domestic industry in the second half of the eighteenth century.”19 Against this, Eversley argues that, in the “key period” of 1770–1779, it is “incontrovertible” that the export sector declined but nonetheless there was “visible acceleration” in industrialization, which reinforces the thesis that “a large domestic market for mass-produced consumer goods” is central to industrialization.20 Hobsbawm suggests the inevitable compromise—both foreign trade and a large domestic market were necessary, plus “a third, and often neglected, factor: government.”21

There are those who doubt that demand rose significantly. They put their emphasis rather on “supply not demand related processes.”22 For some, the question of the supply of capital has loomed large. Hamilton, in 1942, explained the “revolutionary” character of the industrial revolution by the “profit inflation” of the last half of the eighteenth century, resulting from the wage lag, the gap between the rise of prices and the rise of wages,23 an old standby which Hamilton had previously used to explain the economic expansion of the sixteenth century.24 Ashton found the heart of his explanation of the industrial revolution in “relatively cheap capital,”25 coming from the fall in the rate of interest. A generation later, and after reviewing the literature covering the theme of capital formation, Crouzet would take his stand on a more modest position: the “relative abundance” of capital was a “permissive factor,” neither necessary nor inevitable, but one historically true of England in the eighteenth century.26

But was fixed capital even important? There are a growing number of skeptical commentators who argue that “the capital needs of early industrialization were modest.”27 In the face of these arguments, the proponents of capital’s importance have retreated to surer, because less provable, ground. “It was the flow of capital . . . more than the stock that counted in the last analysis.”28 A variant on this theme is the suggestion that what mattered was not a change in the “relative size” of capital stock (that is, the size “relative to the national income”) but the change in the “content of the capital stock,” that is, the diversion of investment “from traditional to modern forms of capital accumulation.”29 Emphasis on the flow of capital leads immediately to a concern with credit facilities. A standard view is that Great Britain differed from other countries precisely in the amount of credit facilities available to industry.30 This view, of course, assumes that capital investments were limited by frontiers. Lüthy, however, believes that, already in the mid-eighteenth century, western and central Europe constituted a “zone of exchange” characterized by “ease in banking transactions and the flow of capital” and speaks of the virtual absence of obstacles to this flow.31

Another group of authors gives pride of place to demographic shifts. Population growth presumably provided both the demand for industrial products and the work force to produce them. Britain’s “unprecedented growth of population”32 is said to be particularly remarkable because it was sustained, long term, and went along with a growth in output.33 Plumb adds the twist that the key element was the survival of more children of “middle and lower middle class” parents, for “without a rapidly expanding lower middle class with sufficient education and technical background, the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible.”34

There are, however, two questions to be posed: was there really a demographic revolution, and what in fact caused the rise of population (which, of course, then bears on whether it is cause or consequence of the economic changes)? The question of the reality of the demographic revolution is in turn two questions: were the changes “revolutionary” in relation to what went before and after, and was the pattern in England (or Great Britain) significantly different from that in France and elsewhere? Given a curve which is logarithmic, some authors see no reason to designate the late eighteenth-century segment as somehow singular.35 To be sure, the rate of population growth in the second half of the eighteenth century was greater than in the first half. But it has been argued that it is the first half which was exceptional, not the second. Tucker argues, for example, in the case of England, that “the growth of population over the eighteenth century as a whole was not very much more than an extrapolation of earlier long-run trends would have led us to expect.”36 Morineau makes exactly the same point for France. The demographic growth at the end of the eighteenth century was not revolutionary but should be considered more modestly as “a renovation, a recuperation, a restoration.”37 And Milward and Saul reverse the argument entirely in France’s favor. The French population pattern was the unusual one (because its birth rate went down before or simultaneously with the reduction of the death rate). “But in the circumstances of nineteenth-century development a more slowly growing population made increases in per capita incomes easier to achieve and thus gave the French advantages rather than disadvantages in marketing.”38

Even, however, if the population rise (uncontested) were not to be considered revolutionary, and even if it were not necessarily peculiar to England, the “core of the problem”39 remains whether the population growth was the result of the economic and social changes, or vice versa. “Did the Industrial Revolution create its own labor force?” as Habakkuk puts it.40 To answer this question, we have to look at the debate concerning whether it was a declining mortality rate or a rising fertility rate that accounts for the demographic increase. For the majority of analysts, there seems little doubt that the declining mortality rate is the principal explanation, for the very simple reason that “when both rates are high it is very much easier to increase the population by reducing the death-rate than by increasing the birthrate,”41 and of course when both are low the reverse is true.

Why then would the death rate decline? Since a death rate that is high is “chiefly attributable to a high incidence of infectious diseases,”42 there are three logically possible explanations for a reduced death rate: improved medicine (immunization or therapy), increased resistance to infection (improvement in the environment), or decline in virulence of the bacteria and viruses. The last may be eliminated if there is reduced mortality from multiple diseases simultaneously (which there seems to have been), since it is not credible that all of them could be due to “fortuitous change in the character of the [disease-causing] organisms.”43 This leaves us with the true debate: better medicine or a better socioeconomic environment. Better medicine has long been a favorite explanation. It still has its strong defenders, who give as the most plausible explanation of declining mortality rates “the introduction and use of inoculation against smallpox during the eighteenth century.”44 This thesis has been subjected to a careful and convincing demonstration that the medical influence on the death rate was rather insignificant until the twentieth century and can scarcely therefore account for changes in the eighteenth.45 By deduction, this leaves us with the conclusion that it must be “an improvement in economic and social conditions” that led to demographic expansion and not vice versa.46

The role of fertility has received a major boost in the monumental population history of England by Wrigley and Schofield. They see a rising fertility rate via the lowering of the percentage of non-marriers. This is tied to a model in which the increased availability of food is the key ingredient in a process that leads to the possibility of founding a household. Their data are over a very long period (1539–1873), in which they find that, except for a short interval (1640–1709), births, deaths, and marriages all increase but there are consistently more births than deaths. Thus they seem to be arguing a long-standing pattern of English demographic history. Yet they also wish to argue that somewhere between the early eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century England broke with the “preventive-check cycle” and the link between population size and food prices.47

In addition to the contradiction in the Wrigley and Schofield logic (a long-standing pattern as explanatory versus a break in a pattern as explanatory), there is the further problem of reconciling their emphasis on increases in marriage rate (and/or lowering the marriage rate) as explanatory of economic “take-off” with the directly opposite argument by Hajnal. Hajnal has argued that there is a unique western European (note: not English alone) marriage pattern as of the first half of the eighteenth century which consists of a later marriage age and a high proportion of non-marriers. Hajnal finds that it is this pattern of lower fertility (lasting until the twentieth century) which serves economic development by “stimulating the diversion of resources to ends other than those of minimal subsistence.”48

One last demographic factor, less frequently discussed but probably of great importance, is the increase in population transfer from rural peripheral zones in Europe to urban and industrializing areas. But this is, of course, the result both of increased employment opportunity and improved transportation facilities.49

Increasing attention has been drawn in recent years to changes in the agricultural sector as a prelude to and determinative of changes in the industrial sector. (That such an emphasis has implicit policy directives for contemporary peripheral countries is not without a link to the increased concern and is often explicitly stated.) In addition to the industrial and demographic revolutions, we are now adjured to locate and explain the agricultural revolution. This turns out to be a big topic. First of all we must remember that, even for Great Britain and even through the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century, “agriculture was the premier . . . industry.”50 Therefore, if there is to be any meaning to the idea that an economic revolution occurred and in particular that there was an agricultural revolution, there must have been somewhere, and for the total of some entity, an increase in yield. We immediately run into the question of whether we mean yield per hectare cultivated (which in turn may mean yield per seed input, yield per unit of labor input, or yield per capita) or total yield. There seems little doubt that total arable production went up in the European world-economy as a whole in the 100 years that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.51 If, however, there was a transfer of part of the work force from arable production to other kinds of production (and in particular to industry), then there must have been, it is argued, either an increase in yield per seed input or in yield per unit of labor input (combined with an expansion of the cultivated area).52 If there was, furthermore, an improvement in the general standard of living, it is argued, then there must have been an increase in yield per capita. There is no necessary reason, however, why an increase in yield per capita need accompany an increase in yield per seed input or labor input, and it is the latter two which are defining elements of an expansionary period of the world-economy.

Might an increase in yield have come about through the mechanization of farm implements? While there seems to have been some increase in the use of iron in plows (and horseshoes for horses),53 it can scarcely be argued that there was significant mechanization of agriculture before the nineteenth century.54 The advances came primarily through the more intensive cultivation of the soil by the use of fodder crops.55 There were two main systems, that of alternate husbandry (called at the time the “Norfolk system”) and that of convertible husbandry (or ley farming). Both variants eliminated the need for fallow by using the roots (turnips, potatoes) to eliminate weeds and the grasses (clover, sainfoin, ryegrass) to nutrify the soil.56 The resulting continuous cropping permitted livestock to have food in winter with their manure serving as an additional nutrient to the soil.

Neither system was new, but the late eighteenth century was a moment of considerable expansion of their use. While, no doubt, these systems made great headway in England, it is doubtful whether this can be said to be exceptional. Slicher van Bath speaks of a “general shift from three-course rotation . . . to convertible husbandry” in western Europe after 1750 in response to higher wheat prices.57 What was nonetheless new in this spread of the use of fodder crops was that it permitted the shift to increased arable production without the sacrifice, as previously, of pasturage.58

Even this advance, if analyzed as output per capita, has been challenged by Morineau. He argues that a significant increase in yield occurred only in the mid-nineteenth century.59 He sees agricultural “progress” in the late eighteenth century, no less than previously, as obeying a “logic of poverty.” Crop innovation tended, he argues, to coincide with conjunctural declines in living standards. These phases of decline were attended by food shortages, and the crop innovations “contributed to maintaining them.”60 While Morineau’s analysis centers on the French data, and he accepts the argument that England had certain advantages over France, he doubts that even England had “a substantial increase in productivity” before 1835.

The take-off of the Western economy did not plunge its roots in an ‘agricultural revolution.’ Is not this latter concept, inappropriate to designate, even in the case of England, such a somnolent progress, frightened away at the first frost?61

Even if the changes in husbandry could be said not to have resulted immediately in any dramatic increase in yield per capita, might not the changes in the social relations of production on the land have been an essential element in the process of industrialization, either because they made available manpower for industrial work (through higher yield per labor input, permitting intersectoral labor flows, or through greater total yield, permitting demographic expansion) or because they were a prerequisite to the technical innovation which would eventually lead to higher yield per seed input, or, of course, both? Was not, in short, enclosure a key element in the whole process?

There are three separate, not inevitably linked, processes that are discussed under the heading of enclosure. One is the elimination of “open fields,” the system which transformed individual units of arable production into common grazing land between harvest time and sowing time. The second is the abolition of “common rights,” which were the equivalent of open fields on the land that was harvested by the lord of the manor, or were “waste lands” (waste, that is, from the point of view of arable production). Both of these changes reduced or eliminated the ability of the person who controlled little or no property to maintain livestock. The third change was the consolidation of scattered property, necessary to realize the economies of scale which the end of open fields and common rights made possible.

Enclosure presumably made mixed husbandry more profitable, both by increasing the size of the units and by protecting those who planted fodder crops against free riders.62 The prime object of the landlords was “the increase in rents resulting from the technical improvements which were facilitated by enclosure and consolidation.”63Whether in fact enclosures did achieve increased yield is, however, less clear. Chambers and Mingay, who claim that enclosure was the “vital instrument” in greater output, nonetheless admit that the evidence for eighteenth-century England is at best “circumstantial.”64 O’Brien is even more skeptical. “There can no longer be any easy presumption” that the massive enclosures between 1750 and 1815 “had any really significant impact on yields.”65

Enclosures, of course, started long before 1750. What accelerated their pace and visibility was the new role of Parliament in Britain in the process.66 It is this political intervention which accounted for the “massiveness” of the development. Still, it would be an error to believe that Britain alone was enclosing. The careful analyses of Bloch indicate that considerable enclosure of one form or another had occurred in France, and that there too it accelerated after 1730.67 In fact, the relative expansion of what Bloch calls “agrarian individualism” was a Europe-wide phenomenon in the eighteenth century.68 If the success of the movement was greater in Great Britain than on the continent, the difference was clearly in the strength of the state machinery in Britain which offered the large landlords weapons that were less available in France, both before and after the French Revolution.69

The mere enclosing (fencing-in) of the land was not enough, given the historical legacy of scattered holdings. Like enclosing, the consolidation of holdings, and the consequent decline of the small farmer (whether owner or tenant), was a secular process, which probably accelerated in the eighteenth century, both in Britain and in France.70Whether compactness of land in fact significantly increased yield has also, however, been more assumed than demonstrated.71

Finally, there is the view that the agricultural social rearrangements led to the elimination of persons from employment on the land, and their consequent availability as urban, industrial manpower. It is in this sense too that an agricultural revolution has been said to be a prerequisite for an industrial revolution. Dobb, for example, argues that the enclosures in England in the late eighteenth century “dislodg[ed] . . . the army of cottagers from their last slender hold on the fringes of the commons, . . . which coincided with a new epoch of industrial expansion.”72 This standard Marxist thesis has been the subject of much refutation, both on the question of how much this process was a violent and repressive one,73 and how much quantitative dislodgement there was at all.74 The latter argument is twofold. On the one hand, it is said that the new husbandry required “more rather than less labour.”75 On the other hand, since there seems to be an unquestioned reduction of the percentage of families in agriculture and an increase in the numbers in industry,76 it is argued that it is population growth which explains the source of the increased urban laboring population.77 Of course, the two theses—forced eviction and demographic overflow—are by no means incompatible. But it is seldom observed that both hypotheses run against the argument of British exceptionalism. If it were demographic growth that led to the expansion of an urban labor force, wherein lay the special advantage of Great Britain in the eighteenth century? And if forced eviction explains Britain’s advantage, how do we account for the absence of evidence of a labor shortage in continental industries?78 As the French like to say: of two things, one. Either there was a different outcome in Britain than on the continent (the “first industrial revolution”) which is then explained by a factor or set of factors peculiar to Great Britain; or the process is a more general one, in which case we must look more closely at how different the outcome was. The same thing is true if we push the argument one step backward, in terms of an agricultural revolution which precedes an industrial revolution. We find ourselves, as we have already suggested, before the two questions: to what degree did the phenomenon take place; and to the extent that it did, how different was Great Britain?

We have mentioned Morineau’s acute skepticism on the theme of an agricultural revolution in eighteenth-century France. An equally thunderous denunciation of received knowledge about English agriculture has been made by Kerridge, who has suggested that the agricultural revolution took place there much earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that “in their truly modest proportions, the agricultural advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fall nicely into place as things secondary in importance to the revolutions in industry and transport.”79 Strangely, however, in his riposte, Mingay (who is one of Kerridge’s main targets) salvages the late eighteenth century by enclosing it as a segment of an agricultural revolution that was “a long drawn-out process of gradual technological and institutional change” running from the later seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries,80 an argument which considerably reduces the case for a “revolution” more localized in time.

Dovring suggests a similar skepticism for western Europe as a whole in the eighteenth century. He too finds no changes in agriculture “at anything resembling the scale and pace of the industrial revolution.” He has, however, a simple explanation for why we have believed there was an agricultural revolution in Britain. He suggests that the changes that did occur there were “better publicized” than those on the Continent, and that “this, plus the seductive analogy of industrial and agricultural revolution, may have led us to exaggerate the depth no less than the originality of what took place.”81

If the specificity of British demography and British agriculture are thrown into doubt as explanations of the industrial revolution, there remains one explanation of some weight that could be put forward: British culture, or some element therein that would explain the existence of a greater entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of arguing this with the circular reasoning of the somewhat ethereal realm of national character, let us look at it in terms of its presumed institutional expression: the existence of a more liberal state structure (derived from history and considered to be the outcome of a cultural thrust).

The orthodox view, if one may be permitted to call it that, is that the industrial revolution in Great Britain “occurred spontaneously, without government assistance,”82 or, more strongly, “without any help.”83 There are some who are less categorical, and who are willing to acknowledge a role for government in the establishment of the “market environment” itself, through the creation of such prerequisites as political stability, administrative unification, the common law, and a sympathetic attitude toward business interests. Supple, for example, concludes: “The state did play an important, albeit indirect, role in the pioneer Industrial Revolution.” Still, he adds: “The fact remains, however, that the role was indirect.”84

If one looks more closely at the presumed liberalism of the British state in the eighteenth century compared to others (and particularly to France), it comes down to two theses: the British state regulated less and it taxed less. However, the major role of Parliament in the enclosures of land can scarcely be offered up as an instance of the absence of state intrusion into the economy. Indeed, it is clear that, in agriculture, the British state excelled in regulating the social relations of production. It may be proferred that this regulation was aimed at removing the shackles of customary constraints, but clearly more was involved than a simple act of legal permissiveness of market transactions. This is equally true with the removal of the market-constraining role of guilds. Once again, state intrusion was essential. Indeed, Milward and Saul offer us as an alternative general hypothesis about Europe as a whole that “where the central government was most powerful after 1750 the guilds and corporations were weakest.”85 Once again, however, this is a regulation presumably aimed at freeing the market.

There was, however, more direct intervention, less in the home market than in the world market. Protectionism played no small role even in that epitome of the newer and freer of industries, cotton production in Great Britain. Mantoux is quite categoric on the subject.86 Furthermore, it would be a mistake to see the government’s regulatory role limited to protection. For as the protection became less necessary, intrusion at home into the production process became a growing reality. Brebner doubts even that there was ever a moment of true laissez faire in Britain: “As the state took its fingers off commerce during the first half of the nineteenth century, it simultaneously put them on industry and its accompaniments.”87

Finally, it is not the case that the state was absent as a source of financing for industrial enterprise in Great Britain. No doubt the money did not come directly from state banks but, in practice, as Pressnell has noted, “a considerable volume of public money swelled the funds of private bankers, and in this indirect fashion helped to fructify private enterprise.”88

If the British state was less of a model of noninterference than it is often asserted or even assumed to be, what are we to say of the view that it was the relative thinness of the British bureaucracy and consequent lower tax load that accounts for British advantage, once again especially over the French?89 This truth, once sanctified by every textbook, has recently come under a heavy barrage from both sides of the Channel—by Mathias and O’Brien in Great Britain and by Morineau in France. In each case, a close look at the fiscal and budgetary data of the two countries in the eighteenth century leads them to invert the traditional hypothesis. Mathias and O’Brien find that the British tax burden was “rising more rapidly than the French” throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, although, up to the 1790s “not dramatically so.” However, after that, the British tax burden pulled far ahead.

Thus, in Britain the increasing pace of industrial growth, urbanisation and population growth after 1775 . . . were processes taking place in a context of a steeply rising real burden of taxation. And the rate of increase of this burden was much faster than in France.90

Morineau’s comparison, using a somewhat different French data base than Mathias and O’Brien, locates the discrepancy even earlier than 1790. Comparing the two countries between 1725 and 1790, he finds British tax receipts to have risen faster, absolutely and relatively, such that

the subject of the United Kingdom paid higher taxes than the subject of the Most Christian King from the first quarter of the eighteenth century: 17.6 livres tournois, after conversion, against 8.1 (ratio of 2.17 to 1) and a fortiori on the eve of the last decade: 46 livre tournois against 17 (ratio of 2.7 to 1).91

This dramatic reversal of received truths does not stop there. Traditionally, one thought British tax burdens not only less heavy than French in the eighteenth century, but more equitable. The argument was that the French fiscality gave a greater role to direct taxation, and that direct taxation is inherently less just because it is less progressive. This was thought to be particularly so in the French case because of the taille, with its exemptions for the nobility and the clergy and even for some bourgeois. But, as Morineau notes, the fiscal role of the taille was not that central. Indeed, it diminished in the eighteenth century and represented only 15% of all receipts in 1788.92 The indirect British taxes were, in turn, scarcely progressive, falling as they did mainly “upon consumption and demand, rather than upon savings and investment.”93

What conclusion is to be drawn from this? For Morineau, it is that equality existed neither in Great Britain nor in France, and even more important that the two modes of taxation (which he explains largely in terms of historical possibilities) had “almost the same level of efficacity, mutatis mutandis, in relation to taxable revenue.”94 Mathias and O’Brien are willing to go further and “raise the possibility” that, both in terms of direct and indirect taxes, French taxation “might on investigation turn out to be less regressive” than British.95

If this is so, then one question remains: whence the misperception? The main answer to this question has been in terms of the absence of formal exemptions in Great Britain which “produced less resentment,” and the fact that the direct taxes “remained ‘invisible’ when passed on as an element in rents.”96 This is to analyze the misperception as historical in origin. But perhaps it is historiographical, especially if we notice Dovring’s suggestion of a parallel misperception in agriculture.

We have taken a long detour through the “causes” of the “first industrial revolution” without attending to the explicandum. We must now look at the nature of the beast itself. What industrial revolution? The answer is, of course, that a series of innovations led to the flourishing of a new industry in cotton textiles, primarily in England. This industry was based on new and/or improved machines and was organized in factories. Simultaneously, or soon thereafter, there was a similar expansion and mechanization of the iron industry. What is said to have made this process different from that associated with any previous set of innovations in production was that it “trigger[ed] a process of cumulative, self-sustaining change.”97 The problem with this latter concept is not only that it is difficult to operationalize, but that it is also controversial to date. It is, for example, a central thesis of this work that cumulative, self-sustaining change in the form of the endless search for accumulation has been the leitmotiv of the capitalist world-economy ever since its genesis in the sixteenth century. We have specifically argued that the long stagnation of the seventeenth century, far from being a break in this cumulative process, was an integral part of it.

Let us therefore look more closely at the social reorganization that may be attributed to those innovations. The innovations of this epoch do not seem to have affected fundamentally the capital–labor ratio in existence for a long time before. Some innovations were labor saving, but many others were capital saving. Even the railroads, which come at the very end of this period, while capital intensive, were capital saving for the economy as a whole because the improved transport permitted manufacturers to reduce stocks and thereby bring down their capital–output ratio “in spectacular fashion.”98 This seems to be what Deane means when she insists that in the period 1750–1850 there was “capital widening” as opposed to “capital deepening” in production.99

What permits this capital widening, the “gains in aggregate output”? Landes has an answer: “the quality of the inputs,” that is, “the higher productivity of new technology and the superior skills and knowledge of both entrepreneurs and workers.”100 No doubt, this is true, but it is always true of a phase of expansion in the world-economy that the leading industries are high-profit industries precisely because of higher productivity which translates into lower costs, and is made possible by a temporary market monopoly of “skills and knowledge.” The question remains whether there was anything very special about this period.

Was there then a scientific or technological breakthrough? The historians of science have seldom credited this particular period as being some sort of turning point. The seventeenth or the twentieth centuries would seem better candidates than the 1750–1850 period in this regard. Furthermore, the historiographic debate on the relative role of science and technology in the industrial revolution seems to have been concluded strongly in favor of technology.101

There must then have been a technological breakthrough. The list of actual inventions is familiar: from Jethro Tull’s seed drill in 1731 to the threshing machine in 1786; from Kay’s fly shuttle in 1733 to Hargreaves’s jenny in 1765, Arkwright’s water frame in 1769, Crompton’s mule in 1779, culminating in Roberts’s fully self-acting mule in 1825; from Darby’s coke-smelted cast iron in 1709 to Cort’s puddling in 1784; and perhaps, above all, Watt’s steam engine in 1775.102 This series of inventions represents the heart of the case for British exceptionalism. These machines were invented in England and not in France or elsewhere.103 They are what account for Britain’s triumph in the world market in cotton and iron.

The story of cotton comes first. Until the late eighteenth century, textiles meant first of all wool and secondly linen. Cotton textiles were manufactured, but in terms of total production they represented a relatively small percentage of the whole, and furthermore a large part of what was supplied to the European market was manufactured in India. Indeed, this latter fact provided a considerable impetus to innovations in cotton textile technology: “machines—which alone could effectively compete with Indian textile workers,” says Braudel.104 For the new cotton technology was, above all, labor saving.105

Since it was woollen textiles and not cotton that was the main industry of western Europe in the early eighteenth century, and since the eighteenth century prior to the 1770s was a time of significant expansion of the woollen textile industry,106 it may be asked—it often has been asked—why the technical innovations did not occur first in woollen textiles.

There are various explanations offered for this conundrum. One traditional explanation is the greater freedom of cotton (as opposed to wool and linen) textiles from guild supervision.107 But, as Landes says, “the argument will not stand scrutiny,”108 since wool was free in England and cotton not so new. Landes offers in its stead two others: cotton was easier to mechanize,109 and the market for cotton goods was more elastic. But ease of mechanization runs against the grain of the hypothesis of a technological breakthrough,110 and ignores the fact that in the early eighteenth century some progress was in fact being made in wool technology, and indeed in France.111

An argument of elasticity of market raises the question of why this should be so, especially if we remember that one of the reasons for the success of English new draperies (wool) in the sixteenth century was also the elasticity of its market.112 Elasticity of market usually refers to the potential market of new customers at lower prices. But if the idea is extended to the ability to acquire new markets by the political elimination of rivals, it may well be that cotton textiles were more “elastic” than woollen textiles at this time from the point of view not only of British but of all of western Europe’s producers. For in wool they competed against each other and were fairly certain that innovations could and would be rapidly copied. In cotton, however, western Europe (collectively) competed against India113, and was eventually able to ensure politically that innovations did not diffuse there.

The other great arena of innovation was iron. Iron was, of course, like textiles, one of the traditional industries of the European world-economy. The main utility of iron hitherto had been in ironwares, both in the household and in armaments. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, two additional outlets of consumption for iron became significant: machinery and transport. Each of the three outlets is said to have played a role in turn in Britain’s economic expansion. Davis attributes to the growing demand of the North American colonies for ironwares in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century the pressure to seek economies of scale which, once achieved, lowered costs and thereby in turn “stimulate[d] demand further.”114 Bairoch makes the case that it was the growing use of iron, first in agriculture, then in textile machinery, which is this further demand.115 And, of course, it would be the railroads in the 1830s that would provide the base for the true expansion of the iron and steel industry, its transformation into the leading industry of the nineteenth-century world-economy. The development of railroads is in turn linked to the massive expansion of mining operations in coal and iron which made the heavy capital investment in transport worthwhile,116 first in canals,117 then in railways.

Hence, the rise of coal as the basic fuel of energy production is intertwined with the expansion of the iron industry and its technological advances. Coal too was nothing new. It was, however, in the eighteenth century that it became a major substitute for wood as a fuel. The reason is very elementary. Europe’s forests had been steadily depleted by the industrial production (and home heating) of previous centuries. By 1750, the lack of wood had become “the principal bottleneck of industrial growth.”118 England’s shortage of timber had long been acute and had encouraged the use of coal already in the sixteenth century, as well as a long-standing concern with coal technology.119 A new technology was needed that would change high-cost industry into a low cost one. The “efficient” use of coal, along with the steam engine to convert the energy, was the solution.120

Landes says, quite correctly, that the “use [of coal and steam], as against that of substitutable power sources, was a consideration of cost and convenience.”121 In seeking to explain why Darby’s method of coke smelting, invented in 1709, was not adopted by others in England for half a century, Hyde suggests the explanation was purely and simply “costs.”122 This throws some light on the question of why coal technology was not similarly developed in France in the eighteenth century. Landes seems to think that Britain’s choice was “indicative of a deeper rationality,” whereas France “obdurately rejected coal—even when there were strong pecuniary incentives to switch over to the cheaper fuel.”123 Milward and Saul see it, however, as a “proper reaction” to an “expensive process producing poorer iron” which made no sense as long as the French were not confronted by the acute shortage of wood faced by Britain.124

In this picture of the two great industrial expansions—cotton and iron—one of the subordinate but important debates has been which of the two was the “crucial” one. There are some important differences in structure between the two industries and their technologies. The inventions in cotton textiles were mechanical in nature and essentially labor saving. Those in the iron industry were largely chemical and improved both quantity and quality of output without immediately diminishing the use of labor.125 The changes in textile technology led to the end of the putting-out system and the use of factories, but factories had already been the mode for the iron industry since the sixteenth century.126

These differences are linked to what we think of as “revolutionary” in the “first industrial revolution.” The rise of the British cotton textile industry involved essentially two changes. First, it meant a major shift in the organization of work (the relations of production) in the then prime industry of the world. Second, it was integrally and visibly linked to the structure of the world market. The raw materials were entirely imported and the products “overwhelmingly sold abroad.” Since, therefore, control of the world market was crucial, Hobsbawm draws the conclusion that there was room for only one “pioneer national industrialization,” which was that of Great Britain.127 Cotton textiles were crucial precisely because they restructured this world-economy. Lilley, however, is skeptical of the importance given to cotton. Looking ahead, he argues that one can “imagine” sustained growth without cotton textiles, but “without an expansion in iron it would have been inconceivable.”128 This debate is revealing of the fluidity (or the fuzziness) of the way the concept of industrial revolution has been employed.

A key example is the commonplace argument that the industrial revolution in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is revolutionary in that it marked the creation of the factory as the framework for the organization of work in industry. But on the one hand we know that there had been factories (in the sense of physical concentration under one roof of multiple workers paid by one employer) before this time.129 On the other hand, the extent of the introduction of the factory system at this time can easily be overstated, even for Britain.130

Of course, there was a shift in textiles from rural to urban sites of production. (The same shift had, let us recall, also occurred in the sixteenth century only to shift back in the seventeenth.) Whether there was at this time truly a shift in manpower allocation is more doubtful. Whereas previously a rural worker spent part of his time on agriculture and part on textile production, now there was greater specialization. But the “global time” devoted to agriculture and industry by British workers may at first have remained approximately the same.131 Since, in addition, these early factories were “not invariably that much more efficient,”132 we must ask why the shift occurred at all, especially since the entrepreneur was losing that great advantage of the putting-out system, the fact that the workers were not only “cheap,” but also “dispensable.”133 Landes himself gives us the key explanation. At a time of a “secularly expanding market,” the entrepreneur’s major concern was not dispensing with his workers but expanding his output, at least extensively, and countering “the worker’s predilection for embezzlement,” especially when, because of rising prices, “the reward for theft was greater.”134

We must now face up to the central assertion about the “first industrial revolution”: that there was one in Great Britain and not one in France (or elsewhere). From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, this was widely accepted as an elementary truism by world scholarship. Paul Mantoux published an elegy to the industrial revolution in Britain, and Henri Sée wrote that “machinism” in France at the end of the Ancien Régime was “sporadic” and “at its beginnings” and that “only a few industries . . . [had begun] to be transformed,”135 all this by comparison with Great Britain.

Superior British economic growth has traditionally been the subject not of demonstration but of explanation. Kemp’s version of explanations is archetypical. Economic growth on a broad front is “conditioned in large part by an aptitude” which the British had, while the French, even in the nineteenth century, continued to suffer from the “historical carry over” of a socioeconomic structure which “inhibited” them.136 Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun to throw doubt on the truism of British superiority. They start with an alternative truism: “France was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the premier industrial power in the world.”137 Furthermore, it is argued that industrial product surpassed agricultural product earlier in France than in Great Britain.138 If one can use such a concept as “take-off,” the argument continues, it occurred in France “towards the middle of the eighteenth century” or “at the very latest, about 1799,” but more probably at the earlier date.139 This whole line of argument is supported by an accumulation of considerable quantitative data which bear directly on the key period under debate.140 From these data O’Brien and Keyder are led to reject the whole concept of French “relative backwardness” and to conclude rather that “industrialization in France simply took place in a different legal, political and cultural tradition.”141

There are two ways to challenge the concept of a “first industrial revolution” in Great Britain. One is to suggest, as we have just seen, that the differences between Great Britain and France at that time was small, or at least smaller than is required by the concept. The second, however, is to raise the question of whether there was an industrial revolution at all. There is the suggestion that there were earlier industrial revolutions—in the thirteenth century142 or in the sixteenth.143 There is the contrary suggestion that the really revolutionary changes came later, in the mid-nineteenth century, or even in the twentieth.144 The most extreme of these suggestions is the argument that technological revolutions occurred in the period 1550–1750, and after 1850, but precisely not in the period 1750–1850.145

The suggestion that there were earlier and later industrial revolutions blends easily into the suggestion that there was a longer one. Already, in 1929, Beales, in reviewing the literature, argued that the extensions backward and forward had eliminated the “cataclysmic character” attributed to the industrial revolution.146 The consequent acerbic comment of Heaton seems pertinent: “a revolution which continued for 150 years and had been in preparation for at least another 150 years may well seem to need a new label.”147

The concept of “protoindustrialization” serves virtually as a belated response to Heaton’s appeal. By creating a new term for “a first phase which preceded and prepared modern industrialization proper”—that is, the phase of “market-oriented, principally rural industry”—Mendels has attempted to retain the specificity of a more narrowly delimited and time-enclosed industrial revolution while accepting simultaneously the emphasis on the gradualness of the process.148 He is even able to argue that the use of this concept can resolve the debate on the superiority of British to French industry in this period by reducing it to a semantic quarrel.149 What he cannot answer thereby is Garden’s query: “is the vigor of change a consequence of the strength of the industrial sector, or on the contrary of its structural weakness in the eighteenth century?”150

There are other ways to respond to the argument of gradualism. One is that of Landes, who says it is an artifact of surface descriptions and of unchanging nomenclature.151 A second is that of Hobsbawm, who singles out a period of “triumph” within the longer, more gradual process.152 A third is that of Schumpeter, who says that both the thesis of revolution and of evolution are correct here (as always), since it is merely a matter of a microscopic versus a macroscopic perspective.153

And yet one wonders whether all this does not add up to putting in doubt the heuristic value of the concept of the industrial revolution. Nef takes a strong negative position:

There is scarcely a concept in economic history more misleading than one which relates all the important problems of our modern civilization to economic changes that are represented as taking place in England between 1760 and 1832. There is scarcely a concept that rests on less secure foundations that one which finds a key to the understanding of the modern industrialized world in those seventy-two years of English economic history.154

I share Nef’s view that the concept of the “industrial revolution” and its almost inevitable correlate, that of the “first industrial revolution” of Great Britain, is profoundly misleading. No amount of patchwork, by extending it in time, by making it into a two-stage process, by distinguishing between slow quantitative accretion and qualitative breakthrough, will salvage it, because it starts from the premise that what explains British “advantage” is a constellation of traits which are absolute when what we need to locate is a constellation of positions which are relational within the framework of a world-economy. It is the world-economy which develops over time and not subunits within it.

The question is not why Great Britain outdistanced France or any other country (to the degree that it did, and, however, one measures the “outdistancing”), but rather why the world-economy as a whole developed in the way that it did at any particular point in time (and here we take the period 1730–1840), and why at this time there resulted a greater concentration of the most profitable economic activities within particular state boundaries (and why more capital accumulated therein) than within other state boundaries.

Briavoinne in 1839 stated more simply than we do now what was going on:

The sphere of labor grew larger; the means of production (exécution) were in the process of being multiplied and simplified each day a bit more. Population grew consequently through the diminution of the mortality rate. The treasures found in the earth were exploited better and more abundantly; man produced and consumed more; he became more rich. All these changes constitute the industrial revolution.155

If you then ask Briavoinne what accounts for this revolution, he explains it by three key inventions: firearms, the compass, and the printing press.156 We are thus referred back to a previous moment in time, the moment precisely of the creation of a capitalist world-economy several centuries earlier.

The “first industrial revolution” and the French Revolution refer presumably to event-periods coterminous in time. This has often been noted and the expression, “the age of revolutions,” has sometimes been used to designate this period. The temporal linkage is in fact reinforced by a conceptual linkage, which has been less frequently discussed. To be sure, many authors have remarked that the locution “industrial revolution” emerged out of “a very natural association”157 of the rapid industrial changes with the political changes of the French Revolution. But the converse is also true. Our perceptions of the French Revolution have come to be framed centrally by our perceptions of the industrial revolution.

The French Revolution incarnates all the political passions of the modern world, more so perhaps even than its only real rival as a symbolic event, the Russian Revolution. It is perhaps the one theme of modern history about which so many historiographies have been written that it is time for someone to do a historiography of the historiography. We shall concentrate here on the question which seems to have been central to the whole debate since the Second World War: was the French Revolution a bourgeois revolution?158

Soboul, who came to be the principal spokesman of the social interpretation of the French Revolution, which he calls the classical interpretation of the French Revolution, asserts that for Jaurès, whom he considers the founder of this school, “the Revolution was but the outcome of a long economic and social evolution which made of the bourgeoisie the mistress of power and the economy.” After Jaurès, says Soboul, came Mathiez and Lefebvre, then Soboul and Rudé.

Thus bit by bit the social interpretation of the French Revolution was perfected by a more than century-long progression. By its constant recourse to erudite research . . . , by its critical spirit, by its attempt at theoretical reflection, by its global vision of the Revolution, it alone merits being considered truly scientific.

This global vision of the Revolution is itself part of a global vision of modern history in which,

the French Revolution is only an episode in the general course of history which, after the revolutions of the Netherlands, England, and America, contributed to bringing the bourgeoisie to (or associating it with) power, and liberated the development of a capitalist economy.159

That the social interpretation of the French Revolution hides fundamentally a Whig interpretation of history, the same which produced the concept of the “first industrial revolution” in England, can be seen in the conclusion Lefebvre came to in the synthesis of his thought he wrote to commemorate the 150th anniversary of 1789:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man remains . . . the incarnation of the whole revolution. . . . America and France, as England before them, are in parallel ways tributary of a current of ideas whose success reflects the rise of the bourgeoisie and which constituted a common ideal in which is resumed the evolution of Western civilization. In the course of centuries, our West, shaped by Christianity, but heir also to the thought of Antiquity, has concentrated its efforts, overcoming a thousand visissitudes, on realizing the liberation of the human person.160

It is perhaps most useful therefore if we begin by spelling out the arguments of the social interpretation in some greater detail.161 There are three fundamental claims in this perspective. The revolution was a revolution against the feudal order and those who controlled it, the aristocracy. The revolution was an essential stage in the transition to the new social order of capitalism on behalf of those who would control it, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie could succeed in the revolution only by appealing for the support of the popular classes who, however, were at best its secondary beneficiaries and were at worst its victims. Furthermore, it is argued that these three statements not only summarize (French) historical reality but they are statements about a particular event-period beginning in 1789 and ending in 1799.162 This event-period is “revolutionary” in that it marked a sudden, qualitative social transformation as opposed to being merely a segment of a secular ongoing sequence of social development.

“At the end of the eighteenth century,” we are told, “the structure of French society remained essentially aristocratic.” The French Revolution marks “the advent of bourgeois, capitalist society” in that it achieved “the destruction of the seigneurial system and the privileged orders of feudal society.”163 Soboul’s assessment of French society is curiously close to that of Landes, except that the difference they both see between Britain and France in the eighteenth century continues to exist for Landes in the nineteenth (and perhaps even the first half of the twentieth) centuries:

The effect of these forces [aristocratic snobbery, bourgeois aspiration, the pressure of literary and artistic opinion] was a general atmosphere [in France] that can best be termed anticapitalistic. The medieval concept of production for use and not for profit, of a static as opposed to a dynamic society, never lost its validity.164

In eighteenth-century France, a France that was not merely “feudal” but said to be undergoing an “aristocratic reaction,” the bourgeoisie found itself deeply frustrated, especially in terms of investment in manufacture because of restrictions imposed on “the elementary capitalist freedoms: the freedom to have labor, the freedom to produce, and the freedom to buy and sell.” The freedoms, it need hardly be added, were presumed to be widely available to the British, who utilized them to launch an industrial revolution. Thus the stage was set, it is argued, for the bourgeoisie to make “its entry on the revolutionary stage.”165

The French bourgeoisie had fortune thrust upon it in 1789, taking (of two possible paths from feudalism to capitalism) the one Marx designated as the “really revolutionizing path.”166 If one asks why the bourgeoisie took this path, Soboul attributes it to the “obstinacy of the aristocracy” (which refused to make concessions) and to the “relentlessness of the peasant masses” (the antifeudal jacqueries of 1789–1793), but not at all to the bourgeoisie “which had not sought the ruin of the aristocracy.”167 Soboul does not tell us if these are the same reasons why the English bourgeoisie took the same “really revolutionizing path.” Nor does he tell us if those countries who followed the other path, the “Prussian path,” were blessed by a less obstinate aristocracy or had a less relentless peasantry.

It is at this point that the exposition becomes a little hazy. Soboul argues quite conventionally that the English revolution was “far less radical” than the French, which was “the most dramatic” of all bourgeois revolutions, indeed the “classic bourgeois revolution.”168 This said, we are left with Hobsbawm’s “gigantic paradox,” that, “on paper” (that is, in accordance with this explanatory model), France was “ideally suited to capitalist development” and should have soared ahead of its competitors. Yet, in fact, its economic development was “slower” than that of others, most particularly than that of Britain. Hobsbawm has an explanation: “the French Revolution . . . took away with the hand of Robespierre much of what it gave with the hand of the Constituent Assembly.”169 If, however, the Jacobins, representatives par excellence of the bourgeois revolution, created by their actions an “impregnable [economically retrogressive] citadel of small and middle peasant proprietors, small craftsmen and shopkeepers” which “slowed [the capitalist transformation of agriculture and small enterprise] to a crawl,”170 one wonders in what sense this was indeed a bourgeois revolution, or if bourgeois, in what sense a revolution?171

It is thus that we come to the most delicate part of the perspective, the role attributed to popular forces. Chateaubriand’s aphorism, “the patricians began the Revolution: the plebeians completed it,”172 is now accepted truth. Where then do the bourgeois come in? Presumably by confounding both: taking the leadership away from the aristocracy in 1789 with the (solicited) support of the popular forces,173 but checking the popular forces by Thermidor, by the defeat of the popular insurrections of Year III, by putting down the Conspiracy of the Equals, and ultimately (perhaps also) by the 18th Brumaire.174

The picture of class forces is one with bourgeoisie in political control everywhere. The Girondins, the Jacobins (Dantonists or “Indulgents,” Robespierrists, Hébertistes), the sans-culottes were all “bourgeois” forces (or in the case of the sans-culottes an alliance of forces led by petty-bourgeois shopkeepers and artisans). These political factions represented increasing degrees of revolutionary militancy, and, to a limited extent, decreasing degrees of bourgeois rank.175

The masses who took so active a role did so under (petty) bourgeois leadership; this was true not only of the sans-culottes, but even of the peasantry, insofar as one means by petty-bourgeois leadership, the leadership of better-off peasants.176 On the one hand, these petty producers (urban and rural) are said to be the vanguard of the revolution and “uncompromisingly antifeudal,”177 (unlike, I presume, other bourgeois who were prone to compromise). On the other hand, it is precisely the concessions that were made to this petty bourgeois group and which proved so durable that are used to explain Hobsbawm’s paradox: the slow pace of nineteenth-century French industrial development and hence the global failure of the French bourgeoisie.

This classical model was disquieting to many in part because of its political implications and usage, in part because of the lack of theoretical rigor behind the facade of a straightforward account, in part because it was thought to be inconsistent with some of the empirical realities. In any case, it has been subjected to a massive attack on all fronts since the 1950s: from the proponents of the Atlantic thesis (Godechot, Palmer), from the skeptics about the role attributed to the bourgeoisie in the Revolution (Cobban, Furet), and from those who have been undertaking to reassess the traditional descriptions of eighteenth-century France, in particular, of the role of the aristocracy in the functioning of the economy.

The Atlantic thesis is essentially that the French Revolution is one part of a larger whole, that “great revolutionary movement which affects the whole Western world.” This larger whole includes, notably, the American Revolution but also the various Latin American revolutions, that of Haiti, and revolutions in almost every European country in the late eighteenth century. The French Revolution is said to be “of the same nature” as these others, only “infinitely more intense.”178 Having made this assertion, the proponents of the Atlantic thesis are less revisionist of the classical interpretation than is sometimes thought.179 This singular revolution of the West is defined by the Atlanticists as a “ ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’ ” revolution,180 a “democratic” revolution, in which “democrats” were fighting against “aristocrats.”181 Furthermore, the Atlanticists interpret the Jacobin phase conventionally as the “revolutionizing of the revolution,”182 a revolution which was, however, “radical at the very beginning.”183 Jacobin radicalism is explained, at least in part, by the “class struggle.”184

Given that the Atlantic thesis utilizes the key premises of the social interpretation—that the revolution was one of the bourgeoisie against the artisocracy, that it was a necessary mode of transition, that the Jacobins incarnate its most radical form—why does Soboul hurl anathema upon it and charge that it “empties [the French Revolution] of all specific content,”185 especially since the Atlanticists present a sympathetic picture of the Revolution? The answer seems very clear: the Atlanticist version “dissociates” the French and Russian Revolutions, seeing the one as indigenous and the other as reactive (to “backwardness”), one as part of the eighteenth-century “Revolution of the Western world” and the other as part of the twentieth-century “Revolution of the non-Western.”186 Atlanticism, therefore, ends up more as an implicit reinterpretation of the Russian Revolution than of the French.

This concern with the Russian Revolution is, of course, not far from the minds as well of those who challenge the concept of a “bourgeois revolution,” but they go more for the jugular. “Everything is derived from Cobban,” it has been said.187 It is more reasonable to argue that everything is derived from Tocqueville’s basic sense that “the Revolution did not overturn, it accelerated.”188 The key operation is to insist upon looking beyond the event-period of the French Revolution itself to the longer sweep, backward and forward, of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, which encompasses “a slow but revolutionary mutation” resulting from the “plurisecular” development of capitalism.189 Furet makes the telling point that, given the premises of the tenants of the social interpretation, they should welcome rather than resist this reorientation of temporal perspective. “If one insists on a conceptualization in terms of ‘mode of production’, one has to take as the object of study a period infinitely vaster than the years of the French Revolution by themselves.”190

The central case against considering the French Revolution a bourgeois revolution is that by the eighteenth century France was no longer a feudal country in any meaningful sense. Cobban quotes a legal treatise of the time to argue that seigniorial rights were merely “a bizarre form of property.” It follows then that the push to increase seigniorial dues which constituted the largest part of the feudal or aristocratic “reaction” was “much more commercial than feudal.”191

The argument consists of two parts. The first is to assert that many seigniors, even most seigniors, functioned in the economic arena as bourgeois, and that it is “scarcely stretching terminology” to define the nobility as “successful bourgeois.”192 Against the “false” traditional picture of the provincial French noble as “indolent, dull and impoverished,” he should be seen as being more often than not an “active, shrewd, and prosperous landowner,”193 whose improving role in agriculture has been “too often depreciated” in comparison to the “sometimes exaggerated” role of the English noble.194 Thus, there were “nobles who were capitalists,” and these were to be found in the “highest ranks” of the nobility.195 If one analyzes carefully seigniorial balance-sheets, it will be seen that feudal dues, as opposed to capitalist profit, “counted strictō sensū often [only] for a small part or even a very small part” of total income.196 It was indeed, as Bloch argued quite early, the extension of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had revalidated economically “feudal” privilege:

In a world more and more dominated by an economy that was capitalist in form, privileges originally accorded to the heads of a few small involuted village communities, came little by little to take on a previously unsuspected value.197

Nor was this capitalist activity of the nobility limited to agriculture. Goubert argues that “a large proportion” of the nobility became significantly interested in manufactures in the eighteenth century, thus “installing themselves early on in the economy of the future and preparing its ‘take-off’.”198

The second part of the argument is to insist that the “aristocratic reaction” has been mislabeled. What observers term a “reaction” reflects primarily the improvement in the market position of “lessors (bailleurs) vis-à-vis lessees (preneurs).”199 It was, in addition, the result not of backwardness but of technological progress. Improved methods of surveying and cartography permitted the seigniors to benefit from “a sort of perfecting of management techniques.”200 Far from there being a “closure” of the nobility, the problem was its “opening, too great for the cohesion of the order, too narrow [nonetheless] for the prosperity of the century.”201 And far from this being a period of great frustration for the French bourgeoisie, the proper theme of the eighteenth-century French history is “the rise of the Third Estate.”202

One can hear the response of the advocates of the social interpretation. These bourgeois who “rose” in the Ancien Régime sought to “aristocratize” themselves as rapidly as possible. Their ideal was vivre noblement. It was only after 1789 that a new kind of bourgeoisie emerged, one ready to live as reinvesting bourgeois (one is almost tempted to add the refrain, one that was infused with a Protestant ethic).

Three kinds of answers are given to this retort. First, vivre noblement was not necessarily incompatible with continuing a profit-oriented mercantile activity.203 Second, the implicit group of comparison, British bourgeois (even British industrialists), also shared the ideal of vivre noblement.204 Third, the pattern did not change in France after the Revolution.205

If it is indeed “not possible to discern a fundamental cleavage at this time between the bourgeoisie and the nobility,”206 what then explains the French Revolution, since surely something occurred in 1789? This argument thus far has eliminated class antagonism as an explanation, since the economic roles of the social categories, noble and bourgeois, are considered to have been highly congruent.207 Tocqueville also eliminates as an explanation a difference in political rights—“neither [aristocrat nor bourgeois] had any”; and a difference in privileges—“those of the bourgeoisie [in the Ancien Régime] were [also] immense.” This leaves only the difference that nobility and bourgeoisie led “separate [social] lives.”208 Tocqueville concluded nonetheless that the Revolution was the “natural, indeed inevitable, outcome” of the various particular aspects of the Ancien Régime, “so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen.” The Revolution occurred through the coming together of the two “ruling passions” of eighteenth-century France, the “indomitable hatred of inequality” and the “desire to live . . . as free men.”209

The recent Tocquevillians in France have continued this explanatory model, combining an amorphous melange of particulars210 and the emphasis on a change in values.211 But they have made one major change in the argument. The Revolution is no longer seen as “inevitable.” It has now become an “accident,” the coincidental result of the telescoping of three revolutions (that of the Assembly, of Paris and the towns, and of the countryside) into a single time period; it was “the popular intervention that transformed the rhythms of the revolution.”212 The shift in emphasis is important analytically but understandable politically. Tocqueville was seeking to persuade conservative forces to accept the Revolution, which was not as bad, he said in effect, as they thought, whereas his successors were seeking to persuade liberal intellectuals that all was not virtue in the Revolution (the Girondins sí, Robespierre no). As Furet himself says, “for almost 200 years, the history of the Revolution has never been other than an account of causation, thus a discourse about identity.”213

By renouncing the concept of a bourgeois revolution, Furet and Richet wish to identify instead with a “liberal revolution,” a revolution they say began earlier in 1789. They are quite explicit about what is to them the most significant intellectual question concerning the French revolution:

Let us dare ask the question: as a result of what accidents did the liberal revolution fail in the short run, that revolution which was launched (enfantée) in the eighteenth century, and would be finally achieved decades later by the French bourgeoisie?214

August 10, 1792 marks for them the date that began the great “dérapage”215 from the path of liberalism which reached its apogee during the Terror, that “brief parenthesis and counter-current” in the “immense thrust of liberalism” spanning the period 1750 to 1850.

It was, it seems, the patriotic fervor of the masses which undid liberalism.216 Furet and Richet reproach Soboul for analyzing Year II as an “annunciation” of 1871 or 1917.217 But is not their analysis equally a certain reading of the history of the twentieth century? In any case, they draw one conclusion from their analysis of this period which is impeccably Soboulian—that, after Year II, the bourgeoisie rediscovered its true objectives: “economic freedom, individualism in property, limited suffrage.”218 But if that is the case, the critique of the concept of a bourgeois revolution loses some of its force. To be sure, the dating of Furet’s “liberal” revolution is somewhat different, somewhat longer, than Soboul’s “bourgeois” revolution. It is less political, more “cultural” perhaps. And the two analyses are in profound disaccord about the interpretion of Year II. The implications once again for the study of the Russian Revolution are different. But the revisionist and the social interpretation of what this historic turning point represents for France are less antithetical than all the fanfare might lead one to believe.

That this is so can be seen by the numerous attempts to find a mode of reconciling the two analyses. These attempts share a common characteristic: they seek to incorporate what seems correct in the critique of the concept of the bourgeois revolution without incorporating the political implications that have been drawn from this critique.

Robin accepts the critique of Furet that, if one is analyzing a change in the mode of production, it is necessarily an analysis that must be made about a long term. A social revolution cannot transform the “rhythm of productive forces; it can only render such a transformation possible.” It was not the social revolution but the industrial revolution which permitted the passage from a formal to a real subsumption of labor, and this industrial revolution was “clearly posterior to the social revolution.”219

Furthermore, it is true that the difference between the nobility and the bourgeoisie in economic roles in the eighteenth century had become relatively minor. Both were “mixed classes,”220 and most seigniors were transforming themselves into capitalist landlords. Once one asserts that France was following neither the English path nor the “Prussian path” but represented an in-between case, and that France was in a typical stage of “transition” from feudalism to capitalism going on for several centuries before and after the French Revolution,221 it is no longer difficult to reconcile the perspective of the long term and a Marxist analysis.222

There is a second mode of reconciling the two. Zapperi asserts that it is correct to say that the quarrel between the Third Estate and the nobility was merely a quarrel between competing elites, both of which for Zapperi were, however, precapitalist elites. The French Revolution was not a bourgeois revolution because France was still in a precapitalist stage of its history. To see the “vulgar polemics” of an urban mercantile stratum quarreling with a landed aristocracy as a class struggle requires a “strong dose of imagination.” The bourgeoisie do not deserve the merit of attributing to them a “revolutionary path”; they achieved their ends “over long centuries” by expanding their role in civil society. To designate the French Revolution as a social revolution is to project backwards by analogy the proletarian revolution, whereas the bourgeoisie had not yet even created a situation in which the working class lived entirely off the sale of its labor force. The Soboulian scenario turns out to be a myth for Zapperi too, but one perpetrated by the Abbé Siéyès more than by Marx, although Marx played into the hands of “mercantile prejudices.”223

There is a third way to accept the critique of the concept of bourgeois revolution without necessarily endorsing liberalism. It is to remove the bourgeoisie from its pedestal in favor of other groups whose actions are considered more consequential and which may be then said to define the true historical meaning of the event-period. Guérin made this case with some force already in 1946. The French Revolution had a “double character.” It was both a bourgeois revolution and “a permanent revolution in its internal mechanism,” which “bred an embryonic proletarian revolution,” that is, an anti-capitalist revolution.224

Guérin managed to unite Soboul and Furet in opposition to him. They both reject this perception of the role of the sans-culottes, this implicit reading of twentieth-century history. For Soboul, Guérin mistakes for a proletarian avant-garde what is largely “a rear-guard defending their positions in the traditional economy.” The sans-culottes furthermore, says Soboul, were united with the bourgeoisie “on the essential matters, the hatred of the aristocracy and the will to be victorious.”225

For Furet and Richet, too, the sans-culottes were largely rear-guard forces indulging in “Rousseauian” reminiscences, in search of “reactionary” utopias of a past golden age. If, during Year II, the sans-culottes quarreled with the government, it was the doing of their cadres, “a sort of sub-intelligentsia [a petty bourgeoisie] which had emerged out of the stalls and shops,” who were jealous of those who had gained positions during the Revolution. Far from this being a class struggle, embryonic or otherwise, it was a mere power struggle, “a matter of rivalry between competing teams.”226

It is clear now how the Guérin critique bypasses the Soboul—Furet quarrel in an opposite way from those of Robin and Zapperi. The latter agree with Furet that the French Revolution was not a bourgeois revolution in the way Soboul thinks it is, because the full social revolution occurred or was fulfilled after the French Revolution. Guérin however agrees with Soboul that Year II was no “dérapage” because the Jacobins were really no different from the Girondins. This was not, however, because they represented the high point of bourgeois radicalism but because they represented the high point of bourgeois political deception of the masses.227 Robespierre may not incarnate “dérapage” but neither is he a hero for Guérin. The sans-culottes and Babouvism thus become even more central to his story than to that of Soboul (and Cobb, Rudé).228

The Guérin position emphasizes the role of the embryonic proletariat and thereby downplays the extent to which the French Revolution can be defined as primarily a bourgeois revolution. In parallel fashion, others emphasize the role of the peasantry not merely as a set of actors in an additional revolution side by side with the bourgeois revolution but as those who left the strongest mark on the French Revolution, which can be defined as the “first successful peasant revolution of modern times.”229 The peasants were the only group, it is argued, whose gains were not taken away in the Restoration of 1815.

This emphasis has been used to criticize Soboul230 and to criticize Furet.231 But the most important point is that its results in a perspective that sees the French Revolution as an anti-capitalist revolution. Le Roy Ladurie asks whether it would not be better to designate the “revolutionary antiseigniorialism” of the last years of the Ancien Régime as an “anticapitalist reaction,” given the fact that it was against the enclosers, the irrigators, the modernizers that the peasants were reacting, and that where such improving landlords were lacking, as in Brittany, where there was no “penetration in depth” of capitalism, peasants were passive.232 In a similar fashion, Hunecke sees precisely in the rise of laissez faire and the end of the control of bread prices the explanation of “the revolutionary mentality of the masses” which took the form of a “defensive reaction” against free trade and the laws of the market.233

The centrality of the lord–peasant struggle (in the tradition of Barrington Moore) finally leads Skocpol also to insist that the French Revolution was not a “bourgeois revolution” and that it was not comparable to the English Revolution. It was rather the expression of “contradiction centered in the structures of old-regime states.” It was as much or more a “bureaucratic mass-incorporating and state-strengthening revolution as it was (in any case) a bourgeois revolution.” In this sense, the appropriate comparison is to the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century. But neither was it then part of a liberal revolution since the political result of the peasant revolts in the French Revolution was a “more centralized and bureaucratic state, not a liberal-parliamentary regime.”234

What then is this whole argument about? Clearly, the French Revolution did occur and was a monumental “event” in terms of its diverse and continuing consequences for France and the world. It is also undoubtedly a “myth” in the Sorelian sense; to this day it remains politically important, and not only in France, to capture this myth and harness it.

“The revolution,” Clemenceau said in 1897, “is a bloc.” For Cobban, this is the “real fallacy” behind all the particular myths of the French Revolution, the idea that there is a something, one thing, “which you can be for or against.”235 Lefebvre is quite right to retort:

The convocation of the Estates-General was a ‘good tidings’; it announced the birth of a new society, in accordance with justice, in which life would be better; in the Year II, the same myth inspired the sans-culottes; it has survived in our tradition, and as in 1789 and in 1793, it is revolutionary.236

It is because this myth is so powerful that Cobban, instead of denouncing the Revolution as evil in the fashion of the nineteenth-century opponents, seeks to undermine the myth of attacking its credibility, an attack which even a defender of the classical model of the bourgeois revolution like Vidotto admits has been relatively “persuasive.” As Vidotto says, however, to respond to these criticisms by widening the definitions, as some defenders of the concept do, leads to “terminological indeterminacy” and makes the whole explanation incomprehensible. Therefore he finds the concept of the bourgeois revolution in its classical form “an unrenounceable heritage for those who move in a Marxist orbit, and not only for them.”237

But is this heritage unrenounceable for those who wish to hail the “good tidings”? As we have seen, time and again, the interpretations of the French Revolution serve as commentaries on the twentieth century. But may it not be possible that some of our confusions about the twentieth century are due to our misinterpretations of the eighteenth? If so, then to perpetuate models because they represent an “unrenounceable heritage” is to ensure strategic error in the interests of maintaining the form of sentiments that were once useful (but may no longer be so) for collective cohesion. I don’t believe we should try to preserve the image of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution in order to preserve that of the Russian Revolution as a proletarian one. But I also do not believe we should try to create the image of the French Revolution as a liberal one in order to tarnish that of the Russian Revolution as a totalitarian one. Neither category–bourgeois nor liberal—classifies well what did in fact go on.

Furet says, “the Revolution incarnates the illusion of politics; it transforms objective reality (le subi) into subjective consciousness (en conscient).” He reminds us that Marx considered that Thermidor represented the “revenge of real society.”238 He draws from this anti-voluntarist conclusions. But by insisting on reanalyzing the French Revolution in the context both of long-term social change (with its transmutations of the very concept of the bourgeoisie) and of a rupture in the dominant political ideology, he gets closer to the spirit of historical materialism than he believes. I am sometimes tempted to classify Furet as a closet Marxist revolutionary, while identifying Soboul, by his exaltation of Year II and his reification of concepts like bourgeoisie and aristocracy into sociological categories, as a double agent of rampart bourgeois liberalism. By refusing the concept of bourgeois revolution on the grounds of the fluidity of the categories themselves, the “revisionists” of the classic interpretation may be making it possible to see how a process of class polarization actually operates—through long, sinuous, persistent restructuring in which the French Revolution plays its role but is not a decisive turning point (drums roll!).

Marx had one major fault. He was a little too Smithian (competition is the norm of capitalism, monopoly a distortion) and a little too Schumpeterian (the entrepreneur is the bearer of progress). Many twentieth-century Marxists no longer share these prejudices, but they think that this is because capitalism has evolved. Once, however, one inverts these assumptions, then the use of a dialectical and materialist framework for analysis pushes one to a very different reading of the history of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, even of the nineteenth, than Marx himself made for the most part.

But surely, I can hear the objection, the French Revolution spoke the language of anti-feudalism. Serfdom was finally abolished; guilds were finally forbidden; the aristocracy and the clergy finally ceased to be privileged orders. Yes, all this is more or less true. It is certainly the case that, in the Ancien Régime, at a time when the ideology of “orders” was dominant, even the wealthiest of haut-bourgeois, insofar as they were not ennobled, suffered from social disdain and material discrimination. Nor was it enough to purchase nobility. In 1781, the loi Ségur rendered it necessary to be a noble of the fourth generation to become an army officer. Whether this was merely a passing snobbism of the aristocracy of the sword, which would have soon been revoked or ignored, we shall never know. It was nonetheless a fiercely felt irritation by the upper strata of the Third Estate as well as by the recently ennobled nobility of the robe.

And then came the French Revolution. For a few years, on the streets, people were actually stopped and aggressively asked, “Are you of the Third Estate?” and the answer had better be yes. This difficult moment was followed by Thermidor and Napoleon and the Restoration and things were back to normal somewhat. Haut-bourgeois once again sought to obtain noble titles, at least until 1870. And after that, they continued to seek signs of formal social status, as successful bourgeois have since the emergence of capitalism as a world-system.

If, then, anti-feudalism is not what the French Revolution was about, why then the language of anti-feudalism? Braudel has an excellent answer:

Might is not be thought that it was at least partly because the language of capitalism had not found the vocabulary to handle a new and surprising situation, that the French peasant reverted to the familiar old language of anti-feudalism?239

But if this is the answer for the peasantry, how can we explain that the notables of the Third Estate also came to use the same language? One answer is that the noisy quarrel of the “bourgeoisie” and the “aristocracy” was a gigantic diversion, in the two senses of the word diversion: fun and games; and displacement of the attention of others, in this case, the peasants and the sans-culottes.240

Yet, of course, something did change in 1789, and even more in 1791–1793. As Anderson has said, “the whole ideological world of the West was transformed.”241 The transition from feudalism to capitalism had long since occurred. That is the whole argument of these volumes. The transformation of the state structure was merely the continuation of a process that had been going on for two centuries. In this regard Tocqueville is correct. Thus, the French Revolution marked neither basic economic nor basic political transformation. Rather, the French Revolution was, in terms of the capitalist world-economy, the moment when the ideological superstructure finally caught up with the economic base. It was the consequence of the transition, not its cause nor the moment of its occurrence.

The grande bourgeoisie, transposition of the aristocracy in a capitalist world, believed in profit, but not in liberal ideology. La carrière ouverte aux talents, universal truth, the categorical imperative are first of all ideological themes in the narrow sense. They are instrumental, diversionary creeds, not meant to be taken seriously whenever they interfere with the maximal accumulation of capital. Nonetheless, the ideology also reflects the structural endpoint of the capitalist process, the final bourgeoisification of the upper classes, where all advantage will be derived from current position in the economic structure rather than from past position. And the proclamation of the instrumental ideology is itself an important factor in the structural unfolding of this process. What was meant as a screen became over time a constraint.

The French Revolution had, in addition, one further meaning, and this is the sense in which it announced the future. The French Revolution represented the first of the antisystemic revolutions of the capitalist world-economy—in small part a success, in larger part a failure. But the “myth” that it represents is not a bourgeois myth but an anti-bourgeois myth.

The concept of the bourgeois revolution serves ultimately the same function as the concept of the industrial revolution. The latter purports to explain why Great Britain captured a disproportionate amount of world surplus in this particular period, particularly vis-à-vis its chief rival, France. The concept of the bourgeois revolution explains the same phenomenon, using French rather than British data. It tells us why France lost out. France had its “bourgeois revolution” more than a century later than Great Britain, and a “bourgeois revolution” is presumed to be the prerequisite to an “industrial revolution.”

We are in no sense denying that, in the period 1730–1840, Great Britain (or more exactly the bourgeoisie who had their territorial base in Great Britain) gained a major competitive edge over France. We shall now seek to explain how this happened, without having recourse to either of these two interlinked misconceptions, the industrial and the bourgeois revolutions.

STRUGGLE IN THE CORE—PHASE III: 1763–1815

The English printmaker, James Gillray (1757–1815), produced some 1500 satirical prints on contemporary political issues. Pitt and Napoleon were two of his favorite subjects. In this engraved cartoon, “The Plumb-pudding in danger:—or—State Epicures taking un Petit Souper,” published on February 26, 1805 by H. Humphrey, Pitt with a trident fork in the Atlantic Ocean cuts the globe west of Britain from the pole to the equator, obtaining the West Indies. Napoleon, using his sword as a knife, cuts France, Spain, Swiss, Italy, and the Mediterranean from Europe, but misses Sweden and Russia. A subtitle reads: “ ‘The great Globe itself, and all which it inherit’ (Tempest, IV, 1), is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites. . . .”

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 placed Great Britain in an advantageous position to accomplish what it had been seeking to do for a century already—outdistance France decisively at all levels, economically, politically, and militarily.1 It was not, however, until 1815 that this task was accomplished, and it was not easy.

This third and last phase of the continuous and open struggle between the two claimants to hegemony occurred under circumstances of a renewed expansion of the capitalist world-economy, itself the result of the restructuring of this world-economy during the long stagnation of the seventeenth century (which I analyzed in Volume II). This renewed expansion created what Labrousse has called “the great century of prosperity . . . from the 1730’s to just before 1820.”2 Labrousse was speaking primarily of France, but the description applies as well to Great Britain, and indeed for the world-economy as a whole, as we shall see. To be sure, one must always ask, prosperity for whom? Furthermore, the concept of a long upswing does not exclude the existence of cyclical phases within this long upswing, as indeed there were. But during this long period we can nonetheless talk of “a continuous movement of rising production, prices, and revenues.”3

Morineau denounces what he believes is a prevalent “good fairy” explanation of this price rise. He prefers to see it not as one long-term phenomenon but rather as a succession of short-term price rises resulting from poor harvests, linked to each other by an “inertia” that operated against price reductions following each spurt of higher prices (cherté), “which thus had a cumulative effect.”4 This observation, however, does not deny the trend; it is rather a particular mode of explaining it.

To understand this story more clearly, we must begin with the so-called crises d’Ancien Régime, of which this period has been said to be the “last” historical moment—for Europe and perhaps for the whole capitalist world-economy. The crise d’Ancien Régime, as described classically by Labrousse, was a phenomenon of the harvest, of the short term. Its operation depended on the centrality of cereals as a staple of the diet and the rapid response of market prices to shifts in local supply, bread being essential to survival for the mass of the population, and transport being slow and costly. For large producers, a food shortage meant a sudden rise in prices and hence usually a dramatic rise in profits, even if their stock diminished. But for the mass of small producers, the same situation offered not profits but disaster, which at first sight seems paradoxical. The reason is that the harvest of a small producer was divided into multiple (of course, unequal) parts: one part for seed for the following year, one part for tithe, one part (sometimes) for rent in kind, one part for subsistence, and one part for sale on the market. Whenever the harvest was bad, it was the last part which largely or entirely disappeared (as well as perhaps a segment of the part for subsistence). Thus, the sale prices may have been high but the small producer usually had nothing to sell under the circumstance of a poor harvest. Perhaps, even worse, he himself needed to buy in order to eat, and to buy when prices were high.5

For the other small consumers, of course, high prices were equally disastrous. Their expenses suddenly expanded at precisely the point in time when unemployment increased, since a large percentage of salaried work was in fact part-time agricultural work, the need for which diminished precisely because of the same poor harvest. Furthermore, textile producers tended simultaneously to slow down production because of a reduction in their short-term demand caused by the bad harvest, which further increased the degree of unemployment.6

This scarcely sounds like prosperity, which is Morineau’s point. However, it was also not something new in the eighteenth century. The short-term harvest crises had always functioned this way to the extent that the agrarian sector operated with a significant number of small peasants (whether proprietors or tenants), with staples as a large part of the popular diet, and with a high cost of transport of staples. What was less usual was that there was some stickiness in the prices in the years when harvests were good. The advantage to the large landlords (and merchants) of poor harvest years should normally have been compensated by the advantage to the small peasants of good harvest years. In fact, however, as agricultural prices climbed after 1730, so did “rent,” rent owed in one form or another by the small producers to the larger landowners.7

What explains this? A succession of years of bad weather?8 We are often inclined to fall back on this kind of “tempting” explanation, as Vilar calls it. The real question, as he reminds us, is located, however, “at the point of arrival, in the social arena” (that is, at the point of distribution of revenues and payments), and “not at the point of departure, in the climate.”9 This is, of course, absolutely correct, but had the “social arena” changed so much from the previous century that it had created a different economic profile from that of earlier times?

One of the issues that gets lost in this discussion of the crises d’Ancien Régime is one to which, nonetheless, Labrousse himself drew attention early on. While short-term price rises had convulsive effects, and in particular were associated with reduced production, long-term price rises had the opposite significance, “the same significance as today,”10 for they led to long-term increases in production. And this had to do with the difference in the mode of operation of local markets on the one hand (domain, par excellence, of the small producer, though not of him alone), and regional or world-economy-wide markets on the other (domain primarily of the large producer). Crises d’Ancien Régime were phenomena of the local markets. Production for the larger, more distant markets were “orthodox” capitalist phenomena, which operated on the simple principle that higher prices reflected some unfulfilled effective demand in the world-economy and therefore a potential long-term profit for those who were ready to expand production. In relation to this larger arena, climate played a secondary role, even in agriculture. What was crucial rather was the general, rate of accumulation of capital.

We have previously argued11 that, in the long stagnation of the seventeenth century, the core countries reacted by attempting to concentrate all the major sources of capitalist profit within their frontiers: world-market oriented cereals production, the new metallurgical and textile sectors, the new transport infrastructure, and the entrepôts of Atlantic trade. They more or less succeeded in this. Furthermore, in the intracore struggle, the United Provinces, which did best by far initially, was eventually undercut by English and French competition. Between England and France, the struggle was more even and, as of the turn of the eighteenth century, neither could be said to have been significantly stronger than the other within the world-economy. The slow restructuring of the production processes within the core led to some redistribution of revenue within each of these countries such that one could speak of some increased “home” demand and the tentative beginnings of a further expansion of the frontiers of the world-economy. In short, most of the processes we associate with the period after 1750 (technological changes in agriculture and industry, geographical expansion, growing demand within the core) were already occurring in the century previously, albeit at a slower pace.12 However, with the economic expansion of the world-economy, there came to be renewed geographic differentiation of production (specialization) and increased mechanization in the core (the “industrial revolution”).

The main achievement of the long seventeenth century, from the point of view of the core countries, had been the ability of the capitalists of these countries to corner such profits as there were to be had. The main drawback had been the limited overall demand, one of whose signs was the stagnation of population growth. The elimination of marginal producers throughout the world-economy plus the limited redistribution of revenues (primarily in core zones) laid the base for a new era of expansion, which began somewhere in the first half of the eighteenth century, and reached a high level in the second half, culminating in that period of profitable turbulence, the Franco—British wars of 1792–1815.

The traditional correlate of economic expansion (both its evidence and its consequence) is a population upsurge, and there seems to be general agreement that one began circa 1740, give or take 10 years.13 In the previous chapter, we have indicated why the explanation of demographic rise in terms of socioeconomic transformations seems plausible: whether it be via mortality decrease (through better hygiene and more food far more than through better medicine, at this time), or via increased fertility. It is the explanation of fertility that is given pride of place by the majority of current scholars. Flinn is representative when he argues that while mortality remained largely “in God’s sector,” fertility was “entirely in man’s [sic!] sector,”14 the key variable being the age of marriage of women.15 To the evidence of lowered marital age some analysts add the deduced and negative evidence of the decline of the (inferred) rate of contraception (by coitus interruptus) which is believed to have occurred in seventeenth-century England and France as a reaction by the peasantry to hard times.16

In effect, by the reduction of the population in the previous century, the survivors ate better, with the “real wage” level thereby slowly rising. Eventually, this “psychology” of austerity bred its own undoing. When, then, there was a “run of good harvests,”17 which seems to have been the case for the period 1715–1750 (a run itself the consequence in part of improving techniques?), it is easy to see why such a run could ignite the increase in fertility observed.

If England was perhaps a bit more productive as the century began, the literature on England also emphasizes a setback, resulting precisely from this advantage, somewhere in the second quarter of the century: the so-called “agricultural depression,” which was a classic case of a price decline resulting from the good harvests.18 Two important points should be noted, however. One is that the price changes at this time did not seem to disrupt the growth in agricultural output either in terms of labor productivity or per capita production.19 The second is no doubt in part the explanation of the first—the consensus that the 1730s and the 1740s saw a tendency for rents to fall (plus more frequent arrears on rents), and “the granting of various concessions by the landlord to the tenants,”20 such that the period could be considered “a golden age for the agricultural laborer.”21

The low prices of cereals, a phenomenon that spread across Europe from circa 1620 and lasted until circa 1750, thus saw one of its most acute expressions at the end of this period, and particularly in the country which was the largest grain exporter at that point, England. But this long-term decline in prices itself helped to create the sources of new demand (in better distribution of revenue) which gave impetus to the demographic reprise. It also encouraged agricultural capitalists in the core to search for new sources of profit. First, they intensified their efforts to concentrate cash-crop production in their hands and to reduce the share of the direct producers. Second, they sought to capture new sources of profit via innovation in industry, which in turn led to an intensification of the conflict over world markets. Each story needs to be told in turn.

The story of agriculture in the eighteenth century is normally recounted in very different languages in the cases of France and of Great Britain. In France, the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI were marked, it is said, by a “seigniorial reaction,” which in turn is said to have been one of the factors (the key factor?) which explains the outbreak of the French Revolution. In Great Britain, beginning circa 1750, there is said to have occurred a (new) wave of great enclosures, which in turn is said to have been one of the factors (the key factor?) which explains the “first” industrial revolution. But were the “seigniorial reaction” and the “wave of enclosures” so different? I think not.

The eighteenth-century effort to increase rental income and to expand control over land and production in the core countries began, in my view, as a modest response to declining profit by large agricultural landowners (akin to the response of eastern European seigniors at the beginning of the seventeenth century). With the demographic upsurge, it became a source of considerable profit in and of itself. That is to say, supply having been at one point excessive became subsequently deficient, and grain prices rose, first slowly, then with momentum, everywhere in the European world-economy, particularly after circa 1750.22

One natural response to a supply gap is normally an effort to increase production through technological improvements. And, indeed, as Abel notes, after 1750 “agriculture became so suddenly the center of interest of cultivated circles that even contemporaries were surprised.”23 But the fact is that, despite the efforts at developing the new techniques of production—constant tillage, new crop rotations, mixed husbandry24—the results were far less dramatic than the “very misleading”25 term, “agricultural revolution,” implies. Obviously, it was not the case that there was no increase in production cr productivity at all. But it can very well have been the case that the population increase outstripped the food supply increase by just enough to provide a base for significant profit but not by so much that the traditional “Malthusian” checks intervened. This would entail, to be sure, a decline in real income of the working strata, and for this there is considerable evidence.

What was the so-called seigniorial reaction in France? It has usually been defined by two central elements: the renewed enforcement of seigniorial dues and privileges which had fallen into disuse or into reduced usage; and the appropriation of common fields by these same seigniors and/or other local large landlords. While, in legal terms, the first operation appealed to a jurisprudence that derived from medieval feudal society (and, therefore, it could perhaps justify the analytic label of “refeudalization”), the second operation went in direct opposition to this same jurisprudence.26 Therefore, even on the face of it, the assertion that the seigniorial reaction represented the last gasp of a feudal regime faces an elementary contradiction. Furthermore, as Forster has suggested, the “reaction” has in fact been “too narrowly understood.”27 It occurred within the context of an expanding world market, to which it was a “comprehensive” reaction, which included as well modern estate management (e.g., accounting, surveying, improved supervision), stocking, speculation, foreclosure, and support for the Physiocratic theory of prices—in short whatever might be expected of entrepreneurs.

The keystone of this “reaction” was located in rent. Rent should not be confused with seigniorial dues, which also expanded during this period, but which only accounted for a small percentage of the total revenue increase. Le Roy Ladurie’s summary of French regional analyses indicates that in a comparison between the 1730s and the 1780s, the largest real increase was in land rent proper—51% in deflated prices, using a weighted index of all agricultural prices. The closest other increase was for tithes paid in money (35%). Revenue from interest on loans also rose significantly, despite an important fall in the interest rate. The weakest sources of increased agricultural revenue, although each still a small increase, were in taxes, tithes paid in kind, and seigniorial dues.28

Who profited from this dramatic rise in agricultural income over a 60-year period? In terms of the rising price level,29 the answer is simple. The winners were those “in command of a marketable surplus” and the losers those “forced to be a purchaser even for part of the year.”30 But in addition to the 80% of the benefit which derived from increased prices, there was the 20% of the benefit that derived from “the extortion of supplementary surplus-value.”31 It is this 20% which reflects the process of transformation of the internal social structure.

At the top of the hierarchy were the large landowners. For the most part, they were noblemen, but in fact, the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France were marked by the relative “ease of transition”32 from the status of commoners to noblemen, for those who were wealthy enough to be large landowners. And in this period in particular, it was the status of large landowner which counted the most in terms of real revenue.33

While the feudal dues played a limited role in direct terms, they could be turned into capitalist profit via the indirect mechanism of farming-out (affermage). For it was not only the central government which had tax farmers; seigniors also “farmed out” their feudal dues. That is to say, the seigniors would each contract with one of more fermiers to pay annually a predetermined sum, which the fermiers in turn collected from the direct producers in kind. It was these fermiers then who actually sold the produce thus collected on the market, which in an era of rising prices, meant that any rise in the prices “benefited the fermier.”34

Side by side with the increased rent which the landlord obtained directly and indirectly went his attempt to increase the size of his domains.35 The main efforts were first the attempts to eliminate the rights of common of shack (vaine pâture), and its extension to neighboring lands, the droit de parcours, which permitted the common feeding of animals on the stubble after the harvest as well as on fallows and waste land36; and second the attempts to divide the commons (communaux) and permit enclosures.

In these efforts, which had at least as long a history in France as in England,37 large landholders in France in the period after 1750 were notably less successful than their English counterparts. A weaker state-machinery in France and a politically weaker peasantry in England led to quite different political results in the two countries. But the converse was also true. English landlords in the period after 1750 were less successful than their French counterparts in the degree to which rents could be raised. The entrenched “rights” of the English tenants to renewal prevented the rapid turnover of tenants, a practice which was “legend” in France.38

If one asks why this were so, one explanation, quite the opposite of the standard one, might be the combination of the greater spread of capitalist values in France (the sanctity of the entrepreneur’s rights of disposition) and its converse, greater endurance of traditional values in England (acquired rights of a sitting tenant) on the one hand, and the weaker ability of the French state (compared to the British) to impose change, on the other. As Forster notes, the efforts by French large-scale tenant farmers engaged in cereals production to obtain tenure security, longer lease terms, and rebates for insurance were considered “unwarranted interference in the freedom of contract.”39

The overall picture on English enclosures is rather clear. There was a considerable acceleration of the pace of enclosures after 1750, largely achieved not through private contract but through Parliamentary decree (that is, via the state). No doubt we are aware today that this is merely the culmination of a three-century-long trend.40 And we are aware today that the long-existing prior system of open fields and scattered strips had not been based merely on the persistence of irrational folly.41 Nonetheless there was an extra spurt of enclosure in the late eighteenth century, occurring primarily on land that lent itself less to the process than the land that had been enclosed previously.42 It is this spurt we have to explain. There is a further problem. As Dahlman argues, if enclosure had been primarily the result of technological change, we should have seen less of it previously than was in fact the case. We consequently need an explanation in terms of a “gradually developing element of change.” He offers us one: “the extent of the market and the influence of relative prices” which require a degree of “specialization” inconsistent with the open field system.43 And if one asks why parliamentary intervention was needed, Deane has a most plausible response: “It is reasonable to suppose that private enclosures proceeded more slowly than in the period before 1760, because the incentives to resist dispossession were strong when the price of food was high.”44

Spurred on by the high prices, agricultural production did advance, if not perhaps quite at the rate of population growth. But it may be considered nonetheless a “heavy and slow” sector in the eighteenth century. The sectors which eventually “galloped”45 were rather industry and commerce. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the industries of England and France (the Northeast, Languedoc), but also of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), and Switzerland enjoyed a “rough parity” of development in terms of the internal ratio (about 2:1) of agriculture to industry.46 They all were exporters, but the bulk of their industrial production was still sold within their frontiers. These industries all tended, therefore, to advocate protectionist policies.47 Industrial production began to rise parallel to cereals production, and earlier in France, perhaps circa 1715,48 than in England, where the more usual date is 1740.49 It is clear, in any case, that the global expansion, as one would expect, was a cumulative process. Hartwell argues:

What good harvests facilitated, general economic expansion after 1750 sustained. . . . Thus after 1750 investment on a broad front—in agriculture, industry, trade and communications—set the stage for the great technological breakthrough of the 1770’s and 1780’s which created profit opportunities in key industries of such magnitude that enterprises responded quickly by rapidly increasing output.50

For Hartwell, however, as for many, this is a description only of England. We must look more closely at the degree to which this “sequence” was only an English phenomenon, and to the extent that it was, by what process it became so. that is to say, why was it true that after 1790, English costs of production fell sufficiently fast such that English producers were able “to invade successfully the large markets of Europe”? If it is true, as Habakkuk and others argue, that most of the inventions of the time can “more plausibly be ascribed to the pressure of increasing demand”51 than to random chance, or to change in factory prices, or to Schumpeterian innovators, then why did not demand have the same effect in France? And did it not?

In addition, economic expansion meant not only increased production but also increased trade. Both England and France expanded their foreign trade after 1715, but not to the same degree in all markets. The British, Crouzet notes, “on the whole did not do well in the European markets, where they came up against protective tariffs and French competition.”52 This situation would change only circa 1785 with the new innovations which proved to be the British lever into this market. But conversely, throughout the eighteenth century, the British had a far larger colonial market than the French and were able, unlike the French, to penetrate extensively the markets of other colonial powers.53

This British edge in colonial trade was given even more importance by the growing role in the world-economy of the Americas trade.54 Furthermore, it is precisely this colonial trade which supplied the income-elastic products that permitted Britain to expand trade at all with Europe in the period of expansion after the 1750s (and before the later post-1785 cotton goods breakthrough).55 Still, on the whole, the growth of English exports was not “remarkably fast”56 before the 1780s. Thus it is this final spurt that will need the explanation.

Similarly, the famous “home market” may turn out on closer examination to be less of a difference between England and France than is regularly asserted by its advocates. There are two issues here. One, did English producers have a significantly larger “total effective demand” within their frontiers—political frontiers, customs-free frontiers, low transport cost frontiers—than did France? Two, was the home market, however defined, significantly more of a dynamic stimulus than the “foreign” market (that is, one traversing the “frontiers”) for either country or both?

In terms of political frontiers, which presumably define the limits of the immediate impact of state policy, we know that France was far larger than England, or even than Great Britain (the effective entity after the Act of Union), although if we add in the empires, the ratio of France’s “internal” market to Great Britain’s diminishes. In terms of customs-free frontiers, to the extent that it was a major price consideration internally (which is doubtful),57 England was about the size of the Five Great Farms. In terms of low transport cost frontiers, the eighteenth century was a period of internal improvements for both countries, no doubt more for England than for France (but how much more?).58 In any case, improvement in internal transport facilities served “foreign” trade as well, making it far less of a port-to-port affair.

The question thus is was there more purchasing power available in the one place than the other? One should in this regard distinguish between the size and prosperity of the middle strata and the degree to which the lower strata had available cash for purchases which, although individually small, could have a meaningful impact given their numbers in the population.

In the previous discussion on the developments in the period 1650–1750,59 we distinguished between the larger landlords, the prosperous (medium-size) producers, the nonprosperous (small) producers, and the landless laborers. Of the two middle categories (which we noted could not be distinguished from each other in terms of tenure rights) we saw the prosperous (medium-size) stratum prospering in that period at the expense of the nonprosperous (small) producers, both in England and northern France. This, in fact, probably reduced overall purchasing power, the increased incomes of the prosperous stratum being more than compensated for by the decreased incomes of the other. This shift moved many of the latter in the direction of engaging in cottage industry and rural wage work, the phenomenon partically analyzed in recent years under the label of protoindustrialization.60

The smaller producers in the long period of stagnation having been undermined, so to speak, it would now be those who had been relatively more prosperous in that earlier period who were most hard hit by the concentration, usurpation, and high rents of the post-1730–1740–1750 period of economic expansion. Chambers concludes about the English enclosures of the late eighteenth century that “it was not the smallest type of owner, but the intermediate type, those paying more than 4s. but less than £10, who were ‘swallowed up’ ”61 The increase in rents in France in this period, which exceeded gains in production and productivity, led many peasants who hadn’t done so before “to seek a second job (métier) merely to acquit themselves of the annual payments for their land. . . . The extra work, undoubtedly, served in such cases barely to maintain the previous standard of living, to keep it from declining further.”62

To this somber picture, one that seems to go against the idea of a growing home demand, must be added the picture of wage income, affecting both rural and urban areas. There seems little doubt that real wages declined in the period 1750–1815, though how much is subject to debate.63 The famous Hobsbawm—Hartwell et al. controversy (to be discussed later), over whether the industrial revolution raised or lowered workers’ real incomes, concerns primarily the period after 1815. If home demand expanded in the period 1750–1815, it seems most likely that this may have been as much a function of increased population as of increased per capita income.64

The same may well be true at the level of the world-economy. Thus, although Cole speaks of the “unprecendented expansion” of Britain’s trade in the late eighteenth century as taking place “in spite of, rather than, because of” conditions in foreign trade, he is quick to add that a large part of the growth was due to the “rapid increase in sales in the North American market,” and speaks of England’s ability to invade the “relatively sluggish markets” of the rest of Europe at this time.65

When thus the Treaty of Paris brought the Seven Years’ War to an end, it was by no means obvious that England was economically performing at a level significantly different from France. What does seem obvious is that each had different advantages in commerce. Great Britain was growing weaker in its competition with France on the continent and compensating for this decline with an improvement in its relative position “overseas.” This was very clear to the perspicacious Dutch author, Accarias de Sérionne, who, writing in 1778, analyzed British difficulties in terms of internal price and wage rises which made her production too expensive to compete with France (and Holland) on the continent. Her difficulties pushed her to “triumph” elsewhere in the world, and, of course, also to the innovations which would soon recreate a competitive position for Britain in Europe. But this “triumph” in the rest of the world must be analyzed carefully, as Braudel insists:

It is easy to see how by and large England pushed her trade to these outer margins. In most cases, success was achieved by force: in India in 1757, in Canada in 1762 or on the coasts of Africa, England shouldered her rivals aside. . . . Her high domestic prices . . . drove her to seek supplies of raw materials . . . from low-cost countries.66

What Choiseul had sought in the Seven Years’ War was to prevent just this, to stop England from creating “a despotic power over the high seas.”67

Although Great Britain emerged victorious from the war, she stopped short of total victory.68 Pitt, who saw as clearly as Choiseul that the struggle over world trade was critical at that moment, was ousted from office after the death of George II in 1760. Peace was made, too soon for Pitt and his friends, who deplored the return of Guadeloupe and Martinique to France, as well as the fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. In the debate of the Treaty, Pitt, supported, by the City merchants, thundered:

The ministers seem to have lost sight of the great fundamental principle that France is chiefly if not solely to be dreaded by us in the light of a maritime and commercial power.69

Those who concentrated their attention on the appropriate role of the state in the competitive struggles within the capitalist world-economy seemed as frustrated in Britain at this point as they proved to be shortly in France:

All seemed within their grasp, but they failed, because they lacked political power. In defeat, they directed their attention to the institutions and methods of government. The day of the bourgeois radical dawned.70

If, however, France’s overseas economic base was not yet destroyed, as Pitt and his friends had hoped, Britain at least emerged with key strategic assets—Canada, Dominica, St. Vincent, Minorca, parts of the Senegal coast, plus, of course, Bengal. France tried immediately to reduce the effect by invoking the balance of power mechanism in European diplomacy.71 The annexation of Corsica in 1768 helped redress the situation in the Mediterranean.72 But this was insufficient to counter the undermining of the French economy in two critical spheres, an undermining that would be its undoing.

In the first place, the Seven Years’ War broke the upward élan of the commerical–industrial complexes of the Atlantic coast of France, that link between the triangular trade, the slave trade, and cotton manufactures which we know worked so well in Britain. In the 20 years before the Treaty of Paris, it was French port cities like Nantes, which had been at the “forefront” of “modern economic development.”73 The war, however, was “disastrous,” the blockade affecting the “fastest growing sector,” and the end of the war saw the emergence of “a more cautious spirit,” the war thus marking “a turning point” for the economy.74

Second, it was the war which “perturbed” fundamentally the finances of the state, permanently breaking the equilibrium between current receipts and ordinary expenses. Thus the state went down the dangerous path of living off future income which it could only obtain through ever greater concessions to its creditors.75 This proved to have for the French state, as for many others in similar situations, a spiral effect.

The period following the Seven Years’ War saw a general slowdown in world trade, a sort of Kondratieff-B period from which the world-economy would not fully emerge until about 1792.76 It would, however, be Great Britain that would be in the best position to seize the advantage of the upturn rather than France and this would become clear by the 1780s. We shall now look at the developments in agriculture and industry which comprise this seizing of advantage. It would be well, however, to bear in mind how fundamental to the upsurge were the politico–strategic advantages Britain had secured in the long struggle with France for the growing overseas markets, the import of which Habakkuk expresses well:

The acceleration of English exports in the 1780’s is, of course, to some extent, the result of technical improvements. But at least in cotton textiles these improvements were in some measure the result of the fact that in the preceding decades England had been linked to markets which . . . were growing rapidly. The textile industries of the Continent . . . served markets where the growth of demand was much slower, and for this reason they were not faced with the same need to improve their techniques and methods of organization.77

It seems to be at this point, in the 1760s, the French elites—the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the agronomists, the industrialists, and the politicians—began to express the feeling that they were somehow “behind” Great Britain, and began to thrash about for ways to “catch up.” In light of our current knowledge, such an impression was probably exaggerated, but that does not efface its impact on the social and political behavior of the time. In agriculture, this meant three major sociopolitical efforts: land clearance, “freeing” grain prices, and agronomic improvements.

Land clearance took two forms: the division of the commons and the abolition of collective servitudes (in particular, obligatory vaine pâture). Because of the legal weaknesses of the French state, this effort at reform had to proceed province by province. Despite this complication, there were successive authorizations by provincial edict for the division of the commons between 1769 and 1781, and for the end of vaine pâture between 1766 and 1777. The monarchy added its support in various ways. Fiscal incentives were provided to clear waste land which further encouraged land usurpation. Bloch calls the effort “grandiose,” pointing out that it was in part a deliberate attempt to imitate Parliamentary procedures in England. Yet, as he observed, the reformers came up against “unexpected difficulties,” and a “wave of timidity and discouragement” brought it to an early end.78 The failure of these reforms is not in question.79 But should we attribute it to a mere cult of tradition? No doubt, the reforms evoked fears reflecting a desire to maintain certain “feudal” privileges (such as hunting zones), but the main source of the opposition was clearly one of menaced material interests.

The division of the commons was generally supported by larger landowners who could obtain a third of the land through the droit de triage. The landless laborers or those who had very little land could also see some advantage in a division, but only if the shares were not proportional to existing property size. It was the laboureurs in general who tended to be most strongly opposed, since what they could add in land scarcely matched what they would lose in grazing rights, and the land that went to the poorest elements, albeit small, was enough to threaten to remove the latter from the labor market of the laboureur. The French laboureur was thus being led in the same direction of proletarianization as the English yeoman. Indeed, Le Roy Ladurie tells us, speaking of eighteenth-century France and not of England, “proletarianization replaced the cemetery.”80

When, however, the issue was the suppression of collective rights (vaine pâture, droit de parcours), the political lineup was different. The landless laborer or very small owner drew no advantage from this whatsoever. Elimination of such rights meant that he would have no grazing land for the very few animals he had.81 It was precisely the laboureur, especially the one who had good fields, who, being the loser in the “reciprocity” of the existing arrangements, could benefit by enclosure.82 On this question, however, the large landowners were of a divided mind. Wherever the units that belonged to the large landowners were scattered, these collective rights were as useful to them as to those peasants with very little or no land, if not more useful. But if their lands were concentrated, they lost by vaine pâture.83

But does this description of the situation differ from one we could make for England? Yes, in one fundamental respect: the degree of scattering of the land units was far greater in France,84 which as we see, can affect the attitude of the large landowners. But why did the French landowners not then simply seek to regroup land by legislative edict, an action that was frequent in English enclosure acts? Bloch supplies the answer:

Natural in a country where the largest segment of landholdings (tenures) had not at all been able to achieve perpetuity, was such a constraint [regrouping] conceivable in France? The economists, the administrators did not even envisage the possibility.85

Once again, it turns out that the strong rules governing existing property rights in France was France’s “disadvantage” vis-à-vis Great Britain where property rights were less well anchored. It enabled better resistance to usurpation in France.

When we turn to the picture of the freeing of grain prices, we discover another irony. It was France, not England, which first tried to implement Smith’s Wealth of Nations, even before it was published. It was in the Declaration of May 1763 and the Edict of July 1764 that the French government broke the provisioning tradition and established “grain liberalism.” The Declaration created free circulation throughout France, and the Edict permitted the free export of grain and flour.86 These decrees were in large part a response to the “humiliating, . . . demoralizing and disorganizing” defeat of 1763. They constituted “a sensational event,” marking a “decisive rupture” with a long tradition. It did not last long, ending with the onset of economic difficulties in 1770, when a decree once again prohibiting import was proclaimed, appropriately enough on July 14.87

If grain liberalism was intended to lower prices, equalize them regionally, or reduce annual variations, it did not succeed notably in these objectives during its short history. Labrousse accounts for its “feeble influence” by the objective economic constraints caused by transport “difficulties.”88 But this assumes that we take the Physiocratic claims as the political explanation. Kaplan reminds us, however, that, though the program surprised by its “radicalism,” it drew its support from very “traditional and conservative-minded” landowners, who were not concerned with the ideology of liberalism but with immediate profits from the grain trade.89 Is it a total accident that grain liberalism was proclaimed during exactly the years (1763–1770) designated by Labrousse as those in which the advantages in leasing land went against the owner and in favor of the tenant? Grain liberalism could be seen as a measure to maintain profit levels by expanding total sales, which became less necessary in the period 1770–1789 when rents were rising while the profits of the direct producers were going down. The brief reemergence of grain liberalism under Turgot in 1774 encountered strong popular reaction this time, the guerre des farines,90 without the necessary political support from the landowning classes. In 1776 Turgot tried to extend free trade in grains even to Paris which had previously been exempted. Turgot fell from office.

But was this failure of reform in this field a sign of the strength of feudal forces? One would not think it to hear Labrousse on the “happy landed patriciate,” whose principal revenue, rental income, was “rising, rising violently.”

Landed capitalism does not merely play the role of a powerful sheltered sector of society. It attacks, it advances at a record pace, and, before it, peasant profit declines enormously.91

No wonder then we have a return to interest in land proprietorship and investment.92

How different was the reality (as opposed to the legality) of grain freedom in France as compared to Britain? As Morineau suggests, in the “absence of statistics,” we cannot really be sure about comparative grain export figures. But in any case, as he says, the problem is not “correctly posed” if one ignores the fact that the excess-supply provinces of France (e.g., Brittany and Languedoc) were shipping to the deficit-supply provinces,93 and consequently foreign trade figures alone are not the appropriate basis for comparison.

If we turn to the third arena of reform, that of economic improvements, first prize is usually given to Great Britain. Indeed, Bourde concludes his study of the influence of England on the French agronomists in the eighteenth century by asserting that the consequences in agronomy proper were few, and the influence “less a fact of economic history than a fact of the history of ideas.”94 Nonetheless, there are three remarks to be made. First, the advances in English agronomy, while real, were (as already suggested) less of a “revolution” than it has often been argued.95 Second, English soil lent itself better than French to the new fodder crops.96 Third, the new husbandry in England did not increase yield per worker, but merely yield per land unit.97

There are thus various ways one can interpret the lack of success of attempted Physiocratic reforms in French agriculture in the period 1763–1789. The real differences between France and Britain have been exaggerated. To the extent that they were real, French hesitations on the part of the landowning/large fermier sector reflected rational concerns to optimize immediate profit possibilities. The French lower strata were more successful in opposing certain aspects of the further extension of capitalist exploitation than the British lower strata. Perhaps all three propositions are true.

How did the picture present itself in the industrial arena? There too, there is a widespread view that the French were falling behind—a view of the actors at the time, of the analysts since. How accurate is this view? The rise of the British cotton industry is the centerpiece of such analysis. We should start by remembering that, for a good portion of the eighteenth century, the cotton industry was not only larger in France than in England, but that in the years 1732–1766 the French cotton industry doubled in size. England’s tiny industry had been stimulated into growth by the protectionist anti-Indian legislation of 1700 but its growth “accelerated only in the mid-1760’s after the Seven Years’ War.”98 Many authors would mark a significant British spurt only as of the 1780s.99

We should also remember that Europe, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing into the nineteenth century, saw a vast multiplication of small rural industries based on small to medium accumulations of capital.100 Milward and Saul remind us that, as of 1780, the “most industrialized landscapes” of Europe were still to be found not in Britain but in “the country areas around Lille, Rouen, Barcelona, Zurich, Basel and Geneva.”101 And Tilly, summarizing the now vast literature on so-called protoindustrialization, suggests that from 1650 to as late as 1850, “large units and big capital may well have experienced a relative decline.”102

In this context, what is usually called the industrial revolution should in fact be thought of as the reurbanization and reconcentration of the leading industries alongside an effort to increase scale. By definition, then, only one or two zones could be the locus of such an effort. What was at stake between France and Britain was which country could succeed in channeling this countermovement whose benefits would be high precisely because of the new expansion of the world-economy.

It is far from sure that Britain even started the process ahead of France.103 As for the size of industry, in the eighteenth century, it was France, not Britain, that housed more “large-scale units.”104 Nonetheless, it is the case that, in the period 1780–1840, Britain was able to achieve the position of the central locus of the larger scale, relatively more mechanized, relatively high-profit105 industrial sector of the world-economy, at the expense of everyone else, and most immediately at the expense of France.106 How did this in fact happen?

It seems clear there was a sudden rise in British relative efficiency of production in the cotton industry in the 1780s—the consequence of the famous “wave of gadgets,” a wave that was greater in Britain than in France.107 One can attribute this, if one wants, to greater “imagination.”108 But one other factor which surely helped was the fact that at this point the British had an edge in access to markets.109 This coincided with a rather “classical phenomenon of transfer of a pole of development—from France to Spain—perhaps complicated by the effect of full maturity in certain provinces with outdated equipment like Brittany.110

There is one other consideration concerning markets. Much has been made by historians of the impact of the British home market. This has always seemed curious to me in two respects. Why would this account for technological advance in an industry which found so large a part of its outlet in foreign trade (and was so dependent on foreign imports, tied in turn to having something to sell in return)? And was not the French home market large or larger? Léon gives what seems to me a far more plausible answer to the question why, precisely at this point, there occurred this leap in British productivity. “Might one not think that the attraction of the [French] home market came to bear with all its force against any profound modification of the dynamics of foreign trade?”111 That is to say, precisely because of profit levels at home, there was less pressure to be competitive abroad—which is why the Treaty of 1786, to which we shall soon come, was so important.

Although “decreasing costs and expansible markets” were no doubt of “strategic importance in the [further] acceleration of technical progress,”112 Britain had one last advantage—a state-machinery that was ready to interfere actively in the market. I can scarcely do better than reproduce the early, and often forgotten, analysis of Mantoux:

Nothing is less accurate than to say that the English cotton manufacture grew up without artificial defence in the face of foreign competition. . . . The import of printed cottons from whatever source remained forbidden. No protection could be more complete, for it gave the manufacturers a real monopoly of the home market. . . . And not only was the home market reserved for them, but steps were taken to help them gain markets abroad. A bounty was given on every exported roll of calico or muslin (21 Geo. III, c. 40 [1781] and 28 Geo. III, c. 21 [1783]. . . . Stern measures were enacted to prevent [the] exportation [of new machinery] to foreign countries. . . . If it be true that the history of the cotton industry can provide arguments for the doctrine of laissez-faire, these will certainly not be found during [the] early period.113

Nonetheless, even given all this, the British edge was not all that large. As Lévy-Leboyer puts it, “the English could not expect to maintain for very long their technological and financial edge.” Nonetheless they did, and for longer than seems reasonable. To what extent is the explanation to be located in the French Revolution, which Lévy-Leboyer wishes to call “from this point of view . . . a national catastrophe”? 114

If we look at the set of political events which led to the French Revolution, there is widespread agreement that it was the convening of the Estates-General that set the immediate process in motion, and that the decision to convene the Estates-General was the result of a sort of “crisis of the monarchy.” Lefebvre offers a straightforward explanation of this crisis:

The government crisis went back to the American war. The revolt of the English colonies may be considered the principal direct cause of the French Revolution, both because in invoking the rights of man it stirred up great excitement in France, and because Louis XVI in supporting it got his finances into very bad condition.115

This explanation leads to two immediate questions. Why was there not the same ideological impact on Great Britain? What about the finances of the British state? Once again, we must return to the turning point of 1763. France perceived herself as “falling behind” Britain. There were basically two solutions discussed: strengthen the French state—financially, socially (vis-à-vis centrifugal forces, whether geographical or class based), and militarily—or “open” the country economically. Both were seen as movements of “reform.” The one proposed using state resources to strengthen France’s economic position by supporting its entrepreneurs and the other proposed using state resources to strengthen France’s economic position by forcing France’s entrepreneurs to be more “competitive.” This kind of national debate has become a familiar one in the last century. It is the debate between the protectionist interventionists and the “liberal” interventionists. France after 1763 oscillated between the two, with poor results, and a high potential for the political explosion which in fact occurred.

The oscillation began with the Duc de Choiseul, who

willed the end, which was the re-establishment of French power in the world and a war of revenge against England; he did not will the necessary means, which was the restoration of royal authority inside France and the reforms of royal finances, without which all other reforms would be in vain.116

It continued with Vergennes who served as Foreign Minister from 1774 to 1786, and with the succession of men who controlled France’s finances: Turgot (1774–1776), Necker (1776–1781), Fleury (1781–1783), and Calonne (1783–1787). Each wrestled with the same problems. Each came up with solutions (diverse ones) which were unpopular. Each failed to strengthen France’s basic economic position in the world-economy. Had the absolute monarchy been more absolute, it might have been able to overcome the crisis, but all the projects for financial reform from 1715 to 1789 “broke on the rock of the opposition of the parlements.”117

The key issue throughout remained state finances. If the long expansion of the world-economy involved a steady accumulation of capital by the landowning producers, primarily via the mechanism of rent, this concentration of capital involved not merely obtaining more surplus-value from the direct producers but reducing the role of the state as a redistributive center. Whereas state revenue as a percentage of national product had risen steadily in the seventeenth century and until at least 1715, from 1730 on it was on the decline.118 The situation had been aggravated by the system of the Company of General Farms, which in the eighteenth century (at least until 1774) had been the principal agency of tax collection, to the great profit of the tax collectors.119 “The monarchy lost its independence [to the Company].” Necker may have reduced the Company’s role, but “it required nothing less than a revolution to bring it down.”120

It was, however, the American war that transformed a steady trend into an acute problem, by dramatically increasing state expenditure in an era of declining state revenue.121 The American war was supposed to serve French interests, and in many ways it did. After all, it represented a secession by that colonial zone of Great Britain which was its most important client for exports. And indeed the war did hurt Britain, causing a “sharp interruption”122 in foreign trade and a decline in its total value. For France, it was a “war of revenge”123 and the ideological implications were ignored.

Although Great Britain lost the American war, the French advantage turned out to be chimerical. Lüthy denounced retrospectively this “unnatural alliance” that derived from Choiseul’s conception of a revenge in the New World, and points out that no sooner was peace concluded than “the English and the Americans found themselves once again in tête-à-tête to liquidate their family quarrel on the backs of those foreigners (Latins and Papists) who had intruded without being invited.”124 Why did this happen? In large part, for all the reasons which explain the parallel resumptions of commercial links between excolonizer and excolonized after the so-called decolonizations of the twentieth century: it is far simpler—in terms of existing commercial, social, and cultural networks—for the excolonized to resume their old ties (in somewhat altered form) than to transfer this relationship to other core powers.125

Indeed, by 1796, an astute French analyst, Tanguy de la Boissière, reflecting on Franco—American commercial relations since 1775, could write that

Great Britain, in losing the ownership of the land of its colonies, has lost nothing, since she immediately became the owner of its usufruct. She has the benefits at present which are provided by an immense commerce without having, as in the past, the costs of administrations. . . . It is thus obvious that England, far from having suffered a loss, has gained from the secession of 1774.126

Such an analysis was not unknown in Britain. It undoubtedly underlay Burke’s opposition to George III’s policies and his view that this “disaster” represented “a departure from the traditions established by the Great Revolution of 1689.”127 Nor was Burke alone. Josiah Wedgwood, a great entrepreneur “typical of his time and class,” was also opposed to the war. He “blessed his stars and Lord North when America achieved its independence.”128

This advantage to Britain of decolonization existed, however, primarily because of the dominant position in world commerce that Britain had already achieved as of 1763. Under such circumstances, to keep British North America as a colony represented a burden without sufficient concomitant advantage, even if not all British officials immediately realized it at the time. In hindsight it is evident (but is it only in hindsight?) that “commercially the secession of the colonies worked out almost to the advantage of the motherland.”129

It was thus that the American war, intended by France to be the “knell of British greatness,” turned out to have as its price “a French revolution.”130 France’s state debt doubled as a result of the war.131 Within five years the monarchy had become “no longer credit-worthy.”132 In 1788, the service on the debt reached 50% of the budget.133The state was approaching “bankruptcy.”134

But was the British state in the 1780s in so much better a situation? Debt service in Great Britain in 1782 was even greater as a percentage of public revenue than in France—the France even of 1788, not to speak of the France of 1782. The difference was not in where they were at the time of the peace treaty in 1783, but in “what took place after.”135

The British–French disparity grew suddenly. First of all, the British raised additional revenue, thereby reducing debt service perceptibly.136 But this was not enough, especially since the British had a further problem resulting from the steady repatriation of Dutch investment in the 1780s.137 That is, their debt could no longer be rolled over. Yet we know that between 1783 and 1790 or 1793, the French debt kept mounting while the British debt was largely liquidated.138 Davis has an explanation—“the plunder of India in the decades after Plassey”—which, even if it wasn’t the basis of capital investment in industry, could be said to have “supplied the funds that bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others.”139 Once again, Britain’s advantage derived from a position acquired as of 1763. When we compare the happy decade of industrial growth in Britain in the 1780s which culminated in the “veritable boom of 1792, on the eve of the [renewed Franco–British] war,”140 with the unhappy “pre-revolution” in France, we must put this in the context of a very different situation of state finances. This financial–fiscal difference could have been merely a “passing annoyance,”141 had it not resulted in an explosion and thus an eventual considerable magnification of the Franco—British disparity.”142

Thus it was that the accumulated advantages of Britain in the world-economy that were hers after 1763 increased in the 1780s to become definitive by 1815. The French state’s desire to “catch up” with Britain was very important in the 1780s in creating the conditions for an explosion. A mounting state debt can only be solved by cutting expenditure, or by increasing revenue, directly or indirectly. The French state chose the path of trying to increase it indirectly.

In 1776, Louis XVI wrote on the margin of a memorandum of Turgot: “There is the great complaint of M. Turgot. For the lovers of novelty, we need a France more English than England.”143 Louis XVI seemed dubious. Necker tried to move in the other direction, the direction of increasing the state’s share in the extraction of surplus value. He failed. The 1780s would offer the chance again to those who wished to “open” France to the fresh winds (their opponents thought wild gales) of “novelty” and of competition. On the one hand, those who profited well from cornering the rent, especially in the 1780s, may be thought to have “sawed off the branch on which they were sitting.”144 On the other hand, the monarchy, reacting against its frustrations (inability to reform the internal fiscal system) and turning thereupon to the solution of open frontiers (and consequent increased customs dues) as a source of revenue, may be said to have joined in the sawing. For the monarchy thereby caused to turn against it yet another section of the capitalist strata, those who feared an eventual “semiperipheralization” of France in a British-dominated world-economy.

The first sign of the new policy was the decree of August 30, 1784 opening the French colonies to free foreign trade. This was an attempt to encourage trade between the now-independent North American states and the French West Indies, a move which turned out to benefit Britain at least as much as France.145 Already, at this point, the great port merchants of France protested vigorously.146 One of the justifications of the government was that the monopolies had already been undermined by an extensive contraband trade. The 1784 decree thus recognized and sought to capitalize upon a reality of economic life.147 It was this logic that led to the fateful Eden Treaty of 1786 which, Braudel argues, “proved,” rather than brought on, France’s failure in the struggle for hegemony.148 But did one have to demonstrate it so glaringly? And was it not itself in many ways the last nail in the coffin?

What caused France not merely to sign the Anglo—French Commercial Treaty of 1786 but to take the lead in seeking it?149 It seems quite evident that the hope was to kill two birds with one stone: both to resolve the financial crisis of the French state by being able to tax what was previously a contraband trade (and indeed to expand this trade globally)150 and to resolve the long-term structural difficulties of French production by forcing innovation via market pressures.151 There was furthermore a conjunctural factor that played in favor of a French initiative from France’s perspective. There was the dramatic fall of agricultural prices in the period after 1778,152 which made the large landowners all the more resistant to any mechanism that would shift surplus from them to the state. The route of increased customs duties must have seemed all the more attractive.

The treaty involved a trade-off with the British. Freer trade meant (crudely) more British cottons (and pottery, wool, hardware) in the French market against more French wine (and other agricultural products, but also silk, linens, glassware) in the British. But how much more? The answer depended on the economic calculations. The French negotiators no doubt underestimated the impact of British manufactures153 and overestimated their ability to compensate French manufacturers for any losses.154 But worst of all, they seemed to welcome a new semiperipheral role for France. Chaptal, in his memorandum to Napoleon in 1802, speaking of the Treaty, thought that France had banked on “the advantages and prosperity of her agriculture” and said that the products of English soil “had nothing that were either special or rare.”155 Nonetheless, Rayneval, it has been argued, seemed ready to make any concession, “provided there were a lowering of duties on [France’s] agricultural products.”156 Indeed, Rayneval wrote to M. Adhemar, French Ambassador in London in 1786, just before the signing of the Treaty:

Doubtless, we are introducing into England principally the products of our soil, in exchange for English products. But I have always believed, and still do, that an agricultural producer is the most interesting person from the point of view of the state.

Nor did de Rayneval stop there. For, as a further justification of the Treaty before the Conseil d’Etat on May 21, 1786, he argued:

Suppose the results are other than those we predict, is it preferable to seek the prosperity of a few iron and steel manufacturers, or that of the kingdom? To increase the number of manufacturers, or the number of agricultural producers? And suppose that we are inundated with English hardware, could we not resell them in Spain or elsewhere?157

Thus did Rayneval appear to contemplate with great equanimity the possibility that France would play the conveyor-belt role in the world-economy that had been the glorious fate of Spain and Portugal for two centuries already. No wonder Pitt could say in defense of the Treaty in Parliamentary debate: “It was in the nature and essence of an agreement between a manufacturing country and a country blessed with peculiar [sic!] productions, that the advantages must terminate in favor of the former.”158

Was this an inevitable strategy for the French state, at the very moment of the apogee of economic growth under the Ancien Régime?159 It is striking that Britain was trying to negotiate commercial treaties between 1785 and 1793 with Portugal, Spain, Russia, England, Prussia, the Two Sicilies, and Holland alongside its negotiations with France. There was also preliminary talk about negotiations with Sweden, Turkey, and the Austrian Netherlands. Thus, the Marquis of Carmarthen could speak in 1786 of “the present Rage for Commercial Treaties.” None of the other negotiations came to anything. “The success [of the French treaty] was unique.”160 The pressure on the French government was no doubt great—the state of government finances, the crisis in the wine trade161—but so was the decision, symbolically and in reality. The French state seemed to be opting, under the guise of reform, for a partial deindustrialization which would serve the interests of certain agricultural entrepreneurs but which compromised the interests of its manufacturing classes. The “reforms” seemed similar to those advocated by the International Monetary Fund in the twentieth century for indebted governments with balance of payments difficulties.

It is thus understandable that British objections to the Treaty, though real, were easily overcome. Pitt defended the treaty on the basis of commercial advantage. Fox opposed it on purely political grounds, that “France was the natural foe of Great Britain.”162 In any case, the British had various good, immediate economic reasons to support the treaty. They had the same incentive as the French to find new sources of state revenue, and thus to legalize a smuggling trade, thereby rendering the Franco–British exchanges taxable.163 They were worried about potential losses of markets to France in North America (because of the postwar treaty), in Spain (because of the Family Accord), and in Portugal (which had just accorded France most-favored-nation status), and thereby welcomed markets in France itself.164 But most of all, they knew that the heart of the competition was in cotton. Not only were they confident of their ability to sell in the French market165 but they were also concerned to maintain access to cotton imports from outside the British colonies, which at the time provided less than 30% of their needs.166 From that point of view, vulgar protectionism would not do.

The economic consequences of the treaty for France were felt almost immediately, especially (as a 1788 French government memorandum indicates) in the field of “ordinary cloth” as opposed to “good cloth,” that is, all the kinds that were used for the consumption of “the people” rather than of “rich persons.”167 The treaty led to a massive import, a “veritable deluge,”168 of cotton manufactures from Britain (and other manufactures as well). It was an “economic revolution,”169 one of the “turning-points in the industrial history of France.”170 British goods “inundated” the French market, Arnould wrote in 1791.171 But it did not take five years for the French to become aware of this. These effects were a matter of political discussion almost immediately. It has often been argued since that this was an error in popular perception, since the economic decline began in 1786 or even in 1785, before the actual date of entry into effect of the Treaty which was July 1, 1787.172 This seems to me to miss the point. Objectively, the effect may have been most acute after 1787, but one factor that in part explains the difficulties of 1786 was probably the anticipation of the treaty. In any case, it is the perception and not the reality which governed the political response.173

Of course, the French manufacturers and others recognized that British cloths were selling well because they were selling cheaper than French cloth in the French market,174 an advance caused by greater mechanization, which in turn could provide the solution. But how, and how fast? A French encyclopedia published in 1789 wrote:

We have just made a commercial treaty with England, which may enrich our great-grand-nephews, but which has deprived of their bread 500,000 workers in the kingdom and undermined 10,000 commerical houses.175

In the meantime, the French perceived the British government as aiding a process of dumping.176 They worried about effects that would be “difficult to undo” such as the emigration of unemployed skilled workers.177 By the time of the cahiers de doléance, the treaty was so unpopular that complaints about it were to be found in the cahierseven of provinces “less immediately affected.”178 “The general desire was the total abolition of this treaty.”179

Writing in 1911, Mourlot argued what many had felt at the time. The treaty made of France an “economic province” of England; it was a sort of “new Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.”180 Politically, the effect was dramatic. The manufacturing sector felt abandoned by the state-machinery precisely when they thought they needed it most. It must have seemed as if the king’s men were ready to accept the semiperipheralization of France under the guise of liberalism and the beneficence of competition. No doubt, in some sense, “the game had already been lost . . . [and] England had already gained control of the worldwide economy.”181 But the Treaty seemed the act that might make this irreversible, a view which could lead to a strong reaction, particularly in light of how well things seemed to be going in England.

There were immediate and “clear benefits” for England. State revenue rose, export opportunities expanded, and the balance of trade “veered sharply” in favor of Britain.182 But there was more. The Eden Treaty, by opening the French market, permitted the economies of scale to the British manufacturers which enabled the British to cut their prices in the United States (and presumably elsewhere). As early as 1789, a British Consul noted that there was a result “a sensible check to the progress of the cotton manufactory at Philadelphia.”183

It had been expected that the French disadvantage in cotton would be somewhat compensated by the French advantage in wine. It was not to be. The English, while they bought more French wine, did not buy all that much more.184 The “crisis” caused by the Eden Treaty presumably caused a decline in the internal French market. Therefore, although the wine producers were naturally185 and factually186 supporters of the open-trade policies incarnated in the treaty, their situation did not materially improve. Wine prices had been declining since 1777 and indeed reached their nadir in 1786, the low levels persisting until 1791. When the violent price rises of cereals occurred in 1788 and 1789, there resulted a squeeze on winegrower revenue resulting in a 40% decline in purchasing power.187 They turned for relief to a campaign against the tithe and seigniorial dues. It is no wonder that this “terrible” crisis of the manufacturing sector, coinciding with very high prices of cereals and bread, “would provoke the Revolution.”188

How does one “explain” a complex “event” like the French Revolution? It does not much matter if one defines the French Revolution as what happened on July 14, 1789 or what happened between 1789 (or 1787) and 1793 (or 1799 or 1815). Whatever the time scope of the event, no explanation of one event in terms of another event can ever be very satisfying. Two events provide a sequence, and their linkage may be plausible, but still other “events” of course intervened, and the question always immediately arises as to how essential such other events might have been to the sequence. Nor can one ever reasonably eliminate other sequences that did not occur as not having been equally likely. To claim a sequence as a causal chain is almost surely to argue post hoc ergo propter hoc.

It is, however, equally unsatisfying to explain an “event” by the longue durée. The longue durée explains large-scale, long-term structural change, but it is not possible to demonstrate that such change could occur only through particular events. Much of the debate about the French Revolution is at this ultimately pointless level. A major event is the result of a conjuncture (in the English sense of the word, meaning a joining point), of conjonctures (in the French sense, that is, of intermediate-length cyclical phases), and the event may be called major because of its consequences more than because of its causes. In this sense, the French Revolution is without doubt a “major event” of the modern world.

Two “objective” conjonctures have been widely used as the “explanation” of the outbreak of the French Revolution: the economic conjoncture189 and the conjoncture in the state-machinery, specifically the growing deficit in state finances. It should be obvious from what has been said thus far that these conjonctures did exist, and did in fact play a major role. If these two conjonctures, however, were the whole story, there might well have been a French Revolution of sorts,190 but it is hard for me to believe that it would have been such a central event in the history of the modern world-system.

The centrality of the French Revolution is a consequence of the centrality of the Franco—British struggle for hegemony of the world-economy. The French Revolution occurred in the wake of, and as a consequence of, France’s sense of impending defeat in this struggle.191 And the French Revolution had the kind of impact on the world-system that it did have precisely because it occurred in the country that had lost the struggle for hegemony. The French Revolution, which many had hoped would reverse the tide of British victory, may be said to have been, on the contrary, decisive in ensuring an enduring British victory. But precisely because of this geopolitical, geoeconomic defeat, the French revolutionaries in fact achieved their long-run ideological objectives.

Let us then look at the history of the French Revolution primarily in terms of its consequences rather than of its imputed causes. First of all, what were the actual economic policies of the early revolutionary governments in two key domains: the structure of agricultural production and the role of the state in relationship to industrial production?

A long time ago, Marc Bloch put forward a view that, in its emphases, goes against the simplistic perception that the Revolution represented the downfall of the large agricultural domain:

Everyone knows how the seigneurial edifice crashed in ruins between the years 1789 and 1792, taking with it a monarchical regime with which it had become identified.

For all that he liked to see himself as the head of his peasantry, the new-style lord had really became once again primarily a large-scale manager; as had similarly many ordinary bourgeois. If we can imagine, which is of course absurd, the Revolution breaking out around the year 1480, we should find that land relieved of seigneurial charges was reallocated almost without exception to a host of small occupiers. But the three centuries between 1480 and 1789 saw the rehabilitation of the large estate. It was not, as in England and Eastern Germany, all-embracing. Large tracts of land, in total larger perhaps than those covered by the great estates, were still left under peasant proprietorship. But the victory was a sizeable one, though its completeness varied noticeably with the region. The Revolution was to leave the large estate relatively unimpaired. The picture presented by the rural France of our own day—which is not, as is sometimes said, a land of petty proprietors but rather a land where large and small proprietors coexist in proportions which vary considerably from province to province—is to be explained by its evolution between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.192

How then have we gotten the impression that the role of peasant production in fact rose as a result of the French Revolution? One reason is that there were indeed some dramatic juridical acts affecting the “traditional” rights of the seigniors. The National Assembly did formally abolish, on the famous night of August 4, 1789, the “feudal regime,” including the tithe and certain (but not yet all) seigniorial rights.193 The remaining seigniorial rights would, however, be abolished in turn and without indemnity on July 17, 1793. Furthermore, the Rural Code adopted on September 28, 1791 did authorize enclosure of commons. The law of August 28, 1792 did authorize the division of the commons. The lands of the clergy were nationalized and eventually sold.

Yet, all this was less than it seems. For one thing, no more than the agrarian reformers of the last decades of the Ancien Régime did the revolutionary governments abolish either vaine pâture or the droit de parcours. (Indeed, vaine pâture was only to be abolished in 1889, and even then its abolition was subject to local consent.194 It was unconditionally abolished only following the First World War.) And the law permitting the division of the commons was suspended in 1797.

Second, and more importantly, such “gains” as were made by some peasants were largely gains by those who had a certain amount of property, the reasonably well-off laboureurs, and were as often as not gains at the expense of the small tenants, small sharecroppers, and landless laborers.195 To be sure, the various reforms created administrative order in France.196 But, as Bourgin somewhat sourly suggests, it was “an administration much more coordinated than one believes . . . placed at the service of a legislation much more conservative than one thinks.”197

Lefebvre attributes our scholarly misperceptions of the radicalness of agrarian reform under the Revolution to the “violent” and “obstinate” quality of the peasant revolt and the “noise” created by the night of August 4 concerning the abolition of feudal rights. Rather than being radical reform, he argues, the legislation was no more than a “compromise.” He does add that we shouldn’t despise it as such because, if it slowed down economic progress, it also “caused less suffering and was more humane” than British agrarian changes.198 This is one way to describe what happened, but it sounds a bit too voluntaristic for my taste. The “compromise,” as we shall see, was the outcome of a ferocious class struggle that was between those who were gaining from the development of the capitalist world-economy and those who were losing.199 The “humaneness” of the outcome was the result of the strength of anti-capitalist forces.200

If we now turn to the state’s role in promoting industrial production, we shall see that the accomplishments of the Revolution in this arena were at least as significant as, probably more so than, in the arena of agrarian reform. Chaptal, writing in 1819, and looking back at the comparative situation of British and French industrial production as of 1789, saw Britain as having a distinct advantage in terms of the geographic width of its market, the quantity of goods sold, and lower prices. He put forward a number of explanations for British advantage, the first of which was “the system followed by England, for more than a century, of allowing into its internal market only the products of its own factories, and rejecting those of foreign producers by means of prohibitions or by customs duties which have the same effect.”201

The return to protectionism was clearly one of the immediate concerns of a large segment of those who made the revolution and/or came to power as a result of it. “There is no doubting the unpopularity of the [1786 Anglo–French Commercial] treaty among the members of the [Constituent] Assembly and in the country as a whole.”202 In 1793 the treaty was formally renounced by the Convention.

This was in no way in contradiction with the other main economic decision that affected industrial production, the abolition of internal tariffs, thereby achieving at last the dream of Colbert.203 For this latter act (as well as the abolition of guilds) the Revolution receives the plaudits of Heckscher, who celebrates its “negative result” of dismantling the “irrational monstrosity” of the industrial legislation of the Ancien Régime. Heckscher calls this “a tremendous work of reform.”204 Soboul, who in principle, should agree, since he sees the Revolution as the triumph of bourgeois liberalism, does observe nonetheless about the various protectionist measures (tariffs, the Exclusif, the navigation act of 1793) that: “The bourgeoisie of the Constitutent Assembly, faced with the dangers of foreign competition, compromised on their commercial liberalism.” He calls this “another proof of the realism of the men of 1789.”205 But why was this a “compromise”? It was only a compromise if one assumes that capitalists by definition favor free trade and a minimal role for the state.206

The whole point of the French Revolution for many was to expand, not to contract, the role of the state. Who wanted this and why? Rousseau in fact posed the problem clearly in his distinction between the general will and the will of all, that is, the common interest versus the sum of particular wills.207 The modern state within the interstate system is precisely the battleground of this unending tension. Strengthening the state obviously means reducing (not eliminating) the ability of particular wills to prevail over some more general will which seeks to optimize the advantages of the state and its citizen—beneficiaries (which is a category smaller than that of all citizens) in the world-economy relative to the citizen—beneficiaries of other states. The state can thus become the mechanism whereby the collective interests of the bourgeois located in a given state prevail (when they do) over the particular interests of particular bourgeois. This is a continuing issue, to be sure, but one that becomes at times acute. The issue tends to become acute, and thus some movement is forced, whenever one or more other states are about to make a surge forward in relative position vis-à-vis the state in question. This, as we have seen, was precisely France’s dilemma in the 1780s.208

As Lüthy put it, in the juridical “jumble” of the Ancien Régime, “there was no established group . . . who did not have privileges to defend,” and thus every royal administration of the eighteenth century, whether neo-Colbertist, liberal, or Physiocratic, “had to become revolutionary or else be bogged down.” All “progressive” tendencies put their hopes in an “enlightened despotism.”209 The French Revolution plus Napoleon provided precisely that enlightened despotism in terms of the administrative structure of the state, as Tocqueville, that prudent conservative, was to recognize and to a considerable extent deplore.210

Still, the fact is there is no truly general will, only a state will or consensus that is based on a more or less stable political coming together of particular wills. It is now commonplace to recognize that the breakdown of this “stability” in France (that is, the Revolution) took two different forms: a breakdown among the privileged strata and a conflict between the privileged strata and those without privilege. Put blandly like this, almost no one will disagree. It is around the effort to attach conceptual terminology to these two struggles that the historiographic battles of the French Revolution (and through it the basic political struggles of the modern world-system) have been fought.

The “class” terminology which almost everyone uses to describe the political actors in this debate—aristocrats, bourgeois, sans-culottes, peasants, and (sometimes) proletarians—is embedded in a series of political codes which have come to render the real struggles very opaque. Let me therefore outline my views on the three debates which I think are crucial: (1) What was, in fact, the relationship between the “aristocracy” and the “bourgeoisie” in this period? (2) What was, in fact, the role and the objectives of “popular forces” (urban and rural) in the French Revolution? (3) Who were the Jacobins?

That the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were distinct sociojuridical categories under the Ancien Régime is unquestionable. What is under debate, however, is whether they were members of different classes. The readers of this work will know how skeptical I am that these kinds of sociojuridical categories tell us much, if anything, about the economic roles of these groups, in France or elsewhere, since the emergence of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth century. If they do not, and if the members of the categories tend to overlap heavily as de facto capitalist entrepreneurs, then the triumph (if we may call it that) of the “bourgeoisie” over the “aristocracy” in the French Revolution is neither the prerequisite, nor the correlate, nor the consequence of a transition from feudalism to capitalism in France, but rather the expression of an acute intra-“elite” struggle (or if you will, an intrabourgeois struggle) over the constitution and the basic policies of the French state.

Can such a view be upheld? To argue that the Revolution began as an upper class internal quarrel we do not have to invoke Chateaubriand or Lefebvre or any other later commentator. It was stated well by Robespierre himself: “Thus it was that in France the judiciary, the nobles, the clergy, the rich, gave the original impulse to the revolution. The people appeared on the scene only later.”211 Indeed, it is one of the more ironic facts in this great drama that one of the elements in the British “example” which attracted attention and admiration in France in the period before the Revolution, and thereby contributed to the readiness to enter a “revolutionary” path, was the political and economic strength of the British aristocracy.212 It is, after all, never to be forgotten that one of the countries in which the “aristocracy” as such retained the largest role the latest into the modern era has been precisely Great Britain, symbolic heartland for so many of modern capitalism.

The so-called social interpretation of the French Revolution (the Revolution as preeminently a “bourgeois revolution”) has been under much systematic attack in recent years, as we have already discussed. But some of the doubts about the description of the revolution as the work of a bourgeoisie which was in structural need of it for its own interests (against those of a feudal aristocracy) can be found by reading the analyses of the tenants of the social interpretation themselves. Mathiez starts his main work by acknowledging that, in 1789, the situation was that the real powers of the absolute monarchy were limited, the seigniors had lost all public power to the state, serfdom had already virtually disappeared and feudal rents had become a minor phenomenon, and the bourgeoisie “despite the shackles of the corporative regime, [were] nonetheless less opposed than we have believed,” since, despite all the constraints, “commerce and industry had grown throughout the [eighteenth] century.”213 Where then the structural need of a revolution?214

Lefebvre, in his analysis of the Declaration of Rights of Man, explains the absence therein of an insistence on the right of property by the fact that it seemed unnecessary to the drafters “because it was a right which the Old Regime did not question. On the contrary, ministers and administrators of the eighteenth century always spoke of property with respect, in an altogether bourgeois manner.”215 And it is Vovelle and Roche who argue persuasively that in eighteenth-century France the term “bourgeois,” although it denoted a commoner to be sure, nonetheless was “restricted to nonactive categories.” Indeed, far from allowing this group to triumph, “the French Revolution dealt a mortal blow to this social class.”216

But is this all a “trivial quibble,” as Barrington Moore would have it, since the “ultimate outcome” was a Western parliamentary democracy, and since “the destruction of the political power of the landed aristocracy constitutes the most significant process at work in the course of French modernization”?217 Quite the contrary: it is scarcely a quibble, for two reasons. If, in fact, the French Revolution is to continue to be interpreted as primarily an anti-feudal revolution of the capitalist bourgeoisie, we really should spend more attention on why it failed in so many ways to achieve more significant economic transformation than it did. Hobsbawm, puzzling over this “paradox,” blames it essentially on the peasantry.218 But that of course only leads us to ask whether a successful “bourgeois revolution” depends on a politically weak peasantry? And if the “classical” bourgeois revolution “failed” to accomplish its bourgeois objectives, wherein is the utility of the concept?

This then brings us to the second reason why this is no quibble. The emphasis on the centrality of the bourgeois struggle against the feudal order had led to a very distorted, and when all is said and done, a very subordinated, view of the revolt of the popular classes, even (if not especially) among the partisans of the social interpretation, most of whom think of themselves as advocates of the popular classes. And this is true despite the incredible amount of scholarly effort that has been invested of late in the study of the sans-culottes and of the peasants.219

Thus we must turn to our second question on the role and the objectives of these “popular forces.” These popular forces are those who Mathiez calls the “Fourth Estate,” and they were, of course, in numbers largely rural. All the talk of an alliance between the bourgeoisie and these popular forces founders on one basic fact, to which Mathiez points:

The propertied bourgeoisie became suddenly aware of the fierce face of the Fourth Estate. It could not permit the nobility to be expropriated without fearing for itself, for it held a large part of the noble lands and received from the villagers seigniorial rents.220

Rather than an alliance, there seems to have been from the beginning an independent action of the popular classes, to which the capitalist strata (on whichever side of the political in-fighting) responded with varying degrees of ferocity or fear.

Let us start with the “peasant revolution,” which in fact refers to a series of struggles that, even for Soboul, are “at the heart of the French Revolution.”221 If one looks at them as comprising an ongoing conflict that stretches across the eighteenth century, merely culminating in the more dense violence of the years 1789–1793,222 it seems reasonable to perceive this peasant unrest as resistance to the “capitalist offensive,” in Saint-Jacob’s phrase,223 which in many areas (especially the Northeast, the East, and the Center-East of France) sought, and often largely succeeded in obtaining, the destruction or diminution of the “collective rights” of French peasants. The peasants responded with “defensive action.”224

The convening of the Estates-General came after decades of such defensive action. In addition it took place, as we know, in a moment of a particularly acute food crisis. The extra agonies of the rural poor compounded and interacted with their fears (which were also those of the stratum of somewhat better-off peasants) about their “collective rights.” In this struggle against the “capitalist offensive,” both the better-off peasants and the rural poor often made less distinction between the “aristocracy” and the “bourgeoisie” than either the latter themselves or subsequent scholars have been wont to do.225 To rural workers, both aristocrats and bourgeois were part of the “privileged classes.”226

If then peasant revolts are to be seen as “the crucial insurrectionary ingredient”227 in the French Revolution, we need to explain what rendered these revolts so explosive. It was, it seems to me, the coming together of resistance to a long-term process of proletarianization with a short-run but very intense demand for bread.228 Marie Antoinette was not alone in misperceiving this. A large part of the “revolutionary” bourgeoisie as well seemed to have misunderstood that for the popular masses the Revolution was “as much a revolution for bread as for the political rights of man.”229

A look at the sequence of events of the Great Fear will illustrate the dynamic of these popular sentiments. In the rural areas, the “growing anarchy” of 1788–1789 inspired the “conjunction of nobles and bourgeois in an attempt to protect their property from the ‘fourth estate’.” If July 14 shook this alliance, “during the subsequent troubles it reappeared in the provinces far more frequently than is realized.”230 After July 14, when the Great Fear spread over vast areas of rural France, the revolutionary bourgeois blamed the “aristocrats’ plot” and the provincial aristocrats in turn blamed the revolutionary bourgeois. Lefebvre has dispelled both theories in his detailed picture of what actually happened. What is clear is that, after July 14, the peasants began to implement their demands, ceasing to pay tithes and dues, resuming collective rights they had lost. “The peasant population took its own cause in hand.”231 The Great Fear stirred the pot considerably, and by doing so “it played its part in the preparations of the night of 4 August.”232 The so-called abolition of feudalism on August 4, 1789 was not the program of the revolutionary bourgeois. It was pressed upon them by the insurgent peasantry. The National Assembly spent its own energy attempting to limit the reality of this institutional transformation.233

In some sense this story was to be repeated for the next four years: the government and legislature taking “radical” action only under direct pressure of the popular masses, and always in some sense trying to limit it.234 One can interpret this, as do Soboul and many others, as the peasants and sans-culottes forcing the timid bourgeois to pursue the logic of the bourgeois revolution.235 It seems more straightforward and obvious to me to see the peasants and sans-culottes pursuing their own revolution, one against the “privileged classes” in their language, the capitalist strata in mine.236 This opposition grew greater, not less, in the period 1789–1793, since the elimination of the “aristocrat” and the church as rural rent-receiver often merely intensified the class struggle in the rural areas between rural worker and rural beneficiary of surplus value.237

The famous problem-issue of how to interpret the Vendée and the chouannerie becomes less difficult from this perspective. Even Mazauric, close in his interpretation to Soboul, asserts that they were “first of all anti-bourgeois.”238 Paul Bois locates the essential cause of these revolts on the deceptions of the participants that the French Revolution brought no real benefit to the rural cultivator. “Under one title or another, he had to continue to pay.”239 Charles Tilly not only concludes the same thing about the peasants,240 but finds the counterrevolutionary forces to have a strong base as well among workers in manufactures.241 Why not therefore simply consider the Vendée as part of the France-wide peasant anti-bourgeois struggle?

The story was not very different in general in the urban areas, most notably in Paris, where the sans-culottes may be said to provide the urban parallel to the small peasants with some land (in particular, the laboureurs), that is, oppressed workers but not indigent ones. Just as the peasants fought against the “privileged classes” (which included indistinctly aristocrats and bourgeois), so did the urban workers struggle against an “aristocracy” defined to refer not merely to noblemen but

to the rich and idle, to large landowners and capitalists, to speculators, to Girondins, to those who paid insufficient wages to workers, to those who wore their hair long and powdered, to those who frequented priests who had not sworn loyalty to the republic, to those with moderate political opinions of any description, even to those who were merely indifferent to politics.242

With such a definition, it is not surprising that the sans-culottes and the revolutionary government were at least as often at odds with each other as they were allies. The sans-culottes were most angry about the depreciation of the assignat243 and about the price of grain, both of which caused a virtual “rupture” between the government and them.244 Their demand for the maximum was accorded to them by the Jacobin bourgeoisie not freely, but “only constrained and forced,” as Soboul says.245 But why then talk of the “ambiguous position of the sans-culotterie,” as Soboul does?246 Fehér seems to be far more correct in calling Parisian direct democracy “the most striking instance of anti-capitalist political will in early modern history.”247 What other attitude was to be expected vis-à-vis a government that forbade the workers to organize at work (loi Le Chapelier) and, on the eve of Thermidor, was denouncing their demonstrations and strikes as “criminal maneuvers”?248

One side issue often confuses the discussion on the class struggle between the urban workers and the bourgeoisie: the presumed nonproletarian character of the sans-culottes. Most analysts seem to agree on the occupational description of that essentially political term. It was a “concertina word”249 that included small shopkeepers, petty traders, craftsmen, journeymen, laborers, vagrants, and the city poor.250 However, their “heart and core”251 were artisans. Salaried workers were only a minority, “one element amidst others.”252 Soboul wishes to deny even to this minority the status of true proletarians by calling them “wage workers of the old style,”253 which presumably means they worked in small shops and not large factories.

No doubt this is all true descriptively. Implicit, however, in the description is a presumed sharp contrast with workers’ movements in truly industrialized countries, composed differently. Is this so sure? Has it not been true subsequently of the majority of workers’ movements that their strength and their cadres have been drawn from a segment of the working population which was somewhat “better off,” whether this segment were technically independent artisans or more highly paid skilled (and/or craft) wage workers? The search for those who truly had nothing to lose but their chains led us at the time of the French Revolution to the indigents and leads us today to what is variously called the subproletariat, the lumpenproletariat, the unskilled (often immigrant) workers, the marginal, the chronically unemployed. If we are to argue, as does Soboul, that a true “class spirit is missing”254 from the urban popular masses because they followed the lead of the artisans (even if this were always so during the French Revolution, which it was not), what are we to say of the class spirit of the working class of twentieth-century industrialized countries?

Before we conclude, let us turn to the last debate, the nature and role of the Jacobins. The discussion here is more heavily overlain with contemporary political implications than any other. For a large part of the participants in the debate, “Jacobins” tends to serve as code language for Third International Communists, in power in the U.S.S.R. and elsewhere. This code discussion, scarcely veiled, makes a dispassionate analysis of the role the Jacobins actually played very difficult. There seem to be, nonetheless, basically two positions which cut across other lines in a curious fashion. Either the Jacobins represented something radically different from those in power previously—not only the Ancien Régime but the Girondins as well—or they were one more variant of the same ruling group. The camp of those who believe the differences were great unites Soboul and Furet, symbols otherwise of sharply opposed views, and also includes Fehér. The other camp is smaller but includes such diverse persons as Tocqueville, Guérin, and Higonnet.

Mathiez stated the position of the partisans of the social interpretation quite explicitly:

Between Girondins and the Mountain, the conflict was profound. It was almost a class conflict. . . .

June 2 [1793) . . . was more than a political revolution. What the sans-culottes overthrew was not merely a party; it was up to a point a social class. After the minority of the nobility which fell with the throne, it was now the turn of the upper bourgeoisie. . . .

Robespierre was, beginning with the Constituent Assembly, the most popular revolutionary of the class of artisans and small proprietors whose total confidence he held. He was the uncontested leader of the sans-culotterie, especially after the death of Marat.255

To be sure, Furet and Richet mark the turning point of the Revolution more on August 10, 1792 (the constitution of the Revolutionary Commune of Paris) than on June 2, 1793 (the arrest of the Girondin deputies).256 And they argue that the turning point had to do more with political values than with class struggle:

After August 10, 1792, the Revolution was dragged by war and the pressure of the Parisian crowd out of the great path traced by intelligence and wealth in the eighteenth century. . . . Beyond the Revolution which Jaurès understood so well, there was the revolution instinctively sensed by Michelet: that of the obscure forces of misery and anger.

Obliged to come to terms with them the politicians of the Mountain gave in to all their demands: conscription, price control, terror. But they conserved what was essential to them: power.257

Beyond the fact that for Mathiez the Jacobin period was a great positive and for Furet and Richet a great negative, they in fact combine to agree that it was profoundly different from the “first phase” of the Revolution and that the Jacobins and the popular masses were basically on the same side.

Fehér presents a somewhat different twist on the same viewpoint. For him the Jacobins do indeed represent politically the sans-culottes and other popular masses. They do this not, however, as the advanced representatives of a radical bourgeoisie, but rather as “anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist.”258 But for Fehér, as for Furet and Richet, the Jacobin experience is negative. For the latter, it was negative because it was a dérapage from the liberal, parliamentary road, the British road, which the Enlightenment had embraced. Fehér, by contrast, sees not only it, but also, behind it, a whole tradition of Enlightenment thought, as representing precisely the rejection of the British “solution” of capitalism.259 If the Jacobin period was negative for Fehér, it is because he believes socialism to be more than mere anti-capitalism, and that terror can be no part of socialism.260

Tocqueville never explicitly discusses this issue, but his whole emphasis on the continuities weighs against any sense of a basic midway turning point in the Revolution. The conflicting passions for equality and liberty were there already under the Ancien Régime, and the struggles merely continued afterward, with ups and down. “Radical though it may have been, the Revolution made far fewer changes than is generally supposed.” Rather, very quickly, the Revolution accomplished “what in any case was bound to happen, if by slow degrees.”261

Guérin is in many ways an orthodox member of the social interpretation school. The French Revolution of the Assemblies was a bourgeois revolution, and remained bourgeois, as Rudé says, “even at the height of the Jacobin democracy.”262 Except that it was not even then for Guérin a “democracy” but rather a “bourgeois dictatorship,”263struggling against a second, separate proletarian revolution. Robespierre was not the agent of this second revolution but its most clever opponent. He “dreamed up a bold plan . . . : make concessions to the bras nus, without giving in on anything crucial.”264

Higonnet comes to these questions from a standpoint much closer to the Cobban–Furet rejection of the concept of a bourgeois revolution (objectively, if not subjectively) than to the social interpretation, but he still arrives at conclusions not all that different from Guérin. For Higonnet sees the period 1792–1793 as one of “opportunistic anti-nobilism” in which the Terror was a “strategic gesture . . . designed to harness ‘the people’ to the bourgeois Revolutionary cause.” In effect, the persecution of nobles (by both the Girondins and the Mountain) was “opportunistic, tactical, and demagogic” because it served essentially to deflect popular complaint from their real object, the “bourgeois, individualist, and capitalist world order” in which nobles, officiers, and bourgeois alike had already long been involved.265

What can we conclude about the Jacobins? From any viewpoint of the longue durée, it seems clear to me that the Tocquevillian continuities dominate the balance sheet of French political and economic structures, and hence Guérin and Higonnet are more nearly right about the Jacobins than the others. To turn Robespierre into a proto-Lenin (whatever one may think of Lenin) seems to me clearly to misread his role, as he and his contemporaries viewed him. It further seems to me that the theory of a bourgeois revolution cannot withstand the fact that the realities of capitalism in France as elsewhere in Western Europe long predated 1789.

What then the French Revolution? Much ado about nothing? Surely not. The French Revolution was three things, three very different things, but all three deeply intermeshed. First, it was a relatively conscious attempt by a diverse group of the ruling capitalist strata to force through urgently needed reforms of the French state in light of the perceived British leap forward to hegemonic status in the world-economy. As such, it continued under Napoleon, and while the reforms were achieved, the objective of preventing British hegemony was not. Indeed the French revolutionary process probably increased, as we shall see, the British lead.

Second, the Revolution created the circumstances of a breakdown of public order sufficient to give rise to the first significant antisystemic (that is, anti-capitalist) movement in the history of the modern world-system, that of the French “popular masses.” As such, it was, of course, a failure, but as such it has been the spiritual basis of all subsequent antisystemic movements. This is so not because the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution but precisely because it was not.

Third, the Revolution provided the needed shock to the modern world-system as a whole to bring the cultural–ideological sphere at last into line with the economic and political reality. The first centuries of the capitalist world-economy were lived largely within “feudal” ideological clothes. This is neither anomalous nor unexpected. This sort of lag is normal and indeed structurally necessary. But it couldn’t go on forever and the French Revolution, which in this sense was only one part (but the key part) of the “world revolution of the West,” marked the moment when feudal ideology would at last crumble. The proof is in the intellectual reaction—of Burke and of Maistre. One needs to defend “conservative” ideas explicitly only when they are fundamentally questioned and no longer accepted by the majority. And until 1789 that was not true.266 This was an exciting change, and is what excited many. But it marks not the beginning of a bourgeois, capitalist era but the moment of its full maturation.

Let us therefore return now to the story of the Franco–British competition for hegemony in the world-system, in this last crucial phase which ran from 1792 to 1815, a period normally identified in the literature on Kondratieff cycles as an A-phase of economic expansion.267 Serge Chassagne cautions us, in his study of the French wool industry from 1790 to 1810, that this period is simultaneously one which “revealed long-existent weaknesses and . . . accelerated inevitable revolutions.” Therefore, he says, let us not overstate the accidental features of the revolutionary period and confuse them with profounder “structural transformations,” thereby seeking either “to glorify of vilify the Revolution.”268 Still, was the Revolution merely an accidental factor, even in narrowly economic terms? Our argument heretofore leads us to doubt this. It broke out, in large part, precisely in response to the structural transformations going on in the world-economy and would, by its dynamic, as Chassagne himself notes, “accelerate” the evolutions.269 Whether or not these evolutions were otherwise “inevitable” we shall never know. What we do know is that they occurred.

The key policy element of this phase of Franco–British rivalry that was different from the previous phases was the virtually automatic involvement of both states, on opposite sides, of every “revolutionary” struggle that occurred. Properly speaking, this difference didn’t start in 1789 but under the Ancien Régime in the 1770s.270 As we know, Great Britain ultimately prevailed globally in military terms. Thus it can indeed be said that “within a conjoncture that was generally favorable, Great Britain created politically, sometime militarily, its own conjoncture.”271 It was these politico–military victories that critically increased the economic gaps—in agriculture, in industry, in trade, and in finance.

In agriculture, the key difference was that while, in France, the political strength demonstrated by the peasantry in the Revolution slowed down (even halted) the process of concentration of ownership,272 the wartime period actually accelerated concentration in Great Britain,273 thereby accentuating the gap and creating Britain’s long-term nineteenth-century advantage in terms of yields on arable land.274

In industry too, the war seems to have had a clear impact on production in the crucial textiles industry. On the one hand, the most recent revisions in the data on British economic growth, particularly in the cotton industry, suggest that the previous picture of “spectacular acceleration” in the period starting in the 1780s seems exaggerated,275and that instead one should talk of a “steady acceleration” both of per capita income and of total productivity.276 Furthermore, previous impressions of a major role in this acceleration for large-scale industry277 or for steam power 278 seem equally overstated for this period. Finally, Chapman argues that the distinction between British “mass-produced” and French “fashion and design-conscious” products “cannot be sustained after 1790.”279

Yet we know that, on the other hand, Britain had as of 1815 an “unquestionably increased economic advantage” in the cotton industry over the continent in general, and over France in particular.280 How could this be? Gayer insists that we cannot infer that British expansion “would have been less rapid at a time of peace.”281 Perhaps this is true, although the war clearly increased the share of cotton relative to linen and wool textile production because of the greater availability of the former’s sources of supply under wartime conditions.282 What seems to be the case is less that British expansion was so much more rapid than previously than that there was “a noticeable slowing-down” of the pace of French industrialization.283

A close look at the timing indicates exactly what happened in France, and by extension, in the rest of continental Europe as it came under French control. The growth rate for the Revolutionary and war periods in fact can be subdivided into a period of low growth from 1790 to 1800, a period of relatively higher growth from 1800 to 1810, and a new low period from 1810 to 1815.284 The first period was that of the self-imposed disruption of the Revolution. The third was that of the disruption imposed by the British. Napoleon’s valiant efforts, in between, did not suffice.

One further difference between Britain and France should be noted with respect to the cotton textile industry. While this period was that of the liquidation, more or less, of the putting-out system in the British textile industry and the urbanization of its productive activities, it was by contrast the period of the veritable creation of a putting-out structure in French textiles, one that would last until 1860. Chassagne calls this a “dualist process of industrialization” which separated physically as of the 1790s the “concentrated very capitalistic” mechanical spinning processes based on hydraulic power and the countryside activities where the weaving was done.285

If one asks why this should have happened, a clue is suggested by Schmidt and has to do precisely with the impact of the Revolution. Remembering that one concern of the French was the catching-up with the new mechanical spinning advances of Great Britain, Schmidt points out that to do this rapidly and inexpensively required the use of factory buildings that were already in existence. The nationalization of church property was in this regard a windfall, large numbers of convents, church schools, and abbeys being given to manufacturers gratis or at low price by the revolutionary government for the purpose of installing spinning mills.286 This property, however, had to be taken where it was found, which was most often in rural areas. Along with this went the sentiment that a putting-out system was an “excellent guarantee of social order,”287 itself a reaction to the strong antisystemic thrust of the French working class during the Revolution.

No doubt, the element that had the greatest impact on both agriculture and industry was the impact of the wars on interstate trade, the key growth sector at this point. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, almost 60% of Britain’s “additional industrial output” was exported.288 It was just at this point that France’s external trade which had played a key role in French economic growth in the last decades of the Ancien Régime suggered a “catastrophic decline”289 because of, first, the Revolution,290 second, the loss of Saint-Domingue,291 and third, the Napoleonic wars.

The case seems clear then that it was the wars that allowed the “spectacular change”292 in Britain’s exports of cotton textiles while it simultaneously “imposed a curb on France,”293 thereby creating for Britain a “permanent trading advantage in world markets.”294 To be sure, Napoleon attempted to reverse this situation. Indeed, in the very month he came to power (Brumaire, Year VIII), a French government internal memorandum observed: “The existence of England is due solely to its trade and its credit. If one or the other is made to totter, she is ruined, she is lost.”295 And yet we know that, despite Napoleon’s best efforts, he could never make foreign trade reach the level it had had in 1789.296

Napoleon’s policies, of course, did not really start with Napoleon. They started with the return to protectionism in 1791, continued with the French navigation act of 1793, the banning of British merchandise arriving on neutral vessels in 1798, and merely culminated in the decrees of Berlin and Milan of 1806–1807 organizing the Continental Blockade.297

The Blockade itself seemed primarily directed against British cotton textile production, which was “menaced with overproduction because of a too rapid expansion,”298 especially between 1799–1802, years in which Napoleon was experiencing his first commercial crisis.299 The Blockade was a “serious” menace, because Great Britain was indeed “vulnerable.”300 Napoleon hoped to affect British trade on many fronts: closing of outlets for manufactured products in Europe, blocking raw materials imports, and impairing British financial credit (by creating a negative balance of payments leading to exhaustion of bullion and therefore a collapse of confidence in the paper money).301

The only one of these objectives achieved even partially was the closing of outlets in Europe.302 Denying Great Britain raw materials imports foundered on the fact that Napoleon’s power, in Captain Mahan’s acerbic prose, “ceased, like that of certain wizards, when it reached the Water.”303 As for Britain’s financial credit, it remained good because the financial links with the continent were never really broken,304 not to speak of the fact that Britain was the steady recipient of a bullion inflow as the haven for the flight of capital, first from the Revolution, then from Napoleon’s Continental System.305 Britain’s state finances were kept in balance, at first by income from the expanded foreign trade,306 and, when the costs of war escalated, by borrowing307 and by imposing the increased tax burden disproportionately on the agricultural sector, thereby protecting industry and trade.308

Although Napoleon was using the power of the state to encourage, indeed subsidize, industry,309 the British were just as actively aiding theirs,310 and trying with some success to deny French and continental industries their raw materials.311 Crouzet insists that the Continental Blockade was not “inefficacious” economically. It did seriously affect British economic activity, but Napoleon could not apply it long enough to succeed in his objectives, for essentially political and military reasons.312 On the one hand, the French encountered political, nationalist resistance within their empire.313 On the other hand, in this fertile atmosphere, Britain was buying allies through its considerable subsidies.314 Under the counterpressure Napoleon began in effect to retreat in the economic arena as early as 1810, when he reopened the ports of France to colonial products via licenses. He did thereby absorb into the state treasury the profit margin of the smugglers, but this only aggravated political resistance within Europe, since it amounted to a covert economic deal with the British at the expense of other Europeans. It thus added one more element fostering the reversal of alliances that would occur.315

Was, therefore, the whole effort of the Revolutionary governments and Napoleon to undo the growing relative advantage of Great Britain over France one enormous failure? Probably not entirely. Crouzet argues that “by 1800, Central Europe was threatened by pastoralization and the fate of India in the nineteenth century.”316 This threat did not materialize. Nonetheless, Britain was much further ahead in 1815 than in 1793,317 and further ahead precisely because of the effects, direct and indirect, of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

There is, however, one further factor to take into account, the course of the state-level class struggles in France and in Great Britain. In France, we have already recounted the antisystemic thrust of the urban masses in the revolutionary years. We know that the Enragés or Jacquesroutains as well as the Babouvistes, failed, and decisively, as political movements.318 The planned reforms in social policy which the popular masses had been able to extract from the revolutionary government were never enacted. Nonetheless, the ideal of Jacobin bienfaisance—the rights of those below the poverty line to social assistance—left a political legacy which “should not be belittled,”319 and this legacy was felt in the Napoleonic era.

Napoleon preserved all the legal reforms instituted by the Revolution and indeed codified them.320 Of course, that did not necessarily mean more security and rights for the wage earner, who was not better off under Napoleon, probably worse.321 But nonetheless the economic conditions of the popular masses improved considerably under Napoleon. His was an era dominated by a “rise in wages.” This improvement in material conditions was “unquestionable,” so much so that, after the economic downturn of 1817, peasants and urban workers looked back upon the Empire “as a sort of golden age.”322 No doubt, the conjoncture served Napoleon well. But it was not automatic that this meant popular support. It is pertinent to compare the atmosphere in France with that in Great Britain in this same conjoncture.

The French Revolution aroused considerable sympathy in the beginning from what might broadly be called the left half of the British political spectrum. While more moderate supporters began to fall away during the Jacobin phase, there remained a faithful group of so-called English Jacobins, whose politics were in fact closer to that of the sans-culottes than to that of the Jacobins. Their strength was among the artisan class and they maintained a “root-and-branch opposition” to monarchy, the aristocracy, the state, and taxation.323 But once the war broke out, the members of these popular societies came to be “isolated” politically from more mainline Whig groups.324

Nonetheless, the government found them quite threatening, fearing “any form of popular self-activity,” because it seemed to menace not only traditional authority but the “new ideology of political economy.”325 The result was a serious and relatively effective repression, such that British radicals during the 1790s “believed that they were experiencing a reign of terror,”326 which included the suspension of habeas corpus.

The two most significant new policies in relation to the control of labor during this period were the Speenhamland “allowance system” of 1795 and the Anti-Combination Acts of 1799. Speenhamland loosened the old Act of Settlement of 1662, whose effect Thorold Rogers asserted to have been “to annex the labourer to the parish of his residence, and to make him a serf.”327 The revised Poor Law system provided in effect for a minimum wage (through government subsidy) tied to the cost of living plus a family allowance system.

Three questions should be asked about Speenhamland. Was it better for the workers? Was it better for the employers (largely of agricultural labor)? Why was it enacted? It clearly had some advantages for the workers in that it meant that even in bad years they “could count on escaping outright starvation.”328 Was it better for the employers? By subsidizing what in fact were “substandard wages,” the effect was that, between 1795 and 1824, it “depressed agricultural wages.” Blaug, however, argues that these subsidies to employers were in effect paid by them through the rate system, the “link” between the two being close.329

Then cui bono? What it did effectively was to prevent unemployment by spreading underemployment in a still largely agricultural country.330 If we ask then why it was done, the motivation seems clearly and immediately political, “the fear of popular uprising,”331 the spectre of the French Revolution as an anti-capitalist revolution. In this regard Speenhamland succeeded.332 It only did so, however, because it was coupled with the Anti-Combination Laws, “but for which Speenhamland might have had the effect of raising wages instead of depressing them as it actually did.”333 Plumb points out that the Anti-Combination Laws accomplished two things simultaneously: it kept down wages despite rising food costs, but it also enabled the government “to eradicate one of the best breeding grounds for subversive propaganda.”334

Thus the policies vis-à-vis the popular masses were in the end harsher in Great Britain than in France, probably because the antisystemic thrust in France, although repressed, had been more efficacious. One piece of evidence in this regard is the actual level of wages and food supply in the two countries during the war period. Whereas we saw that French workers felt that the Napoleonic era has been a period of increased real wages, Britain in this period saw a fall.³³⁵

When this was combined with years of scarce bread, such as 1809–1811, the difficult situation led to serious rioting, which was in some ways comparable to what occurred in prerevolutionary France, except that it expressed itself not in anti-government sentiment, but in anti-employer, anti-machine sentiment, Luddism.³³⁶ Yet the net result was not, or not yet, to be a revolutionary upsurge.³³⁷ Despite worsening conditions in the war period, British workers were held in check—in part by government repression, in part no doubt (as has often been claimed) by Methodism,³³⁸ but also in part by the harnessing of nationalist (anti-French) sentiment to the cause of political stability.³³⁹All that remained for the British ruling class was to begin to transfer a piece of the pie to their lower strata. But this had to await the new hegemonic era (and even then it was slow in coming).

With the end of the wars, Britain was finally truly hegemonic in the world-system. It consolidated its world power by acquiring a set of maritime bases, which added to what it already had, and meant that it now circled the globe strategically. Between 1783 and 1816 Britain acquired, in the Atlantic Ocean area, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Tobago, Bathurst, Sierra Leone, Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, and Gough Island; in the Indian Ocean, the Cape Colony, Mauritius, the Seychelles, the Laccadive Islands, the Maldive Islands, Ceylon, the Andaman Islands, and Penang; in Australasia, New South Wales, New Zealand, Macquarie Islands, Campbell Islands, Auckland Island, Lord Howe Island, and Chatham Island; and in the Mediterranean, Malta and the Ionian Islands.³⁴⁰

Furthermore, Britain had in the process of the war been able to end the last vestige of Holland’s one-time hegemony, her role as a financial center of Europe.³⁴¹ Through her dominance in commerce and finance, Britain now began to earn massive invisible credits—earnings of the merchant marine, commercial commissions, remittances from technicians and colonial officials abroad, earnings from investments—which were enough to compensate a continuing, even expanding, trade deficit, one that existed despite the size of her export trade. Britain, therefore, could maintain a constantly favorable balance of payments.³⁴² She commenced too her new role as the “schoolmaster of industrial Europe,”³⁴³ while nonetheless still maintaining her high protectionist barriers.³⁴⁴

In this period, the sense of French backwardness in relation to British industry became accepted truth. A French industrialist in the 1830s explained British superiority by the greater specialization of British industry, which meant the British could produce faster and cheaper.³⁴⁵ Chaptal’s explanation at the time as to why this should be so emphasizes low French wages as a disincentive to mechanization.³⁴⁶ This seems dubious, however, in light of recent data that workers in French industries at the time “achieved higher levels of productivity than their counterparts” in Britain.³⁴⁷ It is even more dubious if we remember that the data on lower wage rates in France than in Britain is not necessarily a statement about “average levels of earnings,” given a different household income structure, “and therefore [about] welfare in the two countries.”³⁴⁸

One of the clear outcomes of the final British surge forward and France’s defeat in the wars was the emergence of a quite different demographic pattern for the two countries. Le Roy Ladurie somewhat dramatically calls the French Revolution France’s “demographic Islam,”³⁴⁹ meaning that because of it birth control became widespread in the countryside. Reinhard, more soberly, suggests that France’s pattern was merely the “prototype” of what would later occur everywhere.³⁵⁰ McNeill, however, looks at it quite differently, seeing the Napoleonic wars as a way of “ameliorating social tensions arising from rapid population growth” in the eighteenth century.³⁵¹

Could we not, therefore, see the post-1815 demographic pattern as an adjustment to economic and political reality? The British, having gained the upper hand in the world market, needed to expand their labor force to maximize their advantage. They did this by encouraging high rates of natural increase, by immigration, and by encouraging a shift to higher ratios of waged to nonwaged labor.³⁵² France, unable to support an expanded work force through an income from international trade, foreign investment, and mercantile services in general as could Britain, settled for supporting a parallel domestic output per head of population by “restraints on fertility.”³⁵³ In this case, it would not be the slow population growth that explains slow mechanization³⁵⁴ but the inverse. If such were the case, Frenchmen might be forgiven for believing that “successful mercantilism, not the factory system . . . [was] at the centre of British superiority for a century after Waterloo.”³⁵⁵

It is in this light that we should read the long-standing controversy over the standard of living of the British working class. It is, in fact, a debate largely centered about what happened between circa 1815 and 1840. Ashton launches the post-1945 debate by asserting that, given the fall in prices and the rise in imports into Britain, “it is difficult to believe that the workers had no share in the gain.” Hobsbawm conversely suggests that, given the rise of mortality rates and unemployment, the scattered evidence “support a pessimistic rather than a rosy view.” Hartwell in turn suggests improvement occurred “slowly during the war, more quickly after 1815, and rapidly after 1840.” And Hobsbawm retorts that there are improvements in national income, but was there more equal distribution? Taylor continues by suggesting that “the progress of the working class lagged behind that of the nation at large.”³⁵⁶

It does not seem hard to reconcile the actual empirical findings reported. This much seems difficult to contest. Prices fell considerably, although, because of the Corn Laws, they fell less for bread than they otherwise would have.³⁵⁷ The real wages of those who were employed at wage labor rose somewhat. But this is not necessarily the case for agricultural labor, nor for the unemployed and partially employed in the towns. Nor does it exclude the likelihood that for their real wage increase, the wage laborer and his family worked longer and harder hours than previously. That is, the real wage per annum could go up without the real wage per hour going up. Finally, it is clear that profits in the cotton industry (and elsewhere in industry) were “well-maintained” despite falling prices, and that one of the reasons was that industrialists “enjoyed an almost inexhaustible low-priced labor supply.”³⁵⁸ Materially, a segment of the British working class got a slightly increased portion of the pie. But looked at from the point of view of the world-economy as a whole, this is perfectly consistent with the assertion that the world-economy-wide working class got a diminished portion of the same pie.

We should remember a double movement was occurring at just this point in the world-economy. There was a significant incorporation of new zones into the world-economy, new peripheries which were suffering a significant decrease in their standard of living. However, Western Europe generally (and particularly France, Belgium, western “Germany,” and Switzerland) and also the northern states of the United States, having been pushed behind Great Britain, were nonetheless proceeding to “industrialize” and would be able to (re)emerge as strong core zones in the mid-nineteenth century. In the meantime, the resistance of their working classes to capitalist development may have earned them similar small increases in real living standards.

Both of these developments will be the subject of detailed analysis later. But a few preliminary observations are in order here to complete the Franco—British comparison. In the period 1815–1840, France was able to “modernize” its textile industry in particular and thus “overcome its backwardness”³⁵⁹ vis-à-vis Britain. Note carefully nonetheless how this was done and what market was served. France turned to a specialization in quality textiles along with, as we have already noted, a ruralization of location.³⁶⁰ One of the key reasons was the size of the market. Deprived of the world, France had to reconstruct to serve France, which it would do by restructuring and industrial relocation.³⁶¹ While, therefore, this was a period of deindustrialization in the periphery, in Europe, this “evil, not unknown, was less profound,” and that was so because the states were still strong enough to intervene actively to counter the threat.³⁶² But was it not also the case that Britain did not need the deindustrialization of Europe? Quite the contrary, perhaps. Given the widened market of the periphery, Britain would need a second layer of industrializing countries coming in behind her, to take up the slack as she would progress to new technological advances. Or so it would work for at least 50 years.

We must stop this story, however, for the moment at 1830/1832, a political turning point. July 1830 in France was “more than a riot, and certainly less than a revolution.”³⁶³ It played in many ways the function vis-à-vis the French Revolution that the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 played in England vis-à-vis the English Revolution. It represented an ideological compromise among the ruling classes that in some sense laid to rest the bitterness of the ideological quarrels caused by the extreme violence of the previous revolution. It ensured that the internecine quarrels among the upper strata would henceforth be fought in “normal” (if not always constitutional) political form. By so doing, it in fact liberated the workers from their conceptual dependence on bourgeois thinkers. The workers “took up the language of the Revolution and reshaped it to fit their own goals.”³⁶⁴

The French Revolution of 1830 had an immediate echo in Great Britain and led to the Reform Act of 1832.³⁶⁵ Indeed, a violent outbreak there in 1832 was “averted only at the eleventh hour.”³⁶⁶ The Reform Act of 1832 then turned out to be a sort of ideological coda to 1688–1689, including the industrialists within the political game, who had been excluded previously “not because their property was industrial but because it was petty.”³⁶⁷ This coda served the same function for Britain that 1830 did for France. It liberated the working class terminologically. Now British workers could begin to talk the class-conscious action they had long since begun to perform.

THE INCORPORATION OF VAST NEW ZONES INTO THE WORLD-ECONOMY: 1750–1850

The engraving illustrates one part of the elaborate process of receiving a European envoy at the Ottoman court—the ceremonial dinner offered by the Grand Vizier in the hall of the Divan after the exchange of credentials with the Grand Vizier and immediately preceding the presentation of the envoy to the Sultan. The etching was made by Bénoist in 1785 (probably M.-A. Bénoist, who worked in Paris 1780–1810), and was completed by Delvaux (probably Rémi Delvaux, 1750–1832). It appeared as an illustration in one of the first major presentations of Ottoman customs and history to a European public. This book, Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman, was written by Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, who had been chargé d’affaires of Sweden at the Sublime Porte, and was published in French in Paris in three volumes in 1787, 1790, and 1820.

In the course of the renewed economic expansion (and monetary inflation) of the period 1733–1817 (more or less), the European world-economy broke the bounds it had created in the long sixteenth century and began to incorporate vast new zones into the effective division of labor it encompassed. It began by incorporating zones which had already been in its external arena since the sixteenth century—most particularly and most importantly, the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman empire, the Russian empire, and West Africa.

These incorporations took place in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. The pace, as we know, then accelerated and, eventually by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the entire globe, even those regions that had never been part even of the external arena of the capitalist world-economy, were pulled inside. The pattern of this process of incorporation into the existing ongoing process of capital accumulation was set with these four zones. Although the incorporation process of each was somewhat different in detail, the four processes occurred more or less simultaneously and exhibited substantial similarities in their essential features.

Incorporation into the capitalist world-economy was never at the initiative of those being incorporated. The process derived rather from the need of the world-economy to expand its boundaries, a need which was itself the outcome of pressures internal to the world-economy. Major and large-scale social processes like incorporation are furthermore not abrupt phenomena. They emerge from the flow of ongoing continuous activities. While we may give them dates retrospectively (and approximately), the turning points are seldom sharp and the qualitative changes they incarnate are complex and composite. Nevertheless, they are real in their impact and eventually they are perceived to have occurred.

Previously in this work we have sought to distinguish systematically those zones which (in the long sixteenth century) were in the periphery of the world-economy and those which were in its external arena. We suggested then that there were three principal differences between the way Russia (in the external arena) and eastern Europe (in the periphery) related to western Europe: “(a) a difference in the nature of the trade, (b) a difference in the strength and role of the state-machinery, and (c) as a consequence of the two prior points, a difference in the strength and role of the indigenous urban bourgeoisie.”¹

The question we are dealing with now is the nature of the process by which a zone which was at one point in time in the external arena of the world-economy came to be, at a later point in time, in the periphery of that same world-economy. We think of this transition as a period of medium duration and we denominate it the period of “incorporation.” Hence, the model we are using involves three successive moments for a “zone”—being in the external arena, being incorporated, and being peripheralized. None of these moments is static; all of them involve processes.

Incorporation means fundamentally that at least some significant production processes in a given geographic location become integral to various of the commodity chains that constitute the ongoing divisioning of labor of the capitalist world-economy. And how will we know if a particular production process is “integral to” this divisioning of labor? A production process can only be considered to be thus integrated if its production responds in some sense to the ever-changing “market conditons” of this world-economy (whatever the source of these changes) in terms of efforts by those who control these production processes to maximize the accumulation of capital within this “market”—if not in the very short run, at least in some reasonable middle run. As long as this cannot be said to be happening by and large, as long as the vagaries of the particular production processes can be accounted for by considerations other than those which permit the maximal accumulation of capital in the world-economy, then the zone in which these particular processes are located must be considered to remain in the external arena of the world-economy, despite the existence of trade links, and no matter how extensive or profitable the ongoing “trade” seems to be.

Of course, however much defining the difference in this way might clarify the issue theoretically, it is of little utility as an empirical indicator of the correct description of a particular situation. To find such indicators, we must turn to some of the empirical consequences of such integration. And here we must make a distinction between the moment (however long) of “incorporation” and the subsequent moment of “peripheralization.” If an analogy may be permitted, incorporation involves “hooking” the zone into the orbit of the world-economy in such a way that it virtually can no longer escape, while peripheralization involves a continuing transformation of the ministructures of the area in ways that are sometimes referred to as the deepening of capitalist development.

Perhaps if we ask ourselves the simple question of what is required in order that a local production process respond in some sense to the ever-changing market conditions of a world-economy, we may locate the criteria we need. It seems clear that the ability to respond is a function in part of the size of the decision-making unit. A larger unit is more likely to have an impact on itself and its own prospects for capital accumulation by altering its production decisions in light of what it believes to be altered conditions in some market. It follows that, for enterprises in a zone to begin to respond in this way, they may have to become larger. The creation of such larger units of decision making may occur either at a site of direct production (e.g., by creating a “plantation”) or at a site of mercantile collection of production, provided that the collector, that is, the merchant, has some mechanism of controlling, in turn, the activities of multiple petty producers (e.g., debt obligation). Second, decisions, most simply those of expanding of contracting production, must be possible in terms of the ability to acquire (or rid oneself of the responsibility for) the elements that enter into the production process—the machines, the materials, the capital, and above all, the human labor. Human labor must be “coercible” in some way. Third, those who control production processes are more likely to respond if the political institutions that have relevant power and authority permit, abet, and subsidize such responses than if they do not. Finally, responses require an institutional infrastructure of reasonable security and appropriate currency arrangements.

It follows from this that to analyze whether the production processes of a given zone are integrated in the larger divisioning of labor of a world-economy, we should enquire into the nature of the structures of economic decision making, the ways in which labor is differentially available for work in these productive processes, the degree to which governance units relate to the requirements of the political superstructure of the capitalist world-economy, and, finally, the emergence of the necessary institutional infrastructure, or rather the extension of that which already exists in the capitalist world-economy to cover the zone being incorporated. It is this story we shall seek to tell in this chapter.

Let us begin by reviewing in what sense these four zones were not incorporated in the long period 1500–1750 during which all four might be said to have been in a constant trading relationship with the European world-economy as part of its external arena.

There was, first of all, the nature of the trade. The specificity of trade between two zones not within a single division of labor revolves around the distinction, in the language of earlier times, between the “rich trades” and the trade in “coarse” or “gruff” goods. Today we speak of the distinction between “luxury goods” on the one hand and “bulk goods” or “necessities” on the other. A luxury is of course a term whose operational definition is a function of normative evaluation. We know today that even such a seemingly physiological concept as the minimum standard of living for survival is socially defined. If for no other reason, this is so because we have to put into the equation the length of time over which one is measuring the survival. It is difficult to decide that any particular products—spices or tea or furs or indeed slaves—are or are not, in a given context, luxury exports, not to speak of the special case of bullion. I say luxury export, because in an economic sense there is little meaning to the idea of a luxury import. If an item is bought on a market, it is because someone feels subjectively a “need” for that item, and it would be fatuous for the analytic observer to assert that the “need” was not real. In the classical expression of the Thomases, “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”² To be sure, some items are expensive per unit and others not, but what is relevant to the merchant is the rate of return for the totality sold multiplied by the quantity of sales.

Luxury export may, however, have a more analytic definition. It refers to the dispositon of socially low-valued items at prices far higher than those obtainable from their alternative usages. This is a concept that can only apply if one is dealing with the trade between two separate historical systems which then can conceivably have different measures of social value. Hence, the concepts “luxury” and “external arena” go hand in hand. If we now look at the literature we find that authors have frequently used the language of “luxury” trade in the descriptions of India and West Africa. Kulshresthra, for example, notes: “ ‘The objects of oriental traffic were splendid and trifling,’ says Gibbons. And this is particularly true for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”³ Northrup, speaking of the development of Atlantic commerce in the Niger Delta observes that at first the Aro traded in “luxury items—slaves, horses and cattle for ritual purposes and beads”⁴ and that such commerce was not conducted in the local markets.

But what makes the luxury a luxury? Amin finds the crucial variable to be ignorance. He links the “rarity” of the goods in “long-distance trade” with the fact that such trade is based on the exchange of commodities “for which each is unaware of the other’s cost of production.”⁵ If ignorance is a crucial element, we see immediately in what way such luxury trade can be self-liquidating. As the trade expands, the basis of the ignorance may disappear. This brings us then to the second crucial element, the one raised by Karl Polanyi, and illustratively applied particularly to the case of Dahomey in the eighteenth century. It is the concept of “port of trade,” which we may reconceptualize as the political mechanism by which the “ignorance” is safeguarded.

As Rosemary Arnold spelled out the functioning of Dahomey’s “port of trade,” Whydah, the key was in the “drastic institutional separation of the trading organization and the military organization” of the kingdom of Dahomey.⁶ Institutional, and spatial as well—because the wars were located “inland” but the trade at the coast, which meant that the kingdom’s military objectives, including slave raiding, could be pursued “without interference from the traders, whether European or Dahomean.”⁷ But what interference? Clearly, Arnold is thinking not of military but of economic interference, and economic interference implies knowledge of market conditions.

In order to maintain this knowledge monopoly, the concept “port of trade” is linked to the trade monopoly of the ruler, the merchants serving merely as the ruler’s employees or agents.⁸ In addition to physical separation and royal monopoly, Austen adds a third element: “a system of gathering international trade commodities which remained separate from the production of goods for internal African use.”⁹ This assumes, which may not be incorrect, that the infrastructural base of “gathering” as opposed to “producing” is much thinner and that, therefore, the costs of expansion and contraction of the quantity of gathering activities is significantly less than that involved in productive activities.

To be sure, the Polanyi–Arnold argument has not been unchallenged as empirical description of the kingdom of Dahomey. In particular, the royal monopoly on the slave trade seems not to have been total. However, Argyle, who launched this critique, does observe that the king’s power was sufficient to require both African slave raiders and European merchants to do business first with the king before dealing with others, to sell to the king at “fixed prices,” and to buy from him at prices higher than “they gave to the other dealers.”¹⁰ Manning’s form of criticism is perhaps more apt. He suggests that the Polanyi–Arnold model, by confounding three different centuries is thereby “distorted and ahistorical.”¹¹ Thus the description may only have been true for the earliest period. Furthermore, the port of trade, established to prevent integration, may nonetheless have led to other modes of dependence equally integrating. For the port of trade required a stronger state form, a feature of West African involvement in the slave trade that has been frequently noted, and to which we shall return. And the very survival of the stronger state may come to depend on maintaining the trade links.¹²

The strength of the state machinery in the external arena turns out to be a critical variable but one whose impact on incorporation is more complex than we have been wont to recognize. In terms of initial contact with another world-system, strong state-machineries can guarantee that trade is conducted as an equal exchange between two arenas external to each other. The very process of such trade may strengthen some state-machineries on each side, as we know it did in this historic case. The increased strength of some states in the external arena thereupon provoked the power-holders in the European world-economy to invest in the relationship still more force in order to break down this “monopolistic” barrier to incorporation. In a sense, the states in the external arena went from strength to greater strength to relative weakness.

Nolte argues against my previous distinction between Poland, already incorporated and peripheral in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Russia, which I assert was still then in the external arena. His argument hinges on the extensiveness of Russian trade with western Europe. He does admit that Russia’s “process of integration” began later than Poland’s. This happened, however, he says, “more for political and social reasons than for economic ones.”¹³ But this is precisely my point.¹⁴

Nor should we be deceived by mere cultural borrowings. The reign of Sultan Ahmed III in the Ottoman Empire (1718–1730) came to be known as the “Tulip Age” because of the presumed infatuation of the Court with tulips imported from Holland. Hogdson adjures us not to perceive this Western cultural borrowing by the Ottoman Empire as “display of exotic luxury” (which fits in with our insistence that imports are never luxuries), but rather as an attempt by the Ottoman rulers “to restore absolutism” against the regional decentralization which had been occurring. And when the opponents of this absolutism invoked the values of Islam to inveigh against “the infidel (and commercially-competitive) luxuries of the court,” Hodgson says they were striking “knowingly” against those trade links with the Occident “which might have increased the court’s power.”¹⁵

Similarly, the recent scholarship on the Indian Ocean era tends to reduce not augment our perception of Portuguese oceanic dominance in the sixteenth century. (There has never been any question of belief in significant land dominance on the Indian subcontinent by any Western power before the second half of the eighteenth century.) The Portuguese, notes Digby, competed “with only qualified success” for a share in the so-called country (i.e., intraregional) trade, and to get even that they had to reach “accommodations with other holders of power” in the region.¹⁶

Finally, there is the familiar story of the emergence of new kingdoms and strengthening of old ones in the zones along or just inland from the West and Central African coast in the process of the slave trade. The result was, for the most part, a situation “where the Africans called the tune,”¹⁷ especially in terms of shaping the general working of the trading system in West Africa—that is to say, the Africans who governed these intermediary kingdoms and not those of the regions being pillaged. One should, of course, bear in mind that the strength of the kingdoms went hand in hand with the strength of a local trading class.¹⁸

There is a fourth feature to the trade of these external arenas with the European (and capitalist) world-economy that is striking—the persistent long-term imbalance of trade.¹⁹ The outflow of bullion to the Indian subcontinent in the pre-1750 period has long been noted. Chaudhuri calls it a “paradox” that even the increase in India’s demand for Europe’s imports in the period 1660–1760 was insufficient to overcome “the fundamental structural imbalance.”²⁰ There are two ways to think about this phenomenon. One can see it as the purchase by these zones of a necessary commodity, bullion, which, therefore, becomes a sign not of being in the external arena but precisely of the opposite, of being integrated into the European world-economy. This is the path Chaudhuri takes in talking of it as “essentially due to the rising liquidity created by the working of American gold and silver mines”²¹ which created “a relative difference in international production costs and prices.”²² Perlin goes further in arguing that the import of bullion was “a trade in commodities, which in Sraffa’s terms enters . . . into the production of all commodities.”²³ This is the same line of argument Nolte uses about precious metals going to Russia: “They were essential for the circulation of money.”²⁴

But why then all the fuss about the outflow of precious metal? If, in fact, bullion is just another commodity, then there can never be a meaningful distinction between trade within one world-system as opposed to trade between two world-systems (that is, separate and probably differing economic structures). And why then was this outflow so dramatically altered in the case of India? “The import of bullion . . . was stopped after 1757.”²⁵

An alternative way to think about the outflow is to see it as being, from the point of view of the European world-economy, the outflow of a dispensable surplus (hence a “luxury” export) during the European world-economy’s long contraction of the seventeenth century (when the bulk of the outflow occurred), an outflow which then ceased to be dispensable upon the renewed expansion of the European world-economy after circa 1730–1750. Ergo, from the point of view of the European world-economy, the links with these external arenas had either to be transformed or to be cut. Since there were other motives as well that pushed for incorporation as the solution, the process was launched.

From the point of view of the zones external to the European world-economy—the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Russia—the fact that they in effect insisted on receiving bullion indicates that other European products held insufficient attraction for them, which can be translated as meaning that they were not involved in the integrated links that constituted the commodity chains of the capitalist world-economy. The difficulties of the Europeans in selling as opposed to buying has long been noted. For example, the Portuguese first and later the Dutch and English had to engage in the “country” (or “carrying”) trade in the Indian Ocean area in order to finance their purchases.²⁶ This turns out to have been the case initially in the Ottoman Empire²⁷ and West Africa as well.²⁸

Somewhere around 1750, all this began to evolve rapidly and the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire (or at least Rumelia, Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt), Russia (or at least the European part), and West Africa (or at least its more coastal areas) were incorporated into the ongoing set of linked productive processes (the so-called division of labor) of the capitalist world-economy. This process of incorporation was completed by 1850 (perhaps somewhat later in West Africa). In terms of the production processes, there were three main changes, which we shall discuss successively: a new pattern of “exports” and “imports”; the creation of larger economic “enterprises” (or economic decision-making entities) in the four zones; and a significant increase in the coercion of the labor force.

The new pattern of “exports” and “imports” was to be one that replicated the core–peripheral dichotomy that constituted the axial division of labor in the capitalist world-economy. This meant essentially at that time the exchange of peripheral raw materials against core manufactures. In order that the four zones concentrate on raw materials exports, there had to be changes in their productive processes in two directions: in the creation or significant expansion of cash-crop agriculture (and analogous forms of primary sector production) destined for sale on the market of the capitalist world-economy; and in the reduction or elimination of local manufacturing activities. Of the two, the first was primary in time and probably in importance, but eventually the second had to occur as well. In turn, the creation of cash-crop (and analogous) exports involved more than establishing a series of land units on which a particular crop, say cotton, was grown. If these land units were used for cotton, it generally meant that they were no longer used for food crops. It followed that, as a larger and larger percentage of the land area specialized in growing specific crops for “export,” other land units had to begin to specialize in growing food for sale to the workers on the first set of land units. And, as economic rationality moved toward the creation of hierarchies of work forces, perhaps under the authority of property owners, still other areas began to specialize in exporting people to work on both the cash-crop land units and the food-crop land units. The emergence of a three-tiered spatial specialization within a zone—”export” cash crops, “local market” food crops, and “crops” of migrant workers—has been a telltale sign of incorporation of an erstwhile external arena into the ongoing divisioning of labor of the capitalist world-economy.

After 1750, the trade of both Great Britain and France—the two major economic centers of the capitalist world-economy of the time—expanded significantly into all four zones we are analyzing. For both countries, the Napoleonic Wars put a crimp in this trade, and after 1815 France’s role became significantly less than that of Great Britain, but it still did not disappear completely (except perhaps in India). Everywhere, the exports of these four zones to western Europe expanded at a faster pace than the imports, but nonetheless the balance of payments was no longer closed by means of bullion exports from western Europe. A rapid overview will confirm how consistent this picture was.

The most familiar story, no doubt, is that of the Indian subcontinent. In the century before this, 1650–1750, the older centers of oceanic trade—Masulipatnam, Surat, and Hugli—declined in importance, beginning to cede place to new centers linked to European trade, like Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.²⁹ The period 1750–1850 is neatly marked off by two political events which had a direct impact on the pattern of trade. The East India Company’s unconstrained combination of political and economic control in India ran from 1757 to 1813. Chaudhuri argues that, nonetheless, in this period, the trade “continued to flow along the traditional channels” and with the same composition.³⁰ Datta agrees, though he makes the turning point 1793 (the Permanent Settlement of Cornwallis), which seems a more plausible date.³¹

Still, there was already one great difference between the period 1757–1793 and the earlier period—no bullion was exported.³² There were two ways in which this balance of trade gap was covered without bullion export from Europe. One was using the newly acquired state revenues of the Bengal Presidency which seemed to be enough in this period to cover the administration of Bengal, the costs of British conquest and administration elsewhere on the subcontinent, and still leave some over to be used to purchase the items exported to Britain.³³

The second was the system which dates from 1765 known as hypothecation. The East India Company sold bills in London on the Indian Presidencies, and bought bills in India upon England. The Indian goods exported through the Company to English mercantile houses were “hypothecated” as collateral security for the Company’s loans in England with which the Company bought the British exports to India. The Company meanwhile advanced money to sellers of goods in India, which loans were repaid with goods serving as Indian exports to Britain. Bullion flows were in such cases not needed, and the Company received in addition the shipping profit plus any differential on higher interest rates on its Indian loans than on its London borrowings.³⁴

While the plunder of the Bengal Presidency could provide a transitional link, we can talk of incorporation only with the “dramatic expansion” after 1757 of trade along the Ganges linked via Calcutta to the world-economy,³⁵ and a parallel expansion in south India after 1800.³⁶

By the first half of the nineteenth century, four raw materials products dominated exports, accounting for some 60% of the total: indigo, raw silk, opium, and cotton.³⁷ While the first two items went westward to Europe, cotton and opium went at this time primarily to China. We shall discuss below the reasons for this and the significance of this Indian–Chinese–British (so-called) triangular trade.

The immediate impetus to the first European indigo factories, established in either 1778 or 1779, seems to have been the American Revolution, which cut Britain off from its previous North American supply.³⁸ This shortage in world-economy supply was later reinforced by the elimination of Santo Domingo’s supply because of its revolution³⁹ and the virtual abandonment by Spanish America of its cultivation at the turn of the century.⁴⁰ Thus, the production of indigo, which had already been significant commercially in Mughal India, expanded three to four times in absolute terms under British rule.⁴¹

Cotton also was an old Indian production, primarily of Gujarat. But before 1770 Gujarati cotton had never been exported other than to Sind, Madras, and Bengal,⁴² and the production had been shrinking for a century.⁴³ As of 1775, a cotton export trade from India to China was launched by the British.⁴⁴ After 1793, with war in Europe, there came to be a market in Europe as well, although this was a “small affair” compared to United States exports.⁴⁵ The increased world demand seems to have been a factor in annexing Surat in 1800.⁴⁶ The expansion of silk production was also linked to Napoleon’s Continental system, which deprived the British market of its Italian supply.⁴⁷ Only the expansion of opium production had no direct link with shifts in production elsewhere in the world-economy but was rather a function of the Company’s needs in the China trade.⁴⁸ In the long run, none of these four commodities would last as a central Indian contribution to the world-economy’s division of labor (although cotton remained of significance in India’s export production for a very long time), but they provided the mode by which India could be incorporated in the period 1750–1850.

The story of the Ottoman Empire is similar. The volume of trade suddenly increased circa 1750. For example, France’s trade, which dominated the Ottoman arena throughout the eighteenth century, quadrupled in the second half of the century.⁴⁹ Over this same period, there was a steady shift in exports from “manufactured or partially-treated goods [to] raw materials”—mohair yarn instead of camelots, raw silk instead of silk stuffs, cotton in place of cotton yarn.⁵⁰

In the Balkans, it was the expansion of staples production that was most noticeable,⁵¹ in particular cereals after 1780 whose increase has been called “spectacular.”⁵² Cotton was now also very important in Balkan production,⁵³ as well as in western Anatolia. In the late eighteeneth century, it was the key source of raw materials for the French cotton industry, to the point that the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles in 1782 could say that “the Levant’s destiny is to nourish . . . French industry.”⁵⁴ A “link between production in Ankara and export abroad in Izmir was firmly established” at this time.⁵⁵

The British as well as the Austrians replaced the French as the main direct partners in the nineteenth century. The role of Anatolian cotton declined, faced (as was the case in India) with American competition,⁵⁶ as well as in this case with Egyptian competition.⁵⁷ Nonetheless, cotton export would have a renewed temporary boost during the American Civil War.⁵⁸ Furthermore, the relative decline of Anatolian cotton exports to Britain was more than compensated by the steady increase in this same period of Ottoman Balkan wheat exports to Britain and Austria, the Balkans competing with southern Russia as an export zone.⁵⁹

In the case of Russia, too, its trade with western Europe had a “remarkable upturn” in the period 1750–1850.⁶⁰ In this period, the composition of its exports changed rather dramatically as well, coming to be 95% primary products.⁶¹ Russia’s primary exports at this point in time were hemp and flax, “vital raw materials for British manufacturing industries,”⁶² and at first for French as wel1.⁶³ It was the quality of Russian hemp, “treated with deference” by its cultivators and with a “slow and meticulous” processing that made it so useful, features attributed by Crosby to Russia’s “cheap labor and practice.”⁶⁴

In the late eighteenth century, Russian iron (which was processed in Russia) was still an important export because Russia (along with Sweden) had the two essential elements of a quality product based on a charcoal technology—large forests and rich mines⁶⁵—and in addition, as we shall see, servile labor. When new British technology caused the collapse of the Russian iron export industry in the early nineteenth century, a new major export replaced iron—wheat.⁶⁶ By 1850, wheat exports reached 20% of an average harvest. Russia primarily exported the expensive variety of wheat, “which scarcely entered into national consumption.”⁶⁷ To be sure, Russia was responding to the steady rise in world wheat prices, at least until the 1820s,⁶⁸ after which the main sellers, the Russian nobility, were so far committed to wheat production that they had little choice.⁶⁹

It is worth noting that Russia’s main trade partners at this time were not only England (and in the late eighteenth century, France) but two semiperipheral zones, which were able to build strength on Russia’s incorporation. These were Scotland and the United States. In the case of Scotland, the “truly dramatic” economic progress of the late eighteenth century was “particularly” marked by the increase in Russian trade, Russia becoming the “leading continental exporter” to Scotland by the 1790s.⁷⁰ In the case of the United States, its economy “to an appreciable extent . . . prospered because it had access to the unending labor and rough skill of the Russian muzhik.”⁷¹

As for West Africa, here as elsewhere, incorporation into the capitalist world-economy was not something sought by those being incorporated. As Walter Rodney says, “historically, the initiative came from Europe.”⁷² Often, it is said that the shift from the slave trade to so-called legitimate trade is what brought about this incorporation. This is not correct. The initial impetus was the expansion of the slave trade itself. With this expansion, slave raiding passed the barrier from providing a luxury export of gathered “surplus” to being a veritable productive enterprise that entered into the ongoing division of labor of the capitalist world-economy.⁷³ The shift may be considered to have occurred in the eighteenth century with the steady rise in slave prices⁷⁴ reflecting the combination of the increased demand for slaves, the increased competition among European slave traders, and the increased difficulty in expanding supply at the same pace,⁷⁵ all typical phenomena of a period of overall expansion in the world-economy. The peak of the slave trade seems to have occurred in the decade prior to 1793,⁷⁶ the Franco–British wars causing a decline in this as in all other oceanic trade, and subsequently, the combined effect of abolition and the Haitian revolution kept the figures from ever going as high again, although they remained significant until at least the early 1840s.⁷⁷

One of the more passionate and less well-posed questions that has haunted the discussion on the slave trade in this period is the argument about the so-called “profitability” of the slave trade. One would have thought that any trade that flourished over a long period of time must have been profitable to someone. Otherwise, it is hard to conceive that private traders, under no legal compulsion to indulge in the trade, would have continued to do so. This debate originated as an exercise in cultural decolonization. Faced with the standard and traditional picture of the British abolitionists as great humanitarians, to be found most notably in the classic work by Coupland (1964, but first edition 1933), Eric Williams (1944) sought to debunk this overly self-satisfied picture by arguing the economic motives that underlay the banning of the slave trade. His thesis was that, as a result in large part of the American War of Independence and the industrial revolution, Britain’s sugar colonies in the West Indies became “increasingly negligible for British capitalism.”⁷⁸ This led British capitalists to succeed in imposing a triple successive reform—against the slave trade in 1807, against slavery in 1833, and against sugar duties in 1846. “The three events are inseparable.”⁷⁹ The reason for these actions was that, with the loss of the British West Indian “monopoly” and competitive edge, the main problem was the “overproduction” of sugar, and the solution was in these legislative enactments.⁸⁰

In point of fact, this ostensibly central thesis of the book, which has been subjected to a technical attack that is less than devastating,⁸¹ is not at all what aroused the passion. For the more fundamental thesis is that the slave trade plus slave-labor sugar plantations were a major source of capital accumulation for the so-called industrial revolution in Britain. This is, of course, an early version of the dependency thesis, more daringly stated than solidly sustained. Anstey’s countercalculations lead him to conclude that the contribution of the slave trade to British capital formation was “derisory.”⁸² Thomas and Bean go one better by alleging that, theoretically, given the perfectly competitive market of the slave trade, the slave traders were “fishers of men.” As in fishing, so in slave trading, profits were necessarily too low, the prices of slaves were too low, and consequently the price of plantation commodities was too low. The only beneficiaries of this apparently economically absurd enterprise were “the consumers of tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, cotton, etc.”⁸³

This ingenious argument has only three defects: slave trading was far from perfectly competitive, as we shall see; the principal “consumers” of the raw materials were European manufacturers (thereby reinforcing, not weakening, the case of Williams); and slave trading was sufficiently attractive in the second half of the eighteenth century to attract some investors away from textile production.⁸⁴

The real rejoinder, however, is the unimportance of the exact percentage. As we have been trying to show, the late eighteenth century was a period of global expansion of the capitalist world-economy. Each product from a given zone could only be a small percentage of the whole. The whole was eminently profitable, and did in fact lead to considerable capital accumulation which eventually was concentrated, for reasons we have already discussed, more in Britain than in France or elsewhere in western Europe. There is no need to argue that profits from the slave trade were exceptionally large⁸⁵ to conclude that they were a central part of the picture and constituted West Africa’s contribution, as it were, to the global accumulation of this period.⁸⁶

That there were economic motives in the abolition of the slave trade by the British may be seen a bit more dispassionately by looking at the Danish and French debates. The Danes in fact anticipated the British (and deliberately). The then Danish Minister of Finances appointed a commission to advise him in 1791. Their main finding which led him to propose the edict of abolition was that their slave population in the West Indies could sustain itself without a new supply after a transitional period and after the introduction of certain social improvements.⁸⁷ In the French case, the slave trade had been abolished during the Revolution,⁸⁸ restored later, then outlawed in the Treaties of Vienna in 1815. The de facto resistance was nonetheless enormous.⁸⁹ The reason was simple. The French interpreted the imposition as “the Machiavellian invention of England which wished to ruin our colonies by depriving them of the servile manpower indispensible to their prosperity.”⁹⁰ Thus did the analysis of the time anticipate Eric Williams by 125 years.

It is true nonetheless that the abolition of the slave trade eventually had its effect. Slaves declined as exports to be replaced by raw materials exports. The shift occurred largely in the 1800–1850 period, although the two export trades were not per se antithetical. As Rodney reminds us, “slaves were never the exclusive export of West Africa.”⁹¹What did change in this period is that, for the first time, exports were no longer “foraged” items (such as ivory, gold, gum, dyewoods, and, of course, slaves) but had become agricultural products that were “commonplace, low value-to-bulk” items like palm oil and peanuts.⁹² If the total value of these exports was still low (the period after 1817 in the world-economy was deflationary), the quantities were more impressive; indeed the increase was “staggering,” going up by “a factor of six or seven.”⁹³

Basically, the pattern of exports from West Africa to the European world-economy during the period of incorporation went through three phases: (1) an increase in and continued concentration on slave exports, in absolute and probably in relative terms, from circa 1750 (especially) to 1793; (2) a maintenance of significant slave export along with a steady increase in so-called legitimate trade, from the 1790s to the 1840s; and (3) the virtual elimination of the Atlantic slave trade and a steady expansion of primary products export (particularly palm oil and peanuts), from the 1840s to the beginning of the full-scale colonial era in the 1880s.

It is important to bear in mind that, although it is true that slave raiding and cash-crop production are indeed incompatible in the long run, since combining the two tends to create an impossible conflict over the use of labor power, this was not true in the short run. Both exports could flourish simultaneously and did for some 30 to 40 years. Indeed, as Northrup argues, one of the very factors explaining the rapidity of the growth of palm-oil production—given, of course, the indispensable (and new) European demand for fats and oil for industrial lubrication, personal hygiene, and candle power—was the previous massive growth of the slave trade which had stimulated African demand for foreign goods, expanded the network of trading communities, and (which is frequently overlooked), expanded “the economic infrastructure of markets, roads, and currencies.”⁹⁴ Furthermore, slaves could be used directly in the production of “legitimate” goods—first of all as porters in both directions,⁹⁵ and second, as workers on plantations (most notably in Dahomey, between the 1830s and 1860s).⁹⁶ Both uses served to reduce the costs of production.⁹⁷

Still, palm oil eventually began to displace slave raiding as the major productive enterprise. Its expansion began as early as the 1770s in the Niger Delta region.⁹⁸ By the 1830s, it was a steadily growing traffic along the coast, “in spite of fluctuations in prices.”⁹⁹ Of course, the overall improved prices on the European market after the 1840s gave it further economic incentive.¹⁰⁰

The French were culturally resistant at first to palm-oil products, unlike the British, Germans, and Americans, but this ended in 1852 with the discovery of a chemical method to whiten yellow soap.¹⁰¹ Indeed, the origin of the peanut trade lay precisely in this French consumer’s resistance to yellow soap. The Marseilles soapmakers had discovered in the first half of the nineteenth century that peanut oil plus olive oil made a blue marble soap.¹⁰² The peanut trade began in the 1830s and confirmed the decision of the French to stay in Senegal despite the end of the slave trade, this “economic basis for further involvement” coinciding with various internal French pressures for a “more active” colonial policy.¹⁰³

The link between cash-crop production and the expansion of market-oriented food production has been largely neglected, especially in terms of the process we have been calling incorporation. Still, there seems to be some evidence of it that has been observed in the Indian and West African cases. Habib finds that the critical difference in terms of agricultural production between Mughal India and British India was less in the “production for distant markets” than in the “considerable geographic concentration of particular crops in certain tracts,” allowing the soil to be used for purposes for which it was “best suited.”¹⁰⁴ The self-sufficiency of the region was ceding place to the self-sufficiency of the world-economy. Gough analyzes how, in Madras, in the first half of the nineteenth century, alongside the cash-crop areas (for cotton, indigo, pepper, tobacco), other zones began to specialize in grain for the regional market,¹⁰⁵ while still others began to send out indentured laborers, at first only to southern India, but eventually to Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, Mauritius, and finally the West Indies.¹⁰⁶ And Bayly makes the important point that a new expansion of “fragile” town economies emerged in indigo and cotton cash-crop areas as the result of housing “chains of dependent intermediaries on a small group of cash-crops.”¹⁰⁷

As for West Africa, Rodney reminds that the “victualling” of slave ships has received “no serious treatment.”¹⁰⁸ But it is clear that it required a tremendous amount of food and that many slaves were deployed into the local production of food to feed the other slaves en route to the Americas. Latham, for example, notes that there was a large settlement of slaves east of Calabar between 1805 and 1846 who were not, however, engaged in palm-oil production. He speculates that this was probably “to grow food for Calabar.”¹⁰⁹ Finally, Newbury notes the close linkage of “bulking centres” with the growth of local food markets because of the considerable migration into these loci of the trade networks.¹¹⁰

The other, second half of the reconstruction of the pattern of export—import that was imposed by incorporation was the decline of the manufacturing sector in the zones being incorporated. This theme has been so long associated with the experience of the Indian subcontinent that it may be somewhat enlightening to realize that it was by no means peculiar to India. Let us start, nonetheless, with the Indian case. It is clear that, before 1800, the Indian subcontinent was, by world standards, a major locus of textile production. Indeed, Chaudhuri argues it was “probably the world’s greatest producer of cotton textiles.”¹¹¹ The decline was precipitous. Although the early years of the Napoleonic wars actually saw a brief export boom, the Berlin decrees plus English competition “meant the end of the export of Surat piece-goods to London.”¹¹² As for Bengal’s cotton piece goods, they “practically disappeared” from the East India Company’s export list circa 1820 and soon thereafter from that of the private traders as well.¹¹³For a while, there remained (or began) a textile export trade to China, but this too then disappeared, so that the statistics show a continued decline, export value of cotton piece goods diminishing by a further 50% between 1828 and 1840 from an already much-reduced base.¹¹⁴ Furthermore, by observing the sharp decline in Bihar production in the nineteenth century, an area which never exported to Europe, we see the impact on the “internal” market as wel1.¹¹⁵

One explanation is simply Britain’s new technological, and hence, competitive edge. Smelser gives the self-actor (or self-acting mule) the credit for Britain’s “final conquest” of the Indian market.¹¹⁶ One wonders then why, if this is so, the British had nonetheless to resort to political measures to guarantee their market supremacy. In 1830, Charles Marjoribanks testified before the House of Commons:

We have excluded the manufactures of India from England by high prohibitive duties and given every encouragement to the introduction of our own manufactures into India. By our selfish (I use the word invidiously) policy we have beat down the native manufactures of Dacca and other places and inundated their country with our goods.¹¹⁷

He also explained why trade with China was going less well: “We do not possess the same power over the Chinese as we do over the Indian empire.” As late as 1848, as Parliamentary Committee argued the non-”necessity” of India’s import of clothing, justifying thereby the removal of duties on the import of sugar into Britain, in these terms: “If you take India’s market for her sugars, you in the same ratio, or in a greater ratio, destroy England’s market for her manufactured goods.”¹¹⁸ In any case, it is rather difficult to deny the thesis of the deliberate deindustrialization of India, when the chairman of Britain’s East India and China Association boasted of it at the time. In 1840, George G. de H. Lampert testified:

This Company has, in various ways, encouraged and assisted by our great manufacturing ingenuity and skill, succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.¹¹⁹

The Ottoman Empire did not become a British colony in this period, as did the Indian subcontinent. Nonetheless, the story is remarkably parallel and the timing even earlier. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was still exporting silk cloth and cotton yarn to Europe. In 1761, the French placed a high protective duty on imports of cotton yarn from the Ottoman Empire and this duty plus English machine spinning closed off the west European market.¹²⁰ Genç locates the peak of the industrial sector in the 1780s, and says that after this point, the hitherto parallel paths of west European and Ottoman textile production diverged and Ottoman industry started to decline, not only in terms of export but even in terms of “the levels of production it had achieved in its own past.”¹²¹ Despite a whole series of political and economic countermeasures attempted by the Sublime Porte beginning with the measures of Selim III in 1793–1794,¹²² by 1856 one English author talks of the fact that manufacturing industry has “greatly declined” in Turkey and that Turkey now exported raw materials which later returned there in a manufactured form.¹²³ By 1862, another British author’s comment has an even more decisive tone: “Turkey is no longer a manufacturing country.”¹²⁴

The story is the same if we shift our optic from the Anatolian heartland to outlying Egypt and Syria. Despite Mohammed Ali’s attempt at “forced industrialization” in Egypt,¹²⁵ he failed. Not least of the reasons was the fact that the provisions of the Anglo–Turkish Commercial Convention were forced on him in 1841 and this “brought rust and ruin to his factories on the Nile.”¹²⁶ As for Syria, a “catastrophic decline” of manufactures started in the 1820s¹²⁷ and by the 1840s, the process was completed in both Aleppo and Damascus.¹²⁸

Was Russia better equipped to stem the tide? A little bit, but not much. The first half of the eighteenth century had been a high point of Russian industry. The Urals metal industry had a period of rapid expansion from 1716 onwards.¹²⁹ Under Tsaritsa Elisabeth, and especially from 1745 to 1762, there was a “second burst of industrialization,” reaching a “golden age” under Catherine II,¹³⁰ when exports to England grew “briskly.”¹³¹ It is no wonder that the Russian historian, Tarle, argued in his 1910 textbook that, in the eighteenth century, “Russian backwardness does not appear very great when placed in a general European context.”¹³²

Yet, after 1805, Russia began to fall behind Britain in the production of cast iron, and once coke smelting became the dominant technology, Russian production was at a disadvantage.¹³³ In addition, under Nicholas I (1825–1855), the leading officials became “lukewarm” or even “hostile” to industrial growth, fearing social disturbances. Still, despite the drastic decline of the exports of the principal industry, pig iron, the Russians were able to maintain an internal market for their textiles by a combination, after the 1830s, of high tariff protection and some import of technology. They were also able to create a beet sugar refining industry.¹³⁴ This limited ability to resist total deindustrialization, to which the continued relative strength of the Russian army was not an insignificant contributing factor, explains in part their ability to play a different role in the world-economy at the beginning of the twentieth century from either India or Turkey.

Lastly, we do not often think of West Africa as having had industry. And indeed textiles were being imported into West Africa already in the eighteenth century.¹³⁵ Still, one shouldn’t exaggerate. Prior to 1750, Rodney notes, local cottons on the Guinea coast “withstood competition” of English manufactures.¹³⁶ And Northrup, speaking of the Niger Delta in the eighteenth century, observed that imports such as iron bands still required significant processing “and thus had a multiplier effect on the internal economy.”¹³⁷ It is only after the Napoleonic wars, and the withdrawal of British ships from slaving after 1807, that the “nature and quality of imports change.”¹³⁸ This is true not only of textiles but of iron products. West African blacksmithing and iron smelting were “ruined” by the cheap European imports of the early nineteenth century.¹³⁹

Large-scale, export-oriented primary production, as we have already explained, can operate effectively if it is market-responsive, and this can really be the case only when the effective decision-making bodies are large enough such that a change in their production and merchandizing decisions can really affect their own fortunes. The self-interest of the insignificant actor is not necessarily in “adjusting” to the market, or in any case is far less so than that of the large-scale actor.

There are two primary loci where one can create large nodes of decision-making bodies. One can group primary production in large units—what we might call the “plantation” solution. Or one can create large nodes at a stage after the initial production zones in the commodity chain. For example, some large “merchants” (what the French called négociants as opposed to traitants or commerçants) can station themselves at bottlenecks of flows. It is not enough then, however, to create a quasimonopoly or oligopoly of merchandizing. It is also crucial for this (let us call him) large-scale merchant (or merchant–banker) to establish a dependency upon him on the part of a mass of small producers. The simplest and probably most efficient way to do this is debt bondage. In this way, when the large-scale merchant wishes to “adjust” to the world market, he can rapidly alter patterns of production in ways he finds profitable.¹⁴⁰ The creation of these large-scale economic units—either plantations or largescale merchant bottlenecks—is a primary feature of incorporation.

In this period, Indian export centered around four main crops—indigo, cotton, silk, and opium. Of the four, indigo was the most plantation-oriented. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, responding to the faltering Western Hemisphere supply, a number of English private traders created plantations.¹⁴¹ In addition, they granted credit to small-scale producers. The credit was rapidly called in “at the earliest sign of a recession” and this led to land forfeitures, further concentrating the land.¹⁴² The putting-out system,¹⁴³ which was crucial in this process, came into use in indigo production only in this period.¹⁴⁴ In either case—direct production or a system of advances to petty producers—the indigo planters kept the basic production decisions in their hands, using either “petty oppression” or “debt servitude” to realize their objectives.¹⁴⁵

Similarly, in the production of raw cotton, as it became more export-oriented, there came to be an “increasing grip of usury and trading capital over production,” as the “real burdens of rent and interest became . . . heavier.”¹⁴⁶ In the case of opium, the fact that it was a state merchandizing monopoly (via the East India Company) served the same purposes of controlling quantity and quality of production, setting price levels, and in effect monitoring the international competition for the Chinese market.¹⁴⁷ In 1848, F.W. Prideaux testified before a House of Commons Select Committee that “nothing is cultivated in India without advances, sugar, indigo, and everything which is cultivated to be exported from that country.”¹⁴⁸ Yet, despite the absence for the most part of European “planters” as in the West Indies, it is nonetheless true, as Clapham argues, that most of these exports goods had “something of what he called a plantation or colonial character of the old sort.”¹⁴⁹ Rothermund catches the shift from external arena to incorporation precisely in the changing functions, as he describes them, of the (trading) factory: it went from buying and selling aboard ships to placing special orders to financing these orders by advances to using the advances to stimulate production to organizing production via a putting-out system and operating workshops.¹⁵⁰

The rise of plantation-type çiftliks in the Ottoman Empire has been a matter of discussion for some time. Çiftlik is a legal term denoting a form of land tenure. The origin of the word is the reference to a çift (or pair) or oxen, ergo the amount of land that a pair of oxen could plow in one day.¹⁵¹ Some confusion has therefore arisen, since it was primarily those çiftliks that were far larger than a çift, and which came closer to the usual meaning of plantation, that seem to have been directly linked to export-oriented cash-crop production.

Stoianovich directly links the spread of the çiftlik (in particular of the larger hassa-çiftlik) to the “diffusion of cultivation of new colonial products: cotton and maize” from the 1720s in the Balkans.¹⁵² Gandev similarly sees their growth in northwestern Bulgaria as the emergence of large-scale cash-crop land units, which were the subject of capital investment and capital accumulation.¹⁵³ Peter Sugar too emphasizes their market orientation, the cultivation of new crops, and the debt-bondedness of their villagers.¹⁵⁴ McGowan notes that they were located near the sea and that their development in the later Ottoman Empire was “almost always linked . . . with foreign trade in commodities.”¹⁵⁵ Finally, İnalçık too connects the larger çiftliks with market orientation and “plantation-like structures” which spread, he says, particularly in conjunction with land reclamation and improvement in marginal waste lands (mîrî).¹⁵⁶

As for Egypt, it is clear that the rise of cotton production was directly linked to the creation of large estates in the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁵⁷ Already in 1840, John Bowring explained why in his testimony to the House of Commons. He talked of the reluctance of the fellah to produce cotton, for fear of being cheated, for fear of taxation, because it involved only one crop a year. The solution?

Of late many tracts of land have been transferred to capitalists who have consented to pay the arrears due, and who in consequence employ the fellahs as day laborers, taking from them the responsibility of discharging the land-tax, and of declining the stimpulated quantity of produce at the prices fixed by the pacha.¹⁵⁸

In Russia, of course, there had already been considerable land concentration in the hands of the aristocracy. What happened during incorporation was the strengthening of this process and the intensification of its link to cash-crop production. As Blum notes, the seigniors were “by far the chief suppliers of the market,” producing up to 90% of the market’s grain, for example.¹⁵⁹ It is this same period during which we have the major agronomic innovation of three-course crop rotation.¹⁶⁰

In the late eighteenth century thus, the “rural economy took on an ever-more mercantile character.”¹⁶¹ The shift in the pattern of serfdom—away from obrok (or payment in kind and money) to barshchina (or payment in labor, i.e., corvée)¹⁶²—a shift we shall discuss below in terms of labor coercion, should also be viewed as a mode of land concentration. It is not that the ownership was being concentrated, since it already was, but that the decision-making procedures in production were, and this was crucial to a commercialized agriculture. And in those estates where obrok remained, the seigniors often encouraged and protected those peasants who became merchant entrepreneurs (despite the law’s restrictions) because this not only permitted such peasants to pay larger obrok but enabled the seigniors to use them as “guarantors for the less prosperous members of the village commune.”¹⁶³

The picture in West Africa once again bears a greater resemblance than chance would suggest. We start with slave marketing which, far from encouraging infinite competition, led to merchandizing bottlenecks. Everywhere we find the existence of “restrictive trade associations and practices, sometimes official, sometimes private, and sometimes involving collaboration between the two.”¹⁶⁴ Furthermore, the shift toward cash crops such as palm oil was accompanied by attempts to create plantation structures. Indeed, the abolitionists themselves directly supported this as a means, they thought, of giving legitimate trade a solid economic basis.¹⁶⁵ Plantations were primarily successful in Dahomey and Yorubaland. The combination of strong monarchs, slave labor, and presumably capital, meant that the monarchs were able to export palm oil from a considerable distance inland, which was otherwise too expensive.¹⁶⁶ But where transport was less of a problem, the technology of palm oil (and peanut) production made it available to small-scale farmers.¹⁶⁷

However, as Law notes, speaking of the erosion of the dominant position of the king and military chiefs in the production process, as the shift was finally made from the slave trade to palm oil, “the beneficiaries of this change, however, included substantial merchants as well as small farmers.”¹⁶⁸ In other words, the locus of concentration had simply shifted from one product collection point to another, a point we miss if we concentrate on the relatively small unit of palm-oil extraction. Indeed, the link between state power and mercantile concentration was particularly great during this period of incorporation. Newbury presents this phenomenon clearly:

The trading states of Dahomey or the Niger Delta . . . [provide good] examples of African rulers supported by income from trade. . . . Rulers such as Ja Ja of Opobo or Nana of Warri were astute merchants, rather than African bureaucrats milking traders.¹⁶⁹

To understand what was going on, we must be aware of the emergence of a multitiered structure of traders. At the Atlantic ports there were merchants, or exporter—importers, who represented European firms and were usually Europeans. These merchants dealt in turn with large-scale brokers or intermediaries (in French, the négociants), who in turn dealt with other intermediaries who were itinerant traders (in French, the traitants), and it was they who normally dealt with direct producers. It is usually at the level of the brokers that we have concentration wherever there was small-scale production. It is these brokers who would later be absorbed and replaced by the European firms, as the zone fell under colonial rule.¹⁷⁰

The process of incorporation, we have argued, led to the creation of one or another kind of relatively large-scale decision-making units, self-interested in responding to the changing requirements of the world market. The size of these units served in part to motivate them, since changes they made had significant impact on their possibilities of accumulation, but served in part as well to increase their ability to respond, since they controlled sufficient capital and commodities to make some impact in turn on the world market. There remains one element to discuss in terms of the ability to respond, which is the capacity to obtain sufficient labor at a price which would render the product competitive.

For a worker, especially an agricultural worker, involvement in cash-crop production, particularly but not only within plantation-like structures, offered little intrinsic attraction, since it inevitably reduced the time for and physical availability of all sorts of subsistence practices which offered guarantees of survival and even of relative well-being. It should not be surprising, therefore, that, at least at first and for a long time thereafter, the labor supply needed by market producers in a zone undergoing incorporation had to be coerced, directly or indirectly, to work in the appropriate places at the appropriate rhythm. This coercion involved two elements which should be conceptually distinguished: the ways in which the worker was made to work harder (more efficiently?) and longer (per day, per year, per lifetime); and the formal rights or juridical status of the worker, and, therefore, the range of his options in relation to his work.

Mughal India is one of the few areas about which we have some data on standards of living of working strata prior to its incorporation into the world-economy. Four kinds of comparison exist. Habib argues that per capita agricultural output in 1600 was not less than the same area in 1900, and also was not less than that of western Europe in 1600.¹⁷¹ Spear argues that the average person in Mughal India ate better than his European counterpart.¹⁷² And Desai has accumulated quantitative data to support the thesis that the “mean standard of food consumption . . . [was] appreciably higher” in Akbar’s empire than in the 1960s in India.¹⁷³ Yet, as soon as we have the beginnings of incorporation after 1750, we hear of (British) complaints about the “indolence” of the Bengal peasant.¹⁷⁴ A solution to this “indolence” was soon found, one to which we have previously adverted, the system of “advances.” We find this phenomenon suddenly emerging in all the cash-crop areas as the principal mechanism of coercion.

At this time, two systems of land tenure evolved, zamindari and ryotwari, both defined or rather redefined to mean ownership with quiritary rights. This direction of evolution of tenurial forms is a hallmark of involvement in the capitalist world-economy, since quiritary rights are indispensable to the commercialization of land, itself a necessary element in the liberation of all factors making possible the endless accumulation of capital. The zamindari system was instituted in Bengal by the Permanent Settlement of 1793.¹⁷⁵ In this system, the ryots (or peasants) living on their land were considered tenants to the zamindars and therefore subject to rentenhancement or ejectment. As a result, “rents rose, and ejectments were common.”¹⁷⁶ But also, new crops were grown and new laborers were acquired.¹⁷⁷

The ryotwari system, by contrast, presumably eliminated the zamindar as an intermediary by conferring the quiritary rights on the ryot himself. This was touted as being “more sound in theory, expedient and beneficial in practice, and more in accordance with the native institutions, customs and manners of the people.”¹⁷⁸ The system was initially applied in Madras and is often thought to be southern Indian, but it was utilized in the north as well, even in Bengal. In reality, the ryots who obtained the quiritary rights turned out in most cases to be the higher-caste village leaders. These ryots were cultivators, of course, but they were also intermediaries (albeit smaller scale ones than the zamindars), since they were in many cases overseers of lower-caste direct laborers.¹⁷⁹

What is important for us to note is that in both systems the combination of quiritary rights plus the system of advances made possible considerable compulsion. As a British Parliamentary Report of 1861 on indigo production put it:

Where the planter has zemindary rights, the ryot has probably but little option. . . . The influence is perhaps best to be described as moral compulsion, and the apprehension of physical force.¹⁸⁰

But, in fact, indigo was cultivated more frequently under the ryotwari system. It was not, however, any better for the direct producer:

Even in the best of seasons cultivation of indigo barely paid at the rate which indigo planters would allow. . . . Advances were forced upon ryots [by the indigo planters] and the ryots could not furnish the quota of land demanded for indigo cultivation. . . . It would not be wrong to describe the system of indigo cultivation as indigo slavery.¹⁸¹

No wonder the indigo planters were thought to be “conspicuous for their oppression.”¹⁸²

Cotton weavers were not much better off than the peasants growing indigo. In the Regulations for Weavers, promulgated in Bengal in July 1787, once a weaver accepted advances from the East India Company, he was required to deliver cloth to the Company, and it became illegal to sell this cloth to anyone else. The Company was given the right to impose guards over the weavers to see that they fulfilled their contracts.¹⁸³ The result, of course, was a “visible deterioration in their economic conditions,” and the weavers eventually were “pauperized out of their occupation.”¹⁸⁴ The Company extended their policy to southeastern India. Once the East India Company was able to shut out their Dutch and French competitors, as of the 1770s, they made their merchants “draw hard bargains with the weavers.”¹⁸⁵ The workers’ real income declined in terms of direct receipts and in addition because of their inability under the new conditions to carry on their weaving “side-by-side with cultivating the fields.”¹⁸⁶ As for cotton growing itself, we have the telling 1848 testimony of J. A. Turner of the Manchester Commercial Association, asserting that “India, with its cheap labor, will at all times be able to compete with the slave labour of America.”¹⁸⁷

Salt production presented even worse conditions for the worker. Given the poor pay and working conditions, it was “obvious” that salt manufacture could not be carried on “without coercion.” The use of advances took an extra twist here. Once a man was employed, even if on a voluntary basis, he was “liable to be seized” in the future; furthermore his descendants were also bound “in perpetuity.” Under such circumstances, one can imagine the reluctance to accept the advances. The latter were, therefore, frequently thrown before the door of a potential worker. “The mere sight of the money rendered him liable to be sent down to the aurangs.”¹⁸⁸ A similar forcing of advances on the workers is recorded for saltpetre production in Bihar after 1800.¹⁸⁹ In general, this system of advances produced long-term coercion. As Kumar says, one of the reasons that “serfdom” proved “so durable in practice” was the “burden of indebtedness” created by these advances.¹⁹⁰

In Russia, as we have already noted, the more oppressive form of serfdom, barshchina (corvée obligation), grew at the expense of obrok (quit-rent obligation), rather than the reverse (which has too readily been assumed to be the case in the past), particularly during the period between 1780–1785 and 1850–1860.¹⁹¹ Confino gives as the explanation for this slide toward barshchina precisely the development of the capitalist market and capitalist doctrine, despite the fact that, superficially, obrok seems more compatible. He sees the crucial turning point in 1762, at which time (and then in an accelerated fashion after 1775), the nobles began to return to their lands, a phenomenon linked directly to the rise in cereals prices on the world market. It seems that barshchina was, in most cases, “more advantageous” to the cash-crop growing landlord than obrok.¹⁹² Kahan notes a second factor favoring barshchina. The “Westernization” of the gentry led to a considerable increase in imports, which required “a substantial increase” in the real income of the nobles and therefore led to increased pressure by them on the serfs.¹⁹³ The increase in barshchina permitted an expansion of estate lands at the expense of peasant plots, estate lands being “more flexible and more capable of reaping short-term gains from the changing market situations.”¹⁹⁴

It is not that barshchina became the only form of rural labor. Confino, in fact, argues the merits of a form of mixed barshchina–obrok obligations, which offered the lord the assurance of an estate labor supply plus some liquid income from obrok in poor harvest years. This combined form indeed became more frequent during this era.195 It was a matter of priorities. Given the fact that the domains had acquired the character of an “economic enterprise,” the disadvantages of the obrok system seemed greater than its advantages. When the landlords sought to raise rents on the obrok serf, he frequently sought employment elsewhere to meet the obrok obligations. Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, an obrotchnik was thought of as someone who no longer tilled the soil and the word was often “employed in the pejorative sense of ‘vagabond.’ ”196 To produce the wheat, which remained their basic source of income, the landlords needed barshchina.

Furthermore, we must dispense with the myth that corvée labor was necessarily inefficient labor.197 In fact, the zone that saw the greatest increase in barshchina, the blacksoil zone, also saw the most agronomic innovations (e.g., the introduction of potatoes as a garden crop.) In any case, both the expansion of arable land and the rise in yields took place primarily on the estates and not on the land of obrok-peasants.198

Finally, we must bear in mind that this intensification of coerced labor was not accidental but the result of policy decisions. The increase in cereals production was facilitated by the abolition of internal customs in 1754 and the authorization of grain exports in 1766. The acquisition of the southern steppes and the Black Sea ports also furthered grain exports and hence integration into the world-economy. And the manifesto of 1762, freeing the lords from bureaucratic service, gave them the liability to become agricultural, capitalist entrepreneurs.199

Furthermore, the process of increased land concentration was greatly assisted by the comprehensive land survey ordered by Catherine II in 1765, since, by validating all existing boundaries unless specifically contested, the state acquiesced in previous seizures of both state lands and empty tracts and “ratified the spoliation of free peasants and petty serf owners.”200 Le Donne sees in Catherine’s great administrative reform, the establishment of the guberniya, the creation of “an apparatus capable of facilitating the utmost exploitation of serf labor.”201 And it was under Catherine, too, that the legal categorization of serfdom was finally fully developed, ratifying a de facto situation but also excluding almost all the peasants from a so-called personal legal status. As a result, de facto free peasants became “potential serfs and could be made into actual ones whenever the government wanted to use them.”202

One of the most interesting aspects of Russian incorporation was the way in which iron manufacture played the transitional role to a more conventional emphasis on cash-crop exports, somewhat parallel to the role of slave trade in West Africa and cloth export in India. The significant rise of the Urals iron manufacture industry occurred in the mid-eighteenth century and owed its real take-off to the increased demand caused by the European wars of 1754–1762, as a result of which both the purchases of the Russian government and the English market became major outlets.203 This manufacturing export role was in the long run not to last and was furthermore based heavily on coerced labor.

Work in the Urals factories was arduous and not well paid. For many, the “conditions and treatment were frequently far worse than those of agricultural serfs.”204 This was, of course, particularly true of the unskilled apprentices and the “youth of the mines,” that is, the very young children engaged in auxiliary tasks.205 The skilled workers were, in part, foreigners (recruited on attractive terms, one presumes), in part, metallurgists recruited from central Russia, and, in part, local artisans.206 They were industrial wage earners. The skilled workers not only had a cash salary but in many cases a small plot of land that often brought in as much income as the wage received from the factory.207

However, the unskilled workers were “ascribed” peasants who performed multiple auxiliary tasks—felling trees, burning charcoal, and transporting both the raw materials and the finished products. Initially, the “ascribed” peasants were merely local settlers, doing this work in payment of their taxes.208 But such local settlers were not enough. A law of 1721 permitted factory owners to buy whole villages of serfs, who were then known as possessional serfs, attached to the factory and not to its owner.209 There were, in addition, fugitives from domains of the state who volunteered for the factories and were then reintegrated into the feudal system as possessional serfs.210Finally, there were also obrok serfs in the factories, who were, however, located more in textile than in metallurgical factories. They were “detached” from their villages, and were relatively freer than the other serf workers, having a better bargaining position vis-à-vis the factory owner.211 This added up to a system that, from the point of view of the factory owners, provided “flexible and cheap labor,”212 but, from the point of view of the worker, was “repugnant.”213

Given the oppressive conditions, the owners had to resort to considerable force and they maintained estate prisons to punish drunkards, quarrelsome types, and even lazy or incompetent workers.214 Needless to say, coerced labor, bad conditions, and disciplinary punitiveness added up to conditions provoking rebellion. Already in the mid-eighteenth century, troubles began in the Urals.215 When Pugachev would begin his great revolt in 1773, the industrial peasants of the Urals as well as the agricultural serfs would rally to him.216 They were not the only ones as we shall see.

The existence of “slavery” within West Africa has been a subject of much debate in which there has appeared confusion about dating and definitions, and, therefore, about its social causes and meaning. Slavery turns out to be a concept whose empirical content runs at least as wide a gamut as that of wage labor. If we define it very minimally as some kind of indefinitely lasting work obligation of one person to another from which the worker may not unilaterally withdraw (and to that extent at least the slave is at the mercy of the master), then no doubt there were forms of slavery in West Africa, or at least in parts of West Africa for a long time. There was surely in many regions some form of so-called domestic slavery, which might be seen as involving the compulsory integration of non-kin into a relatively low-status family role as pseudokin. This seems a significantly different phenomenon from the process of enslavement for sale to others, or from the use of slaves as “field” laborers. Even in this last case, the term has been used to cover not only plantation slaves but also persons who owed their master a rent in kind or a rent in labor (in which case the term is being used quite loosely, since the latter persons in a European context have been historically called serfs and not slaves). We shall not try to sort out this definitional maze at this point, but instead concentrate on seeing what were the trends as West Africa first came into Europe’s external arena and then subsequently was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy.

It seems rather clear that there was a sequence, more or less imperfectly followed everywhere, from a period of the predominance (if not virtual exclusive existence) of some form of domestic slavery (and not even that everywhere) to a period when slave raiding became the dominant phenomenon (and these slaves were then sold via commercial networks) to a third period when increasingly the slaves were used on productive enterprises within West Africa itself. The slave raiding took on importance initially when West Africa was in the external arena, and continued (even grew in importance) as a mode of incorporation, giving way during incorporation to a form of so-called legitimate trade that in practice involved significant slave labor in West African cash-crop production itself, a phenomenon that would only slowly taper off. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, thus, there were large numbers of slaves within West Africa, for one reason because those who sold the captives “kept some for their own purposes.”217 As Kopytoff puts it with simple clarity, “in case after African case, when the possibility of profiting from the labor use of acquired persons rises, such use increases.”218 But as we have seen this was not a phenomenon peculiar to Africa.

The first shift, therefore, was when Africans began to conceive of the “slave” not as someone given into bondage for crimes or because of “dire necessity” and thus as pseudokin in a new family but as a “vendable commodity,” a concept which seems to have originated with the export trade in slaves.219 Furthermore, there seems to have been a clear correlation between being a slave-selling people and being a slave-using people, a correlation which emerged over time. The sequence is not sure, but it is more probable that the selling preceded the using than vice versa.220

As the transition to a greater emphasis in cash crops began, particularly in the decades following the British proclamation of abolition, the slave-selling states faced economic difficulties, losing some outlets for their slaves, and, in addition, losing some of the trade profits from the resale of European products. Where they couldn’t delay the effects, they thereupon reacted “by diverting the slaves they could not sell into producing alternative crops.” Hence, Ajayi insists, abolition led, in fact, directly to “more extensive and intensive use of domestic slaves.”221

It is this more extensive and intensive use of slavery within West Africa which is the mark of incorporation into the world-economy and which, therefore, represents a more decisive transformational break than the rise of slave trading per se.222 In addition to being for sale as workers on enterprises integrated into the commodity chains of the world-economy, slaves had become, in addition, objects of financial investment—a capital good, a store of wealth, and an object of speculation.223

This increased coercion for mercantile production also took the other form in West Africa that it took elsewhere—debt linkage. This started with the European ships making advances to African brokers;224 the practice then moved inland from brokers to itinerant traders. For example, in the Niger Delta, the development of the Ekpe, a secret society with a debt-collecting role, dates from the period of the rapid expansion of the slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century. The Ekpe was, in Latham’s words, an “elementary capitalist institution.”225 The next step was easily taken: European imports advanced on credit “against seasonal provision of staples.” Newbury regards this as “a major structural innovation arising from the new bulk produce trade.”226

If the Ottoman literature discusses the increase of work obligations at this time less, this may simply be the result of scholarly neglect. We do have hints along these lines. Discussing the Ottoman tax structure, Stoianovich estimates that the Peloponnesian peasant in the last part of the eighteenth century had to provide “at least 50 percent more labor” than a French peasant of the time.227 McGowan notes that Macedonia is subject to increased peonage: of the stick via debt; of the carrot via the garden plot. He also speaks of Romania and the southern Danube of the ways in which the government collaborated with the local lords “to bring almost the entire peasant class, the clacaûi, into complete subjection, legislating progressively more oppressive corvée requirements.”228 And Issawi notes for Syria the transformation of the peasant proprietors into sharecroppers, and observes that cash-crop production led the landlords to the increased use of corvée labor.229 Sharecropping was also common in Anatolia.

We have tried to establish that incorporation involved the integration of the production sphere into the commodity chains of the capitalist world-economy and that this integration tended to require, in the period of incorporation, both the establishment of larger units of economic decision making (including often, but not always, plantations) and the increased coercion of the labor force. Sometimes, confusing counterexamples are offered which are not necessarily relevant. This is because a secondary phenomenon occurred which has often been insufficiently distinguished from incorporation.

As a given zone is incorporated into the world-economy, this often led to an adjacent further zone being pulled into the external arena. It is as though there were an outward ripple of expansion. As India was incorporated, China became part of the external arena. As the Balkans, Anatolia, and Egypt were incorporated, parts of the Fertile Crescent area and the Maghreb came into the external arena. As European Russia was incorporated, Central Asia (and even China) moved into the external arena. As coastal West Africa was incorporated, the West African savannah zone became an external arena.

From the point of view of the capitalist world-economy, an external arena was a zone from which the capitalist world-economy wanted goods but which was resistant (perhaps culturally) to importing manufactured goods in return and strong enough politically to maintain its preferences. Europe had been buying tea in China since the early eighteenth century but found no acceptable payment other than silver. The incorporation of India offered some alternatives for Britain which were better for her and yet still acceptable to China. This was the origin of what has come to be called the India–China–Britain triangular trade.

The triangular trade was an invention of the East India Company. As early as 1757, the Company began shipping Bengal silver to purchase tea in China.230 Over the next 70 years, the Company’s purchases in China (90% of which were tea) expanded five times.231 The cost in silver would have been very high. The Company was under great pressure to do something to avert this.232 There was a solution that arranged two matters simultaneously. On the one hand, as we have already seen, a process was underway to reduce cotton cloth manufactures in India which had found a market in western Europe and of course in various parts of the Indian subcontinent, and to substitute British cloth imports. But this process created a problem of what to do with Indian cotton production, since it was not really economical at this point to ship it to Europe. China, it turned out, needed more raw cotton and, unlike Indian cloth manufactures, those of China were not being exported to Europe, and posed, therefore, no competitive threat. Indian cotton exports to China thus provided a suitable market outlet233 from Britain’s point of view and simultaneously eliminated the need for British silver exports to China.234

Cotton exports nonetheless posed a problem since China produced cotton herself and imports from India were merely supplementary. The price of Indian cotton in China varied with the success of the Chinese annual crop which made profits uncertain and led the Company to prefer to act as commission agents in China rather than as principals and to shift the economic burden of crop variation on the Hong merchants by means of long-term contracts. The 1820s were particularly difficult as Chinese demand was depressed.235

The British then found a substitute for cotton—opium, grown in Malwa and Bengal. Although, in theory, the Chinese Emperor forbade its import, the combination of “a corrupt Mandarinate and naval weakness” opened Chinese ports to the opium trade.236 The import levels became so high that, reversing the original situation, China began to export silver to pay for the opium. As of 1836, the Emperor sought to enforce the ban on opium more seriously. This led to the Opium War in 1840 and, with the Treaty of 1842, China would start on the path of being herself incorporated.237 But that is another story.

The incorporation of India into the world-economy induced changes in its production patterns (decline of cloth manufactures) which created problems for cotton producers in Gujarat which were solved by finding an outlet (China) in the external arena. Similarly, the incorporation of coastal West Africa in the world-economy induced changes in its economic patterns (ultimately, the end of the slave trade) which created problems for the slave-selling zones. Some reconverted to cash crops sold in the capitalist world-economy. Others, for various reasons, were unable to do so at this point in time. They found new outlets for new products in the new external arena, savannah West Africa.

The size of Saharan commerce—a phrase which covers the trade of the savannah or Sahelian zone of West Africa both northward to the Maghreb and southward (westward) to the forest and coastal zones of West Africa—had a “recrudescence” and “sharp growth” between 1820 and 1875.238 Asante, a major slave-selling state in the forest zone in the late eighteenth century, significantly expanded its export of kola northward to Hausa areas as a “response of the Asante Government to the decline in the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century.”239 But the most remarkable change was in the savannah zone itself, which was marked by two central phenomena: the spectacular expansion of major Islamic reformist and expansionist state-building movements, most notably those of Uthman dan Fodio, Al Hajj Umar, and Samory, and the equally spectacular expansion of the phenomenon of slavery.

In the case of the Islamic movements, the story started essentially with the revival of the Sufi orders throughout the Islamic world in the late eighteenth century which was undoubtedly linked to the sense of threat posed by (Christian) European expansion and the decline of the three major Islamic political entities of the time—the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires.240 In West Africa, the continued disruptions in the interior caused by the Atlantic slave trade no doubt gave this sense of malaise further basis.241 Major religious movements cannot be reduced to merely instrumental politics, as so many of the commentators have insisted.242 But it also clear that political transformations, which is what these religious movements brought about, can only be explained in the larger context of social and economic transformations. We shall discuss these political changes in themselves shortly. Let us, for the moment, concentrate on the economic changes.

Why did slavery expand so notably in the savannah at this time? The answer is in one sense simple. The demand for slaves increased in adjacent regions both southward and northward, and within the savannah itself.243 I have already described the sources of the southward demand. The growth of large-scale production created “labor-intensive economies which relied on increased numbers of slaves.”244 The export of slaves northward to Tripoli, and beyond to Egypt, Cyprus, and Constantinople, doubled in comparison with the eighteenth century. This was because of the economically “booming” nature of the nineteenth century. This trade nonetheless remained largely one in female slaves, hence still reflecting a domestic “luxury” expenditure.245

Finally, a significant number of slaves were retained for use in the savannah zone on the new plantation structures which were used to produce for the regional economy.246 In a sense, the ripple effect of the incorporation of coastal West Africa caused, in nineteenth-century savannah West Africa, the same phenomenon which had occurred on the coast when it was still an external arena in the early eighteenth century: the rise of slave-selling states and the expansion of the use of slaves for local-regional production.

Incorporation into the world-economy means necessarily the insertion of the political structures into the interstate system. This means that the “states” which already exist in these areas must either transform themselves into “states within the interstate system” or be replaced by new political structures which take this form or be absorbed by other states already within the interstate system. The smooth operation of an integrated division of labor cannot operate without certain guarantees about the possibility of regular flows of commodities, money, and persons across frontiers. It is not that these flows must be “free.” Indeed, they are hardly ever free. But it is that the states which put limitations on these flows act within the constraint of certain rules which are enforced in some sense by the collectivity of member states in the interstate system (but in practice by just a few stronger states).

From the point of view of the existing interstate system, the ideal situation in an area undergoing incorporation is the existence of state structures which are neither too strong nor too weak. If they are too strong, they may be able to prevent necessary transfrontier flows on the basis of considerations other than that of maximizing the accumulation of capital in the world-economy. And if they are too weak, they may not be able to prevent others within their territory from interfering with these flows. At the end of the process of incorporation, one should expect to find states, which internally, had bureaucracies strong enough to affect directly in some ways the production processes, and which were linked externally into the normal diplomatic and currency networks of the interstate system.

The transformation that is involved is splendidly caught up in Meillassoux’s discussion of the relationship of West African states to traders in the nineteenth century:

[It is not] established in any clear way that trade was everywhere encouraged by the existence of state systems. The militarism of the latter was opposed to the pacifism of the traders. . . . According to nineteenth-century travelers the most dangerous regions, avoided by the caravans, were found in the territory of the most centralized of the states due to the wars they fought among themselves. . . . The state starts playing a positive role in furthering trade when the means of its administration (transport, currency, public order) becomes the means of commerce. This tendency leads to the integration of the trader as a subject of the state and removes his ‘stranger’ status. This phenomenon is mostly to be found in the Gulf of Guinea where the slave trade prevailed.247

As a zone became incorporated into the world-economy, its transfrontier trade became “internal” to the world-economy and no longer something “external” to it. Trade moved from being at great risk to something promoted and protected by the interstate system. It is this shift of which we are speaking.

Of course, the prior political situations in the four regions we have been analyzing had been quite different from one another. The details of other political transformations that were required were therefore considerably different. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the outcomes at the end of incorporation turned out to be less different than the starting points, although the particularities of each region were never effaced entirely.

Let us start the analysis this time with the Ottoman Empire. The Empire had been under steady pressure at all its edges since the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683. The successive wars, primarily with Austria and Russia, involved a slow but steady loss of territory throughout the eighteenth (and then nineteenth) century whose ultimate outcome would be the republic of Turkey, which in its present frontiers, is essentially reduced to Anatolia, the original core of the Ottoman Empire. The physical retrocession of the Ottoman Empire was, for a long time, matched by the steady retrocession of its ability to control politically its empire with the institutions it had created in the era of its expansion. Specifically, the state was seeing a serious diminution of its ability to control the means of production, of circulation, of violence, and of administration.248

The end of the territorial expansion of the empire had been a severe blow to a foundation block of its structure, the timar system, in which newly acquired land was distributed to intermediate officials (sipahis) who served as local representatives of the central state and in particular as its tax collector. As the same time that the central state was losing its ability to reward retainers with land, it underwent a long decline in its ability to maintain revenue levels—in part because of price inflation (the impact of being in the external arena of the world-economy and the recipient of a silver outflow from this world-economy), in part because of the diversion of once lucrative trade routes (because of the rise of the new Atlantic and Indian Ocean networks of the European world-economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). To solve this problem, the state turned to tax farming which ultimately resulted in the quasiprivatization of imperial land.

There was a parallel decline in the detailed control of mercantile activity via the hisba regulations. The ability of the government to control all trade transactions so as to give priority to the provisioning of the Ottoman center gave way to a system where European currencies circulated with ease in the Empire and money lending to the bureaucracy became widespread.

In the military domain, the empire found itself beginning to fall behind the Europeans by the turn of the seventeenth century. To remedy this, the central government authorized provincial administrators to create mercenary units (sekban troops), and it expanded its own mercenary force (the janissaries). Given the growing financial difficulties, the growth in the military mercenary forces simply meant, over the long run, a growing body of servitors both difficult to control and restive.

Finally, the empire saw the power of provincial officials and local notables (the ayans) grow, as they acquired income from tax farming and military power from sekban troops.249 By the time we get to the “disastrous peace treaty”250 of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, following defeat in the war with Russia, the ayans had emerged as “de factorulers of various areas” and were in a position to “contend for power.”251

This rise of regional power occurred everywhere within the Ottoman empire—in Rumelia (the Balkans), in the Fertile Crescent, in Egypt, and in North Africa. It took its most dramatic form in Egypt, with the virtual secession of Mohamed Ali whose de facto new state emerged in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion. But Egypt’s autonomy was not merely a function of internal Ottoman decline which was its precondition. If it were that alone, Mohamed Ali might have succeeded in creating a new powerful counter empire. In the context of the process of incorporation, the world war between Great Britain and France initially permitted his secession; but, later, Britain constrained (over 40 years) his ability to consolidate such a new imperial structure.252

The rise of virtual “autonomies” in the Balkans is equally striking. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ottoman control over the Balkan provinces had become “purely nominal”253 Such figures as Pasvanolu Osman Pasha in Serbia and Ali Pasha in Janina had become “semi-independent.” Their base was, to be sure, in the class of large landowners but they received support as well from the local merchant classes, who “had every interest in creating a strong governmental structure which could check the anarchy that the Sublime Porte could no longer do anything about.”254 The emerging strong structures were, however, being created within the framework of medium-size units larger than the sandjaks of the Empire.

Sultan Mahmud II’s reforms aimed at ending this frittering of central power. And ultimately he was able to abolish both the ayans and the janissaries.255 His achievement was that he “founded an absolute monarchy, supported by a centralized bureaucracy and a state army recruited from among commoners and formed with a new secular and progressive orientation.”256 But there was a price for this consolidation. In a sense, in the long run, he did succeeed by creating a modern “state with the interstate system,” but only within a zone smaller than the whole of the previous Ottoman Empire.

Mahmud II’s attempts at reform and recentralization in the early nineteenth century became the “immediate cause of the Greek rising,”257 the first successful true secession. Although the Greek cause would eventually take a classically nationalist form, built around common language and creed,258 its wider base as resistance to Ottoman recentralization can be gauged by the important role “Bulgarians” played in the early days both in the Greek war and in political resistances in Romania.259

It is within this context of the attempt to stem the decline of centralized power and to ward off external military pressure that the Ottoman Empire became “the first non-Christian country to participate in the European state system and the first unconditionally to accept its form of diplomacy.”260 If the first Western “diplomat,” an Englishman named William Harborne, arrived in Istanbul as early as 1583,261 Ottoman unilateralism and contempt for European states was still unbridled at that time and would largely remain so until the end of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, which was the first step in the Ottoman geographical recession in Europe, marked the beginning of at least episodic acquiescence in negotiations and rule recognition, and, therefore, a new Ottoman view of diplomacy.262

A similar evolution was beginning in the role of the “consul.” The “capitulations” were originally a privilege granted to foreign nationals belonging to a non-Moslem religious community, a millet, whose representative was the “consul.” As late as 1634, the Sultan “appointed” the French ambassador without waiting for word from Paris. But once geographical recession began after 1683, capitulations became something the Sublime Porte could trade for European “diplomatic support” against other European powers.263 In 1740, the French received just such a reward for their assistance in the peace negotiations with the Russians at Belgrade in 1739. This led to a considerable increase in French trade with the Ottoman Empire.264

But most importantly, in this new arrangement with the French, the Ottomans redefined the meaning of “capitulations,” extending the certificates of protection (the berats) beyond the foreign nationals to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects who were accepted to be under the aegis of the foreign consul.265 This would result in a profound change in the overall social composition of the commercial classes, from a situation in which Moslems had been “either the majority or a strong minority” in most regions to one in which in finance, in industry, and in foreign trade the non-Muslims (Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Levantines), linked via the capitulations to foreign consuls, would predominate.266

When the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 forced upon the Ottomans the “bitter fact” that they were in no position to defend themselves militarily without assistance, they “drew the obvious conclusion” that they had to integrate themselves into the “complicated mechanism” of the European interstate system.267 It is in the reign of Selim III (1789–1807) that the Ottoman Empire made its first “experiment with reciprocal diplomacy,”268 while seeking at the same time to “reduce abuse” in the administration of the capitulations. The latter effort, however, was successfully opposed by the European ambassadors and consuls “who saw in every reform only a new attempt to reduce the profits” which they and the merchants protected by them obtained via these “abuses.”269

This new atmosphere did not stop the European powers from lending support to the decentralizing thrusts within the Empire. Bonaparte invaded Egypt, thus ending definitively the prudent reserve of the Ancien Régime which had feared that such intrusion would only redound to the advantage of Russia and Britain,270 which indeed turned out to be the case.271 The British would support de facto the Greek struggle for independence, with Lord Byron singing its romance.272

Selim’s reforms were insufficient because Ottoman diplomacy lacked an organizational basis in terms of a permanent specialized bureaucracy. This would be another achievement of Mahmud II’s reign (1808–1839).273 Once Britain achieved its definitive hegemonic status, it replaced France as the protector of Ottoman integrity, which it saw as both checking Austrian and Russian ambitions and ensuring the lifeline to India, which had by then become a prime British concern.274 But most importantly, Great Britain was now able to impose its terms on the Ottomans as the price for its protection of the Empire. The terms were high. At the very end of Mahmud II’s rule, in 1838, Britain and the Ottoman Empire signed the Anglo–Turkish Commercial Convention (ATCC) of Balta Limann. The immediate prelude to the signing of this Convention in August had been the proclamation of Egyptian (plus Syrian) independence by Mohamed Ali. Britain would help the Empire to negate this proclamation.275 In return, ATCC confirmed all previous capitulatory privileges “forever” and limited the rights of the Ottomans to impose ad valorem customs duties higher than 3% for imports and transit trade and 12% for exports. All monopolies were ended and British was given most-favored-nation status.276 British importers also agreed to pay 2% in lieu of other internal duties. This had the effect of supporting the Ottoman center against potential secessionists like Egypt.

As all observers agree, this treaty represented the “virtual adoption of free trade” by the Ottomans.277 The negative impact of the treaty was great.278 In addition to its impact on the composition of production (the decline of Ottoman manufactures), it also seriously cut into Ottoman state revenues, leading in 1854 to the Ottoman state’s becoming a borrowing power, which ultimately culminated in the debacle of 1878 and the consequent debt tutelage.279 After 1838, Turkey became Britain’s fourth best customer and by 1846 Lord Palmerston could tell Parliament that there was “no foreign country with which we carried on commercial intercourse in which the tariff was so low and so liberal as that of Turkey.”280

The political and administrative reforms of the Tanzimat in the Gulhane Rescript of 1839 at the onset of the new sultanate of Abdülmecid I marked the last stage in this process. “The doors to the West were thrown wide open.”281 The incorporation became so complete that by 1872, the British subject, J. Lewis Farley, who was serving as the Consul of the Sublime Porte in Bristol, could argue that since Turkey “has fairly entered the community of nations,” and since her administrative system has been “remodeled” and since she recognized the paramountcy of universalism over the claims of sect, therefore, perhaps now, some of the capitulations might be revised.282 In short, they were no longer needed.

The reconstruction of the political mechanisms on the Indian subcontinent followed a quite different trajectory than that of the Ottoman Empire. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, the outcome by 1850 was a state internally stronger than in 1750, but externally weaker and geographically reduced in scope. Ultimately, the territory would be subdivided even more, but with all the successor states fully participating in and constrained by the interstate system. By contrast, in 1750, the Mughal Empire was at the end of a political disintegrative process that was much further advanced than that of the Ottoman Empire (and no doubt the Mughals had never been as internally cohesive and georgaphically extensive as the Ottomans). The result of incorporation would be the total abolition by 1857 of the Mughal Empire as well as all the other smaller political structures that had existed on the Indian subcontinent and their collective replacement by a single (but complex) administrative unit, India, which was however nonsovereign. It is this entity which would go forward to independence in the twentieth century in the form of two (later three) sovereign states. Nonetheless, the historical evolution of the two zones between 1750 and 1850 show certain clear parallels in the (re)construction of state structures, neither too strong nor too weak, fully ensconced in the interstate system.

The explanation of the weaknesses of the Mughal Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been much debated in Indian historiography. Two major accounts are those of Irfan Habib and Satish Chandra. Essentially, Habib argues that the central administration sought to raise enough revenue from the peasantry to secure its military strength but not so much as to make impossible the subsistence of the peasantry. However, the Mughal Empire, as all such structures, had to rely on some intermediary cadres, in this case, the jagirdars, to collect the revenue. The interests of the intermediaries being quite different from that of the central administration, they tended over time to raise steadily the level of surplus extraction in order to retain more for themselves. In Habib’s words, this was “reckless,” since it led (in the Mughal Empire as it had elsewhere, it should be added) to flights from the land, armed resistance, and a decline in cultivation, undermining in the long run the economic base of the imperial structure.283

Satish Chandra words his explanation somewhat differently. He says that the system was up against the “basic problem” that the available surplus was “insufficient to defray the cost of administration, pay for wars of one type or another, and to give the ruling class a standard of life in keeping with its expectations.”284 Athar Ali affects to see a contradiction between Chandra’s argument and that of Habib, asserting that the latter argues that the mansabdar system worked too well, and that Chandra argues that it didn’t work well enough. I do not myself see the contradiction. The process which Habib describes led to the situation that Chandra describes. The only question is whether this process was significantly precipitated by the European presence in Asia. Athar Ali’s own answer is that, given the nonexpansion of production, European demand for Asian goods served to increase the real prices of those products on Asian markets, thereby causing a “serious disturbance” in their economies and intensifying “the financial difficulties” of the ruling classes.285 This would then partially explain the increased squeeze of which Habib speaks, and would affect not only the direct producers but those one level up in the structure. It thereby led in effect, says Gupta, to a drain of local capital such that, unable to pay the “exorbitant revenues” to the Empire, local land controllers were often led to transfer their rights to collect revenues by sale or mortgage, despite this being illegal. Thus, he argues, “the pre-conditions for the functioning of a land market in India . . . came into existence in the last days of Mughal rule.”286

The military disintegration of the Mughal Empire, the extensive warfare on the subcontinent, and the rise of new autonomous zones no doubt made the European trading companies aware, by the 1740s of “the political opportunities which lay open to further their own economic interests.”287 But simply because “opportunities” exist does not mean they are seized. For such “opportunities” have their cost. Political conquest and direct administration have many advantages but they require a significant financial disbursement. In general, if the same or more profit can be made without them, the states representing strong economic actors will seek to sidestep such disbursements. It is clear that, not only in the 1740s but for a half-century or even a century, therefore, there were many powerful persons in Great Britain who thought it prudent to sidestep such disbursements. Yet, as we know, they were made.

The Seven Years’ War, during which India was an important locus of Franco–British warfare, played its role. As Spear says, it gave the Europeans a new “confidence in the superiority of their armed forces in Indian conditions,”288 and the Clive period may, in addition, have propagated or expanded a myth of India as a “land of abundant wealth”289 which eclipsed the reality of the costs of military and administrative expenditures. That a link between increasing involvement in the production networks of the world-economy and a consequent restructuring of the political networks was perceived by local rulers at the time is illustrated by the anecdote related by a merchant from Malabar traveling to Calicut in 1784. It is told that he

saw on his way that all sandal trees and pepper vines were being cut down. People told him that the Nawab [i.e., Tipu Sultan] had given strict orders for their destruction as it was because of these commodities that the Europeans sought to make war on him.290

As Marshall insists, and as this anecdote shows, India was by no means “an inert victim ripe for conquest by any European state that chose to assert its irresistible power.”291 And furthermore, in the eighteenth century, neither the British government nor the Court of Directors of the East India Company manifested any strong desire for the use of military force.292 Yet, “paradoxically,” as Harlow says,293 the actual result was the acquisition of the largest, most populated land mass to be colonized either before or since.

One reason for this colonization was that there were not two but three major British actors on the Indian scene. In addition to the British government and the Court of Directors of the East India Company, there were the private traders. Furthermore, there were at least two kinds of private traders, those who were themselves servants of the Company and those who were not.294 Obviously those who were employees of the Company had conflicts of interest; their private interests were given latitude by the realities of distance and the extreme difficulties of effective centralized control. It seems clear, furthermore, that the pursuit of these private economic interests frequently led the Company’s servants to use their authority to pressure Indian states in political ways. As Marshall puts it, “they were willing to use [their military ascendancy] to extract concessions from Indian rulers whose cumulative effect was to weaken and eventually destroy those states.”295

This drive for political control did not happen without considerable debate within the framework of the Company. This was the heart of the disagreements in the 1770s and 1780s between the so-called Hastings and Francis factions.296 But the fact is that the attitude of even the anti-involvement forces was not unambiguous. The two factions, for example, argued, to be sure, about the annexation of Oudh which was inland, and which was finally annexed by Wellesley in 1801. But the anti-involvement forces had economic designs no less clear than those who wished to annex. As Marshall puts it:

Free trade is a game which requires more than one player. If Europeans were to give up their political influence to support their trade, they felt that the Wazir [of Oudh] must be persuaded to remedy the conditions which, in their view, made the use of political influence necessary.297

Ultimately, there was a give and take relationship between the Company and the traders. The latter needed to fall back often on the “protection of nationality,” as well as on the credit rating afforded by the fact of the Company’s presence. Conversely, however, they utilized the Company’s commercial infrastructure. They paid duties; they stimulated trade. “The benefit received from such ‘invisibles’ as discounts on remitted estates, payments for permissions, stated damages, freights and fines on prohibited goods, would all have helped to nullify the occasional outrage.” All this added up to a “difficult” and “ambivalent” relationship.298 Thus, these private trade interests could get away with overcommitting first the Company and then the British government.

Still, one has to wonder why, at certain crucial points, the brakes were not more sternly applied. I think we have to take this question at two points in time, from 1757 to 1793, and from 1793 on. The fact is that the political acquisition of Bengal turned out to be quite profitable in the immediate period under discussion. The bullion outflows from Britain ceased, and since the cotton piece goods and other items were still arriving in Britain, it is clear that something was paying for them. The state revenues must have been this something. Indeed, as we know, Bengal silver began to flow out to the other Presidencies and finance their conquest and administration as well.299 Since this was occurring at a moment of great financial strain for the British state (as for the French) in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the inward flow of revenues from the Indian subcontinent could not have been unwelcome or unnoticed. Cain and Hopkins summarize this situation quite well: “Plassey plunder did not start the Industrial Revolution, but it did help Britain to buy back the National Debt from the Dutch.”300 In short, there was a short-run justification for direct colonization which tended to outweigh the middle-run negatives which might otherwise have governed the policy-making in London.

The rivalry with France was crucial. In part, no doubt, this was rivalry in the direct manner one usually suggests, that is, a competition for control of a new peripheral zone of the world-economy; though here one should exmpasize this was more true for Britain than for France in view of their differing geopolitical strategies in the world-economy, especially after 1763.301 But in greater part, probably, it was crucial indirectly in that it enabled Britain to resolve the state financial crisis of the 1780s which France was precisely unable to surmount, a fact we have already discussed in terms of its link with the French Revolution. As we have seen, the ultimate outcome of the third round of Anglo–French rivalry led to the final consecration of the British economic lead.

The dilemma posed to both the Court of Directors and the British government was therefore clear. Unhappy as they may have been about the creeping political dominion into which they were being led, they were constrained from applying the brakes. They came to feel that the British government had really only one choice, which was to take over the operation more directly. This was the Pitt solution, which eventually was imposed. As Harlow puts it, the Company’s employees, having gotten out of hand, represented “a menace to the Company” and had therefore to be “transformed into quasi-civil servants.”302 Like it or not, and the Court of Directors did not like it, the Court of Directors could not really do this alone. The British state had to become involved. Lord Stormont stated the objective clearly at the time: “a strong government in India, subject to the check and control of a still stronger government at home.”303 And this they got. With Pitt’s India Act in 1784304 and the reforms of Lord Cornwallis in the decade following it, the Company’s servants disappeared from the picture as independent actors.305

Of course, as the wise and prudent had anticipated, the costs of government, direct and indirect, turned out to be greater than anticipated. The “balance of payments” issue returned, and a renewed silver outflow began. Furthermore, there was the continuing silver outflow to the other great trade zone in the East, China. To solve this problem, Britain could now turn its emerging political dominion to good use. The situation at the end of the eighteenth century is summarized thus by Spear:

The Company’s trade in India was no longer profitable, for its profits, instead of being augmented by the revenues of Bengal, were in fact absorbed by the costs of administration. Its profits came from China. . . . A cogent economic argument for the hegemony of India was the preservation of the China trade.306

Because it controlled India, it could create the export crops which would find a market in China, where it could not yet force a restructuring of production processes.

The compromise involved in the modality of renewing the Company’s charter in 1793 served these interests well. The British government increased its control over the Company. The Company, however, retained its monopoly over the China trade and some monopolies in India. But the private traders got new statutory claims on a certain amount of shipping. This compromise combined stability as Britain was entering the long wars with France,307 a stability from which the private traders themselves would benefit,308 with assurances that the China trade would be pursued aggressively by the Company. Meanwhile, 1793 was also the year of the Permanent Settlement of Cornwallis, the culmination of a process of legal and administrative reform that had the effect of removing barriers to considering land to be “a commodity to be bought and sold in a market.”309

With the ending of the Napoleonic Wars approaching in 1813, the British government could go further in asserting direct control when the Company again came up for Charter revewal. In the meantime, the private traders had successfully expanded their trade and were chafing at the constraints as well as at the losses on remittances made via the Company. The Lancashire manufacturers now also entered the fray, anxious to expand their own markets in India. Hence, the new Charter ended all monopoly in India but extended the China monopoly of the Company for 20 years. The Charter also provided for the total separation of territorial and commercial accounts, thereby preparing the way for a proper fully colonial administration.310 “By the year 1837 the British were no longer simply a power in India. They were the power over India.”311

The incorporation of Russia was quite another story still. Whether Russia was a part of Europe (and, therefore, of the European interstate system) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was and is a matter of scholarly (and popular) doubt. Whether Russia is part of “Europe” remains a question for some even in the twentieth century, but there can be no doubt that the U.S.S.R. is today a full participant in the (now worldwide) interstate system. It shall be my contention that Russia only became a fully integrated member of the (then European) interstate system in the eighteenth century.

As Dehio reminds us, on the one hand, “the Russians, unlike the Turks, were distant cousins of the Western peoples both ethnically and in mentality,” yet on the other hand, “the young Leibniz still spoke of Russia, Persia, and Abyssinia in the same breath.”312 In any case, if one use the criterion of the existence of reciprocal diplomacy, it is only with the reign of Peter the Great (1689–1725) that we find its beginnings.313 This was coordinate with the significant expansion of foreign trade and “the gradual elimination of Russia’s political and cultural isolation from the rest of Europe.”314

Peter presented himself as the great “Westernizer” or, in today’s language, as the great “modernizer,” and many, in Russia and elsewhere, then and now, accept this description. This is the same role, mutatis mutandis, claimed for Mohamed Ali of Egypt or, with less éclat, for Sultan Mahmud II. Peter undoubtedly launched the process of creating a centralized bureaucracy with the creation of the Ruling Senate in 1711–1722.315 He also transformed the army by making the nobleman’s service in it both compulsory and permanent.316 And it is generally agreed that it was the performance of this modernized army that established “Russia’s status as an important part of the European political system.”317

Still, recent scholarship has been more skeptical of how much Peter the Great achieved, as distinguished from what he hoped or claimed to achieve. Cracraft argues that the Petrine myth may perhaps be “of greater historical significance than any achievements of the Petrine regime.”318 And Torke calls the administrative changes Peter effected “greatly overrated” and asserts that he accomplished “almost nothing” in this regard. The true “turning-point,” he says, was 1762, that is, the accession of Catherine II to the throne.319

Peter’s work was in some sense transitional work. He put the nobility into the army on a regular basis and put the army into the administration as well. He thereby curbed the decentralizing tendencies by absorbing the time of the nobility and using them to force each other into ensuring better internal flows of surplus. It was left to Catherine (1762–1796) to end compulsory lifetime military service for the nobility, creating in its place a civilian apparatus, which in addition had the virtue of allowing the nobility the time to become the cash-crop entrepreneurs. Catherine abolished the old provinces and divided Russia into some 50 guberniyas (subdivided into uezds), each of which had collegial administrative structures composed partly of centrally appointed officials and partly of locally elected representatives.320 She thus transformed Russia’s government fundamentally, “from a tribute-collecting hierarchy to a civil administration whose servitors, like those of the army, were aware of general purposes. . . .”321 In 1766, Catherine signed the Anglo–Russian Commercial Treaty providing low duties on the exports of raw materials, which served Britain well.322 It is in this context that we should evaluate Catherine’s somewhat aggressive military policy, triumphing over the Ottoman Empire, participating in the partition of Poland, and giving an “overwhelming impression . . . of Russian dynamism.”323 But it was as though this external policy were to compensate the external trade policy and allow Catherine the possibility to take up in earnest, through her administrative reforms, “the organization of [Russia’s] internal space.”324

This internal reorganization meant, of course, among other things, an increasingly effective oppression of the work force, as we have seen.325 And this repression led both to a “massive flight” of the Russian peasantry eastward across the Volga, to the Urals and even Siberia326 and to popular rebellions linked to “deterioriating . . . economic conditions.”327 As the involvement in the world-economy grew, this “development” impinged increasingly on the once remote and free Cossack frontiersmen.328 Their complaints, linked to those of the new industrial serfs and those of the intensified serfdom on cash-crop estates (which we have already explained) plus the opposition of the Old Believers,329 created an explosive mix which reached its apogee in Pugachev’s revolt, precisely in Catherine’s days. The underlying ideological theme was that of peasant memories, “hark[ing] back to times when their forefathers were free men,”330 or at least freer men than under the conditions of incorporation into a capitalist world-economy.

Catherine nevertheless held strong. She suppressed the peasants and maintained free trade. This policy had sufficiently negative effects to induce her successors to take the advice of “frankly protectionist” advisors like M.D. Chulkov who pushed for greater reciprocity in Russian–British relations. The onslaught of the Protectionists against “the long-resented British traders” reached a point where Tsar Paul broke relations with Britain in 1800, embargoed British goods, and confiscated British vessels.331

But Russia found herself caught up in the constraints of the interstate system and discovered that her freedom of action was very limited. Already in the 1780s, Russia’s attempts to increase her margin of maneuver with Britain by developing commercial links with France foundered on the contrary interests of the two countries vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire.332 Russia counted on her expansionist role in the “East”—both politically and economically—to ensure that her incorporation would be as a semiperipheral state and not as a peripheralized zone. And indeed the triumph over the Ottomans in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca did signal a “quantum leap forward in Russia’s international position.”333 Her ability to achieve this was undoubtedly due to the fact that, in 1783, France and Great Britain were absorbed in their struggles related to the American War of Independence and could do little to implement “their professed opposition to the Russian annexation of the Crimea.”334

But there was a price to this game. Russia needed the benevolent neutrality of at least one of the western European great powers in the Middle East. Since France in the late eighteenth century supported the Ottomans diplomatically, Russia felt she had to maintain her links with Britain. Thus Paul’s gestures in 1800–1801 could not be satisfied, especially given Napoleon’s long-term thrust, and Russia was forced back into Britain’s camp. Russia was caught between and bound by her attempts to consolidate her domain and influence in southeastern Europe, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus region on the one hand and to carve out a stronger position vis-à-vis western Europe on the other.335 To do the former, she sacrificed the latter, and thus was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy in ways that guaranteed and promoted the famous “backwardness” of which later authors would write. But Russia still enjoyed a less weak interstate position than other incorporated zones, and this fact would result eventually in her ability to pursue the Russian Revolution.

West Africa was different from all the other three zones in that there was, as of 1750, no world-empire in the area comparable in scope of organization to the Ottoman, Mughal, or Russian Empires. There were instead a number of strong, largely slave-selling states, and a plenitude of small entities which were militarily and politically weak.

We have been arguing that incorporation into the world-economy requires states that are neither too strong nor too weak, but ones that are responsive to the “rules of the game” of the interstate system. It is often asserted that one of the reasons for the political pressures of western European states in these zones was to restore “order” in areas where “anarchy” made pacific trade impossible. We have already indicated we thought this a dubious explanation for the Indian subcontinent, where much of the “order” restored by the British after 1750 served as a remedy for an “anarchy” in the very creation of which the Western intrusion had played a significant role in the previous 100 years. The point is that capitalism needs not “order” but rather what might be called “favorable order.” The promotion of “anarchy” often serves to bring down “unfavorable order,” that is, order that is capable of resisting incorporation.

In the historiography of West Africa, one familiar theme is the so-called slave–gun cycle. The evidence for the link between the acquisition of firearms and the acquisition of slaves seems in general quite strong. “For the professional slave gatherers the firearms represented important inputs.”336 Richards insists this “high correlation” was already found in the 1658–1730 period, and led then to the “most dramatic changes” in the West African political scene.337 For it was precisely in that period that the great slave-selling states, such as Dahomey and Asante, took form. No doubt these states thought they were creating insulation from the impact of the world market, as Polanyi argues. But it is also true that “once caught up in the vicious cycle of slave-raiding warfare the dependency could only intensify.”338 From the point of view of the economic forces of the world-economy, however, these growing slave-selling structures were creating “anarchy” in other zones, thereby breaking down “unfavorable order.” That is, the source of what Akinjogbin calls the “greatest paradox” of the slave trade.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Aja politics had become chaotic because of the increase of trade. At the end of the century, instability was about to set into the kingdom of Dahomey because the trade was declining.339

The now “favorable order” of the slave-selling states depended, however, on too restricted a definition of economic activity. As the central focus of West African involvement in the world-economy shifted from a period primarily of slave-export trade to a period of mixed exports to a still later period of virtually no slave exports—a process we have already described—the rather small pockets of slave-selling states amid a larger, more “anarchic” zone became less useful. What was needed were new states, larger in most cases than the existing states, but states which were once again neither too weak nor too strong.

Thus the British merchants on the Gold Coast sided strongly with the Fanti states which were resisting Asante expansion because they “were convinced that if Asante power could be destroyed, a vast field of commerce would be opened to them.”340 The Islamic thrust of the nineteenth century was, as we have seen, one toward the “large-scale political integration of several small states and petty principalities.”341 And where no state form existed, as in Ibo country, a “partial state formation” in the guise of the Aro Chuku grew up.342

Among other things, one can interpret the British drive against the slave trade as a drive to break down the “unfavorable order” of the smaller units in the interests of recreation of larger units. It was, of course, aimed also at weakening the positions of French and other economic competitors.343 If we cannot yet talk of reciprocal diplomacy in this period, we do see the emergence of more structured political entities who began to guarantee the flows of the emergent cash-crop production for the world-economy.

We have insisted on dating this incorporation process as roughly 1750–1850 (or in the case of West Africa perhaps 1750–1880). Is this the only possible periodization? Obviously not, and the empirical debate is widespread on this issue of dating. Unfortunately, many of the participants do not have a clear model of the process, or at least they have not been using the same model we have been using: external arena–incorporation–peripheral (or semiperipheral) zone. In terms of this model, what we see is that some authors move the dating of incorporation back to the time when a zone becomes part of the external arena. Some authors, on the other hand, will not consider a zone incorporated until it begins functioning as a peripheral zone of the world-economy. Neither of these two sets of authors perceive of “incorporation” as a distinctive process in the way we have been arguing.

A standard way of formulating this debate is to argue about the date at which “capitalism” began. Some authors insist that with the widespread development of long-distance trade in the earlier period of the “external arena,” we already have capitalism, or at least protocapitalism. This is often accompanied by an argument about the “indigenous” roots of capitalism, or the “interruption” of this process by European intrusion. Other authors insist that the very earliest “capitalist” period occurs much later. In extreme cases, some argue that it barely exists even today. We have insisted that there are not multiple capitalist states but one capitalist world-system, and that to be part of it one has minimally to be integrated into its production networks or commodity chains, and be located in states that participate in the interstate system which forms the political superstructure of this capitalist world-economy. Incorporation is then defined as precisely the period of such integration.

THE SETTLER DECOLONIZATION OF THE AMERICAS: 1763–1833

The French artist and lithographer, Francisque-Martin-François Grenier de Saint-Martin (1793–1867), student of David, specialized in historical topics. This print, executed in 1821, shows General Toussaint l’Ouverture handing over two letters to the general commanding the English forces that were in Haiti in 1798. The letters indicate the request of the French Commissioners that Toussaint seize the English general and Toussaint’s refusal to do so on the grounds that he would not dishonor himself by reneging on his word. “A noble refusal,” says Grenier. At the bottom we see Haiti’s seal, with the inscription “Liberté Egalité.”

In the middle of the eighteenth century, more than half the territory of the Americas was, in juridical terms, composed of colonies of European states, primarily of Great Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal. The remaining territory was outside the interstate system of the capitalist world-economy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually all of these colonies had been transformed into independent sovereign states (after some combinations of and divisions among previous administrative entities). Furthermore, these new states had, by this time, laid claim to jurisdiction over the remaining land area in the hemisphere.

This was a remarkable reshaping of the physiognomy of the interstate system. This “decolonization” of the Americas occurred under the aegis of their European settlers, to the exclusion not only of the Amerindian populations but also of the transplanted Africans, despite the fact that, in many of these newly sovereign states, Amerindians and Blacks constituted a substantial proportion (even a majority) of the population. To be sure, there was one exception, Haiti, and this exception was to play an important historical role, as we shall see. In any case, this decolonization differed strikingly from the second great “decolonization” of the modern world-system, that which occurred in the twentieth century, the difference being precisely in terms of the populations who would control the resulting sovereign states.

The story is conventionally and correctly said to begin in 1763, “a great turning point.”1 The outcome of the Seven Years’ War was that Great Britain had effectively ousted France from the Western Hemisphere. And this fact alone would be enough to make it impossible for the Spanish and Portuguese to attempt to take advantage of the renewed expansion of the world-economy and to (re)assert true economic control over their American colonies. But this very triumph of Great Britain acutely posed, for the first time in the Americas, the question of the intra-elite disposition of the rewards. As we know, this dispute would lead the settlers, first those of British North America, then those of Hispanic America and Brazil, to found separate state structures.

The issues facing Great Britain in 1763 are well illustrated in an important diplomatic event. In the discussions leading to the Treaty of Paris, one major question was whether Great Britain would obtain territorial control from the French over Canada or over Guadeloupe. It was accepted from the outset that Britain could not have both, but that Britain had the choice. Those Britons who argued for the retention of Guadeloupe pointed out that the small sugar island was far richer than bleak Canada, and that its acquisition would be both a boon for Britain and a great loss for France. This, of course, was precisely the fear of the sugar planters of the existing British West Indian territories who saw Guadeloupe sugar as unwanted competition. Their views ultimately prevailed.2

In addition to this strictly economic argument, there was a geopolitical debate. Proponents of the retention of Guadeloupe pointed out that the defense of Canada posed a continuing and draining burden on France whose navy was not strong enough for such imperial warfare. But even more important than Canada’s impact on French strategy was its potential impact on the attitudes of British settlers in North America. Already, on May 9, 1761, the Duke of Bedford wrote to the Duke of Newcastle:

I do not know whether the neighborhood of the French to our Northern Colonies was not the greatest security of their dependence on the Mother Country who I fear will be slighted by them when their apprehensions of the French are removed.3

The argument was very prescient. Furthermore, there was a British settler counterpart to this argument: “[The colonies] seem to wish Canada as French, it made them of some consequence [to the British].”4

If this geopolitical argument for leaving Canada to the French did not prevail, it was because, in addition to the weight of the West Indian sugar interests in London, there existed a certain British pride in territorial conquest and a British insouciance about the settlers, whose “mutual jealousies” were thought to be a guarantee of continued dependence upon the mother country. But no doubt the strongest argument was that of state finances:

It would save a vast expense to Britain in not being obliged to keep up a great number of regular forces which must be maintained if the smallest spot is left with the French upon that Continent.5

As we have already argued, the ability of the British to keep their state finances under better control than the French was to be a crucial element in the last phase of their struggle for hegemony. So perhaps this was as prescient an argument as the other.

Britain’s problem had long been how to create a very strong state, both inside its frontiers and within the interstate system without incurring the negative consequences of too heavy a public finance burden. This problem had been greatly exacerbated by the Seven Years’ War.6 The “bloated Leviathan of government” erected by Walpole on the basis of the “broad consensus” of the Glorious Revolution had already been under attack for being “fat with corruption, complaisant, and power-engrossing.”7 The new rapport de force in the world after the Treaty of Paris seemed to offer the British two benefits in this regard: a lowered military expenditure because of the weakening of France and the possibility of shifting part of the tax base outside of the metropole to British settlers in North America.

Seen, however, from the standpoint of these British settlers, the Treaty of Paris had an almost opposite meaning. They were now “freed” from their fears of the French (and the Spaniards) and could therefore devote their energies and resources to the prospect of “a vast growth of power and wealth with . . . westward expansion.”8 Thus, while both the British at home and the settlers in North America “rolled the sweets of victory under their tongues,”9 they drew from it opposite expectations. The British anticipated a “rationalization” of empire, and therefore sought to “tighten controls.” The settlers, on the other hand, were expecting a “loosening of constraints.”10 What seemed merely a sensible objective to the British, the need for “a more highly-keyed . . . imperial organization”11 to secure their successes, seemed to the settlers to be “a fundamental attack upon the extant moral order within the empire.”12 A clash was inevitable, although secession was not.

A good deal of the historiography of the revolution in British North America is concerned with explaining its roots in prior long-term tendencies—economic, social, and/or ideological—which culminated, say the various historians, in the events of 1765–1776, and which therefore enable us to characterize what the “American Revolution” was really about. Much of what is said is true, but a good deal of it is irrelevant as explanation. All major political events have long-term roots, although these are often easier to discern ex post facto than at the time. But it is seldom the case that these long-term trends could have led only to the particular outcome (even broadly defined) that did in fact occur. It is not that the outcome was logically accidental. It is rather that, as we specify more and more the particular outcome, we need to include more and more specific factors in the accounting, and many of these are inevitably conjunctural13 rather than structural.

The most important general conjunctural change was the renewed expansion of the capitalist world-economy in the eighteenth century, and Britain’s ability to win the struggle with France for hegemony. But there were conjunctural trends more specific to the situation in British North America. The general economic conditions of British North America had been improving since 1720, at first gradually, then, after 1745, more rapidly.14 But expansion, of course, did not mean an even distribution of rewards. On the one hand, it led to a “sudden increase in concentration of wealth”15 in the colonies, which easily explains the apparent paradox that colonial society became “less coherent and more rigid at the same time.”16 On the other hand, it also led to a sharpened rivalry between private business interests in England and those in the colonies. The role of English capital was increasing to the detriment of even the wealthier merchants and planters of the colonies. The “agents” of British firms were displacing colonial merchants. Over a half century, “profit margins were lessened, and possibilities for local development sacrificed.”17

The increasing difficulties of colonial merchants in this period brings us to that “hardy perennial,”18 the question of how much of a burden the Navigation Acts constituted for the North American colonists. Hardy perennial it has been to subsequent historians of colonial North America, but was it a hardy perennial to people of the time? Greene asserts that “the extent of colonial compliance” with the mercantilist regulations of Great Britain suggests a “very high degree of accommodation” to the system. This is a plausible argument provided we consider the degree of compliance high. He adds that, given the degree of prosperity, many persons had a “strong vested interest” in maintaining their ties with the British. Again, this is plausible presuming the degree of prosperity remained high.19 The presumed “burden” of mercantilist regulations has been a matter of continued quantitative debate since figures were first offered by Lawrence Harper and, as in most such debates, it is a question of what to count and how much is too much. Harper’s original conclusion was that, even if the mercantile laws were administered in “perfect fairness” by an administration balancing equities, decisions were being made in far-off England and “the colonies were at a disadvantage.”20 Aside from the subsequent acerbic debate on the quality of Harper’s data,21 a good deal of the discussion has centered upon calculations of whether or not it would have made a difference had independence been achieved earlier, the so-called counterfactual premise.

This counterfactual premise literature started with Robert Paul Thomas in 1965 and has continued ever since. Thomas purported to demonstrate that “the largest burden would be slightly more than 1 percent of national income,”22 and therefore insignificant. Price thought that even Thomas’s low figure was overstated since the “meaningful unit of economic life” was the firm and not the transaction, and firms take into account more than sales prices on single transactions. Firms consider something Price called the balance of “overall exchange” (for example, calculating costs of credit) and thus they might have found “sound business reasons” for sticking to the traditional entrepôts even had there been no mercantilist constraints.23 Price’s argument was intended to weaken the Harper argument even more, but in fact it strengthened it by reminding us (and especially the cliometricians) that real economic calculations of profit have to be done in wider space and longer time.24

Ransom proceeded to point out that aggregate North American calculations might hide differential regional effects of the Navigation Acts and that the Southern states’ exports were particularly negatively affected.25 Thomas agreed in reply, and admitted such arguments might justify an “economic interpretation” of the origins of the American Revolution since such disparities might lead to the creation of a “passionate minority” who would champion such a political outcome. He even noted that many of the events of the time, such as protests about the Currency Act and the Stamp Act, lend credence to such an interpretation.26 And this then is perhaps the point. As Broeze remarked in his commentary on this debate, while the New Economic History may contribute to the calculation of real economic growth (and Broeze himself is not at all hostile to such undertakings), it cannot tell us anything about a “subjective notion” such as the “burden” people feel. The historian’s perceptions about the actors’ feelings “can only be gathered and understood from their writings and actions.”27 The subject of the real cost of the Navigation Acts may have become “a great bore,”28 but the subject of collective motivations remains central.

We thus come to the economic conjuncture of the 1760s and how it was perceived in the Americas. The end of the Seven Years’ War brought on a postwar slump29 which followed the “unprecedented prosperity”30 of the Seven Years’ War and negatively affected almost all the sectors of the North American economy—merchants, planters, small farmers, and laborers.

Schlesinger, in his classic disquisition on the North American merchants, starts from the premise that the century preceding the Treaty of Paris had been their “Golden Age.”31 When, therefore, the normal postwar downturn and readjustments were “substantially prolonged” by the attempts of the British to reorganize the empire and “bring the colonials into a more subordinate status,”32 this gave the merchant classes “food for sober reflection.”33 It was the merchants more than anyone else who were surprised and aggrieved by the “new rules to the game after 1763.”34 In self-protection, they moved to seek relief by nonimportation of British goods.35

At the same time, southern planters came into problems because of their chronic indebtedness to Scots factors. In 1762 there was a collapse of credit which shook the planters of Maryland and Virginia.36 The colonial governments had been financing their current expenditures by a system called “currency finance,” which involved issuing notes in anticipation of future tax returns.37 The expansion of this process led to British merchant concern with the security of debts and the passage of the Currency Act of 1764 which offered the compromise that paper currency would continue as legal tender for public but no longer for private debts. The main losers here were the colonial planters who thereupon “turned to politics.”38 The 1762 crisis was followed by the worse one of 1772. In the context of general metropole–settler strained relations, the “psychological effects” of the Currency Act were very important, serving as a “constant reminder”39 of colonial dependency on the economic priorities of the imperial government to the detriment of the colonists.

The general situation exacerbated relations between small farmers and the elite planters. At the very time the larger planters were challenging the British government in one way or another, small farmers were undertaking rural action whose effect was “to challenge and undermine the authority of provincial institutions”40 controlled by the local elites. As small farmers became involved in the political agitation, in some localities they radicalized “patriot” activities,41 but in some localities they turned against the patriot activities.42 It was clear that the small farmers were at least as concerned with their struggles against the planters as they were with a struggle against the British.

Finally, the urban poor were not quiescent. In the post-1763 period, “inequality rapidly advanced”43 in the urban centers, and especially in Boston, the “major town least enjoying prosperity” from 1765 to 1775. Thus it was no accident that Boston was “the most radical town” during these years.44 For Nash, it was out of these grievances that came “much of the social force that saw in Revolution the possibility of creating a new social order.”45

For Great Britain, however, 1763 marked a turning point more significant than a mere postwar slump. It marked the end of Phase II of the Franco–British struggle for hegemony. Nonetheless, this struggle, while won in principle by Great Britain in 1763, would require one last immense spasm going from 1763 to 1815 before the issue would no longer be contested by France. We have sought above to place this final British triumph in the context of the renewed economic expansion of the capitalist world-economy (the A-phase of a logistic) which we have dated as going approximately from the 1730s to (conventionally) 1817.

Hegemony, as we have already seen from the Dutch example in the seventeenth century (Vol. II, Chapter 2), is a state in which the leading power fears no economic competition from other core states. It, therefore, tends to favor maximal openness of the world-economy. This policy is one which some historians have called informal empire (that is, noncolonial and eventually even anti-colonial imperialism). In the specific situation of British imperial institutions this is the structural basis of what Vincent Harlow has termed the founding of the “second” British empire. Harlow notes that, following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Britain undertook a “sustained outburst of maritime exploration” whose only prior parallel was in the Tudor days. The object was to create a “network of commercial exchange” throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans, based on a chain of trading ports and naval bases, but not on colonies. The exception to this pattern was to be India, and we have already discussed why India was an exception.

Where did the “old” colonies, those of the “first” British empire, fit in this schema? These “old” colonies were primarily in the Americas. As Harlow notes, in the course of the late eighteenth century, as the quarrel with the American colonists became acute, “radical economists in England preached the startling doctrine that political separation was a consummation to be wished.”46 But was such a view really widespread among policy makers? We have little evidence that this is so, particularly at the beginning of the process. Perhaps a thin case could be made that such a view underlay Edmund Burke’s arguments concerning the American revolution.47 But, in general, politicians are rarely bold and farsighted innovators. Nor are most capitalists. Investors at the time showed few signs of being “aware of a need to choose” between an Oriental trade empire and a Western hemispheric colonial system. Rather, they invested “wherever a profit seemed likely.”48

Foresight is not, however, the issue. Structural changes will, of their own accord, slowly but decisively change attitudes and policies. The cause of the restiveness of the American settlers was no doubt complex. But the British government, when it responded, found itself in a situation where the growth of its power in the world-economy forced it to take into account a wider set of interests than previously. This posed dilemmas, and in this case, as Peter Marshall notes, “dilemmas were antecedent to disasters,”49 or at least what seemed at first to be disasters.

The first dilemma was that of finding political solutions that could reconcile the demands which distant White settler populations would now begin to put forward with what was required for maintaining internal political balances at home. We previously discussed the political importance of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as the basis of a consensus among the powerful forces in England, and after the Act of Union in 1707, of Great Britain.50 The institutional key to the compromise was the constitutional supremacy of parliament with a circumscribed role for the monarch, one that has become ever more circumscribed in the centuries that have gone by. Any demand by White settlers for legitimating the decentralization of legislative power not only threatened the central control of the British state over the colonies but also threatened the internal constitutional compromise in Great Britain, a compromise that had already been taxed “by the addition of Scotland in 1707 and the corruption of parliament under Walpole and George III.”51 Asking the king to exercise any powers outside of the British parliament seemed, in Namier’s phase, “a dangerous and unconstitutional reversion to ‘prerogative’ ”52—the monarch’s prerogative.

It was still too early for Britain to think of, much less adopt, the Commonwealth solution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely because the British monarch was still too strong internally in Britain. And to the extent that Britain was now entering into an “age of interests” in which parliament was expected to respond, in the exercise of its power, to multiple pressure groups, the settlers in British North America were less powerful than many rival interests. “North America’s political influence in no way equalled its economic importance.”53

Seen from the angle of British settlers in North America, this was precisely the problem. One of the very first things the British government did after 1763 was to implement a treaty obligation it had incurred in 1758 vis-à-vis the Ohio Valley Indians. The treaty provided that if the Indians deserted the French they would be “secure in their lands.”54 On October 7, 1763, the British issued a proclamation decreeing that the Ohio Valley was to be maintained as an Indian preserve and therefore to be closed to settlers. But the immense growth of the settler population in the preceding two decades had been premised on “cheap land [being] readily available.”55 The creation of the “proclamation line” seemed to close that door.

Why did the British create the proclamation line? Yes, they had signed a treaty with the Indians, but this was scarcely enough in itself to explain the act. The British victory over the French seemed to open the “Northwest” to two groups eager to exploit the area: most immediately, New England fur trappers previously excluded by the French, and behind them, potential settlers and land speculators. The immediate “harshness”56 of the new trappers to the Indians and the Indians’ general fears concerning the Treaty of Paris57 led to a major uprising, the Conspiracy of Pontiac, which involved a militarily significant organization of various Indian groups. The rising was crushed by a “war of complete extermination,”58 but the British drew a quick lesson therefrom.

The Royal Proclamation divided up New France. It constituted in the north a new government called Quebec (but attached Labrador and Anticosti to Newfoundland). However, it made all the zones west of the Alleghenies into reserves under the protection of an Indian Service.59 British merchants rapidly took over the role of the French in Montreal, developing within ten years “an organization which had features strikingly similar to those of the French regime.”60 Indeed, as British practice evolved, the fur trade became, in effect, “a subsidized industry”61 because the Indians now received supplies from two sources: purchase from the traders paid for by furs and free presents of identical items offered by the British government.

Thus, the Proclamation underlined a “far-reaching divergence of interest” between the British and their settlers in North America. The British were attempting “to call a halt to the westward expansion of her colonies” and to utilize trans-Appalachia as a source of extraction via peaceful trade with secure indigenous populations, a policy dictated both by “commercial reasons [and] considerations of economy.”62

At the same time, the British moved to make the settlers begin to pay for the costs of empire and to enforce vigorously the mercantilist commercial regulations. This led to a decade of controversy in which colonial opposition brought about repeated de facto backdowns by the British government—for example, imposition then repeal of the Stamp Act, imposition then repeal of the Townshend duties—always followed by new British attempts to pursue the same policies. In the process, both sides became more “principled” or more ideological. In 1766, when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, they simultaneously passed the Declaratory Act affirming the abstract right to tax the colonies. Over a 10-year period, colonists who objected to particular acts became transformed into persons denying the British parliament this abstract right—“no taxation without representation.”

It was a kind of acceleration of conflict, or raising of the decibels. “The decade of controversy had failed to resolve a single basic issue.”63 But the issues themselves do not seem, in retrospect, all that intractable, nor were they all that new. Knollenberg argues they date from 1759,64 and Greene from 1748.65 There seems little reason to doubt that, in the absence of the acute economic downturn, the whole controversy might have been reduced to a momentary tempest.66

There is another point of view, of which Bernard Bailyn has become the prime expositor, that the fundamental concerns of the colonists were not economic but “ideological,” which Bailyn defines as a struggle between power and liberty.67 In this vision,

Unconstitutional taxing, the invasion of placemen, the weakening of the judiciary, plural officeholding, Wilkes, standing armies—these were major evidences of a deliberate assault of power upon liberty.68

And it was the Tea Act, he says, which was the turning point for the colonists whose anger cannot be “lightly dismissed as mere window dressing for the more fundamental economic questions.”69

But Bailyn undermines his own case for the primacy of ideological motivations when he turns to fight on another front. Against those who would contend that the importance of the American Revolution was that it was socially revolutionary, a struggle that achieved the overthrow of an “ancien régime,” Bailyn wishes to insist that de facto the great revolutionary objective of “equality of status before the law” had long since been won in practice in British North America. In practice, he argues, but not, he admits, in theory. “Many felt the changes . . . represented deviance; that they lacked, in a word, legitimacy.” This represented a “divergence between habits of mind and belief on the one hand,” which habits he says remained “aristocratic” in the sense that the colonists “conceded to the classes of the well-born and rich the right to exercise public office,” and “experience and behavior on the other.” This divergence ended with the Revolution; “this lifting into consciousness and endowment with high moral purpose [of] inchoate, confused elements of social and political change . . . was the American Revolution.”70

But Bailyn cannot have it both ways. If the motivations that impelled the colonists were more than anything else, ideological, they cannot have been largely unconscious of them; they cannot have been driven merely by “inchoate confused elements of social and political change.”71 First of all, as Arthur Schlesinger says, the view that the Revolution was “a great forensic controversy over abstract governmental rights will not bear close scrutiny,” and that for the very simple reason that the ideological case was never put forward consistently:

At best, an exposition of the political themes of the anti-Parliamentary party is an account of their retreat from one strategic position to another. Abandoning a view that based their liberties on charter rights, they appealed to their constitutional rights as Englishmen; and when that position became untenable, they invoked the doctrine of the rights of man.72

Of course, the colonists were ideologically jumping from claim to claim. In the middle of serious political strife, we all tend to use whatever arguments are at hand, and sometimes, no doubt, we come to believe passionately in their validity. Later we like to think that we always felt the way we ended up feeling, but it is dubious practice for the analyst to do more than acknowledge the a posteriori utility of ideological positions. The fact is that the colonists were not rebellious as long as they continued to experience “the tangible benefits of empire,” but when “the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War radically altered the situation,”73 their political and, hence, their ideological stance evolved.

Still, why weren’t they more “patient”? Christie and Labaree argue that their worries about “the establishment of imperial precedents seems to reveal a curious blindness to the implications of current population trends,” asserting that if they’d waited less than two generations, the settlers would have been in a position “to conduct arguments with Great Britain from a position of material superiority.”74 But “curious blindness” is an analyst’s arrogance. Why not go for the simpler explanation? The opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townshend duties in 1767 had first of all to do with their immediate financial impact, both directly as taxes and indirectly in terms of their effects on the balance of trade; and both colonists and their friends in Great Britain feared it as “a killing of the goose that was laying the golden eggs.”75 And, as in most economic crises, the negatives cumulated. For example, a series of poor crops in England beginning in 1764 led to an increased demand for grain exports from the middle colonies. Good for some, no doubt, but given the high rate of unemployment and poverty in the towns, the consequent sharp rise in food prices in British North America led to demands to forbid the exports.76 The cumulation of grievances reached a point where a small spark seemed enough to push each side to even more militant positions. We have traced reasons why the British were getting less and less flexible as their White settler colonists were getting more and more irritated. The “radical” elements who bruited independence demands seemed less and less unreasonable. In this atmosphere, the British came up with a brilliant but unwise maneuver, the Quebec Act, enacted on June 22, 1774, as a constitution for the province.

There were two aspects to the Quebec Act. One was the question of the form of government Quebec would have, which was an issue involving a conflict between the older French-speaking (and Catholic) settlers and the newer English-speaking Protestant settlers. The second was the extension of the boundaries of Quebec to include the Ohio Valley, which involved the conflict between the fur interest and the agricultural settlers for the control of the Ohio Valley.77

The English-speaking Protestant settlers in Quebec had been seeking an autonomous local government since the conquest by Great Britain, but one from which the French-speaking “Papists” would be excluded. The British authorities, and in particular Governor Carleton, had been resisting their demands under counterpressure from the French-speakers. The debate had been going on since 1764. The British administrators finally persuaded a reluctant George III to give the French-speakers the essence of their demands: liberty of Catholic worship within the framework of a loosely interpreted “supremacy” of the Church of England; reinstitution of French (that is, Roman–Dutch) civil law; permission for the Catholic Church to collect the tithe; and elimination of the requirement that civil servants take an antipapist oath.78

At the same time, the Ohio Valley became part of the territory of Quebec. This was of no special interest to the French-speaking peasantry in Quebec. But it was crucial to the fur interest. Of course, one may wonder why the system of an Indian reserve established in 1763 did not suffice. Neatby argues that the very success of the fur trade, its expansion “involving complicated relations with the Indians,” created the need for some direct regulation. This could be done either out of Montreal or Albany, the two fur-trading entrepôts. Given the choice, “it was inevitable that Quebec should be chosen.” But for the land seekers the situation had now become even more “oppressive,”79 not to speak of the alienation of the Albany-based fur merchants.80

The decision upset the seaboard colonies on multiple grounds. First, “the fruit of the Seven Years’ War [seemed to be] sacrificed, and the terror of being hemmed in by Indians and French from the north and west was easily revived.”81 Second, the colonists “feared an absolutist government formed in their neighborhood [and] a Catholic religion they identified with intolerance and the Inquisition.”82 Third, they were particularly dismayed that the laws governing the Ohio Valley would have “so un-English a form of land tenure.”83 Finally, the Quebec Act was passed at the same time as the Intolerable Acts and was, therefore, “tainted by this association.” The colonists, therefore, regarded the Act “naturally, if uncritically, . . . as the systematic recreation of the old northern threat to the coastal colonies, this time for British ends.”84

The delegates at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia were thereupon placed before a dilemma—how to win over Quebec to their cause while simultaneously denouncing the Quebec Act. The resolution was that the Continental Congress pursued a “subtle” campaign in which they emphasized the taxation issue and argued that the Quebec Act was essentially the triumph of an alliance of the clergy and the landed seigniors.85 This was not without resonance among ordinary French-speaking persons in the countryside.86

As for the merchants, although the Continental Congress was “willing to make every possible concession in order to win over the Canadian trading class,”87 the latter reacted with great prudence. On the one hand, they were upset with the Quebec Act which took away from them English civil and commercial law (as well as trial by jury and habeas corpus); on the other hand, they were in direct competition with the New England merchants.88

In September 1774, the Continental Congress sent a “message to the Canadian People” emphasizing the absence of democratic government in the provisions of the Quebec Act, citing Montesquieu on popular liberty, and lauding the example of the Swiss confederation of Protestant and Catholic cantons. They even printed the message in French and had 2,000 copies widely circulated.89 However, they simultaneously sent an Address to Great Britain protesting the Quebec Act, in which they spoke of Catholics having brought blood to England and being impious and bigoted. Governor Carleton distributed this letter in Quebec, where the double language was not appreciated.90Nonetheless, when the Continental Army invaded the province in the autumn of 1775 it was regarded by many of the French-speaking peasants as “indeed an army of liberation,”91 despite the threats of the clergy, who rallied to the British cause, and threatened those who refused to fight the invaders with the refusal of sacraments, even excommunication.92

The military action at first succeeded (Montreal fell), and then failed. The rebellious colonists were still indecisive. The Declaration of Independence was still in the future.93 The Protestant merchant class determined that their “deepest necessities,” that is, “close connection with London and unrestricted trade with the Indians in the far west” were precisely what the rebellious colonists could not grant.94 And the French-speaking habitants realized that they were being asked to subscribe to still more radical ends than were the American colonists. For the objectives of the latter were “liberal and Protestant in character.” It was not only the authority of the state that was being challenged but “an authoritarian ecclesiastical order” as well. Thus the initial sympathy of the habitants shifted to greater antagonism.95 In the end, as Dehio says, Britain kept Canada “for the very reason that there were no English settlers there.” The local Catholics thought their Puritan neighbors more fanatical than the “negligently tolerant regime of London.”96

As the American colonists became more militant, the social basis of support of the movement began to shift somewhat, as happens frequently in revolutionary situations. Socially conservative elements often became a bit frightened of the momentum their own self-interested protests create. What Schlesinger notes of the merchants of the northern colonies was probably true more generally:

The experience of the years 1764–1766 gave the merchant class food for other reflection. Intent on making out a complete case for themselves they had, in their zeal, overreached themselves in calling to their aid the unruly elements of the population. . . . Dimly, the merchants began to perceive the danger of an awakened self-conscious group of radical elements.97

Thus although, as Jensen notes, before 1774 or 1775, the revolutionary movement was not a democratic or radical movement “except by inadvertance,” popular mobilization transformed the situation somewhat and brought popular objectives more to the forefront.98 Did the situation change to the point that the struggle could not be said to be primarily a “popular war,”99 one in which “the strength of the revolutionary party lay most largely in the plain people, as distinguished from the aristocracy”?100

Perhaps! What seems clear is that “contemporaries had no doubt the War for Independence was accompanied by a struggle over who should rule at home.”101 But there were two kinds of conservative reactions to such a developing radicalization. One was to withdraw support altogether; some did this.102 But a second was to rush to resume leadership of the struggle in order to deflect class objectives into purely national ones.103 Both reactions occurred, which is what accounts for the revolutionary–loyalist split among the wealthier strata. Those who sought to moderate the political outcome of the independence movement by joining with it were historically more significant than the Tories and were able in the long run to achieve their objectives because the situation remained one in which “in fact . . . the radical elements were a minority of the colonial population.”104

Still, it is important to note that the groups ready to pursue their grievances with the British government did not win out everywhere. There were 30 British colonies in the Americas after 1763, all subject to the trade and navigation acts. As Harper says, a valid explanation of the American War for Independence “must show why thirteen colonies joined in the revolt while seventeen remained loyal.”105 This is especially true since the Thirteen Colonies made various kinds of efforts to secure the adherence of the other colonies.

The attempt to pull Quebec into the revolution was abortive. But Quebec was a special case, given the fact that most inhabitants had come under British rule only recently and did not think of themselves as “British.” East Florida too was a similar special case.106 There was, however, another British colony on the North American continent which was a possible recruit since it was settled largely by New Englanders. This was Nova Scotia. Brebner points out that if, on the continent of North America, there was a geographical core of colonies where the “fires of imminent revolution” blew hot in 1774, the heat seemed to grow less as one moved to the margins. Georgia, Vermont, Maine, and Nova Scotia all “hung in the balance,”107 but only Nova Scotia didn’t come along in the end.

At this time, there were close economic (and indeed family) ties beween Nova Scotia and New England. Furthermore, like the Southern planters, the Nova Scotians were “debt-ridden” at this time and might have been tempted to rebel for the sake of debt repudiation.108 Despite this, they showed “apathy”109 to the proposal of active solidarity and affirmed instead a position of “neutrality.”110 In part, their military weakness as an exposed peninsula with very scattered settlements was a major factor in their reluctance to contemplate rebellion.111 In part, New England had reserved its “expansionist” energy for Quebec and didn’t think Nova Scotia of sufficient importance to risk its military input.112

Still Nova Scotians were a frontier people, and “like all frontier peoples, the Nova Scotians were separatists.”¹¹³ However, they found themselves too weak to resist politically, that is, militarily. Consequently, or so it seems, they found their outlet in a religious movement, the Great Awakening. The small settlements of Nova Scotia were peopled largely by Congregation-alists who feared the recurring “threat of episcopacy” being pressed upon them from London and Halifax (the capital city). When, in addition, they found themselves pressed and unwilling to choose between their kin in New England and loyalty to the Crown, the revival of religion “offered at once an escape and a vindication.”¹¹⁴

The so-called New Light revival movement grew out of the “same conditions of social unrest and dissatisfaction”¹¹⁵ as did the revolutionary movements elsewhere, but was obviously more politically acceptable to the British. In addition, it gave to Nova Scotians “a new sense of identity” such that by 1783 it seemed as if Nova Scotia had become a “vital centre of the Christian world.”¹¹⁶ Nova Scotia thus removed itself from the orbit of the United States in creation. This was unimportant economically to the future United States and perhaps beneficial to Nova Scotia in the short run.117 But it was of great geopolitical consequence in the long run since, had Nova Scotia become the fourteenth state, there seems little doubt that England would have found it difficult to hold on to Canada, and probable that England would thus have been “driven out” of America.118 Had this happened, the whole process of settler decolonization might have taken a different turn.

In the Caribbean, the relationship of the colonies to Britain presented itself differently. Unlike British North America which was suffering a period of economic depression, the West Indies entered into a boom period for its major export produce, sugar.¹¹⁹ And in addition, the Free Port Act of 1766 successfully counteracted the trade depression for the West Indies, one whose roots went back to 1751. West Indian commerce had had, for over a century, a large contraband component. This was in effect the major modality of trade between Great Britain and Hispanic America. Circa 1751, a “radical change” occurred in this trade.¹²⁰ Instead of British ships trading in Spanish ports, Spanish ships began to frequent British ports. This, of course, was totally illegal under the Navigation Acts, but the local British authorities at first connived in this. In 1763–1764, as part of the general tightening of enforcement launched by Grenville, new acts were passed making foreign ships hovering near British ports liable to seizure.¹²¹

With the Rockingham ministry in 1765, the Stamp Act was repealed to appease the North Americans, and the Free Port Act was passed to appease the West Indian merchants. The initial motivation had to do with French island sugar. The British colonists had opposed the acquisition of Guadeloupe because they feared the competition. However, British island production, while sufficient to supply Great Britain, could not meet the demand for reexport to the continent. By opening the British West Indian ports to illicit export from the French islands, whose sugar would then pass through Britain and be sold on the continent, Britain could in effect have its cake and eat it too, garnering both trade and shipping profits without the political costs of colonial administration.

The act, as passed, was aimed not only at acquiring French island sugar; it was intended also to revive trade with the Spanish Indies, particularly via Jamaica. If the revival was slow at first, it would be very successful in the longer run. In any case, it precipitated an immediate Spanish reaction.¹²² The Spanish reaction to the Free Port Act was, however, only a small part of a larger dilemma posed for Spain. The Treaty of Paris was in the long run as consequential for Hispanic America as for the British colonies for one very simple reason. With France eliminated as a major actor on the American scene, “Spain was left to face the English menace for the next two decades alone.”¹²³Spain’s basic problem remained what it had been for more than a century at least. In the gibe of the seventeenth-century German publicist, Samuel Pufendorf, “Spain kept the cow and the rest of Europe drank the milk.”¹²⁴ But now, even keeping the cow seemed to be put into question.

The threat, of course, predated the Treaty of Paris. The British merchants operating out of Jamaica were, already in the 1740s, seeking to bypass wholly the Cádiz entrepôt.¹²⁵ In 1762, the British had seized Havana (and Manila) and threatened Veracruz. Although the Treaty of Paris restored Havana to the Spanish, and even though, in addition, France ceded Louisiana to Spain as compensation for its assistance during the Seven Years’ War, the British menace was nonetheless still very real, and in 1765 Charles III of Spain initiated the famous reforms associated with his reign, the institution of comercio libre, free trade.

Free trade was no doubt Charles III’s “strategy,”¹²⁶ but it should be borne clearly in mind that in this situation free trade had quite a restricted meaning. The Spanish policy was in reality “only a liberalization of trade within the imperial framework.”¹²⁷ The successive decrees of 1765, 1778, and 1789 basically provided for three things: considerable freedom for intercolonial trade among Spain’s colonies, elimination of the peninsular Spanish monopoly of the parts of Seville and Cádiz, and permission for Spain’s colonists to transport goods themselves from Spanish colonies to Spanish ports.¹²⁸ The essential object of this intraimperial liberalization of trade was to “achieve revenge over Great Britain.”¹²⁹

The revenge was to be achieved via two routes. One was that, by making the trade of the colonists with peninsular Spain more profitable to the Spanish colonists, the widespread contraband trade with the British (and others) would become less attractive. It would thus undermine exactly what the Free Port Act of Great Britain had been designed to enhance. But the second measure was to be more direct. The counterpart of liberalization of intraimperial trade was to be greater real administration of the empire by the metropole. The spirit of the Spanish colonial bureaucracy under the Hapsburgs had been said to be: “Obedezco pero no cumplo.” “I obey but I do not execute the commands.” The Bourbons, beginning with Charles III, were determined to try to change this. So “liberalization,” which on the surface seemed to mean more freedom, really meant “less de facto freedom . . . as [the Americans] were now subject to a more efficient monopoly and specifically excluded from benefits extended to Spaniards.”¹³⁰This seeming paradox came from the fact that, as the Spanish government reduced the differences in commercial rights of persons resident in peninsular Spain and those resident in the colonies, they at the same time increased the de facto differences in rights between peninsular Spaniards resident in the colonies and Creoles in the colonies.

It is crucial to observe that, as of 1763, the British and the Spanish faced parallel problems in two fields. First, their laws governing colonial trade were being violated by their own citizens “almost with impunity” and, when they were not, it was due more to “convenience and complaisance [than] to fear of coercion.”¹³¹ After 1763, in response, both the British and the Spanish governments moved toward a great increase in the use of coercion.¹³²

The second parallel problem for the two governments was the increasing financial burden of the state-machinery. They both, therefore, sought to increase taxes in the colonies after 1763. The colonists of both countries reacted in similar ways. British colonists dumped tea into the harbor of Boston in 1770 and Spanish colonists dumped aguardiente (and also burned tobacco) in Socorro in 1781. These reactions nonetheless did not stop the British/Spanish drive to impose order, which evoked parallel resentment in both colonial zones, in both cases in the name of a prior tradition of decentralization. The only difference, as Phelan remarks, was that the prior decentralization of the British empire had been largely legislative, whereas that of the Spanish had been largely bureaucratic.¹³³

Portugal too was set back by the Seven Years’ War. The Marquis of Pombal, who became Secretary of Foreign Affairs in 1750, had initiated a policy of seeking greater economic independence for Portugal by creating situations in which “the profits of the American dominions would accrue largely if not exclusively” to Portuguese nationals.¹³⁴ The primary mechanism was an increase in “state control” of the colonial economy. This was indeed seen by Pombal as the “foundation” of his conception of political economy.¹³⁵ His attempts were no doubt aided considerably by the means placed at the country’s disposal with the dramatic rise of gold mining in Brazil.¹³⁶ Indeed, as a result, Portugal had a higher per capita revenue at this time than France. Braudel suggests an analogy to Kuwait in the second half of the twentieth century.¹³⁷

Pombal was not trying to place Portugal’s historic alliance with Britain into question. He was merely trying to take advantage of the “large room for maneuver” which the new situation in the world-economy offered Portugal. But Spain’s invasion of Portugal in 1762 was a “shattering challenge to [Pombal’s] basic assumptions,” and the continuing Spanish threat in the Americas after 1763 “made the retention of British goodwill by Portugal essential.”¹³⁸ Britain’s price was to be the abandonment of Portugal’s pretensions, and Pombal’s successors would reverse his policies. Still, this would not fully happen until later.¹³⁹ In the meantime, the Pombaline policy reduced Portuguese (and therefore Brazilian) trade with Britain considerably,¹⁴⁰ and elicited a serious negative reaction from merchants in Brazil.¹⁴¹

Thus it was that, as of 1763, not only Great Britain but Spain and Portugal as well had to begin to deal with the increasing disaffection of their settlers in the Americas. One should in fact say that the latter provoked the serious disaffection of their settlers by their somewhat successful efforts to reestablish Spanish and Portuguese strength in the world-system, which they did by reinforcing the administrative cohesion of the two empires, by reinforcing the armies, and by putting the central governments on far firmer financial bases.

Charles III moved on many fronts to strengthen the ability of the Spanish state to deal with the metropole (peninsular Spain), with its colonial territories in the Americas, and with the world. Although informed by Spain’s version of Enlightenment ideology, the Ilustración, the actual policies were designed to (re)create in Spain the absolutist state, to diminish the role of the aristocracy, to weaken the power of the Church, and to base his administration on a more professional salaried bureaucracy, both civil and military. The object was to obtain an expansion in economic activity by reforms in commercial regulation and the encouragement of colonial exports, and then, via this new effective bureaucracy “reap [the] fiscal harvest.” At first, the economic (and fiscal) success was “extraordinary,”¹⁴² but this great upsurge of Spanish strength turned out to rest on “a fragile equipoise”¹⁴³ that could not be maintained because of forces in the world-economy that were beyond the control of the Spanish state. It is to this story we must now turn.

Since the “catalyst of change” was the Seven Years’ War, in which Spain suffered unpleasant military reverses (the fall of Havana being the most notable but not the only one), the first step in Charles Ill’s reforms were military ones, and soldiers were to play a central role in the administrative revolution, which has even been termed the “Reconquest of the Americas.”¹⁴⁴ But the most radical changes were in civil administration. This involved the revival of the institution of the visita general, the dispatching from Madrid of an official with powers to enquire and act at the highest level. The key individual in the process of reform, Don José de Gálvez, originally appears on the scene as the first of these Visitors-General, to New Spain from 1765 to 1767.

But the most important reform was the introduction of intendants, that classical Colbertian mechanism of state centralization. Intendants were to replace the district magistrates called alcaldes mayores and corregidores (collectors of Indian tribute, recruiters, and assigners of Indian labor), whose posts had been sold for over a century and who had been using their posts (and tax power) for private commercial profit. In 1768, Gálvez, along with Viceroy Croix of New Spain, proposed the outright abolition of this category of officials who simultaneously oppressed the Indians and kept the largest part of the Crown’s fiscal revenue. When Gálvez became Minister of the Indies in 1776 he came to personify the “reformist zeal of the Bourbon government,”¹⁴⁵ and finally, in 1786, he pushed through his reform. This can be interpreted as the reward of persistence; it can equally be interpreted as the proof of how difficult it was to reform in the climate of “metropolitan immobility.”¹⁴⁶

Gálvez’s lasting impact was in the transformation of the political geography that he effectuated, a transformation which was to have an important impact on the future process of decolonization. In 1776, one of his first acts as Minister of the Indies was to establish the Viceroyalty of La Plata. In the sixteenth century there had only been two Viceroyalties, New Spain and Peru. A third, New Granada, was carved out in 1739. Why did Gálvez create a fourth in 1776 (as well as a number of lesser units as Capitanerías Generales and Audiencias)? 1776 was not a fortuitous date. The War of Independence in British North America had started. It seemed a golden moment to move against Great Britain and its ally, Portugal, who, among other things, were economically penetrating the Indian zones of South America under Spanish rule via illicit trade on the Sacramento—Buenos Aires route. Charles III sought to create a strong government that would cut short this penetration. This was to be La Plata which included present-day Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. “In normal circumstances, England would not have tolerated carrying out such intentions.”¹⁴⁷ But these were not normal circumstances. The reinvigoration of the military forces paid off. An expedition of 8,500 men crossed the Rio de la Plata in 1776 and captured Sacramento “for the third and last time.¹⁴⁸ This Spanish victory would be ratified at the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1778 and Portugal’s aspirations over La Banda Oriental (today Uruguay) were forever at an end.

The struggle in North America provided a continuous pressure on Hispanic America. It gave “a character of urgency”¹⁴⁹ to the reform movement which led to the second set of free trade decrees of 1778. Spain was under great pressure to join the war against Britain in 1779, following upon France which had already done so in 1777. The French decision was quite obvious in a sense. They had been seeking to reduce Great Britain’s power in the Americas ever since 1763. Upon his retirement in 1770, the Due de Choiseul left a memo in which he reiterated the five necessary elements in such a policy: avoid war, ally with Spain and Holland, weaken British financial credit, promote the independence of Britain’s American colonies, and reduce commerce between Britain and the colonies of Spain and Portugal. When Vergennes took office in 1774, he revived Choiseul’s policies.¹⁵⁰ The American colonies had now, however, forced the French hand by starting a war.

At first the French restricted themselves to secret aid to the North American revolutionaries. The French cabinet was divided, Turgot believing that war should be avoided as “the greatest of evils.”¹⁵¹ And it was far from sure that the North Americans could hold out very long. They had, after all, lost the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776. Thus the defeat of General Burgoyne at Saratoga on October 16, 1777 had an immense impact on France, and on Spain.¹⁵² France suddenly began to fear something even worse than a British victory—a victory of the rebel forces unaided by France, that is, the possibility of an independent and unfriendly United States.¹⁵³ France signed a treaty with the United States on February 6, 1778 and joined openly in the war.

Now the pressure was on Spain, and the Spanish were very reluctant. Spain was hesitant to do anything that might seem to legitimate colonial revolt. Furthermore, Spain was bargaining her neutrality against a cession by Britain of Gibraltar and Minorca, a deal the British felt no need to make. The French were more anxious to get Spanish support and paid the Spanish price in the Treaty of Aranjuez in 1779. This price was the promise of a joint invasion of England, which Spain conceived to be the way of ending the war before her “overextended and vulnerable colonial empire” was attacked.¹⁵⁴ Spain signed its treaty with France, not the United States.¹⁵⁵ Its object was quite explicitly to regain Minorca and Gibraltar, of course, but it was also to “dislodge the English from all their positions in the Caribbean—Louisiana, the Mosquito Coast, Jamaica, the Lesser Antilles.”¹⁵⁶

Spain paid a high price “in blood and treasure.”¹⁵⁷ The war resulted in the first of successive de facto cuts in the links between Hispanic America and Spain. The Company of Caracas was ruined. The state treasury did not receive income from the Americas. The Catalan cotton industry suffered.¹⁵⁸ And the trade of the Cádiz merchants, still the most important group, “fell into the greatest confusion, which inevitably redounded to the benefit of contraband which now knew its period of greatest development.”¹⁵⁹

The greatest damage of all was probably the inflationary cycle that was now launched. As late as 1774, the Count of Campomanes had been citing Spain’s freedom from paper money inflation as a “great national asset.” But the war expenditures combined with diminished intake exhausted the royal treasury. This pattern was to be repeated after 1793. Since the costs were real, the Spanish state had to recoup somehow. In effect, “the American colonists were taxed for [the] redemption” of the paper currency.¹⁶⁰ So, of course, were the people at home. Ultimately, this inflation became a factor both in the Napoleonic conquest of Spain and in the independence movements.

Spain’s “halfhearted” involvement in the War of American Independence was thus to have “reverberations in and for Spanish America.”¹⁶¹ Two major revolts occurred precisely at this moment, that of Túpac Amaru in Peru, and that of the Comuneros in New Granada.¹⁶² The Túpac Amaru revolt so shook the Americas that its very objective remains a subject of great controversy. Was it the first clarion call of the independence movement or was it almost the opposite?

There are those who see the Indian uprising in the Andes led by Túpac Amaru—which was, let us remember, merely the culmination of a long series but the one with greatest impact¹⁶³—as “the last major effort of the unsubdued Indians.”¹⁶⁴ This was clearly the view of many administrators at the time, at worst a primitive refusal to accept civilized ways, at best a “social scream”¹⁶⁵ which therefore can be understood if not approved or tolerated. This camp places itself in opposition to those who have tried to coopt the history of the Indian revolts of the Andes as a “prodrome of independence.” That effort of some later Peruvian historians is denounced by Chaunu, who says it is a “total misconception (contresens).” He argues that, far from these Indian revolts involving a revolt of America against Europe, they were a revolt by the Indians against “their unique enemy, . . . Creole oppression.”¹⁶⁶ In this version of the events, great emphasis is placed on the fact that Túpac Amaru asserted that his movement was “loyalist”¹⁶⁷—to the King, albeit not to the King’s servants. But loyalism worked both ways. One result of the Túpac Amaru uprising was to make a part of the White population feel that the colonial order was “the best defense of its own hegemony, and the only guarantee against extermination at the hands of the more numerous indigenous and mixed-blood castes.”¹⁶⁸

There is, however, a third position. It is to see Túpac Amaru neither as loyalist whose quarrel was with the Creoles, nor as the first fighter for independence, but as the social revolutionary. These revolts make sense only if we place them inside the cyclical phase (or conjoncture) of the world-economy. There are three considerations. First, we know of the general economic downturn after 1763, which by 1776 has produced the events of the revolution of British North America, and Spain’s involvement against the British as of 1779. Second, we know of the reform movement launched by Charles III and which got a second major push in 1778. Third, there was the effect of the decline of agricultural prices in the Andean region. It turns out that the years 1779–1780 “correspond, quite exactly, to one of the deepest drops in the century.” The prices were at their lowest since 1725–1727. Furthermore, the years 1779–1780 were only the dramatic low point of a cycle that had been downward since 1759.¹⁶⁹

Far from being primitive resistance, the revolts were caused first of all by the involvement of the Indians in the capitalist world-economy, which had, only recently, been made more efficacious by the various attempts “to strengthen the arm of the central administration.”¹⁷⁰ Peru was proverbial for the corruption and abuses of its corregidores. When José Gabriel Condorcanqui, claiming to be Túpac Amaru II Inca, rose up in 1780, he used as his main theme the “bad government” which was oppressing the Indians through taxes far too high and ruining the economy.

It is really not to the point to try to decipher Túpac Amaru’s personal social motivations. What is significant is the social response he evoked. The heart of the rebellion was to be found in the Indian rural population, but not to the same degree everywhere. Golte does some crude but persuasive calculations. He created an index for each province of the per capita total income (which varied obviously with the soil conditions, the amount of export production, and the opportunities for wages from mine employment). He deducted from that the average level of tribute actually levied, legally and illegally. He found an almost exact correlation of the lowness of the sum remaining and the degree of participation in the uprising.171 Piel correctly points out the many parallels between the Túpac Amaru uprising and the almost simultaneous Pugachev uprising (1773–1775) which we discussed above: the claim to be a “tsar” or an “Inca”; peasants on large landholdings rebelling; and a large mining operation, based partly on forced labor—in short, a great deal of labor coercion for market-oriented activity.172

Túpac Amaru sought the support of the Creoles. Indeed, at first, the authorities suspected that corregidores, angry with reforms in prospect, had inspired Túpac Amaru, and there was perhaps some evidence of this.173 But the interests of the two groups went in opposite directions. The “pride of blood” of the Creole vis-à-vis Indians, Blacks, mestizos, and mulattoes, was not merely a social fact of Hispanic America from the outset but had actually increased during the eighteenth century.174 The sentiment of social distance was reciprocated.175

The demographics were clear. In 1780, 60% of the population of Peru was Indian, but few lived in Lima. Only 12% were Spanish (Creole or peninsular). The rest were so-called castes—principally Blacks, mestizos, and mulattoes.176 For the Indians their most immediate enemy was those who controlled economic and social life and “in general these were Creoles,” and not peninsulars.177 Furthermore, Túpac Amaru promised to free slaves, and put forward “suspect” views on property, destroying Creole-owned obrajes (textile manufacturing units), for example. Faced with this kind of revolt, “Creoles soon made common cause with Spaniards.”178 In general, in Hispanic America, as Lewin puts it, there were at the time two different revolutionary movements, the Creole and the Indian. “Sometimes their paths crossed, . . . and sometimes they went their separate ways.”179

The rebellion of Túpac Amaru was overcome by a combination of concessions—the suppression of the repartimentos180—and military force. But the importance of the rebellion lay in its political consequences for Hispanic America. The Indians “lost definitively any initiative in conducting any more significant rebellions.”181 And the reason was that the extent, early successes, and fierceness of the Túpac Amaru rebellion thoroughly frightened the Whites. There would be no more “adhesion” of Whites and near-Whites to such rebellions after 1780.182 Instead, the Creoles were to assume from this point on the leadership of revolutions. Still, even after this became so, as a general rule, the depth of commitment to separatism and independence remained “inversely proportional to the percentage of Indians and Blacks under domination.”183 And in the wars of independence, particularly in Peru, the Indians were made to suffer from both sides. “They were plundered by all the armies.”184

The initial successes of Túpac Amaru inspired a movement known as the Comuneros in the neighboring Viceroyalty of New Granada.185 It too was a manifestation of the “great revolutionary process” set off by (but not caused by) the process of Bourbon reform.186 The successes of Túpac Amaru also kept the Creoles of Santa Fé de Bogotá, the capital of New Granada, and those in the other urban centers, in a state of “constant anxiety.”187

The immediate cause of the uprising of the comuneros on March 16, 1781 was outrage at the harsh new procedures and increased alcabala (sales tax) of the new Visitor-General, Juan Francisco Gutiérrez de Pinedes. The central issue was “who had the authority to levy new fiscal exactions.”188 Thus, the issue was a constitutional one and parallel to the issue that had been raised by the British North American settlers. The difference was that, in New Granada, there was a significant Indian population who were less interested in devolution of central fiscal power and far more interested in the abuses of this power, such as excessive tribute and the invasion of the Resguardos, the community lands of the Indians, which were being auctioned off to Creole large landowners (hacendados) as well as to smaller purchasers who were largely mestizos. The situation was worsened by the fact that the local textile industry was in decline, again a result of the general economic problems of the world-economy.189

Whereas in Peru the social tinderbox, when ignited, fell into the hands of Indian leadership (albeit Indians who were caciques and claimed descent from the old Inca aristocracy), in New Granada, the insurrection had a very large mestizo element from the outset and the leadership was assumed by a Creole, Juan Francisco Berbeo, who was a hacendado (albeit a modest one). There were thus, in New Granada, virtually two revolts, more or less under one heading—a mestizo–Creole one centered in Socorro and an Indian one in the llanos of Casanare.

The rebels marched on Santa Fé, where, in the confusion, power had been assumed temporarily by the Archbishop, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, whose line was subtle and conciliatory. Berbeo “held back the rebel army”190 and entered into negotiations with Caballero. The result was a compromise, the capitulations of Zipaquirá (June 8, 1781), which reduced taxes, assured greater access to office by nonpeninsular Spaniards, and offered some improvements to the Indians. The latter, however, basically saw the capitulations as a “betrayal,”191 a way to keep the Indians from entering Santa Fé (by appeasing the Creole and mestizo elements of the revolt). The Indians sought to continue the struggle alone but were crushed with the help of their former allies.

In the end, the temporary alliance of a part of the elite, unhappy with Spain and the “plebe,” the “disinherited,” was an impossible alliance.192 The former were inspired by the revolt of their counterparts, the North American settlers.193 The latter were inspired by the example of Túpac Amaru, and in the end, the Creole landowners “not only did not support them, but openly rebuffed them and collaborated with the authorities.”194 However, in New Granada, the elites (sustained by somewhat different demographics) had quickly learned the lesson of Túpac Amaru. By assuming the leadership of the revolt and sapping it from within, they preserved their options for the future far better in terms of pursuing their own interests vis-à-vis Spain. Bolivar was to emerge in New Granada, and to suffer a very mixed reception in Peru in the 1820s.

The Creole drive to independence thus now found its double spur—the grievances of Creole against peninsular, and the fear that both had of the non-White lower strata. It is the first, the subject of Creole–peninsular rivalry, that has virtually dominated the historiography of the late colonial period of Hispanic America (and to a lesser degree of Brazil). A Creole was, by definition, the descendant of a peninsular. At all moments in Hispanic America, as in almost all settler colonies, a segment of the settlers were born in the colony, and a segment were migrants from the metropole. Among the latter, some were new settlers, and others were persons who migrated temporarily to hold office of some kind with the intention of returning to the metropole. Some fulfilled this intent and others did not. In any case, even if a peninsular returned to the metropole, it was perfectly possible that he had children born in the colony who opted to remain.

The discussion has in a sense gone through two phases. The classic position is that the Creoles were being excluded from office in the eighteenth century in favor of peninsulars, and this was the source of their discontent.195 Beginning in the 1950s this position came under attack. Eyzaguirre, for example, argues that Creoles still maintained “unquestioned predominance in the bureaucracy,” and what was at issue was a Creole drive to transform its majority into an “exclusivity” of access to official posts.196 The revisionists argue that the sequence—Bourbon reforms leading to Creole discontent—was, in fact, the reverse. Creole control caused “alarm” to Spanish officialdom.197Bourbon reform was “a consequence rather than a cause of Creole assertion.”198

It seems clear that whatever the sequence of development of the issue, and whatever the degree of reality in perceptions, the subject of the “place” of peninsulars in Hispanic America had become “more acute,” that is, more public and that, in the dispute, the colonial administration placed “all its weight” on the side of the peninsulars.199 This was less a matter of new legislation than of enforcing old ones.200 The issue became more acute also because, on the one hand, there was a significant numerical growth in the number of Creoles.201 And on the other hand, there was a significant new influx of immigrants precisely because of the Spanish effort at “reconquest” of the Americas and economic expansion.202

No doubt the situation was exacerbated by the “arbitrariness’ of the metropolitan authorities as viewed by the Creoles,203 and by the “ineptitude and suspected disloyalty” of the Creoles as seen by the Spanish authorities.204 Precisely as in British North America, the mutual suspicions grew, slowly perhaps but steadily. But there was a further complication—racism. In British North America, the situation was relatively clearcut. There were Whites and there were Blacks. The racial barrier was strong. Indians were disdained but they were largely outside the economic system. Mulattoes were Blacks. And among Whites, the distinctions were largely on straight class lines, uncomplicated by too much ethnicity. There were sure to be settlers whose origins were not British but rather, for example, German. But whatever antagonisms existed in this regard played almost no role in the political turmoil. There were loyalists and patriots, but no peninsulars nor Creoles.

Racial lines were far more complex in Hispanic America (as well as in Portuguese and French colonies). Instead of a simple bifurcation of White–Black (or non-White), there was a complex graded hierarchy. The realities of sexual habits over three centuries meant that peninsulars were “pure white” but Creoles were “more or less white.” As Lynch points out, in fact, many Creoles had dark skins, thick lips, coarse skin, “rather like Bolivar himself.”205

No doubt the fact of being in fact of mixed blood (two out of three, according to Chaunu206) in a structure where “whiteness” was prized led many Creoles to translate their high status as “descendants” (albeit tinged with racial ambiguity) into a class superiority over the newly arrived. The Creole group, largely composed of persons whose ancestors had arrived from Andalucia, Extremadura, and Castile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saw in the eighteenth-century arrivals not Spaniards but persons disproportionally from the Cantabrian Mountains and Galicia. “The ‘anti-gachupin’ folklore [gachupin was out of the derisory expressions for peninsulars] is quite reminiscent of the ‘anti-Cantabrian’ and even more the ‘anti-Galician’ folklore of Seville.”207 Creoles also called peninsulars godos, that is Goths, presumably implying a parallel to the descent of the “barbarian” Goths into Roman Spain.208 The peninsulars retorted by classifying the Creoles as “idle.”209 The peninsulars who were settlers were in fact often poor persons who were upwardly mobile.210 The Creoles seemed often to be “trapped on a downwardly mobile economic escalator.”211 The fact is that Creoles and peninsulars took these statuses seriously, but only up to a point. Gandia reminds us that, when the crunch of political struggle finally arrived, the labels often reflected not family history but current political option. “The curious thing is that these supposed Creoles were often not Creoles but Spaniards, and the Spaniards were not Spaniards but Creoles.”212 And economic locus was often the crucial consideration. As Izard says of Venezuela, “the confrontation between merchants and landowners did not take place between metropolitans and Creoles, but between producers and buyers.”213 The proof, he says, is that the conflicts continued after independence when all the peninsular merchants disappeared from the scene.

What comes through clearly is that the Bourbon reforms crystallized the issues. The attempt to reassert central authority, so necessary if Spain were to limit the impending final thrust forward of British economic interests in Hispanic America—a “desperate rearguard action,”214 was a no-win game. Had Charles III and his agent Gálvez failed, the British would have won. But Charles III and Gálvez did not fail. They were, for example, quite successful in reining in the Church. The expulsion of the Jesuits was achieved with remarkable ease and resolved various financial and authority problems for the Spanish state. But, in the process, the loyalty of the Creoles was sorely strained, for the over 1,000 American Jesuits who sailed off to Europe were in fact “the very flower of the Creole elite.”215 The price of this policy was to be the “alienation” of those who remained.216 And this “alienation”—because of the Jesuits, because of the substitution of intendants for corregidores, because of the higher taxes more effectively collected—was to lead the elites in the direction of independence, especially given the evolving political climate of the world-system. By 1781, Marcos Marrero Valenzuela wrote a memo to Charles III predicting that this had to happen.217

Thus it was that, following the Treaty of Paris of 1763, in less than 20 years the Americas—all the Americas—seemed inescapably headed down the path of the establishment of a series of independent settler states. The next 50 years was merely the unfolding of a pattern whose general lines, if not detailed etching, had been drawn. Why this was so probably lies less in the heroics of some devotion to “liberty” on the part of the settlers or in some “errors” of judgment of the metropolitan powers—two favorite lines of argument—as in the cumulation of successive evaluations of costs and benefits (on all sides) in the context of the newly emerging British world order. This was not all cool calculation, to be sure. Once launched, the settler thrust for independence would build its own momentum which led to results that often went beyond narrower calculations of collective interests. The final outcome was beneficial in different ways simultaneously to the British and to the settlers in the Americas, both north and south. Of course, the degree and quality of the benefits varied. The principal losers were the Iberian states and the non-White populations of the Americas. It was an unequal contest, and in hindsight the outcome may seem evident. The de facto long-term alliance of those who gained was the one that provided the most immediate political stability to the world-system, and was, therefore, optimal for the worldwide accumulation of capital.

In 1781, the United States forces defeated the British at Yorktown. This seemed a great defeat for Great Britain, and no doubt it was sobering for the British. Yet peace was not made until the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. Why this was so places the real world military situation into some perspective. For Great Britain was not only fighting its colonies. It was at war with France, Spain, and the Netherlands as well, and most of Europe was de facto aligned against her. In the two years between 1781 and 1783, the British fleet decisively defeated the French fleet in the West Indies in the Battle of the Saints. And the Franco–Spanish attack on Gibraltar proved fruitless. These British successes against her European enemies outweighed the defeat at Yorktown and meant that, following 1783, Britannia would continue to rule the waves even though she had lost her thirteen Continental colonies.”218

From the British point of view, 1783 marked not peace but a truce in warfare. There was no interruption in her drive to hegemony. We have already discussed (in Chapter 2) how the French sought next to deal with the British—the Eden Treaty, the Revolution, the revolutionary wars, Napoleonic expansion, and the Continental Blockade. We must now return to the story of how the settler populations sought to defend their interests. After 1783, there were three key “moments” that shook the balance of forces in the struggle of the settlers: the revolution in Haiti, the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and the final collapse of the French in 1815. We shall seek to trace the story from the perspective of the Americas in terms of these markers.

After 1783, the newly independent United States sought to realize the fruits of its victory. It turned out to be harder than it had expected. In particular, two of its central economic objectives—obtaining a significant expansion of its exports, to Europe, to the Caribbean, and elsewhere; and obtaining access to and control over the frontier lands of the North American continent—were by no means guaranteed simply by ending British overrule. Furthermore, the Revolutionary War had stirred up many internal social conflicts, which threatened the stability of the new state and hence its possibility of achieving the economic objectives the settlers had set for themselves.

During the War for Independence, the Continental Congress had, of course, cut economic ties with Great Britain. Internationally, the Continental Congress took a strong free trade position as early as 1776, a position it maintained throughout the war.219 The cutoff from British manufactures was partially compensated for by an increase in home manufactures and increased imports from France, the Netherlands, and Spain. The latter were paid for in small part by exports, and in larger part by subsidies and loans as well as by the fact that the French expeditionary forces shored up the productive sector by its own expenditures. In general, however, the war did not have “revolutionary effects” in the economy and in particular on the manufacturing sector.220

Furthermore, in the immediate postwar trade depression, Great Britain (the loser) seemed to fare better than the United States and France (the winners). Essentially, the United States remained in a quite dependent relation on Great Britain,221 a matter of some frustration to both the United States and France. With our present knowledge, the reasons seem obvious enough. For the United States, British entrepôts were strong and inexpensive in their offerings. Above all, United States merchants had “long established commercial connections” with them, which meant that long-term credits were available. Nor should one forget the value of a common language and culture.222 Moreover, after 1783, British merchants “bestirred themselves to recapture the American trade.” The British government assisted them by offering these merchants the same drawbacks, exemptions, and bounties they had been getting when the United States were still British colonies.223 By contrast, for French merchants, developing trade with the United States involved creating new channels of trade and, given the losses port merchants had suffered during the war, in 1783 they couldn’t “permit themselves the luxury of much innovation.”224

Thus, the United States found its commerce back in the hands of the British, though at a lower overall level225 and with the two countries “in an unequal position.” This was because “however valuable American trade was to England, English trade was vital to America.”226 It is no wonder that Arthur Young could reflect in a conversation with the Abbé Raynal in 1789 that it was “a most extraordinary event in world politics” for people to lose an empire “and to gain by the loss.”227

The most obvious zone in which the United States could hope to expand its trade was the Caribbean with which it had long been trading. But here too, the 1780s proved to be a difficult period. None of the British West Indian islands had joined in the American War of Independence, despite various declarations of sympathy throughout the islands and some measure of covert support.228 The reason was probably twofold: demographics, that is, the fact that Blacks (mostly slaves) were about seven-eighths of the population;229 and the military vulnerability of small islands to British seapower.230

However, the link of the mainland colonies and the British West Indies had grown strong in the decades before the outbreak of the Revolution, precisely because the increasingly monocultural production of sugar had led to a great need for food imports by the West Indian islands. The disruptions of the war caused “severe short-term dislocations” in this trade link and thereby raised the cost of sugar production231 giving the West Indians great motivation to resume ties as soon as possible. Yet, after 1783, United States ships were excluded by the British from their West Indian colonies (as they were from Spanish colonies).232 This was bad news as well for the sugar plantation owners. “From 1783 onward marginal plantations began to collapse.”233

If external trade prospects seemed momentarily dim for the new settler state, they thought that at least they could expand their economic development on the continent by colonizing the “frontier” zones. But neither Great Britain nor Spain had any intention of facilitating this ambition which ran directly opposite to their own interests. One can think of the eastern half of the North American continent as forming a rectangle in which, in 1783, the new United States constituted a box within the box. Though its border to the east was the same as that of the larger box, the Atlantic Ocean, it was surrounded to the north by Canada which was excluded from its jurisdiction; to the south where the whole northern border of the Gulf of Mexico (from Louisiana to Florida) was under Spanish jurisdiction; and to the west by a vast zone between the Mississippi and the Appalachians, the jurisdiction over which was contested.

There was no question during the peace discussion at Versailles of whether the United States would get Canada. They had failed militarily or politically to secure it during the war. And they certainly had no French diplomatic support in this regard.234 The British were, if anything, more casual about Canada than the French.235 The bigger question was whether the United States should be allowed to expand westward. The treaty of 1783 provided that Great Britain turn over the so-called Western ports, eight frontier posts on the American side of the boundary line from Lake Michigan to Lake Champlain. The British dragged their feet. The excuse was that the United States refused to restitute confiscated property of the Loyalists, the United States retorting that the British had permitted thousands of Blacks who were slaves to emigrate to Canada (thus not “restituting property”). In reality, the British merely sought to give Canadian fur traders enough time “to reorganize their businesses and withdraw their property.”236 The matter would not be settled until the Jay Treaty of 1796. Yet the quarrel would eventually be settled with the British, precisely because the British counted on maintaining the United States as a sort of economic satellite.237 In addition, it is likely that the British were skeptical that the new United States government could solve the real obstacle to its westward expansion, the strong drive to separatism on the part of the frontiersmen.238

The situation in the northwest was complex. In addition to the United States and Great Britain, the individual states of the United States had varying interests, as did fur traders and land speculators, as did the White frontiersmen and the Native Americans (the so-called Indians).

The problem, seen from the perspective of the new country, involved two successive issues: first, straightening out the claims of the various thirteen east coast colonies among themselves; then, straightening out the disputes between the east coast (in some zones called the “Tidewater”) and the frontier (largely but not entirely trans-Appalachia).

The first issue revolved around presumed ancient rights. Six states—Massachusetts and Connecticut (in the North) and Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia (in the South)—claimed that their charters going “from sea to sea” allowed them indefinite westward expansion. The states in between—and notably Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey—had no such clause in their founding documents, and would, therefore, be excluded from the land speculation rush. They sought to organize private companies (e.g., the Indiana Company and the Illinois-Wabash Company), and turned to the new United States to help them, as they had in earlier times turned to the British.239 The outcome was a compromise, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The states with “sea to sea” claims ceded these claims to the United States, allowing the land to be sold off (and thereby reduce United States debt), but only in lots of 640 acres (thereby satisfying the large land speculators in “democratic” fashion).

The Ordinance had, however, another provision, the possibility of creating new states in the region. This clause, again excluding equally all east coast “imperialism,” would eventually be the solution for the tidewater—backwoodsmen tension which plagued the Continental Congress throughout the revolution—the hostility of the “Regulators” in North Carolina and the ambivalence of Vermont to the revolutionary cause.240 In general, “westerners,” particularly those in the new territories of Kentucky and Tennessee saw Congressional control as “deliverance from the role of the coast counties in the legislatures.”241 The frontiersmen thought of themselves as continuing the battle of 1776, with themselves as the “oppressed colonists,” and with the east coast state governments in the role of “tyrant formerly filled by George III.”242 Furthermore, the economic geography of the situation was such that it was easier to ship their products by inland navigation northeast into British zones and southwest into Spanish zones than overland to the east coast states.243

The Northwest Ordinance deflected this resentment by creating a distinction between the central United States government and the eastern states. But there was a second issue which pushed the frontier zones away from the separatism which tempted them, the Indians. The British were playing the traditional game of trying to create a “neutral Indian barrier state” inside the United States,244 and the frontiersmen basically coveted the “unceded” Indian lands. This is where the United States could help them, especially after 1789 with the formal creation of a federal government, and the simultaneous distraction of Great Britain because of the French Revolution and its aftermath. “Europe’s distresses were America’s advantage.”245 That is, it was to the advantage of the White settlers, not the Native Americans. For the latter,

the American president was a man to be feared, the direct analogue of czar, emperor, and sultan; for Creeks and Cherokees, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Winne-bagos, and many others, the new city of Washington was what St. Petersburg was for the Finns, Peking for the Miao, or Constantinople for the Serbs: the seat of a capricious, tyrannical power.246

Whereas Great Britain’s attitude towards United States frontier expansion was that of a hegemonic power handling an essentially minor, if troubling, problem, the Spanish had to take the issue more seriously. They were defending an American empire that was already under attack and could not afford either United States economic success or the spread of the United States political example. The British–United States treaties of peace and the British–Spanish treaty of peace were both signed on September 3, 1783. Yet they contradicted each other on a crucial issue affecting the entire Mississippi Valley. The treaty with the United States granted the United States free navigation of the Mississippi River and fixed the southern boundary at the 30° parallel. The treaty with Spain made no mention of navigation on the Mississippi. It provided, however, that Spain should retain West Florida which, according to a British order-in-council of 1764, included the Mississippi river port of Natchez and all territory north to a point about 32°26’.247

At first the Spanish found it hard to distinguish between their traditional enemy, England, and its offshoot, the United States, whom they referred to as “Anglo—Americans.”248 But the distinction began to take hold, and not to the favor of the United States. Perhaps the Spanish read the astute forecast of Jacques Accarias de Sérionne in 1766:

New England is perhaps more to be feared than the old one, with regard to Spain’s losing its colonies. The population and the liberty of the Anglo—Americans seem a distant announcement of the conquest of the richest zones of America, and the establishment of a new empire of Englishmen, independent of Europe.249

The Spanish found that the British merchants in the newly acquired ports of St. Augustine, Mobile, and Pensacola favored them over the United States traders with whom they had “bitter feuds.” There was, however, a price for the Spanish resulting from their own economic weakness. “In order to prevent [United States] Americans from trading with her Indian neighbors, [Spain] had to permit Englishmen to trade with them through her own ports.”250

Spain as defender of the fur trader in the southwest against the United States land speculator was even less able to succeed than Britain in this role in the northwest, especially given the large role of non-Spaniards in the local economy of Louisiana and the Floridas. Spain was never able to integrate these zones (all recently acquired) into its own colonial system and this foreshadowed the loss of the two colonies (in 1815 and 1819, respectively) to the United States.251

The new United States was not only a new power in the Americas with economic interests to pursue. It was also a symbol of settler independence. It espoused a principle of republicanism. But what was a republic? It seemed to many to be an ideology of free trade, free men, and equality. We have just seen that in the 1780s the United States did not do so well promoting free trade. Indeed, as McCoy observes, the commercial crisis of the 1780s had a “profoundly unsettling effect on the way in which Americans viewed themselves and their society.”252 The failure in foreign trade was no doubt one of the elements that created the constitutional crisis of 1783–1791, the moment where the survival of the new state as a unified political entity was in question. But, in the long run, what was more important for the world-system, insofar as the United States presented itself and was thought of as a model of settler independence, was how it resolved the questions of free men and equality in this period.

The question of free men did not revolve around the Native Americans. They were outside the realm (and constitutionally remained so in the United States until 1924). The settlers wanted to displace the Indians from their land, not incorporate them as a work force in their economic activities.253 The Blacks, largely slaves, were not outside the realm. They were an integral, indeed a central part, of the productive process. In 1774, the population of the Thirteen Colonies (excluding Indians), was 2.3 million. Of these, 20% were Black slaves and another 1% free Blacks.254 The eighteenth century saw a steady increase of slave imports into the Americas.255 One of the main reasons for this was the sharp decline and eventual elimination of the system of indentured labor. In the case of British North America, the indentured laborers had been mostly English in the seventeenth century, but the ethnic pattern changed in the eighteenth century, a large percentage now being Germans, Swiss, Scots, Scotch—Irish, Irish, etc.256 The last two decades of the colonial era saw the “rapid abandonment of bound labor” in the major northern cities. This was of course in part because of the economic difficulties, and indeed even led to “resentment of slave labor competition” by artisans and attacks on slavery.257 But the longer term reason was that, with the growing demand for labor, the elasticity of the supply of slaves was much greater than that of indentured workers, and hence the costs of the latter rose with respect to the costs of the former.258

When Jefferson sought to include in the Declaration of Independence a section denouncing George III for curtailing efforts to ban the slave trade, he met with “heated objections” not only from the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina where slaves were plentiful but from delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, in which states the slave trade remained an important business.259 Slavery existed even in the northern states where, if “relatively small” in numbers, it remained a “common and accepted practice.”260 The American War of Independence opened the question up, as both the British and the colonists considered the possibility of using Blacks as soldiers. Although the idea was unpopular, even in England, “the war brought realities of its own.” First the British recruited, and then with greater reluctance the Continental Congress and most of the northern states recruited, granting freedom as “the reward for faithful service.”261

The Blacks (freemen and slaves) maneuvered as best they could. Those who became Loyalists were “less pro-British than they were pro-Black.” They saw themselves as “advocates of Black liberation.”262 Others joined the Revolutionary cause and thereby contributed to a process of eradicating slavery which, by the end of the war, had been launched in all the northern states except New York and New Jersey.263 The message was clearly mixed at best. And the postwar pattern remained mixed. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 did ban slavery from this region. And the matter of the slave trade was much debated in the Constitutional Convention. The famous compromise, a total abolition of the slave trade to come into effect 20 years later (in 1808), had the important side effect of pushing slavery “deeper into the South.”264 Seventy years later, in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney would declare in the Dred Scott decision that, as of 1787, the Blacks “had no rights which man was bound to respect.” As Litwack says, this was “less a sign of moral callousness than an important historical truth.”265 The “inalienable rights” of the colonists did not yet include Blacks.

Well then, were at least all White settlers equal? Not quite. We know that there was growing inequality in the period leading up to the War of Independence. The question is whether the war itself and its immediate aftermath had any significant impact on the degree of economic polarization and on the political ideology that was in formation. What originally split empire loyalists and rebels in British North America was less the perception of British policy (widely considered to be misguided) as the attitude to take toward it. The Whigs thought they were rebelling on behalf of British national ideals; the Tories thought loyalty to the Crown had to be maintained despite ministerial folly. The positive act of creating a new nation came later. It was the “march of events of the Revolution [that] were inexorably pushing the Americans toward the formation of the image of a nation.”266 This is important to remember, because the dynamic of a nationalism in creation had a lot of impact upon the social perception of inequality.

To understand what was happening, we have to look at who was cool to revolution. We must always bear in mind that here, as in most revolutionary situations, at the beginning, only a minority were strongly committed either way. The majority were “dubious, afraid, uncertain, indecisive.”267 There seemed to be three zones where Toryism (or at least Loyalism) had its strongest foothold. One zone was constituted by the maritime regions of the middle colonies. This was the Toryism of social conservatism. These were the people who feared New England activists as “radical levellers.”268 These were the people who saw themselves in a great battle with other colonists over “what kind of institutions America ought to have.” If one looks at these Tories vis-à-vis the Patriots, one can talk of a “civil war,” in which the Patriots were the party of movement against the Tories as the party of order.269 This is the basis of the mythology, plausible up to a point, of the American Revolution as a social revolution.

But there were other Tories. A second major group were the frontiersmen from Georgia to Vermont, most notable in the Regulator Movement in western North Carolina. “Wherever sailors and fishermen, trappers and traders outnumbered farmers and planters, there Tories outnumbered Whigs.”270 These were the Loyalists who looked to the British government as a check on the rapacious land speculators of the east coast. As we have just seen, the fear was real and justified and the victory of the settler Patriots doomed these frontiersmen. Perhaps they were “doomed” in any case, but the American Revolution no doubt accelerated the pace. For these Loyalists, the Patriots represented a conservative not a radical force.

There was a third node of resistance, the “cultural minorities,” all of whom seemed to show a higher rate of Loyalism. This group, who overlapped with the group of frontiersmen, were more beset by poverty. From Pennsylvania to Georgia, inland counties were “largely peopled” by Scots, Irish, and Germans. The differences of origin between inlanders and those on the coast were most marked in the Carolinas, where the most serious clashes in fact occurred.271 Religious as well as ethnic minorities (of course, often they were the same) also inclined toward Loyalism. Episcopalians in the northern colonies, Presbyterians in the southern ones, Pietists and Baptists everywhere, were not leaning toward the Revolutionary cause.272 All of these people seemed skeptical that the new national and nationalist majority would consider their interests. They feared that the emphasis on individual interests would eradicate their group interests.

In terms, therefore, of the defense of social privilege, there were Loyalists who were Loyalists because they feared egalitarian tendencies and there were Loyalists who were Loyalists for exactly the opposite reason. In the end, Palmer’s evaluation seems quite just: “the patriots were those who saw an enlargement of opportunity in the break with Britain, and the loyalists were in large measure those who had benefited from the British connection,” or at least, one might add, who saw no reason to presume they would benefit from the break.273

One last consideration. Why was not what might be called the Toryism of the left, those who were not Patriots precisely because they feared inegalitarian majorities, not stronger than it was? For had it been politically stronger, it is probable the settlers would never have won the war with the British. Morgan notes how different the intensity of this class conflict was between the atmosphere in 1676 at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion274 and in 1776. In between, he says, “the growth of slavery had curbed the growth of a free, depressed lower class and correspondingly magnified the social and economic opportunities of whites.”275

The ambivalence about the social implications of the War of American Independence maintained itself after 1783. The reality of polarization in fact grew. If Boston, for example, heartland of the radical thrust of the revolution, had been intensely unequal before the Revolution, “an even more unequal society” developed after the Revolution.276 When, in the post-1783 period, New England merchants found themselves excluded from the West Indies by British retribution, they translated their economic difficulties into “debt collection.” When small farmers in western Massachusetts grumbled, repressive legislation ensued which “spurred many farmers to direct action,” the insurrection known as Shay’s Rebellion in 1786.277 It was suppressed.

This ambivalence was the context within which the Constitution was drafted in 1787. It is in this sense that the Beardian interpretation,278 much contested in the American celebration of the 1950s and 1960s, has merit. If the social revolutionaries played a large role in launching the Revolution, and some of their radical thrust had gained strength by the very process of the Revolution, it seems clear that the Constitutional Convention represented an attempt to turn back this thrust. The conspicuous popular leaders of 1776 were all absent from the 1787 Convention, most of whose members “deplored democracy and agreed that a powerful central government was needed to remedy the evils which had beset the nation because of it.”279 This was so marked that it almost torpedoed the ratification process, which led to the concession of 1791 with the adoption of the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.280

If the peace of 1783 opened a period of great uncertainty for the United States, it was even more serious in the long run for Spanish America, precisely because Spain not only had to deal with her own populations and her European rivals as before, but now with the United States as well.281 At one level this was a golden period for the Spanish colonial economy. The average annual exports from Spain to Spanish America between 1782 and 1796 (the year that war began again between Spain and Great Britain and hence a British naval blockade disrupted trade) were four times higher than in 1778 (just before Spain and Great Britain went to war). In particular, there was a “massive expansion” of trade in 1784–1785.282 This was in part due to the ability of Spain to reduce seriously the amount of contraband trade, an ability that had been steadily growing since 1760.283

To be sure, the golden age was only to be “brief” and the commercial expansion of Spain between the declaration of comercio libre in 1778 to the British naval blockade of 1796 seems “far less impressive” if placed in the context of the overall growth of the world-economy.284 The Steins even speak of the “meager returns” for Spanish (and Portuguese) efforts at economic nationalism. Iberian colonial trade merely “shored up the ‘gothic edifice,’ which was not precisely the way to ready it for the great crisis.”285 Local artisanal and manufacturing production in Spanish America was “jeopardized”286 by Spanish liberalization of trade. But this was to metropolitan Spain’s advantage only momentarily because of Spain’s inability to compete with Great Britain as a producer of goods and as an exporter of capital. Thus, precisely where foreign penetration was deepest, Caracas and La Plata, some colonists began to think that perhaps “a golden prospect was in store for them if they could but shake off the Spanish yoke.”287 In the meantime, the position of British merchants located in Cádiz (and Lisbon) “seemed particularly fortunate and happy,” since they could immediately benefit from the abolition of the monopolies.288 Furthermore, it may even be that the relative success of the Spanish against the interlopers was itself negative for Spain politically, since previously these British interlopers, “by supplying the needs of the Spanish–American colonies, kept them from rebelling earlier against the rule of Spain.”289

Still, during this brief interlude of the 1780s, matters were quiet in Spanish America, and the United States was absorbed in its own difficulties. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 was unsettling. But even more unsettling was the fact that the outbreak of the Revolution in France set in motion a process in St.-Domingue that would lead to the creation of the first Black republic in the modern world-system. The violent birth of Haiti was a more critical factor in the history of the Americas than we usually suggest. It should be given credit for hastening and clarifying the pattern of settler independence everywhere else. For the Haitian Revolution was indeed, as that scholarly racist T. Lothrop Stoddard put it, “the first great shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality.”290

The difficulties began in the economic arena. St.-Domingue had been a jewel in France’s crown, the leading sugar exporter of the Americas, and all to the profit of France. Then the Eden Treaty of 1786 and the Franco–American convention of 1787 “broke a wide breach” in the Pacte Colonial,291 and hence made French planters aware that they now needed actively to look after their economic interests in the political arena. Thus, when Louis XVI convened the Estates-General in 1787, there was an immediate debate about whether St.-Domingue should claim representation. The advocates won the day, and in this way, St.-Domingue was drawn into the vortex of the Paris events.292

The White settlers found almost immediately a resistance to their interests in the French National Assembly on two quite different grounds: resistance to the idea of colonial autonomy; and resistance by some who wished to accord individual rights (and hence share in control of any potential autonomy) to the so-called “free colored” (a legal category) and even thought of emancipating slaves.293 The reaction was swift. On April 15, 1790, at Saint-Marc, the General Assembly of the French Sector of St.-Domingue met and refused the title of colony. Its President, Bacon de la Chevalerie, posed the following question: “By what subtle reasoning has one arrived at a situation in which one puts free and independent conquerers under the most astonishing despotic yoke?”294 (shades of 1776). He promptly announced to the “colored” populations that they would be put back behind their demarcation line (shades of 1787).

The difference was that, in France, the revolution proclaimed the aim of ending legal privilege, while the White settlers of St.-Domingue made claims for autonomous authority on the basis for “the political nonexistence of other free persons and . . . the political and civil nonexistence of the slaves.” In short, instead of ending legal privilege, they wanted to given permanent legal status to “a dominant caste.”295 They were not successful in this objective.

France’s Constituent Assembly in 1790 ambiguously gave the vote to propertied mulattoes in St.-Domingue. When a political leader of the mulattoes returned to St.-Domingue and sought by rebellion to enforce this right, he was captured, tortured, and executed. The National Assembly, upset, passed another, less ambiguous decree. The White settlers rose up against the French and against the mulattoes. And suddenly, in the midst of this, we have the first Black uprising of slaves. Instead of the “class alliance” of the government, the planters, and the rich mulattoes against poor Whites, mulattoes, and Black slaves, as occurred in other French colonies, such as Isle-de-France and Isle de Bourbon, the “race war” had begun.296

The race war was not what the White settlers had wanted when seeking their racially pure autonomy. Nor was it what the French Revolutionaries in Paris wanted, since, for them, the principle of “territorial conservation” remained strong.297 Nor was it what the “free coloreds”—often rich, slave-owning mulattoes—had wanted when they laid claim to their equal rights. But it was imposed by the Black slaves themselves, in what can only be seen as the most successful slave rebellion in the history of the capitalist world-economy. Now began the period of the “three-way civil war”298 in St.-Domingue, the fruit of the three successive uprisings—“the fronde of the important Whites, the mulatto revolt, and the Negro revolution.”299

The situation alarmed, appalled, and discontented all four powers in the region—France, Great Britain, the United States, and Spain. The views in the National Assembly and then in the Convention were mixed and perhaps confused. But overall, the Convention tended to be on the side of the mulattoes, as the guarantors of a civilized transition. As Césaire put it, the famous Société des Amis des Noirs in Paris was “first and foremost the Society of the mulattoes.”300

As for the British, as soon as the war broke out between Great Britain and France in February, 1793, the White settlers appealed for British assistance and entered into secret accords with the British.301 The British saw this as a good opportunity to ruin the commerce of France. The British sent an expedition, but their occupation of St.-Domingue backfired badly, ranking “among the greatest disasters in British military history.”302 Indeed, their intervention, by creating a competition among French, Spanish, and British troops for slave support, “dramatically broadened the scope of the then languishing [slave] revolt and rescued it from what might have been extinction.”303

The United States, which feared as much as Great Britain, that “the virus of freedom would infect slaves in their own possessions,” was, however, “by no means enthusiastic” about the British intervention, which threatened to place their trading partner, St.-Domingue, “behind the bars of the Navigation System.”304 The United States therefore tried very hard to maintain and extend its role as food supplier to St.-Domingue, while avoiding all political relations.305

The Spaniards, of course, were equally wary. The eastern half of the island was their colony of Santo Domingo. The Black revolution did not really spread there, except by conquest. The economy was different (cattle and subsistence farming instead of sugar plantations). The demography was therefore different—Whites, libertos (mostly mulatto, but some Black), and Black slaves in equal proportions. Finally, the social structure was different. The libertos were not an important economic force, like the mulattoes in St.-Domingue, and the Spanish administration was able to keep them under stricter control.306 The initial Spanish intervention in St.-Domingue was no more successful then the British.

Toussaint L’Ouverture was able to take advantage of the Franco–British war to consolidate his administration and to create a disciplined army. He kept the plantations going, confining the Black workers to them but giving them a fourth of the produce. But as the Europeans temporarily stopped fighting among themselves, they turned their anxiety about the Black republic into a new attempt to decapitate it. Napoleon’s troops arrested Toussaint in 1802. And Spain, the United States, and Great Britain all tacitly collaborated with France in this attempt at recolonization.307 Though the island remained independent with, after a while, two governments in existence, recognition on the part of the four powers remained “unthinkable” for quite a while.308

In retrospect, we can probably say that the Black revolution in St.-Domingue slowed down the drive for independence in Hispanic America, despite the friendly but ambiguous links of Simón Bolívar and Alexandre Pétion, president of one of the two successor states in Haiti, the mulatto-dominated southern part. The effect of St.-Domingue was to instill a great deal of prudence not only in the European powers but, above all, among the White settlers of the Americas.309

It was in this same period that the prospects of an Irish revolution, which initially seemed to be carried along by the same wave that swept up British North America, but then began to assume the shape of a social revolution, came to an end. Ireland had played a role in precipitating the British imperial crisis of the 1760s in the first place. In some ways, in North America, Great Britain was repeating attitudes and carrying out policies already invented for the Irish situation.310 Ireland itself was actually in many ways worse off than British North America. British Protestant settlers had imposed their rule on a dense Irish Catholic peasant population, not on a scattered group of largely hunting tribes. It was a situation structurally more akin to Peru or central Mexico than to the Thirteen Colonies.311

The absence of all political rights for Catholics (as of 1691) meant, however, that it was the Protestant settlers who felt “the full force of English commercial jealousy.” It was, therefore, this “trusted ‘garrison’ [that] was [being] treated as a commercial menace.”312 The Protestant settlers were not even allowed to have a shipping industry (which the New England settlers had), and Ireland was not permitted to be an entrepôt between the Americas and Europe. Indeed, one of the explicit North American fears of the time was that they might be reduced to “the unhappy condition of northern Ireland.”313

Hence, with the defeat of the French in the Seven Years’ War, an “Anglo–Irish colonial nationalism”314 developed, and for the same reasons as in North America. In the Irish Parliament, a reform group known as the Patriots emerged. At the very moment that Charles Townshend was trying to impose the Stamp Act on British North America, he sent his elder brother George as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland “to tighten up direct British control and get the Irish too to pay for a larger share of imperial defense.”315 It is obvious why the North American and Irish settlers felt they shared constitutional grievances and objectives. And thus many Irishmen “naturally sympathized” in 1775 with the North Americans—many Protestant Irishmen, that is, since the Catholics tended to support Britain’s American policy.316

The American Revolution, in fact, worsened the economic situation in Ireland. The British defeat spurred on Irish demands, and the British in 1782 were willing to give some greater political autonomy. Pitt even proposed economic concessions, but on the condition the Irish share in imperial defense expenditures.317 As soon as a peace treaty was signed with France in 1783, the British line hardened further.318 Still, the Irish Patriots were not ready to press for independence, because they were not ready to create “an inclusive party,” and were not “a fully national movement.”319 The fear of internal social revolution held them back (then as in the twentieth century).

The French Revolution had a big impact on Ireland, opening up new possibilities. Catholics and Presbyterian Dissenters began to draw together in rebellious republican intent. The Catholics were demanding Emancipation. Catholic tenants also began to rebel against their oppression by landlords (who were Protestants). It was at this point in 1795 that the Orange Society was formed as a secret Protestant society to resist Catholic demands. In 1796, Wolfe Tone, leader of the United Irishmen, the nationalist movement, went from the United States to Paris to help plan an expedition to Ireland. He convinced the Directory that Ireland was “ripe for revolution.”320 He counted on support not only from Catholics but from the Presbyterians of Ulster who had a long republican tradition and whose leaders justified their appeal to French assistance by the “precedent” of 1688.321

The invasion failed. The weather was bad. The seamanship was bad. The French had chosen the region of landing, Bantry Bay, badly. It was a zone where the United Irishmen had the least support. But they almost made it. British dominion in Ireland rested at this point on an “extremely precarious tenure.”322 But Bantry Bay was the turning point. And its consequences for the world-system were great. As Thompson says: It is arguable that France lost Europe, not before Moscow, but in 1797, when only the Navy in mutiny stood between them and an Ireland on the eve of rebellion.”323

The rebellion of the United Irishmen went forward in 1798. By this time the faith of Ulster Presbyterians in the French Revolution had cooled and the Orange lodges had grown stronger. The rebels were given no quarter by the British. Napoleon decided against a second invasion, diverting his troops to the conquest of Egypt, a decision he is said later to have regretted. The failure of the revolutionaries hurt as well the position of the moderate reformers in the Irish Parliament, like Arthur Grattan. The British decided to press to abolish the reforms of 1782. Pitt pushed through the Act of Union in 1800. The Irish Parliament was no more. The Protestant settlers in effect gave up (were pressed to give up) all perspectives of autonomy, because they feared that it was an autonomy they could not control, an autonomy that would be too democratic.324

Thus the 1790s saw two major defeats of White settlers—in St. Domingue and in Ireland. The historic situations were different. The final outcomes were different—an ostracized Black republic in Haiti and a reintegration into the metropole in Ireland. But both served as a signal, warning the White settlers of the Americas that the road to a settler republic was a difficult one and strewn with hazards, and that the example of the Thirteen Colonies would be difficult to emulate if one wanted to have the desired outcome. And Haiti and Ireland in the 1790s came after Túpac Amaru and the Comuneros in the 1780s. Independence was decidedly a risky affair.

It was no wonder then that those like Miranda and Bolivar who preached settler revolution were received cautiously for the most part. Then one event transformed the world political situation: Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. Before, however, we discuss why this event could crystallize and give renewed life to the cause of settler independence in the Americas, we must observe what had been happening in the one existent settler republic until then.

The years 1793–1807 were “extraordinarily prosperous ones” for the young United States. In what in retrospect seems a long-run pattern of United States economic growth, this period was a particular “bulge” in which the United States was able to take advantage of their “neutral” position in the Franco—British wars by gaining a substantial share of the trans-Atlantic commerce.325

What made this possible was a strategic decision by the United States in 1794, to tilt their “neutrality” toward the eventual victor and hegemonic power, their ex-colonial master, Great Britain. It was in fact the outbreak of war in 1793 that precipitated the decision which took the form of Jay’s Treaty in 1794. Great Britain had refused to recognize the United States’ claims to full rights of wartime trade to the French West Indian islands. The United States tacitly ceded the issue in return for the return of the western ports (at last! they had been legally the possession of the United States since 1783), and some new trading rights in the British West Indies.326 The terms were basically poor for the United States, but the United States feared war with Great Britain more than the latter did. Essentially, Jay’s Treaty “served to postpone hostilities” to 1812, a moment that would be more favorable to the United States.327 The British, meanwhile, saw the treaty as guaranteeing a freedom of commerce with the United States for the benefit of British industry.328

There seemed to be two great economic pressures on the United States which lay behind this strategic choice. The economics of transport still condemned the United States to earn a large part of its income from foreign trade, though this would later change after 1820.329 The second factor was the opportunity for agricultural revival offered to the Southern United States by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The Revolutionary War had been quite destructive of agriculture in the Lower South and there seemed to be no expanding markets for their principal staples of indigo and rice.330 The South in the 1790s “urgently needed a new crop.”331 Cotton was it, and cotton needed Great Britain as a customer.332

To be sure, this geopolitical–economic deal of the United States with Great Britain would have its negative side for the weaker partner. It slowed down the development of United States manufactures, which could not compete as a locus of investment given the “high profits to be won in foreign commerce” in the period after 1793.333 In 1808, an American author, James Cheetham, was boasting of the fact that the United States had become, “as by enchantment, the successful rival of the greatest commercial nation on earth.”334 It was perhaps fortunate for the United States that renewed hostilities in Europe burst this naive bubble. On November 11, 1807, Great Britain placed a total ban on United States trade with European ports under Napoleon’s control. President Thomas Jefferson sought to pressure both Great Britain and France by an embargo on both. The Embargo Act of 1808 lasted only one year and turned out to be self-defeating,335 but it eventually led to the renewal of conflict with Great Britain in 1812, to which we will return. What it did do was renew the role of the United States, as a rival as well as collaborator with Great Britain in the decolonization of the Americas.336

Much has been written about the ideological inspiration of the American and above all of the French Revolution on the thinking of the Creoles in Spanish America. No doubt it is true, at least for certain strata. Yet it is too easy to exaggerate the importance of such diffusion of ideas ex post facto in cases where the ultimate political outcome makes the importance of such diffusion plausible. What Eyzaguirre concludes for Chile may in fact be more widely true: “It cannot be demonstrated that the French Revolution was a catalyst for separatist ideas; it may even have been on the contrary the occasion for the Creoles to reaffirm their fidelity to the monarchy.”337

Spain was at war with revolutionary France from 1793 to 1796. But in 1796, the Spanish Minister Manuel de Godoy led Spain into an alliance with France in the Treaty of San Ildefonso. Great Britain retaliated by cutting Spain’s maritime links with the Americas.338 But Great Britain at this point hesitated to give any serious support to the burgeoning settler independence movement.339

In any case, the entire economic impact of the economic reforms of Charles III, the neoprotectionism combined with intraimperial liberalism that had led to the revived prosperity of Spain, was “completely overturned” between 1797 and 1814.340 The impact was equally great on some zones of Spanish America. Venezuela in particular entered into economic difficulties as of 1797. One response was the legalization of contraband.341 The sharp price inflation in Mexico increased economic polarization and led to discontent among the less-privileged classes.342 But these difficulties reappeared cyclically and under other geopolitical conditions would have had few major political consequences.

In 1806, an unauthorized British expeditionary force occupied Buenos Aires. But the local population proved loyal to Spain and successfully defeated them; they proved “unwilling to exchange on imperial master for another.”343 Miranda’s tiny expedition to liberate Venezuela failed that same year, undone at least in part by the semblance of Haitian support.344 The lack of enthusiasm for independence, even in Venezuela and Argentina (shortly to be the pacemakers), was evident.

All this would change abruptly. In 1807, Napoleon induced Spain to join in conquering Portugal. Dom João fled to Brazil. Godoy’s permission for French troops to enter Spain en route to Portugal led to a Spanish nationalist reaction and Godoy’s unseating. Charles IV was deposed by his son Ferdinand VII. Summoned to Bayonne by Napoleon, Ferdinand then returned the throne to Charles who promptly abdicated in favor of Joseph Bonaparte. Ferdinand also renounced his rights. Suddenly, there was no legitimate authority in the Spanish Empire. A central junta assumed authority in Seville, and signed an alliance with the British. It declared American lands not to be colonies and invited them to participate in the cortés. But the French forced the junta to flee to Cádiz. It then dissolved. Confusion spread everywhere in Spanish America. Regional and local juntas took over in the name of Ferdinand VII, in many cases ousting Spanish authorities. Creoles were now exercising de facto self-government in the name of loyalism.345 In Caracas, in 1810, the local junta went further. In the name of loyalism to Ferdinand VII, it explicitly denied the authority of the new Spanish Council of Regency (successor to the junta in Cádiz). This was followed by revolts in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. They all declared their ports open to free trade. Bolivar went to London in 1810 and was received by the Foreign Secretary Lord Wellesley, who “advised a continuing allegiance to Spain as the best avenue to British assistance.”346

The Mexican revolution proved the most socially radical. When a local parish priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo in 1810 called for an end to viceroys forever in his Grito de Dolores (did he copy the name from the Cahiers de doléance?), he united all the Creole establishment against him as well as the Spanish authorities. The Hidalgo uprising swept through central Mexico, “spreading terror and shock.” The “virtually unarmed” Indians managed to reach the capital city, acquiring 20,000 men in the process and executing some 2,000 gachupines (Spaniards) out of an estimated total population of 15,000. Hidalgo was put down by the over-whelmingly Creole Regiment of New Spain. One of Hidalgo’s lieutenants, José Maria Morelos, also a priest, took up the struggle and this time created a “superbly organized and effective army” and a clear political program including radical social reforms. This second phase of the revolt was supported more by mestizos than by Indians. Morelos was not as easily crushed, but his military power declined rapidly once the Creole congress preempted his program by proclaiming independence in 1813.347

Three elements now entered to set the stage for the final phase of the Spanish American settler independences: the War of 1812 (actually 1812–1814) between the United States and Great Britain, the restoration of Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain in 1813, and the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

The War of 1812 was more or less the last act of the settler decolonization of the United States. Relations of the United States with Great Britain had been difficult ever since 1783, but there had never been a real break. Great Britain wanted the United States as a market but not as a competitor. The United States was seeking to improve its standing in the world-economy. The Franco—British wars were both an opportunity and an exasperation for the United States. As the British maritime position grew uncontested, United States anger against British constraints on its trade grew greater. When fighting broke out again on the continent, the United States’ opportunity to press Great Britain, and perhaps to conquer Canada, arrived.348 In a sense, the United States did badly in the war. There was now little enthusiasm either among English-speaking or French-speaking Canadians for incorporation into the United States.349 Canada remained British. The importance of the fur trade had declined.350 The British made no real concessions about the constraints of their navigation code on the carrying trade.351 All that Great Britain surrendered at the Treaty of Ghent was an intangible recognition of a United States right to its own westward and southern expansion,352 and a say (at least a junior say) in the developments to come in the decolonization of the Americas. But, of course, this was crucial.353

The war between Great Britain and the United States came at a critical moment for Spain. With the defeat of Napoleon, Ferdinand VII would return to the throne in 1814. He abrogated the liberal constitution of 1812 and sought to restore the status quo ante including in Hispanic America. Within a year, most of the uprisings in Hispanic America were put down by his armies. Bolivar himself wrote that, but for the War of 1812, “Venezuela singlehandedly would have triumphed, and South America would not have been devastated by Spanish cruelty nor destroyed by revolutionary anarchy.”354

Bolívar may have been right about the very short run. But actually the Spanish restoration guaranteed the only slightly delayed independences of Hispanic America. The return of Ferdinand VII liberated both the United States and Great Britain to pursue their penchant to support the settler movements.355 And the Treaty of Ghent reduced the United States–British mutual sense of need to be fearful that these independences would favor the other.

Finally the Congress of Vienna, by establishing peace in Europe on the basis of the support of legitimacy and absolutism, in a perverse way, weakened the Spanish claim to Hispanic America. The major European powers feared that Spain’s repressive measures were “unlikely to be effective,” and that revolutions leading to independence in Hispanic America would “encourage liberal revolutionaries” in Europe. Hence they much preferred that Spain grant “concessions” to the colonies.356 This further freed Great Britain’s hand to pursue her commercial interests in Latin America, especially now that it had become a major zone of expansion of cotton textile sales for Great Britain.357

All that remained for the settlers was to make sure that the independence to which there was now no major obstacle would truly fall into their hands, and not into the hands of other groups. The second round of struggles began. Much of the difference between the form of the struggle in the different colonies was a consequence of the different rapport de force between Creole elements and Blacks, Indians, and mestizo—pardo (mulatto) groups. Indeed, the degree to which Creole elites were for, against, or ambivalent on the question of immediate independence was to a considerable degree their assessment of the “conditions necessary for containing the actual or potential rebelliousness of the masses.”358 Once the process of disintegration of the Spanish empire started, many Creoles who formerly were skeptical of independence felt obliged to jump on the bandwagon, not primarily in order to take power from the Spanish but, “above all, to prevent the pardos from taking it.”359 We do not have to look to the reluctant, belated, and somewhat conservative independence movements of Peru and Mexico to verify this. It can be seen with some clarity in the radical, avant-garde independence movements of La Plata and Venezuela.

La Plata was a colony with a particularly high percentage of Creoles, perhaps half the population. It could easily sustain a Creole-based revolution, and one that was “liberal” in attitudes to Indians and Blacks, mestizos and pardos. In La Plata, as previously in British North America, both colonial ruler and settler revolutionary sought, “hesitantly at first,” to recruit Black and pardo soldiers into their armies, promising ultimate liberation.360 And as in British North America, the Blacks got some small advantage out of it, but at the cost of heavy casualties. The Indians were freed from encomienda, but only to be recruited as peons on sugar plantations. The mestizo gauchos were to be tamed to work on the estancias.

In Venezuela, with its great latifundias, the problem of slavery and peonage was still greater than in La Plata. Whites were only 20% of the population and many of these were the blancos de orilla, poor Whites often of Canarian origin. When Bolívar relaunched the struggle in 1816, he arrived from Haiti, and saw “the need of fusing the creole, pardo and slave rebellions into one great movement.”361 Bolivar promised to liberate the slaves in Venezuela and elsewhere.362 But he was unable to impose abolition on his fellow hacendados, and the Black slaves became less enthusiastic about independence, lapsing into neutrality.363 Full abolition would only come much later, in 1854.364 And Bolivar himself would repay his early Haitian support by refusing later to recognize Haiti or to support its invitation to the Panama Congress in 1826. Indeed “the fear of creating another Haiti . . . entered into the decision not to invade Cuba.”365

The Spanish-American states now went forward to independence one after the other, in ambiguous, or violent, or conservative revolutions.366 They went forward one by one. Bolïvar’s dream of replicating the formula of unity achieved by the Thirteen Colonies failed. The area involved was, of course, far more dispersed, and hence there was no possibility of unifying the military struggle, an important factor in the creation of the United States. Bolivar’s Congress of Panama in June 1826 failed completely.

The year 1823 sealed the issue. Britain’s Secretary of State, George Canning, and United States President James Monroe competed to see who could get the credit for giving the definitive blessing to Hispanic-American independence.367 Meanwhile, in Spain, the French invasion of April 1823 permitted Ferdinand VII to free himself from the “constitutionalists” and to pursue a policy of “unrelieved reaction.” The decade from 1823 to 1833 became known as the “ominous decade.”368 This triumph at home for Ferdinand meant, however, that all hope of Spain in the Americas was now doomed.369

The story in Brazil basically parallelled that of Hispanic America. It was the story of simultaneous decolonization (1789–1831) and of British penetration of its economy (1810–1827).370 The post-Pombaline era in Brazil gave rise to two “conspiracies,” the so-called Inconfidência mineira of Minas Gerais in 1788–1789 and the Conjuracāo Bahia in 1798.371 They were both early attempts at independence. The first, led by Creole elites protesting against taxation, was a “precursor.”372 The second was urban and more radical, “aiming at an armed uprising of mulattoes, free Blacks, and slaves.”373 It was particularly inspired by the French Revolution seeking “a complete revolution,” in order to create a society “without distinction between Whites, Blacks (preta) and mulattoes (parda).”374

In Brazil, too, Napoleon precipitated matters by causing the flight of Prince Regent Dom João to Brazil. This, of course, created a different situation than the abdications in Spain. The Portuguese king could provide the legitimate transition to eventual independence. In 1815, instead of returning to Portugal, Dom João raised Brazil to the status of a coequal kingdom, with the center of the now dual monarchy in Brazil. The result was that Portugal was in effect governed in Lisbon by a Council of Regency (and it in turn was presided over by an Englishman, Marshal Beresford, who had been the commander-in-chief of the Portuguese army which had reoccupied the country, and remained afterwards).

In 1820–1821, a liberal revolt erupted and a new constitution was adopted. The revolt spread to Brazil. There the “Brazilian party,” representing the Creole elites, “won supremacy,” while the popular classes could not “obtain their demands.”375 The Portuguese helped the Brazilian Creoles in this effort. A Portuguese deputy, José Joaquim Ferreira de Moura, defended sending troops to Bahia in 1821 by the argument that the Brazilian people, “composed of Negros, mulattoes, & White Creoles, and Europeans of various sorts” are under the impulse of “passions in effervescence” and need help in restoring order.376 Dom João returned to Portugal, and now the Brazilians feared they were faced with less than full equality. They transferred allegiance from King João VI to the Prince Regent Dom Pedro, who was persuaded to remain. Soon thereafter, in 1822, Dom Pedro I became Emperor of Brazil, with the blessing and under the protection of Great Britain.377

Thus, slowly, over 50 years, the White settlers created states throughout the Western Hemisphere that became members of the interstate system. They all, in one way or another, came under the politico—economic tutelage of the new hegemonic power, Great Britain, although the United States was able to carve itself out a role as lieutenant and, therefore, potential and eventual rival to Britain.

The one exception was Haiti, and Haiti was ostracized. France, Spain, and Portugal were effectively eliminated from any role. But so were the Blacks and the Indians. The dream of Morelos, that he could found a republic modeled on European constitutional theories but which proclaimed “Aztec antiquity as the true origin of the nation,” remained a dream that was quashed.378 The new nationalism was “almost entirely devoid of social content.”379

None of the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century—the so-called industrial revolution, the French Revolution, the settler independences of the Americas—represented fundamental challenges to the world capitalist system. They represented its further consolidation and entrenchment. The popular forces were suppressed, and their potential in fact constrained by the political transformations. In the nineteenth century, these forces (or rather their successors) would reflect on their failures and construct a totally new strategy of struggle, one that was far more organized, systematic, and self-conscious.

Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914

PREFACE: ON WRITING ABOUT THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM

This is the fourth volume in a series whose first volume was published in 1974. The overall work was conceived as a multivolume analysis of the historical and structural development of the modern world-system. Each volume was designed to stand by itself but was also intended simultaneously to be part of the singular larger work. This poses some problems both for the author and for the reader. I think it might be useful to the reader for me to spell out how I have approached these difficulties, not all of which were apparent to me when I started out. I do this in the hope that it makes my intentions and methods more clear to the reader.

Each volume, and each chapter within a volume, has a theme and tries therefore to establish a point. The whole book is simultaneously historical/diachronic and structural/analytic/theoretical. This is in accord with my epistemological premise that the much-vaunted distinction between idiographic and nomothetic epistemologies is outdated, spurious, and harmful to sound analysis. Social reality is always and necessarily both historical (in the sense that reality inevitably changes every nanosecond) and structural (in the sense that social action is governed by constraints deriving from the historical social system within which the described activity occurs).

If, however, one tries to describe reality over a large space and a long time (say, the modern world-system as a whole from its inception in the long sixteenth century [1450–1640] to today and tomorrow), one encounters the elementary difficulty that one cannot do everything at once. So I decided to take the story forward more or less chronologically, introducing structural aspects of the modern world-system when they first occurred or became evident in a significant way. There seemed to me no point in discussing, in a volume largely devoted to the long sixteenth century, structural issues that became salient only in the nineteenth century.

But equally, it did not seem to be useful to discuss, in a volume largely devoted to the nineteenth century, structural issues that had already been discussed in the first volume and whose characteristics had not significantly changed in the intervening centuries. Since, however, my views on when a phenomenon such as “industrialization” first occurred is somewhat different from the one argued by many other analysts, readers might not locate it in the volume in which they expect to see it discussed. I have tried to make clear, as I have proceeded, the logic of my choices.

So, let me first say how I decided to handle chronology. When I wrote volume 1, I said in my introduction that I would divide the overall work into four epochs, to which I gave specific dates in that introduction. Volume 1 sought to cover the long sixteenth century, defined as running from 1450 to 1640. However, when I came to write volume 2, I saw immediately that the story I wished to tell did not start in 1640 but rather, more or less, in 1600 and ran, more or less, to 1750. I put these years in the subtitle. I had now adopted, quite deliberately, the concept of overlapping long periods, a concept I continued in volumes 3 and 4. But this meant, of course, that I could not reach the present in merely four volumes, as I had thought in 1974.

The concept of overlapping time periods turned out to be crucial for my analyses. For time boundaries are of course fairly arbitrary and can be justified only in terms of the immediate issue that one is treating. The story of Dutch hegemony in the world-economy (chapter 2 of volume 2) may be thought to have started in 1600 (or even earlier) but definitely was not over in 1640 and is not really part of the story of the long sixteenth century. It belonged in volume 2, devoted to the consolidation of the European world-economy in the seventeenth century—again, more or less.

Furthermore, this raises the question of when one should seek to enter structural notions into the text. There was, at least in my opinion, no hegemonic power in the sixteenth century. It would have been out of place to introduce the concept, therefore, in volume 1. The Dutch were the first hegemonic power in the modern world-system. It is also true that they were not the last. But the concept of hegemony was not discussed within the context of Great Britain's assuming that role, nor will it be in the context of the assumption by the United States of that role. The concept, as such, once discussed, was taken for granted, and reference, when appropriate, was made to it without reviewing the logic of the concept. The theoretical debate had already taken place.

The chronology of each chapter follows its own internal logic as well, provided only that it stays somewhat within the parameters of the chronological limits of the volume. A good example of this is found in volume 3. Whereas the overall volume presumably ends in the 1840s, chapter 3, on incorporation, goes to 1850 (according to its title), and actually somewhat beyond. On the other hand, chapter 4, on the settler decolonization of the Americas, goes from 1763 to 1833.

Since I cannot presume that the reader of this volume will have read the three previous volumes, I believe it would be useful to resume the diachronic/theoreti-cal story that I have heretofore told. Should readers of this volume feel that I have failed to discuss something that they think ought to have been included in it, perhaps they will discover that it is something I have extensively treated previously. For example, most books devoted to the nineteenth century will discuss—indeed, discuss at length—the so-called industrial revolution. I have treated this as chapter 1 of volume 3 and see no point in repeating this in volume 4, especially when I wish to tell a different kind of story about the nineteenth century.

So let me start by summarizing what I think is the overall argument of each of the successive volumes. Volume 1, defined as covering the long sixteenth century, is the story of the creation of the modern world-system and the creation of some of its basic economic and political institutions. Volume 2 is the story not of refeudalization but of the consolidation of the European world-economy in a period running from 1600 to 1750; it seeks to explain how capitalists in different zones of the world-economy responded to the phenomenon of overall slow growth. Volume 3, defined as running from 1730 to the 1840s, is the story of the renewed expansion—both economic and geographic—of the capitalist world-economy. Volume 4, which I think of as running from 1789 to 1873/1914, is devoted to the creation (and only at this late point) of a geoculture for the modern world-system, a geoculture largely fashioned around and dominated by what I am calling centrist liberalism.

I have said that the various chapters make successive theoretical points. In volume 1, I discussed in chapter 1 why and how the modern world-system emerged from the medieval prelude. I later considered this chapter inadequate to its theme, and elaborated the argument considerably in an essay first published in 1992.¹ The key chapter of volume 1 is chapter 2, in which I outlined the concept of an axial division of labor that leads to the construction of different zones in the world-economy—the core, the periphery, and the semiperiphery (this last being a concept I added to the core/periphery distinction that had been put forward by Raúl Prebisch). I also made the case that this was the construction of a capitalist world-economy, the form that was taken by the modern world-system, and that initially this capitalism was constructed in the agricultural arena, with different modes of labor control for different zones of the world-economy.

Chapter 3 analyzed the creation of the states within the modern world-system and the role played therein by the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth century. Chapter 4 elaborated the distinction between a world-economy and a world-empire, and why the attempt by Charles V to create a world-empire was a failure. Chapter 5 looked at the core zones of the nascent world-economy and analyzed why strong state structures were established there, and the role that class played in this process. Chapter 6 looked at the peripheral zones and analyzed why their state structures were weak. It further elaborated the distinction between peripheral zones inside the world-economy and external arenas—that is, zones that remained outside the axial division of labor of the capitalist world-economy.

Volume 1 set the basic argument of the overall work in place, and concluded with a theoretical reprise that summarized and conceptualized the concrete empirical transformations described in the rest of the volume. During the long sixteenth century, and indeed for some time thereafter, the capitalist world-economy existed in only a part of the globe—essentially, western Europe and parts of the Americas. The rest of the globe was not yet part of this historical social system and therefore not subject to its rules and constraints.

If volume 1 went against the common argument that there was nothing we could call “modern” or “capitalist” before the late eighteenth century, it also argued with the position of those who said that there was a beginning of capitalism in the sixteenth century but that capitalism had a big setback in the seventeenth century. See the very extensive literature about the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” I treated this literature in the introduction to and chapter 1 of volume 2. I wished to argue that the so-called crisis was not at all a setback but a normal B-phase (or downturn) of the world-economy, one that advanced rather than disrupted capitalist development.

Chapter 2 dealt, as we have already indicated, with Dutch hegemony and the general patterns that explain why and how one country becomes hegemonic—for a while. Chapter 3 explored what happens when a hegemonic power first begins to decline. Empirically it dealt with English and French aspirations to be the successor state. Chapter 3 discussed how peripheral zones cope with a B-phase and why “turning inward” is not anticapitalist but survivalist. Chapter 4 was the first serious discussion of the characteristics of a semiperiphery; the role that semiperipheries play in the life of the modern world-system; and the distinction between those that are “rising” and those that are “declining.” Chapter 6 dealt with the continuing Franco-British rivalry in the period after there was no longer a significant political role for the Dutch. It described the lead that was taken by Great Britain and why this lead was the result not of more advanced economic structures (the usual argument) but of the fact that the British state, for various reasons, was stronger than the French state (contrary to the usual argument).

If the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is widely recognized as a period of economic and geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy, credit is usually given to something called the “industrial revolution”—and often to something called the “first industrial revolution,” which presumably occurred in England. Analytically, I thought this conception was weak on two grounds. One is that there were not, could not be, separate “industrial revolutions” in different countries. If there were any such thing, it had to be a phenomenon of the capitalist world-economy as a whole. And second, although what happened in that period did indeed reflect an upward blip in the mechanization and the value output of world production, it was no more significant than several previous and several subsequent blips. This is what chapter 1 sought to demonstrate.

Chapter 2 took up the story of the French Revolution. The voluminous literature on this “event” is currently divided between the adherents of the social (or classical) interpretation that had been so prominent for a long time and those of the liberal (or revisionist) interpretation that gained so much force in the last third of the twentieth century. My contention was that both interpretations are wrong, since they both focused attention on phenomena said to be internal to France and on the kinds of changes that occurred in the French state and economic structures. The argument of this chapter was that the French Revolution was a part of, a consequence of, the last phase in the British-French struggle for hegemonic succession—one that was won, of course, by Great Britain—and that the changes internal to France as a result of the Revolution were far less fundamental than is usually contended.

One of the outcomes of this Franco-British struggle was the second great geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy, in which four large zones were incorporated into the axial division of labor: Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, and West Africa. The key argument is about what happens to a zone, previously in the external arena, when it becomes incorporated as a peripheral zone of the capitalist world-economy. The transformations of both the political and economic structures in the four zones, starting from very different existing structures before incorporation, seem to have brought the four zones to all having more or less similar structures as a result of incorporation.

Finally, chapter 4 dealt, for the first time, with the concept of formal decolonization—why it occurs and why it is linked to the emergence of a new hegemonic power. But I argued also that the decolonization of the Americas was a “settler” decolonization and not a reassumption by the indigenous peoples of control of their own lives. The one exception was Haiti, and I tried to show here why and how Haiti was isolated and largely destroyed economically precisely because it was not a settler decolonization.

When I came to volume 4, which I had intended to be the story of the “long” nineteenth century, I faced two problems. As we move forward chronologically, the geography of the world-system widens, which expands the amount of material to be considered. But the amount of scholarly literature, even about a single country, has expanded at least arithmetically and probably geometrically. This poses a real problem of reading time and of difficulties of synthesis. This is my perhaps feeble excuse for having taken so long to produce volume 4. (The other part of the excuse is that, as time went on, I became more involved in many other intellectual activities that competed with the time available to me to write volume 4.)

The second problem was to decide what would be the central theme of this volume. Given my previous analyses, it could not be the industrial revolution—nor could it be the creation of a capitalist system, since I believed that this had occurred earlier. It was also not the great democratic revolution(s), of either the French or the American variety, since I thought that the role of both kinds of revolutions was quite different from that most often ascribed to them. I decided that the key happening was to be located in the cultural consequences to the modern world-system as a whole of the French Revolution. I conceived of this as the creation of a geoculture for the world-system—that is, a set of ideas, values, and norms that were widely accepted throughout the system and that constrained social action thereafter.

As the reader will see, I consider that the French Revolution had legitimated the concept of the normality of political change and the idea that sovereignty lay not with the sovereign but with the people. The consequences of this pair of beliefs were manifold. The first was the creation, as a reaction to these newly widespread concepts, of the three modern ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism. The argument of the volume as a whole is that centrist liberalism was able to “tame” the other two ideologies and emerge triumphant in the course of the century. This then took the form of privileging the creation of liberal states, first of all in the two strongest states of the time—Great Britain and France. It took further form in stimulating the creation, and limiting the impact, of the major kinds of antisystemic movements (a new concept treated here). It is here that I treat the advances permitted by the concept of citizenship, and the illusions concerning the extent of these advantages. And finally, it took the form of encouraging and constraining the formation of the historical social sciences. The story as a whole runs from 1789 to 1914, or perhaps, one should better say, from 1789 to 1873/1914.

It took me a while to realize that this emphasis meant that three stories I intended to tell in this volume should be postponed to volume 5. They were the scramble for Africa and the rise of movements of national liberation; the U.S.-German economic and political rivalry for succession to Great Britain as the hegemonic power, and the ultimate triumph of the United States; and the incorporation of East Asia, its peripheralization, and its resurgence in the late twentieth century.

All three stories had their start somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. But one could not reasonably tell these stories as though they ended somehow in 1914. The nineteenth-century story was integrally linked to its continuation in the twentieth century. The year 1914 was not a turning point for any of the three stories per se. The essential part of each story was located in a sweeping curve of rise and decline, or decline and rise. In any case, I decided that each of these stories was a story of the “long” twentieth century, a story of America's century and not Britain's century. So I beg the reader's indulgence and patience.

If volume 5, as I project it now (but this may change in the writing), will go from 1873 to 1968/89, there will have to be, if I can last it out, a volume 6, whose theme will be the structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy and whose parameters would go from 1945/1968 to somewhere in the mid-twenty-first century—say, 2050. And then, I feel, we will be into a totally new situation. The modern world-system will have seen its definitive demise, ceding place to a successor or successors yet unknown, unknowable, and whose characteristics we cannot yet sketch.

Centrist Liberalism as Ideology

The French Revolution…is the shadow under which the whole nineteenth century lived.

—GEORGE WATSON (1973, 45)

In 1815, the most important new political reality for Great Britain, France, and the world-system was the fact that, in the spirit of the times, political change had become normal. “With the French Revolution, parliamentary reform became a doctrine as distinct from an expedient” (White, 1973, 73). Furthermore, the locus of sovereignty had shifted in the minds of more and more persons from the monarch or even the legislature to something much more elusive, the “people” (Billing-ton, 1980, 160–166; also 57–71). These were undoubtedly the principal geocultural legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. Consequently, the fundamental political problem that Great Britain, France, and the world-system had to face in 1815, and from then on, was how to reconcile the demands of those who would insist on implementing the concept of popular sovereignty exercising the normality of change with the desire of the notables, both within each state and in the world-system as a whole, to maintain themselves in power and to ensure their continuing ability to accumulate capital endlessly.

The name we give to these attempts at resolving what prima facie seems a deep and possibly unbridgeable gap of conflicting interests is ideology. Ideologies are not simply ways of viewing the world. They are more than mere prejudices and presuppositions. Ideologies are political metastrategies, and as such are required only in a world where political change is considered normal and not aberrant. It was precisely such a world that the capitalist world-economy had become under the cultural upheaval of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. It was precisely this world that developed the ideologies that served during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as both the handbooks of daily political activity and the credos justifying the mundane compromises of such activity.

Was the French Revolution inspired by liberal ideology, or was it rather the negation of liberal ideology? This was a central theme of the French (and worldwide) debate during the bicentennial of 1989. The question, however, is perhaps not very meaningful, because liberalism as an ideology is itself a consequence of the French Revolution, and not a description of its political culture.¹ The first ideological reaction to the French Revolution's transformation of the geoculture was in fact, however, not liberalism, but conservatism. Burke and de Maistre wrote about the Revolution immediately, in the heat of the events, in books that have remained founts of conservative ideology to this day. Of course, the concepts preceded the terms. The term conservative apparently first appeared only in 1818,² and the noun liberal was probably first used in 1810.³

Conservative ideology has been deeply tied to a vision of the French Revolution as the exemplar of the kind of deliberate political change that disrupts the slow-moving evolution of “natural” social forces. For conservatives, this disruptive process had a long and dubious heritage:

The French Revolution was but the culmination of the historical process of atomization that reached back to the beginning of such doctrines as nominalism, religious dissent, scientific rationalism, and the destruction of those groups, institutions and intellectual certainties which had been basic in the Middle Ages. (Nisbet, 1952, 168–169)

Conservative ideology was thus “reactionary” in the simple sense that it was a reaction to the coming of what we think of as modernity, and set itself the objective either of reversing the situation entirely (the hard version) or of limiting the damage and holding back as long as possible the changes that were coming (the more sophisticated version). The conservatives believed that, by imposing their “rational,” deductive schema on the political process, the partisans of revolution (or reform; it makes little difference in the conservative dogma) create turmoil, undo the wisdom of the ages, and thereby do social harm.

Like all ideologies, conservatism was first and foremost a political program. Conservatives knew full well that they had to hold on to or reconquer state power, that the institutions of the state were the key instrument needed to achieve their goals, When conservative forces returned to power in France in 1815, they baptized this event a “Restoration.” But as we shall see, things did not really go back to the status quo ante. Louis XVIII had to concede a “Charter,” and when Charles X tried to install a true reaction, he was ousted from power and in his place was put Louis-Philippe, who assumed the much more modern title “King of the French.”⁴

The ideal solution for conservatives would have been the total disappearance of movements reflecting liberal impulses. Barring that—it did not happen in 1815 and came to be recognized as utopian after 1848—the next best solution was to persuade legislators of the need for utmost prudence in undertaking any political change of great significance. The continuing political strength of conservatism would be located in the popular wariness that multiple disillusions with reforms would repeatedly instill in the “sovereign people.” On the other hand, conservatism's great weakness has always been that it was essentially a negative doctrine. “[Conservative doctrine] was born in reaction to the French Revolution….[I]t was thus born counterrevolutionary.”⁵ And counterrevolution has been in general even less popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than revolution; it is a label that has been an albatross for conservatives.

Conservatives felt, nonetheless, that they had an unassailable case. The greatest objection conservatives had to the French Revolution was the belief espoused by its partisans and theoreticians that all was possible and legitimate through politics. Conservatives argued, instead, for an organic conception of society, and the “radical inadequacy of the political as a final account of man.”⁶Conservatives supported the state insofar as it incarnated authority, but suspected the central state insofar as it might legislate. The consequence was a penchant for localism, in part because notables had greater strength at local levels and partly because inherently less could be legislated at that level.⁷To be sure, this antipolitical bias was not universal among those who were “counterrevolutionary”; it was merely dominant. Henry Kissinger makes a very cogent distinction between Burkean conservatism (which is what I have been describing here as conservatism) and the conservatism of Metternich:

To fight for conservatism in the name of historical forces, to reject the validity of the revolutionary question because of its denial of the temporal aspect of society and the social contract—this was the answer of Burke. To fight the revolution in the name of reason, to deny the validity of the question on epistemological grounds, as contrary to the structure of the universe—this was the answer of Metternich. The difference between these two positions is fundamental….

It was this rationalist conception of conservatism which imparted the rigidity to Metternich's policy….

It was thus that the Enlightenment retained deep into the nineteenth century its last champion, who judged actions by their “truth,” not by their success.⁸

Success. This was the clarion call of the liberals. But success in what? This is the key question we must address. Liberalism as an ideology, as opposed to liberalism as a political philosophy—that is, liberalism as a metastrategy vis-a-vis the demands of popular sovereignty, as opposed to liberalism as a metaphysics of the good society—was not born adult out of the head of Zeus. It was molded by multiple, often contrary, interests. To this day, the term liberalism evokes quite varied resonances. There is the classic “confusion” between so-called economic and so-called political liberalism. There is also the liberalism of social behavior, sometimes called libertarianism. This melange, this “confusion,” has served liberal ideology well, enabling it to secure maximal support.

Liberalism started ideological life on the left of the political spectrum, or at least on the center-left. Liberalism defined itself as the opposite of conservatism, on the basis of what might be called a “consciousness of being modern” (Minogue, 1963, 3). Liberalism proclaimed itself universalist.⁹Sure of themselves and of the truth of this new world-view of modernity, liberals sought to propagate their views and intrude the logic of their views within all social institutions, thereby ridding the world of the “irrational” leftovers of the past, To do this, they had to fight conservative ideologues, whom they saw as obsessed with fear of “free men”¹⁰—men liberated from the false idols of tradition.

Liberals believed, however, that progress, even though it was inevitable, could not be achieved without some human effort, without a political program. Liberal ideology was thus the belief that, in order for history to follow its natural course, it was necessary to engage in conscious, continual, intelligent reformism, in full awareness that “time was the universal friend, which would inevitably bring greater happiness to ever greater numbers” (Schapiro, 1949, 13).

After 1815, liberal ideology presented itself as the opponent of the conservative thrust,¹¹and as such was considered by conservatives to be “Jacobinical.” But as liberalism gained momentum, support, and authority as an ideology, its left credentials weakened; in some respects it even gained right credentials. But its destiny was to assert that it was located in the center. It had already been conceptualized in this way by Constant¹²in the eighteenth century. It was institutionalized as the centrist position in the nineteenth century. And it was still being celebrated as the “vital center” by Schlesinger (1962) in the mid-twentieth century.

To be sure, the center is merely an abstraction, and a rhetorical device. One can always locate oneself in a central position simply by defining the extremes as one wishes. Liberals are those who decided to do this as their basic political strategy. Faced with the normality of change, liberals would claim a position between the conservatives—that is, the right, who wanted to slow down the pace of normal change as much as possible—and the “democrats” (or radicals or socialists or revolutionaries)—that is, the left, who wanted to speed it up as much as possible. In short, liberals were those who wished to control the pace of change so that it occurred at what they considered to be an optimal speed. But could one really know what is the optimal speed? Yes, said the liberals, and their metastrategy was precisely geared to achieving this end.

Two emblematic figures arose in the development of this metastrategy: Guizot and Bentham. Guizot was a historian, a man of letters, and of course a politician. Bentham was a philosopher and an advocate of concrete legislative action. In the end, the eyes of both of them were focused on the state. Guizot himself defined modernity as “the substitution in government of intellectual means for material means, of ruse for force, Italian politics for feudal politics” (Guizot, 1846, 299). He said it began with Louis XI, and this may be so. But even if it were so, it became fully institutionalized only in the first half of the nineteenth century, precisely when Guizot was in the government of France.

Guizot sought a way to mute popular sovereignty without returning to the divine right of kings. He found it by claiming the existence of an “irresistible hand” of reason progressing through history. By arguing this more political version of the Smithian “invisible hand,” Guizot could establish, as a prior condition for the exercise of the right to popular sovereignty, the possession of “capacity,” defined as the “faculty of acting according to reason.”¹³Only if suffrage were limited to those having this capacity would it then be possible to have a “scientific policy” and a “rational government.” And only such a government would eliminate the triple menace of “the return of arbitrary government, the unloosing of popular passions, and social dissolution” (cited in Rosanvallon 1985, 255–256; see also 156–158). The reference to science is not casual, but fundamental. Manning (1976, 16, 21, 23) develops the links between liberal ideology and Newtonian science. He shows the derivation of what he argues are the three principles of liberal ideology from Newtonian thought: the principle of balance, the principle of spontaneous generation and circulation, and the principle of uniformity. First, the stability of the world “depend[s] upon its constituent parts remaining in balanced relationships.” Second, “any attempt to transform the self-moving society into the directed society must necessarily destroy the harmony and balance of its rational order.” Third, “we may expect democratic institutions to materialize in human societies whenever they reach the appropriate level of development, just as we may expect any physical phenomenon to materialize given the principle of its sufficient condition for its occurrence.”

In short, Guizot supported neither Louis XVI (or Charles X) nor Robespierre, for neither was a rational choice. And of the two, Guizot (and his epigones) probably worried about Robespierre and Rousseau more. “What is still generally called ‘liberalism' in the beginning of the nineteenth century was an attempt to conceive of politics against Rousseau. Revolutionary terror was the child of political voluntarism (artificialisme); everyone agreed with that analysis“ (Rosanvallon, 1985, 44).¹⁴

Guizot's reputation faded, sullied no doubt by his increasingly conservative role in the July Monarchy, and is only today being resuscitated by France's political neo-liberals. But Bentham's reputation as Great Britain's quintessential liberal has never ceased to be asserted (and acclaimed).¹⁵Guizot's triple menace was equally there for the Benthamites, of course, but they were perhaps even more adept at countering it.¹⁶It was the great French Anglophile and liberal Elie Halevy (1900, iii-iv) who pointed out how Bentham took a starting point actually not too different from that of Rousseau but had it end up not with revolution but with classic liberalism:

England, like France, had its century of liberalism: the century of the industrial revolution across the Channel was the equivalent of the century of the French Revolution; the utilitarian philosophy of the identity of interests that of the juridical and spiritualist philosophy of the rights of man. The interests of all individuals are identical. Each individual is the best judge of his own interests. Hence we ought to eliminate all artificial barriers which traditional institutions erected between individuals, all social constraints founded upon the presumed need to protect individuals against each other and against themselves. An emancipatory philosophy very different in its inspiration and in its principles but close in many of its practical applications to the sentimental philosophy of J.-J. Rousseau. The philosophy of the rights of man would culminate, on the Continent, in the Revolution of 1848; the philosophy of the identity of interests in England in the same period in the triumph of Manchesterian free trade concepts.

On the one hand, for Bentham, society was the “spontaneous product of the wills of its individual members [and therefore] a free growth in which the State had no part.” But at the very same time—and this is crucial for Bentham and liberalism—society was “a creation of the legislator, the offspring of positive law.” State action was therefore perfectly legitimate, “provided the State were a democratic State and expressed the will of the greatest number.”¹⁷

Bentham shared Guizot's penchant for scientific policy and rational government. The state was the perfect, neutral instrument of achieving the “greatest good of the greatest number.” The state therefore had to be the instrument of reform, even of radical reform, precisely because of the triple menace:

Bentham and the Benthamites…were never complacent about the condition of England. They were “Radical Reformers,” and they worked hard at their reforms: by working out detailed blueprints for them; by propaganda, agitation, intrigue, conspiracy; and if truth be told, by encouragement to revolutionary movements up to—but not beyond—the point where resort to physical force would be the next step.¹⁸

We come here to the heart of the question. Liberalism was never a metastrategy of antistatism, or even of the so-called nightwatchman state. Far from being contrary to laissez-faire, “the liberal state was itself a creation of the self-regulating market” (Polanyi, 1957, 3). Liberalism has always been in the end the ideology of the strong state in the sheep's clothing of individualism; or to be more precise, the ideology of the strong state as the only sure ultimate guarantor of individualism. Of course, if one defines individualism as egoism and reform as altruism, then the two thrusts are indeed incompatible. But if one defines individualism as maximizing the ability of individuals to achieve self-defined ends, and reform as creating the social conditions within which the strong can temper the discontent of the weak and simultaneously take advantage of the reality that the strong find it easier than the weak to realize their wills, then no inherent incompatibility exists. Quite the contrary!

Great Britain and France had been precisely the two states where relatively strong state machineries had already been created between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. But these states did not have a deep popular legitimacy, and the French Revolution had undermined what legitimacy they had. Nineteenth-century liberalism set itself the task of creating (re-creating, significantly increasing) this legitimacy and thereby cementing the strength of these states, internally and within the world-system.

Socialism was the last of the three ideologies to be formulated. Before 1848, one could hardly yet think of it as constituting a distinctive ideology. The reason was primarily that those who began after 1789 to think of themselves to the left of the liberals saw themselves everywhere as the heirs and partisans of the French Revolution, which did not really distinguish them in the first half of the nineteenth century from those who had begun to call themselves “liberals.”¹⁹Even in Great Britain, where the French Revolution was widely denounced and where “liberals” therefore laid claim to a different historical origin, the “radicals” (who were more or less the future “socialists”) seemed at first to be merely somewhat more militant liberals.

In fact, what particularly distinguished socialism from liberalism as a political program and therefore as an ideology was the conviction that the achievement of progress needed not merely a helping hand but a big helping hand, without which achieving progress would be a very slow process. The heart of their program, in short, consisted in accelerating the course of history. That is why the word revolution appealed to them more than reform, which seemed to imply merely patient, if conscientious, political activity and was thought to incarnate primarily a wait-and-see attitude.

In sum, three postures toward modernity and the “normalization” of change had evolved: conservatism, or circumscribe the danger as much as possible; liberalism, or achieve in due time the happiness of mankind as rationally as possible; and socialism/radicalism, or accelerate the drive for progress by struggling hard against the forces that were strongly resisting it. It was in the period 1815–1848 that the terms conservatism, liberalism, and socialism began to be widely used to designate these three postures.

Each posture, it should be noted, located itself in opposition to something else. For conservatives, the target was the French Revolution. For liberals, it was conservatism (and the ancien regime, whose revival the conservatives were thought to seek). And for socialists, it was liberalism that they were rejecting. It is this fundamentally critical, negative tone in the very definition of the ideologies that explains why there are so many versions of each ideology. Affirmatively, as a positive credo, many varied, even contradictory, propositions were put forward within each camp, each affirming itself as the true meaning of the ideology. The unity of each ideological family lay only in what they were against. This is no minor detail, since it was this negativity that succeeded in holding together the three camps for 150 years or so (at least until 1968).

Since ideologies are in fact political programs to deal with modernity, each one needs a “subject,” or a principal political actor. In the terminology of the modern world, this has been referred to as the question of sovereignty. The French Revolution asserted a crystal clear position on this matter: against the sovereignty of the absolute monarch, it had proclaimed the sovereignty of the “people.”

This new language of the sovereignty of the people is one of the great achievements of modernity. Even if for a century thereafter there were lingering battles against it, no one has since been able to dethrone this new idol, the “people.” But the victory has been hollow. There may have been universal agreement that the people constitute the sovereign, but from the outset there was no agreement about who were the “people.” Furthermore, on this delicate question none of the three ideologies has had a clear position, which has not stopped their supporters from refusing to admit the murkiness of their respective stances.

The position that seemingly was least equivocal was that of the liberals. For them, the “people” was the sum of all the “individuals” who are each the ultimate holder of political, economic, and cultural rights. The individual is the historic “subject” of modernity par excellence. One can credit the liberals at least with having debated extensively this question of who this individual is in whom sovereignty is located.

Conservatives and socialists ought in principle to have been debating this issue as well, since each proposed a “subject” quite different from the individual, but their discussion was far less explicit. If the “subject” is not the individual, who, then, is it? It is a bit difficult to discern. See, for example, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (in White, 1950, 28):

The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs.

If one didn't know that this was a text attacking French revolutionaries, one might have thought it was intended to denounce absolute monarchs. The matter becomes a bit clearer if we look at something Burke stated almost two decades earlier (1926 [1780], 357): “Individuals pass like shadows; but the commonwealth is fixed and stable.”

Bonald's approach was quite different, because he insisted on the crucial role of the Church. His view shares, however, one element common to all the varieties of conservative ideology: the importance they confer on social groups such as the family, guilds (corporations), the Church, the traditional “orders”—which become for the conservatives the “subjects” that have the right to act politically. In other words, conservatives gave priority to all those groups that might be considered “traditional” (and thus incarnating continuity) but rejected identifying conservatism with any “totality” as a political actor. What has never in fact been clear in conservative thought is how one can decide which groups incarnate continuity. After all, there have always been arguments around contending royal lineages.

For Bonald (1988 [1802], 87), the great error of Rousseau and Montesquieu had been precisely to “imagine…a pure state of nature antecedent to society.” Quite the contrary, “the true nature of society…is what society, public society, is at present.”²⁰But this definition was a trap for its author, because it so legitimated the present that it virtually forbade a “restoration.” Precise logic, however, has never been the forte or main interest of conservative polemics. Rather, conservatives were concerned to issue warnings about the likely behavior of a majority constituted by adding up individual votes. Their historical subject was a far less active one than that of the liberals. In their eyes, good decisions are taken slowly and rarely, and such decisions have largely already been taken.

If conservatives refused to give priority to the individual as historical subject in favor of small, so-called traditional groups, socialists refused to do so in favor of that large group that is the whole of the people. Analyzing socialist thought in its early period, G. D. H. Cole (1953, 2) remarked:

The “socialists” were those who, in opposition to the prevailing stress on the claims of the individual, emphasised the social element in human relations and sought to bring the social question to the front in the great debate about the rights of man let loose on the world by the French Revolution and by the accompanying revolution in the economic field.

But if it is difficult to know which individuals constitute the people, and even more difficult to know of what “groups” the people are constituted, the most difficult thing of all is to know how to define the general will of the whole people. How could one know what it is? And to begin with, whose views should we take into account, and how?

In short, what the three ideologies offered us was not a response to the question of who the appropriate historical subject is, but simply three starting points in the quest for who incarnates the sovereignty of the people: the so-called free individual, for the liberals; the so-called traditional groups, for the conservatives; and the entire membership of “society,” for the socialists.

The people as “subject” has had as its primary “object” the state. It is within the state that the people exercises its will, that it is sovereign. Since the nineteenth century, however, we have also been told that the people form a “society.” How might we reconcile state and society, which form the great intellectual antinomy of modernity?

The most astonishing thing is that when we look at the discourses of the three ideologies in this regard, they all seem to take the side of society against the state. Their arguments are familiar. For staunch liberals, it was crucial to keep the state out of economic life and to reduce its role in general to a minimum: “Laissez-faire is the nightwatchman doctrine of state” (Watson, 1973, 68). For conservatives the terrifying aspect of the French Revolution was not only its individualism but also and particularly its statism. The state becomes tyrannical when it questions the role of the intermediate groups that command the primary loyalty of people—the family, the Church, the guilds.²¹And we are familiar with the famous characterization by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1976 [1848], 486):

[T]he bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

These negatives views of the state did not stop each of the three ideologies from complaining that this state, which was the object of their critique, was out of their control and said to be in the hands of their ideological opponents. In point of fact, each of the three ideologies turned out to be in great need of the services of the state to promote its own program. Let us not forget that an ideology is first and foremost a political strategy. Socialists have long been under attack for what has been said to be their incoherence in that most of them, despite their antistatist rhetoric, have always striven to increase state activity in the short run.

But were conservatives more seriously antistatist? Were they regularly opposed to achieving reforms by state action? Not at all, in reality. For we must take into account the question of the “decline of values,” which conservatives have seen as one of the central consequences of modernity. To reverse the perceived current decadence of society, to restore society to the purer state in which it existed before, they have always needed the state. It has been said of one of the great English conservatives of the 1840s, Sir Robert Peel, that “he believed that a constitution issuing in a strong executive was essential to the anarchic age in which he lived” (Gash, 1951, 52). This comment in fact applies more generally to the practice of conservative politicians.

Note the way in which Halévy (1949, 42–43) explains the evolution of the conservative position vis-à-vis the state during the “Tory reaction” in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century: The analysis is limpid. Conservatives were always ready to strengthen the state structure to the degree necessary to control popular forces pushing for change. This was in fact implicit in what was stated by Lord Cecil (1912, 192): “[A]s long as State action does not involve what is unjust or oppressive, it cannot be said that the principles of Conservatism are hostile to it.”

In 1688 and in the years following, the King regarded himself, and was regarded by public opinion, as the Sovereign. It was always to be feared that he would make his sovereignty absolute, and the independence of his authority enjoyed by all the powers of the State constituted a deliberate limitation of the prerogative, a system of constitutional guarantees against royal despotism. At the opening of the nineteenth century it was the people who in America, in France, in England even, had asserted, or were about to assert, the claim to be supreme; it was therefore against the people that the three powers now maintained their independence. It was no longer the Whigs, it was the Tories who supported institutions whose significance had changed, while their form remained the same. And now the King presided over the league formed by the three powers for the defence of their autonomy against the new claimant for sovereignty.

The analysis is limpid. Conservatives were always ready to strengthen the state structure to the degree necessary to control popular forces pushing for change. This was in fact implicit in what was stated by Lord Cecil (1912, 192): “[A]s long as State action does not involve what is unjust or oppressive, it cannot be said that the principles of Conservatism are hostile to it.”

Well then, did not at least the liberals—champions of individual freedom and of the free market—remain hostile to the state? Not at all! From the outset, liberals were caught in a fundamental contradiction. As defenders of the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the state, they were pushed in the direction of universal suf-frage—the only guarantee of a democratic state. But thereupon the state became the principal agent of all reforms intended to liberate the individual from the social constraints inherited from the past. This in turn led liberals to the idea of putting positive law at the service of utilitarian objectives.

Once again, Halévy (1950: 99–100) clearly pointed out the consequences:

The “utilitarian” philosophy was not solely, nor even perhaps fundamentally, a liberal system; it was at the same time a doctrine of authority which looked to the deliberate and in a sense scientific interference of Government to produce a harmony of interests. As his ideas developed, Bentham, who as a young man had been an advocate of “enlightened despotism,” was converted to democracy. But he had reached that position by what we may call a long jump, which carried him at a bound over a number of political doctrines at which he might have been expected to halt—aristocracy, a mixed constitution, the balance of powers, and the doctrine that the statesman's aim should be to free the individual by weakening the authority of the Government and as far as possible dividing its powers. In Bentham's view, when the authority of the state had been reconciled by a universal or at least a very wide suffrage with the interests of the majority there was no further reason to hold it suspect. It became an unmixed blessing.

And thereupon, the conservatives became now the upholders of the genuine liberal tradition: the old system of aristocratic self-government, with its unpaid officials, against a new system of bureaucratic despotism administered by salaried officials.

Is it possible, then, to think that Benthamism was in fact a deviation from liberalism, whose optimal expression is to be found rather in the classical economists, the theoreticians of “laissez-faire”? No, because we shall see that, when the first Factory Acts were passed in Great Britain, all the leading classical economists of the time supported the legislation—a phenomenon spelled out (and approved) by none other than Alfred Marshall (1921, 763–764), the father of neoclassical economics. Since that time, the great bureaucratic state has never stopped growing, and its expansion has been sponsored by successive liberal governments. When Hobhouse wrote his book on liberalism as an answer to that of Lord Cecil on conservatism, he justified this expansion in this way: “The function of State coercion is to overcome individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State” (1911, 146).

No doubt the justifications that each ideology invoked to explain its somewhat embarrassing statism were different. For socialists, the state was implementing the general will. For conservatives, the state was protecting traditional rights against the general will. For liberals, the state was creating the conditions permitting individual rights to flourish. But in each case, the bottom line was that the state was being strengthened in relation to society, while the rhetoric called for doing exactly the opposite.

All this muddle and intellectual confusion involved in the theme of the proper relation of state and society permits us to understand why we have never been entirely sure how many distinct ideologies came into existence in the nineteenth century. Three? Two? Only one? I have just reviewed the traditional arguments that there were three. Let us now look at how one can reduce the three to two.

It seems clear that in the period from the French Revolution to the revolutions of 1848, the “only clear cleavage” for contemporaries was between those who accepted progress as inevitable and desirable, and thus “were globally favorable” to the French Revolution, and those who favored the Counter-Revolution, which took its stand against this disruption of values, considering it as profoundly wrong (Agulhon, 1992, 7). Thus the political struggle was between liberals and conservatives; those who called themselves radicals or Jacobins or republicans or socialists were regarded as simply a more militant variety of liberals. In The Country Parson (Le Curé de village), Balzac (1897 [1839], 79) has a bishop exclaim:

Miracles are called for here among an industrial population, where sedition has spread itself and taken root far and wide; where religious and monarchical doctrines are regarded with a critical spirit; where nothing is respected by a system of analysis derived from Protestantism by the so-called Liberalism of to-day, which is free to take another name tomorrow.

Tudesq reminds us (1964, 125–126) that in 1840 a Legitimist newspaper, l'Orleanais, denounced another newspaper, Le Journal de Loiret, as a “liberal, Protestant, Saint-Simonian, Lamennaisian paper.” This was not completely wild, since, as Simon notes (1956, 330): “[t]he Idea of Progress, in fact, constituted the core and central inspiration of Saint-Simon's entire philosophy of thought” (cf. Manning, 1976, 83–84).

Furthermore, this liberal-socialist alliance has roots in liberal and egalitarian thought of the eighteenth century, in the struggle against absolute monarchy (see Meyssonier, 1989, 137–156). It continued to be nourished in the nineteenth century by the ever-increasing interest of both ideologies in productivity, which each saw as the basic requirement for a social policy in the modern state. “Both Saint-Simonism and economic liberalism evolved in the direction of what we call today economic rationalisation” (Mason, 1931, 681). With the rise of utilitarianism, it might have seemed that the alliance could become a marriage. Brebner speaks with sympathy of the “collectivist” side of Bentham, concluding (1948, 66), “What were the Fabians but latter-day Benthamites?” And he adds that John Stuart Mill was already in 1830 “what might be called a liberal socialist.”

On the other hand, after 1830 a clear distinction began to emerge between liberals and socialists, and after 1848 it became quite deep. At the same time, 1848 marked the beginning of a reconciliation between liberals and conservatives. Hobsbawm (1962, 117) thinks that the great consequence of 1830 was to make mass politics possible by allowing the political triumph in France, England, and especially Belgium (and even partially in Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal) of a “moderate” liberalism, which consequently “split moderates from radicals.” Can-timori, analyzing the issue from an Italian perspective, thinks that the question of a divorce was open until 1848. Until then, he notes (1948, 288), “the liberal movement…had rejected no path: neither a call for insurrection nor reformist political action.” It was only after 1848 that a divorce was consummated between these two tactics.

What is crucial to note is that after 1848 socialists stopped referring to Saint-Simon. The socialist movement began to organize itself around Marxist ideas. The plaint was no longer merely poverty, susceptible to repair by reform, but the dehu-manization caused by capitalism, whose solution required overturning it completely (see Kolakowski, 1978, 222).

At this very time, conservatives began to be conscious of the utility of reformism for conservative objectives. Sir Robert Peel, immediately following the Reform Bill of 1832, issued an electoral manifesto, the Tamworth Manifesto, which became celebrated as a doctrinal statement. It was considered by contemporaries as “almost revolutionary,” not merely because it announced the acceptance of the Reform Bill as “a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question,” but because this position was announced to the people rather than to Parliament, which caused a great “sensation” at the time (Halevy, 1950, 178).²²

In the process, conservatives noted their convergence with liberals on the importance of protecting property, even though what interested them about property was primarily the fact that it represented continuity and thus served as the foundation for family life, the Church, and other social solidarities (see Nisbet, 1966, 26). But beyond this practical convergence, there was the concrete menace of real revolution—a fear they shared, as Lord Cecil noted (1912, 64): “For it is an indispensable part of the effective resistance to Jacobinism that there should be moderate reform on conservative lines.”

Finally, we should not entirely neglect the third possible reduction of three to two—conservatives and socialists joining hands in opposition to liberals—even if this seems the least likely theoretically. The “conservative” character of Saint-Simonian socialism, its roots in Bonaldian ideas, has often been noted (see Manuel, 1956, 320; Iggers, 1958a, 99). The two camps could come together around their anti-individualist reflex. Equally, a liberal like von Hayek denounced the “socialist” character of the conservative Carlyle's thought. This time, it was the “social” side of conservative thought that was in question. Lord Cecil (1912, 169) did not in fact hesitate to declare this affinity openly:

It is often assumed that Conservatism and Socialism are directly opposed. But this is not completely true. Modern Conservatism inherits the traditions of Toryism which are favourable to the activities and the authority of the State. Indeed Mr. Herbert Spencer attacked Socialism as being in fact the revival of Toryism.

The consequence of liberal-socialist alliances was the emergence of a sort of socialist liberalism, ending up with two varieties of liberalism. The conservative-socialist alliances, more improbable, were originally merely passing tactics. But one might wonder whether one might not think of the various “totalitarianisms” of the twentieth century as a more lasting form of this alliance, in the sense that they instituted a form of traditionalism that was both populist and social. If so, these totalitarianisms were yet another way in which liberalism remained center stage, as the antithesis of a Manichean drama. Behind this facade of intense opposition to liberalism, one finds as a core component of the demands of all these regimes the same faith in progress via productivity that has been the gospel of the liberals. In this way we might conclude that even socialist conservatism (or conservative socialism) was, in a way, a variant of liberalism—its diabolical form. In which case, would it not be correct to conclude that since 1789 there had only been one true ideology—liberalism—which has displayed its colors in three major versions?

Of course such a statement has to be spelled out in historical terms. If during the period 1789–1848 there was a great ideological struggle between conservatism and liberalism, conservatism failed in the end to achieve a finished form, as we shall see. After 1848, liberalism would achieve cultural hegemony in the world-system and constitute the fundamental core of the geoculture. In the rest of the long nineteenth century, liberalism dominated the scene without serious opposition. It is true that Marxism tried to constitute a socialist ideology as an independent pole, but it was never entirely able to succeed. The story of the triumph of liberalism in the nineteenth century is the theme of this volume.

Constructing the Liberal State, 1815–1830

[The French Revolution] overthrew or terrified the princes, disconcerted the philosophers, changed the form of problems.

—ELIE HALÉVY (1901A, 276)

During the half-century following the French Revolution from the fall of the Bastille to the final collapse of English Chartism, the danger of revolution was never entirely absent from any European country.

—FRANK O. DARVALL (1934, 304)

Great Britain and France fought a long battle for hegemony within the capitalist world-economy from 1651 to 1815.¹ It was only in 1815 that Great Britain at last won its definitive victory. At once, and with a celerity that is remarkable, the two countries entered into a tacit but very profound alliance in the effort to institutionalize a new political model for states located in the core zones (or aspiring to locate there). This model was that of the liberal state, which was a key element in the legitimation of the capitalist world-economy in the era of popular sovereignty.

The alliance between Great Britain and France was based not only on the fact that they faced somewhat comparable internal pressures but also on the fact that they needed each other in order to achieve this end. They needed each other for mutual support and learning in the construction of the model, to be sure. They needed each other also to maintain a geopolitical balance in their mutual inter-est.² But most of all, they needed to present a common standard to the rest of he world in order more effectively to sweep away alternative models and turn all eyes toward theirs. Thus began the complicit although quite often less than totally cordial entente. The crucial period for this process ran from 1815 to 1875, after which the model was firmly established and would remain so for at least a century, enabling the capitalist world-economy to maintain a certain structural stability amid the very stormy turmoil to which it would be subjected. Still, on the morrow of Waterloo there seemed to be very few advocates of the liberal state in places of power, even in Great Britain and France. Indeed, the very term did not yet exist.

Construction of the modern state, located within and constrained by an interstate system, had been a constituent element of the modern world-system from its beginnings in the long sixteenth century. The concern of rulers had been to strengthen the state in two ways: to strengthen its authority—that is, its capacity to make efficacious decisions within its frontiers; and to strengthen its world power—that is, its capacity to impose its will on other states and diminish their possibility of doing the converse. There had long been much debate about the proper distribution of decision making within the state: how much of it should be concentrated in the head of state as sovereign, how much shared with legislative bodies. For three centuries, however, the debate remained one of distribution of power among branches of government. It is true that in 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in the name of “we, the people”, but it was not at all clear (even to the signers of this declaration) how seriously one was to take the idea of popular sovereignty, and what its implications were. For the world-system as a whole, it was “the French Revolution [that] let the genie out of the bottle. After 1789 it was impossible to keep political debate within a privileged circle of propertied interests” (Evans, 1983, 66). The French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath made the concept of popular sovereignty one with which every government in the modern world had to come to terms, and none more so than the governments of the two rivals for hegemonic power. The question in 1815 was whether 1789–1815 was merely a sort of revolutionary interlude, to be interred by a “Restoration” and a “Tory reaction,” or whether the concept of popular sovereignty would have an enduring political impact. To the surprise of the restorers of global order, it was an idea that had taken deeper root than they had realized. They could not inter it, whatever they wished. The specter that haunted the notables³ was that of democracy. The distinction between the liberal state and democracy was, in Max Beloff's words, “the most important distinction in nineteenth-century politics.”⁴ Democracy, in nineteenth-century usage, meant taking popular sovereignty seriously. The notables were not, and have never been, ready to do that. It was the realization of this new reality that would give birth to that extraordinary invention of the nineteenth century—the political ideology.

In 1789, no one really knew what transferring sovereignty from the monarch to the people really meant. They thought it had something to do with limiting the arbitrary power of the executive authority associated with the concept of an absolute monarch. And so it did, but that done, there was still the need to find a legitimation for the decisions of passing coalitions of sundry political leaders. Taking seriously the slogan of popular sovereignty has seemed ever since to all those with effective political power to be threatening, to suggest the unpleasant prospect of submission to the vagaries of uninformed capricious masses. The problem for the notables, therefore, was how to construct a structure that would seem to be popular and in fact was not, but would nonetheless retain the support of a significant proportion of the “people.” That would not be easy. The liberal state was to be the historic solution.

In 1815, looking back on the long adventure from 1789 to 1815, in terms of internal social tensions in France and Great Britain, what did one see? Michel Vovelle (1993, 7) said of an essay of his about the French Revolution that it would be pretentious to entitle it “the birth of a nation” and that instead, “more modestly,” he would call it “the discovery of politics.”⁵ But is this different? What else do we mean by a nation except that within which the pursuit of politics by its nationals is considered to be legitimate? In a profound sense, the sovereignty of the people is a concept that incarnates the legitimacy of politics. And therefore the debate about the implementation of this concept is a debate about the limits of the political—not only about who may be involved and how they may be involved, but also about what matters are subject to the collective decision of the nation. France, in this sense, had a rude beginning as a nation. But so did the rest of Europe. For, in effect, “the invader” Napoleon “with his ideas of emancipation and social liberation…spread the concept of the nation” (Ponteil, 1968, vii)⁶ and spread with it France's rude beginnings. The question for France, as for all the other new nations, became what difference the politics of a nation would make for the lives of ordinary people, as opposed to their lives when politics did not exist and decisions were subject to the intrigues of a court. It was intended to make a profound difference. Still, there are those who would come to view the Revolution, as did Elton (1923, 7), as having been “primarily a movement for order; a movement against chaos.” In that case, one could say of Napoleon (but not only of him) “indifferently that he ‘organized the ancien régime' or that he consolidated the Revolution: for the two processes were identical” (Elton, 1923, 69).

In terms of the politics of the period following 1815, there were two main political legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic era. One was the image of the Terror, which informs French and world politics to this day—a Terror that is inextricably associated in the minds of many with democracy. For a long time, the Terror was in fact the chief argument the notables used against the extension of the suffrage. “In the name of this experience, men like Louis Guizot or Benjamin Constant refused the extension of political rights to the needy classes” (Donzelot, 1984, 21–22). The second legacy, which was intimately tied to the first, was the unceasing drive to seek to exclude the lower strata from the political arena of the nation entirely.

The story was not really very different in Great Britain. We often think of absolutism as having disappeared in Great Britain much earlier than in France. But in fact it is only at this very time that the king's power to make and unmake ministries—that is, to control the executive—was undone in practice. The French Revolution, it is true, drew a modest amount of support at first from the so-called English Jacobins, but they were relatively fainthearted, “eschew[ing] revolutionary means” (Thomis and Holt, 1979, 11).⁷ Rather, as Evans says (1983, 23), “it may seem bizarre, and it is certainly too simple, to argue that [it was] Pitt the Younger [in office from 1783 to 1801] who destroyed the powers of the monarchy, but the observation contains a grain of truth.”⁸

The period of the revolutionary-Napoleonic wars was a period of repression of the working class in Great Britain. There were the Anti-Combination Acts of 1799–1800. These were, of course, not totally new. There had been such laws as early as 1339, but they had been largely neglected. George argues that these were, too.⁹ Indeed, she argues (1936, 177), the acts were “in practice a very negligible instrument of oppression.” But if so, one must wonder why Pitt bothered, and the answer of course it that they were passed “principally against the background of Jacobin agitation” (Evans, 1983, 158), an agitation we have already noted to have been exaggerated by the government of the time.

It was less the immediacy of the threat to order than the fear that a serious threat might be in gestation. Clearly, there was an ideological message being conveyed to the urban workers, who were beginning to take too seriously the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The message became more concrete with the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1818, but from the point of view of the authorities, the events that led to Peterloo were in fact merely the culminating acts of a steady stream of civil disobedience going back to 1789, which had by 1818 given Manchester “a particular reputation for turbulence in the eyes of contemporaries” (Read, 1958, 93). Particularly perturbing to the notables was the fact that the character of the protest movements was changing. Local food riots, still the dominant mode of protest in the late eighteenth century, had ceased to be the preferred form. Rather, popular movements were becoming “national in scope and acquiring organization….[They were] increasingly identified [after 1800] with the new industrial districts” (Thomis and Holt, 1977, 29). The Luddites, despite the fact that their slogans were seemingly backward-looking, because anti-industrial in tonality, alarmed the notables not because they seemed to be against progress or for the violence in itself but primarily because of their demonstration of the “remarkable capacity for organization within working-class ranks.”¹⁰ As a consequence, the Luddites united both Tory and Whig against “working-class Jacobinism” (Thomis, 1970, 174).

It is not accidental that this period of affirmation of popular sovereignty and therefore of nationalism led directly to the attempt to justify the exclusion of the working class from the right to participate, on the excuse that they were not yet prepared for it. The upper strata were willing to sacrifice even their own hedonism in order to validate this argument. The eighteenth-century aristocratic culture in England had been “expansive, bucolic, and roistering,” permitting lavish entertainment, licentiousness, and alcoholism. The turn of the nineteenth century was the epoch of the rise of the Evangelicals, preaching “regularity, self-discipline and moderation in personal habits” (Evans, 1983, 46). The notables began to change their own behavior (institutionalized later as Victorianism), thereby allowing the Evangelicals to make working-class conversion implicitly become the gateway of resocialization, before whose conclusion there could be no thought of extending political rights or social acceptance.

The demand was paternalistic, to be sure. But we must see that it was merely the replacement of a more expensive form of paternalism by a less expensive form. The same period was the one in which the Elizabethan social security system (wage regulation, poor laws) was being repealed as “anachronistic and impractical”:

By the end of the French Wars paternalism sanctioned by legislation was dead; relations between masters and men were defended “objectively” by market forces. A decade before the frontal attack on tariffs, it was the first triumph of the new political economy and a talisman for the new age. (Evans, 1983, 44)

This demand of a prior resocialization, a transformation of the “moral order,” as a way of postponing participation in the political rights that went with popular sovereignty was voiced not only in relation to Great Britain's working classes but also as a requirement for the unwashed, dangerous classes of what we would today call the Third World or the South. The same Methodists who led the evangelical thrust internally were the first Christian group to organize (in 1787) “a regular system of foreign missions” (Halévy, 1949a, 1:446).¹¹ This was also the moment of the rise of the abolitionist movement. There were of course many economic as well as humanitarian motives behind the pressure within Great Britain for the abolition of both slavery and the slave trade.¹² However, what we note here is the cultural message. Wilberforce's first bill had been introduced in 1789. At this time, the anti-slavery movement had a substantial “radical following” and was profiting from the general revolutionary upheaval. But the Jacobin phase of the Revolution “divided [British] abolitionist ranks” and provoked a “counter-revolutionary mobilisation,” which set back the movement. Ten years later, the abolitionist movement was able to revive within a much more conservative climate, precisely because it was seen as “not so much the most urgent, as the least controversial reform that could be undertaken” (Blackburn, 1988, 147, 295). This conservatization of the message can best be understood within the context of the major change in British attitudes toward their “subject races” that was occurring at just this time. As Bayly (1989, 7) notes:

Between 1780 and 1820,…Asians, Eurasians, Africans and even non-British and non-Protestant Europeans were widely excluded from positions of authority in government [in the colonies], while steps were taken to decontaminate the springs of British executive power from the influence of native corruption. Ironically, the growing and orchestrated contempt for Asian, African and even European subordinates was derived in part from the very same humanitarian drives which saw the abolition of the slave trade and the beginnings of the moves for the emancipation of the slaves. It was morally necessary to bring slaves back from social death into civil society. But if so, the hierarchy of civil society must be closely defined both through institutions and by an ideology which derived from the idea that cultures attained “civilisation” by stages of moral awakening and material endeavour. The “discovery” of the urban poor and the criminal classes in [Great] Britain were part of a very similar project and undertaken by the same civil and religious agencies.¹³

Great Britain and France had been precisely the two states where relatively strong state machineries had already been created between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. But these states did not have a deep popular legitimacy, and the French Revolution had undermined whatever legitimacy they had had. Nineteenth-century liberalism set itself the task of creating (re-creating, significantly increasing) this legitimacy and thereby cementing the strength of these states, internally and within the world-system.

Of course, Great Britain and France did not find themselves in quite the same economic situation in 1815. Indeed, in some ways their economic conditions had come to be sharply in contrast. By the end of the Napoleonic wars,

Britain had been made safe from invasion and had developed productivity, technical skills, and financial strength. Instead of a debtor, it had become practically the sole creditor country in the world. In the course of a long and exhausting struggle, France, then the greatest power on the continent of Europe, and its reluctant allies, had been cut off from the expanding overseas world and impoverished. (Condliffe, 1951, 203)¹⁴

To be sure, the end of the Napoleonic wars ended Great Britain's “abnormal [wartime] development in agriculture, shipbuilding, and in the re-export trade,” and these branches went into a “severe and chronic depression” (Rostow, 1942, 18).¹⁵But Great Britain simply placed a greater emphasis on domestic investment in the period 1815–1850, making what Rostow (1942, 22) terms an “incredibly easy” adjustment.¹⁶

The gap in industrial production between Great Britain and its neighbors on the Continent grew bigger.¹⁷ But then the gap with France (and Belgium, and perhaps some others) began to close, such that, somewhere between 1835 and 1850, it virtually disappeared.¹⁸ Nonetheless, Great Britain would continue to be dominant in world trade (i.e., trade beyond northwestern Europe) for another quarter century at least,¹⁹ a dominance Great Britain would maintain by its loans of capital abroad.²⁰ “[T]he contribution made by foreign trade and foreign investment to the consumption levels attained by British families” (O'Brien and Keyder, 1978, 63) essentially explains the higher standard of living that Great Britain was to maintain over France throughout the nineteenth century, despite the rough parity of the two countries in per capita domestic commodity output.

Thus, the conventional view of early nineteenth-century Great Britain as the “workshop of the world”²¹ is coming under a certain amount of sniper attack. Already in 1934, Darvall (1934, 12) had argued that “England in 1811 was still largely a rural and agricultural country.”²² This theme was renewed by Samuel (1977, 19) some forty years later:

The most complete triumph of the machine was in the cotton trade of industrial Lancastershire. Elsewhere its progress was more halting, and there were major sectors of the economy…where down to the 1870s steam power made very little impression at all….Even in textiles, the progress of mechanisation was uneven.²³

If mechanization was less widespread and advanced than our conventional imagery has it, how then did Great Britain achieve its remarkable industrial growth? Recent scholarship is even questioning how remarkable it was, or at least whether the growth was quite as great as previous scholars (such as Walther Hoffmann, Phyllis Deane, and W. A. Cole) had led us to believe. By recalculations based on occupational data of the 1841 census, Harley (1982, 267; see also 285) concludes that this growth was “a third lower” than they had asserted for the period 1770–1815. And Bairoch (1962, 318, 323) asserts that the rate of growth in the nineteenth century of Great Britain (also of France and the United States) was less than 2 percent per annum. Bairoch calls our impression that it was higher “a great exaggeration” having its origin at a time when the 1930s theory of slow growth in mature economies was very influential, and which consequently led to backward overestimates.²⁴

Still, it would be dangerous to go to the other extreme and lose sight of Britain's relative strength. The revisionist analyses enable us to see Britain's weaknesses despite her strength, and therefore the political dilemmas that the government faced even at this time of relative strength in the world-economy. The basic problem for the core countries in the period 1815–1873 was that growth led to a decline in prices,²⁵ and in particular a decline in industrial prices relative to prices of raw materials (Markovitch, 1966, 228–229). From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, cost control for producers focused on the large role of wages in the total price. A combination of repression and mechanization was used to reduce these costs, successfully. These techniques had in fact succeeded too well. For this had the negative consequences of both stimulating political turbulence and leading to the relative decline on the world market of industrial prices. It was only by means of the creation of the liberal state that this dilemma was overcome and capitalist producers in the core zones could benefit from a restored internal order and a return to favorable terms of trade. The key mechanism utilized by the liberal state was a shift in the central focus of cost control from the domestic front to the periphery—a process incarnated in the colonial expansions of the last third of the nineteenth century.

But until that happened, Great Britain in particular, and western Europe in general, had to live with the dilemmas of deflation, particularly acute from 1815 to the late 1840s. Wage-workers were hurting, since wage levels went down both absolutely and relatively.²⁶ Agricultural producers were hurting, since there was a “steady fall in English wheat prices in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century” (Fairlie, 1969, 105).²⁷

Were even British industrialists doing all that well? We have already noted that their initial edge as of 1815 over western Europe, a quite significant one, seemed to fritter away by 1850, not to mention the emergence of Germany and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The profitability of British industry risked being ephemeral. Alternatives needed to be secured, and were. If British hegemony in the world-system served to create any long-lasting economic advantage, it did so by making possible the remarkable growth in British foreign investments, “one of the most important facts of British economic development in the nineteenth century and by no means a minor one in world affairs” (Imlah, 1952, 222).

France, of course, seemed, especially to the industrialists, to be in even more difficult straits. France did, to be sure, have a few advantages. Its technical education, thanks to the Revolution and Napoleon, flourished and was considered to be the best in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. It could export its technical and commercial expertise (see Cameron, 1957a, 245–246; 1961). And its industrial base did steadily expand, as we have seen. Still, it has long been thought that France's industrialization, and hence its competitive edge in the world market, had been impeded by the slow growth of the population, and by the particularly large role of small as opposed to large industry.²⁸ This view has been challenged by Nye (1987, 650, 668), who has argued that small size was in fact a “rational response to prevailing economic conditions and in no way hampered the process of French industrialization,” since “by any standard the returns to scale [were] rather low.” And Gille (1959b, 163) has argued that there was more large industry than has been thought. Indeed, he locates the birth of large-scale capitalist industry in France in precisely the period 1815–1848.

Did not, however, Great Britain and France take opposite stances on the crucial question of free trade in the world-economy? The answer is less evident than we have been led to believe. In the first place,

[i]n 1815, [Great] Britain was still a protectionist power and the state played an important role in directing foreign trade and overseas expansion. Tariff protection was extended not only to agriculture but also to [Great] Britain's growing manufacturing industries. Severe restrictions were placed upon the emigration of skilled labour and the export of machinery. (Evans, 1983, 12)

In the second place, quite aside from government protection, British industries were “riddled with price-rings or equivalent arrangements, often only on a regional basis but sometimes on a national basis” (Cain, 1980, 20). In the third place, British industrialists, including those in Manchester, were not at all unequivocally in favor of free trade. As late as the 1840s, free trade “was seen as a weapon in [the] commercial war [with other countries], and when it did not seem to answer [the needs of winning this war] it was not supported” (Evans, 1983, 20).²⁹

And finally, Imlah (1949, 307–309) observes that British protectionism was at “its worst” in its last years:

It was so much more severe in its effects after the Napoleonic Wars than in the preceding infant period of British industrialism that it constituted virtually a new system….

Tested by real [i.e., not “official”] values, British customs duties at the end of the eighteenth century were very moderate….The compelling problem [which explained the considerable rise in customs duties in the early nineteenth century] was revenues.

Imlah argues that these duties were sufficiently severe that, by reducing imports significantly, they affected the purchasing power of potential customers. And since international trade was essential to Britain's economic health, her “fiscal system [was throwing] her international economy out of balance.”³⁰

Perhaps some of this protectionism was for show; it was surely not all strictly enforced.³¹ But it tarnishes the image of the centrality of free trade in British policy, at least before 1850, especially when we put it in relation to the reality, and not the theory, of French protectionism. French tariff rates were in fact “substantially lower” than British rates for the whole period 1800–1840, despite the perception that the opposite was true. Nye (1991, 25; 26, table 1; 42) explains this misperception triply: by the attention the world has given Repeal of the Corn Laws; by the fact that analysts took into account only certain industries instead of the pattern of the economy as a whole; and by the fact that the British tended to talk free trade while the French tended to talk protectionism, even under Napoleon III. But, Nye says, in fact “the traditional stories of free trade counterpoising a liberal [Great] Britain against a protectionist France, reluctantly dragged into a world of more enlightened commercial policies, must now be seen as false.” Indeed, Imlah, himself a great believer in the economic merits of free trade, explains (1958, 123) the deficiencies of Great Britain's economic performance during this period precisely by the relative absence of free trade:

In many respects the first half of the nineteenth century should have been bonanza times for British trade. The technical efficiency of her increasingly mechanized industries, the possibilities of developing demand at home and abroad for her coal and for her machinery, both more freely exportable after 1825, the potentialities of her merchant marine and business services and the demand for her capital created an opportunity with few parallels in economic history. The opportunity was not finally realized under the high protectionism of the postwar years.³²

This false contrast between Great Britain and France³³ is the background against which we should review another revisionist discussion—that concerning the presumed slowness of industrialization of France,³⁴ or the asserted “lateness” of “take-off” in France.³⁵ O'Brien and Keyder (1978), running a series of comparisons of Great Britain and France for the period 1781–1913, found the following: Per capita domestic commodity output was roughly equal. Wage levels were markedly lower in France, but since fewer persons were wage-workers, this tells us little about average level of earnings. British labor productivity was higher, which was offset by the allocation of a larger share of France's potential labor to agricultural and industrial production.³⁶ British agricultural productivity was higher, which the authors attribute not to greater efficiency but to better land endowment and greater allocation of land to animal-intensive agriculture.³⁷ In industry, French labor productivity was higher, the British not catching up until the 1890s, although there was less mass industry. In conclusion, O'Brien and Keyder (1978, 198) criticize any suggestion of a “relative backwardness” of France, seeing its economic choices as no doubt different but equally rational; indeed, they go further and say that they are “inclined to see a more humane and perhaps a no less efficient transition to industrial society in the experience of France.”³⁸ The impact of this revisionism has been strong, such that even those who wish to insist on British “superiority,” like Crouzet, are reduced to “nuancing” the views of the revisionists and to insisting that French economic achievements in the nineteenth century were “creditable, but not more.”³⁹ Crafts (1984, 59, 67), who undertakes to demonstrate that “the revisionist interpretation [of French economic performance in the nineteenth century] exaggerates French achievements,” nonetheless seems forced to conclude, after indicating his various reservations, that “even if all the above points are accepted, it is true that French economic performance looks substantially better than was once thought.”⁴⁰

Both Great Britain and France, then, as of 1815, sought to concentrate the worldwide accumulation of capital within their frontiers, and how well they did so was only in part a function of the strength of their respective industrial enterprises. It was also very much a function of their ability to restrain the costs of labor, to ensure the constancy of external supply, and to obtain adequate markets for their production. And this was more a political task than a matter of improving their respective economic efficiencies, which on a world scale were rather high for both. The operative role of the states was therefore crucial, but their use was a delicate matter, since the states could wreak damage as well as ensure advantage. The states had to be tamed, manipulated, and directed rationally. The politics of the next sixty years was to center around this effort to “rationalize” the role of the state—that is to say, to fine-tune the structure of the state so as to maximize the possibilities of increasing the “wealth of the nation” and, especially, of those who accumulated capital within its frontiers.

This process began at the interstate level. From September 18, 1814, to June 9, 1815, Europe's monarchs and foreign ministers met in Vienna to decide the peace that was supposed to govern Europe—what would come to be called the Concert of Europe. In the middle of this long conclave, Napoleon returned from Elba for a “Hundred Days,” but then was defeated, finally and definitively, at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. It is always harder to achieve consensus about peace than about war. Its objectives are more long-term, and more multifold; hence they divide the peacemakers. It was only Great Britain that had been unremittingly opposed to France (and from a time predating Napoleon). Austria, Russia, and Prussia had had a checkered history over the period of the wars. Great Britain was therefore the prime winner of the 23-year-long series of wars (which might better be considered a single war) as well as the 150-year-long struggle for hegemony in the world-system. She had every reason to be calm, balanced, and forceful. She wanted to be certain, of course, that France could never again rise to challenge her. But after the failure of the Hundred Days, this could not have seemed too big a problem. What was probably more on Lord Castlereagh's mind was how to prevent the other three great powers from expanding their power unduly, especially since they did not fully share Great Britain's political worldview—nor, of course, her economic interests.

On the one hand, now that French military power had been broken, Great Britain needed to worry only about Russian military strength and possible expansionist ambitions. In twentieth-century language, there were only “two superpowers,” although in fact there was no real possibility of a military confrontation between them.⁴¹ Castlereagh's real problem was that he had a rival in the construction of political order, Prince Metternich, who used his diplomatic skill and the fact that he represented the political sensibilities of the “eastern” trio—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—to counterbalance Great Britain's world strength. The assessment of Henry Kissinger (1973, 5) is that Castlereagh “negotiated the international settlement” but that it was Metternich who “legitimized it”:

Castlereagh, secure in the knowledge of England's insular safety, tended to oppose only overt aggression. But Metternich, the statesman of a power situated in the center of the Continent, sought above all to forestall upheavals.⁴²

I'd say myself that Metternich tried to impose a certain form of legitimation, which was not really to the taste of Great Britain, and that Great Britain would in fact eventually prevail. In any case, it would soon become evident that Metternich could not forestall too much.⁴³

It was, however, clearly in Great Britain's immediate interest (not to speak of her long-term strategy) to restore France to a position where she could serve as a potential ally in the politico-diplomatic struggles (even if France would occasionally resent the role of being a junior partner). Indeed, one could argue that France was the great victor of the Congress of Vienna, in that “the most striking feature of the post-Napoleonic peace settlement was, beyond doubt, the leniency showed toward the vanquished power” (Schenk, 1947, 45).⁴⁴ This is usually, and with some justice, attributed to Talleyrand's ingenuity. One shouldn't, however, underestimate the role of Great Britain's understanding of what it would take to stabilize a non-Napoleonic regime in France. A secret report written (by M. Gallars) in April 1816 to the British ambassador in Paris (Sir Charles Stuart), and conveyed in turn to Lord Castlereagh, indicates exactly what the British feared:

The general upheaval caused by the revolution still subsists in the spirits because authority, which had been so long placed in vile hands, has lost its majesty which had been the basis of confidence and respect;…[and] because religion has lost all its control over that class of men who, lacking a suitable education, do not know the laws of morality and cannot be intimidated by the fears of hell and of the scaffold. (Cited by Schenk, 1947, 49)

Because of these fears, the British, even ultra-Tories like Wellington, were on the side of the more moderate advisers around Louis XVIII, for fear that a full reactionary dose of medicine would be refused by the “patient,” who might thereupon “relapse into his old left-wing revolutionary illusion” (Schenk, 1947, 130–131).⁴⁵Nothing Great Britain could do could more enhance the authority of Louis XVIII than France's diplomatic rehabilitation.

In fact, France's rehabilitation served Great Britain's ability to exercise its hegemony. Castlereagh's somewhat simplistic formulas—Nicolson (1946, 155) speaks of his dream of an “ideal equilibrium, calculated almost mathematically in terms of population and power”—were eventually softened and improved by Talleyrand's “more realistic conception,” which enabled Talleyrand (and thus the British as well) to confront the world with “lucidity, elasticity, and speed.” So it was that France was admitted to the inner circle. The so-called Quadruple Alliance forged at Vienna in 1815 was replaced by the Quintuple Alliance (or Pentarchy of Great Powers) at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. As Dupuis (1909, 165) notes, this changed everything:

The entry of France in the European Directory seemed to increase the latter's strength and authority; in reality, it weakened them….The French peril faded away into the haze of the past; it would now become easier to express differences of opinion or pursue contradictory interests.⁴⁶

Metternich had of course a quite different vision from that of Great Britain. In September 1815, the three monarchs of the “east”⁴⁷ signed the document that became known as the Holy Alliance—the pledge to work together to maintain the status quo in Europe, if necessary by intervention in countries threatened by revolution.⁴⁸ Great Britain did not join the signatories. The Prince Regent excused himself on the grounds that, constitutionally, he needed a minister to cosign. He contented himself with endorsing the “sacred maxims.” Castlereagh declined to pass the document on to his government on the grounds that it was “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense” (Weigall, 1987, 111; see also Ruggiero, 1959, 93). But Metternich was anything but a mystic. He was merely a true believer in the ancien régime, as can be seen clearly from his Memoirs, when he discusses the movements for change in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain:

In all four countries the agitated classes are primarily composed of wealthy men—real cosmopolitans securing their personal advantage at the expense of any order of things whatever—paid State officials, men of letters, lawyers and the individuals charged with public education….This evil may be described in one word: presumption. (Cited from 3:465, 467, in Boyle, 1966, 832–833)

Great Britain was strong enough to ignore presumption. “When Castlereagh opposed revolution, it was not, as with Metternich, because it was ‘unnatural' but because it was unsettling” (Kissinger, 1973, 32, 35). He continues: “Revolutions, although undesirable, are not [for him] an actual danger.” There seemed to remain for Great Britain no obstacle for “the only major expansionist interest” it had—that of trade and investment (Hobsbawm, 1962, 134). Gash (1979, 282) calls Great Britain “a satiated power.” It therefore sought, and could well afford merely to seek, “influence without entanglement” (Evans, 1983, 196–203).⁴⁹ With “pragmatic pacifism” (Polanyi, 1957, 5), Great Britain “knew how to get the most out of her preponderance” (Renouvin, 1954, 131).

One way to do this was to concentrate not merely on world commerce but on becoming the supplier of public loans to other states. Such loans were largely a Rothschild monopoly for a generation, and tended to be “loans in support of revolution rather than legitimacy”—that is, loans to Latin America, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The offerings on the stock exchange thus “appealed to that blend of political idealism and commercial strategy which was the dominant tone of British public opinion.” In turn, the securities on these loans (reaching some 750,000 between 1815 and 1830) represented an “accumulation of assets readily negotiable abroad,” proving to be a currency available for “financing the corn trade” (Jenks, 1927, 44–45, 61–62).⁵⁰

A structure of hegemony in the world-system could not be stable unless the home front was secure, and as of 1815 Great Britain was in trouble. The combination of a growing population, expanding urban and industrial zones, and the severe postwar slump represented “an aggregate of social evils which took half a century to bring under control” (Gash, 1979, 2). The essential choice in budgetary terms for the government was whether it would emphasize reduction of expenditures, including social expenditures, and opening the economy maximally, or the more cautious and protectionist policies advocated by the majority of the supporters of the Tories in power. “In fact, [the government] oscillated between the rival policies” (Halévy, 1949b, 46).⁵¹

Although this was the moment of the so-called Tory Reaction, the British variant of conservative ideology was relatively “enlightened” from the beginning, albeit sometimes grudgingly. To be sure, Toryism emphasized the “sense of harmony of the society” (Brock, 1941, 35).⁵² The question is how much this meant in practical terms. For Halévy (1949a, 199), the Tory Reaction amounted, when all is said, to very little. The political passions exploited by the Tory leaders, the catchwords so frequently on their lips, differed in no essential point from the mass of sentiments and commonplaces that had composed the Whiggery of sixty years earlier.⁵³ And Brock (1941, 35, 76) dates the marginalization of the old, or High, Tories, “who resisted reform wherever it appeared,” from the ministry of Lord Liverpool (1812–1827, but especially in its reorganized version after 1822). He calls this ministry “the first of those nineteenth-century governments which, without being called ‘reforming,' may certainly be called ‘improving.' “⁵⁴ It was less that the conservatives thought that improvement should be slow than that they thought it should not be consciously planned or intellectually constructed; it should simply emerge as the quiet consensus of wise men.⁵⁵

The immediate problem with such a tactic was that, in a time of economic distress, the patience of the working classes sometimes proved to be limited. It is rather difficult to implement improvement as quiet consensus amid social disorder. Before Great Britain could launch the improvements, the governments felt, therefore, that they needed to bring the disorder under control, and the route they chose was repression. The war years had already not been without repression of social unrest, from that of the English Jacobins in the 1790s (see Thompson, 1997) to that of the Luddites in 1811–1812. In 1815, peace brought the provocative adoption of the Corn Laws (precisely those that were to be repealed with such commotion in 1846). These laws produced “a petitioning movement of unprecedented scale” (Stevenson, 1979, 190).⁵⁶ In 1817, the so-called Pentrich Rising of hand-loom weavers (not quite a revolution, but so it seemed to some at the time) led to the suspension of habeas corpus and the hanging of the leaders.⁵⁷ A mass meeting of some sixty thousand people in Manchester in August 1819 in St. Peter's Field, Manchester (following similar meetings in Birmingham, Leeds, and London), triggered a panic reaction, which has come to be called the Peterloo Massacre. (This sardonic play on Waterloo has become irrevocably engraved in the manuals of history.) The state responded to its own panic by creating “Eleven Martyrs” and passing “Six Acts,” and increasing the size of the military establishment (ten thousand troops and two thousand marines) (see Read, 1958, 186–189).⁵⁸ Finally, in February 1820, the Cato Street Conspiracy to blow up the entire Cabinet was exposed by its agent provocateur, and five persons were hanged. How are we to appreciate this period of disorder? Brock (1941, 1) claims that it “remains the one period during the nineteenth century in which a revolution could have taken place.”⁵⁹ This seems a bit of unfriendly hyperbole. By contrast, Thomis and Holt (1979, 124) draw the conclusion about the “revolutionary threat” that “the most abiding impression” it leaves is that of the “weaknesses” of “a purely working-class movement with no middle-class involvement.”⁶⁰ Perhaps so, but in any case, one can agree with White (1973, 192) that, as a result, “with Peterloo, and the departure of Regency England, parliamentary reform had come of age.” The quiet consensus of wise men would be that the combination of repression followed by reform (but not the one without the other) was the best guarantee of long-term political stability.

This is all the more clear when one remembers that upheaval was not limited to Great Britain. It was Europe-wide in 1819–1820. Metternich reacted by promoting intervention in Naples and Spain at the Congress of Troppau in 1820. As we have already seen, the British Cabinet formally rejected this idea, despite the “increasing sympathy” that Tory supporters felt for Metternich, in the light of their own sense of insecurity “in their control over the masses of the people” (Webster, 1925, 176–177). Cooler heads saw that the day was already won and that it was now time to move on from repression to reform, or at least to improvement.

France in many ways initially suffered less popular discontent from the postwar slump than did Great Britain. Perhaps it was the fact that the French were so involved in the reconstruction of the government apparatus. Perhaps it was the legacy of revolutionary structures despite the fact that France was supposed to be living a Restoration. Perhaps it was the greater need to restrain a group of “Ultras” that quickened the pace of the liberal center. Perhaps, most of all, it was the excessive presumption of the “Ultras,” which may have distracted attention from social issues.

Napoleon might even be said to have been the one who launched the restructuring. In his Hundred Days, he was “converted to liberalism.” Faced with a Louis XVIII who had proclaimed a liberal constitution in the Charter, he told the Chamber of Peers two weeks before Waterloo: “I have come to inaugurate the constitutional monarchy” (Suel, 1953, 180). What his “messianic reappearance” from Elba did in fact accomplish was to cloud over the image of Napoleon as tyrant and reestablish his image as revolutionary. He thereby ensured a legacy. “The three nations which dominated the revolutionary tradition of the early nineteenth century—France, Italy and Poland—were precisely those in which the cult of Napoleon was most developed” (Billington, 1980, 129).

The king in 1814, not yet certain of his throne, sought support in the center. Not wishing to concede in principle the concept of popular control, he instead edicted a Charter that guaranteed a large number of the “popular” gains of the Revolution: equality before the law, in taxes, and in military service; freedom of expression and religion (although Catholicism would once again be the state religion); maintenance of Napoleon's Civil Code; continuity of titles and ranks accorded in the previous regime; security of the properties that had been confiscated and sold under the revolutionary procedures; and above all, continuity of the centralized state. Of course, one element in this compromise was the fact that, politically, the first restoration was effectuated with the connivance of many of Napoleon's leading supporters, who had bargained for their own continuity in posts (see Zeldin, 1959, 41). But it is important to note that, although some of these same persons compromised themselves with the king during the Hundred Days and were thereafter purged—in some cases, hanged—in the White Terror of the second Restoration, the Charter remained. It obviously reflected more than a circumstantial arrangement; it was a political choice.

To the dismay of the king, the first parliamentary elections brought in an ultraroyalist assembly—the disciples of de Maistre, Bonald, and Chateaubriand. Within a year, the “moderates” loyal to the preferences of the king found themselves in a parliamentary minority. And France entered into the ironic situation in which ultraroyalists, those who stood for “tradition made into a system and put forward as policy,”⁶¹ a tradition of which the monarchy was a pillar, stood at cross-purposes with the incarnation of this pillar of tradition. The king dissolved this assembly and managed to get one that was somewhat better for him, but the struggle would go on until 1824, when the ultraroyalists got a major boost with the succession of Louis XVIII's brother as Charles X. However, this definitive right-ward turn would of course lead directly into the July Revolution of 1830.

The crucial, definitive battle over the creation of the liberal state was fought not in Great Britain—where, as we have seen, it had won out even within the Tory party by the 1820s—but in France, where the Legitimists fought hard and unremittingly during the Restoration to achieve what they thought the ouster of Napoleon ought to have signaled: the restoration of a privileged aristocracy and a privileged Church—that is, in their view, “the destruction of equality!” (Elton, 1923, 103). So, when they found themselves under the authority of a king who wished to govern rationally and moderately—that is, in the center—because he was aware that the real problem was how to channel popular sentiment that could no longer simply be ignored as unworthy of notice, the Legitimists turned against the king, and therefore tradition. Already in 1817, Bonald (cited in Mellon, 1958, 102–103) observed clearly what was happening:

We who call ourselves Royalists want royalty to be affirmed by legitimacy; if then, we begin to act somewhere like Leaguers, we must be excused—even praised—since it is because we think that royalty is being opposed to legitimacy, and that we are right to serve [royalty] against itself.⁶²

The Legitimists self-destructed. On the one hand, they came to be in favor of an authoritarian state, which is not the same as being in favor of an absolutist one, since it implies a populist, or at least antielitist, tonality.⁶³ At the same time, “their attachment to absolute monarchy and divine right [their effort to serve royalty against itself] led them to oppose the constitutional monarchy and become partisans of parliament” (Ruggiero, 1959, 174).⁶⁴ Worse yet, they turned to an extension of the suffrage, thinking that a middle-class suffrage could be diluted by a “traditionalist” peasant suffrage. And in so doing, they further emphasized the role of parliament. Louis Blanc, writing in 1841 (1:73), was lucid:

What does it matter to history what the Chamber of 1815 intended? Their legacy is what they did. It is they who proclaimed the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the legislature, and thus it is they who unknowingly laid the foundations of the syllogism out of which, after fifteen years of struggle, 1830 represents the conclusion drawn….[The result of Louis XVIII dissolving the Chamber was that] those who called themselves ultra-royalists were dismayed, and those who called themselves liberals applauded. It should have been the other way around.

It is therefore no surprise that it was these same Legitimists who by 1840 were forming the first organized political party in France.

The Legitimists gave the opening to the liberals, allowing them to appropriate the Revolution (and even Napoleon) for true tradition, dissociating themselves in the process from the Revolution's overly democratic overtones.⁶⁵ The Revolution had been virtuous, but had gone wrong by deviating from its original liberal intent, said Guizot⁶⁶ and other liberal historians (a theme Furet would revive in the late twentieth century), but “with the Charter, it became possible to complete the catechism—the Revolution is over and has triumphed.” In that way, “the Liberals become the true royalists, the Ultras the true revolutionaries” (Mellon, 1958, 47).⁶⁷Mellon calls this reading of the history of the French Revolution “a milestone in the development of European Liberalism.” Thereby, the liberals were deradicalized, and were distinguished in their own minds, and more and more in the minds of others, from “democrats.” Liberalism became a term linked with a moderate status quo.⁶⁸ It lost its “partisan meaning by being semantically dissolved into a general qualifier of various French ‘achievements' after 1789” (Marichal, 1956, 293). And with that, it could shift from representing opposition to Napoleonic despotism to continuing the Napoleonic experience:

Liberalism as the practice of government derived from the same matrix as Napoleonic administration, with the single and practically restricted exception of elected representation as a check on arbitrary rule. Like the Napoleonic functionaries, liberals were convinced that they embodied social and economic progress, were favorable to science and technology, and proclaimed rational, utilitarian principles as the basis for a superior and neutral administration. The continuity between the Napoleonic experience and liberalism was accentuated by the strong defense of the former imperial administrators against the legitimist claims of some Restoration monarchies, as well as by their leading role in statistical propositions to resolve social problems. (Woolf, 1991, 242)

Once liberalism had thus cast off its radical associations, both in Great Britain and France, it was launched on its technocratic, reformist path. For the British government at the time, the most urgent problem to solve was that of money. Actually, W. Cooke Taylor said in 1851 that Great Britain had three urgent problems to solve after 1815—”cash, corn, and Catholics“—but note that he put cash first. In 1797, because of economic difficulties resulting from wartime expenditures and a weak military position, Pitt suspended “cash payments” on the notes of the Bank of England “temporarily,” thus preserving its bullion reserves⁶⁹ but also “precipitating a controversy that continued for over three-quarters of a century” (Fetter, 1965, 1). To be more exact, there were two controversies. The resumption marked the culmination of the so-called bullionist controversy, and this in turn led to a second controversy, that between the so-called Banking School and the Currency School.⁷⁰ The bullionists took fright in 1809–1810 at inflationary pressures, which they attributed to excessive issue of notes; they preached the remedy of convertibility. The antibullionists argued that the problem could not be solved by a change of monetary policy, since it was the result of the extraordinary pressures of wartime and would pass. The compromise was to put off resumption until peacetime. At that point, however, acute deflation set in, and considerable opposition emerged to any tightening of credit, which resumption amounted to doing.⁷¹It was in large part at this point a controversy between those (such as the leaders of the cotton industry) who emphasized Great Britain's foreign-exchange position, which a gold standard would enhance, and those who worried about maintaining the prices of agricultural products,⁷² who were not only the large landowners but the “little man” as well.⁷³

How much place there should be for the “little man,” once Peterloo had shown the stiff backbone of the government, was a question that absorbed more and more public concern in Great Britain. The underlying cause of popular discontent, it was evident, was “distress,” and the existing institutions of relief were clearly insufficient to keep the working classes from “resorting to disturbances” (Darvall, 1934, 199).⁷⁴Despite the fact that Peterloo had been an effort to intimidate the working classes, and did intimidate them up to a point, the governing classes were fearful of their increased social power.

The debate between liberals and conservatives (better language than Whigs and Tories, or even radicals and Tories) was not over whether there existed a “problem” to be resolved. It was, rather, over how it could best be resolved. The liberals looked to legislation empowering experts, whereas the conservatives looked to a vague entity called “interests.”⁷⁵ The timid beginnings of the legislative approach were made nonetheless under a Tory government in 1817 with the Poor Employment Act, which provided work on canals, roads, and bridges. The act represented “a significant new departure” in that it “implicitly acknowledged” an obligation to help the “little man” in a time of depression (Flinn, 1961, 92).⁷⁶ To the timid legislative effort we must add the pacifying elements of Methodism, emigration, and empire. The role of the Protestant sects in ensuring the political stability of Great Britain has long been argued.⁷⁷ Wilmot Horton's proposals to encourage emigration as a solution to poverty has been termed a policy of “shoveling out paupers.”⁷⁸And emigration was in turn linked to empire.

The keynote of British policy in the period immediately following 1815 seems to have been caution. They were cautious about lifting protectionist structures. They were cautious about resuming cash payments. The same caution could be seen vis-à-vis the colonies and the mercantile system. The liberal political economists were anti-imperial in principle,⁷⁹ but there was opposition to any “sudden overthrow of the existing system.” Here, as everywhere else, the liberals hedged their bets. Yes, a free market, but not at the expense of the accumulation of capital. The modifications eventually came, although “it seemed to free-traders that the old system, like Charles II, was an unconscionable time a-dying” (Schuyler, 1945, 103).

The liberals were prudent even in their teaching about colonies. The liberal economists were in general very worried about the decline of profits. Wakefield drew the conclusion that colonies were a partial answer to the shortage of profitable investment opportunities. James Mill (cited in Winch, 1963, 398), though he accepted the strictures of Ricardo in general, did concede: “If colonization was an economic necessity for Britain, then it would require government support.”⁸⁰Wakefield developed a “new, liberal conception of empire,” with a properly Benthamite justification for efficient and self-financing colonies.⁸¹ The colonies in the Regency empire were thus indeed different from the earlier colonies, as Harlow (1953) has argued. They became “an extension of social change overseas, an example of social imperialism” (Bayly, 1989, 252–253).⁸²

Social change overseas for the British in practice meant colonization by the British when it was an economic necessity for them, and decolonization of other countries' colonies when it was economically useful for the British. For an insular people, without Napoleonic universalist pretensions, the world had suddenly become their oyster. “Ever since 1815 England had been sending out her swarms over the entire Globe“—as tourists, as emigrants, as colonizers, and as romantic revolutionary supporters (Halévy, 1949b, 126–127).⁸³ Great Britain, after a long period filled with both hesitations about and encouragement of the settler independence movements of Latin America, finally came down decisively in 1823 in opposition to any European country other than Spain sending troops there to quash these movements; this was recognized as the definitive moment in the struggle.⁸⁴ For Great Britain was ready to fight here, as it had not been ready to fight in opposition to French intervention in Spain itself in 1820.⁸⁵ This is of course what one expects of a hegemonic power, and how such a power asserts itself—by making implicit threats that it expects will not be called, but also by knowing when it is not quite strong enough to issue ultimatums.⁸⁶ Having thus successfully maneuvered the European states into a do-nothing position, “Canning eventually obtained the chief credit among South Americans” (Temperley, 1925b, 53), and thus Great Britain secured her status as the standard-bearer of liberty despite the obvious economic self-interest that was at play.

This readiness of Great Britain to play the role of limited supporter of independence movements was extended to the Balkans/Ottoman Empire as well, most particularly in the case of Greece. Public opinion in Great Britain was torn between a disdain for autocracy, seen as somehow not quite civilized, and a prudent desire not to become too entangled. “Influence without entanglement” is how Evans (1983, chap. 21) describes British foreign-policy aims in Europe at this time. Another way to describe these aims, however, is to say that their primary objective was the slow eating away of the Holy Alliance by embarrassing it where its principles were most shaky. The case of Greece offered a golden opportunity. The Greek revolution started in the wake of, and at the same time as, others in Europe in 1820–1822. In the case of the others, Great Britain, as we have seen, disapproved “passively” of intervention. The Greek uprising, however, had the special characteristic of being an uprising of Christians against a Moslem empire, and in particular an uprising of Orthodox Christians. Metternich might remain unmoved, but it was harder for the Tsar of All the Russias. Even then, Alexander hesitated, but Nicholas, who acceded to the throne in 1825, was ready to join Great Britain, and then France, in forcing the issue,⁸⁷ which was ultimately fully to be resolved only in 1830.

In Great Britain and elsewhere, on the one hand, the Greek uprising was the cause of the radicals:

Greece…became the inspirer of international liberalism and “philhellenism,” which included organized support for the Greeks and the departure of numerous volunteer fighters, played a part in rallying the European left wing in the 1820s analogous to that which support for the Spanish Republic was to play in the later 1930s (Hobsbawm, 1962, 145).⁸⁸

But, on the other hand, Greek nationalism served as a wedge that the British government could use to undermine what remained of the Holy Alliance. If from “monstrous portent” still in 1822 the Holy Alliance had become a “thing of contempt” by 1827 (Temperley, 1925a, 474), it was primarily because of the Greek revolution. “[T]he prime artisan of this ruin [of the Holy Alliance] was George Canning” (Weill, 1931, 68).⁸⁹

The ambiguous role of the Greek revolution—both archetype of nationalist revolution for the later “springtime of the nations,” and crucial pawn in the British struggle to strengthen its hegemonic hold on the world-economy; ergo both myth of the radicals and excuse for clever maneuver by the Tories—precisely reflects the ambiguities of romanticism. For Greece became the prime inspirer of European romanticism, even as the good classicists of Europe celebrated the rationality of the ancient Greeks. Romanticism “comes of age between 1780 and 1830.” It was naturally associated with the French Revolution, since romanticism had to do with “creating a new society different from its immediate forerunner” (Barzun, 1943, 52). Thus it was individualist, voluntarist, and poetic. It stood for a liberation of the imagination. But precisely because it wanted a liberation of the imagination, and rejected the limitations of the present. But at the same time it was “also the love of the past, the attachment to old traditions, the curiosity for epochs when the peoples, suffused [bercés] with legends, created naive poetry, a bit childish, but sincere and spontaneous” (Weill, 1930, 215).

Thus, although romanticism involved spontaneity and hence could sanction revolution, it was strongly opposed to any universalistic tone in revolution, particularly as this had been incarnated in the Napoleonic imposition of the universalist project on unwilling peoples.⁹⁰ For that reason, a radical, rationalist revolutionary like Blanqui considered romantics to be the enemy. When Blanqui, the great practical revolutionary of the nineteenth century, had finished fighting in the revolution of 1830, he burst into the editorial room of the paper on which he had worked. Standing in the doorway, he flung down his rifle and shouted with young enthusiasm [surely a romantic quality!] to the elderly journalists sitting there: “Enfoncez, les romantiques!”—“That finishes the Romantics.” For him, the Revolution for which he had just risked his life was not primarily the victory of republican workers over their oppressors; what first occurred to him was that the ornate romantic style of Chateaubriand, the idealisation of the Middle Ages, fake Gothic and the aping of feudalism, would all now disappear in favour of a purer classical style, which would model itself, in writing, drama, and architecture, on the noble tradition of Republican Rome. (Postgate, 1974, 97)

Nonetheless, says Barzun (1961, xxi), “romanticism is populist…even when the Romanticist, like Scott or Carlyle, preaches a feudal order.” Perhaps Hobsbawm (1962, 306) best catches the overall tone:

[T]hough it is by no means clear what romanticism stood for, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever its content, it was an extremist creed. Romantic artists or thinkers…are found on the extreme left…, on the extreme right…, leaping from left to right…, but hardly ever among the moderates, or whig-liberals, in the rationalist centre, which indeed was the stronghold of “classicism.”⁹¹

Where, then, does Greece fit in terms of this all too malleable concept? Here, Bernal's [1987, 1991] important work on the conceptualization of the ancestry of Europe comes in. He points out that Renaissance thinkers had seen Egypt, not Greece, as “the original and creative source,” and that both Egypt and China had maintained “a high reputation for [their] philosophy and science, but above all for [their] political system” (Bernal, 1987, 16) until precisely the time of the French Revolution, at which point, led by Romantic thinkers, the focus shifted to Greece:

By the end of the eighteenth century, “progress” had become a dominant paradigm, dynamism and change were valued more than stability, and the world began to be viewed through time rather than across space. Nevertheless, space remained important for the Romantics, because of their concern for a local formation of peoples or “races.”…Real communication was no longer perceived as taking place through reason, which could reach any rational man. It was now seen as flowing through feeling, which could touch only those tied to each other by kinship or “blood” and sharing a common “heritage.” (Bernal, 1987, 28)

And this is exactly why Egypt had to be cut out of the line of anteriority for Europe. For eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable that “Greece—which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites” (Bernal, 1987, 28). Greece represented, was made to symbolize, the line between Europe and the outer world, the Orient, the lands of barbarism. Nationalism was acceptable, even desirable, within the zone of “Europe” (especially if protesting against a non-Christian imperial entity)—hence, both White settlers in Latin America and Greeks could have British support against “autocracy“—but this had nothing to do with what was appropriate in distant cultural climes like India.

The existence of more conservative and more revolutionary forms of romanticism correlates with a split in both time and place. In time, the romanticism that was nurtured against the universalism of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period was dominant in the earlier years, and in the core countries. Circa 1830, it gave way in Italy, Germany, and Poland, following in the footsteps of Greece, to a “romanticism of progress,” which became “an important factor in the movements of national liberation” (Renouvin, 1954, 19). But in the core, and especially in Great Britain, it remained identified “with tradition and with the maintenance of authority in church and state,” as opposed to the “revolutionary or semi-revolutionary character” it had on the Continent (Seton-Watson, 1937, 40).

Romanticism served British hegemony well. It undermined the Holy Alliance, which, as we have already noted, was quite rationalist and universalizing. It undermined the vestiges of the revolutionary-Napoleonic tradition. It encouraged a reorganization of the geopolitical space in Europe (and the Americas), which served Great Britain's immediate economic interests and its ability to maintain and reinforce its hegemonic order. And it drew a clear line between Europe and the outer world, creating a basic justification for imperialism and racism—both so crucial to the geopolitics and geoculture of the post-1789 world. Of course, it was a loose cannon and could not always be controlled. So romanticism would also eventually become part of the undoing of the British hegemonic order, but not until this order was undermined by the economic and political transformations of the last third of the nineteenth century.

It was of great help to the British that France's internal evolution went in tandem with this grand schema. As in Great Britain, so in France, the period after 1815 had “brought neither prosperity nor abundance for the working classes,” but rather unemployment, worsened by internal migration toward the large urban centers (Ponteil, 1968, 285).⁹² Socially, the gulf between the workers and the urban bourgeoisie was enormous.⁹³ The rights of the workers to organize were strictly limited to mutual aid societies under police surveillance.⁹⁴ There was worker unrest in Lyon in 1817, in which the workers raised the tricolor cockard, an event that the prefect of the Rhône attributed to contagion from the news about uprisings in England (as well as the rebellion of the Americas and the plot in Lisbon).⁹⁵ Still, a liberal like Guizot could say in 1820: “I do not despair of obtaining the support of the masses (saisir les masses), especially with regard to the political institutions.”⁹⁶

The mid-1820s, however, created a serious inflammation in the political process. At the very moment that Liberal Toryism was taking hold in Great Britain, Charles X, by the accident of the king's premature death, came to power in France in 1824 and began to implement his particularly reactionary views. This led to strains with the British, strains with large segments even of the pays légal at home, and strains with the working classes. In addition, the accession of Charles X coincided with an economic downturn that began in 1825 and greatly intensified in 1829. The combination of political sclerosis and economic troubles tends to be explosive, and led directly into the revolutionary atmosphere of 1830 (see Bourgin, 1947, 203; and Gonnet, 1955, 250–280).

Instead of seeking to moderate his policies and appease some of the malcontents, Charles X asserted his authority all the more arbitrarily.⁹⁷When 221 deputies found the courage to send him a public address, asking him to respect the rights of the legislature, he saw this, not incorrectly, as the defense of the essential principles of the French Revolution, as upheld in the Charter of Louis XVIII, and he ignored the plea. This was in a sense Charles X's last chance. “If there was a revolution in 1830, it was a revolution that had been provoked.” Charles X issued a repressive press decree on July 26. The deputies temporized; a crowd of workers acted. This crowd was composed neither of the “desperate and dispossessed” nor of the “substantial middle class” but “largely of men from skilled crafts, reasonably mature in years” (Suel, 1953, 188).

Was this then the revolution that Buonarroti, Europe's “first professional revolutionary,” was hoping for when, “on the eve of the Revolution of 1830, he actually prayed for the triumph of reaction” (Eisenstein, 1959, 49)?⁹⁸ Not really. It was a three-day popular revolution—July 27–29, les Trois Glorieuses—which was quickly captured by Restoration liberalism and resulted in the July Monarchy, with Louis Philippe, who was prepared to call himself not King of France but King of the French. Thiers said: “Without the Duke of Orléans…we could never have contained this rabble” (cited by Dolléans, 1947, 42). Against the Ultras, who had still hoped to truly restore some version of the ancien régime, the July Monarchy legitimated a liberal version of the French Revolution. “By the Revolution of 1830, the assault upon the Revolution of 1789 was finally defeated” (Elton (1923, 88).⁹⁹

The workers would rapidly realize that, “in terms of the economy and the social structure, the Revolution [of 1830] had brought about no change whatsoever” (Bourgin, 1947, 205).¹⁰⁰ If the workers were disillusioned, the Ultras were nonetheless dismayed. On August 7, 1830, Chateaubriand (cited in Béneton, 1988, 56–57, n. 3) made a speech in the House of Peers refusing to support Louis-Philippe: “A useless Cassandra, I have wearied the throne and the fatherland with my disdained warnings; all that remains to me is to sit down on the debris of a wreckage that I have so often predicted.” And big businessmen were unsure whether they should applaud or not, fearing simultaneously “reaction,…the Legitimists, [and] social revolution by the masses” (Price, 1975b, 6).¹⁰¹

Finally, the British were also hesitant to applaud at first. In fact, in the weeks immediately following the revolution, the “menace of war hung heavily over France” (Pinkney, 1972, 303). The tricolor, the Marseillaise, the reorganization of the national guard all made the Holy Alliance states shudder; they even began to fear renewed French aggression. But the British government, under none other than Wellington, the spokesperson of the more conservative Tories, hastened to recognize the new government. And by October, so had everyone.

Why did the British move so rapidly? No doubt it helped that Louis-Philippe was both a “sincere admirer” of Great Britain's parliamentary institutions and a partisan of an alliance with Great Britain (see Guyot, 1901, 579). No doubt it was a clever move by Louis-Philippe to recruit the well-known exponent of these two views, Talleyrand, as ambassador to Great Britain, symbolizing that Great Britain was the country whose support “it was most important for [Louis-Philippe] to win” (Guichen, 1917, 186).¹⁰² And no doubt the British had many reasons to be annoyed with the foreign policy that Polignac had conducted for Charles X. In particular, they were most unhappy about the implications of France's invasion of Algeria early in 1830, especially when they realized that Charles X saw in it virtually a revival of the Crusades.¹⁰³ At a moment when Great Britain had succeeded in constraining the Holy Alliance, Charles X seemed to be upsetting the apple-cart.¹⁰⁴ Great Britain had been restrained from acting directly against him because of the strong support France was receiving from the other European powers, and from Russia in particular.¹⁰⁵ Now, however, it could hope for better from Louis Philippe, as indeed would turn out to be the case.¹⁰⁶

But with all the hesitations, the fact is that the July Revolution succeeded. That is, the liberal state was installed—in its primitive form, at least. One hundred years later, Benedetto Croce (1934, 101–102) could look back at what he called the “July sun” and exult:

With [the July Days] all European absolutism was morally defeated and, on the contrary, European liberalism, which was struggling and bridling in depression, became an example of how to face the enemy in extreme cases; a proof that in this way victory is certain; an aid in the fact itself that a great power had reached the plenitude of liberty; and ground for confidence in revolutions soon to come.

As Croce indicates, the Revolution of 1830 was to be contagious, spreading most immediately to neighboring Belgium and Italy, but then also to Poland. “The peoples of Europe emerged from a long apathy. The Holy Alliance was shaken” (Rudé, 1940, 413).¹⁰⁷ Of the three revolutions, that of Belgium was the only successful one, and for good reason. It was the only one that fit into the project to create and consolidate the liberal state in the core countries of the world-economy. The Italian uprising of the Carbonari was supported by the more radical elements in France and various parts of the Parti du mouvement under the leadership of Lafayette. They organized the Volontaires du Rhône to come to the aid of Piedmont (and incidentally annex Savoy). They were. however. in part foiled by the French authorities themselves.¹⁰⁸ For the new French government wanted merely to contain Austria; and Charles-Albert, king of Piedmont, wanted the Austrians out but the liberals held in check. So in the end it was the liberals who lost out (see Renouvin, 1954, 73–75). As for Poland, the revolution there was suppressed without too much difficulty. The link between it and the revolution in France was spiritual but not more.¹⁰⁹ The French were very far away and neither able nor prepared to do anything.

Belgium was another story entirely. Belgium had never been an independent state, but in the long period between the Revolt of the Netherlands and the French Revolution, it had been a somewhat autonomous administrative unit first under Spanish, then Austrian rule. During this period, agriculture had flourished,¹¹⁰but industry thrived there as well, particularly following the “thirty-two years of prosperity” [1748–1780] under Prince Charles. The prince's deputy, the Count of Coblenz [1753–70], known as “the Colbert of the Low Countries,” instituted a protectionist policy (Briavoinne, 1839, 7, 86–90), which resulted in “dazzling” growth between 1765 and 1775,¹¹¹ growth that continued steadily from that point on.¹¹²One of the advantages the Austrian Netherlands had over the United Provinces at that time was its combination of high population growth, low wages, and a skilled labor force.¹¹³ One result was that Belgium was introducing industrial machinery almost as fast as England.¹¹⁴

France annexed Belgium in 1795. The main centers of industrial production—cotton in Ghent, wool in Verviers and Eupen, and heavy industry in Liège and Hainault—all underwent a further “remarkable expansion” in the French period (Mokyr, 1974, 366).¹¹⁵ There seem to be two main reasons: “integration with a huge protected and unified area of 30 million customers” (Crouzet, 1964, 209), and transformation of the social structure—the removal of internal barriers to trade (customs, tolls), the abolition of guilds, civil equality, reform of codes and tribunals, and the abolition of feudal rights (see Wright, 1955, 90).¹¹⁶ The two together seem to have worked splendidly, as everyone seems to agree: “brusk acceleration,” the moment of a Rostovian “take-off,” “total transformation,…[and] the moment of decisive expansion” are the phrases used (Lebrun, 1961, 555; Devleeshouwer, 1970, 618; Dhondt, 1969, 42, 44).¹¹⁷ This was already the view of the Belgian analyst of the time, Natalis Briavoinne (1839, 113):

The political events [of the French period], a unified civil legislation and, more relevant, the complete reorganization of the tribunals, [and] improved commercial institutions all underlie a remarkable momentum in Belgium as in France; but Belgium is the country which reaped the earliest and greatest benefits.

After Waterloo, Belgium was integrated into the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Local opinion was not consulted. This reunion (after 250 years of separation) was greeted with hostility in Belgium by both main groups of the population: by the democrats, strong in Wallonia, who wanted a parliamentary system; and by the Catholics, strong in Flanders, who were wary of being under a Protestant monarch without a prior pact to defend their religious rights (see Ponteil, 1968, 17). The immediate economic effect was negative, in part because of the general world economic downturn, and in part because of the contraction of the market for their goods.¹¹⁸ In terms of policy, the central debate was about tariffs, between Dutch merchants who survived on open entrepôts and were much more concerned about Hamburg than about Manchester,¹¹⁹ and Belgian industrialists. who were seeking protection against British competition.¹²⁰

King William was primarily concerned about holding his enlarged kingdom together and servicing the enormous state debt.¹²¹ In fact, the tariff quarrel subsided. The Belgians did better than the Dutch and became less protectionist. This became in turn part of the problem, because the Europe-wide downturn after 1825 created a pool of unemployed proletarians precisely in Belgium, who became “ready to receive revolutionary ferment” (Demoulin, 1938, 369).

Thus, the July Revolution in Paris had an immediate resonance in Belgium. It revived the always latent thought of possible reunion with France that animated some of the Walloon bourgeoisie. It revived the discomforts of the Catholics with Dutch Protestant overrule. But it needed a spark. Even if, as some argue, the August 25 uprising was inspired by “agitators arriving from Paris,” they needed “troops,” and the troops were to be found only among the unemployed workers (Harsin, 1936, 277). This was a “popular revolt,” preceded by a social malaise, marked by Luddism and some violence.¹²² But here, too, as in the case of the July Revolution, the uprising was quickly recuperated by middle-class forces and was transformed into a national, liberal revolution (see Demoulin, 1950, 152).¹²³

Unlike the situation in France, there was no strong Ultra party in Belgium, precisely because Catholics were not in power. This made Belgian Catholics more open to the version of Catholic liberalism that Lamennais had pioneered in France, but which he could not really manage to turn there into a primary social force.¹²⁴To be sure, the Vatican itself was very legitimist, and therefore very reserved about Belgian liberal nationalism, but “the policy of Rome was one thing and the behavior of the Belgian clergy another” (Demoulin, 1950, 143).¹²⁵ Walloon anticlerical liberals were willing to make concessions to the (largely Flemish) Catholics to win their support on the national question.¹²⁶

The issue quickly became not the status quo versus a change, but simply the form of the change. There were three possibilities: separation of the Netherlands and Belgium, but under a king coming from the House of Orange; reunion with France; or independence, with a king selected from elsewhere. The chances of the Prince of Orange, King William's son, were wrecked by the king's bombardment of Antwerp on October 27, which the Belgians saw as a way of aiding Dutch merchants against them. On the other hand, reunionist sentiment was never all that strong, and in any case had very powerful opposition outside Belgium. And both Orangism and reunionism had a very powerful enemy within—the Church, which saw the House of Orange as Protestant, and France as too anticlerical.¹²⁷

But the internal social compromise would have been insufficient to carry the day had not Belgian independence served the larger needs of both Great Britain and France. The Holy Alliance had hoped that Great Britain would not rush to recognize the new regime as it had done with Louis-Philippe. They hoped that British commercial links with Holland might induce them to take a hard line. They assumed as well that Great Britain would fear renewed French expansionism (see Guichen, 1917, 172 and passim).¹²⁸ They failed to understand the dynamism of the emerging British-French model, and how an independent Belgium, industrialized and liberal, would in fact consolidate it. “The idea of the ‘liberal alliance' [was] from the 1830s on a constant theme of liberal journalism in London and Paris” (Lichtheim, 1969, 42).The French proclaimed the principle of “nonintervention” to dissuade the Prussian troops from intervening at the end of August, and got the British to concur.¹²⁹ “The confident relations of Great Britain and France in the first days of October 1830 were of paramount importance in keeping the peace” (Demoulin, 1950, 127)¹³⁰ and permitted thereby the declaration of independence by the National Congress on November 18. On November 24, the congress excluded all consideration of a king from the House of Orange. But at the very moment that Russia was mobilizing to send troops, the Polish insurrection broke out on November 29. The tsar was in effect restrained twice from intervention. Earlier, the opposition of Grand Duke Constantine and Foreign Minster Count Nesslerode had delayed action. They had counseled prudence, the grand duke fearing the decimation of the Polish army, his “private domain.” And now the Polish uprising definitively “saved Belgium from intervention and perhaps Europe from war” (Guyot, 1926, 64). Indeed, the very mobilization by the tsar was itself an element in the Polish uprising, the Polish officers fearing decimation (see Morley, 1952, 412–414).¹³¹ On January 15, 1831, Lafayette said: “Gentlemen, the war has been prepared against us. Poland was to form the advance-guard; the advance-guard has turned against the main army” (cited in Morley, 1952, 415).

The Polish uprising thus marked the end of all possibility of Russian intervention against Belgium. To be sure, it did Poland itself little good. When Great Britain's prime minister, Lord Grey, received the Polish envoy, Prince Leon Sapieha, at the beginning of 1831, the latter reminded him of a pamphlet he had written on behalf of Poland. “Grey said he had not changed in principle; but in view of the existing danger that the French would be driven by public opinion to annex Belgium, Britain must have an ally capable of counteracting such a move. This could only be Russia” (Betley, 1960, 89).

The cynicism was de rigueur. It does, however, confirm the crucial difference between Belgium and Poland—the role that Belgium, but not Poland, could potentially play in consolidating the British-French model. Buonarroti at least was clear as to what had happened: Belgium, under the king finally chosen, Leopold I, had joined Great Britain and France to constitute the “bulwarks of that constitutional monarchy based on a parliamentary system and the broad consent of the middle classes,” which he denounced as the “Order of Egoism” (Eisenstein, 1959, 86). Metternich was equally clear. In a letter to Count Nesselrode, he wrote: “My most secret thought is that old Europe is at the beginning of the end….New Europe, on the other hand, is not yet at its beginning. Between the end and the beginning there will be chaos” (cited by Silva, 1917, 44).

Evans (1983, 200) calls this the “natural watershed in the history of European diplomacy“—autocracies in the East, liberal constitutionalism in the West.¹³²It served as the material basis for that new cultural concept, the “West,” which was developed precisely in the period between 1815 and 1848, in part by Auguste Comte, in part by various Russian theorists who looked longingly and in frustration at this “specific form of civilization” (Weill, 1930, 547). The concept of a West that was militarily strong and economically dominant, and which laid claim to the banner of individual freedom against an economically backward, “unfree East,” would become the pattern for the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What Belgium had over Poland was its geographical location in northwestern Europe, combined with an already developed industrial base. It could therefore be included in the expanded core; indeed, it was needed as part of the enlarged locus of high-technology production required by a growing world-economy.¹³³ Belgium would recover quickly from its transitory economic difficulties caused by the turbulence of a political revolution,¹³⁴ to be sagely governed by a king who would set himself the objective of “working at the Franco-British entente” (Ponteil, 1968, 327).

With France and Belgium in secure hands, Great Britain could make its own political adjustments with some ease. The story of reform started in fact not in 1830 during the Whig government of Lord Grey but in 1829 when the Duke of Wellington was presiding over a Tory government that was the nearest thing Great Britain had to an Ultra regime. The issue was not the enfranchisement of the urban middle classes but the “emancipation” of the Catholics. The question of Catholic emancipation had been under parliamentary discussion since 1778, when the penal laws were abrogated.¹³⁵ It was originally a question of extending civil rights to a minority—one element in the gradual liberalization of the political system. The Act of Union in 1800, however, complicated the issue. Once Ireland was juridically incorporated into the United Kingdom, extending Catholic rights could be seen as “the necessary completion” of the act. But it could also be seen as a way station to its reversal, one element in a possible decolonization of the British Empire.

At the same time, two other elements entered the picture. The first was the Protestant revival of the eighteenth century, which, although it was itself placing pressures on the Anglican Establishment, added a strong voice, which was “on the whole opposed to [Catholic] emancipation” (Hexter, 1936, 313). The second, which went in the other direction, was the French Revolution. Opposition to the Revolution led to a change in how Catholics were viewed in Great Britain: “Catholicism, no longer a soul-devouring ogre, was a virtuous Atlas, propping the tottering world against the onslaughts of a godless sansculottism” (Hexter, 1936, 301).¹³⁶

Still, it was undoubtedly the Irish lower classes who forced the issue, and their actions reflected not an urge for integration into the British political system but the beginnings of a popular Irish nationalism:

It was rather that in Catholic emancipation [the Irish lower classes] foresaw vaguely the satisfaction of many desires, the expropriation of the Protestant landlords, and the division of land among themselves—in a word, the restitution to Catholics of the soil that had belonged to their ancestors. (Halévy, 1949a, 191)

By 1829 the nationalism had taken hold sufficiently that Ireland seemed poised to rebel. “At least so it seemed to the Duke of Wellington” (Reynolds, 1954, 30).¹³⁷Required, he thought, to choose between emancipation and revolution, the Duke of Wellington—the Iron Duke, ferociously opposed to emancipation—”decided upon one of his strategic retreats. He wrung from the king permission“(Reynolds, 1954, 30)¹³⁸to put forward a measure for unqualified emancipation.

Emancipation was to change the life of the Irish lower classes far less than they had hoped.¹³⁹ No matter! Wellington's retreat had the consequence that “it made reform respectable” (Moore, 1961, 17), and at the same time it had the final twist of turning the British Ultras themselves into partisans of electoral reform. This was the same reaction that the French Ultras in the Restoration had had in the face of what they considered Louis XVIII's insufficiently autocratic stance. Wellington and Peel were seen by the British Ultras to have turned out to be unreliable. Since they had been supported by the representatives of the rotten boroughs, these Ultras now argued, “paradoxically, but not irrationally,” that only “a rational and widely-based electorate could be relied upon to rally round the ‘No Popery' flag” (Evans, 1983, 206).¹⁴⁰Wellington's timely retreat on Catholic emancipation ensured that there would be nothing like a July Days scenario, but the outcome turned out to be substantially the same, for it was equally the culmination of what were essentially parallel processes in both countries.

Catholic emancipation may have calmed things down in Ireland, but the failure of the harvest in England that same year revived the sense of turbulence. In the winter of 1830, unemployment in rural areas had become “widespread” and was followed by the failure of country banks, leading to agricultural riots (see Gash, 1935, 91). It was at this point, with new elections pending, that the July Revolution (the July Days) broke out. The reaction, as we have already noted, was mixed. The radicals were “triumphant.” They saw July 1830 as “the renewal of 1789.” The liberal center (the Whig aristocrats, the urban middle class notables) were hoping that the July Revolution would turn out to be “at once liberal and conservative, would in fact revive not 1789 or 1792 but 1688 and thus be a French tribute to the political wisdom of England” (Halévy, 1950, 5–6).

In any case, Wellington lost the election, which Halévy (1935, 53) sees as the “natural outcome of the fall of the last of the Kings of France.”¹⁴¹ Though July may or may not have hurt Wellington, we have already seen that Wellington was not in fact hostile to Louis-Philippe. As Louis Blanc (1842, 2:4) remarked at the time, if the Whigs embraced July as the “triumph of French liberalism,” the Tories did so because they were seeking to maintain the “supremacy…in Europe” of Great Britain:

The English aristocracy, like all aristocracies, is quite clairvoyant and coherent in seeking to accomplish its aims. It knew that, under Charles X, there was a serious possibility that France would take over the left bank of the Rhine and deliver Constantinople to the Russians. It knew that the Duke of Orleans was English in his tastes and inclinations.

The contagion of 1830 was clearly spreading. Still, reform might never have come, any more in Great Britain than in France or Belgium, had there not been a popular push. The new Whig government of Lord Grey reacted to the continuing agrarian disturbances by enforcing laws “with the utmost severity,” bringing the riots and the arson successfully to an end (Halévy, 1950, 15). Once the riots were under control, Lord Grey moved his reform bill. When it carried only most narrowly, Parliament was dissolved, and a stronger reform majority was returned. But when the House of Lords voted down the readopted reform bill in October 1831, urban disturbances began. The middle-class reform leaders, like Francis Place, struggled to remain in the lead. Place launched the famous slogan “To stop the Duke [of Wellington], go for gold.” This meant withdrawing private funds from the banks. The suggestion of armed resistance to a new Tory ministry was bruited, although “a revolution led by Francis Place would have been an incongruous phenomenon” (Evans, 1983, 211). Nonetheless, the threat worked. Wellington abandoned his opposition, the king promising Grey that, if need be, he would create new peers. “The test never came” (Thomis and Holt, 1977, 91, 98).¹⁴²

Both supporters and opponents of reform agreed that at that moment Great Britain had been “standing on the edge of a precipice of disorder” (Fraser, 1969, 38). Rudé asserts there was no English revolution in 1830 because there was no “self-conscious working-class movement” and because the occasional angers of the laborers “lacked solid middle-class support” (Rudé, 1967, 102). But is this the way to analyze what happened? In response to the boast that the 1832 reforms were accomplished “without an insurrection,” John Stuart Mill, writing in 1849 (p. 12), asks: “But was it without the fear of an insurrection? If there had been no chance of an uprising, would the House of Lords have waived their opposition, or the Duke of Wellington have thrown up the game in despair?”¹⁴³ The answer is almost surely not.

This does not mean, however, that the putative insurrectionaries accomplished their goals. For once again the process was taken in hand by the centrist liberals. The “primary purpose” of the Reform Bill was to “rally middle-class support round the aristocratic system” (Gash, 1979, 147).¹⁴⁴ The Whigs “made sure—to use their own language—that the ‘age of improvement' would not be suddenly transformed into an ‘age of disruption.' “ For this, they needed a bill, any bill, that seemed to include the middle classes in the polity.¹⁴⁵ Even John Bright, who wanted much more, would say: “If the bill was not a good bill,…it was a great bill when it passed” (Briggs, 1959, 259–260).

The reforms had some unanticipated consequences for British politics. “[Enfranchised Scotland and Catholic Ireland became powerful reinforcements for the Whig-liberal parliamentary strength” (Gash, 1979, 154). The Celtic fringe would be the bulwark first of Gladstone and Lloyd George, and then later of Labor. At the same time, the Conservatives could shift from being merely the “party of the Crown and the Peerage” to being the “party of England” (Halévy, 1950, 182). Still, it could be argued that it was as much by integrating the Celtic fringe as by integrating the middle classes that the reforms of 1829–1832 established the national liberal state in Great Britain.

In addition, by eliminating rotten boroughs, the bill weakened the power of the ministries vis-à-vis the individual members, who now needed to be responsive to their constituencies. This would be undone fifty years later by the development of centralized parties, which brought the members and their constituencies back under control. In the meantime, this weakening of an autocratic, if ministerial, center actually caused “dismay” to many radicals, liberals, and even Whigs, because they found new reform legislation often harder, not easier, to obtain. It was no longer sufficient to persuade a few men at the very top to make timely, essential changes. The interests of a much larger, but still quite narrow-minded, group had to be taken into account:

The fondness of the Benthamites for Wellington and Peel in 1829 and 1830 may, indeed, be extremely significant. If history followed a logical progression (which it never does), it might be argued that the first Reform Act did more to delay such measures as the Repeal of the Corn Laws than it did to accelerate them. (Moore, 1961, 34)

If the middle classes got less than they might have wanted, they did get honor, and they would be turbulent no more. However, all the working classes got, in Great Britain as in France, was “disillusionment” (Briggs, 1956, 70) and a weakened position for the next round of battle.¹⁴⁶

By 1830/1832, a liberal state governed by a liberal center had been fabricated in Great Britain, France, and Belgium—the three most industrialized states of the epoch. Collectively, the three formed the economic and cultural core of the world-system. The model of the liberal state was intended for their use and for the use of those others who were aspiring to achieve comparable prosperity and stability. The Holy Alliance and the Ultras in the core had been checked; indeed, they had been routed. The conservatives and the radicals had begun their de facto transformation into mere variants of centrist liberalism. If the Ultras were effectively neutralized, the insurrectionary revolutionaries had scarcely been able to achieve any political presence whatsoever, especially in the three model liberal states.

The machinery of the liberal state now needed to be developed. The process of electoral reform was still timid. But it had been launched, and it would roll on inexorably until it reached its peak as universal suffrage within a century. Suffrage was accompanied by the extension of civil rights to all citizens—even subjects, even residents. What had not yet quite begun was the second great pillar of the liberal state in its taming of the dangerous classes—state protection of the economically and socially weak. This process would be launched in the next period—that of the consolidation of the liberal states between 1830 and 1875.

The Liberal State and Class Conflict, 1830–1875

British state intervention was growing like a rolling snowball throughout the [nineteenth] century which most historians were inclined to characterize as one during which Government kept its hands off business.

—J. BARTLETT BREBNER (1948, 108)

[R]evolutions merely happen, they neither fail nor succeed.

—JOHN PLAMENATZ (1952, XII)

The struggle of the Orders suffuses or rather creates all this history….Facts don't just disappear because ministries and parties want them to or find it useful that they do so.

—FRANÇOIS GUIZOT (1820, 6)

During the first half of the nineteenth century, socialism as a concept was still not separate from “bourgeois democracy” as a concept or, as Labrousse (1949b, 7) says, “Jacobinism and socialism remained muddled in political life.” In some sense, it probably remained for at least a century thereafter that a full distinction of the two concepts did not exist. Nonetheless, liberalism (which seems to me a better locution than “bourgeois democracy”) and socialism began to have diverging trajectories as political options after 1830. Indeed, as Hobsbawm (1962, 284) argues:

Practical liberals…shied away from political democracy….The social discontents, revolutionary movements, and the socialist ideologues of the post-Napoleonic era intensified this dilemma [of relying upon the majority to carry out the dictates of reason] and the 1830 Revolution made it acute. Liberalism and democracy appeared to be adversaries rather than allies.¹

The concept of class and class conflict was not a contribution of socialist ideologues, much less of Karl Marx. It is a Saint-Simonian idea, developed and pursued by Guizot as part of the liberal project.² Saint-Simon's view of the class structure in the modern industrial world was that there were three classes: the property owners, the propertyless, and the savants. He saw the class conflict between the “industrials” (those who work) and the idlers as a transitional phase, to be superseded by a harmonious society of productive industrial classes under the aegis of the savants, a meritocratic vision in which the old aristocracy of birth would be replaced by an aristocracy of talent (Manuel, 1956; Iggers, 1958b).³For Guizot, the concept of class was an essential element in his efforts to “legitimate the political aspirations of the bourgeoisie” (Fossaert, 1955, 60).⁴

But in 1830, Guizot and his friends succeeded, as they were simultaneously succeeding in Great Britain,⁵ in establishing a form of middle-class rule “as a permanent juste milieu or golden mean between the extremes of revolution and reaction” (Starzinger, 1965, viii).⁶ The Chamber of Deputies on August 7, 1830, suppressed the Preamble to the Charter of 1814 “as wounding the national dignity by appearing to grant to Frenchmen rights which belong to them essentially” (Collins, 1970, 90). The liberals politically and the grande bourgeoisie socially had at last won their droit de cité.⁷

Since, in addition, this coincided with a period of accelerating economic and social change, the most urgent problems facing France and Great Britain had now become the “social problems” of industrialism, and especially those of the “new proletariat, the horrors of uncontrolled break-neck urbanization” (Hobsbawm, 1962, 207). Class conflict would therefore come to mean something different from what Saint-Simon and Guizot had had in mind. The Revolution of 1830 itself came at a moment of particular economic difficulty for the workers (high unemployment, unusually high wheat prices).⁸ It provided evidence of the utility of political uprising and served to stimulate workers' consciousness, a sense of having common interest “solely as proletarians,” a sense of the “dignity of the worker” (Festy, 1908, 330).⁹ The liberals perceived this change immediately. Thiers said in a statement to the Chamber of Deputies: “The day after the Revolution of July, we saw our duty to moderate it. In effect it was no longer liberty, but order which was in danger” (cited in Bezucha, 1974, 137).¹⁰

The next few years were to see worker unrest of a new intensity and quality in both France and Great Britain. It has been increasingly noted in the literature on strikes and workers' unrest how much of this activity was that of “artisans” as opposed to “workers.” Although the line is not always as clear as some seem to think, in general those referred to as “artisans” had more technical skills, higher real income, and more workplace autonomy than other kinds of workers. Many of these “artisans” were members of organizations that had been in existence long before the nineteenth century, and which functioned to advance the welfare of their members through social support and mutual help. The organizations were hierarchical and built around rituals.

These organizations were the only ones permitted at all in the periods when trade-union organization had been strictly forbidden,¹¹ and then only under the careful surveillance of the authorities. In the changing political situation after 1830, however, even mutual aid societies began to take on new roles, as Sée (1951, 2:199) pointed out: “Many of these societies served…to hide veritable resistance organizations, hostile to the employers; by creating auxiliary monetary reserves (bourses auxiliaires), they created funds to support the unemployed and strikers.”¹²Thus it could be, as Stearns (1965, 371–372) has argued, that such “artisans” were more likely to engage in strike action at this time than the “factory workers,” who, being in an even weaker position, were “almost totally quiescent.”¹³

The distinction made by many scholars between artisans and factory workers seems to be asserted primarily on the basis of differing workplace organization. But in fact the artisans were usually in “workshops,” which were not all that different in structure and even social organization from the rather small “factories” that existed in this era. I suspect the real difference was in the social origins of the two groups of workers. The “artisans” were males, and males who came for the most part from the immediate area. The “factory workers” were largely either women and children (Bezucha, 1974, 35) or “migrants,” which included both those who came from rural communities and workers speaking another language.¹⁴

The most dramatic expression of protest by the “artisans” was that of the canuts¹⁵ of Lyon, first in 1831 and then in 1834. The struggles began right after the July Revolution, and included machine destruction and eviction of “foreign” workers.¹⁶ The background to this was an eighteenth-century militancy of journeymen, which had erupted in 1786 in the so-called tuppenny riot (émeute de deux sous), in which the journeymen sought to obtain a fixed minimum rate for finished cloth. The ongoing turmoil continued up to the French Revolution and the enactment of the Loi Le Chapelier. Bezucha (1974, 11) concludes that “the French Revolution, in fact, broke the momentum created prior to 1789 and may have retarded the development of a workers' movement in Lyon.” In the years between 1789 and 1830, however, the relatively stable system of the compagnon had been replaced by a more “fluid one of piece-work laborers” (Bezucha, 1974, 46).

Levasseur (1904, 2:6) asks the questions, Why Lyon? Why 1831? His answer is that Lyon was living off a luxury industry, silk, which made it more “sensitive…to economic crises and political turmoil.” The immediate issue, as in 1786, was a minimum wage, which had been agreed to by the prefect but subsequently revoked by the central government. The first strike was relatively nonpolitical. But discontent continued. There was a strike in Paris in 1832. The atmosphere was more and more politicized, partly by the dissatisfaction of the working classes with the politics of the July Monarchy, partly (at least in Lyon) by the agitation of the Italian nationalist forces. Mazzini's aide-de-camp, General Romorino, was often in Lyon recruiting persons for their attempts to liberate Savoy and Piedmont (Bezucha, 1974, 122). On February 14, 1834, a general strike was called. It did not succeed. The local Republican party was divided in its attitude.¹⁷ A repressive law caused a further reaction by the workers in April, an uprising in which some three hundred were killed. This attempt came to be viewed as a “landmark in the history of the European working class” (Bezucha, 1974, 124). This time the repression by the authorities was definitive. There was a “monster trial” in 1835, which the government used “to get rid of the republicans.”¹⁸ Faced with the beginnings of a serious class struggle by the urban working class, the liberal state initially reacted as repressively as did its predecessors.

The story was not very different in Great Britain. The moral equivalent of the July Revolution was the Reform Bill of 1832. Great Britain did not know “three glorious days” of “revolution.” Instead, there was a parliamentary battle in which the revolution was “voted” in, on the crucial second reading in 1831, by a single vote. When, despite this, the bill was defeated in committee, Parliament was dissolved, and a pro-reform Parliament elected. At the time there was great awareness of events in France, and the possibilities of “worse” happening. Macaulay's speech on March 2, 1831, in favor of reform makes clear the reasoning of those who advocated it:

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve….Renew the youth of the State. Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude, endangered by its own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, and fairest, and most highly civilised country that ever existed, from calamities that may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is short. If this bill should be rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social orders.¹⁹

Macaulay's argument was heard. And, exactly as in France, once the middle strata had won their droit de cité, attention turned immediately to containing the claims of the working classes. Chartism, “much the most important movement of working men” (Evans, 1983, 215)²⁰ and a continuation of the old radical reform movement, was contemporaneous with and strongest during the great industrial depression from 1837 to 1843. It gained considerable notoriety and seemed a real menace to the authorities for several years. A large part of Chartist ranks were drawn from members of trade societies.²¹ But it also had support from middle-class radicals (Rowe, 1967, 85). The Chartist movement existed simultaneously with, and was in direct rivalry with, the free-trade movement of the Anti-Corn Law League. Halévy (1947, 9) raises the specter of a potential for “civil war.” Briggs (1959, 312) speaks of the two movements as representing “a contrast between two segments of a divided society.” Gash (1965, 2) says of the “Movement” (“a phrase borrowed from Continental politics”) that it “had an undeniable air of class war.”²²

However, Chartism, after flaring up, fizzled. As of 1843 it was on the decline. Partly, there wasn't enough social support in Great Britain for a movement that was primarily and overtly a workers' movement. Partly, the movement also could not agree on the degree to which violence was a legitimate weapon. And partly, there was the “Irish factor“: the working class in England was no longer just English, but English and Irish, and issues of Irish nationalism became intertwined with class issues. When Feargus O'Connor took the leadership of the Chartists, the confusion became too great, and the movement was “compromised.”²³ Perhaps most important of all, times got a bit better, and Sir Robert Peel's program of economic reform removed some of the discontent.²⁴ In the end, class warfare did not do much better at this time in Great Britain than it had in France.

The internal problems of Great Britain and France never became large enough that those powers could not concentrate attention on the geopolitics of the world-system. The July Revolution, repeated and confirmed by the independence of Belgium and the Reform Act of 1832, was to have an immediate effect on Europe. Whereas the relations of Great Britain and France between 1815 and 1830 had been correct, and those countries often found themselves on similar sides of world issues, the heritage of the two-century struggle for hegemony continued to ensure enough mutual suspicion to preserve a degree of distance. The July Revolution overcame that, affecting even the Tory government of Wellington before the Reform Bill was enacted. Europe now entered the era of the entente cordiale, a marriage perhaps not of love but certainly of reason, one that would survive all subsequent quarrels until at least 1945. The term itself was probably coined by Palmerston in 1831, although it did not come into official use until 1842 (Guyot, 1926, 220; Halévy, 1950, 3:73, n. 1). The geopolitical basis of the alliance was clear. “As a Liberal power, France was [after the July Revolution] in the nature of things the ally of Liberal England” (Halévy, 1950, 3:73).” ²⁵Great Britain could now pursue with greater ease its containment of absolutism in Europe and expand the circle of liberal states (Guyot, 1926, 88, 117).²⁶

But there were further motives. Great Britain and France faced the same internal problems, and even if France was not yet ready to embrace the free-trade nostrums of Great Britain, the entente cordiale seemed “in the eyes of democrats and socialists” as an “alliance of capitals” that was a “fait accompli” (Guyot, 1926, 302). Was this so wrong? Indeed, the two effects were not separate. In pressuring other powers to follow their example, Great Britain and France, with the entente cordiale, “discouraged the international revolutionary propaganda which counted on the divisions among the powers” (Guichen, 1917, 424–425).

Furthermore, 1830 launched a pattern that would discourage such propaganda even further. For France at least, 1830 served to restore France to a sense of world centrality and nationalist pride. It was not Guizot but the French socialist Louis Blanc (1844, 4:143–144) who would write:

The July Revolution…was more than the dénouement of a struggle against the Church and royalty; it was the expression of national sentiment that had been excessively repressed by the treaties of 1815. We were determined to shake off the yoke of these treaties and restore the European equilibrium.²⁷

One of the curious facts to note about the July Revolution was what happened in Algeria. Charles X's launching of the imperial venture had made Great Britain most unhappy, and Louis XVIII was ready to sacrifice it to appease the British. When, however, the French restrained themselves from direct intervention in Belgium, they felt they had done their share of pleasing the British, and simply continued the occupation, this time without British protest.²⁸ One reason clearly was its effect on worker unrest within France. The “floating” population of Paris, the potential revolutionaries, were being encouraged to settle in Algeria. Indeed, in 1838 Léon Blondel, a high civil servant in Algeria, could say with some confidence: “Africa is an element of order in France” (cited in Tudesq, 1964, 2:815).²⁹

The liberal states thus combined legitimating the political role of the middle classes (and thereby receiving from them legitimation in turn) and internal repression of working-class discontent with an entente cordiale between themselves to ensure their dominance in the geopolitical arena. This seemed to work at first. But it was fragile, as the European revolution of 1848 was to demonstrate. More would have to be done to secure a stable political framework for the capitalist world-economy in the post-1789 situation.

The fragility lay in the fact that the liberal concessions to the working classes were extremely limited, and this made it difficult for liberal governments, if they were not ready to go further, to surmount the disarray caused by periodic severe economic downturns. This was the case most notably in France, where the July Monarchy, and its liberal epigone, Guizot, had become more and more conservative as the years went by, in face of the festering social discontent. The economic crisis of 1847–1848, one of the “most violent” crises that had thitherto been known, hit France hard. Profits fell severely. At the height of the crisis, 75 percent of Paris industrial workers were laid off (Markovitch, 1965, 256; Sée, 1951, 2:143; Labrousse, 1976b, 3:983–984).

The government did not prove itself flexible. Furthermore, it had failed to notice that its major political mechanism, the vote censitaire, was backfiring by alienating the very group of small merchants whose support they had acquired in 1830 by lowering the cens. The problem was that, as taxes were lowered by the government, this very fact pulled these voters off the rolls, undermining not merely the political rights of this group but also their social standing,³⁰ and thus making them receptive to the agitation for suffrage reform. Meanwhile, among the working classes the very moderate Icarians of Étienne Cabet, who had been in the 1840s the major socialist voice—Christian, pacifist, legalist, nationalist, emphasizing class reconciliation—would now be squeezed out in the economic crisis and thereby yield place to more radical groups.³¹

The conservatization of the French regime contrasted with what was happening in the other liberal states. A liberal pope, Pius IX, had been elected in 1846, to the dismay of Metternich (Bury, 1948, 425). If Belgium remained “calm” in 1848, “it was because it had made its revolution, peacefully, in 1847” (Dhondt, 1949, 124). Similarly, the liberals and radicals had won their internal struggle against the Sonderbund in Switzerland in 1847, with the diplomatic support of the British but amid French hesitation (Halpérin, 1948, 1:157).³² Indeed, this was a moment of temporary breakdown of the entente cordiale.³³ At home, the British had handled well the Chartist challenge at the same time that Sir Robert Peel was steering through the Repeal of the Corn Laws,³⁴ such that the “specter of Communism”³⁵ passed them by as well. The crisis of 1847 “provoked no revolutionary disturbance” (Halévy, 1947, 181),³⁶ although the Irish had to pay the price for this.³⁷

Nonetheless, the weakening of the liberal project in France, one of the two pillar states, provided enough tinder for the revolutionary flame to be ignited throughout the nonliberal parts of Europe. To be sure, Metternich and the Austrians blamed the British, accused of being too liberal, for the uprisings,³⁸ but the blameis more legitimately placed at the feet of the French, who got cold feet and were not liberal enough. John Stuart Mill (1849, 7) was very severe on Louis-Philippe in assessing the causes of the February 1848 uprising in Paris, which was the beginning of the 1848 European revolution:

No government can now expect to be permanent unless it guarantees progress as well as order; nor can it continue really to secure order, unless it promotes progress. It can go on as yet, with only a little of the spirit of improvement; while reformers have even a remote hope of effecting their objects through the existing system, they are generally willing to bear with it. But when there is no hope at all; when the institutions themselves seem to oppose an unyielding barrier to the program of improvement, the advance of tide heaps itself up behind them till it bears them down.³⁹

The tide—that is, the European revolution of 1848—as all such great happenings, was made up of a mixture of movements and objectives. In France, it consisted essentially of the joining together of Europe's “first great proletarian insurrection” (Tilly, 1972, 228)⁴⁰ with the acute discontent of the left liberals who shared John Stuart Mill's view of the conservatization of the July Monarchy. Elsewhere in Europe, in states that were not as yet committed to liberalism, there were no proletarian insurrections; rather, there were liberal uprisings combined with nationalist uprisings. Two situations, with two solutions: Louis Napoleon handled the first; Palmerston, the rest.

The uprising of February 1848 illuminated the hopes of a “social republic,” a vague socialist utopia that would provide jobs to the unemployed and liberation to all those who suffered indignities and inequalities. Everyone put forward their claims: the “artisans,” who sought to restore their privileges and their mode of production;⁴¹ the peasants, who sought to reestablish traditional rights of collective usage;⁴² the women, who sought the extension of “universal” suffrage to include them;⁴³ the slaves, who sought abolition.⁴⁴ The pendulum was beginning to swing too far, and in June the forces of order under General Cavaignac reined in the unruly dangerous classes.⁴⁵ “Pitiful provisional government!” cried Labrousse (1948, 2). “It feared the social revolution as much as it did the counter-revolution.”⁴⁶

Cavaignac could repress; he could not relegitimize the state. Nor could the monarchs return; they had exhausted their credit. Into this void stepped Louis Napoleon, who sought to re-create a liberal, orderly, modern state and who, as Zeldin (1958, 6) puts it so well, “was not elected because he was [the] candidate [of the Party of Order], but…was their candidate because they saw he was bound to win.”⁴⁷ But what did Louis Napoleon represent? He represented, first of all, the Napoleonic tradition, which combined the legacy of the French Revolution, a commitment to scientific and industrial progress, and nationalism. During the 1840s, Louis Napoleon had been a sharp critic of the July Monarchy because he felt that, by distancing itself from progressive liberalism, it was “building on sand and would surely tumble.” And, unlike Guizot, he was aware that “with proper safeguards a democratic regime could be established without threatening the stability of the country.”⁴⁸

The liberals acted in 1848 just as they had in 1830. Dismayed by a regime that had become too rigid, too illiberal, they rose up and quickly won the day. Then, dismayed by the possibility that the lower strata would be able to take advantage of the situation and push things too far, they renewed their links with the political groups they had just ousted from power, because “the enemy, at present, is on the left” (Palmade, 1961, 25 5).⁴⁹ When Louis Napoleon made his coup d'état on December 2, 1851, the primary objective was to repress the left.⁵⁰ The secondary objective was, however, to constrain the ability of conservative forces to act other than through him.⁵¹ One can, if one wants, emphasize the Caesarist—the so-called Bonapartist—element in the regime.⁵² If one does, however, one risks missing the degree to which the outcome of the repression, which was both real and effec-tive,⁵³ was that of a centrist regime, oriented to capitalist expansion, constructing a liberal compromise⁵⁴—one led not by a classical liberal but by an enlightened conservative.

If the liberal center was once more secure in France, it had required a Bonapartist form, given the strength of working-class rebelliousness combined with the rigidity of conservative forces—a consequence of France's narrower margin of maneuver in the face of economic recession, as compared at this time with that of Great Britain. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the problem was not resecuring the liberal center but allowing it to emerge. It was the role of the hegemonic power, Great Britain, to keep this process, which of course it favored, from upsetting the geopolitical calm too much.

Outside France, the specter of Communism did not have a comparable social base. Nonetheless, it seemed real for the ruling elites, who found it difficult to distinguish between liberals and socialists. A French author, writing about Spain in the Revue des Deux Mondes in January 1848, just before the revolutions began, said:

I do not believe, I say again, that a revolution is possible, unless our government makes errors of which I think it incapable. But let us at least have no illusions. Let me be heard by those so imprudent as to excite the wrath of the people and so ambitious as to speculate on their fury! A revolution will not take place to the profit of a viewpoint, but to the profit of communism.⁵⁵

Similarly, Cantimori (1948, 1:279) argues that in northern and central Italy, “the fear of social revolution…was but a reflection of the fear of the ‘red specter,' of jacqueries, and of Communism, which all of European reaction felt.” The revolutions broke out everywhere, taking different local colors according to the history: in the Austrian empire (“nowhere…more virulent” [Vermeil, 1948b, 2:46; cf. Endres, 1948]), in Germany and in Poland, in northern Europe and in southern Europe.⁵⁶ And everywhere the liberal/nationalist “blues” and the much weaker “reds” soon parted company (Fejtö, 1948c, 2:441).⁵⁷ The radical elements were easily contained, but in the process, the gains of the centrist nationalists and liberals were limited.⁵⁸ Nationalism could of course be used both to promote liberalism and to contain it, depending on the circumstances.⁵⁹

Great Britain entered the picture, here to support the liberals, there to make sure they didn't go too far, everywhere to maintain a balance, and consequently its sway over the interstate system. In Spain, where the government prior to 1848 had been closely tied to that of Louis-Philippe, Great Britain supported attempts by the liberals in March 1848 to change the government of General Narvaez. Palmerston actually sent a formal letter on March 16 to the government, in which he permitted himself to say: “[T]he Queen of Spain would be acting wisely, in the critical state of affairs, if she restructured the government by enlarging the bases on which her administration rests, and appealing for the counsel of some of those who have the confidence of the liberal party” (cited in Quero, 1948, 1:328).⁶⁰

British intervention, if not directly successful, may have limited the repression. The British did better in Sicily, where they supported the insurgents against the Kingdom of Naples. Naples decided that her friend, Austria, was far off and otherwise occupied, and granted a constitution as demanded; in one fell stroke, “Italy [or at least Naples] found itself on the side of France, England, and Switzerland” (Cantimori, 1948, 1:265). Palmerston also asked the Austrians in 1849 to treat Hungary “with generosity,” to which request the Austrian ambassador in London replied that Austria would be “the sole judge” of how it would deal with the rebels (Fejtö, 1948b, 2:202). On the other hand, Palmerston declined to intervene with the tsar concerning Poland, fearing the encouragement it might give to the Irish movement (Goriély, 1948a, 2:277). In short, Palmerston's policy was very simple: “[H]is foreign policy…had no other goal than to turn to England's advantage the situation created by the revolutionary events” (Fejtö, 1948a, 1:35). In general, the policy was efficacious, even when the diplomatic intrusions were rejected.⁶¹

The European revolution of 1848 began as a threat to the world liberal regime that the hegemonic power, Great Britain—with the crucial aid of France—was establishing, but then became the crucible in which the dominance of liberalism in the geoculture was ensured. When Polanyi outlines in The Great Transformation (1957, 3) the four pillars of nineteenth-century civilization—the balance-of-power system, the international gold standard, the self-regulating market, and the liberal state—he says that “the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market.” If there was any moment in which this self-regulating market seemed to be functioning as close to its theoretical model as possible, it was in the years 1850–1873. And the crucial prelude to this moment of optimal operation of this principle was the Repeal of the Corn Laws in Great Britain in 1846. The story is worth reviewing in some detail.

The so-called Hungry Forties, coming in the wake of “the very real distress of the 1820s and 1830s,” permitted a coming together of interests between the working classes, who were concerned with the price of basic commodities, and the liberals, who were preaching the virtues of the market. They both could find a target in those monopolists whose practices ensured a high cost of living: the West Indian coffee and sugar interests; the East India Company, which controlled the tea trade; and above all the English landowners, whose grain production was price protected by the Corn Laws (Mellor, 1951, 14).⁶²

The political balance had begun to shift against continuing protection of grain. There had been a post-1815 grain glut in Europe because of the prior expansion of production due to military demands and the effects of the blockade, and this glut had served to justify the Corn Laws.⁶³But by the late 1830s the glut had ceased to exist. Industrial expansion had increased urban populations, and land was being converted to industrial crops as well as to animal husbandry (a normal shift in a period of Kondratieff downturn). “[N]orthwestern Europe became collectively deficient in bread grains” (Fairlie, 1965, 568).⁶⁴ The battle for repeal waxed strong, and its defenders were reduced to arguing a conservative position for its own sake. It is nonetheless interesting to note, since we have come to take the Repeal as a great defeat for the landed aristocracy, that opposition to repeal was far stronger among small tenant farmers than among large landowners.⁶⁵

Why then all the fuss, since fuss there was indeed? The answer is that, for both sides, “the Corn Laws were a symbol“—for those who favored repeal, of the new and progressive against the old and privileged; for those who were opposed, of the defense of the landed gentry, “without which there can be no steady mean between democracy and despotism.”⁶⁶ Into this symbolic battle, Sir Robert Peel devoted himself to the only objective worth achieving—not the triumph of the middle classes, but the triumph of the liberal state with the “perpetuation of the status of the landed classes in new technological conditions” (Moore, 1965, 651).⁶⁷When Peel, on May 15, 1846, won the day for Repeal on its third reading, he had two-thirds of the Conservative Party against him. It was a rare parliamentary alliance that carried the day.⁶⁸

Peel pushed Repeal through Parliament on two conditions or two considerations. The first was that the stick of repeal to force the extension of high farming techniques on British agriculture was accompanied by carrots that would ease the transition financially: a reduction of tariffs on grass and clover seeds; laws making it more difficult to return the urban poor to rural birth areas, thereby reducing the needed local levies; and “most important of all…the drainage loan,” which was designed to popularize high farming among tenant farmers by giving loans to the “settled estates,” thereby enabling the tenants for life to charge the estates with the costs of improvement (Moore, 1965, 5 5 4).⁶⁹ The second consideration was purely political. Peel wanted to make sure that Repeal was seen as a decision of Parliament in its wisdom, and not one in reaction to popular pressure. Peel refused to make repeal an issue in the general elections of December 1845. (It might in any case have deeply split his own party.) By forcing it through Parliament, and in a vote that crossed party lines, he made it “a victory over democratic agitation and the [Anti-Corn Law] League, and a proof that parliament put the general welfare above sectional interests” (Kemp, 1962, 204).⁷⁰

What did Repeal of the Corn Laws actually achieve? Two things, really. On the one hand, it ensured the reorganization of the axial division of labor in the world-economy, such that wheat production once again became a peripheral activity. The years following would see the rise of the United States and Canada in North America and of Russia and Romania in eastern Europe as great wheat exporters to western Europe, permitting an intensification of the industrial concentration in the western European zone.⁷¹ But this shift was done in such a way that large British landowners could make the financial transition to new sources of wealth.⁷²

On the other hand, it ensured the restructuring of British politics divided between a right-of-center Conservative Party and a left-of-center Liberal Party (eventually to be supplanted by a left-of-center Labor Party), both basically accepting the logic of centrist liberal politics. One may think of this as a victory for the middle classes, or just as easily as a concession by the aristocracy, “a timely retreat…from a forward position that had proved to be dangerous” (Kitson Clark, 1951b, 12).⁷³ The concept of Whigs and Tories, both coalitions of the eighteenth century, ceased to exist.

The initial advantage went to the Liberal Party because of the great split in Conservative ranks over Repeal.⁷⁴ But there now arose a new kind of conservatism, attuned to the normality of change, one that would regain power by “bas[ing] itself…squarely on the support and votes of the people” (Mosse, 1947, 142). Meanwhile, those Liberal Party members (radicals) who had wanted to associate their party with the working classes had lost out in favor of those who were more concerned with consolidating the state structure. As Briggs (1956, 72) said, “[W]hat the Reform Bill had decreed, the Corn Bill had realized.”

You will note that I did not list as one of the great results of the Repeal of the Corn Laws the enshrinement of the doctrine of laissez-faire. That is because there is more myth than reality in the doctrine of laissez-faire. As a result, it cannot be taken as the defining characteristic of liberalism, surely not the fundamental message of liberalism as the geoculture of the world-system. To be sure, the public posture was that, as John Stuart Mill put it so tersely, “every departure from laissez-faire, unless required by some greater good, is a certain evil.”⁷⁵ But the subordinate clause turned out to be a mighty big loophole. For example, in the very year of Repeal, 1846, in the debate on the Ten Hours Bill, Macaulay asserted that, although there was no economic justification for restricting hours, Parliament was required to take into consideration the social needs of women and children “who were incapable of entering into a proper contractual relationship with their employers” (Taylor, 1972, 44).⁷⁶ The simultaneity of the successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws—opposition to the high symbol of state interference in the economy—with the beginning of serious social legislation in Great Britain (and on the Continent) is strong evidence for Brebner's dictum (1948, 107) that what was really happening was not a shift to laissez-faire but a shift “from intervention by the state in commerce to intervention by the state in industry.” The classical economists and liberals were in fact aware of this and always took a nuanced position on laissez-faire, from Adam Smith to Bentham to Nassau Senior⁷⁷, as did even the great neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall.⁷⁸ The distinction between recognizing the “value” of laissez-faire and preaching it as an “absolute dogma” was fundamental to all the classical economists (Rogers, 1963, 5 35).⁷⁹ They were all aware that “one man's laissez-faire was another man's intervention” (Taylor, 1972, 12).⁸⁰

Still, Europe's liberals felt that the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a great event, which guaranteed economic progress.⁸¹ And, as is true of many such beliefs, the years immediately following seemed to provide the evidence. For the world-economy was now entering into another Kondratieff A-phase, the “golden age of prosperity” of the 1850s and 1860s, and “many contemporaries came to attribute this to the repeal of the Corn Laws“—a “reconciling myth,” according to Kemp (1962, 195). The years were particularly beneficent to the two key countries of the world-system at this time: Great Britain and France.

In Great Britain, this period has been labeled the “Great Victorian Boom” or, slightly more dramatically, the “High Noon of Victorianism,” one that “rested upon the balance between industry and agriculture” (Kitson Clark, 1962, 31, 57).⁸²It was a period during which British capitalists were doing so well that they primarily sought “to paddle their own canoes” (Clapham, 1932, 2:145), in the slang of the times. To be sure, they were obliged to do so, since Great Britain had become “an open market for nearly everything which she produced.” This posed no problem as yet, since at this point Great Britain's superiority in everything was clear: in commerce, in finance, and in industry—that is, in the making of “those things which were chiefly needed” (Clapham, 1932, 2:2, 12).⁸³

The 1850s marked the high point of growth in British exports. The export of cotton piece goods “just about doubled” in the decade, actually increasing even the rate of growth, which, Hobsbawm argues (1975, 30–31), provided “invaluable [political] breathing-space.” Cotton textiles were still central to British wealth, but this was the period in which metals and machinery moved to the fore as the leading industry, and with them the emergence of “bigger industrial units all along the line” (Clapham, 1932, 2:114). Great Britain was clearly on the road to becoming an industrial state. “The course was set” (Clapham, 1932, 2:22). For Great Britain, these were “buoyant years,” in which her economic dominance of the world-economy went “virtually unchallenged” and in which the new world of industry “seemed less like a volcano and more like a cornucopia” (Coleman, 1973, 7–8).⁸⁴Great Britain was comfortably hegemonic, but also complacently so, not always feeling she had to watch over every fluctuation of the world-economy.⁸⁵

Yet, we should not exaggerate. The voyage was “not half over.” Agriculture remained “by very far the greatest of [Great Britain's] industries” (Clapham, 1932, 2:22).⁸⁶ Church (1975, 76) believes that calling this period the “mid-Victorian boom” must be “severely qualified.” Yes, there was a price rise,⁸⁷ business expansion, and an improved standard of living, but the growth rate in production was not all that big, and 1858 saw the most profound downward business cycle of the century. Like all economic leaders, Great Britain was preparing its own fall. It was resistant to innovation. It was in1856 that Bessemer first read his paper on his use of air blasts to make quality steel more inexpensively, but his ideas would not be widely adopted until the Kondratieff B-phase.⁸⁸ The expansion of the world-economy was bringing in its wake further industrialization in the United States and various parts of Europe, making Great Britain's competitive position “steadily more difficult,” particularly because these countries indicated, with the significant exception of France, that they had “no intention of following Britain's example” in adopting free trade (Schlote, 1952, 43).⁸⁹ Indeed, Great Britain itself would eventually sour on free trade.⁹⁰

In this midcentury British glow, France seemed initially at a disadvantage because of the turmoil of 1848. Once again, its revolutions seemed to be hurting its economic development. But this time only most briefly, because the political solution to the turmoil—the populist authoritarianism of the Second Empire—served to resolve some of the political tensions precisely because this regime had made itself, as none had done before,⁹¹ the proponent and propellant of a leap forward of French economic structures, thereby consolidating the liberal core of the world-system.

The economic indicators were clear: Foreign trade tripled (Palmade, 1961, 193). The production of the means of production grew relative to the production of consumable goods (Markovitch, 1966, 322).⁹² There was a boom not only in domestic investment but also in foreign investment, such that by 1867 net income from external investments exceeded net export of capital. For Cameron (1961, 79), this meant that France had become “a ‘mature' creditor nation.”⁹³ And French public finances had become, along with those of Great Britain, “solid.” The public subscription to government loans “demonstrated the strength of savings and the abundance of capital which existed in the two countries” (Gille, 1967, 280).⁹⁴ In short, this was a time of economic glory for France as well as for Great Britain. This was “to the benefit, if not the credit, of the Second Empire,” but, as Palmade (1961, 127, 129) insists, “the externally favorable situation fell to a government firmly committed to taking advantage of it.”

Furthermore, it was a government that thought governmental action was essential to this economic expansion, one that did not consider, in the words of Napoleon III, that state action was a “necessary ulcer” but rather that it was “the benevolent motor of any social organism.” The intention nonetheless was to promote private enterprise thereby. Although the “primary concern” of the government was to “create as many [economic] activities as possible,” still the government wished to “avoid this grievous tendency of the state to engage in activities which private individuals can do as well as or better than it can.”⁹⁵ Furthermore, the public-works program of the government was directed not merely to aid industry, but to shore up the agricultural sector.⁹⁶ And behind this practice—”a precursor of technocratic Gaullist modernization“—was the objective of combating “political instability and class conflict” (Magraw, 1985, 159),⁹⁷ crucial for a regime that had emerged in the crucible of the Revolution of 1848.

This is where the famous Saint-Simonian link comes in. Actually, we should talk of the post-Saint-Simonians, those who had emerged out of the pseudoreligious phase under Enfantin and who retained only the “radical” spirit of Saint-Simon—rigorously modernist, technocratic, reformist, ultimately neither “socialist” nor “conservative” (as some have claimed) but essentially “liberal” in spirit, as became most clear in the Second Empire.⁹⁸ It was liberal in spirit because it combined the two key features of liberalism: economic development linked to social amelioration. For liberals, the two are obverse sides of the same coin. The Saint-Simonians affirmed “the primacy of the economic over the political sphere” (Blanchard, 1956, 60). But they also argued, in the 1831 formula of Isaac Péreire, that economic progress would bring about “an amelioration of the lot of the largest and poorest strata” (cited in Plessis, 1973, 86). This is of course why Napoleon III and the Saint-Simonians were “made for each other” (Weill, 1913, 391–92).⁹⁹ To be sure, the Saint-Simonians were “about the only intellectual group available to [Napoleon]” (Boon, 1936, 85). But also vice versa: the modernist sector of the bourgeoisie, the true liberals, “needed [Napoleon] to liberate themselves from the timidities of the well-to-do” (Agulhon, 1973, 234),¹⁰⁰ who had dominated the Party of Order in the July Monarchy. This is why Guérard (1943, chap. 9) called Napoleon III “Saint-Simon on horseback.”

It is in this period as well that banks came into their own as key agents of national economic development. In this, too, the credit must go to the post-Saint-Simonians (such as the brothers Péreire), who were “the first to realize the role of stimulus and coordinator that banks could play in economic life” (Chlepner, 1926, 15). But the story predates the brothers Péreire. From at least 1815 on, the biggest banks—notably the Rothschilds and the Barings—shifted their emphasis to long-term loans, first in negotiating and promoting loans to governments and second in sustaining large private enterprises. Since, as Landes (1956, 210–212) notes, were these banks to show “too voracious an appetite,” they could be undercut by competitors, they tended to form cartels. The Rothschilds in particular found their best profits in a tacit link with the Holy Alliance and were thus able to locate themselves in the principal money markets, which at that time were “more markets of demand than centers of money supply” (Gille, 1965, 98).¹⁰¹ Furthermore, the “favorite gambit” of the Rothschilds—the short-term emergency loan to a government in difficulty—was not necessarily an aid to national self-sufficiency. Cameron (1957b, 556) argues that such governments “rarely ever regained [their] independence” and compares the practice to a “habit-forming drug.”¹⁰²

The need, of course, was for more locally controlled sources of credit. Chlepner (1926, 19) reminds us that, before the Crédit Mobilier of the brothers Péreire, there were “predecessors” in Belgium—most notably the Société Générale, founded by King William in 1822. It was, however, only after Belgium marked its independence in 1831 with the enthronement of Leopold I that the bank became a major actor in economic development, primarily in the construction of railways. If this bank and the rival Banque de Belgique, founded in 1835, both went into relative hibernation after the financial crisis of 1838, they were even harder hit by the Anglo-French economic crisis of 1846–1847. With this in the background, February 1848 led to fear of revolution, fear of the loss of independence, and a “veritable financial panic” (Chlepner, 1926, 238; see also 1931), which caused the state to come to the aid of the bank and end the period of agitation. Belgium thus was able to avoid the revolutionary upsurge and could then move to a more truly liberal system, eliminating the semiofficial character of the Société Générale in 1851.¹⁰³

The banking controversies in Great Britain, previously discussed, created a situation in which the banks were unable to play a direct role in promoting economic growth. These controversies culminated in the Bank Act of 1844, whose objective, from Peel's point of view, was primarily to “make more solid the foundations of the gold standard” and secondarily to remove the use of gold as an internal political weapon (Fetter, 1965, 192).¹⁰⁴ Perhaps Great Britain could afford, better than other countries, not to have a banking policy that would promote economic growth. Cameron (1961, 58–59) calls this “inefficient” but notes that “paradoxically,…the very obstacles placed in the way of a rational banking and monetary system stimulated the private sector to introduce the financial innovations necessary for realization of the full benefits of technical innovations in industry.”

What the British state had promoted by its failures—an adequate supply of credit for the midcentury economic expansion—the French state under Napoleon 111would create deliberately. The decree of February 1852 authorizing the formation of mortgage banks, the Crédit Foncier of Émile Péreire being one of the first, provided the financial underpinning for the reconstruction of Paris by Haussmann. “[F]rom a laggard, France became a leader and innovator in mortgage credit” (Cameron, 1961, 129).¹⁰⁵ The Rothschilds were not happy. James de Rothschild argued that this change in structure would concentrate too much power in untried hands. It seems a case of the pot calling the kettle black.¹⁰⁶ In any case, the rise of the great corporate banks of the Second Empire took the monopoly away from what had been called the haute banque, a “powerful group of private (unincorporated) bankers” (Cameron, 1953, 462). But the haute banque had not provided sufficient credit to French business enterprises.¹⁰⁷

Toward the end of the Second Empire, in 1867, the largest of the new banks, Crédit Mobilier, failed. The Rothschilds, however, were still there, and are still there today. Nonetheless the liberal state, by its intervention, had changed the worldwide credit structure of modern capitalism: “[T]he banking system of every nation in Continental Europe bore the imprint of French influence” (Cameron, 1961, 203).¹⁰⁸ The creation of larger numbers of banks oriented to the international market may have diminished the power of the haute banque. This was not necessarily a great virtue for the weaker state structures in tight financial situations. Jenks (1927, 273) discusses the perverse effect of greater competition in the field of loans to governments:

[C]ompetition simply augmented the risks of marketing the loan in the face of efforts of the unsuccessful banker to cry it down….What the competition did encourage, however, was the pressing of more money upon frequently “bewildered” borrowers….In a word, the loan business was monopolescent.¹⁰⁹

The collapse of Crédit Mobilier gives credence to this analysis. It formed part of a sequence that led to the drying up of loans to weak governments and hence the accentuation of what was to become the Great Depression after 1873.¹¹⁰

The liberals had achieved what they had hoped to achieve in midcentury. The long upswing of the world-economy and the actions of the governments of the core zone—in particular, of Great Britain and France—secured a steady process of worldwide relocations, until at least the end of the twentieth century. We may call this the “strong market,” one of the three pillars of the liberal world order that was to be the great achievement of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were two further pillars for a liberal world order: the strong state, and the strong interstate system. It is to the process of securing them that we now turn.

The absolute monarchies had not been strong states. Absolutism was merely the scaffolding within which weak states sought to become stronger. It would only be in the post-1789 world-system's atmosphere of normal change and popular sovereignty that one could build truly strong states—that is, states with an adequate bureaucratic structure and a reasonable degree of popular acquiescence (which in wartime could be converted into passionate patriotism). And it was the liberals, and only the liberals, who could construct such states in the core zones of the world-system. Bureaucratic growth was the essential pendant of economic growth, at least of economic growth at the scale that capitalists now hoped for and that was now technologically possible.

Of course, the construction of a strong bureaucratic state was a long process that had begun in the late fifteenth century. Resistance to such construction is what we really mean when we refer to an ancien régime, which of course existed quite as much in Great Britain as in France, as indeed it did throughout Europe and most of the world. What we may call generically Colbertism was the attempt to overcome this resistance by taking real power from the local level and concentrating it in the hands of the monarch. It was at best partially successful. Jacobinism was nothing but Colbertism with a republican face. It died in its original form in 1815. After 1815, it would be liberalism that took up the battle to create a strong state. Whereas Colbertism and Jacobinism had been brutally frank about their intentions, the fact that liberals refused to acknowledge that building the strong state was their intention—in many ways, their priority—was perhaps precisely why they were able to succeed better than the Colbertists and the Jacobins. Indeed, they succeeded so well that the enlightened conservatives took up this same objective, largely effacing in the process any ideological distinction between themselves and the liberals.

Of course, there are many reasons why capitalists find strong states useful. One is to help them accumulate capital;¹¹¹ a second is to guarantee this capital.¹¹² But after 1848, capitalists fully realized, if they had not before, that only the strong state—that is, the reformist state—could buffer them against the winds of worker discontent. Péreire put his finger on it: “The ‘strong' state became the welfare state of large-scale (grand) capitalism” (cited in Bouvier, 1967, 166). Of course, “welfare state” here has a double connotation—the welfare of the working classes to be sure, but the welfare of the capitalists as well.

We think of Victorian Great Britain as the locus of antistatism in its heyday, and it is quite true that “in general, [most Englishmen] were suspicious of the State and of centralization” at this time (Burn, 1964, 226).¹¹³ But in the jostle of conflicting interests between those (largely the “liberals”) who wanted the state to cease propping up the agricultural interests and those (largely the “conservatives”) who were inclined to favor local and more traditional authority, combining it with a rhetoric of social concern for the poor,¹¹⁴ it was easy for the latter to find compensation for every victory of free commerce by pushing forward some project of state intervention in industry. Brebner calls it the “mid-century dance…like a minuet“: parliamentary reform in 1832, the first Factory Act in 1833; Peel's budget in 1841; the Mines Act in 1842; Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the Ten Hours Bill in 1847. “The one common characteristic [of the political initiatives of 1825–1870] is the consistent readiness of interested groups to use the state for collectivist interests” (Brebner, 1948, 64, 70).¹¹⁵

Before 1848 much of the argument among the middle classes for state social reform had been based on “widespread philanthropic enthusiasm and the uneasy conscience…at the spectacle of the poverty in which the workers were condemned to live” (Halévy, 1947, 218). However, the revolutions of 1848, which Britons could not help but feel they had averted by the beginnings of social intervention, added to mere guilt a sense of the political importance of reformist legislation.¹¹⁶ Thus it was that, at the very height of the classical age of English liberalism, “the growth of the central government was staggering” (Katznelson, 1985, 274).¹¹⁷ These foundations of modern government may have been, as Evans (1983, 285) said, “laid in the teeth of a gale.”¹¹⁸ But Gladstonian liberalism was “a restless, reforming creed” (Southgate, 1965, 324), albeit without the least semblance of any commitment to economic equality.

The origins of Gladstonian reformism were in Benthamism, as we have seen.¹¹⁹The result was the so-called administrative revolution, which transformed the functions of the state in the direction of a “new and more or less conscious Fabianism” (MacDonagh, 1958, 60).¹²⁰ Bit by bit, “the disciples of Smith and Ricardo [came to promote a series of] social reforms which brought a strong paternalistic state” (Roberts, 1958, 335). And then, in the last twist, English liberalism redefined in this fashion “found a complementary expression in the Conservative Party which…actually realized certain Liberal principles which the other…was in danger of obscuring” (Ruggiero, 1959, 135).

The situation in France was remarkably similar. There, too, laissez-faire had become “the dominant watchword.” But there, too, “practice was rather different from theory.” And there, too, “those in power were conscious of the industrial factor in the world struggle for preponderance, peaceful but then tending to become warlike” (Léon, 1960, 182).¹²¹ And there, too, the nineteenth century was the century in which the strong state was constructed. To be sure, this creation had been and would continue to be a continuous process—from Richelieu to Colbert to the Jacobins to Napoleon to the monarchies censitaires to the Second Empire to the Third Republic to the Fifth.¹²² But in many ways the Second Empire marked a crucial step forward. Or perhaps the way to put it is that the Second Empire marked the locking in of the structure by laying the basis for popular acquiescence. Louis Napoleon was able to do this because, as Guizot (cited in Pouthas, 1983, 144) said, with what sounds like grudging admiration, he incarnated at one and the same time “national glory, a revolutionary guarantee, and the principle of order.”¹²³

What Napoleon III instituted was a welfare-state principle from the top down. The Second Republic had brought the “social question” to the fore of the agenda, arguing that the sovereignty of all the people contrasted with, was belied by, the “tragic inferiority in the conditions of some of the people.” From this observation, two conclusions seemed possible: a definition of popular sovereignty that would lead to “unlimited political power,” or an “absolute rejection of political authorities (pouvoir)” that risked making society “ungovernable” (Donzelot, 1984, 67, 70). Bonapartism represented the former definition, without ever forgetting that it had to use the power to provide a response to the “social question.”

In his first decade in power, Napoleon III repressively reestablished order, used the state to build public works and modernize the banking system, and concluded the 1860 free-trade treaty with Great Britain. In this period, Napoleon III was primarily concerned with creating an “environment favourable to industrial capitalists,” and therefore one in which the working class was “held in check” (Kemp, 1971, 181).¹²⁴Once this was assured, he would then turn to integrating the working classes into the political process. He became quite popular with the workers in the years after 1858. They were years of great prosperity, years of political reform, years in which France was supporting oppressed nationalities in Italy and elsewhere. A pro-Bonapartist workers' group came into existence (Kulstein, 1962, 373–375; also 1964). In this atmosphere, there was a growing competition among republicans, royalists, and Prince Napoleon for the favor of the workers. They were all encouraging cooperatives on the grounds that such organizations were not “incompatible with the free economy in which they all believed” (Plamenatz, 1952, 126).¹²⁵

In various ways, Napoleon III sought to “become closer to the new social left” (Duverger, 1967, 156).¹²⁶ In 1864, he legalized trade unions and strikes, which constituted, in the words of Henri Sée (1951, 2:342), “an act of major importance in the social history of France.”¹²⁷ Indeed, the regime used its attempt to “ameliorate the conditions of the workers and the needy” as a central theme of its propaganda, boasting of its “cradle to the grave” assistance to the needy (Kulstein, 1969, 95, 99).¹²⁸ What Napoleon III, as the first among the “democratic Bonapartists,” sought was a program that would “render the masses conservative…by giving them something to conserve” (Zeldin, 1958, 50). In this way, he made it possible to complete the project of transforming France into a liberal state—a project that would be consecrated in the constitution of 1875.¹²⁹ Furthermore, France was not only a liberal state but a national state, and it was France that had sealed the identification of the two in nineteenth-century Europe.¹³⁰

The third pillar of the British/liberal world order was a strong interstate system. Metternich's Holy Alliance had not been considered a step in that direction, since the oppressive interference had tended to stir the nationalist pots while trying to keep the kettle tops pinned in place—a sure remedy for further revolutions, as 1848 would show. Or so both the British and the French thought. What the British wanted, as the hegemonic power and the strongest actor in the world-economy at this time, was as much free trade as possible, which meant as much as was politically possible, with the least need for military expenditures. The British wanted to have their way without having constantly to use too much force to impose their way. In short, they wanted stability and openness to the degree that it served their economic interests. Of course, in some sense this objective was not new. But in midcentury the British were in a position to be more honest about it and for a short time to profit highly from the fruits of such a policy. To be sure, as Cunningham (1908, 869) noted:

It may be pointed out with some truth that the system of unfettered intercourse was opportune for England, because she had reached a particular phase of development as an industrial nation, but that it was not equally advantageous to countries in which the economic system was less advanced.

And this was because, as Musson (1972b, 19) has argued, free trade is in fact simply one more protectionist doctrine—in this case, protectionist of the advantages of those who at a given time are enjoying greater economic efficiencies.¹³¹

Nor should we forget that, to the extent that one may argue that free trade prevailed in the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth century, or at least among European powers, it was at most a story of the midcentury Kondratieff A-period, 1850–1873. “The nineteenth century began and ended in Europe…with restrictions of international trade” (Bairoch, 1976a, 11),¹³² quite severe restrictions—the Continental Blockade at the one end and the multiplicity of protectionist tariffs at the other.

It was only slowly that Great Britain itself had been won over to the merits of free trade. The political economists in the Board of Trade believed that the adoption of the Corn Laws in 1815 had been the stimulus to the Zollverein, which worried them doubly. It furthered the development of competitive manufacturing in the German states, and it also tended to cut the British off from using these states as the “excellent smuggling bases” into Prussia, Bavaria, Austria, and Russia that they had previously been (Clapham, 1930, 1:480–481; Kindleberger, 1975, 33–34).¹³³In the 1830s, the worries about competitive manufacturing grew.¹³⁴ These worries, plus the internal considerations previously discussed, account for Peel's actions in the 1840s. Peel, let us remember, was not a free-trade ideologue; he was no Cob-den. He was, in Schuyler's apt image (1945, 134), “a reformer on the installment plan, disinclined to push theories to their logical limit.”¹³⁵

The strongest theme of free trade in Great Britain—or, let us say, the theme that assembled the widest band of public opinion behind it—was what might be called the theme of “liberal interventionism.” Free trade for the British was a doctrine that was intended to prevent other governments from doing anything that might hurt British enterprise. In this sense, one might regard the antislavery (and anti-slave-trade) movement as the first great success of liberal interventionism. We have previously discussed the degree to which the British abolitionist movement was predicated on economic considerations (Wallerstein, 1989, 143–146).¹³⁶ What we wish to note here is the degree to which the antislavery movement provided a model of liberal reformism—a point underlined by Blackburn (1988, 439–440):

In acutely troubled times anti-slavery helped middle-class reformers to highlight their socio-economic ideals….[Anti-slavery] furnished a model of legislation dictated by general policy rather than particular interests. It justified state intervention in regulating the working class contract, while sanctifying the contract itself. The advocates of emancipation presented it as furnishing an economic stimulus via market expansion. The free worker was also a consumer.¹³⁷

The same liberal belief in the legitimacy of state-led reformism was applied to free trade. The forced transformation of India, from being an exporter of cotton textiles to being an exporter of raw cotton, permitted British cotton manufacturers to embrace free trade unreservedly, once the British state had “secured Lancashire against any threat of Indian competition in the markets of Europe” (Farnie, 1979, 100).¹³⁸ Palmerston told Auckland on January 22, 1841: “It is the business of Government to open and secure the roads for the merchant” (cited in Platt, 1968b, 85).¹³⁹ Applying this logic even to European states, a Whig M.P. in the parliamentary debate of 1846 could describe free trade as a beneficent principle whereby “foreign nations would become valuable Colonies to us, without imposing on us the responsibility of governing them.”¹⁴⁰This sense of imposing beneficence could lead to (was based upon?) the “quasi-religious” belief that cotton manufacturing was more vital to the “social regeneration” of civilization than the fine arts dear to John Ruskin, as one R. H. Hutton argued in 1870: “If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton-mill, then, in the name of manhood and morality, give us the cotton-mill” (Farnie, 1979, 87–88).¹⁴¹

Free trade was free-trade imperialism, in the phrase made famous by Gallagher and Robinson (1953, 2–3, 11, 13), but their crucial qualification should always be borne in mind: “British policy followed the principle of control informally if possible, and formally if necessary.” It was apparently necessary even in the mid-century free-trade years (that preceded the acknowledged colonial scramble of the last third of the nineteenth century) to occupy or annex a long series of colonies, to the point that, far from being an era of “indifference,” this period might be thought of as the “decisive stage” in British overseas expansion, permitting a combination of commercial penetration and colonial rule such that Great Britain could “command those economies which could be made to fit best into her own.”¹⁴² Although intervention was considered somewhat distasteful, it rapidly became legitimate whenever there seemed to be a danger to the routes to India, or “an alarming threat” to the British position in the world-economy that was thought to be caused by “unfair” activities of rival trading powers (Platt, 1968b, 32).

Despite the entente cordiale, and despite the de facto collaboration of Great Britain and France in imposing a liberal world order, France was quite reluctant to abandon an overt protectionism. France had done so briefly in 1786, with unhappy results (Wallerstein, 1989, 87–93). In the post-1815 period, Great Britain remained protectionist, as did France, albeit a little more intensively so.¹⁴³ When Great Britain moved toward free-trade protectionism, the French stood firm, for reasons that seemed quite cogent to them, as this 1845 speech by a French industrialist to his peers makes clear:

Gentlemen, pay no attention to the theories that cry out, freedom for trade. This theory was proclaimed by England as the true law of the commercial world only when, following a long practice of the most absolute prohibitions, she had brought her industry to so great a level of development that there was no market within which any other large-scale industry was able to compete with hers.¹⁴⁴

Indeed, in the early 1840s France was trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to create a customs union with neighboring states in order to strengthen its industrial position vis-à-vis Great Britain.¹⁴⁵

It may therefore seem surprising that the greatest success in Europe of Great Britain's free-trade diplomacy of midcentury was the signing of the so-called Chevalier-Cobden treaty—the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860, a treaty that “represented the most significant trade liberalization agreement of the nineteenth century” (O'Brien and Pigman, 1992, 98). What happened?

The treaty affected all the most important industries. France ended her prohibitions and limited the ad valorem duties, which were to be replaced within six months by specific duties. Great Britain agreed to let in nearly all French goods free, with the notable exception of wine. Coal would be exported duty-free from both countries. But since Great Britain was an exporter and France an importer, this was in reality a British concession—one that aroused much opposition in Great Britain. Furthermore, the treaty contained a most-favored-nation clause, which meant that, to the degree that France would enter into reciprocal tariff-cutting arrangements with other European countries, Great Britain would automatically benefit. Each new treaty in turn containing the same clause, there cumulated rapidly a general reduction of tariffs such that “for a decade or so…Europe came as close as ever to complete free trade until after World War II” (Cameron, 1989, 277).¹⁴⁶

British free-trade diplomacy had always centered on France. France was of course a major trading partner, but, even more important, France was the country with which Great Britain had the greatest and most persistent deficit in the balance of trade (Bairoch, 1976a, 46).¹⁴⁷ Every previous attempt since 1815 by Great Britain to negotiate a treaty with France had failed. The negotiations had been in fact halfhearted on both sides because the terms discussed had always involved strict reciprocity, and no doubt above all because the French government had “lacked the power to control the protectionist Chambers” (Dunham, 1930, 101).¹⁴⁸ What had changed was the desire of Napoleon III to consolidate a liberal state. Just as, after repression of revolutionaries, he would move a decade later to the recognition of trade unions, so after a decade of state-led strengthening of the French economy, he would move forward to the Treaty of 1860. He could do this effectively precisely because he did it in secret, by virtue of his authoritarian powers. One day in a letter to his minister of state, Achille Fould, Napoleon III simply announced the treaty. It was immediately branded a “new coup d'état of Napoleon III” (Bairoch, 1970, 6).¹⁴⁹

What mattered in Napoleon III's negotiation of this treaty was not the economic change it brought, but the cultural meaning. Signing the treaty represented the full commitment of France to the concept of the liberal state. In economic terms, it was “the culmination, not the start of the opening of the French economy” (Mokyr and Nye, 1990, 173). It was at most a move from an openly protectionist system to a “moderately protectionist regime” (Rist, 1956, 943; cf. Coussy, 1961, 3).¹⁵⁰ What were its consequences economically? Dunham (1930, 1–2) claims that it revived “moribund French industries…by the salutary pressure of foreign competition.”¹⁵¹ But Bairoch (1972, 221) is not persuaded that there were economic benefits to France. Rather, he says “the liberalization of trade substantially slowed down [French] economic growth.”¹⁵²

In general, free trade was supposed to serve Great Britain well, and both its supporters and its enemies have tended to agree that, from a British point of view, it was “a success from the very beginning [1846]” (Imlah, 1950, 156). But there have come to be skeptical voices about how well it worked even for Great Britain: skepticism about the economic advantages,¹⁵³ and skepticism both about the degree of real support it had within Great Britain and about how influential the “free-traders” were.¹⁵⁴ So, says Redford (1956, 11), the great events of 1860—the Anglo-French treaty and Mr. Gladstone's budget—may have had, probably did have, “less practical effect” than previously thought, but “they made a splendid coping-stone to the free trade edifice.”

Still, quibbling over the degree of economic advantage to the one or the other party in the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce may make us lose sight of the effort to construct an international order that would sanctify liberalism as the European ideology. We talk of the period 1815–1914 as the Pax Britannica. In fact, this is a deceptive way of describing it. It was actually a period of constant colonial wars, “some not so very ‘small' as [some] are wont to call [them]” (Gough, 1990, 179–181).¹⁵⁵ For the creation of the liberal-national state was also and necessarily the creation of the liberal-imperial state.

To be sure, world conditions between 1815 and the 1870s favored “a more relaxed policy” of Great Britain toward the periphery. These were “halcyon days” for British trade. And the myth of “Little England” was a good way of denying the imposition of “informal empire” (Galbraith, 1961, 39–40).¹⁵⁶ Furthermore, Burn (1949, 222–223) argues that, as part of what he calls Great Britain's “liberal equipoise,” it was crucial to direct the angers of the populace outward: “The instinct for violence was also being diverted abroad….The English were by no means a pacific people, but they satisfied themselves by thinking of what ought to be done or what they would do to rebellious Sepoys, riotous negroes, Russians or Frenchmen or, in 1861, Americans.” This diversion was not merely a matter of social psychology but of social mobility. Job opportunities in the colonies took “some of the sting” out of early nineteenth-century radicalism.¹⁵⁷

In theory, liberal ideologists were opposed to colonialism on the grounds that it constituted an infringement on human freedom.¹⁵⁸ But this was very theoretical. In practice, British liberal (and socialist) economists and commentators had an evolving and increasingly favorable concept of British imperial rule over “barbarians” (which term did not include the White settler colonists), although there were a few moments (1780–1800, 1860–1880) when they were rather skeptical.¹⁵⁹Even as strong a proponent of the self-determination of nations as John Stuart Mill intruded a criterion of “fitness.”¹⁶⁰ India was of course the centerpiece of the British imperial project. It was not at first merely, even perhaps primarily, a matter of free-trade imperialism but of revenues, as Bayly (1989, 10) rightly insists.¹⁶¹And when the free-trade group successfully worked to eliminate the East India Company entirely from the picture, they did so in a way that contributed to “the strength and the endurance of Britain's imperial connexion with India” (Moore, 1964, 145).

French liberalism was no less oriented to the imperial state. After all, for Saint-Simon, as for so many other believers in “the certainty of human progress,” the “East” was thought to be still in the “childhood” of this progress (Cole, 1953, 1:41).¹⁶² Louis de Bougainville had already made a tour of the Pacific, starting from St.-Malo on December 15, 1766. on a trip that had brought him to Tuamolu, Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and the Moluccas. It was, however, only after 1796 that missionaries and merchants began to show some interest in the Pacific. Beginning with Charles X's incursion into Algeria, and continuing under Louis-Philippe, France “constantly enlarged its overseas domain” (Schefer,1928, 430).¹⁶³

The July Monarchy evinced an economic concern to maintain order on whaling vessels in the Pacific. It was at this point that the entente cordiale almost disintegrated into warfare because of acute British-French rivalry in the so-called Pritchard affair of 1843. In 1838, the French had made a treaty with Tahiti. In 1840, the British had beat the French out by annexing New Zealand (Jore, 1959, 1: 186, 213). France “took her revenge” in 1842 by taking over the Marquesas and establishing a protectorate over Tahiti as well as sending missionaries to New Caledonia. It was just then that Great Britain, by the Treaty of Nanking, “opened” China (Faivre, 1954, 9, 338; Jore, 1959, 1:200–207, 213, 224; 2:81–106, 165–171, 181–353).

The climax of the rivalry occurred in Tahiti. Though the British “acquiesced” over the Marquesas, they were more unhappy about Tahiti. In 1842, the French arrested the British consul in Tahiti, one Pritchard. In 1843, C. V. Lord Paulet sought to place Hawaii, which the French also coveted, under a British protectorate. Passions rose on both sides. But then both sides pulled back. Guizot and Aberdeen agreed to calm the waters. The French voted an indemnity to Pritchard. Both Pritchard and the French consul in Tahiti, Moerenhout, were replaced. There would be no French protectorate over the Wallis Islands or New Caledonia, nor would there be a British protectorate over the Gambia (in West Africa). Both powers agreed to recognize Hawaii as an independent state (Faivre, 1954, 496–497; Jore, 1959, 2:385–387).

There were a number of reasons for this mutual withdrawal from the precipice. There was an upsurge of agitation in Ireland. And the United States was entering the picture. Great Britain and the United States were in active dispute over the Canadian Pacific border. The convention of the Democratic Party in the United States had proclaimed the slogan of “54°40' or Fight.” U.S. Secretary of State Webster had extended the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii. Both the British and the French felt that the possible gains to be derived from their continued colonizing did not outweigh the damage to be done to their alliance—so essential to their mutual objectives. They were both determined not to let such an incident recur, as well as to maintain the status quo in the Pacific. They thus both decided to “veiller au grain' (or “look out for squalls,” in the old mariner's expression) (Jore, 1959, 2:388).¹⁶⁴

The importance for world order of this reassertion of the entente cordiale became clear in the 1850s with the Crimean War. Basically, the war was about Russia's long-standing attempt to expand its territory, power, and influence southward into the zone controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Since the British (and the French) were equally desirous of controlling the economic flows of this zone, and the British were in fact well into the process of turning the Ottoman Empire into being very dependent on them, the two powers decided to make it militarily clear that the Russians had to concede priority to the British. The war was thus, in Polanyi's words (1957, 5), “a more or less colonial event.”¹⁶⁵ Since the British were indeed the hegemonic power and commanded the support of the French (and of course the Ottomans), “Palmerston's war” could not but be a military success. Russia was forced into a “humiliating peace.” But can it really be called that “rare example of a war that achieved what it set out to achieve” (Vincent, 1981, 37–38)?¹⁶⁶

In retrospect, the Crimean War has been presented as a “minor” exception to the Pax Britannica, involving “localized theatres of operations and…limited objectives” (Imlah, 1958, 1). Hugh Seton-Watson (1937, 359) calls it “the most unnecessary war in the history of modern Europe.”¹⁶⁷ It certainly did strengthen the British position in the Ottoman Empire.¹⁶⁸ But it had unexpected negative side effects for the British. The British government had to withdraw some troops from the colonies to use in the fighting. It even sought to recruit troops in the United States, which strained diplomatic relations.¹⁶⁹ But the use of these troops for the Crimean War backfired. For it proved that one could diminish the “burdens of Empire,” thereby giving Conservatives further arguments for the “rise of a new imperialism” (Schuyler, 1945, 233).

Even more important, however, was that the war had to be fought at all. Hegemony depends in many ways on the fact that implicit strength is never challenged. Although Great Britain won, it did so only after “the much publicized defeats and disasters of the first Crimean winter.” The resulting “paradox” was that Great Britain had now to spend much more on military preparedness and nonetheless witnessed “a decline of British influence in Europe” (Gash, 1979, 310–311). The defeat of Russia as a result was in fact only temporary. Russia found that she “only had to await patiently the moment when she would be able to shake off the restraints imposed on her in the Black Sea” (Seton-Watson, 1937, 359). And at home, the Crimean War persuaded previously recalcitrant British manufacturers of the importance of the liberal state being an actively imperial state.¹⁷⁰

The 1860s should have marked the definitive installation of the British-dominated pacific world order, in crucial alliance with France. It was indeed the moment of its apogee, but it also marked the beginning of its decline. The very period when the “tendencies in Britain towards the disruption of the Empire reached their climax” (Schuyler, 1921, 538) was also the period of “the final demonstration of British powerlessness and pacifism over Schleswig-Holstein,” and thus of the shattering of “the old confidence in the moral power of British influence“ (Gash, 1979, 317–318).¹⁷¹

The same thing happened in France. In addition to Crimea (1854–1856) and the conquest of Cochin in 1862, Napoleon III sought to consolidate France's position as a world power by an adventure into Central America, seeking thereby to limit the power of the United States. In 1852, France and Great Britain proposed to the United States a tripower protectorate over Cuba. The “haughty refusal” by the United States increased the suspicions of U.S. intentions.¹⁷² In 1859, in a situation of two competing governments in Mexico—that of Juárez in Veracruz and that of Zuloaga in Mexico City—President Buchanan spoke of U.S. ambitions in Cuba and Mexico, and threw his weight behind Juárez. Zuloaga turned to the French for military help. When the United States was then paralyzed by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the French and the Mexican monarchists joined forces to support Archduke Maximilian of Austria as the king of Mexico. France had begun its American “Crimea.”

When Juárez suspended debt payments, the French, British, and Spanish joined forces, demanding the installation of debt commissioners in Veracruz and Tampico. All three powers sent in troops in 1862, but only France was willing to support Maximilian. The other two powers and Maximilian himself pulled back, leaving France alone “forced into a real war.” Napoleon III sent a whole expedition, which failed, and the Second Empire was “discredited,” losing much of the “prestige on which [the Second Empire] was in large part based” (Schefer, 1939, 11, 241), and of course particularly in Europe.¹⁷³

The British-French attempts to create a liberal world order that they would dominate was thus a great success, but it was also a great failure. On the one hand, they had stretched their economic and military power to the limit and would not be able to stop the steady ascent of Germany and the United States, whose joint increase in real power and whose mutual rivalry would begin to shape the increasingly conflictual world order after 1870. Both Great Britain and France would now be forced to change their pattern of colonial acquisition from one in which they alone set the pace to one in which everyone (or at least very many) were free to “scramble.” But on the other hand, Great Britain and France had succeeded in imposing on the world-system the geoculture of liberalism, to which increasing homage had to be paid by everyone, at least until the outbreak of the First World War. Bismarck could not resume the language of the Holy Alliance, nor did he have the least interest in doing so. Rather, Bismarck and Disraeli would draw the positive lessons of the Second Empire and propound an enlightened conservatism, which was really a conservative variant of liberalism.

The turning point in the nineteenth-century world order would be the years 1866–1873—”a gigantic hinge on which the history of the later nineteenth century turns” (Clapham, 1944, 2:271). The United States had remained united, and in 1866 it seemed clear that Germany was about to become so. Thus, the two rising powers were in a position to increase their geopolitical role. At the same time, Great Britain was about to join France in the big leap to universal male suffrage. Parliamentary reform in Great Britain in 1867 is seen, quite correctly, as “the end of an epoch” (Burn, 1964, chap. 6). The British Reform Act of 1867 plus the paroxysm of 1870–1871 in France represent together the culmination of a process begun in 1815 of trying to tame the dangerous classes—in particular, the urban proletariat—by incorporating them into the system politically, but in such a way that they would not upset the basic economic, political, and cultural structures of the two countries.

In the prior fifty years, the extension of the suffrage had been in theory a proposition of liberals, resisted by conservatives. The classic evidence for this is the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Is it not then strange that most of the other crucial advances were made under the aegis of, or at least the leadership of, conservative politicians: Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which preceded the Reform Bill of 1832; Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; and, most important, the Reform Act of 1867, which granted virtual universal manhood suffrage? Himmelfarb (1966, 117), in her analysis of 1867, says that liberals, believing that individuals mattered politically, were so cautious about putting political arrangements at the mercy of the mass of individuals that they considered universal suffrage both “serious and perilous.” Conservatives, she says, with their “faith in eternal verities of human nature and society,” worried less, which is why the Reform Act was “a Conservative measure, initiated and carried out by a Conservative Government.”¹⁷⁴ This is no doubt a correct description, up to a point, of the reasoning process of members of these two political groups, but I am not sure that this is what really happened.

It seems to me that the Liberals never quite had the courage of their convictions, for the simple reason that they shared all the fears of Conservatives of the dangerous classes, with little of the political and social self-assurance of Conservative aristocrats. Liberals were always afraid of being accused of being reckless. Conservatives, on the other hand, were in no rush to reform, but when they saw that reform was essential, they were quite ready to move more decisively, free of the fear of being attacked for radical beliefs.¹⁷⁵ Besides, with a little cleverness they might turn the extension of the suffrage into votes for themselves rather than for the Liberals.¹⁷⁶ It thus might seem not totally coincidental that

[t]he years 1869–70 seem clearly to mark a turning point in the attitude of public opinion in Britain towards the colonies. When confronted with what looked like an imminent dissolution of the Empire, the British people, it was evident, were not ready to follow the doctrinaire disciples of the Manchester School, whatever some of the political leaders might wish. (Schuyler, 1945, 276)

The political leaders who might have wished this were Liberals, not Conservatives. Having made the working class into citizens with something to defend, and having reassured the middle classes that they were not about to be dispossessed, the Conservatives could now lead Great Britain into being more avowedly a liberal-imperial state. In any case, Great Britain did not have much choice. Given the erosion of her dominant economic and political position in Europe, she sought solace and renewed strength in her imperial role.

Could the Second Empire have made the same smooth transition to the mature liberal-imperial state? France already had universal suffrage. What it lacked was a fully liberal parliamentary political regime. But Napoleon III saw that and was clearly trying in the 1860s to move in that direction. As Plamenatz says (1952, 162): “By making the Empire liberal, Napoleon III…really wished to placate…the republicans.” True, his regime was being attacked for squandering money on prestige expenditures and for evading parliamentary controls through public borrowing.¹⁷⁷Still, the gradual liberalization of Napoleon III might well have succeeded were it not for the Franco-German War and the defeat of France.

Bismarck had correctly seen that the Second Empire was the weak link in the structure of British hegemony and that knocking down France would ensure a more rapid decline of Great Britain in the geopolitical structures of the world-system. What Bismarck did not anticipate was that knocking down Napoleon III also meant knocking down the political constraints that had been elaborately constructed on the French working classes and on French radical democrats in general. Hence the Commune of Paris. It was the siege of Paris and the armistice that aroused the workers of Paris:

They had resisted the Prussians for over four months and were willing still to resist them. It was the provincials who had been defeated, and it was the provincials, dominated by the church and the bourgeoisie, who had supported the Second Empire. They were unpatriotic and reactionary. (Plamenatz, 1952, 137)

In the elections of February 5–8, Paris and other large towns voted republican, but the provinces voted royalist (and for peace). The Bonapartists were out of the picture. The republicans had become the war party. Nationalism and republicanism/socialism were deeply intertwined in the Commune, which was no doubt the most significant workers' insurrection in the history of western Europe, and furthermore the first that attracted significant support from employés—that is, from those whose work was “cleaner,” better paid, and at the time more skilled:

[I]t was the first time that those who were not yet “white-collar workers” [cols-blancs] but still merely “pen pushers” [ronds de cuir] joined in such large numbers the ranks of a workers' insurrection. In June 1848, the employés had been fighting on the side of order. (Rougerie, 1964, 128)¹⁷⁸

What the middle classes feared vaguely in 1815 and more pertinently in 1848 was now occurring. The dangerous classes wanted democracy. They wanted to run their country, which they thought of both as their country and their country. The uprising was fiercely repressed by the troops of the provisional government at Versailles, which enjoyed the benign noninterference of German troops. The repression met equally fierce resistance by the workers, and after this resistance was overcome, there were widespread executions and sentences of exile.¹⁷⁹

But once done, what were the consequences? I think Plamenatz (1952, 155–156) gets it just right:

The Commune did for republicans in the 1870s what the June insurrection did in the middle of the century. It discredited the socialists and the revolutionaries. But this time it did not strengthen the conservatives….

The failure of the Commune did no harm to the republicans, but it did make the republicans more conservative than they would otherwise have been.¹⁸⁰

For the republicans took up exactly where Napoleon III had left off, speaking the language of the liberal-imperial state, ready to repress the dangerous classes if they should ask too much, but also ready to give them citizenship, and citizenship in a liberal-imperial state.¹⁸¹ Adolphe Thiers incarnated the transition. A man of many regimes, as were Talleyrand and Guizot before him, he had supported the workers in Lyon in 1834 but the Party of Order in 1848. He had not been compromised by participation in the Second Empire governments, was friendly with both royalists and republicans, and was a fierce enemy of revolutionaries. In 1870, he said that, though he had not wanted the Republic, it had one virtue (titre) in his eyes: “[I]t is, of all governments, the one that divides us least.”

By 1875, it could be said that the liberal-imperial state was now securely in place in Great Britain and France and had shown its ability to contain the dangerous classes. It had thus become a model for other states. What was most constant in the model was certainly not fidelity to the free market (a fidelity that varied with the shifting economic position of given countries in the world-economy and the impact of its cyclical rhythms). Nor was the liberal-imperial state marked by fidelity to the maximization of the rights of the individual (a fidelity that varied with the extent to which individuals used these rights to challenge the basic social order). What distinguished the liberal-imperial state was its commitment to intelligent reform by the state that would simultaneously advance economic growth (or rather the accumulation of capital) and tame the dangerous classes (by incorporating them into the citizenry and offering them a part, albeit a small part, of the imperial economic pie).

To this end, liberal-imperial states had to revolve around the political center and avoid regimes that smacked either of reaction or of revolution. Of course, to be able to do this, a state had to have no major unresolved nationalist problems vis-à-vis outsiders and no strong internal unhappy minorities. It had also to be strong enough in the world-economy that the prospects of collective prosperity were not unreal. And it had to have enough military power or strong enough allies that it was free from excessive outside interference. When all these conditions prevailed, the liberal-imperial state was free to reflect the collective conservatism of a majority that now had something to conserve.

Therefore, first of all the liberal-imperial state had to be a strong state, a strengthened state. To be sure, from the beginning, the extension of the state's powers was intended primarily to control the dangerous classes:

[T]he centralization which Bentham and especially [Edwin] Chadwick meditated did no more than touch the dominant middle classes. Centralization, swept clear of theory, meant authorization of those services which affected the labouring classes. Centralization, it cannot be doubted, was never intended to curtail in the slightest degree the economic and social freedom of the more respectable classes. Nor did it. (Hill, 1929, 95–96)¹⁸²

And second, the liberal-imperial state involved a commitment to the extension of the suffrage. But, as we have seen, this extension was managed prudently. “The right to exercise freedom was only guaranteed to responsible adults by classical liberals” (Crouch, 1967, 209). The concept of responsibility, as applied to extension of the suffrage, involved both timing and an application of the Enlightenment faith in the educability of humanity. Therefore, the liberal advocacy of universal suffrage was “deeply ambiguous,” as Rosanvallon (1985, 136–137) explains:

In most cases, [such advocacy] was but a sort of bet on the future, expressing merely an anticipatory representation of the movement of civilization and of Enlightenment progress in the nation….In the liberal and republican circles that were favorable to it, universal suffrage continued to be understood as a recognition of potential capacity, far more than as a consequence of the principle of equality, a symbolic translation of humans together in society….Hence the great debate about the premature-ness of introducing universal suffrage. It was often rejected because it was still too early. It was the suffrage of the ignorant and immature masses that was feared.¹⁸³

That said, liberalism was identified with rationalism, with science, and with economic progress, and for that reason and in that sense, by midcentury “almost every statesman and civil servant…was a Liberal, irrespective of his ideological affiliation” (Hobsbawm, 1975, 105).¹⁸⁴

The most interesting thing to notice about this period is the position of the Conservatives. If, in 1834, following the Reform Act, Sir Robert Peel “had rechristened his party ‘Conservative,' it was to make it plain that it was not his intention to pursue in any respect a policy of reaction” (Halévy, 1947, 57).¹⁸⁵ At the very same time in France, following the Revolution of 1830, conservatism was being elaborated in France as “the way one manages a post-revolutionary society,” as a way of “concluding the revolution.” As such, it is no longer in opposition to liberalism, as Rosanvallon (1985, 277–278) puts it so well: “Rather it conceived of itself as the completion of liberalism, as its eternity.”

As a result, Conservatives, too, began to favor the strong state. For Conservatives, there were at least three considerations. The first was the inbuilt weakness of the appeal to tradition and continuity, which Burke had wanted to make the basis of conservative ideology.¹⁸⁶ For, as Bénéton (1988, 116) notes, this position leads to contradictions, once there are, as in France, durable interruptions that have led to creating other traditions. What can one do then? Political conservative thought began to oscillate “between fatalism and radical reformism, between the rule of a limited state and the appeal for a strong state.” Hence, for many Conservatives the strong state became the road to the restoration, or at least the partial restoration, of tradition. Second, many Conservatives felt that conservatism was “an attitude that saw in law, order, and stable rule the first principle of government” and, like Peel, drew from this the conclusion that “the conservation and steady improvement of the institutions of the state [were] the necessary corollary in principle” (Gash, 1977, 59).

But the third reason was the most cogent, as perceived by the liberal ideologist Guido Ruggiero (1959, 136–137) in his discussion of how British Tories, influenced by German romanticists, transferred their defense of royal prerogatives to the state:

It was the State whose importance and prestige were to be reasserted. The State was to be regarded not as a compromise between opposing self-interests but as what Burke had called it—a living communion of minds.

For this reason the Conservatives recognized the need of broadening the basis of the State and building it not upon the tower of privilege but upon the humble yet solid platform of the feelings and interests of the whole people. The old Toryism had created an oligarchical government; but was not the Liberal government an oligarchy, less entitled to rule because based solely upon wealth detached from birth and the privileges of an ancient tradition?

Why, asked the Conservatives, did Liberalism wish to weaken the State? The answer was easy. It wanted to allow free play to the strongest forces in competition with the weakest, and full power to exploit the defenceless masses, which were the victims and not the protagonists of the struggle, by destroying all power superior to individuals and able to exercise upon them a moderating and equalizing function.¹⁸⁷

When, in 1960, Lord Kilmuir (1960, 70–71) sought to explain how it was that the Conservatives in Great Britain always returned to power after great defeats by “social revolutionary movements” (he so terms 1832, 1846, 1906, and 1945), his answer is “the Shaftesbury tradition,” which he defines as the association of Toryism with “state intervention to insure minimum standards in diverse forms, for example, factory acts, housing and public health acts, and acts on behalf of trade unions“—in short, because the Conservatives had used the state for their own version of social reformism.

This “mutually advantageous alliance between the [Conservative] party and the people” was the heart of Disraeli's so-called national Toryism. Despite the fact that Disraeli's original rise in the Tory party was the result of his fierce opposition to Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws, close observation of Disraeli's own later political practice shows it to be “largely ‘Peelite' in spirit” (Smith, 1967, 4, 15).¹⁸⁸ What Disraeli essentially added to “Peelism” was imperialism. Liberal reformism was to be seen as “a means, a path, a discipline, in the service of a higher end, Empire” (Ruggiero, 1959, 140)—thereby tying the working classes more closely both to the nation and to some extent to the Conservative Party.

It could be said that, if the great political achievement of liberalism in the period 1830–1875 was the taming of the dangerous classes, the great ideological achievement was the taming of conservatism—transforming it into a variant of the rational state-oriented reformism that liberalism propounded. The common ground was nationalism and the strong state, which affected even the cultural outlook of conservatives. Barzun (1943, 143–144), in discussing the cultural shift from romanticism to realism in the period 1850–1885, calls it a “rebound from [the] disappointment” of 1848. He notes the rise of both Realpolitik and materialism, each bolstered by the “august authority of physical science.” He argues:

Liberals, conservatives, and radicals were united by their common desire for tangible, territorial nationhood; scientific hypotheses were tested by their suitability to mechanical representation or analogy…; while force…was applied as the great resolver of social paradoxes and complexities.”¹⁸⁹

As liberalism and conservatism moved toward their “common policy of state intervention,” some Conservatives (such as Chamberlain in the late nineteenth century) tried to insist on the distinction that for Conservatives it was an act of “patronage,” whereas for the Liberals it was the belief that “all people should be assisted to govern themselves.” But, as Ruggiero (1959, 151) says, “in practice, the difference was often very slight.” Of course it was. In 1875, the socialists were still not totally tamed. That would be completed only in the period 1875–1914. Schapiro (1949, vii) would thus be able to conclude his book on liberalism: “When the nineteenth century ended historically in 1914, liberalism had been accepted as the way of political life in Europe.”

The Citizen in a Liberal State

That the principle of national sovereignty is at the very heart of the French Revolution is something on which we need scarcely insist. That this principle was created—and put into practice—by the transfer of absolute sovereignty from the king to the nation is a truism that is worth repeating. And worth examining.

—KEITH MICHAEL BAKER, “SOUVERAINETÉ” (1988)

I would say that the French revolutionary tradition…had a greater impact on the nineteenth century than on contemporaries.

—MERNEST LABROUSSE (1949B, 29)

Inequality is a fundamental reality of the modern world-system, as it has been of every known historical system. What is different, what is particular to historical capitalism, is that equality has been proclaimed as its objective (and indeed as its achievement)—equality in the marketplace, equality before the law, the fundamental social equality of all individuals endowed with equal rights. The great political question of the modern world, the great cultural question, has been how to reconcile the theoretical embrace of equality with the continuing and increasingly acute polarization of real-life opportunities and satisfactions that has been its outcome.

For a long time—for three centuries, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth—this question was scarcely mooted in the modern world-system. Inequality was still considered natural—indeed, ordained by God. But once the revolutionary upsurge of the late eighteenth century transformed the language of equality into a cultural icon, once challenges to authority everywhere became commonplace, the disparity of theory and practice could no longer be ignored. The need to contain the implications of this cultural claim, and thereby to tame the now “dangerous classes,” became a priority of those who held power. The construction of the liberal state was the principal framework that was built to limit the claim. The elaboration of modern ideologies was in turn an essential mechanism in the construction of the liberal state.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE CONCEPT OF CITIZENSHIP

The great symbolic gesture of the French Revolution was the insistence that titles no longer be used, not even that of Monsieur and Madame.Everyone was to be called Citoyen (Citizen). This gesture was intended to demonstrate the repudiation of traditional hierarchies, the incrustation of social equality in the new society that was being constructed. The French Revolution came to an end. Titles were reinstituted. But the concept of “citizen” (if not its use as a title of address) survived. It did more than survive. It thrived. It became the rhetorical bedrock of the liberal state. And it was adopted juridically everywhere, to the point that by 1918 the world found it necessary to invent the concept of “stateless” persons to describe the relatively small portion of humanity who were unable to claim citizenship somewhere.

The concept of citizen was intended to be inclusive—to insist that all persons in a state, and not just some persons (a monarch, the aristocrats), had the right to be a part, an equal part, of the process of collective decision making in the political arena. It followed that everyone should have the right to receive the social benefits the state might distribute. By the second half of the twentieth century, the existence of rights that are guaranteed to citizens came to make up the minimal definition of what constitutes a modern “democratic” state, which virtually every state was now claiming to be.

But the other face of the inclusiveness of citizenship was exclusion. Those who did not fall into this new category of citizens of the state became by definition that other new concept: aliens. The aliens of one state might be the citizens perhaps of some other state, but not of this state. Still, for any given state, even the exclusion of aliens within its boundaries did not limit very much the number of persons theoretically included. In most cases, more than 90 percent of the residents of the country were citizens—legally citizens, that is, for citizenship had now become a matter of legal definition.

And this was precisely the problem faced by the states after the French Revolution. Too many persons were citizens. The results could be dangerous indeed.¹ The story of the nineteenth century (and indeed of the twentieth) was that some (those with privilege and advantage) continually attempted to define citizenship narrowly and that all the others responded by seeking to validate a broader definition. It is around this struggle that the intellectual theorizing of the post-1789 centuries centered. It was around this struggle that the social movements were formed.

The way to define citizenship narrowly in practice, while retaining the principle in theory, is to create two categories of citizens. The effort started with Abbé Siéyès, just six days after the fall of the Bastille. In a report he read to the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly on July 20–21, 1789, Siéyès proposed a distinction between passive and active rights, between passive and active citizens. Natural and civil rights, he said, are rights “for whose maintenance and development society is formed.” These are passive rights. There also exist political rights, “those by which society is formed.” These are active rights. And from this distinction, Siéyès drew the following conclusion:

All inhabitants of a country should enjoy in it the rights of passive citizens; all have the right to the protection of their person, of their property, of their liberty, etc. But all do not have the right to play an active role in the formation of public authorities; all are not active citizens. Women (at least at the present time), children, foreigners, and those others who contribute nothing to sustaining the public establishment should not be allowed to influence public life actively. Everyone is entitled to enjoy the advantages of society, but only those who contribute to the public establishment are true stockholders (actionnaires)of the great social enterprise. They alone are truly active citizens, true members of the association.” (Siéyès, 1789, 193–194)

Without blinking an eye, Siéyès then added that equality of political rights is a fundamental principle (but presumably only for active citizens), without which privilege would reassert itself. On October 29, 1789, the National Assembly translated this theoretical concept into a legal decree that defined active citizens as those who paid a minimum of three days' wages in direct taxation. Property became the prerequisite of active citizenship. As Rosanvallon (1985, 95) points out, “If reason is sovereign, men cannot invent laws. They must discover them….The notion of capacity finds its logic in this framework.”²

The attempt to circumscribe the meaning of citizenship took many forms, all of them necessarily involving the creation of antinomies that could justify the division into passive and active citizens. Binary distinctions (of rank, of class, of gender, of race/ethnicity, of education) are ancient realities. What was different in the nineteenth century were the attempts to erect a theoretical scaffolding that could legitimate the translation of such distinctions into legal categories, in order that such categories serve to limit the degree to which the proclaimed equality of all citizens was in fact realized.

The reason is simple. When inequality was the norm, there was no need to make any further distinction than that between those of different rank—generically, between noble and commoner. But when equality became the official norm, it was suddenly crucial to know who was in fact included in the “all” who have equal rights—that is, who are the “active” citizens. The more equality was proclaimed as a moral principle, the more obstacles—juridical, political, economic, and cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization. The concept of citizen forced the crystallization and rigidification—both intellectual and legal—of a long list of binary distinctions that then came to form the cultural underpinnings of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: bourgeois and proletarian, man and woman, adult and minor, breadwinner and housewife, majority and minority, White and Black, European and non-European, educated and ignorant, skilled and unskilled, specialist and amateur, scientist and layman, high culture and low culture, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and abnormal, able-bodied and disabled, and of course the ur-category that all of these others imply—civilized and barbarian.

In states with citizens enjoying equal rights, the dominant groups were seeking to exclude, while the dominated groups were seeking to be included. The struggle was conducted both in the political and in the intellectual arena. All persons found themselves on one side or the other of each of the antinomies. Those who were on the dominant side tended to theorize the distinctions as in some way natural. The key problem of the dominant was to make sure that individually they were on the dominant end of each and every binary distinction. Facing them, those who were located on the dominated side began to organize, seeking to devalue, destroy, or redefine the distinctions in order to relocate themselves into the category of active citizens, into the category of the civilized.

The fact that there were multiple binary categories created a difficulty. It was possible to be on the dominating side in some categories and not in others. Those who did not have what might be called a perfect score had political decisions to make if they wished to be considered part of the group that comprised full-fledged citizens. They often, quite understandably, sought to give priority to those categories in which they were on the dominant side. The result could be some widening of the privileged group, but this merely increased the difficulties for those who remained excluded. It was this struggle about definitions of priorities of binary categories that was at the root of the continuing debates inside the social movements about the tactics of their struggles and the nature of potential and desirable alliances.

To be sure, the concept of citizenship was meant to be liberating, and it did indeed liberate us all from the dead weight of received hierarchies claiming divine or natural ordination. But the liberation was only a partial liberation from the disabilities, and the new inclusions made sharper and more apparent the continuing (and new) exclusions. Universal rights as a consequence turned out in actual practice to be somewhat of a linguistic mirage, an oxymoron. Creating a republic of virtuous equals turned out to require the rejection of others who were thereby deemed to be nonvirtuous.³

Liberalism, which would become the dominant ideology of the modern world, preached that virtue could be taught, and it therefore offered the managed progression of rights, the managed promotion of passive citizens to the status of active citizens—a road for the transformation of barbarians into the civilized. Since the legal process of promotion was thought to be irreversible, it had to be handled carefully, prudently, and above all gradually. On the other hand, those social movements that were being created to champion the interests of those whose rights were not fully recognized were always debating what might be done to end nonrecognition as rapidly as possible. There were those who insisted that the movements should be antisystemic—that is, that they should seek to destroy the existing historical system that made possible the travesties of equality. And there were those who were essentially integrationist—that is, who believed that the role of the movements was merely to speed up the already existing liberal program of the managed acquisition of rights.

The story, as we have already seen, began with the French Revolution itself. Siéyès, in that same memorandum, said: “All public authority, without distinction, is an emanation of the general will; all come from the people—that is, the Nation. These two terms should be considered synonyms” (1789, 195). The implementation of this view was simple and rapid. Everything that had been labeled royal was relabeled national.⁴“For the French revolutionaries, the nation was not a given; it had to be created” (Cruz Seoane, 1968, 64). The concept of nation spread rapidly to other countries.⁵ It was the French revolutionaries, too, who first used the concept of nation to justify the concept of the self-determination of nations. When the Assembly voted the annexation of Avignon and the Comtat Venaisson on September 13, 1791, it was done in the name of “the right of people to determine their own fate [disposer d'eux-mêmes]” (Godechot, 1965, 189).

However, once having noted that national sovereignty was constituted the moment sovereignty passed from the crown to the nation, Nora (1988, 893) asks pertinently, “But what nation?…And what society?” The enthusiasms of ordinary people during the heyday of the French Revolution may have given a momentary hyperegalitarian tonality to the concept of nation, but there existed as well a quite different Enlightenment tradition that had distinguished sharply between the “nation“—a concept used to denote the educated strata—and the “people,” who were “not depraved but easily influenced, [and who therefore] required a moral, technical (and physical) education appropriate for their status, that would best equip them for a life of labour” (Woolf, 1989, 106). Linguistic games would continue to be played, with shifting emphases from fatherland (patrie) to nation to people.⁶

It would not be too long before the term nation had become too mild, and the term people had become so popular that even autocratic rulers sought to use it.

By the 1830s, romantic revolutionaries were speaking almost routinely of le peuple, das Volk, il popolo, narod, or lud as a kind of regenerative life force in human history. The new monarchs who came to power after the Revolutions of 1830, Louis-Philippe and Léopold I, sought the sanction of the “people” as the king “of the French” and “of the Belgians,” rather than of France or Belgium. Even the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, three years after crushing the Polish uprising of 1830–31, proclaimed that his own authority was based on “nationality” (as well as autocracy and Orthodoxy)—and his word narodnost, also meaning “spirit of the people,” was copied from the Polish narodowo. (Billington, 1980, 160)

But it was more than a game. It was part of the crucial debate about who was a true citizen. Nor was this merely an abstract debate. The National Assembly and then its successor structure, the Convention, were faced with three concrete issues about citizenship: women, Blacks, and workers. The record of the French Revolution was mixed, but in each case, they decided on exclusions that left bitterness.

In the case of women, the whole matter started out badly. The royal decree summoning the Estates-General specified that women who held seigniorial fiefs had to choose male proxies to represent them in the Electoral College—nobles for laywomen, clergy for nuns (Landes, 1988, 232, n. 5). Nonetheless, women (religious communities, societies of tradeswomen) did write cahiers de doléance. And some of their complaints foreshadowed later problems of alliances. Mme. B*** O***, Pays de Caux, wrote: “There is talk of liberating the Negro slaves;…could it be possible that [the nation] would be mute about us?”⁷

It is well known that women played a major role in various popular demonstrations during the French Revolution, most crucially in the so-called October days in 1789, when the Parisian market women (along with national guardsmen) marched on Versailles and forced the royal couple to come to the capital to reside. But this demonstration concerned the rights of poor people, not of women per se.⁸ And two months after these riots, on December 22, 1789, the National Assembly formally excluded women from the right to vote. True, Condorcet did write a famous pamphlet in 1790 calling for women to have droit de cité, but he didn't persuade those in power. The Constitution of 1791 renewed the exclusion, and this was reiterated in a vote of the Convention on July 24, 1793, specifying that women were excluded from all political rights, which actually was something that at least aristocratic women had had in the ancien régime.⁹

Some improvements in women's rights were instituted, it is true. Marriage and divorce became civil processes. Primogeniture was abolished, and the rights of illegitimate children and their mothers to financial support were promulgated. A law was passed permitting women to be witnesses in documents related to the état civil, although this matter continued to be controversial (Abray, 1975, 55). And in the heated atmosphere of the Jacobin period, women began to organize. They began to play a much larger role in the popular societies. They stood outside the doors of the Convention, trying to control who would enter. They packed the galleries and shouted their views (Landes, 1988, 139–140).

On May 5, 1793, the Society of Republican-Revolutionary Women was founded. They pushed vigorously the demands of women for bread. Their language had distinctly feminist overtones. They were allied to the Enragés,¹⁰ who were critical of the Jacobins from the left. But above all, they were women, organized women, who insisted on being heard. When women in one Paris section petitioned for the right to bear arms, Fabre d'Eglantine sputtered in the Convention: “After the bonnet rouge, which the Républicaines wore during their meetings, comes the gun belt, then the gun” (cited in Abray 1975, 56). The Committee on Public Safety appointed a committee, headed by André Amar, to consider whether women should exercise political rights and whether they should be allowed to take part in political clubs. The answer to both would be no. The committee deemed that women did not have the “moral and physical qualities” to exercise political rights, and furthermore that it was the aristocracy that wanted women to have these rights “in order to put women at odds with men” (cited in George, 1976–1977, 434).

As for participating in political associations, Amar was quite explicit in explaining why women should not be allowed to be members:

If we consider that the political education of men is at its beginning,…then how much more reasonable is it for women, whose moral education is almost nil, to be less enlightened concerning principles? Their presence in popular societies, therefore, would give an active role in government to people more exposed to error and seduction. Let us add that women are disposed by their organization to an overexcitation which would be deadly in public affairs and that interests of state would be sacrificed to everything which ardor in passions can generate in the way of error and disorder. (Cited in Landes, 1988, 144)

As Banks noted (1981, 28), advocating the “rights of man” did not necessarily lead to the “rights of women,” since “it is quite possible to define women as having a different nature from that of men.” To be sure, the exclusion of women was often put forward as a temporary provision. An earlier report by Lanjuinais in April 1793 called for the exclusion of women from political rights “for the time that it will take to remedy the vices of women's education.” As Cerati (1966, 170) remarked acerbically: “[These vices] must have been terribly tenacious since it took a century and a half to overcome them.”

Why it was the women's clubs that became the first victim of the Law of Suspects¹¹ has been a matter of considerable debate. George (1976–1977, 412) thinks that “Jacobin nerves were taut, and Jacobin patience snapping with apostles of participatory democracy,” and that the women were an easy first target. Lytle (1955, 25) specifies that “the Revolutionary Women had become a danger to the Robespierrists [because the latter were] unable to satisfy the demands of Parisians for bread.” Hufton (1971, 102) links the latter issue to that of the attitude of the sans-culottes:

The sans culotte, Chaumette said when he dissolved women's clubs in October 1793, had a right to expect from his wife the running of the home while he attended political meetings….Others have lingered on the pride of the sans culottes in his new-found importance in société populaire, [in] section[,] or as a professional revolutionary on commission….While her husband was still talking she in some areas had joined the food queues and the minute she did that her loyalty was potentially suspect.

Applewhite and Levy (1984, 76) see the outlawing of the women's clubs as “the triumph of the bourgeois revolution over the popular revolution.”¹² But of course bourgeois feminists fared no better. Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen,¹³ was sent to the guillotine on November 3, 1793. Whichever the explanation for the Jacobin attitude, the situation did not change after the downfall of the Jacobins. In 1795, after the journée of 1er Prairial, the Convention excluded women from its hall entirely, even as listeners, unless accompanied by a man with a citizen's card (Abray, 1975, 58). And in 1796, the Council of Five Hundred excluded women from senior teaching positions. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code regressed over even the ancien régime. Previously, at least aristocratic women were allowed to handle property and legal matters. Now, in the more egalitarian mood of the French Revolution, all women were treated equally—all having no rights whatsoever (Levy et al., 1979, 310).

I have called this a mixed picture. One can emphasize the negative side. Abray (1975, 62) says that it “stands as striking proof of the essential social conservatism [of the Revolution].” Knibiehler (1976, 824) insists that it marks a “relative regression of the status of women,” one that, for George (1976–1977, 415), was “more clearly inferior than that of the Catholic, feudal past, because now defined, cloaked and justified by the bourgeois deities of Reason and the laws of Nature.” Cerati (1966, 13) asserts that the claims of women for greater rights during the French Revolution met with “a glacial reception from the [otherwise] enthusiastic [masculine] partisans of equality.” However, Landes (1988, 148) claims that part of the problem was that the feminists themselves “bore the stamp of ambivalence toward public women.”

But one can also evaluate the experience more positively. Landes (1988, 170) also points out that, after the French Revolution, “gender became a socially relevant category…in a way that it would not have mattered formerly.” Kelly (1982, 79) compares the situation of the post-1789 feminists favorably with that of those involved in the famous querelle des femmes launched by Christine de Pisan and others in the fifteenth century. The earlier feminists, she says, lacked “the vision of a social movement to change events,” whereas after 1789 they “were animated by a notion of progress and of intentional social change.” And Moses (1984, 14) insists that, whereas before 1789 feminism was an issue only for the upper classes, the French Revolution led to “the rise of a feminism more sweeping in its scope and more inclusive in its following.” The negative evaluation lays emphasis on the changes actually achieved and the justifying ideas of the times. The positive evaluation lays stress on the development of the feminist movement and its mobilization. This tension would remain the principal cultural-political antinomy of the nineteenth (and twentieth) centuries: the dominant theorized; the dominated organized.

The story of Blacks was not too different. There were of course few Blacks in hexagonal France at the time of the Revolution. But there were plenty in the colonies, and above all in St.-Domingue. I have previously told the story of the successive rebellions there, the creation of the first Black state in the Americas, the wars, and finally the diplomatic isolation of the Republic of Haiti (Wallerstein, 1989, passim, esp. 240–244, 253–256). Here I wish to underline the debate that took place in Paris.

St.-Domingue had had a clear system of social stratification before the Revolution. There was a small White stratum, most of whom were planters. There was a stratum of free mulattos. But the largest group were the Blacks, and the Blacks were almost all slaves. This was an ordinal social ranking. But none of these groups had political rights. The French Revolution was thus received enthusiastically by all three strata, because they all hoped it would bring them political rights. However, the Whites did not wish social equality to be granted to the free mulattos, and neither the Whites nor the free mulattos wanted the enfranchisement of the slaves. Once again, the norm of equality raised the question of who is to be included. As Aimé Césaire (1981, 342) notes so acutely:

Just as the royal authority could not oppress the Blacks without oppressing to various degrees all the classes, it became rapidly clear that the authority that emerged out of the French Revolution could not accede to the demand of one of the classes of colonial society for freedom without putting on the table the question of the very existence of colonial society. More specifically, the bourgeois power that emerged out of the French Revolution felt that liberty was indivisible, that one couldn't give political or economic liberty to White planters and keep mulattos under iron rule; and that one couldn't recognize the civil equality of free men of color and at the same time keep Blacks in the ergastulum. In short, to liberate one of the classes of colonial society, one had to liberate them all, one had to liberate St.-Domingue. And this seemed contrary to the interests of France.

It is not that there were not some in the National Assembly and the Convention who realized this. In the debate on the condition of the slaves, Abbé Grégoire declaimed: “There still exists one aristocracy, that of skin color” (cited in Césaire, 1981, 187). But, as Césaire suggested, beyond philanthropy and even antiracism lay anticolonialism, and even Grégoire and Robespierre were not prepared to go that far. Only Marat was. Marat noted the connection of this issue with the very principle of active citizens: “But how can we treat as free men persons with black skin, when we do not treat as citizens those who cannot pay one écu in direct taxes?” (cited in Césaire, 1981, 189–190).

The emancipation of the slaves in 1793 was not the fruit of the egalitarian impulses of the French revolutionaries. It was imposed by the power of Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion in St.-Domingue, and merely ratified by the Convention in a decree (Decree no. 2262 of February 4, 1794) that would be revoked by Napoleon in 1802 after Toussaint had been imprisoned (and one that would not be reenacted until 1848).

What is more revealing, however, is the prior debate on the rights to be accorded to free mulattos. Pushed by the Amis des Noirs and opposed by the Club Mas-siac, which represented the interests of the White planters, the Assembly decided “unanimously” on a curious compromise. After the adoption of the decree granting the vote to free men of color, Dupont de Nemours presented a “declaration” of the Whites explaining their assent on the grounds that the vote was being given only to “qualified mulattos of free parents” and was not being accorded, could not be accorded, “to unfree persons, or freedmen, since these were members of a ‘foreign nation’ “ (cited in Blackburn, 1988, 187–188).¹⁴ The poorWhites on St.-Domingue opposed any property qualification, since that would give the vote to some free mulattos while not to them. They applied the description of the White planters—“a species of foreigner with no entitlement to political rights”—to all free mulattos (Blackburn, 1988, 177). Even the free mulattos were by definition not part of the “nation”; they could not therefore be citizens.

As for French workers, we have already noted that the concept of active citizenship, by creating a property-based definition of political rights, resulted in excluding them, was intended to exclude them. In the heady revolutionary atmosphere, however, workers began to seek improvement of their situation by organizing. The Assembly had abolished the guilds. The employers and workers gave this opposite interpretations. For the former, the only law that now governed production was the law of supply and demand. The workers thought it meant they could not create organizations freely, as they wished (Soreau, 1931, 295).

The rapid rise of prices plus the collapse of the paper money, the assignats, fueled worker effervescence, peaking in the spring of 1791 just before the flight of the king and the enactment of the Constitution. Strikes and disorders seemed beyond the control of the Paris municipality, and led to calls for action by the Assembly. While maintaining the inegalitarian standards for voting, the Assembly sought to use the ideology of equality against the possibility of workers to organize by enacting an “anti-cabal” law. The notorious Loi Le Chapelier, adopted on June 14, 1791, outlawed any workers' combination, and on July 20 this proscription was extended to the compagnonnages, the long-existing mutual benefit societies (Wallerstein, 1989, 107 and n. 248).

Steven L. Kaplan (1979, 74–75) observes how, behind the facade of the new language of equality, the revolutionaries continued the very same practices that the royalist regime had followed:

One would henceforth repress in the name of individual liberty what one had previously repressed in the name of collective and corporate public weal….It is striking to notice that the two great means of social control of the world of labor utilized by the revolutionaries for the defense of liberty—the maximum, underpinned by a system of food supply obtained by constraint, and the anti-cabal law—had been the cornerstones of the prohibiting, paternalist Ancien Régime.

In his history of the French Revolution, Jean Jaurès (1968, 912) denounced this “terrible law” that, under the guise of symmetry between workers and employers, affected only the workers, and weighed upon them heavily for seventy-five years. He cites Marx, who called it a “bourgeois coup d'état,” and finds it quite unsurprising that Robespierre should have tacitly supported enacting the law by his silence.¹⁵

The French Revolution appealed to nature, which was a universal phenomenon, belonging to everyone. But it also appealed to virtue, which was only a potential (but not necessarily the actual) characteristic of everyone. From these concepts, it derived the existence of human rights. Since there could be multiple “natures” and multiple capacities, the discourse had an “ambivalent quality” (Landes, 1981, 123). Scott (1981, 2) sums up “the persistent question of the relationship of specific, marked groups to the embodied universal” quite well: “[H]ow could the rights of the poor, of mulattos, blacks, or women be figured as the rights of Man? The general answer is: with difficulty.”

Still, the French Revolution had the consequence that “revolutionary action acquired a status whose promise, or menace, was at once qualitatively different from rebellious action and morally comparable to that with which, in other times and places, great religious changes had been (and sometimes still are) invested” (Sonenscher, 1989, vi). Of course, since revolutionary action was both promise and menace, it was polarizing, and this polarization “provided the subsoil for the politics of the next century and a half” (Roberts, 1978, 73).

The great socially unifying concept of the citizen thus led to the formalization of multiple cross-cutting binary categories and to the binary tension of political life—the split between right and left, the Party of Order and the Party of Movement—a split that centrist liberalism would devote all its efforts to rendering meaningless. The result was an intense zigzagging of public life, energized by the juggernaut of a belief in progress, and distorted by the continuous and increasing social and economic polarization of real life within the world-system.

In the nineteenth century, the so-called middle classes came to dominate the Western world, and Europe came to dominate the world. When one has achieved the top position, the problem is no longer how to get there but how to stay there. The middle classes nationally, and the Europeans globally, sought to maintain their advantage by appropriating the mantle of nature and virtue to justify privilege. They called it civilization, and this concept was a key ingredient of their effort. In the Western world, it was translated into education, and education became a way of controlling the masses.¹⁶ And on the global scene, starting with Napoleon (but adopted subsequently by all the other European powers), “the concept of civilization as an ideology…became unashamedly a form of cultural imperialism” (Woolf, 1989, 119).

The French Revolution would come to a definitive political end in 1793/1799/1815 and become thereafter merely a political symbol and a cultural memory. It left, however, a monumental legacy to the whole world-system. Sovereignty now belonged to the people, the nation. And political debate and political change were the normal consequence of the sovereignty of the people. The privileged strata of the world-system had to come to terms with what was for them a poisonous legacy. They would see whether they could incorporate it institutionally in ways that would contain its potential for the radical dislocation of existing hierarchies.

This process of containment took three forms. The first was the crystallization of what came to be called ideologies, which claimed to be philosophical constructs but were actually primarily political strategies. The second was the elaboration of conceptual categories as a new discourse with which to describe the world. This was initially and primarily, as we have said, the work of the dominant strata, who hoped thereby to frame the debate and justify the limiting of citizenship. Eventually, this work of creative conceptualization became transformed and institutionalized in the structures of knowledge known as the social sciences. And the third was the establishment of a network of organizations, initially primarily the work of the dominated strata, which were to serve as agents of furthering change but would act simultaneously as mechanisms of limiting change.

The period 1815–1848 was one in which all and sundry seemed to be moving uncertainly in this transformed political terrain. The reactionaries tried to turn the clock back, to undo the cultural earthquake that was the French Revolution. They discovered, as we have seen, that this wasn't really possible. The dominated (and repressed) strata, for their part, were in search of appropriate and effective modes of organizing. And the emergent liberal center was unsure of how it should, or could, construct the appropriate political base to get the turmoil under control. They concentrated, as we have seen, on constructing liberal states—first of all, and what was most important, in the most powerful countries: Great Britain and France.

THE WORLD-REVOLUTION OF 1848

It would be the world-revolution of 1848 and its immediate aftermath that would require resolving these uncertain searches and efforts in order to stabilize the world-system and restore a certain degree of political equilibrium. The revolution started once again in France, where the July Monarchy had exhausted its credibility and legitimacy. The rebellion of February 25, 1848, had widespread support, from both the middle and the working classes, from Bonapartists, even from the Church and the Legitimists, “who saw in the fall of Louis-Philippe revenge for 1830” (Pierrard, 1984, 145). And it had immediate resonance elsewhere in Europe—in Belgium, to be sure, but also in all those countries where nationalism was becoming a rallying point: Germany, Italy, Hungary. That is why 1848 came to be called by historians “the springtime of the nations.” The one country where the revolution would not occur was England, something immediately explained in an editorial in the Times on February 26, 1848, as due to the fact that “the people feel that under the existing state of things they have a voice in the government of the country, and can utter that voice with effect.”¹⁷

The Times may have been right about England, but the revolution took on a more social, more working-class and radical tone in France. Four months later, on June 25, came the second so-called social revolution.¹⁸ The broad support evaporated almost immediately. By July 2, Le Moniteur Industriel was thundering: “[F]amily, property, nation—all were struck to the core; the very civilization of the nineteenth century was menaced by the blows of these new barbarians” (cited in Scott, 1988, 117). We know how this second revolution ended—in the overthrow of the social regime, and eventually the installation of Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire.

But the cat had been let out of the bag. The movement for socialism, which “had never been more than the tail, a lively tail, of the movement for bourgeois democracy” (cited in Droz, 1972a, 16),¹⁹ would now separate itself clearly from centrist liberalism.²⁰ For Halévy (1947, 204), “Chartism had triumphed, but in France, not in England.”²¹ To be sure, this nascent movement “suffered a very great set-back after 1848” (Cole, 1953, 1:157). And an economist of the era, Louis Reybaud, a student since the 1840s of the socialist movement, would even proclaim in 1854: “Socialism is dead. To speak of socialism is to give a funeral oration” (cited in Droz, 1972a, 16). This would not be the last of such premature opining.

It would have been more audacious, even at the time, to suggest that nationalism was dead. Lovett (1982, 92) sees the revolution of 1848 as the transformation of local and regional Italian democratic movements into a “national democratic network,” but one that would then have difficulty facing up to the “social” question.²²The Hungarian nationalist movement discovered a different kind of problem. Whereas, for Kossuth, “nationalism coincided with liberalism” (Fejtö, 1948b, 133), for the Serbs, Romanians, and Croats who were located within the boundaries of Hungary, Hungarian nationalism seemed “a movement of the nobility, a family quarrel between Hungarian seigniors and the rulers in Vienna” (Fejtö, 1948b, 153).²³ Still, 1848 “put in motion the revolutionary wave in Europe” (Djordjevíc and Fisher-Galati, 1981, 106), and it would spread throughout the Balkans.

The revolutions of 1848 constituted the first world-revolution of the modern world-system. It is not that it occurred in all parts of the world-system; it did not. Nor is it that the revolutionaries achieved their objectives; by and large, the revolutions were defeated politically. It is that the revolutions centered around issues of exclusion—exclusion from the benefits of citizenship. It was in 1848 that we first see clearly that there would be two kinds of antisystemic movements, two separate ways of dealing with this exclusion: more rights within the nation (the social revolution), and separating one ethno-national group from another, dominant one (the national revolution).

And it was in 1848 that the question of long-term strategy first became clearly posed. From 1815 to 1848, the ideological struggle was considered to be one between liberals and conservatives, between the heirs of the spirit (if not of all the tactics) of the French Revolution and those who fervently sought to restore the order derived from an older way of viewing the world. In this struggle, “democrats” and “radicals” had little place. Anathema to the conservatives, an embarrassment to the liberals, they played at most a gadfly role, pressuring the liberals to be more daring (without much success, be it noted). What the revolutions of 1848 did was to open up the possibility that these democrats/radicals, who now sometimes called themselves “socialists” but sometimes also “nationalist revolutionaries,” would be more than gadflies, that they would organize mass action separate and distinct from the liberal center. This is what Chartism had foreshadowed, and this is what Halévy meant when he said that Chartism had triumphed not in England but in France.

This was a terrifying prospect not merely to the conservatives but also to the liberal center. And both reacted accordingly. Suppression of the radicals became the order of the day, not merely in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and among the various regimes in the Germanies and Italies, but in the liberal states of France and England as well. This is the “set-back” of which Cole spoke. Socialist and trade-union movements would now have a difficult ten to fifteen years. So would feminist movements. So would nationalist movements.

The suppression would be effective, but not long lasting, since all these movements would reemerge in a decade or two, and in far stronger forms. What was lasting were the lessons that the proponents of the three classical ideologies of the nineteenth century—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—would draw from the experience of 1848. The liberals drew two lessons. One was that they were in many ways closer to the conservatives than they had thought, and that alliances with radical elements often proved dangerous to their interests. But second, they determined that they had to elaborate better theoretical justifications for the distinctions that they continued to wish to make among the citizenry, between the active and passive citizens à la Siéyès, if they wished to sustain this distinction.

The conservatives drew a different lesson. The strategy of Metternich (really of de Maistre, Bonald, et al.) would not work. They were impressed that only Great Britain did not have an uprising, even though it had been the country where radical forces had been the strongest. They noticed that Great Britain had been the only country where conservatives had followed a more centrist path, ready to make some concessions, in order to absorb and co-opt at least middle-class forces into the arena of political decision making. And they noticed that this policy had succeeded, as the editorial in the Times suggested. The conservatives would now be ready to go down the path of pursuing some version of centrist liberalism, albeit a somewhat more conservative one—what historians have come to call “enlightened conservatism.”

Radicals (erstwhile democrats) drew a still different conclusion. It was that spontaneity was not enough.²⁴ If one wanted to have a major political impact, systematic and long-term organization was a prerequisite. This would lead the “movements“—an ephemeral concept—down the path of bureaucratic organizations, with members and officers, with finance and newspapers, with programs, and eventually with parliamentary participation.

Sewell (1985, 82) says that the French Revolution changed the concept of revolution from “something that happened to the state…[to] something that people did to the state consciously and with forethought.” What 1848 led the movements to see was that the “people” were unlikely to do something that mattered to the state without their prior uniting in organizational form.²⁵ This would inevitably make them focus on the state, the national political level. It would also eventually and inevitably call into question the degree to which these movements could continue to be truly antisystemic and not simply a variant of centrist liberalism, albeit a somewhat more impatient one.

The story of the rest of the nineteenth century, and indeed of a good part of the twentieth, was that the centrist liberals would theorize, the antisystemic movements (both of the socialist and of the national-liberation variety) would organize, and the enlightened conservatives would legislate. They would enact compromises, and in the process they seemed to compromise the antisystemic movements. It was the theorizing of the liberals about citizenship, however, that would make this possible. It is this story that we shall now tell.

LABOR AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

In the liberal states—western Europe and North America, and later central Europe—the strongest demand for inclusion in citizenship came from the urban working classes. It is their struggle, which they most frequently called the struggle for socialism by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, which commanded most attention at the time and since. It is fitting to start with this part of the story. I shall organize it in the temporal division of socialism as idea and as movement, a division that was suggested by Labrousse (1949b, 5): 1815 to 1851—”powerful idea (grandeur de l'idée), weak movement“; 1851 to 1871—”movement on the rise, idea in decline“; 1871 to the end of the nineteenth century—”powerful idea, powerful movement.”

We have previously noted the beginnings of labor movements in the 1830s and 1840s.²⁶ Jones (1983, 59) explains well their confused efforts: “The elements of working-class politics had to be forged together from the mixed inheritance of the Enlightenment, socialism, Dissent and traditional notions of moral economy, in a situation which had no precedent.”²⁷ What they did feel was that they were somehow the heirs of the more radical elements of revolutionary traditions.²⁸

As we know, in 1830 there was a revolution in France but not one in England. Instead, England saw the enactment of the Reform Bill in 1832. This is largely because England had no equivalent of the regime of the Ultras under Charles X.²⁹But “revolution” or not, the development of working-class consciousness began to take root in both France and England, not within the parties but outside them.³⁰ In order to do this, the nascent socialist movement had to carve out a place for corporate demands not previously admissible within the revolutionary rhetoric of the French revolution (and its generic citizen). They began to speak of “cooperation” and “association“—not of a single trade but of all “workers” as a class.³¹ Even before 1830, the need for collective action by workers came to be seen. The logic of their position derived directly from the consequences of the dissolution by the French Revolution of the guilds. The controller of production was no longer a master; he was now an employer. Whereas workers had thereby gained more freedom, they had lost all claims to the paternal solicitude of the master. To compensate, they adopted “a modified version of the corporate idiom of the Old Regime,” creating workers' guilds with rituals and older organizational forms “to assert the continuing existence of a moral community of the trade, and to maintain vigilance over conditions of labor in the workplace” (Sewell, 1979, 55). It is these journeymen who became the strongest supporters of the early labor movements. Kocka (1986, 314315) says they came largely from “urban crafts that had great continuity, stability, and cohesion, usually guild traditions,…and relatively good bargaining power.”³²

They began to use the weapon of strikes, even though strikes were illegal, through anonymous calls launched by informal social networks.³³ At the same time, the workers began to concern themselves with the “nationality” of their fellow workers, the issue of non-“citizens” as competitors in the labor market. We have already discussed the ways in which the canuts of Lyon had made the employment of “foreign” workers one of their key complaints in 1831. Some of the artisanal guildlike structures would wither after 1830, especially because of the “ever growing migration to Paris in particular” (Judt, 1986, 57). The result would be a “new identification of the worker to the nation” (Derainne, 1993, 33). There would now come to be a debate about the bases of workers' unity. Flora Tristan, who was a very strong voice for workers' unity (as well as an important feminist figure), in her pamphlet on this topic written in 1843 (1983, 53), drew an inference that would become very controversial in the history of workers' movements—support for independence movements in colonial countries, the workers as a class blending into the “people” as a construct:

If I constantly cite Ireland [the Catholic Association, headed by O'Connell] it is because Ireland is still the only country to realize that if the people want to leave their slavery, they must begin first by creating a huge, solid, and indissoluble union. For the union gives strength, and in order to demand one's rights and to bring the right of such a demand to public attention, one must above all be in a position to speak authoritatively enough to make oneself heard.

Perhaps Tristan could say this about Ireland because she was French. English workers were notably more reticent on the subject. Their only focus was England. It was Chartism that was central to English history of the 1830s and 1840s. The Charter adopted in 1838 famously made six demands, demands that had, however, long been demands of English radicals: annual Parliaments, universal suffrage, equality of electoral districts, the secret ballot, parliamentary immunity, and the removal of property requirements for eligibility for election. To the question of whether this was not at most merely a set of demands for parliamentary democracy, Dolléans (1947, 127) replies that this was merely an “appearance,” that the Charter had a “clearly socialist character,” and that, for the Chartists, “true democracy implied a social revolution.” Whether this is the way to view Chartism has long been a matter of debate. On the one side there are those, like Evans (1983, 255, 257), who see Chartism as “much the most important political movement of working men organized during the nineteenth century” and claim that it was “a critical stage in the political education of the working people.”³⁴ And there are those, like Gash (1979, 209), who see it rather as merely “a continuation under another name of the old radical reform movement.” Jones (1983, 168, 171) provides a bridge between the two viewpoints by saying that “if Chartism became a movement of workers, it became so not out of choice but from necessity.”³⁵

Still, as we know, in the end, Chartism failed. Perhaps it was, as Royle (1986, 57–58) argues, that the Chartists had “no coherent or effective strategy to offer,” torn as they were between “hopelessly naive” moral educationists and “physical force advocates, caught up in their own rhetoric.” Nonetheless, as Royle (1986, 93) himself says, “the Chartists' greatest achievement was Chartism, a movement shot through not with despair but with hope.” Chartism was an essential part of the process—crystallized by the world-revolution of 1848—of defining the great social antinomy of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth: bourgeoisie versus proletariat.

Neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat are eternal essences. They were social creations, reflecting to be sure a certain social reality, which was then reified. And as with all such concepts, it was the dominant, not the dominated, stratum that began the process of reification, contrary to subsequent beliefs. We have already discussed Guizot's role, even before the July Monarchy, in elaborating the concept of class—a concept he had taken from Saint-Simon. He did this, of course, in order to justify the political role of the bourgeoisie as opposed to the aristocracy. But he also did this to situate the bourgeoisie (which he felt would in time assimilate the aristocracy) vis-à-vis the proletariat, and to distinguish between the two (Botrel and Le Bouil, 1973, 143). If he was seeking droit de cité for the bourgeoisie, and ultimately total political control, he was specifically opposed to the inclusion of the proletariat. The droit de cité was to be reserved for active—that is, propertied—citizens.³⁶

As the bourgeoisie slowly evolved into that much vaguer and more inclusive category of the “middle class” or “classes,”³⁷ so eventually the proletariat evolved into that vaguer and more inclusive category of the “working class” or “classes.” There would come to be a great deal of resistance to explicit class language by many politicians and social scientists, because the use of such language came to be identified with a particular political position—that of Marxism—and using it therefore came to signify for many people accepting Marxist analysis and politics. But the retreat to vaguer language did not eliminate the antinomy. If anything, it strengthened it—by making it easier for individuals to pass quietly over the line—while at the same time maintaining the line firmly. For those who passed, the important thing was that there be a line, one that might keep others from passing as well and thereby undermining the newly acquired privileged position of full citizenship of those who managed to pass.³⁸

Since in the end the concept of the proletariat, even in its watered-down version of the working class, was intended to exclude, it is not surprising that the persons so designated often worked hard to redefine the terminology. For example, in Catalonia, retail-shop employees, whose working conditions were awful, refused to allow themselves to be called obrers or proletaris, insisting they were treballadors. This was because the latter term was less associated in the nineteenth century with unskilled manual labor than obrers (Lladonosa and Ferrer, 1977, 284). In Germany, the politics of naming was quite clear. From the 1830s on, the term Arbeiter began to widen from its original indication of unskilled laborer to include journeymen, and to be accepted by the latter in their politically radical phase. The self-employed craftsmen, however, resisted this category, and the workers' movements resisted including them (Kocka, 1986, 326–327).³⁹

Of course, this was a game that could be played by both sides. Scott (1988, 123124) recounts the interesting story of a report by the Paris Chamber of Commerce in 1851 that attempted to recategorize the social structure in order to delegitimize the social revolution of 1848. The object was to reduce the number of workers by including in the category of heads of enterprises all self-employed persons; all persons making goods to order who employed others, even if these others were family members and not paid; all persons making goods for “bourgeois clientele” (this included washerwomen); and all those making goods to order for more than one manufacturer. By doing this, the report eradicated the class identification of these persons as workers or proletarians, which they had manifested in the February-June 1848 period. “Written in the wake of 1848, it was intended to dispute the revolution's most radical economic and political claims and to reassert a vision of economic organization [hierarchical and harmonious] that had been severely challenged, especially by socialist theorists.” Thus it was that liberals theorized when radicals organized.

The period from the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 to the end of the 1860s was a very difficult one for workers' movements. The initial reaction of those in power was to repress anything that seemed to hark back to those revolutionary days. The defeat of Chartism and of the 1848 revolutions in turn created a sense of “disillusion” in the working classes. Jones (1983, 71) argues that “the permanence of industrial capitalism now seemed assured, and all except the most despairing of the outworkers were forced to adapt to this fact.”⁴⁰ A closer look, however, seems to indicate that adapt may be the wrong word. It is perhaps more like lie low until better times come. Dolléans (1947, 1:225) seems to me to put it more aptly when he designates the period 1848–1862 as “the fire that is brewing.”

What author after author emphasizes is the continuity between the patterns of the 1840s and those of the 1860s, as though the tactics of the workers were simply taken up again once the repression was slightly lifted. “Popular radicalism not only survived after 1848, but remained a major political force” (Biagini and Reed, 1991, 5).⁴¹ And everywhere, we continue to see a primary role for the artisans, as opposed to the unskilled factory workers. Hinton (1983, 2) says of mid-Victorian England: “In the language of contemporary social commentary, ‘skilled' and ‘organized' were often used as synonymous.”⁴²

One can of course appreciate the warning that Kocka (1984, 112) makes “against exaggerating the continuity between Handwerk and working-class history.”⁴³ And yet we find a certain “radicalization” in this period among the artisanal strata, says Sewell (1974, 88–89), especially among those who are “immigrants.”⁴⁴ Hinton's comments (1983, 5) are helpful in unraveling this seeming paradox. He sees two kinds of skilled workers: those in craft industries, whose “trade-unionism was an outgrowth of the informal community of the trade“; and those in other sectors, where “skilled status was more commonly a product of trade-union organization” rather than preceding it. The first were sometimes quite radical, for they “experienced a greater relative deprivation” (Moss, 1975b, 7) than the factory worker, but they eventually were forced out of the picture, whereas the latter were going to be the mainstay of the future socialist and trade-union organizations.

During all this time, as indeed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “fear of the masses, the concern with order, was the motif…always underlying the actions of the ruling class” (Moorhouse, 1973, 346). The question always remained for the dominant strata as for the working classes, Which tactics are optimal? From the point of view of the dominant strata, repression has its merits, but it also stokes the fire that is brewing, and eventually breeds revolt. So in the late 1860s, both Napoleon III and the British Conservative Party felt the need to loosen the constraints, to make it more possible for there to be workers' organizations and perhaps to expand a bit the de facto definition of citizenship. In a report written in 1860 for the Congress of the National Social Science Association, in Great Britain, “trade-unionism as an essay in self-government” was approved, and the authors declared that “leaders of a strike, where there is no regularly organized society, are likely to prove more unreasonable and violent than where there is” (cited in Pelling, 1976, 51). It seems an elementary bit of social science wisdom, one that signaled the beginning of an attempt to deal with the challenge to the definition of citizenship that organized working-class movements were now making. One hundred years later, another social scientist, looking back, opined that “in England lower-class protests appear to aim at establishing the citizenship of the workers” (Bendix, 1964, 67). Bendix saw this as distinguishing England from the Continent. He is probably doubly wrong. The objective was as true of labor movements in continental Europe as of those in England. And it is not true, even in England, that this was their only objective. This is, however, all they would achieve, and the liberal center in their theorizing and the enlightened conservatives in their practice endeavored to persuade them that it was all they needed or should want.

This period was the moment in which the so-called First International, the International Working Mens' Association (IWMA), was founded. It was a very small and weak organization, whose member organizations were equally weak and were pursuing objectives that were not entirely international.⁴⁵ But in terms of the evolving strategy of the workers' movement, it served as the locus of the great debate of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin (Forman, 1998, chap. 1). This debate had many aspects. But the heart of it was that the anarchists regarded the state as an implacable enemy, with which there could be no compromise, whereas the Marxists essentially had a two-stage theory of social transformation: somehow obtain state power, and then transform the world. How to obtain state power would of course come to divide the Marxists severely. But first they had to overcome the strength of the anarchist view.

The situation would evolve in the last third of the nineteenth century. Socialism became, in Labrousse's terms, a powerful movement as well as a powerful idea. So there seems to be a considerable “radicalization” of class conflict, starting with the Paris Commune and followed by the rise of socialist parties and trade unions, at least in all the more industrialized, wealthier parts of the world-system. “In 1880 [socialist parties] barely existed….By 1906 they were…taken for granted” (Hobsbawm, 1987, 116–117).⁴⁶ But it is now also a truism that after 1890 there was a general deradicalization of these movements,⁴⁷ culminating in 1914 with the war votes of all the socialist parties (with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks).⁴⁸

The picture that is offered us by most historical writing on the subject is one of a curve of militancy that went upward via popular mobilization and then downward via reformist sagacity (or betrayal, if one prefers that rhetoric). This is undoubtedly true in its crude outlines, although the upward part of the curve may never have been as great as some believe. As Michèle Perrot (1967, 702) says of so-called revisionism among the socialists of late nineteenth-century France, “In order that there be a ‘revision,' there first has to be something to revise.”⁴⁹

The question is where the roots of this so-called radical political upsurge lie—an upsurge that, in the end (by 1914), no longer seemed to threaten any of the encrusted social structures of the modern world-system. It seems reasonable to interpret this as a clash about citizenship—that is, about who was to be included in the privileges and derived benefits of being designated the kind of citizen (active) who had these rights. It was a material issue, to be sure, but it was also a question of identity and identification. The narrowness of the prevailing definitions of real citizenship in the period 1815–1848 (justified by the premise that the workers were uneducated and propertyless, and therefore could have no reason to maintain social order) provoked a “world-revolution,” which appalled the middle strata (since it threatened to go too far) and led to repression. When the pluses of repression were exhausted in twenty years,⁵⁰ there came to be more political space for popular maneuver. On the one hand, the liberal center urged the “education” of the working classes. And on the other hand, the working classes pushed for their own “education.”

This is turn led to the creation of serious organizations that sought to force the pace of inclusion of at least the male, urban working classes. These organizations had to make their demands somewhat loudly in order to be taken seriously, both by the dominant classes and by those they were hoping to mobilize politically. Thus we heard a “radical” rhetoric. This rhetoric was effective, and the dominant strata reacted by various kinds of concessions—extension of the suffrage, the expansion of economic benefits (including the nascent welfare state), and inclusion in the “nation” via the exclusions resulting from racism and imperialism. Of course, this gave the results intended—the maintenance of the system in its major outlines, and the “moderation” of the workers' rhetoric. One does not need to intrude concepts of errors of judgment (false consciousness), self-interest of a leading, bureaucratic stratum (betrayal, the iron law of oligarchy), or the special interest of the better-paid workers (aristocracy of labor) to account for a process that seems more or less pandemic, more or less inevitable in retrospect, and which occurred in quite similar form throughout the world (the more industrialized, richer part of the world in the period 1870–1914) despite all the national variations in the details of their respective histories and immediate conditions—variations that proved ultimately to be of minor importance.

There is a sense in which the “radicalism” of the post-1870 period was actually a lot less radical in spirit than the “radicalism” of the pre-1848 period. As Jones (1983, 237–238) puts it:

One of the most striking features of the social movements between 1790 and 1850 had been the clarity and concreteness of their conception of the state….It had been seen as a flesh and blood machine of coercion, exploitation and corruption….The triumph of the people would replace it by a popular democracy of a Leveller or Jacobin sort.

The concrete program, however, was “republicanism, secularism, popular self-education, co-operation, land reform, internationalism,” and all these themes had by now become part of the litany of the liberal center, at least of its more progressive flank. The late nineteenth-century movements would shift their emphasis “from power to welfare,” and with that, they were encased in a “defensive culture.” In a sense, however radical the post-1870 movements were, they were less angry than the pre-1848 movements. The lure of the reward of citizenship was becoming too strong.

The period running from the 1870s to the First World War saw the first substantial organization of the working classes into political movements (primarily socialist and anarchist) and into trade unions. It therefore became the period of a major debate about strategy. The question that preoccupied all those who organized was how the working classes might achieve their goals, and in particular how they should relate to the existing states and parliaments. There was the debate between Marxists and anarchists. And there was the crosscutting debate between so-called revolutionaries and so-called reformists. At one level, these were real debates, and they absorbed a good deal of organizational energy and time. And on the other hand, they turned out often to be less consequential debates than people at the time and since have usually assumed.

It is important to note that the strongest and the most influential movements were located primarily in the countries that were strongest economically: Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Europe and Great Britain's White Dominions. And if one adds to this list Russia, then all the debates that subsequently formed the central historical memory of the world's social/labor movements and became the reference of discourse almost everywhere took place in these countries. What is striking, when one reviews the debates in these countries, is how amazingly similar they were, despite all the important and oft-noted historical specificities of each national situation, and despite the differences in rhetorical labels that are usually used to describe them.

Let us first remember that the post-1870 period was one in which male suffrage had become widely extended. Most notable had been the 1867 extensions in Great Britain instituted by Disraeli and in Germany by Bismarck. They matched those that had previously been instituted in the Second Empire and the United States, and would soon be matched elsewhere in Europe. Of course they were still less than universal.⁵¹Bendix (1964, 63) celebrates these extensions as channeling lower-class protest to “realizing full participation in the existing political community or establishing a national political community in which such participation would be possible.” He is probably right.⁵² The question is how much we should celebrate this.

In Great Britain, which served as one of the two principal loci of the pre-1870 movements, in the view of most observers, the so-called New Unionism of the late 1880s represented a new (or renewed) militancy. Of course, as Hobsbawm (1984c, 152–153) points out, we can have a “new” unionism in Great Britain because, unlike continental Europe, “we find an already established ‘old unionism'…to combat, transform, and expand,” a new unionism that would become the founding base of the Labour Party.⁵³ The new unions were intended to include more than the artisans or those with steady, continuous wage work. They were to be “general” unions for the highly mobile, unskilled workers who lacked scarce human resources and who had been unorganized because they couldn't use the tactics of craft unions. General unions were their hope as a weapon (Hobsbawm, 1949, 123–125).

The new unionism emphasized strategies and organizational forms, close links with the emerging socialist movements, and organizing the unorganized in order thereby to create a far stronger trade-union movement. Although the new unionism is often seen as a peculiarly British phenomenon. there were in fact analogous developments in various European countries (Hobsbawm, 1984d, 19; Pollard, 1984, 58). The new unionism led to a spectacular growth of trade unions at its outset in 1889–1891, but this sudden upsurge turned out to be quite shortlived. From 1891 to 1914, the numbers did continue to creep upward, but only at a very slow pace (Hinton, 1983, 45–53, 64).⁵⁴ Why was there such a “short heyday“? For Hyman (1984, 331), “various institutional correctives [checked and] considerably reduced the potential for disorder.” For Hobsbawm (1964, 189), it was the fact that the ability of class-militant general unions to ride out slumps depended on their being “tolerated and accepted” by employers, and this in turn depended on “a more cautious and conciliatory policy.” For Howell (1983, 111), similarly, given that the new unionism succeeded best when organizing workers (gas workers, metal trades) whose work had scarcity value, they found that they needed to abandon the “ecumenical hope of large-scale general unions,” and it then followed that “prudence [was] a condition of survival.” Burgess (1975, 309) lays emphasis on the development of a trade-union bureaucracy with a different “life style” from the average worker, which made the trade unions “reluctant” to be too militant insofar as disputes with employers might “endanger” union funds, the positions of the trade-union officials, and the friendly society benefits of the members.

The upshot was that British new unionism did accomplish a few things: It helped to wean the trade unions away from the Liberal Party to the Labour Party.⁵⁵It organized new sectors of the labor force—those in which the organizers did not have to compete with already existing trade-union structures (Hobsbawm, 1984b, 166–167). And it contributed to the “narrowing of differentials” among the working classes (Hobsbawm, 1984b, 156). But in the long run, there would turn out to be “no essential difference in outlook” between the old unionism and the new (Duffy, 1961, 319).⁵⁶

One of the central issues for the workers' movement in this period was the relationship of trade unions and socialist parties—a matter of much debate and some tension. In Great Britain, the trade unions were a major organizational base of the new Labour Party and received a greater institutionalized role within the party than would be the case in most other national situations. The new unionism in Great Britain was, however, perhaps the last instance in which the central locus of militancy of the workers' movement was to be found in trade-union action per se. As of the 1890s, the parties sought in general to control the trade unions rather than the other way around.

The Second International vigorously sought to make this relationship clear. Already in 1881, the Swiss trade unions “willingly” used the metaphor of man and woman to denote the relationship of party and trade union as one of subordination (Haupt, 1981, 31). Whereas the First International had often debated the relative merits of political and economic action, the Second International now went on to make an organizational distinction between them.⁵⁷ In 1891, its Congress passed a resolution calling on all socialist parties to establish a trade-union secretariat within the party structure (Hansen, 1977, 202). As the parties sought to control the unions more closely, the latter resisted, and the “idea of trade-union autonomy gained ground” (Haupt, 1981, 43). What had always been a “problematic” relationship of trade unions engaged in “the day-to-day processes with the existing social order” and the parties with a “project of social transformation” (Hinton, 1983, viii) led increasingly to “divergence” and “friction” (Hobsbawm, 1984b, 171) between them.

Politically, the trade unions were pushed to the sidelines, and the strategic debates about degrees and forms of militancy would center henceforth within the parties. The “model party” in the world social/labor movement would be, up to the First World War, the German SPD.⁵⁸ It was the most powerful party in the Second International. It was the only party with a true mass base. It was the party of the most intense theoretical debates. When, in 1877, the SPD was able to get sixteen deputies elected to the German Reichstag, this resulted in increased repression (the antisocialist laws of 1878). It also resulted in the deflation of the anarchist case (Ragionieri, 1961, 57–62)⁵⁹ and the acceptance, at the Erfurt Congress in 1891, of Marxism as the official doctrine of the SPD.⁶⁰

From this point forward, the SPD became the locus of the grand debate between Bernstein and Kautsky. Bernstein preached a “reformism” of a party that was no longer a “sect” and argued that, with universal suffrage, the party could achieve its objectives through the ballot. Kautsky represented “orthodox” Marxism, which was presumably the “revolutionary” option.

How important was this theoretical debate? Geary (1976, 306) says it concerned “only a small group of intellectuals” and that trade unionists “often voted for party orthodoxy” because it didn't affect what they were really doing and they “disliked all theoreticians, both left and right.” Even Liebknecht, who would later be a supporter of the Russian Revolution, argued (against a Dutch delegate to the International who objected in 1893 to electoral participation) that “tactics are essentially a question of practical politics” and that there are neither “revolutionary” nor “reformist” tactics (cited in Longuet, 1913, 29). There was an upsurge of revolutionary spirit after the 1905 Russian Revolution (Schorske, 1955, 28; Stern and Sauerzapf, 1954, xxxiv, xliii), but, like the 1905 revolution itself, it didn't last.

One can sum up this historical trajectory as “radical theory and moderate practice” (Roth, 1963, 163). And the basis of this contribution was “deterministic Marxism” in its two variants (Bernstein and Kautsky).⁶¹ Roth (1963, 167) asserts that it was the “fitting ideology” for a Social-Democratic subculture, given the inability of the labor movement to “break out of its isolation.” Nolan (1986, 389) states the same thing in more friendly terms, emphasizing that deterministic Marxism “provided the promise of a revolution in a nonrevolutionary situation, a theory of revolution in a country without an indigenous revolutionary tradition.” Mathias (1971, 1:178) argues that making Marxism the official ideology of the SPD was a “precondition for the acceptance of the fatalistic interpretation of Marxism.”

The key shift was not in the terminology but in the fact that, from the 1870s on, the socialists began to demand protective legislation. After 1871, the working classes “entered into a close relationship with the nation-states” (van der Linden, 1988, 333). Nolan (1986, 386) calls this a shift from “politics to social policy.” In Germany, they were responding to “an agenda that Bismarck had set.” This had to lead over time to “a general integration of the working-class into the state” (Mathias, 1971, 1:181).⁶²

In the German case, Roth (1963, 8, 315) calls this “negative integration,” which he defines as allowing “a hostile mass movement to exist legally, but preventing] it from gaining access to the centers of power.”⁶³ In any case, Kaiser Wilhelm I repealed the antisocialist legislation in 1890 and called for an international conference to promote international labor legislation (Ragionieri, 1961, 159) He gained the sobriquet of Arbeiterkaiser by making various small “reformist concessions,” although he continued to vacillate by occasional “recourse to further repressive legislation” (Hall, 1974, 365). Roth wants to see this as quite different from what happened in Great Britain and the United States. I agree that the rhetoric was more strident in Germany, but were the ultimate results so different?

If we turn from the two “model” national cases—Great Britain and Germany—to the other major loci of growth of the socialist/labor movements, we find variation without significant difference. Everywhere the pattern is one of organizing with some difficulties in the light of state repression, rhetoric that is often radical with practice that is on the whole moderate, and a sort of “negative integration” into the national communities. In France, the heavy repression after the Commune eased up after 1875, the government recognizing the wisdom of a “social policy directed at the working class” (Schöttler, 1985, 58).

The Guesdists in France founded the Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) in 1882 and called themselves Marxists, but it was a limited version of Marxism, one still influenced by anarchism (Willard, 1965, 30). What Marxism seemed to mean most of all was the rejection of “associationism” based on class harmony and “a revolutionary strategy in the pursuit of trade socialism” (Moss, 1976, 157). What the POF seemed most to like in Marxism was the Saint-Simonian tradition of industrialism combined with a “vitriolic critique” of capitalism. They were “heralds of a transcendent future” (Stuart, 1992, 126).⁶⁴ The POF was never a mass party, unlike the later Section Française de l'Internationale Socialiste (SFIO) (Cottereau, 1986, 143). Stuart's epitaph (1992, 54) on the POF is that its story was that of “a prolonged and agonizing birth, an unpromising youth, a prosperous and hopeful maturity followed by apparent terminal crisis and final transfiguration [in 1905].” Metaphorically, might this not be said of all the socialist/labor movements—at varying paces, to be sure?

French socialists were to take another path. It was Alexandre Millerand in 1896 who first coined the term reformism (Procacci, 1972, 164), and he would be the first socialist to enter a coalition government, one headed by Pierre WaldeckRousseau under the aegis of “republican concentration” (Willard, 1965, 422).⁶⁵ The subsequent failure of the general strike in 1906–1908 (as well as the second one in 1919–1920) “marked the death of a [last] dream: revolution via the strike of workers” (Perrot, 1974, 1:71).

In any case, all the parties seemed to follow the path of de facto reformism—that is, integration (even if negative) into the political structures of their respective countries. Heywood (1990, chap. 1) calls the Spanish socialists “decaffeinated Marxists.” The Dutch party and trade unions “were clearly moving in a reformist direction” (Hansen, 1977, 199). The Italian party pursued an “edulcorated version” of the program of the German SPD (Andreucci, 1982, 221), and its great expansion in 1901–1902 occurred “under the aegis of reformism” (Procacci, 1972, 163).⁶⁶

As for the United States (and Canada), which Lipset (1983, 14) insists are different because the absence of a feudal past “served to reduce the salience of class-conscious politics and proposals,” one merely needs to change a bit of the rhetoric to see the similarities. Herberg (cited in Dubofsky, 1974, 275) showed the degree to which the relationship of the IWW (“with its stress on proletarian direct action”) to the craft unionism of the AFL was parallel to the relationship of Kautsky's “orthodox Marxism” to Bernstein's “reformism.” Laslett (1974, 115–116) makes the same point essentially about the American Socialist Party. Foner (1984, 74), responding to the literature on why there was “no socialism in the U.S.,” says that the question should really be posed as “Why has there been no socialist transformation in any advanced capitalist society?” The most striking difference in the United States (and Canada) from the western European states was the ability of the Democratic Party in the United States (and the Liberal Party in Canada) to remain the prime vehicle of working-class politics (Shefter, 1966, 270; Kealey, 1980, 273), something that might be explained more by the role of the city machines in incorporating immigrant workers than by anything else.⁶⁷

What was crucial to all the social/labor movements in the end was their drive to participate in the nation. The unification of the Parti Ouvrier Belge occurred within the framework of the struggle for universal suffrage (Sztejnberg, 1963, 214). The demands of the socialists in France in the 1880s began to center around material needs that could be met only by “an appeal to the state, or rather, to the Republic” (Schöttler, 1985, 68). The U.S. trade-union movement became national in the 1860s to 1890s in order “to demand uniform wage scales” across the country—“that is, to impose some order on capitalism from below” (Montgomery, 1980, 90; see also Andrews, 1918, 2:43–44). And in discussing the Charte d'Amiens of the French trade-union federation, the CGT, in 1906, Bron (1970, 2:132) describes the “complementary battles” of the trade unions and the socialist party. The trade unions emphasized the productive role of the workers; the socialists, “the aspect of ‘citizenship.’ “

The workers regarded themselves as the working classes. The upper strata tended to think of them as the dangerous classes. A large part of the tactical struggle on the part of the workers revolved around how they could lose the label of “dangerous” and acquire that of citizens. In Germany, after 1871, the Social-Democrats had been accused on being “enemies of the nation” and “Vaterlandlos “ (without a fatherland) (Groh, 1966, 17). They needed to overcome this label. Chevalier (1958, 461) expresses well the analytic issue, which in the end was a political issue:

Distinguishing the working classes from the dangerous classes…is made all the more difficult by the fact that the borders between these categories are unclear, and that at the uncertain frontier between them there are found many intermediate groups, of whom it is difficult to say whether they belong more to the one or the other category. How can one finally distinguish them when they depend so greatly on economic, political, or biological circumstances that intermingle them, and make persons shift, according to the years or the season or the revolutions, crises, and epidemics, from one category to the other?

One key mechanism that was widely used was to distinguish workers by the category of ethnicity or of nationality. Racism internally and imperialism/colonialism externally served the function of displacing the label of dangerous to a subcategory of workers. To the extent that this was persuasive, some workers could become active citizens while others remained passive citizens or even noncitizens. Once again, inclusion was being achieved by exclusion.

The internal exclusions are most salient in the story of the United States—a zone of constant immigration during the nineteenth century—in which immigrants tended to settle in urban areas and start as relatively unskilled laborers, while native-born Americans formed a very large part of the artisanal strata and were more likely to be upwardly mobile, with their positions being filled in behind them by immigrant (and second-generation) workers. Already in the 1850s, the social distance between the native-born artisans and the predominantly immigrant wage workers took the political form of nativist parties (anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic) that “emphasized their artisan membership as well as their Protestantism” (Bridges, 1986, 176). In the Civil War, conscripted native labor was often replaced by foreign labor, and “race antagonism added intensity to the natural struggle between employer and employed” (Ely, 1890, 62). Immediately after the war, U.S. interest in and participation in the First International was spurred by the attempt of the newly formed National Trades' Union to regulate immigration by an arrangement with the IWMA (Andrews, 1918, 2:86)—an interest, as we have already noted, that was shared by British trade unions. The workers' organizations led the agitation for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Selig Perlman (1922, 62), in his famous history of the U.S. trade-union movement, goes so far as to say that this agitation “was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have been a conflict of races instead of one of classes.”

The Socialist Party disproportionately recruited immigrant workers. On the one hand, this was doubtless because the U.S. working class of the late nineteenth century, as was noted at the time, consisted “chiefly of men and women of foreign birth or foreign parentage” (Ely, 1890, 286). But this can also account for the decline of this party when immigration was cut off and the third generation shunned linkage with their immigrant past.

The employers took advantage of this ethnic split, of course, and often used “blacks, Orientals, and women” as strikebreakers (Shefter, 1986, 228). And it is certainly true that the top place of English-speaking White workers in the ethnic hierarchy was “implicitly accepted throughout [U.S.] history” (Soffer, 1960, 151) and that disorder was regularly blamed on the immigrants. But this is not enough to account for the continued centrality of ethnic/racial distinctions among American workers. Commons (1935, 2:xvii), it seems to me, captures well the essence of the issue—the relation of U.S. unions to “Americanism“:

[Anthracite mines had “open shop” agreements with the miners.] Consequently, with the weakness of the unions the companies in 1912 discovered that their mines were being invaded by syndicalists, the I.W.W. They reversed their attitude toward the union. It was discovered that the American labor movement, however aggressive it might be, was the first bulwark against revolution and the strongest defender of constitutional government. Upon the unions, indeed, falls the first burden of “Americanizing” the immigrants, and it has done so for more than fifty years. When President Wilson saw the need for unifying a heterogeneous nation for the World War he was the first president to attend and address the convention of the American Federation of Labor. When Samuel Gompers, at 74 years of age, and fifty years of leadership, returned from his alliance with the labor movement of Mexico, to which he had gone to prevent its capture by the communists, his last words on his dying bed at the Mexican border in 1924 were “God bless our American institutions.”

The other arena in which inclusion/exclusion played a major role was outside the country—in other countries or in colonial possessions of a metropole. On the one hand, it was easy for workers in western Europe to keep within a certain radical/liberal tradition of favoring the struggles of far-off persons for their liberation. In 1844, 1,505 Parisian workers petitioned the deputies to abolish slavery in the colonies, noting that “the worker belongs to himself,” that “whatever the vices of present-day organization of work in France, the worker is free, in a certain sense” (cited in Césaire, 1948, 11). British workers saw the Crimean War as pitting “free Englishmen against the Russian serf” (Foster, 1974, 242). And in the 1860s, the British working class supported Garibaldi, the North during the U.S. Civil War, and Polish insurrection (Collins, 1964, 29–30).⁶⁸

But it is also true that the antislavery movement in early nineteenth-century England met with working-class hostility, because “black slaves were already better off than white slaves; freedom for the blacks would be bought by further oppressing the white slaves; and once freed, black slaves would become as badly off as white slaves” (Hollis, 1980, 309). And at the beginning of the twentieth century, British labor centered its critique of imperial policy in South Africa around the importation of Chinese labor to work in the Rand mines, which they saw as “further evidence of Government-sponsored blacklegging” (Hinton, 1983, 73).

The Second International was deeply split on colonial questions (Haupt and Rebérioux, 1967a, 77–283). Those like Hyndman of the United Kingdom and Lenin, who denounced imperialism at every turn, were more than balanced by such as Henri van Kol of the Netherlands, who spoke of the “necessity of the colonial reality” and merely wished to limit its “crimes,” and those like Bernstein, for whom “the colonial question [was] the question of the extension of civilization” (Rebérioux and Haupt, 1963, 13, 18). Even the Austrian socialists, so noted for their more nuanced understanding of the demands of the multiple nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were vehement in their opposition to Hungarian “separatism.”⁶⁹

In the end, even for those who took an anticolonial position like the Guesdists, it was always a “minor combat” at best (Willard, 1965, 63). What dominated sentiments was the certainty expressed by the German SPD that, when the SPD prevailed, its “victory would sweep the peasantry along behind it and thus make the advent of socialism possible in economically backward countries” (Haupt, 1986, 57). This was argued as a question of priorities. But it rang a bell among the working class as a question of inclusion among the “civilized.”⁷⁰ Socialists in colonial countries had to draw their own conclusions about priorities. When Connolly, who considered himself both a Marxist and an Irish nationalist, observed what he considered the betrayal by the European working class of proletarian internationalism in 1914, he hung a sign outside the Dublin headquarters of his party—”We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland” (Bédarida, 1965, 20)—and proceeded in 1916 to lead the Easter Rebellion.

WOMEN'S AND FEMINIST MOVEMENTS

The story of the feminist/women's movement in the nineteenth century is similar in very many ways to the story of the social/labor movement. But for the most part, it is as though these two movement families were on widely separated and largely parallel tracks, almost never crossing each other and seldom collaborating. Indeed, in many ways the social/labor movement regarded the feminist/women's movement as a rival, a nuisance, a diversion, and even quite often as an enemy. This had everything to do with inclusion/exclusion.

There were of course a few voices who saw the two struggles as not merely compatible but intertwined. Flora Tristan in the pre-1848 period spent her life preaching this. Indeed, devoted as she was to the cause of the workers, she put into her book The Workers' Union (1983, 83), written in 1843, the message that “all working-class ills can be summed up in two words: poverty and ignorance. Now in order to get out of this maze, I see only one way: begin by educating women, because women are in charge of instructing boys and girls.” She was, it must be said, a voice in the wilderness, as was Aline Vallette, disciple of Guesde, who wrote in L'Harmonie sociale on March 15, 1892, that “to renovate society, it is necessary that the two oppressed groups of society, women and proletarians, unite” (cited in Zylberberg-Hocquard, 1978, 89).

The issue seemed to the male worker in urban wage work quite straightforward. Women were paid less—indeed, before 1914, “considerably” less (Guilbert, 1966, 21)—and this posed a threat to the level of wages in general.⁷¹ The asserted threat was raised in meeting after meeting (Guilbert, 1966, 188). Despite some mythology, the feminine component of the manufacturing work force was rather large. It is estimated at 40 percent for Paris in midcentury (DeGroat, 1997, 33). Women were relegated to the more “proletarian” positions (Judt, 1986, 44–46, 50–51), partly no doubt because they were barred by the skilled artisans from entering their trades (Hinton, 1983, 31), but partly because employers thought them more productive workers with more labor discipline (or docility) and more technical dexterity than men (Berg, 1993, 41).

Male workers reacted both at a personal level and at an organizational level. Alexander (1984, 144) sees their reaction primarily “as a desire to (legally) control and (morally) order sexuality.” One should never underestimate sexual motivations, and no doubt this drive fitted in very well with the cultural mores of the time, particularly among middle-class women who favored “reducing women to unpaid work in marriage and family along with their total exclusion…from remunerated occupations” (Kleinau, 1987, 199). It is undoubtedly also the case that, among male urban wage-workers, “proletarian anti-feminism predominated” (Thönnessen, 1973, 19). The German male workers referred to women workers as Fabrikmenschen (a curious phrase, since it literally means “factory men” but had the tonality of “factory girls”) and tended to regard them as “morally depraved” (Quataert, 1979, 153). Hobsbawm (1978, 8) notes that workers' imagery evolved in the course of the century, so that by the last third of the nineteenth century the image of “inspiring women” (see Delacroix's painting Les Trois Glorieuses) with which the century had begun had been transformed into that of women who merely “suffer and endure,” while the nude male torso now became the pictorial symbol of workers' energy and power.

The First International was divided on the question. At the first congress in Geneva in 1866, the representative of Lassalle's Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeitsverein proposed forbidding female employment on the grounds of “protection” of women (Hervé, 1983, 23). The final resolution compromised by saying that women's work was to be regarded positively, but criticizing its conditions under capitalist production (Frei, 1987, 39). The workers' organizations would now place their demands on three fronts: equality of wages, the family wage, and ending dangerous workplace conditions.

Equality of wages (for equal work) is a standard and obvious demand of trade unions. But it was frequently the secret hope that, if wages were made equal (for women, for minorities and immigrants, for workers in other countries), the hierarchically dominant worker (the male citizen worker of the ranking ethnic group) would then be employed in preference, if only for cultural-historical reasons. Notice, for example, the language of the resolution in the Ninth Congress of the French CGT in Rennes in 1898:

That in all areas of life we seek to propagate the idea that the man must nourish the woman; that for the woman, widow or young girl, necessarily obliged to provide for herself, it shall be understood that the formula, for equal work equal pay, shall be applied to her;…

Keep men from taking jobs and work that belong to women, and reciprocally, keep women from taking work away from men that is their natural province. (Cited in Guilbert, 1966, 173)⁷²

By and large, women did not join or were kept out of the trade unions. In the period 1900–1914, when trade unions had grown relatively strong, it is estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of women workers in France were members (Guilbert, 1966, 29, 34). There were some efforts to create special women's trade unions, and in England these grew relatively numerous in the same period, but they were less bargaining structures than “benefit societies,” from which they were “indistinguishable” (Olcott, 1976, 34, 39).

Of course, trade unions had a difficult time justifying the exclusion of women, as can be seen in the reluctant resolution of the Fédération Française des Travailleurs du Livre, notorious for having conducted the largest number of strikes aimed at excluding women from employment. Finally, the FFTL, admitting that for economic reasons even those workers opposed to the employment of women in their own trades regularly pushed their wives to work in other trades, offered the following compromise:

1. We shall support, morally and materially, those locals that…wish to react against the exploitation of women by obtaining for them the minimum trade-union rate of pay.

2. During a transitional period…women presently employed shall be admitted to the Federation on the same conditions as men. At the end of the transitional period only women employed at the trade-union rate will be admitted. (Cited in Guilbert, 1966, 62)

A second resolution simultaneously urged “workers who were heads of families to apply the principle of the woman at home and require their companions to refuse all work outside the home.” If this seems somewhat inconsistent with the other resolution, it is because it is.

Social scientists lent their expertise to validate these positions. Dr. William Ogle explained to the Royal Statistical Society in 1890:

There are men who work because work is a pleasure to them and there are others who toil because work is a duty; but the great majority of men are only stimulated to labour that in amount or character is distasteful to them, by the hope that they may be able, in the first place, to maintain themselves, and secondly to marry and maintain a family….If therefore, the well-being of a state consists in the mature well-being of the people, a country is then most flourishing when the largest proportion of its population is able to satisfy these two natural desires. (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, cited in Lewis, 1984, 45)

The “family wage” became a central demand of the trade-union structures. In part, this demand originated in a real problem. Whereas in the eighteenth century it had been considered normal that women and children work for remuneration as well as men, the shift of many productive activities outside the home meant the loss of income from the home work of women and children. This is probably a key element in the observed dip in real household income in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Pinchbeck, 1930, 4; Wallerstein, 1989, 124).

The family wage was a simple idea. The minimum wage an adult male should receive for his waged work should be a sum sufficient to sustain him, his wife, and his nonadult children. This concept had wide appeal. It was strongly endorsed by the labor movement (Lewis, 1984, 49). It appealed to many employers, since it seemed to promise stability of the work force (May, 1982, 418). It fit in with the nineteenth-century value of the “responsibility” of men to care for their family (Evans, 1983, 281). It appealed therefore not only to the IWMA and other labor movements but to centrist politicians of all stripes. Only feminists objected to the concept (Offen, 1987a, 183).

The concept of special “protective” legislation for women workers was always a “thorny issue” (Rowbotham, 1974, 114). It seemed a virtuous idea, and it was long a preoccupation of the socialist movement (Guilbert, 1966, 413). Anarchists didn't like it, but only because it involved government intervention. Middle-class feminists opposed it in the name of equality. The women workers themselves often feared that it would result in reduced wages. The socialist movement was somewhat divided. Clara Zetkin, for example, argued that it was irrelevant since, following Marx and Engels, industrialization had destroyed age and sex as “distinctive” variables, but hers was a minority view in the German SPD (Quataert, 1979, 39). The Catholic Zentrum in Germany endorsed the family wage as part of its search for a more social capitalism. For most male workers, it served as an alibi for their unwillingness to see an equal role for women in the workplace, and hence in political society. The inclusion of male workers, they seemed to think, required that women be treated as a weaker, more vulnerable, and hence more passive part of the population.

The issue of women's rights got a somewhat more sympathetic audience in socialist parties than it received within the trade unions. The most famous and important locus of socialist debate about the relation of women and the party was in the German SPD, which Quataert described (1979) as “reluctant feminists.” The important role of the Women's Conference and the Women's Bureau within the SPD was exceptional in socialist parties. It originated as the result of the restrictive laws of the German state. The Prussian Vereingesetz of 1851 forbade women not only to join political organizations, but even to attend meetings. There were similar laws in Bavaria and Saxony (Evans, 1976, 10–11). The SPD, in order to mobilize women, was obliged to set up separate structures that could claim legally to be apolitical. This turned out to be a double-edged sword. It enabled the SPD to organize women despite the government's laws. But it also enabled the women socialists to act as an organized faction within the party, “securing representation for women's special interests.” In addition, it meant that the socialist women, precisely because they had their own organization, were extremely hostile to the middle-class feminist movements, with whom their split was “pronounced” (Honeycutt, 1979, 32–33).

The result was a curious in-between position on feminist issues. On the one hand, August Bebel wrote the most important and most cited book on women by any socialist leader, Frau und Sozialismus, one that was considered relatively “feminist.”⁷³ And although the socialist women insisted there did not exist such a thing as a “women's question“—as did the Italian, French (Guesdist), and Russian movements—unlike the other movements, the German SPD did place emphasis on the political emancipation of women (Honeycutt, 1979, 37). Also, despite Rosa Luxemburg's views (she was never involved in the SPD women's movement), they did seek various reforms designed to “alleviate sex oppression under capitalism” (Quataert, 1979, 12). On the other hand, the SPD women's movement was in fact “largely a movement of married women“—housewives and not women workers (Evans, 1977, 165). And as soon as the German government passed a new Vereingesetz and ended its restrictions on women's political activities (1908), the SPD abolished the Women's Conference (1910) and then the Women's Bureau (1912). Honeycutt's assessment (1981, 43) is that the goal that Clara Zetkin, the leader of the socialist women, had set herself “of realizing feminist ideals through the socialist movement was utopian for the period in which she lived.”

The French socialist women shared the hostility to bourgeois feminism of the German women. Louise Saumoneau, the organizer of the first Groupe des Femmes Socialistes in 1899, rejected completely any collaboration with bourgeois feminists (Hause and Kenney, 1981, 793). But, unlike the socialist women in Germany, who were nearly 20 percent of the SPD in 1900–1913, women made up only 2 to 3 percent of the party in France (Sowerwine, 1976, 4–5). On the other hand, socialism and feminism seemed less incompatible in France. First of all, there was the very strong image of women as leaders of the Commune (Rabaut, 1983, 6). Indeed, the popular image was so strong that even the bourgeois women's movements seemed tarnished by its subversive flavor.⁷⁴

Second, there was the figure of Hubertine Auclert, to whom there was no equivalent in Germany. Auclert gave a famous speech to the Third French Workers' Socialist Congress of 1879, saying that she had come “not because I am a worker, but because I am a woman—that is, one who is exploited—a slave delegated by nine millions slaves.” She appealed for an alliance between the workers and the women, ending with a peroration: “Oh, proletarians, if you wish to be free, cease being unjust. With modern science, with the awareness that science knows no prejudices, say: equality for all men, equality between men and women” (Auclert, 1879, 1–2, 16). And she did get from the congress a strong resolution in favor of “the absolute equality of the two sexes” and the right of women to work (emphasizing, to be sure, “equal work, equal pay”), albeit insisting at the same time that women had the obligation to nurse their children (Guilbert, 1966, 156–157).

But in France, too, the alliance, momentarily achieved, would ultimately fail (Rebérioux, 1978a, xvi; Sowerwine, 1978, 233–234). The split among the French socialists in 1882, generally considered to be that between a more reformist faction (the Brassists) and a more revolutionary one (the Guesdists), took as its immediate excuse a women's issue. Léonie Rouzade, a Brassist, had stood for election to the Paris Municipal Council in 1881, and the Guesdists were decidedly cool to her candidacy. This led to their expulsion from the party. The Guesdists then formed the Parti Ouvrier Français, alleging that Brousse advocated a “sex struggle” rather than a “class struggle.” The Guesdists said that to advocate women's political rights was “reformist” since they could be achieved “legally” rather than by revolution, to which the Brassists replied that men had also achieved their “rights” legally. But then, nonetheless, the Guesdists incorporated women's rights into their own project (Sowerwine, 1982, 28–45).

In the end, both the feminists and the socialists in France gave up the idea of a coalition. What weighed on the socialists was the great fear that most women were too influenced by the Church and would use their suffrage against their party (Perrot, 1976, 113). When the SFIO created a feminine auxiliary, it was primarily to prevent the spread of feminism rather than to obtain full rights for women (Sowerwine, 1978, 1).

The unhappy relationship seemed at its fiercest in 1913 with the “Couriau affair.” Emma Couriau, with the support of her husband, who had long been a militant trade unionist, sought admission to the typographers' union. She was refused, and her husband was expelled from the union for permitting her to work. A great fuss was created, and Couriau received support not only in feminist but also in some trade-union circles. The issue was then referred to the next national congress of feminism and political radicalism….Given the links between the two movements in the early days, it is hardly surprising that from the outset mainstream feminism in France opted for a course of prudence and moderation which might better be described as timidity” (McMillan, 1981b, 84). the FFTL in 1915, which, however, never took place because of the war (Albistur and Armogathe, 1977, 361). Whereas many authors have emphasized that this incident demonstrates the depth of labor hostility to the right of women to work, Sowerwine (1983, 441) views it more positively: “If the Couriau affair is ‘an indication of attitudes toward women,' it indicates not the persistence of misogyny but a step in an evolution toward egalitarianism.”

The Italian socialist movement also had a famous debate on women's suffrage, one between Filippo Turati, the party leader, and his life companion, Anna Kuliscioff, in Critica sociale. In Italy, too, the male socialists wished to delay the struggle for women's suffrage in order to achieve more rapidly universal male suffrage. And in Italy, too, they used justifications of capacity—such as, for example, that women “were absent from politics.” As Kuliscioff replied, if this is the argument, one has to ask “how many men participate effectively in politics?” And when the vote is offered to illiterate men, she said, how can one argue that the vote should not be given to women because they are illiterate? (Ravera, 1978, 77–79; see also Pieroni, 1963, 122–123; Pieroni, 1974, 9; Puccini, 1976, 30–31).

The ambivalence could be found everywhere. In England, the Labour Party was reluctant to put its support behind the move for women's suffrage, many of its supporters believing that “feminism was simply another name for increasing the privilege of propertied women” (Liddington and Norris, 1985, 28). The fear of a conservative women's vote made most Labour men “not enthusiastic” for women's suffrage (Fulford, 1957, 113). It was only in 1912 that Labour resolved not to support any further extension of the franchise that did not include women (Hinton, 1983, 79).

In the United States, there was a famous incident at the National Labor Congress in 1868, when the credentials of Elizabeth Cady Stanton were challenged on the grounds that she did not represent a labor organization. In finally accepting her credentials, the congress felt it necessary to assert that they did not agree with her “peculiar views” but that they accepted her simply because her organization was seeking the amelioration of the conditions of labor (Andrews, 1918, 2:128).

In Belgium and Austria (as well as Germany), socialist parties refused to support women's suffrage in order not to jeopardize universal male suffrage (Evans, 1987, 86–88). On the other hand, in country after country, eventually (and to some extent painfully) the socialists came down on the side of women's suffrage (Evans, 1987, 76). And in postrevolutionary Russia, the Clara Zetkin brand of “proletarian women's movement” did get the endorsement of both Alexandra Kollontai and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife (Stites, 1957, 251).⁷⁵

Still, Kennedy and Tilly (1985, 36) insist that feminists and socialists remained “at arm's length,” at least from 1890 to 1920, and indeed “became bitter enemies.” Klejman and Rochefort (1989, 231) say that “[f]rom 1889 to 1914, the relations between organized feminism and the Socialist Party never ceased being conflictual.” For working-class women the basic choice seemed always to be: “Sisters or citizens?” (Sowerwine, 1982, 1). And in the end, working-class women who were politically active were not allowed to refuse the choice.

The feminist/women's movement must not, however, be seen primarily through the prism of the social/labor movement. It had its own dynamic, albeit one that was parallel in many ways. John Stuart Mill explained this dynamic well:

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogatives of sex are likely to be little attended to by the generality, as long as they are able to say to themselves that women do not complain of it. (Cited in Rossi, 1970, 214)

Still, the story didn't really start with the women but with the men. As O'Neill (1971, 6) says of Victorian men (but was more generally true throughout the nineteenth-century European world), they “taught women to think of themselves as a special class….[They] created The Woman, where before there had only been women.”

In England, in the early years of the century, women organized primarily as part of the antislavery movement, and that would perhaps pay off well for feminist organizations later. As Banks (1981, 22) suggests, their active participation in this movement “gave them valuable experience in such fundamentals of routine political activities as fund-raising and collecting signatures for petitions.” It was perhaps a little less than manning the barricades, but surely a little more than conversation in a parlor. Early Chartist politics was more radical in its tactics—it was a mass politics—and in those days women took their part. But the Chartists would be as ambiguous on women's rights (particularly suffrage) as the social/labor movement later on. While, at an early stage, the Charter's calls for universal suffrage “specifically included” women (Fulford, 1957, 38), in most later statements, “the matter was left vague” (Thompson, 1976. 132). The sentiment was that the main issue was “one of class.”

Similarly in Italy, whereas Anna Monzoni insisted on the necessity to have alongside a socialist party an organization for woman's liberation, and if the socialists did not understand that, it was because the “working class was inheriting from the bourgeoisie a new form of antifeminism,” Anna Kuliscioff (the same person who debated her companion, Filippe Turati, on the importance of woman's suffrage) argued against an “interclass” organization, which, she said, even for such a “clear objective as woman's emancipation,” was unacceptable (Bortolotti, 1978, 105).

It was Owenite socialism that provided the friendliest environment for nascent feminism. Owenism had both a “theoretical and practical commitment to women's liberation” (Taylor, 1983, xiii).⁷⁶ But Owenism was to fade out with the collapse of Owenwood in 1845, just about the time Chartism was collapsing. Owen had seen women's liberation as part of the larger “social regeneration” he had been preaching. And with the disappearance of this movement “went the ideological tie between feminism and [English] working-class radicalism.” After that, what had been seen as “twin struggles of a single strategy [became] separate struggles, organized from different—and sometimes opposing—perspectives” (Taylor, 1983, 264).

The last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth were marked by the contributions of a number of striking women intellectuals, from the feminist writings in England of Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Martineau to the cultural centrality of Mme. de Staël and Georges Sand in France to the Berlin salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Dorothea von Courland (Hertz, 1988). But it was primarily in France that we would have the stirrings of feminist movements, albeit all inside the various, mostly small, socialist movements. Indeed, Abensour (1913, 222, 330) would explain the absence of significant success for French feminist demands between 1830 and 1848 (divorce, entry into the liberal professions, political rights) as the consequence of “their firm union with socialist doctrines.”

Most notably, feminists were linked to the Saint-Simonians and to the Fourierists. The Saint-Simonians placed a great emphasis on regeneration by love, therefore by women, and at first gave women a major role in their organizational structure (Thibert, 1926, 78). They founded many women's journals: La Femme Libre, the work of a working-class Saint-Simonian woman, Désirée Veril⁷⁷; the Tribune des Femmes in 1832, in which only articles by women were published (Moses, 1982, 251–257); La Gazette des Femmes, founded in 1836 by Jeanne Deroin, which sought to combine a Saint-Simonian spirit with democratic tendencies in general.⁷⁸

Thibert (1926, iii-iv) celebrates the “sentimental and idealistic” nature of Saint-Simonian feminism and speaks of “disinterested generosity.” Moses (1982, 265) makes a perhaps more sober evaluation of what took place. She notes how, as the women came to assert themselves, the Saint-Simonian men moved to curtail their powers in the organization. But, says Moses, “ironically, the result was liberating,” because in consequence “the Saint-Simonian women emancipated themselves from male tutelage” and created the first independent women's movement in history.

Fourier linked women's liberation to the “moral liberation” that was central to his socialism. But even more important, he argued that the moral and social freedom of women had as an “essential condition” women's economic independence, hence their “right to work” (Thibert, 1926, 99, 140). It is Fourier who is generally credited with having invented the term feminism (Perrot, 1988, 33),⁷⁹ but this is controversial.⁸⁰ In any case, it is better to be remembered as the inventor of the term than to be remembered, as is Proudhon (1846, 197, cited in McMillan, 1981b, 193), the leader of the other important early socialist movement (and one that would continue to be strong throughout the century), as the inventor of the formula “harlot or housewife” (courtisane ou ménagère), for which he was denounced immediately by Jeanne Deroin, and for which he has continued to be reproached ever since (Tixerant, 1908, 186).⁸¹

Flora Tristan, as we have already noted, made a valiant effort to insist that the struggle of women and that of the proletariat were a common cause, since both women and the proletariat occupied “an inferior station” in society (Puech, 1925, 337) and therefore the two struggles were “inseparable” (Albistur and Armogathe, 1977, 284). Indeed, she said, “the woman is the proletarian of the proletarian” (cited in Rebérioux, 1978a, xix; see also Dijkstra, 1992, 178; Portal, 1983, 95).

It seemed in the world-revolution of 1848 that such appeals might at last bear fruit. In 1848, feminism reasserted itself as part of the social revolution in France and elsewhere. In France, the demands were many. Pauline Roland tried to vote in the mayoralty election in Paris and was refused the right. Jeanne Deroin petitioned to stand for election to the National Assembly in 1849. The journal Voix des Femmes bore the subtitle Socialist and Political Journal, Organ of the Interest of All Women. Its editor, Eugénie Niboyet, even had the audacity to ask that the rooms of the Bibliothèque Nationale be open to women readers (Thibert, 1926, 313, 317–318, 327). But with the exception of a few tiny Communist groups, these demands were met by a “wave of puritanism” (Devance, 1976, 92). In 1850, Deroin, Roland, and others were imprisoned for having formed L'Association des Instituteurs, Institutrices et des Professeurs Socialistes, on the grounds that this was a “secret society with political goals” (Thibert, 1926, 332–334),

In the United States, the only expression of the world-revolution of 1848 was the Seneca Falls Convention, generally regarded as the founding moment of U.S. feminism. Its famous Declaration of Sentiments of July 19–20, 1848, echoing the Declaration of Independence, begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Among the grievances listed on August 18 was the fact that women were deprived of “the first right of a citizen, elective franchise,” a franchise that was given (this complaint foreshadowing future conflicts) to “ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners” (Rossi, 1973, 416).

In Europe, the repression was severe. The June Days in France resulted in the “rejection of even limited acceptance of social change” (Thompson, 1996, 399), undoing the more liberal ambiance of the July Monarchy. The feminist press would be closed (Adler, 1979, 175). And on July 26, 1848, a decree assimilated the status of women to minors, forbidding them even to attend meetings of a political club (Tixerant, 1908, 63). In Italy, the initial sympathy for women's causes in the Provisional Government (February 25-May 4) was negated by the discriminatory measures of the Constituent Assembly (May 4–28), followed by a legislature in which there could no longer be any “illusion of improvements in the status of women” (Anteghini, 1988, 57). The German feminists, linked to the liberals, “fell victim to the repression that followed the 1848 revolution” (Hackett, 1972, 362).

The net result of 1848 was thus not merely a repression of the socialists but of the feminists as well. This did not, however, draw them together. Rather, the two “pariahs” would now, for the most part, go on their separate organizational ways. What had happened in the first half of the nineteenth century is summarized thus by O'Neill (1969, 17):

The gap between women's narrowed sphere and men's expanding one appears to have reached its greatest extent at a time when liberal and libertarian ideas were in ascendance. In both England and America the exclusion became more obvious as the suffrage was broadened, and more difficult to defend.

Of course, this was equally true of continental Europe. It is this difficult-to-defend gap⁸² that would be the focus of the feminist/women's movements from this point forward.

The housewife had now become the dominant cultural image of the role the woman was supposed to play in the modern world. The woman had lost whatever element had existed in prior epochs of being an “appreciated collaborator in the economic sphere” (Ortega, 1988, 13). Of course, emphasis should be put upon the word appreciated, for most women did not cease to “collaborate” in the economic sphere. As Hall (1992c, 68) notes, “the bourgeoisie made their wives into ladies in a position of dependence economically and subordination ideologically and then used lower-middle-class and working-class women to service their households and produce their textiles.”⁸³

In the nineteenth century, the distinction between public and private spheres of life became central to the geoculture. It was being hailed as one of the great advances of modernity, and was the logical consequence of the demand for rationality, in which “good social organization” seemed to require “a stricter definition of spaces, roles and tasks” (Perrot, 1988, 35), which in turn “served as a justification for the assignment of personal characteristics and social roles to males and females” (Allen, 1991, 29).⁸⁴ This has been called the “gendering of the public sphere,” and Landes (1988, 2) notes the difference between this nineteenth-century cultural definition and that of the ancien régime, in which, “because rights were not universal, women's exclusion from formal channels of power was not deemed to be particularly exceptional.”⁸⁵ Precisely the point: rights were now supposed to be universal, as the feminists kept insisting. In 1876, Hedwig Dohn, a German feminist, proclaimed: “Human rights [Menschenrechte] have no sex” (cited in Clemens, 1988, 1).

However, feminist movements were from the beginning caught in the conceptual dilemma that had been created for them. On the one hand, they were heirs to the universalist, and individualist, tradition enshrined in the French Revolution. But when they asked for their full rights as active citizens, they found these refused on grounds of their difference from men in some important ways.⁸⁶ On the other hand, when they decided alternatively to seek “equality in difference,” a concept adumbrated by Ernest Legouvé, a French mid-nineteenth-century feminist,⁸⁷they were doubtlessly seeking “a way to expand liberalism and to negotiate the patriarchal political world which liberalism accepted” (Caine, 1992, 53). They were also fitting in with the “new scientific representation of the body” that saw male and female bodies “as a series of binary oppositions” that were incommensurable (Poovey, 1988, 6). But in doing this, they were inevitably acceding to their role as passive citizens, accepting, if you will, the role men had assigned themselves of “benevolent patriarchs” (Offen, 1983, 257).

Navigating the channel between Scylla and Charybdis has never been easy, and it has rarely been done successfully. Viewing this from a distance, one can come to some unusual conclusions. Yvonne Turin (1989, 359) suggests that perhaps we should think of nuns as the true women's liberation movement of the nineteenth century:

They were the first students of medicine, of pharmacy, the first heads of enterprises, the first strikers, too….Totally foreign to theorizing, whether feminist or not, they made their presence felt by their daily practice, by fulfilling what they called their vocation, which pushed them to assume responsibilities, but also to get their initiatives adopted by the Church and civil society. The Church was the only structure that offered them a sphere of liberty large enough for their activities….Before acting, today's feminist asks herself if men also do what she is asked to do. If the answer is yes, she agrees. If no, she refuses. She knows how to copy, to repeat, to conform, and kills female inventiveness. The nun of the nineteenth century, a woman to the tip of her toes, invented all over the place.

And in an orthogonal but strangely complementary argument, at the other end of the cultural divide, see how Rubin (1975, 185) analyzes (and criticizes) psychoanalysis:

[Psychoanalysis] is a theory of sexuality in human society. Most importantly, psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed, of how bisexual androgynous infants are transformed into boys and girls. Psychoanalysis is a feminist theory manqué.

But neither Turin's sense of how to navigate the rapids nor Rubin's sense of how to understand how the rapids became so dangerous in the first place was central to the ways in which feminists thought about and organized themselves after 1848 and up to the late twentieth century. Feminism had to make its way in a world in which sexism was not merely legitimate but openly and aggressively argued and therefore had an impact on any and all potential allies. Rebérioux (1978b, 154) speaks of “the force of ‘cultural’ antifeminism common to all European societies in the nineteenth century and shared as well by the socialists: the [socialist] parties could function as the anti-State, but not as the anti-Society.”

Neither the scholars nor the political commentators nor the political leaders were of much help. In England, Herbert Spencer's early support for feminism (derived from his individualist ideas) was transformed into antifeminism by his discovery of the principle of Darwinian selection (Paxton 1991). Michelet's La Femme (1981 [1859], 49) includes an incredibly sexist dialogue of two men about the limitations of women, who are “brought up to hate and disdain what all Frenchmen love and in which they believe”—that is, secular values, science, the Revolution of 1789. McMillan (1981a, 362–363) points out that Michelet, Proudhon, and Jules Simon—all staunch anticlericals—in fact shared the conventional views of the Church on the role of women in the home. As for the forces of the right, they made feminism into one more example of the degeneration of values, and connected their views to nationalist themes.⁸⁸ And in Italy in 1893, Lombroso and Ferrero published a book, La donna delinquente, la prostituta, la donna normale, that talked of the intellectual inferiority of women, their innate tendency to lie, and their genetic potential for deviance.⁸⁹

Rendall (1985, 321) notes that “by 1860, the common language within which, in [the United States, France, and England], the question of women's political rights was discussed […] was still the language of republicanism and citizenship”⁹⁰—and of course not only in those three countries.⁹¹ The search for political integration into the states became virtually the only political issue of a movement that had an “overwhelmingly middle-class composition” (Evans, 1977, 34). How does one demand to be an active citizen? The answer seemed simple enough: organize, ask that laws be changed, lobby for these changes. And that is what feminists did. And if one asked why it was important to become a citizen? The answer would be parallel to the two-stage theory of Marxism: first the vote, then everything else.⁹²

The question was how to get the vote. It required organization—organization as women.⁹³ The French feminists gave names to the two possible alternative tactics. They called them the “politics of the breach” (associated with Maria Desraines) and the “politics of the assault” (associated with Hubertine Auclert). The issue was whether priority should given to achieving civil emancipation or political emancipation (Bidelman, 1982, chaps. 3, 4). As a debate about tactics, this was not too diQ erent from the reformist-revolutionary debate among the German Social-Democrats. In general, the politics of the breach was dominant. “Almost everywhere, the radicals (i.e. above all those who demanded feminine suffrage) were a minority, often strongly opposed by the ‘moderate’ majority of feminists” (Evans, 1977, 37).

The usual explanation of the moderation of feminist movements is the fact that they were dominated by middle-class women with bourgeois values. “Bourgeois mentalités predisposed them to gradual, lawful solutions” (Hause and Kenney, 1981, 783).⁹⁴ But some feminists did move on to more radical tactics. Evans (1977, 189–190) credits the example of the socialist movements and the emergence of social-democratic women's movements for inspiring those who came to be called “militant” feminists by their “aggressive tactics and intensive propaganda methods….Mass demonstrations in the streets, banners and placards, slogans and colours, and the hard-hitting aggressive approach to opponents were all tactics pioneered by the socialist movement.”

The aggressive tactics took hold particularly in Great Britain and the United States. “The [British] suffragettes smashed the image of woman as a passive, dependent creature as effectively as they smashed the plate-glass windows of Regent Street” (Rover, 1967, 20). Chafetz and Dworkin (1986, 112) argue that it was precisely this militancy and “narrowing the issue to suffrage” that enabled the U.S. [and British] movements to achieve a “mass following.” If this didn't happen in France, Moses (1984, 230) says, it was not because the French movement “burned itself out” but rather because “repressive governments repeatedly burned feminism.”

The feminists who led the struggle for suffrage were faced with groups of organized women who placed other objectives ahead of suffrage, either as a goal or as a priority. The suffragists saw these other movements as essentially less militant, more socially conservative. But some invert the analysis:

Far from radicalizing the women's movement,…the emergence of the Suffragist Movement led to a contraction of its aims and an emphasis on pragmatism and moderation which considerably narrowed the scope of the movement….The dominating role of the suffragists led to an almost exclusive concern with an issue of direct importance only to some middle-class women, in place of the concern with the problems of all women evident in the Contagious Diseases Agitation and some of the earlier work in regard to marriage laws and employment. (Caine, 1982b, 549–550)⁹⁵

The argument was not simply suffrage versus other priorities. The fundamental issue was whether, when women entered the public sphere, they were entering it in order to demand genderless individuality (equality before the law in all matters, equality in the market, equality in education and any other cultural arena) or in order to ensure the recognition of women's particular virtues and talents (and to insist that these should not be confined to a “private” sphere). This debate within the feminist/women's movement informed the nineteenth-century movements and has not ceased to this day.⁹⁶

It is important to be aware that the social feminists were in fact as concerned with political questions (i.e., questions of the law) as were the political feminists who concentrated on suffrage. For the law impinged on women's rights and possibilities in countless ways. The illegalization (as opposed to the social disapproval) of abortion was an early nineteenth-century action (Rendall, 1985, 226). And its legalization has been a women's issue ever since (McLaren, 1978a; Evans, 1977. 108). So has birth control.⁹⁷ So was, especially in the United States, the issue of temperance, in which movement many suffragists participated.⁹⁸ And when German feminists argued for kindergarten education, it was in pursuit of their model of a liberal state, based on Rechtsstaat, “which required an active role for government not just in protecting individual freedoms but in positively encouraging a sense of community.” Kindergartens were thought to promote this goal “by stimulating the child's early instinct for self-activity” (Allen, 1991, 65).

All these attempts of women to control the elements of their femaleness met one obstacle, newly important in the nineteenth century: the rise of the medical doctor as the governing expert, based on the new scientificity of medicine.⁹⁹In general, these physicians “assumed that women and men were more different than alike and that the physiological differences between the sexes translated ‘naturally’ to different social roles” (Theriot, 1993, 19). The physician, in this more secular world, succeeded the clergyman as the “keeper of normalcy” in the sexual sphere (Mosse, 1985, 10).¹⁰⁰ In particular, the new concept of the “family physician” became a mode of “direct surveillance” within the home of approved behavior (Donzelot, 1977, 22, 46). It is no wonder that even conservative women sought to emerge into the public sphere, and thereby reacquire some personal autonomy.

Of course, in the shift from religious control to medical/scientific control of behavior, we shift from a concept of “natural” behavior, from which sinners may deviate but back to which repentant persons may return, to a concept of “physiologically essential behaviors” that can be dealt with by the scientist and to a degree “controlled” or “reformed” but not fundamentally changed. Foucault (1976, 59) shows how this works for sexuality: “The [seventeenth-century] sodomite was a relapsed person; the [nineteenth-century] homosexual is a species.” It is the difference, he argues, between a forbidden act (sodomy) and a person (a character) with a past, an infancy, a mode of life (the homosexual). And of course, once one reifies these behaviors into persons/characters, one can link one kind of deviance to another, since they are all rooted in biology. And those who could do this best were not biologists (very few in number) but physicians:

Medical men had enough training in basic science to be credible as scientific mediators between the mysteries of the clinic and the vexing problems of everyday life. Doctors were also well organized, thoroughly secular and political in their outlook, and fierce defenders of their professional and social prerogatives. (Nye, 1984, xi)¹⁰¹

Of course, the feminists were divided over what to emphasize in the public sphere. For some it was the “maternal metaphor” and the sense that “familial and maternal roles exert a positive influence on women's public and private behavior” (Allen, 1991, 1, 244). Some felt that the discourse on marriage and the family ended by confining women to a women's sphere, although very few advocated “free love.” Either way they intended to strike “at the roots of…patriarchy” (Basch, 1986, 36) and create more space for women.

The last important public arena in which women sought to play a specifically feminine role was geopolitics. Women formed peace movements, often insisting that it was because women, unlike men, abjured military traits, and because they were “maternal,” that they refused to see their sons die in pointless wars. Pacifism became a woman's specialty, with a special international organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which was formed in 1915 in the midst of the First World War to protest against the war.¹⁰²

The state action that women had the least ability to affect, because it was not a matter of legislation, was census categories. In late nineteenth-century Australia, married women were all categorized as dependents, “a political act carried out in the interests of working-class men for the purpose of labor-market closure” (Deacon, 1985, 46). Such a classification had become widespread: “By 1900, the notion that married women without paying jobs outside the home were ‘dependents’ had acquired the status of a scientific fact” (Folbre, 1991, 482). When social science concepts are legislated, they have an effect and gain a degree of legitimacy that carries great weight in the day-to-day functioning of the social system.

ETHNIC AND RACIAL MOVEMENTS

We have seen that the social/labor movements had great difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of the feminist/women's movements in their demands for the rights of active citizenship. In a similar manner, the feminist/women's movements had great difficulties in accepting the legitimacy of the ethnic/racial movements in the latter's demands for the rights of active citizenship. It was as though there weren't enough room on the ship to accommodate everyone. Or perhaps the better metaphor is an unwillingness to accept the idea of a one-class ship—citizens all, citizens equal. In the nineteenth century, this second organizational conflict was to be found primarily in the United States, where the oppression of the Blacks played such a central role in political tensions and therefore gave rise to Black social movements. The struggle for Irish rights in Great Britain posed a parallel issue, except that it included a demand for political separation that was largely absent in the case of the Blacks in the United States.

From the point of view of the dominant strata, the issue of women's rights and that of rights for Blacks (and indeed for other ethnic “minorities”) were not fundamentally different. Indeed, it often seemed that they fused the perceptions:

Republican gender ideology eased the development of a racialized citizenship. Gender ideology opposed manhood to womanhood, fastening manhood to productivity and independence and womanhood to servility and dependence….By assigning feminine traits to ethnic men, old-stock Americans not only neutered allegedly servile and dependent men but marked them as a peril to republican liberty as well….The flip side of dependent womanhood was virtuous motherhood; the flip side of dependent manhood was the germ of tyranny. (Mink, 1990, 96)

In the early nineteenth century, women were quite active in the abolitionist movements, especially in Great Britain and the United States. It was a period in which women's rights were deteriorating everywhere—in the case of the United States, “dramatically” (Berg, 1978, 11). It should be remembered that the first formal exclusion of women from the vote was in the British Reform Bill of 1832, which was intended to enfranchise some who did not have the franchise before. But in doing this, the bill specified “male persons,” a phrase that had never before been found in English legislation. This phrase “provided a focus of attack and a source of resentment,” (Rover, 1967, 3) out of which British feminism would grow.¹⁰³

Women turned quite pointedly to the concept of “natural rights,” which was the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in order to lay claim to their freedom. Abolitionism was also based on the concept of “natural rights,” and the abolitionist movement “served as a catalyst which transformed latent feminist sentiment into the beginnings of an organized movement” (Hersh, 1978, 1). Abolition, of course, involved the ending of slavery, and thus the entry into formal citizenship of those who had been slaves. But since, as we have seen, there were de facto two levels of citizens, the active and the passive, the immediate question was into which of the two categories the liberated slaves would be placed.

This was the kernel of the debate over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution following the end of the Civil War. President Lincoln had emancipated the slaves on January 1, 1863 (actually not quite all the slaves, but most of them). The Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, made slavery unconstitutional. The Fourteen Amendment, passed in 1868, declared that if the right to vote was denied in any states to citizens over twenty-one who were “male inhabitants” of that state, the basis of representation of that state would be reduced in Congress. And the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, declared that the right to vote shall not be abridged “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The feminists saw the Fourteenth Amendment as a “political setback” because for the first time the world male was included and thus for the first time women were “explicitly excluded from politics” (Ryan, 1992, 20). This was precisely parallel to what had happened with the British Reform Act of 1832. The franchise was enlarged, and in the process women were consciously and specifically excluded. The women, of course, argued that extending the suffrage should be done for all that were excluded, and at the same time. Wendell Phillips, one of the leaders of the U.S. abolitionist movement, had said in May 1865 that the demands of women's suffrage should not be pressed at the moment, for “this is the Negro's Hour.” This famous statement received a very strong and almost equally famous response from Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a letter to the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard on December 26, 1865:

The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were willing to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see “Sambo” walk into the kingdom first….

It is all very well for the privileged order to look down complacently and tell us, “this is the negro's hour; do not clog his way; do not embarrass the Republican party with any new issue; be generous and magnanimous; the negro once safe, the woman comes next.” Now, if our prayer involved a new set of measures, or a new train of thought, it would be cruel to tax “white male citizens” with even two simple questions at a time; but the disfranchised all make the same demand, and the same logic and justice that secures Suffrage to one class gives it to all.

The struggle of the last thirty years has not been on the black man as such, but on the broader ground of his humanity. (Gordon, 1997, 504–505)¹⁰⁴

The women suffragists did not stand by mute. They managed to get the New York State Constitution in 1867 to eliminate the word malealong with white, over the objections of Horace Greeley (O'Neill, 1971, 17). And in Kansas in 1867, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony supported the campaign of George Francis Train, a known racist, who, however, advocated women's suffrage.¹⁰⁵ In this struggle of the women with their long-time allies in the fight against slavery—the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, the former slaves—”the women were defeated in every encounter” (Griffith, 1984, 118).

Not all women leaders took the Stanton-Anthony position. Lucy Stone argued that “if the women could not win their political freedom, it was well that the Negro men could win theirs” (Kraditor, 1967, 3). The outcome was a profound split in the feminist movement. In 1869, Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, with more links henceforth to the Democratic Party. And Stone and Henry Ward Beecher formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, with more links to the Republican Party. The NWSA had the more social analysis, arguing that women's oppression was due to marriage and the sexual division of labor. The AWSA restricted itself to the central political issue of suffrage (Buechler, 1990, 50).¹⁰⁶

As the women's movement became more conservative on all social/labor issues in the second half of the nineteenth century, so did it on all ethnic/racial issues within countries (as in the United States)¹⁰⁷ or colonial issues (as in Great Britain).¹⁰⁸ In the course of this conservative shift, many feminists abandoned the “natural rights” argument. In the United States, they began to argue that women be given the vote “to balance the impact of the foreign born” (Berg, 1978, 269). When the NAWSA in 1903 came out for an “educational requirement” for the vote (to the notable but lonely dissent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman), they had shifted from campaigning to extend the franchise to a proposal “to take the vote away from some Americans—Negroes in the South and naturalized citizens in the North” (Kraditor, 1965, 137; see Flexner, 1975, 316).¹⁰⁹

To the antifeminist eugenicists, strong in both England and Germany, who argued against suffrage on the grounds that high fertility was essential for a superior race, some feminists felt it appropriate to respond that “unless women were granted their demands for a new social order their refusal to bear children would result in racial decline” (Rowbotham, 1974, 106).¹¹⁰ The so-called Ruffin incident in 1900 illustrated the dominant tone. At the Milwaukee meeting of the National Federation of Women's Clubs, the Women's Era Club was admitted as a new member. When Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin showed up as its representative, the Executive Committee realized that this was a club of Black women and revoked the decision. Mrs. Ruffin was told she could enter the convention as a delegate of the Massachusetts State Federation, a “White club” of which she was a member, but not as a representative of a “colored club.” The incident degenerated to the point of someone trying to snatch away her badge—unsuccessfully, since she resisted—but she then refused to attend (Moses, 1978, 107–108).¹¹¹

At the height of this tension, some suffragists resorted to crude racism. For example, they issued a poster of a “brutish-looking Negro porter sitting next to a refined-looking White lady” with a caption that read, “He can vote; why can't I?” Of course, this received the obvious reply from antisuffragist men that the presumed infusion of intelligent votes by granting the vote to White women would be undone by the granting at the same time of votes to Black women. And in 1910, in the Atlantic Monthly, one antisuffragist wrote: “We have suffered many things at the hands of Patrick; the New World would add Bridget also. And—graver danger—to the vote of that silly, amiable uneducated Negro, she would add (if logical) the vote of his sillier, baser female” (Kraditor, 1965, 31). It did not help that Blacks like Mrs. Booker T. Washington would plead for consideration on the grounds of the moral superiority of Blacks to immigrants.¹¹²

The First World War was in many ways a political turning point for feminist movements. In many countries, they had by then or at that time obtained the vote. And with that, the feminist/women's movements seemed to go into serious decline. One reason, of course, is that the process of mobilizing to obtain the vote had transformed the women's suffragist worldview from one that saw the suffrage “as a means of challenging traditions that were oppressive to a view that embraced many of those traditions and built on them to develop arguments for the vote” (Buechler, 1987, 78–79).¹¹³ Evans (1977, 227) notes that in the United States, Prohibition and women's suffrage were voted in at virtually the same time, and largely supported by the same people:

Both were associated with Populism and Progressivism. Both represented an attempt by middle class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to control the blacks, the immigrants and the big cities. They were a response to what was felt as a growing threat to the supremacy of American values. They achieved victory in the war not least because with the conflict against Germany and—to an immensely greater extent—the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the revolutions in Central Europe at the end of the war, the fear of the subversion of values by the Protestant middle classes reached panic proportions.

If citizenship—that is, active citizenship—was difficult to achieve for workers and women, it was even more difficult for persons of color (or other groups defined by some status-group characteristic and treated as somehow inferior). The intellectual justification for this had been building up since the beginning of the capitalist world-economy.¹¹⁴ But it was only in the nineteenth century that the theme of superior and inferior “races” was constantly elaborated and considered to be by Whites virtually self-evident. Above all, the previous theories of race all allowed for some possibility of movement—for example, via “conversion.”¹¹⁵ “Beginning in the nineteenth century,…implicitly or explicitly, there was a rupture in humanity; groups ‘are’ and no longer have a mobile status” (Guillaumin, 1972, 25).

The racial divide was made almost inevitable from the beginning by the forms in which class ideology evolved.¹¹⁶ When commoners asserted their rights to citizenship both in England and in France, one of the arguments they sometimes used was that the aristocrats were “strangers” and not of native origin. This was the theory of the Norman Yoke, put forward in England since the seventeenth century,¹¹⁷ and the theory of the distinction between the “race gauloise” and the “race franque” in France, which had been bruited for some time but became prominent during the French Revolution.¹¹⁸ A parallel argument emerged in Italy with Etruscomania (Poliakov, 1974, 65–66). But if the aristocrats were to be excluded from active citizenship on the grounds of their foreign origins, how much more obviously would persons of color be so excluded? Jus sanguinis as opposed to jus soli is by definition exclusionary and inevitably racist. Still, if there existed the theme of the racial superiority of commoners, there was of course an even stronger one of aristocratic “blue bloods” and their natural rights.¹¹⁹

If race became a theorized concept in the nineteenth century, and racism an institutionalized practice, it was the result primarily of the centrality of the concept of citizenship. For citizenship as a concept had two logical consequences: It led states to emphasize and to predicate and insist on homogeneity as the only sound basis on which to justify the theoretical equality of all citizens. And it led states to justify their political domination of other states on the grounds that their particular homogeneous quality incarnated a higher degree of civilization than that of the dominated state, equally homogeneous but inferior.

The organic quality of the nation is inherent in what we have come to call Jacobinism, the key concept of which is that there should exist no intermediary bodies between the state and the individual. All individuals being equal, they have no public (or state-relevant) qualities other than that of being a citizen. Groups, however formed, no matter what their basis, do not have legal or moral standing as such. Gilroy (2000, 63) calls the resulting nation “a violent, organic entity of a new type manifest above all in the working of the state.” This organic entity represented progress. Bourguet (1976, 812) analyzes how this may be noted in the Statistique des Préfets of the year IX (1800):

Progress was thus defined as the march toward a society ever more homogeneous, the triumph of man over nature, of the uniform over diversity.…The philosophy of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution forged this ideal of a rational society, from which the abnormal, the pathological, the different were to be excluded.

It would not be difficult or even illogical to transform the concept of organic qualities into different ones for each nation and, more generally, for a difference between the civilized (European) nations taken together and all the others. The slide from a created homogeneity to a culturo-genetic organic reality, which could not be easily changed, was not difficult, either. A good example is that of Gustave Le Bon, who, in his 1886 work on race psychology, defined the greatest danger to the organic nation as that of assimilation—of criminals, of women, of ethnic groups, of colonials (Nye, 1975, 49–50).¹²⁰ Thus did we go from an organic whole that legitimated the equality of all citizens to an organic reality that justified a hierarchy among those citizens. Once again, from citizens all to an active/ passive distinction. At which point, those excluded could demand inclusion. But they could also embrace the negatives, as angry riposte, rhetorical ploy, or organizer of identification.¹²¹

The nineteenth century was the apogee of Europe in the world. “[N]ever did white men of European descent dominate [the world] with less challenge” (Hobsbawm, 1975, 135).¹²² This was based on their military power, no doubt, but it was secured by their ideological constructs. “Europe had been ‘Europeanized’ by the construction of a unifying grid of civilization, against which all other cultures could be measured and classified” (Woolf, 1992, 89).¹²³ As the states sought to create homogeneous nations of citizens, they simultaneously sought to create a White (European) race, in the “crusade against the backward areas of the world” advocated by Saint-Simon (Manuel, 1956, 195).¹²⁴ And the crusade involved colonization: “The identification of colour with less than human became…an essential part of the process by which the French defined their role as colonizers” (Boulle, 1988, 245–246).¹²⁵ Of course, this was equally true within countries. Jordan (1968, xiii) notes that, in post-Revolutionary America, what the intellectuals did “was, in effect, to claim America as a white man's country.”

The concept of a racial hierarchy received the legitimation of science, itself the great cultural icon of the nineteenth century. Science did this by the “confusion of sociological reality and biological reality” (Guillaumin, 1972, 24),¹²⁶ egregious for avowed racists like Gobineau but evident in only milder form among centrist liberals.¹²⁷ In the mid-nineteenth century, “polygenism” enjoyed a vogue among anthropologists, despite the fact that it defied even biblical views. Or perhaps just the contrary: one of the reasons polygenism appealed was that it seemed more “scientific” than the book of Genesis.¹²⁸ Todorov (1989, 3) sees this “scientism” as somehow a betrayal of the Enlightenment's “basic principle, the triumph of freedom over determinism,” which he claims “refuses to subordinate what ought to be to what is.” But Cohen (1980, 210), it seems to me, is more correct in asserting that the Enlightenment thinkers left “unresolved” the debate on whether differences between “peoples” were environmental or biological in origin. The question remained unresolved in public debate until 1945, and perhaps, albeit more sotto voce, to this day.¹²⁹

One of the key scientific notions that contributed to this biological interpretation of social reality was the concept of the Aryan. It was originally and basically a linguistic concept—the discovery by nineteenth-century linguists of the links between a large series of languages: almost all of those that were spoken in Europe, in Persia, and some spoken in South Asia. Linguists call this family of languages Indo-European. In 1814, Ballanche suggested substituting the study of Sanskrit for the study of Latin. This was in fact to take the side of language as it was created by humans against language as revealed by God. Linguists like Schlegel and Grimm were discovering the incredible complexity of what had been thought of as “primitive” languages (Schwab, 1950, 190–191). During the nineteenth century, Aryan theory came to be “in the main current of scientific progress” (Poliakov, 1974, 327–328).

As the European powers moved into a more active imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, the racist ideas that had previously supported slavery were “dressed up in a new pseudo-scientific garb and given a popular mass appeal” (Davis, 1993, 73). The concept of the Aryan now became the justification of European domination of the non-European world. The concept of the Aryan then met up with the concept of the Oriental.

Gilroy (2000, 72) suggests that all this scientific and pseudoscientific theorizing added up to what he calls “raciology,” which he defines as the “variety of essentializing and reductionist ways of thinking [about race] that are both biological and cultural in character.” It is important to stress that the essentializing is just as pernicious if it is cultural as when it is biological.

Racist theorizing bred antiracist movements. But it must be admitted that such movements were in fact quite weak in the nineteenth century, much weaker than the social/labor movements and the feminist/women's movements. And in the end, they got even less support from the liberal center than did the other kinds of movements. In part, this may reflect the even greater strength of racist ideology than of ideologies of bourgeois or of male dominance. In part, it reflected the numerical weakness of those as the bottom of the racial hierarchy in Western countries. This was not true of the United States, but then the United States was the country where precisely racist ideology was most deeply rooted, because it was the country first of slavery and later of Jim Crow.

The difficulty of the centrist liberals in confronting racism was their acceptance, fundamentally, of the active/passive distinction, which they framed as the difference between the inherent potential of all humans to be civilized (hence active citizens) and the current level of those who had not yet achieved their potential (hence passive citizens). They assumed that those with potential would take “generations—even centuries—to catch up, even given the most careful, paternalistic attention from benevolent Anglo-Saxons” (Bederman, 1995, 123).¹³⁰ This could be seen in the equivocation of Frances Willard, head of the U.S. temperance movement, on issues of racial equality within her own organization, and the strained public disputes she had with Ida B. Wells, Black woman leader, when both of them conducted speaking tours in Great Britain (Ware, 1992, 198–221). This could be seen in the choices made by workers’ and nationalist movements regarding how boldly they would be willing to be antiracist.¹³¹

It was extremely rare to hear the kind of statement that Eugene V. Debs (1903, 255, 259), the American socialist leader, made:

The whole world is under obligation to the negro, and that the whole heel is upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized. The history of the negro in the United States is a history of crime without parallel….We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.”

What is more pertinent is to remember that the nineteenth century was “an age of synthesis.” And that if Marx synthesized economics and Darwin biology, it was Gobineau who synthesized racism, with at least as much effect (Cohen, 1980, 217).

The racist binary split that was theorized was intertwined with the binary splits of sexuality. As Bederman (1995, 50) says, “ ‘[T]he white man’ represented ‘civilization’ as a single human being defined equally by his whiteness and his manliness.” It seemed always important to connect racial differences and ranking with differences in sexuality. This was logical insofar as one was making a biological case for hierarchy. Mosse (1985, 133–134) notes how, from the beginnings of a racist discourse, “the description of blacks included their supposed inability to control their sexual passions.”¹³² To regard the male racial inferior as someone who cannot control his sexual impulses served also to reinforce the man-woman binary distinction. Not only did it give a further excuse to the White male to act as the protector of the White female, but it also allowed the White male to treat the Black male as he would treat a female.¹³³ And should the White male somehow falter, he would then be taxed with “neurasthenia,” which was seen as a “bodily weakness” that needed to be cured.¹³⁴

Sexuality was in turn linked to nationalism. The prevailing nineteenth-century concept of bourgeois “respectability” spread to all classes via nationalism, which “hardly wavered in its advocacy of respectability.” But at the same time, to be “abnormal” was to be not respectable. Enter the physician as “the keeper of normalcy” (Mosse, 1985, 9–10). The full circle of binary constraints thus englobed class, gender, race, and sexuality—all mechanisms of limiting the pervasiveness of citizenship. Nationalism required giving precedence to those who would, who could be active citizens.

Difference and inequalities of persons of different social origins—orders (Stände, Estates), class, gender, race, and education—were not invented in the nineteenth century. They had long existed and had been considered natural, inevitable, and indeed desirable. What was new in the nineteenth century was the rhetorical legitimacy of equality and the concept of citizenship as the basis of collective governance, as the centerpiece of centrist liberal ideology. This led, as we have seen, to the theorizing of the binary distinctions, the attempt to freeze them logically, to make de facto transiting across the boundaries not merely against the rules of society but against the rules of science. What was new as well were the social organizations created by all those excluded by these binary reifications in order to secure their liberation, or at least a partial liberation, from the legal constraints. Each success of a particular group seemed to make easier by example and more difficult in practice the attempts of the next claimants of liberation. Citizenship always excluded as much as it included.

The nineteenth century saw the creation of our entire contemporary conceptual apparatus of identities. Once rule was no longer an apparatus guaranteed by heritage—a system whose legitimacy, if not whose reality, the French Revolution had definitively undone—identities were required to delineate who had and who didn't have the right to power and wealth. The identities of the powerful were the most urgent. They were, however, relational—that is, they identified not only who they were but who they were not. In creating their own identities, the powerful thereby created the identities of the others.

The concept of the bourgeois preceded and provoked the concept of the proletarian/worker. The concept of the White preceded and provoked the concept of the Black/Oriental/non-White. The concept of the masculine male preceded and provoked the concept of the feminine female. The concept of the citizen preceded and provoked the concept of the alien/immigrant. The concept of the specialist preceded and provoked the concept of the masses. The concept of the West preceded and provoked the concept of the “rest.”

Concepts preceded and provoked organizations. But organizations institutionalized concepts. And it was organizations/institutions that guaranteed heritage for some and an oppositional role for others. Of course, all these categories were ancient, but they had not been previously defining concepts of one's identity in the modern world. Before the nineteenth century, identities were still a matter of “orders” (Stände), and persons were defined by their family, their community, their church, their station in life. The new categories were the mark of the new geoculture of the modern world-system, informed and dominated by the ideology of centrist liberalism, which came in the course of the nineteenth century to dominate mentalities and structures.

Liberalism as Social Science

The values liberals hold dear are absolute not relative values….Where recognized, the liberal order of justice is eternal, immutable and universal.

—D. J. MANNING (1976, 79)

I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present or nothing but the past.

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1926, 16)

[W]e tend to overstrain a new principle of explanation.

—FREDERICK A. VON HAYEK (1952, 209, N. 9)

The century stretching from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War has been called the Age of Steam, the Age of Nationalism—and the Age of the Bourgeoisie. Defensible names all, but it might well be called, too, the Age of Advice.

—PETER GAY (1993, 491)

The French Revolution, as we have been arguing, had enormous consequences for the realities of the capitalist world-economy. It led to the construction of the three modern ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—and then to the triumph of centrist liberalism as the basis of the world-system's geoculture. It led to the construction of the liberal state in the core zones of the world-economy. It led to the emergence of the antisystemic movements and then to their containment. And it led to the creation of a whole new knowledge sector: the historical social sciences. Hayek sums up (1941, 14) the impact of the French Revolution on our knowledge systems thus:

In the first place, the very collapse of the existing institutions called for immediate application of all knowledge which appeared to us as the concrete manifestation of that Reason which was the Goddess of the Revolution.

In this field, too, centrist liberalism would come to be triumphant. It is the story of this other pillar of the nineteenth-century world-system (one that lasted indeed for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century as well) that we wish to tell now in order to complete the picture of this triumph of liberalism in the nineteenth century.

The real social world changed remarkably during the nineteenth century. But the ways in which we perceived, analyzed, and categorized the world changed even more. To the extent that we do not take cognizance of the latter, we exaggerate the former. What had changed most in the real social world was the wide acceptance of the twin doctrines that were consecrated by the French Revolution—the normality of change, and the sovereignty of the people. For those who were immersed in the politics of the world-system, it now became urgent to understand what generated normal change in order to be able to limit the impact of popular preferences on the structures of the social system. This is the task for which the historical social sciences and its new conceptual language were invented.¹

To be sure, social analysis and social theorizing were ancient activities, and eighteenth-century Europe in particular was the locus of important theoretical debates that we might find useful to read still today, were we to read them. However, this prior tradition of social analysis was not what we call today social science. The social science that was invented in the nineteenth century is the systematized, organized, and, yes, bureaucratized research on how our social systems operate, and in particular on how the modern world-system operates. This “social science” was conceived of as a knowledge activity that was to be distinguished from, and somehow situated between, “humanities” or “letters” on the one hand and “natural science” on the other (Lepenies, 1989).

THE INVENTION OF THE “TWO CULTURES“

The period between 1789 and 1848 was one of great confusion, in terms of both the content of the emerging ideologies and the content and structure of the emerging knowledge systems. Neither the terms to be used nor the boundary lines to be drawn, nor even the number of basic categories (the key question being whether there were two or three) had yet been clearly decided, and certainly these were not yet in any way institutionalized. At that time, these political and intellectual battles took place for the most part in a geographically very restricted arena: primarily in Great Britain and France, and secondarily in the Germanies. the Italies, and the United States.

Social science did not emerge solely in the shadow of the political consequences for the world-system of the French Revolution. It also emerged in the context of a several-century-long transformation of the knowledge systems that had led, was leading, to a consecration of a concept that we would later call the “two cultures“—a term popularized much later by C. P. Snow's famous 1959 Rede lectures at Cambridge (1965).

Once upon a time, in Europe as elsewhere, there was only one knowledge culture—the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful. It was not divided into differing and opposed epistemologies. Rather, there was a continual struggle as to who would control this single knowledge culture. In medieval Europe, the Church laid claim to being the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. It claimed a privileged access to God's truth. In a sense, all knowledge in its view was theological. When Europe rediscovered, primarily via the Arabo-Muslim world, the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, the Church sought to absorb it as part of theological knowledge, as for example by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The creation of the modern world-system was accompanied by a long effort of nontheologians, who called themselves philosophers, to liberate themselves from the heavy hand of the Church. They argued in self-justification that human beings could acquire knowledge through the direct use of their intellects without passing through the straitjacket of revealed knowledge that had a special institutionalized guild of interpreters—the theologians. The philosophers argued that there were, as the Church had said, natural laws—of truth, goodness, and beauty. The philosophers insisted that they could perceive these natural laws as well as (if not better than) anyone else. Gradually, between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophers were able to push the theologians aside and gain equality, even primacy, of place as the purveyors of knowledge.

Among the more practical persons involved in the economic and political institutions of the modern world-system, it was not clear that the philosophers offered much greater help than the theologians. Their work seemed too abstract, with too little immediate practical consequence. The universities, which had originally been the bailiwick of the theologians, were sorely weakened by the struggle of the philosophers and the theologians, and receded as a locus of the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Other institutions, like the Collège de France and the Royal Society in Great Britain, emerged as substitutes.

By 1750, there was great confusion and uncertainty about where and how knowledge could be constructed. There was even greater confusion about the names that could describe knowledge categories. There were a large number of terms that described phenomena we today call social science, and they were used indifferently and almost interchangeably.²

The natural scientists now began to assert that the search for truth could not depend on the proclamations of either theologians or philosophers but had to be located in the concrete world of empirical observations. Such observations, they argued, could lead to hypotheses that could be verified by other natural scientists and offered as tentative laws, which could then be applied to the solution of practical problems.³Although the natural scientists still suffered from lower prestige as of 1800,⁴ their arguments nonetheless began to persuade more and more people. Turner (1974, 2:524) argues that, by 1820, wissenschaftlich had become “the supreme scholarly accolade” in Germany.⁵

There was, to be sure, resistance to the rising prestige of science. Bonald had already in 1807 noted unhappily in Des sciences, des lettres et des arts that this was happening. As Lepenies (1989, 9) notes, he saw “in the widening divorce between science and literature a sign of modernity and thus a symptom of decadence.”⁶Carlyle, on the other hand, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1829, seemed far more sanguine about what was happening. He noted that

metaphysics and moral sciences are falling into decay, while the physical are engrossing every day more respect and attention….[W]hat cannot be investigated and understood mechanically cannot be investigated and understood at all. (Cited in Ross, 1962, 69–70)

In a certain sense, the organizational objective of the natural scientists (the word did not yet exist) was to secede from the combined blur of knowledge activity and create a haven for certain kinds of activity from which others were to be excluded. The natural sciences presented themselves as the sole guardian of the search for truth. They were to be distinguished from letters or philosophy, which was, in the view of the natural scientists, something quite different from the activity in which they were engaged. To succeed in this intellectual “divorce,” the natural scientists needed a secure institutional base. They began to ensconce themselves in the universities and to create organizational niches in newly created faculties of natural science.

Once the natural scientists went down this path, the “humanists” felt impelled to respond defensively, by seeking to establish similar organizational niches (Lee and Wallerstein, 2004, esp. chaps. 1–3). In this way, the university began to revive as a locus both of the production and of the reproduction of knowledge systems. But it was a different kind of university than its putative ancestor, the medieval university. By the eighteenth century, the university had descended to being a site, perhaps primarily a site, of “brawling students” (Ziolkowski, 1990, 220–236). In the nineteenth century, it would be transformed into a professionalized university quite different from the medieval university. Scholars earned their basic income within it, and received full-time appointments in what were beginning to be the units of organization we would come to call departments and which presumably were based on distinctions between disciplines. In these departments, the students were now full-time as well and pursuing serious study.⁷

Such a structure took a while to construct. It would not be easy. Oxford adopted new statutes in 1800 and 1817, creating honors both in Literae Humaniores (classical studies, history, languages) and in science and mathematics (Engel, 1974, 1:307). The distinction between faculties of letters and of science dates from 1808 in France (Aulard, 1911). Nonetheless, as late as 1831, Sir William Hamilton still believed it necessary to write an article, “Universities of England—Oxford,” in the Edinburgh Review (53, June, 384–427) in which he called upon the university to realize that “education had to be conducted by professionals who taught one subject they knew well, rather than by college tutors each of whom had to teach all subjects, though not qualified to teach any particular subject in depth” (cited in Engel, 1974, 313). The scholars were now beginning to find their appropriate and different places within the universities. The economic base for scholars now became double—university appointments and royalties from books, the latter more important for the humanists than for the natural scientists.⁸

The epistemological difference and quarrel between “science” and the “humanities” was being institutionalized. Science was being defined as an activity empirical in method, in search of general laws in objective, and consequently as quantitative as possible in description. The humanities were being defined as hermeneutic in method, considering general laws to be reductionist illusions, and consequently qualitative in description. Later, we would come to call this the difference between a nomothetic and an idiographic epistemology. Furthermore, it was more than a simple difference between epistemologies. Each side tended to consider the other side as engaged in activities that were intellectually dubious, if not useless and even harmful.⁹

In 1859, as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Prince Albert asserted:

The domain of the inductive sciences…is the domain of facts….We thus gain a roadway, a ladder by which even a child may, almost without knowing it, ascend to the summit of truth. (Cited in Benson, 1985, 299)

To which John Henry Newman responded by saying that science simply “brings us phenomena….We have to take its facts, and give them a meaning” (cited in Benson, 1985, 300). And Matthew Arnold further specified: “The humanist's task was to put what is ‘only' knowledge into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty.” (cited in Benson, 1985, 301).

Romanticism as a movement emerged in large part as a response to the increasing scorn by the natural sciences of all that was literary and metaphysical. As Dale argues (1989, 5):

The essential intellectual history of the nineteenth century may fairly be described as a search [by the humanists] for an adequate replacement for the lost Christian totality, an effort to resurrect a saving belief, as Carlyle poignantly put it, on the ashes of the French Revolution….[Romanticism remade] Christianity for the modern world, secularizing it as a metaphysical idea of social and individual wholeness.¹⁰

It is in this context that the need for a coherent understanding of social reality, the source of ordinary change, led to the construction of the social sciences—in effect, to new kinds of disciplines.¹¹ The natural scientists and the humanists both laid claim to controlling this emergent arena of knowledge. The scientists argued that the rules of scientific method applied to human activity just as they applied to physical or biological activity, because the rules of scientific analysis were universal. The humanists argued, against this, that humans, unlike the subjects of the enquiries of natural scientists, were conscious actors affecting their own destiny and that therefore any analysis of their activities could not be subjected to the mechanical use of lawlike generalizations.

Which path would the social sciences take? The general answer is that the practitioners of what would be constructed as the social sciences were profoundly split over this question, and remain so to a considerable extent to this day. Some social scientists would opt for a scientistic path, others would opt for a humanistic path, while still others attempted to wiggle in between.¹² Whole disciplines made collective choices, but in addition there were individual choices being made within the organizational framework of each discipline. To appreciate this, we must look successively at (1) the degree to which social science was explicitly linked to social reformism and (2) the efforts to “professionalize” social science, which was linked to the debates about the nature of objectivity and the merits of value neutrality. Then we shall be better able to appreciate how and why what we have come to denote as the separate disciplines of the social sciences came into institutional existence.

SOCIAL SCIENCE AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT

In the wake of the French Revolution, its promises, and its perceived failings, science in general—and later, social science in particular—came to be seen as an alternative path to human betterment. Knight summarizes (1984, 3) this view succinctly:

It was not political revolution but scientific development which would bring prosperity and reduce misery. This would happen both through science being applied to what were previously activities done by rule of thumb, traditional routines; and also by the general adoption of “scientific” ways of thinking. This was the programme of the Age of Science; an age of innocence and of faith.

It was in this context of innocence and faith that social science began its life in the nineteenth century—not as a set of university disciplines (nor even as a single one) but rather as a social movement, which in the words of L. L. and Jessie Bernard (1943, 33)

was much more epochal than anything specific it may have accomplished. For it represented the transition from a theologically oriented society to a scientifically minded one. Social Science [in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century]…was not a generic term for all the social sciences; it was the religion of a society in the throes of industrialization, just as theology had been the religion of the old feudal world.

And because it was a social movement, its initial expression was not within the universities but within structures that were called social science associations, the most important of which emerged first in Great Britain and the United States, and later in Germany. These associations were “the product of the urge to understand and correct the social evils of the times…, the child of the urge for social reform (Bernard and Bernard, 1943, 25–26). When later the social sciences became institutionalized within the university structures, they would not lose this focus.¹³

In Great Britain, the earliest of these associations were statistical associations. Those who founded the Manchester Statistical Association were “united by common social ideology, [in particular] a commitment to social reform” (Elesh, 1972, 33). The two principal subjects on which they collected data were public health and education. It was “urbanization which dominated the minds of the statisticians” (Cullen, 1975, 135). Amid the political turmoil of 1832, William Jacob, then Comptroller of Corn Returns for the Board of Trade, called for the creation of a statistical department, giving as his argument that

the best mode of allaying disquietude and of diffusing contentment on the subject of public affairs is an open and clear disclosure of their condition and management.…A more general diffusion of accurate knowledge regarding the state of public affairs would tend to check that excitement and party spirit which has often been created by misrepresentation or exaggeration, and has produced an annoyance to the government, and at least a temporary disaffection of the public mind. (Cited in Cullen, 1975, 20)

Jacob was not alone. Abrams suggests (1968, 38) that “in the 1830s the fear that poverty was the father of sansculottism was a powerful motive to social research.”

In 1856 the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science—otherwise known as the Social Science Association (SSA)—was founded specifically to aid legislation.¹⁴ Rodgers (1952) calls the combination of social reformers, social workers, lawyers, educationalists, economists, doctors, and businessmen who made up its members “an inchoate body” (p. 283), but one that “was pretty confident that everything could be accomplished by Acts of Parliament” (p. 289). Goldman sees the association as less incoherent than that: “[B]ehind its rhetoric of neutrality, its cultivation of a bi-partisan image, the Social Science Association was an essentially Liberal Forum” (1986, 101).¹⁵

There were parallel developments in the United States. As the Civil War ended in 1865, the American Social Science Association (ASSA) was founded, “sponsored by genteel New England intellectuals […] who wanted to understand and improve their rapidly changing society” (Haskell, 1977, vi). But at the same time, in addition to this reform sentiment, Haskell sees the ASSA as involved in

a Tocquevillean impulse to defend authority, to erect institutional barriers against the corrosive consequences of unlimited competition in ideas and moral values in an interdependent mass society. (1977, 63)

He calls this a “movement of conservative reform“—what I have been calling centrist liberalism.

Indeed, Edwin Godkin, who in 1865 founded the quintessential left-liberal magazine in the United States, The Nation, was at the same time one of the principal creators of the ASSA in 1869. He wrote of the founding meeting that the ASSA would

render society a great service if it simply helps to rouse the public into a perception of the fact that there is no subject of greater intricacy, and of greater importance, than the proper adjustment of the relations of men in society; and that with regard to it as with all other subjects, men who have made it a special study are better worth listening to than men who have not. (Nation, November 4, 1869, p. 381; cited in Goldman, 1998, 22)

While the social science reform movement was perhaps strongest in Great Britain and the United States, the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales was created at a meeting in Brussels in 1862, with delegates coming from Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States (Villard, 1869), but it survived only until 1866 (Goldman, 1987).¹⁶

It was only some time after the unification of Germany, in 1890, that a similar social science movement developed in Germany. It was called the Verein für Sozialpolitik. The Germans were more open about their objectives. Its name spoke not of social science but of social policy. Like the others, it brought together scholars and businessmen, civil servants, and free professionals (Lindenaub, 1967, 6). As Krüger (1987, 71) notes:

The Verein was the manifest link between the dominant socio-scientific paradigm and socio-political conviction. Since the 1870s, the Historical School had emerged as the leading tendency in German political economy….It was accompanied by the prevailing opinion among scholars and the cultured bourgeoisie that the outmoded institutional system should be amended in favour of an improvement in the situation of the working classes. Academic knowledge and socio-political convictions thereby legitimated and stimulated each other….[T]he Verein was a “combat patrol of social reforms,” that is, a platform for cultured bourgeois commitment to social reforms.¹⁷

The question was, What kind of reforms? On the one hand, “entrepreneurial circles sometimes put the Verein für Sozialpolitik and Social-Democracy in the same category, insofar as they were both accused of being too friendly to the working classes” (Plessen 1975, 59). Indeed, hostile critics accused the academics of the Verein of being Katheder-Sozialisten, or professorial socialists (Dorfman, 1955b, 18).

But that's just the point. They were Katheder-Sozialisten, not revolutionaries. Although the social reform movement began life in intellectual opposition to what was called the “Manchesterism” of the “Berlin economists” of the period 1820–1850, with their emphasis on the virtues of free trade (Lindenlaub, 1967, 2), the movement was also opposed to Marxist Social-Democracy.¹⁸ Their essential analysis was very centrist:

The founding generation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik believed that the reactionary social attitude of the economic liberal circles and the social-revolutionary commitment of the Socialists aggravated social tensions and had to lead to the class struggle and revolution. They thought that only through social reforms could one stabilize the shaky social order. (Lindenlaub, 1967, 4)¹⁹

Plessen points to the congruence of the sociopolitical program of the Verein and Bismarck's program of social legislation. He goes further, arguing that “Bismarck's path breaking legislation would not have been possible were it not for the work of the Verein für Sozialpolitik” (1975, 127).

PROFESSIONALIZATION AND VALUE NEUTRALITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

Despite what might be considered to have been the manifest success of social science as a movement for social reform that was an incarnation of centrist liberalism, the academic half of the combination of academics and middle-class nonacademic reformers grew increasingly uncomfortable about the role that they were playing. The academics sought a more autonomous and a more distinctive role in the social order. This required breaking away from the social science associations and creating professional, exclusively academic structures.

The academics would now reject the claim of the dilettante to pretend to scholarly knowledge, which had been so widely recognized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Torstendahl, 1993, 115) and was still being legitimated in the nineteenth century within the framework of the social science associations. Instead, the professionalization of academics was advocated as

a means of establishing authority so securely that the truth and its proponents might win the deference even of a mass public, one that threatened to withhold deference from all men, all traditions, even the highest values. (Haskell, 1977, 65)

But authority to do what? Dale reminds us (1989, 14) that all the early social science positivists (such as Comte, Mill, and Spencer) felt that “social science theory was meant, in the end, to lead to the regeneration of social order. This, to be sure, is a political objective.” One should not miss the antiegalitarian thrust that was the basis of this new tendency. Professionalization was directed against both the pretensions of popular culture and the narrow perspectives of profit-oriented busi-nessmen.²⁰ This double objective could be accomplished by installing in authority what Haskell calls “the community of the competent.”²¹

The authority of professional competence required a new “social organization of science” (Wittrock, 1993, 318). This was the research university, a structure that permitted the university to resume its central role in the production, and not merely the reproduction, of knowledge. The rise of the research university was “intimately linked to…the rise of the modern nation-state,” as a result of which the universities were given “much greater resources than had previously been the case” (Wittrock, 1993, 305, 344).

This did not necessarily mean the abandonment of centrist social reform as an objective, but rather putting its implementation more solidly in the hands of experts.²² This meant that direct advocacy was no longer safe, since the academics lacked the cover of prominent nonacademic figures. What was necessary was rather to cloak reform objectives in the garments of “objective” knowledge, knowledge that only the scientific experts were capable of establishing and offering to the public.²³

The trick was to be political without appearing to be political. Furness notes that in the United States in the 1880s, both Herbert Baxter Adams and John Bates Clark believed that unregulated industrial capitalism caused injustices. They found that they could not directly denounce the injustices. Rather, “as they began to achieve scholarly recognition both also began equating moderateness of opinion with objectivity, and objectivity with scholarly worth” (Furness, 1975, 91). Pre-witt points out that searching

for social theories to buttress politically derived goals…is difficult territory, full of traps for the unwary and not easily navigated even by those alert to the inherent contradictions. Can there be a social intelligence that is both useful and in fact used that stands outside partisan advocacy? Social science leaders schooled in pragmatic liberalism…have insisted that this can be so. (2004, 782)

The most famous debate about advocacy and value neutrality was the so-called Werturteilstreit (values controversy). In 1909, Max Weber and others withdrew from the Verein für Sozialpolitik to found the German Sociological Society, which was to be wertfrei (value free). This objective was not, however, as straightforward as it may seem; indeed, it has been plagued by ambiguity ever since. For the social scientists who claimed to be value free nonetheless believed that

the progress of science would ensure prosperity for all time to come….[S]cience, pursued for its own sake, would enable men to transcend their petty differences; science would triumph over war and social conflict as it had triumphed over ignorance and disease. Science was a harmonizing force, a unifying force. (Proctor, 1991, 96)

It was the particularly difficult political situation of German academics in the Wilhelmine period between 1871 and 1918 that created a very awkward squeeze on social scientists. On the one hand, they were being accused of being hidden socialists, while at the same time the socialists were pressing them to become their open allies. On the other hand, they were under pressure from German nationalists to identify openly with German military and imperial objectives.²⁴ Value freedom was the ideological expression of “science under siege.”²⁵ Value neutrality involved moral and intellectual wiggling.

But did it work? Two later scholars, Ralf Dahrendorf and Raymond Aron, both deeply influenced by Weber, underlined the difficulties and the moral uncertainties of these arguments—what Dahrendorf calls their “explosive ambiguity.” If Weber's distinction between facts and values, between an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility, is so clear, asked Dahrendorf,

why did Weber himself find it all but unbearable to live with his distinctions? Could it be that the distinctions are, at the same time, intellectually compelling and impossible to sustain in practice? Are they a prescription for breakdown? (1987, 577–578)

Aron is less harsh in his analysis, but in the end is not very far from Dahrendorf's reservations:

The originality and the grandeur of Weber derives first of all from the fact that he was and wanted to be both a political person and a scholar, or more precisely to the fact that he separated and united politics and science. Separated: science must be independent of our preferences, pure of any value-judgment. United: science is conceived in a way that it is indispensable to action….Neither science nor reality impose any law; science, which is incapable of prophecy or total vision, leaves man entirely free; each of us must decide for ourselves….[M]an must choose between the gods….History is the story [of] the rivalry of the gods, the conflicts of faith and necessity. (1950, 97–98)

It is perhaps for these reasons that Novick said (1988, 7) that objectivity is like “nailing jelly to the wall.” The debate has always centered around what one means by being “disinterested.” As Rueschmayer and Van Rossen point out (1996, 150), the Verein claimed as evidence of their disinterestedness “their distance from capital and working class alike“—the fact that they were attacked by both “interested parties.” But given the increased political and ideological conflicts within the community of scholars, Weber drew the “logical conclusion” (p. 147) that social science had to be insulated from morality and politics.²⁶

The arena in which the objectivity of value-neutral social science most manifestly seemed to falter was eugenics. Eugenics was of course intimately linked to a basic characteristic of the modern world-system, its continuing racism—a phenomenon overtly in conflict with the theoretically egalitarian doctrines institutionalized in the geocultural structures spawned by the French Revolution.

When Linnaeus in the eighteenth century formulated a morphology with which biologists classified all biota, it became necessary to explain why, if homo sapiens were in fact a unified genus/species, there seemed to be substantial visual differences between people in different parts of the world. Substantial visual differences are of course a matter of social definition. Few people create or utilize social categories according to the color of human eyes, but many do so according to the perceived color of human skin. By the late eighteenth century the term race was used primarily to classify groups differing in skin color.

In the eighteenth century, there were two basic theories about the origins of racial differences—monogenesis, which accorded with the traditional Christian concept of the unity of mankind (Heiniger, 1980, pt. 3); and polygenesis, which asserted clear lines of distinction between the races and thereby “provided a useful rationalization for the apparent historical subservience of non-whites to whites” (Lorimer, 1978, 132). By the second half of the nineteenth century, although polygenesis had been discredited, a sociobiological argument about significant differences between the races came to be articulated to which we have given the label “scientific racism.” It presumed the existence of “impassable walls” (Guillaumin, 1992, 25) between biosocially unequal groups. And “significant efforts to popularize this authoritative scientific view were developed (Lorimer, 1990, 369).²⁷

Eugenics was a social movement that derived from scientific racism. It called for state action to preserve the “purity” of the races and to favor in various ways the increase in numbers of the race that was considered superior, at the expense of the others. Despite what Hofstadter calls its “fundamental conservatism,” it attracted strong support at first from liberal centrists:

[T]he eugenics movement had about it the air of a “reform,” for it emerged [in the United States] at a time when most Americans liked to think of themselves as reformers. Like the reform movements, eugenics accepted the principle of state action toward a common end and spoke in terms of the collective destiny of the group rather than of individual success. (Hofstadter, 1992, 167)

“[T]he idea of race [was] linked to the development of nationalisms in Europe [and the pan-European world]; the two facts [were] at least contemporaneous” (Guillaumin, 1972, 37). What Parker (1981, 827, 846) terms “liberal racialism” was part of the search for national identity, one that “led all too easily to hostility to those beyond the pale.”

Of course, as we know, eugenics was brought to its most horrendous, but logical, conclusion in Germany with the Nazi program of extermination of lesser breeds. The “reciprocal involvement of science and politics” took on a particularly strong form in Germany, where

the small community of race hygienists (as eugenicists called themselves there), seeking status and recognition, formed a coalition with politicians of the conservative and radical right. (Weingart, 1989, 260)²⁸

It was because eugenics led in Germany to the Nazi conclusion that the liberal center after 1945 so firmly rejected “scientific racism“—to be replaced in its turn by what might be called a scientific antiracism, which would also be put forth as value free.

THE CREATION OF SCIENTIFIC HISTORY

The professionalization of social science took the form, within the universities, of the establishment of distinctive disciplines and the creation of corresponding professional/academic national (and eventually international) organizations for the various disciplines.²⁹ It did so not as a single discipline, but “fragment[ed] into many sub-disciplines, new organisations, and specialisms” (Goldman, 2002, 356). As we shall see, a discipline, a profession, is “a vocabulary, an organisation, a journal and a conference” (Maloney 1985, 2).

The first discipline to assert its presence in the new university structures was the one with the longest presence as a university category—history. History is of course a very ancient term. And it is common today to speak of noteworthy ancient historians. There certainly were always writers who described the “past” and who eulogized important rulers. The major source for these historians had traditionally been the work of prior historians insofar as their written works survived.

What happened in the nineteenth century was the creation of a new concept of appropriate sources for the work of historians. It is sometimes called a “scientific revolution” in historiography, and is associated prominently with the work of Leopold von Ranke. It was Ranke who bequeathed to us the notable insistence that we write history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it really happened).³⁰

There are two things we should notice in this famous slogan: the belief that it is possible to achieve a true description of the past, and the assumption that not everything that had previously been done in the name of history adhered to this rule. Ranke was asserting the potential existence of an “objective” analysis of the past. For all those who shared this view, the questions ever since have been what renders an account objective, and what it is that historians are writing about. Nipperdey, who considers Ranke the “father” of the idea of scientific objectivity in history, insists (1988, 218) that the core of Ranke's ideas was the strict binding of the historian to both the “sources and their critique (Quellenkritik),” which he calls a “methodologically restricted objectivity.” Herbst underlines (1965, 216) the contradictions of Ranke-ian historicism: “[A]s idealists they asserted the autonomy of their discipline and of all Geisteswissenschaften, while as empiricists they proposed to use the tools of natural science.”

Sources are a very empirical concept. Originally (and for a very long time), they were thought to consist only in written documents. Later, the concept was extended to include material objects such as archaeological finds that were available for careful study. Archaeology was used primarily as a mode of studying zones and times for which written sources did not exist or were very rare—a sort of second-best.

But why were written sources the basis of objective knowledge? The principal argument was that they were not created for the eyes of later researchers but somehow reflected immediate reality as seen by the participants of the time. To be sure there was the possibility that such sources could be fakes that were written later than the source seemed to indicate or were meant as modes of deceiving others at the time they were written. And it was for this reason that sources had to be subjected to Quellenkritik. Still, it was considered that there was no substitute for using such sources. Ranke “approached the past as virtually a revelation of God….It was, as Ranke himself remarked, a sort of Gottesdienst [church service]” (McClelland, 1980, 173).

Historical research of this sort was “scientific” insofar as it was considered legitimate only if it was linked to empirical evidence. However, the historians were in other ways very unscientific. Most of them were antitheoretical, rejecting any search for lawlike statements that might be inferred from this empirical research.³¹They took this stance essentially because of their opposition to the Enlightenment radicals and their successors who wished to reform the world.³² Novick believes (1988, 27) that Ranke's “abstention from moral judgment, rather than manifesting disinterested neutrality, [was], in its context, a profoundly conservative political judgment.”³³

And yet this “shrinking” of the analysis of politics to “events in the narrowest sense” (Burke, 1988, 197) served well the interests of the centrist liberals. For, when generalizations were shunned, historical writing became for the first time in the nineteenth century a “national religion” (Barrett-Kriegel, 1988, 264). The reason was very simple. If one was to construct liberal states, there had to be states within which people could create their identities as a “nation” to which they could offer their primary loyalties. The creation of the nation was essential as the basis of the liberal state. And to create a nation, one had to have a state.³⁴

The historians were charged with the task of discovering/creating the memory of the historical past for a state. This was true for Great Britain and France, the original liberal states, but it was even more true for Germany and Italy, states to be created in the course of the nineteenth century, and then by extension for everywhere else.³⁵ The French revolution of 1830 had, as we know, an echo in Poland (under Russian rule).

And this in turn had an impact on German intellectuals, stimulating their concern with national unification. Ranke, for example, wrote a series of articles in 1832 around the theme previously argued by Berthold Niebuhr: “The historical development of a people is a function of its national genius.” Ranke concluded that “we have a great German duty: create the true German state which will reflect the genius of the nation” (Renouvin, 1954, 75–76).³⁶ Younger historians at this time, “skeptical of Ranke's conservative leanings and looking to Prussian leadership in German unification, turned back to Humboldt, Fichte, and Hegel for inspiration.” But the failure of the 1848 revolution convinced them, too, “of the primacy of state action and of the ethical rightness of political power.” By 1871, conservatives, liberals, and even democrats (radicals) came to share in the “common religion of history” (Iggers, 1983, 11).³⁷

The engagement of German historians in the construction of a German nation was matched by the engagement of British historians in what we have come to call the Whig interpretation of history. Great Britain being then the hegemonic power of the world-system, its historians took comfort in the belief that everything that had occurred to put Great Britain in this position was both inevitable and progressive. Manning (1976, 84) explains the logic of this position quite clearly:

All events which helped to constitute the civil society liberals admire are necessarily progressive and all those which mark resistance to those changes are necessarily reactionary. By definition a civil society is more civilized than a feudal one. In the vocabulary of liberalism, part of the meaning of the word civil is something open and progressive, and part of the meaning of the word feudal is something closed and reactionary.³⁸

German historicism and the Whig interpretation of history (which was in fact a variant of historicism) concurred in placing the progress of the nation at the center of their analysis and their concerns.³⁹

France, like Great Britain, began to make history central to the national state it was creating. Hauser (1903, 119) sees the July Revolution as the turning point:

Precisely because it wasn't an “historic” royalty, the July monarchy could neither ignore history nor dispense with it….Under the direct influence of political events, history turned towards questions of organizing society. The new state had every interest in having the Guizots, the Thierrys, using memories of medieval France and the lessons of English revolutions, create for it a new legitimacy founded on reason.

But whereas the July Monarchy legitimated history in order that historians legitimate it, it was the traumatic events of 1870–1871—defeat of France by Germany, the Paris Commune—that finally established history as central to integrating the state. The newly established Third Republic turned to the historians to help reinvigorate and reunify the nation by reforming the curriculum of the secondary school system. Logue (1983, 80) describes the thinking of leaders of the republic's education system this way:

The hitherto ignorant and superstitious masses were seen in those early years [after 1875] as less formidable potential enemies of the republic than those middle-and upper-class youths who had received their education at the hands of priests, lay brothers, and—worst of all—Jesuits. It was disunity within the elite that most worried the liberals of the late nineteenth century, not disunity between the elite and the masses….A truly republican and liberal elite would be the natural leaders of a democratic people.⁴⁰

Hobsbawm (1983, 270), however, sees this emphasis on national history as motivated more by the fear of radical tendencies, arguing that the historians invented “imagery, the symbolism, and the traditions of the Republic” to control the working classes. The “men of the centre” (he is talking of the Radical Socialists) did this by “masquerading as men of the extreme left.”

No doubt the centrist liberals were seeking to limit both the conservative forces, whom they identified with the Church, and the radical forces that had shown their face and vigor in the Paris Commune. They were able to make use of the new scientific history to establish in the public mind a past that could unify a nation, and render national identity the basis for a patriotism that would stabilize the state. It was not, to be sure, the only mechanism. Service in the armed forces for young men integrated and socialized them as much as the public school system. It was particularly effective for those who came from rural districts and from minority ethnicities. The construction of national monuments and the invention of public ceremonies (such as Bastille Day in France) were also part of the systematic campaign (Hobsbawm, 1983, 271).⁴¹ But these, too, were the product of the work of the historians. The past was thus becoming secure. But what about the present?

THE CREATION OF THE NOMOTHETIC DISCIPLINES

Creating and reinforcing a national identity was only part of the liberal agenda, however important. A strong national identity served to legitimate the states and limit severely the justification of alternative and potentially oppositional loyal-ties—to class, religion, ethnicity, or language community. But the liberal states, in order to function smoothly and in particular to anticipate the antiliberal pressures of the dangerous classes, needed to understand the ongoing reality of the present. This came to be the function of the three nomothetic social sciences: economics, sociology, and political science.

The first thing to notice about this trinity is that it is a trinity. When writing about the past (the role of history), the emerging university structures combined the so-called economic, political, and social domains into one single “discipline.” But as soon as one engaged the present, the social scientists insisted that these were three separate domains, to be studied separately.

Wherefore this division? There is only one source—the insistence of liberal thinkers (but not of either conservative or radical ones) that the signal feature of “modernity” was the differentiation of the social structure into three compartments that were quite different from each other. They were so different that they had consequently to be isolated from each other in practice, and hence analyzed quite distinctly. These three domains were the market, the state, and the civil society. It was from the theoretical distinction of these three domains, which presumably had been differentiated as the outcome of modernizing, that the universities derived the three disciplines: economics for the study of the market, political science for the state, and sociology for the civil society.

Centrist liberalism has always devoted itself to the prudent and competent reform of institutions, and in the mid-nineteenth century this objective posed a fundamental question for the emerging social sciences studying the present, as we have seen. Were they to constitute themselves as social activists or merely as those who produced the analyses that the social reformers could use to implement their objectives? When thinkers like Mirabeau and Condorcet first used the term social science, they had made it synonymous with social art, which “carried practical and reformist connotations as a rational guide to public policy and social reconstruction” (Goldman, 1987, 141). The initial result had been the creation of the social science associations, as we have discussed. But in the late nineteenth century, the arena shifted to the universities and to the creation of disciplinary departments that would produce the needed specialized professionals.

Economics

The first of these nomothetic disciplines to be institutionalized was economics. The name economics was a late invention. Up until the late nineteenth century, the usual term in Great Britain and the United States had been political economy. In France, there was somewhat of a struggle between the terms social economy and political economy. A similar split existed in the Germanies, where the term national economy (Nationalökonomie) competed with Volkswirtschaft, with all the ambiguity of attaching the term Volk (literally “people,” but with a strong ethnic overtone) to the term Wirtschaft (usually translated as “economy” with or without the prefix Volks-). Why did all these other terms come to be rejected eventually in favor of the shorter term economics?

The term political economy suggests that there is some relation between the political and economic spheres of life. But what kind of relation? One of the earliest expressions was the so-called Scottish historical school of the eighteenth century, which included such diverse figures as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and John Millar. Diverse perhaps, but they shared some clear premises, both about history and about political economy. Their macrohistorical imagery was that of a world in which mankind had passed through a progressive succession of different stages. The most frequent list of stages at the time was that of hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. The basis of the list was a sort of “techno-economic determinism.”⁴²

If these men spoke of political economy, it was because they analyzed these successive forms of economic structuring, and particularly that of commerce, as occurring within a polity—that is, a state. They all therefore placed emphasis on the “mode of subsistence,” a phrase invented by Robertson (Meek, 1967, 37). And they all believed that if one knew the state of property, one would know something about the political system, because there was a “causal connection between property relationships and the form of government.”⁴³ For a later unremitting believer in the primacy of the market like Friedrich von Hayek, the eighteenth-century political economists would be seen as persons who could not decide whether they were scientists or moral and social philosophers (Hayek, 1952, 13). And neither they nor successive generations had particular training in the kinds of skills we would today associate with economics.⁴⁴

Hayek was right, of course. Adam Smith in fact occupied the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. And this concern both with moral philosophy and history explains the great difference between the political economy of what we now call the classical economists (from Smith to Marx) and the so-called neoclassical economists who came to define the field in the late nineteenth century.

The classical economists hoped to unravel the skein of history, to find the great central forces which move (determine?) the course of nations and empires….[T]hey were engaged in the delineation of the “magnificent dynamics.” By contrast, the task set by [the neoclassicists] Walras and Marshall seems mean and petty, but it was their efforts to analyze the mechanics of markets that produced the problem-solving economics we now possess. (Gordon, 1973, 255)

The ambiguous relation of the market and politics had its parallel in France. Before the French Revolution, it was the Physiocrats who held center stage. The term physiocracy means the “rule of nature.” And the nature that ruled for them was the land, the sole source of productive labor and therefore of net profit. Their emphasis on distinguishing who or what was productive from who or what was sterile became a constitutive element of political economy, even if there were differences of views as to which groups were indeed the productive groups. The Physiocrats, like the Scottish political economists, were materialist, not rationalist. Their economic determinist views were endorsed strongly by the words and deeds of the leaders of the French Revolution.⁴⁵

But they were more than mere economic determinists. After Thermidor, their legacy was continued by a group called the idéologues, for whom, however,

political economy was not an economism. It was one means among others to achieve the happiness of a society founded on the rights of man. The affluence which would result from understanding the laws of economics would render men “more virtuous,” more able to govern freely. Political economy took its place alongside other moral and political sciences. The [French] Institute [which included an Academy of Moral and Political Sciences], created in 1795 [on the instigation of] the idéologues, was intended to promote [such good government]. (Le Van-Mesle, 1980, 272–273)

However, these views came to be considered dangerous, even subversive, first by Napoleon, and then even more so by Louis XVIII and the leaders of the Restoration. Political economy thus fell into disgrace. However, political economy soon returned to acceptability in France. It did so by revising its self-presentation. It shed its subversive image and emphasized rather the degree to which it was a “centrist” doctrine. As such, of course, it was attacked both on the left and on the right. It would nonetheless seek to establish its political utility by demonstrating the link between what it defined as the centrist principles of the French Revolution and economic liberalism. In 1845, the political economist Eugène Daire wrote:

The glory of the French Revolution is to have inscribed in the law, on normal bases, the constitution of liberty, property, and family….Today the task of men who accept these principles is simply to make them realized completely in reality, and to combat energetically any retrograde or so-called progressive doctrines which tend to undo the work of our fathers, and to deprive future generations of the rewards of the blood spilled on their behalf. (Cited in Lutfalla, 1972, 495)

It is because political economy became so centrist that some left Catholic thinkers sought to oppose “social economy” to “political economy.” The 1835 catalogue of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University criticized political economy for concerning itself only with how wealth was accumulated and failing to discuss the fact that the wealth was badly distributed.

Thus the fortune of some was based on the misery of others. And society, awakened from its dreams by the clamors of the poor, discovered at last that it had lost in security what it had gained in opulence. (De Caux, 1835, 35)

Hence, it followed that there was need for a course in social economy.

The voice of these left Catholics was not heard by the political elite, and the clamors of the poor (De Caux was no doubt referring to the uprising of the canuts in Lyon) were not to find a significant political expression until the Revolution of 1848. One of the noteworthy decisions of the provisional government in 1848 was to abolish the chairs of political economy in the university, precisely because political economy was seen as linked to social conservatism, despite the vain protests of the Society of Political Economy. In turn, the Academy of Moral Sciences responded to the appeal of the government by asserting that it was “not sufficient to restore material order by force if one did not restore moral order” (Le Van-Mesle, 1980, 286).

The radicalism of the Revolution did not last long, as we know, but political economy was not restored as a discipline. Perhaps it was considered too centrist and insufficiently conservative in the aftermath of the revolution. By 1864, however, Victor Duruy persuaded the emperor to found a chair of political economy in the Law Faculty. He argued that Great Britain had avoided a bloody revolution in 1848 precisely because “the principles of political economy were widespread in all strata” (Weisz, 1979, 87). France was returning to centrist liberalism.

In the Germanies, the Cameralism of the eighteenth century, which emphasized the economics of public administration, gave way to the “national economy” of the early nineteenth century. Staatskunst (the art of the state) was replaced in Prussia by Staatswissenschaft (the science of the state), of “governing in relation to economic processes” (Tribe, 1988, 8). And once again, the simple advocacy of market principles was replaced by what was called in Germany historical economics, the last defense of a political economy that was as much political as it was economic. In effect, Germany was still holding on to a variety of political economy at a time when Great Britain, the United States, and France were finally ready to bury it in favor of (neoclassical) economics.

The big shift occurs with the change of name. Political economy became economics. The widely influential W. S. Jevons suggested this in 1879.⁴⁶ But it was Alfred Marshall who institutionalized this change when he became professor of political economy at Cambridge in 1884. He had already written a text entitled The Principles of Economics in 1881. And in 1885 he argued that the Statistical Society should change its name to the Society for Economic Science and Statistics. He would proceed to be a founder of the British Economics Association (later the Royal Economics Society) in 1890, which he and his followers firmly controlled (Kadish, 1982, 143–144, 152; Coats and Coats, 1970). By 1903, Marshall was able to establish Economics Tripos as an undergraduate course at the University of Cambridge.

What did Marshall institutionalize, however? One way to describe it is as a shift in the focus of economic enquiry:

The change of name signified a break with a “classical” economics preoccupied with the capital and labour in the production of value and the distribution of national wealth, and relaunched economics as a science of exchange and price formation. In place of a theory of production and distribution centred on rent, profit and wages with their corresponding agents of production—landlords, capitalists and labourers—the new science of economics became a theory in which the allocation of scarce resources was effected by the calculations of an abstract economic agent. A new theory of value turned on the interactions of these self-interested agents, whose drive to satisfy their own wants led them in turn to satisfy the needs of others and hence create market prices. (Tribe, 2005, 116–117)

Another way to describe it might be to say that neoclassical economics ended definitively the connection of economics and history. The marginalization in Marshall's Cambridge program of the economic historian William Cunningham is notorious, and his actions seem to have led Cunningham to leave Cambridge by 1891. There were no doubt personality conflicts between the two men. Still, Geoffrey Hodgson disagrees with the idea that Marshall was hostile to economic history as such. Hodgson points to Marshall's sympathetic praise and support of the German historical school. He also points to the fact that he did not side in the Methodenstreit with Carl Menger despite the fact that Menger, like Marshall, was a pioneer of marginal utility theory.⁴⁷

Perhaps the correct way to interpret Marshall's organizational transformation of economics is to see it as a way to consolidate the ability of economists to influence policy making more effectively by becoming professional and abstaining from direct partisanship—in short, of being centrist liberals.⁴⁸ To guarantee that, Marshall needed to control the program of university training by creating an economic orthodoxy, the true source of his dispute with Cunningham.⁴⁹ Church then explains that the very process of professionalization led economists away from historicist leanings.⁵⁰ But at the same time, this professionalization permitted the same economists to rescue economics for social reform.⁵¹

The emphasis on the ability to influence policy affected the practice of French economists equally, although there economics tended to be located within the Faculty of Law rather than in the Arts and Sciences faculties, as in most countries.⁵² Nor was this different in Germany, where training in economics had its historicist focus that was linked to the long-dominant role of the Verein für Sozialpolitik.⁵³

With this in mind, it seems that one should not think of the famous struggle in the early days of the American Economic Association as one between advocacy and expertise—the usual line of analysis—but rather as a debate of what was the most effective way to achieve appropriate reforms in public policy.

In the United States, the key figure in the late nineteenth century was Richard T. Ely. Ely was trained in Germany at Heidelberg under Karl Knies. He was very impressed by the German historical school and, when he returned, become a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University in 1881. As early as 1882, he was urging acceptance of the German social legislation of Bismarck (Dorfman, 1955b, 24–25). He formulated a plan to create an association of economists who, as he wrote in a letter in 1884, “repudiate laissez-faire as a scientific doctrine” (cited in Coats, 1960, 556).

In 1885, he was one of the founders of the American Economics Association (AEA), of which he became the first secretary. In the AEA's founding statement of principles, the first point read: “We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.” Its other three points emphasized “the historical and statistical study of actual conditions“; the need to solve the social problems resulting from the conflict of labor and capital; and the insistence that, although the AEA was not partisan, it felt that that a “progressive development of economic conditions…must be met by a corresponding development of legislative policy” (Dorfman, 1955, 27).

Ely himself asserted twenty-five years later (1910, 60) that this statement “was a compromise in behalf of catholicity….[E]ach modification represented] what has been called a ‘toning-down' process.” The compromise did not work. In 1892, Ely ceased being secretary, and although he was later elected president of the AEA for a year, his view that the AEA should engage in relatively public advocacy was rejected in favor of a more “professional” orientation.⁵⁴ This did not mean, however, that there was a turn away from seeking to influence public policy, precisely because the “upper and middle classes” saw this as a positive role.⁵⁵ It simply meant that the political implications—primarily those of centrist liberalism—of a professional, neutral economics became sub rosa, not to be avowed publicly.

Sociology

Sociology underwent the same process of professionalization as economics. It was, however, as a discipline somewhat less coy about its commitment to social reform. As is well known, the term sociology was invented by Auguste Comte, who considered the study of social relations the culminating positivist activity, the “queen of the sciences.” But where can we place Comte's work in the political spectrum? For Koyré (1946, 56), Comte's ideas were those of the ultraconservative Bonald, “dressed-up, or rather disguised in modern garb.” Nisbet (1952, 173) gives a similar appreciation:

Comte himself was no scientist; but through his romantic worship of science, the social structures of family, community, language, religion were removed from the frankly theological and reactionary context in which they lay in Bonald's thought and were given the context and terminology, if not the substance, of science….Comte's work was the means of translating the conservative principles into a perspective more acceptable to later generations of social scientists.

Yet we know also that Comte started his career as the secretary of Saint-Simon, who may be difficult to characterize politically but was certainly someone openly hostile to a Bonaldian view of society. Hayek (1941, 9, 11, 18) sees Comte evolving from a more left position to arrive more squarely in the political center. For Hayek, the two great intellectual forces of the nineteenth century were socialism and positivism (which he preferred to call scientism):

Both…spring directly from this body of professional scientists and engineers that grew up in Paris, and more particularly from…the Ecole polytechnique.…

[T]hroughout the development of French positivism this rationalist element, probably due to the influence of Descartes, continued to play an important role….

That synthetic spirit which would not recognize sense in anything that had not been deliberately constructed…was a strong new element which was added to—and in the course of time even began to replace—the revolutionary ardour of the young polytechnicians.

The other major figure of French sociology in midcentury was Frédéric Le Play. His training was that of a metallurgist, a graduate of the elite École des Mines. What he drew from this education was an aversion to abstract theorizing and the belief that social science was not analogous to physics but rather to “the classificatory and eminently practical [science] of metallurgy” (Goldfrank, 1972, 134). He thus pursued an empirical, observational sociology, quite the opposite of Comte. At the same time, he was a devout Catholic, again the opposite of Comte. But he was what might be called a pastoral Catholic. From this, he derived an aversion to Saint-Simonian rationalism and individualism.

The Revolution of 1848 was a formative experience for Le Play. In a political atmosphere riven between the Party of Order and the working classes, he sought to promote “a reformist social policy” (Kalaora and Savoye, 1989, 100). He founded the Société d'Économie Sociale in 1855, which was specifically concerned with the social implications of economic development for the working classes. He established links with the British SSA and pursued an objective of social harmony, with a conservative coloring:

Le Play, being a careful but not value-free social scientist, insisted that “social peace” could be achieved only through an understanding of “social reality.” That reality…consisted of a hierarchy of unequal classes reproduced in the industrial division of labour. He thereby threw out the market-place as a model for social relations, and brought in the seigneurie, with the grande bourgeoisie acting as the ascendant “social authority.” (Elwitt, 1988, 212)

Le Play's reformism was not that of social and economic change but of “moral reforms, reasserting the five bases of social organization: religion, family, property, work, and patronage” (Chapelle-Dulière, 1981, 745). But despite his paternalistic conservatism, Goldfrank (1972, 148) considers him “a curiously contemporary figure: the upwardly mobile conservative (liberal) technocrat hoping to solve ‘scientifically' problems perpetuated by the very ruling groups he begs to serve.” It is noteworthy that, in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, Le Play was perceived as linked to the new liberalism of the nascent welfare state. He was seen as representing a “third alternative to the anomie of disordered capitalism and the tyrannies of socialism” (Abrams, 1968, 60)—in short, as a centrist liberal.

The other great figure of preuniversity sociology was Herbert Spencer. Spencer was by far the most widely read and esteemed sociologist in the English-speaking world in the last half of the nineteenth century. His sociology was of a totally deterministic variety. He adopted an extreme version of Darwin's “survival of the fittest.” This harsh, unforgiving version of evolution asserted that whatever is, is beneficial. It followed, as Abrams argues (1968, 73), that “the greater purpose of sociology was to impress upon men the fatuity of efforts to accelerate the improvement of their condition by legislative measures.”⁵⁶ Social Darwinism was, needless to say, incompatible with the image of centrist liberalism. So, despite his fame in Great Britain and the United States,⁵⁷ Spencer's meteoric presence came and went, leaving little residue in the emerging discipline of sociology.

The three birthplaces of academic professional sociology were France, Germany, and the United States. We have already discussed the ambiguities of the version of value-free sociology professed by the leading figure of the new German academic sociology, Max Weber. These ambiguities were in fact analogous to those that were part of the institutionalization of sociology in France and the United States.

In France, the key figure, both intellectually and organizationally, was Émile Durkheim. Durkheim, like Marshall, was an organizer. His academic training was in philosophy, which he found too arcane and too removed from the moral and political questions of the day. In 1887, he received an appointment in Bordeaux in philosophy. But at the instigation of Louis Liard, the director of higher education for the government, he was permitted to teach a course in social science. By 1896, he had become a full professor of social science, the first such appointment in the French university system. In 1898, he founded a scholarly journal with the name of sociology, L'Année sociologique. It became a major institutional meeting ground for all those, in France and elsewhere, who were oriented to empirical social science. In 1902 he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris and in 1908 became a professor of “the Sociology of Education“—a title changed by ministerial decree in 1913 to “the Science of Education and Sociology”.⁵⁸

During this time, he was also active politically, notably during the Dreyfus affair. He was the secretary-general in Bordeaux of the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme, the principal Dreyfusard organization, and was a “favorite speaker at rallies in the Bordeaux area” (Clark, 1972, 161). The question here, as it is in discussing Weber, is how close the link was between Durkheim's professional activities and his political ones. And here, too, the answer is ambiguous.

Clark offers us one answer (1972, 170):

[Durkheim] had a remarkable ability to formulate problems strategic both for sociological theory and pressing moral and political concerns. His prestige both with his collaborators and the general public was enhanced by the timeliness of his theoretical works for definition of a secular morality, development of a theory of solidarity, and isolation of causes of social deviance. The Durkheimians also shared a common training and career pattern. They were brought together again by a series of important political experiences.

But Clark's answer is itself ambiguous. For it evades the issue of intention. If Durkheim sought to turn sociology into a genuinely positive science,⁵⁹ it is also true, as Richter argues (1960, 172), that for Durkheim

sociology was to create a solid base for the Republic. It would indicate what reforms were needed; it would provide principles of order in politics, as well as a moral doctrine on which the country could unite; for he believed that beneath the choppy surface of political and ideological differences lay a real consensus of values. This belief motivated his effort to discover what the ties are that hold together the members of a society and produce at least that minimum of order and harmony requisite to its maintenance.

There is considerable agreement that Durkheim saw himself as, and was, a firm supporter of the Third Republic. The question is where this put him on a political spectrum. Conservative members of the academy often labeled him a socialist. And there is evidence to indicate that, at a personal level, he was a fellow traveler of French socialists, if never a party member.⁶⁰ On the other hand, Lewis Coser (1960, 212) makes the case for his “abiding conservatism.”⁶¹

But most analysts place him in between the two, a proper example of centrist liberalism. Weisz (1979, 111) catches, I believe, exactly where French social science in general, and Durkheim in particular, stood:

One should note the intimate links of the social sciences in the university with a certain republican-progressive ideology, one that was clearly anti-socialist. It is true that the case of Durkheim was more ambiguous in the degree to which certain circles considered him a socialist. But, by emphasizing how his thought was evolutionist, pragmatic, anti-utopian, and sometimes even conservative, Durkheim managed to reassure the leading university figures.

To which Logue adds (1983, 151):

For Durkheim rejected traditional conservatism, laissez-faire liberalism, and collectivist socialism, while much of his thought was occupied with the main problem of the new liberalism: how to combine social integration with individual freedom.⁶²

Overall, Durkheim's variety of centrist liberalism was perhaps a bit closer to the position formulated by the German Katheder-Sozialistenthan to Weber's national-liberalism. But Schmoller, Weber, and Durkheim all emphasized the importance of the state as the incarnation of collective values, and in the end all three were nationalists. As Maier (1992, 134) puts it:

Sociology from Comte to Durkheim represented, in effect, an intellectual project for encouraging an organization of civil society that might stabilize an increasingly democratic politics. And not only in France.⁶³

The United States was in fact the country in which academic sociology was institutionalized the earliest. The debates and the solutions were not too different from those in France and Germany. The principal organizational figure in the history of American sociology was Albion Small. His own career illustrates well the trajectory of most of his contemporaries. Son of a Baptist minister, he studied at a seminary but was not ordained. Instead he went to Germany in 1879 to study history and Sozialwissenschaft. He then was appointed to Colby College in 1881 to teach history and political economy. He decided to obtain a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in economics and history. In 1889 he returned to Colby as its president. There he replaced the course in moral philosophy with one in sociology—one of the very first courses so entitled.

In 1892, he was called to the newly founded University of Chicago to found the first accredited department of sociology in the United States (and indeed in the world). In 1895, he founded at Chicago the American Journal of Sociology (AJS). And in 1905, he was one of the founders of the American Sociological Society. That same year, he published a basic text, General Sociology. His fundamental outlook is well defined by Bulmer (1984, 34–35):

Small believed that sociology was a science, that it was changing from a discursive to an objective discipline grounded in empirical study, and that it was a cumulative discipline with a nomothetic, theoretical character….

At the same time, sociology was also an ethical discipline and the sociologist had a distinctive role to play in the improvement of society. His expertise and commitment enabled him to be involved in social reform without espousing the position of any class or interest group. Scientism and moralism were integrally connected.

For Oberschall, this meant that Small “literally walked a tightrope.”⁶⁴ When J. W. Burgess, as dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, recruited Franklin Giddings in 1891 to teach sociology, it was because he felt that “many special questions of penology, charity and poor relief could not be treated from the standpoint of pure political economy and many problems of social ethics could not be studied from the point of view of individual ethics” (Dorfman, 1955a, 176). Oberschall calls this the demand for courses in the “3 Ds: the defective, dependent, and delinquent classes.”

All the other leading figures in the early history of American sociology also linked their sociology in varied ways to social reform. Lester Ward “replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory adaptable to the uses of reform” (Hofstadter, 1992, 68). E. A. Ross wanted the “wise sociologist” to speak to “those who administer the moral capital of society” in order that he “make himself an accomplice of all good men for the undoing of all bad men” (cited in Dorothy Ross, 1984, 163). Even Sumner, generally identified as a conservative, was critical of “the laissez-faire content of [Spencer's theories, seeking to] put the case that ‘progress' meant government by skilled social scientists” (Crick, 1959, 50).

As both Bulmer (1984, 39) and Oberschall (1972, 188) note, the underlying influence of liberal Protestantism, very influential in the Progressive movement of the time, permeated the work of these sociologists. Still, all of them were aware of the possible confusion of sociology and socialism. When Albion Small sought to convince President Harper of Chicago to allow him to found the AJS, he wrote him that a journal was “needed both to exert restraint on utopian social effort and to encourage and direct well advised attempts at social cooperation” (cited in Dibble, 1976, 301). Government in the hands of the specialists was a key element in centrist liberalism.

Political Science

Of the three nomothetic social science disciplines, political science was the last to emerge as an autonomous discipline. Its early period was marked by the establishment of three major institutions—Sciences Po in Paris, the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, and the London School of Economics (LSE) in London. The curious thing is that none of the three was originally designed to establish an autonomous discipline of political science. Indeed, they were all three intended to be pluridisciplinary, and indeed were so in practice. And yet, the three all left a lasting imprint on the discipline of political science, even though, in the twentieth century, political science went its own and separate way as an autonomous discipline, first of all in the United States, and later (particularly after 1945) throughout the world.

The three institutions were not founded simultaneously. Sciences Po was the first, established in 1871. It is harder to date the establishment of Columbia's Faculty of Political Science, since it went through many organizational versions. But the best date to use is probably 1880. LSE was the last, officially founded in 1895. Their stories are linked, but need to be told in order.

Sciences Po is the popular locution for the school, but it is not its formal name. In the semiofficial history of Sciences Po, written by Richard Descoings in 2007, we read (p. 27):

Émile Boutmy founded the École libre des sciences politiques [the original name of Sciences Po] in 1871….Who was Émile Boutmy? Why 1871? What should we understand by a “free school“? How should we define “political science“? That is what at Sciences Po one calls “baliser le sujet.”⁶⁵

Boutmy was a center-left bourgeois, a cultured political commentator (publiciste cultivé), a man with many connections and much influence. An entrepreneur. All this at the same time.

Why 1871? This is perhaps the place to begin. The years 1870–1871 were very traumatic ones for France. France was militarily defeated by Prussia. The empire of Napoleon III came to an end, and the Third Republic was proclaimed. The Prussian monarch, Wilhelm, somewhat flamboyantly used the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to have himself proclaimed emperor of Germany. And, perhaps most important of all, Paris was the site of a profound social revolution, the Commune, which was finally repressed with much bloodshed.

The French world of knowledge suffered as a consequence the “German crisis of French thought” (Descoings, 2007, 32–33). Vincent says (1987, 28) that “Germany's victory was perceived as that of knowledge over ignorance.” But more than that, the experience of the military defeat plus the Commune transformed French political life:

[The combination of these two events] led to the belief that another social explosion was probable, and another (military) defeat possible. One had to borrow from Germany its formulas to use them against her. The pilgrimage to Germany became thereupon part of the educational program [cursus] of the French academic, and it is from German universities that Émile Boutmy borrowed the new pedagogical system that he established at the École libre. (Vincent, 1987, 13)

Nor could the Commune be separated from the experience of the French Revolution, still a subject of great controversy in France, and about which the centrist liberals had ambivalent feelings. Vincent suggests (1987, 13) that this, too, was on Boutmy's mind:

In six years (1789–1794), the traditional elites were…swept away and replaced by others who, by and large, did not manage to rule for more than a brief time. The leaders of 1792 were all practically unknowns in 1788, which leads one to think that the “mass” has some “formidable” potentialities, dangerous but—why not?—utilizable, “recuperable,” as we would say today.⁶⁶

Boutmy's principal solution was the formation of elites. As Vincent notes (1987, 12),

Boutmy did not hesitate to use the word [elite], and for him this meant endowing France with economic and political deciders recruited in the superior strata of the dominant class—including in the group a few exceptionally gifted persons coming from the “lower classes” (better to have them on your side than against you).⁶⁷

So Boutmy used his connections to raise the money to establish a private institution. But in the first year he did not find too many students who were ready merely to study the political situation, to pursue what we might think of today as academic political science. So he quickly adjusted his strategy, adding a professional objective to the imparting of knowledge. In his report to his investors in 1872, he suggested that what was necessary was “to offer something such that the two top-rated (haut vol) professions that have such a great influence on the destinies of nations—diplomacy and the higher civil service—find in this institution that first-class preparation which has up to now not been available” (cited in Descoings, 2007, 40). In Vincent's metaphor, it was the shift from being an institution of knowledge to being an institution of power. “Liberal, anti-state, the École became a center to prepare the examinations for appointment to the Inspection des Finances, the Conseil d'État, the Cour des Comptes, and the Quai d'Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry)” (Vincent, 1987, 61).⁶⁸

Boutmy thus created an École libre—that is, a private institution, one that was not subordinated to the Sorbonne but also was not clerical. It was a school of “political sciences” (note the plural). But the words political and sciences were both somewhat ambiguous. Sciences in French was still being used to mean knowledge in general, like the German Wissenschaften. And political sciences was still a term that could mean social sciences in general. Indeed, what Boutmy actually offered was mostly what we would call today history, economics, and sociology, rather than political science more narrowly defined.⁶⁹

John Burgess was called to Columbia University from Amherst College in 1876 with the title Professor of Political Science, History, and International Law (Hoxie, 1955, 6). The intent of the Columbia administration, as Burgess later recounted in 1893, was “to neutralize the intense professionalism of the Law School by supplying the students in private law…with those studies in ethics, history, and public law necessary to complete the science of jurisprudence” (cited in Bryson, 1932, 322). Burgess found the Law School “impenetrable” and turned to creating a School of Political Science instead.

In Hoxie's official history of the Faculty of Political Science, written for Columbia's bicentennial, he delineates the link to Sciences Po:

The story of the Ecole Libre was an inspiring one for John Burgess. He, like many other students of our government, was much concerned in 1879 about the state of the United States Civil Service and was carefully following the reforms attempted by the Hayes administration. Moreover, the ideas he had gained from Sir Stafford Northcote regarding the British Civil Service had made a strong impression on him. He had noted during his visit to England in 1878 that civil service was viewed as a professional career for which one prepared much as for medicine or law. Could not a graduate school be established in this country for the training of civil servants—a school, or at least a department, not unlike the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques? Might it not also provide the complement to the apparently unalterable professionalism of Columbia's law curriculum? (1955, 11)

This fit in very well with a political movement of independent Republicans called the “Mugwumps“—a group drawn from the social elite and devoted to civil service reform. They were quintessential centrist liberals. They opposed the so-called Greenbackers and the labor unions, who they thought wanted to confiscate property. They also opposed the so-called Radical Republicans, who had been leaders in the struggle to ensure political rights for the liberated Negro slaves. The Mugwumps considered the Radical Republicans to be fanatics. On the other hand, the Mugwumps also inveighed against the social irresponsibility of the rich, which gave them their centrist credentials. They saw salvation in an educated elite. It followed that “enlarging social science's place in the curriculum was another part of this educational effort” (Church, 1974, 577).⁷⁰

When the trustees of Columbia gave the go-ahead for a School (later called Faculty) of Political Science, they noted that Burgess “explicitly avows it to be part of his view to train men for the service of the government; but it is hardly necessary to make this a declared object, and to do so might awaken jealousies prejudicial to its success” (cited in Hoxie, 1955, 15). The trustees may have feared the reactions of other faculty but had no doubt themselves as to the merits of the objective. In Columbia's College Handbook of 1880, the new School of Political Science's objectives were stated this way: “[The] prime aim [is the] development of all branches of political science. Its secondary aim is the preparation of young men for all branches of public service” (cited in Crick, 1964, 28).

Just as Émile Boutmy was the driving force to create Sciences Po and John Burgess to establish the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia, so Sydney and Beatrice Webb were the driving forces to create the LSE, whose full name is the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Webbs had long wanted such an institution when, in 1894, one Henry Hunt Hutchison died and left a bequest to the Fabian Society of twenty thousand pounds—a princely sum at the time. So, at a breakfast meeting on August 4, 1895, convened by the Webbs and attended by George Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, it was decided (over Shaw's opposition) to found the LSE.

As in the case of the other two institutions, the initial intention was to improve the training of Great Britain's political and business elite. The Webbs used the curriculum of Sciences Po as the basis of their own offerings. Indeed, although their concerns were heavily oriented toward economic issues, Ralf Dahrendorf, a later director of the LSE, explains in his centennial history of the school (1995, 196) that the phrase “and Political Science” in the title was inserted because

the Webbs did not want to lose the allusion to the Paris École Libre des Sciences Politiques and the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, so that political sciences had to find a place in the name.

Furthermore, Dahrendorf notes (1995, 21) that in the beginning all classes were given in the evening as a means of pursuing its object of professional education:

Students would not be prepared especially for any degree, but attendance would be useful for Civil Service examinations as well as those of the Institute of Bankers, the London Chamber of Commerce, and others.

Although Sciences Po continued to have as one, but not the only one, of its roles to prepare students for entry into diplomacy and the higher civil service, this eventually ceased to be a major role of the LSE, whereas the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia became a graduate school in the social sciences, one of whose departments was political science (called at Columbia at the time Public Law and Government).

Political science, as we knew it after about 1900, emerged first in the United States.⁷¹ Its emergence was part of what Hughes (1958, 66–67) has called the major ideas of the 1890s, one of which was “to penetrate behind the fictions of political action…[to the] actual wielders of power.” Crick (1959, 37–38) indicates how this idea was developed:

The theories of a necessary progress and of a therapeutic science of society both appeared upon the scene. They were to result in a new split between political theory and political practice; a predilection to psychological explanation, and an antagonism to historical and philosophical explanation….They were to furnish added conditions…for the emergence of a unique type of philosophy, pragmatism, and of a largely unsystematized but increasingly influential positivism.

The positivist and presentist orientation of the founders of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1903 represented a break both with history and economics on the one hand and with the civil-service training orientation of Burgess. As Gunnell argues (2006, 481), the principal reason to break with history and economics was not, however, method but a concern about “the relationship between social science and politics.”

The founders of the APSA were interested, as were their predecessors, in achieving “an effective practical role for social science, but they were also rejecting the stance of Kathedersozialisten” (Gunnell, 2006, 481). They were trying to do exactly what Weber and Tönnies would try to do in 1909 in the establishment of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. In taking this path, the American political scientists, like the German sociologists, were approaching what Dahrendorf calls (1995, v) the Sydney Webb fault line “between wanting to know the causes of things and wanting to change things.”

The way to navigate the fault line was centrist liberalism, an option Lowi suggests (1985, ix) was particularly evident in the United States, and within the United States, in political science:

National government in the United States, emerging late and slowly, built nevertheless of liberal lines. So did the social sciences, especially political science….Rejecting the Right and the Left, liberalism avoided judging the morality of conduct or of capitalism. Liberal government could be justified by concerning itself with conduct deemed harmful only in its consequences. Social science could analyze such a system and also serve such a system by concerning itself with hypotheses about conduct and its consequences or, correlatively, conduct and its causes. This helps explain why political science and the emerging national government both has such an affinity for science.

THE NON-WESTERN WORLD

The institutionalization of history and the three nomothetic disciplines—economics, sociology, and political science—in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth took the form of university disciplines wherein the Western world studied itself, explained its own functioning, the better to control what was happening. I say the Western world, but in practice, as we have noted, 95 percent of the scholarship was located in just five countries—Great Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Italy—and concerned primarily those five countries. The last 5 percent was mostly about Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Russia, Iberia, and to a very small extent Latin America.

Since we are talking of a period in which the Western world, and particularly the five countries, dominated the rest of the world—politically, economically, and culturally—this should be no surprise. Still, the rest of the world was a matter of some concern to the powerful of the world, who wished to know how best to control the “others” over whom they held sway. To control, one must understand, at least minimally. So, again, it is no surprise that academic specialties emerged to produce the desired knowledge.

The rest of the world was, however, divided into two parts politically—a division that came to be designated by often inexact terminology. Analysts sometimes spoke of colonies and semicolonies—a distinction between those zones under direct colonial rule by a “European” power and those that were still nominally independent but subject to considerable European domination. As we shall see, this mode of categorizing particular places created analytic boxes that had to be transgressed if one were to read the situation accurately. Nevertheless, we can begin by noting that a discipline called anthropology emerged in this period, and it dealt largely with areas that were either colonies or special zones within the metropolitan powers' home territory. A second discipline, called Orientalism, dealt in this period largely (but not exclusively) with the semicolonies.

These two “disciplines” were entirely separate from each other, with rare exceptions. Indeed, even in the twenty-first century, few social scientists see the two “disciplines” as even vaguely connected with each other, much less two variants on a set of common themes. Nonetheless, common themes there were. The first was that both disciplines dealt with the “rest” of the world, those that were not part of the dominant pan-European zones in the late nineteenth century. The second theme was that the peoples with whom they were dealing were not considered to be “modern“—meaning that they did not have the technology and the machinery that was thought to be constitutive of modern “progress.”⁷²Consequently, it was not believed that they shared the values of modernity as these values were imagined and practiced in the pan-European world. And the third common theme was the assertion that these countries/zones/peoples had no history, meaning that they had not changed, developed, progressed over historical time.

There was, however, one important difference between the peoples dealt with under one or the other label. Anthropologists dealt with populations that were relatively small, both in their numbers and in the size of the area they inhabited. These peoples, with rare exceptions, had no written documents at the time they came under colonial rule. They all spoke a single language, which was normally not shared with other neighboring peoples. Their gods also were not shared. From the perspective of their European conquerors, these were denominated “primitive” peoples, strange in every way, whose modes of living and thinking were virtually incomprehensible to the ordinary European.

Orientalists dealt with quite different kinds of peoples. They dealt with peoples or “civilizations” that were large both in their numbers and in the size of the area that they inhabited. They did have written texts, albeit ones that were difficult for Europeans to decipher. There also seemed to be a shared common language over a large area, or at least a lingua franca. Hence, the number of speakers was very large. They seemed in addition to have a single dominant religion in this large zone, a religion large enough that, in the nineteenth century, Western scholars deemed it to be a “world religion.” And they clearly had a history, but one that Western scholars would deem somehow “frozen” and therefore one that had not evolved into “modernity.” Upon inspection, it turned out that all these large, “frozen” civilizations were the product of large, bureaucratic empires that existed at some time in the past, what we have been terming “world-empires.” It was these bureaucratic empires that gave rise to a common language or lingua franca, a common “world religion,” and common cultural traditions. Many, but not all, of these zones were still coherent enough politically and militarily to be able to resist direct colonization.

As a result of this crucial difference between the two kinds of non-European zones, two different intellectual questions formed the basis of disciplinary enquiry, and two different practical methodologies of research came to be utilized. The anthropologists sought to decipher how the peoples they studied—peoples that they began to treat almost uniformly as “tribes“—actually functioned. That is, they sought to discover the rational bases of behavior under the outer layer of what seemed to most Europeans to be irrational behavior. In this sense, the quest for the hidden rationality of behavior was not all that different from what other social scientists thought they were doing when studying “modern” peoples. It was a quest that derived from Enlightenment visions of the appropriate role of social science.

But how could they do this? Initially, there was nothing for the anthropologists to read, and they were unable even to communicate orally with such peoples, at least at the outset of their work. The solution to this problem came in the form of a practical method called participant observation. This method required field-work. The anthropologists typically went to live among a particular people for some time. They sought to locate persons they thought of as “linguists“—that is, some members of the group who had acquired, for some reason, command of a European language. These persons would become not only intermediaries between the anthropologist and their people but also interpreters (both literally of the language and intellectually of the culture).

The anthropologists would seek to learn everything about their people, whose culture was defined as a single, integrated whole that was unchanging, in order eventually to write an ethnography of this people. Once done, the anthropologists became cultural and political interpreters of their people to the European world in general and quite often to the colonial authorities in particular. This is, of course, a highly idealized picture of what occurred, but this was the standard description of the activity at the time,

The Orientalists had a quite different concern and a quite different practical methodology. Since they were dealing with what they termed a “high civilization,” but one that did not seem to them modern in the sense that European civilization saw itself as modern, the most obvious and immediate issue to resolve was to explain why this “high” civilization never made the evolutionary leap that Europeans were presumed to have made into modernity. This was, of course, a highly self-congratulatory question for Europeans to pose. It presumed superiority and sought less to demonstrate its reality (for it rather was a largely unquestioned premise) than to explain its origins.

The question was how this was to be done. Since there did exist a written literature, it seemed hardly urgent to engage in the kind of fieldwork that was the pride of anthropologists. Still, this literature was written in a language quite different from the languages native to the European Orientalists. Learning the language required a long training, especially since these texts were for the most part ancient and many of them were religious texts. The needed skills were largely those of philology, and the locus of research was primarily a limited number of major libraries. To be sure, the Orientalists shared the same basic premise of social science as the anthropologists. They, too, wished to explicate the rational underpinnings of seemingly irrational behavior and philosophical argument. They, too, wished to become interpreters of their civilization to the European world in general and quite often to its political authorities in particular.

The desire of the anthropologists and the Orientalists to explicate the underlying rationality of their tribe or their civilization led them almost inevitably to be centrist liberals in their implicit ideology. They sought to ameliorate the rough edges of the relations of the powerful to the weaker, while aiding the powerful to govern their charges and/or deal with other civilizations more intelligently and more effectively.⁷³ They abetted reforms that served to limit conflict and above all radical subversion of the status quo of pan-European geopolitical power.

Orientalism was heir to a long tradition in the Catholic Church. Already in the Middle Ages, there were monks and other Christian scholars who were studying the languages and texts of the Muslim world and of China, as part of the effort to evangelize these zones. Such scholarship got a new (and often more secular) impulsion in the late eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth century, when European expansion began to embrace all the different parts of the Asian continent.

The study of a reified Egyptian civilization—Egyptology—began in the second half of the eighteenth century. Two political events were, however, critical to the serious development of Egyptology as an Orientalist subdiscipline. One was Napoleon's unsuccessful invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the other was the Greek war for independence in 1823. Napoleon's invasion was in the end abortive politically (see Cole, 2008). But he had had the idea to bring with him a whole group of scholars to study Egypt. One major result was a multivolume work called La Description de l'Egypte, a compendium of articles on the history, architecture, flora, and fauna of Egypt, plus maps and engravings.

This monumental work was perhaps less important in the creation of Egyptology than the incarnation of Greece as the fount of Western civilization—a concept so common today that it is hard to remember that this was not always a given of even Western perceptions of history. Martin Bernal, in Black Africa, the book in which he argued for the Afro-Asiatic roots of (Western) classical civilization, entitled volume 1 (1987) The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985.

The point he was making is the counterpoint. It was Greece, as opposed to both Rome and Egypt, that represented for the Romantic movement “models of liberty” (p. 289). An overly favorable picture of Egypt might pose a threat to “the uniqueness of Greek civilization and that of Europe as a whole” (p. 269). When the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire in 1823, European Romantics led the call for solidarity, proclaiming it a “struggle between European youthful vigor and Asian and African decadence, corruption and cruelty” (p. 291).

It is not important here to analyze the scholarly controversy that Bernal's book has aroused.⁷⁴ What is undeniable is that Egyptology developed in the nineteenth century as an Orientalist subdiscipline, as a study of the other. The largely deprecatory picture of Egyptian civilization that dominated the nineteenth-century literature (and indeed that of the twentieth century) corresponded to the geopolitics and geoculture of the world-system of that period.⁷⁵

It also seems clear that the emergence of Classics as a field of study, a discipline, in British (and then American) universities reflected the thrust of centrist liberalism in the geoculture. Classics represented on the one hand, in its emphasis on a close reading of the literature, a break from the stagnant curriculum of traditional Oxbridge education. But at the same time it also represented a rejection of the radicalism bred by the French Revolution. It was a sort of “third way.”⁷⁶

Egypt was nonetheless secondary, in the emergent discipline of Orientalism, to India. In 1818, James Mill published the first edition of A History of British India. In it, Mill developed the thesis of Oriental despotism as something quite different from European enlightened despotism, drawing quite negative portraits of both Hindus and Muslims in British India, both seen as unchanging peoples (Bannerji, 1995, 60–61). The book was highly successful, republished in ever-expanded form. It led to his appointment in a senior position in India House, of which he eventually became the director.

But, despite Mill and despite the fact that India became a British colony, it was not Great Britain that became the prime locus of the study of Indian civilization. Rather, it was Germany. Dietmar Rothermund, himself a late twentieth-century German historian of India, attributes the origin of the German romantic “quest for India” to the struggle of German poets and playwrights in the late eighteenth century “against the supremacy of French style and classical literary precedent in Germany.” He notes the translation by Georg Fischer in 1791 of the Indian epic Shakuntala, which “created a veritable sensation in literary circles” and had a “much more enthusiastic reception than the English translation by William Jones in Great Britain” (1986, vii-viii). Indology served the German rejection of Anglo-French universalism.⁷⁷

German Indology took a heavily linguistic form. The discovery of the links among that vast group of languages we today call the Indo-European family can be traced to the late eighteenth century. Although there had been suggestions of the existence of such linguistic links by both an English Jesuit and an Italian merchant in the sixteenth century, by a Dutch linguist in the seventeenth century, and by two French Jesuits in the eighteenth century, these suggestions got little purchase until Thomas Jones, founder of the Asiatick Society, proposed it in his presidential address in 1786. The actual term Indo-European was subsequently coined by Thomas Young in 1813 (Decharneux, 2000, 13).

In Germany, Indo-European was, however, labeled Indo-Germanic (Shapiro, 1981), and German research emphasized the search for an Urspache (an “original language”), sometimes associated with a search for an Urheimat (an “original homeland”). This search could take on romantic notions of linguistic purity, making of Sanskrit the oldest language and German the closest language to Sanskrit in terms of its structure (Mawet, 2000, 62). This is what Rothermund (1986, 53) considers the “conservative” version of German Indology, one “which saw in the most ancient past the manifestation of the greatest purity and perfection of language and religion,” one whose object was “to penetrate the veil of later decay and corruption so as to reach the fountainhead of original revelation.”

Nonetheless, the most famous of Germany's nineteenth-century Indologists, Max Muller, was also infused with the liberal optimism of evolutionary doctrines, and he conceived of the possibility of a religious evolution of Hinduism that would bring it closer to Christianity. He was personally close to the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, a group that actually pursued such a process, as did comparable movements in other Asian religions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Rothermund, 1986, 54).

Of course, not all German scholars were Indologists. It was precisely in opposition to Orientalist views that Hegel laid such great emphasis on the idea that it was only in ancient Greece that mankind began in seiner Heimat zu sein (“to live in its homeland”) (Droit, 2000, 91). As with Egypt, so with India. It was point-counterpoint of European universalism versus the frozen civilizations of the Orient, which might evolve, but only under Western tutelage. It was therefore no accident that German (indeed all Western) nineteenth-century scholarship concerning India and other Asian countries took no interest in the contemporary history of these countries.⁷⁸

China is in some ways the most interesting case of the tilt that the Orientalist perception involved. The image of China as an old, wealthy, far-off civilization was one that had aroused European admiration for a long time. But somewhere in the mid-to late eighteenth century, the image was inverted: “[T]he Chinese were now condemned for what the Enlightenment had considered admirable, their stability” (Bernal, 1987, 240). China became, especially in the period after the First Opium War (1839–1842), “a civilization conventionally interpreted…as archetypically ‘static' and ‘traditional' “ (Blue, 1999, 94–95).⁷⁹

Here, too, Germany seemed to take the lead. But unlike in the case of India, German thinkers seemed unforgiving on all sides. Herder led the way, arguing that China was “the definitely dated and localized product of the Eastern Mongolians,…a mere petrification of an ancient way of life,…a hibernating marmot and…an embalmed Egyptian mummy” (Rose, 1951, 58).

Hegel was slightly more generous. Rose (1951, 59) summarizes Hegel's views:

The Chinese State was an admirable patriarchy and a well-functioning bureaucracy, but it also represented an unbearable despotism….Hegel could not find any free spirit, inward religiosity, deep feeling, or high ethical standards in China. In their place, the dead hand of abstract reasoning had arrested all life by its withering touch. China had no share in history. “It has always remained what it was.”

Finally, Gobineau, although deeply opposed to progress and modernity, nonetheless found reasons for disdaining China, if reasons that were virtually the opposite of those of other Western thinkers. Blue (1999, 134) characterizes Gobineau's analysis in this way:

[Mediocrity, despotism, and lack of freedom] were for him typical characteristics of “the masses” and “Revolution.” China was thus a striking example of democratic despotism and “progress” as he conceived it, and of the consequences he saw flowing from these—namely, slavery, stagnation, and eventual doom.

Thus, by different particular arguments but by similar logics, Orientalism as a mode of interpreting the “high civilizations“—those latter-day descendants or continuations of historic world-empires—combined to produce an image of these zones as frozen civilizations that always remained what they were. They were, in Hegel's language, zones that could advance further only through some intervention by the European world.

The anthropologists in many ways had an easier task in demonstrating their arguments. They dealt with peoples who had no written documents and whose technology was by and large beneath the level of that of nineteenth-century Europe. As Hinsley (1981, 29) says of the study of Native Americans in the United States: “The central, nagging, political and religious dilemmas were these: Are these peoples in any sense our brothers? By what right can we claim their land as our own?”

The early history of anthropology turned around a debate over so-called poly-genesis—the concept we discussed previously: that Europeans and other peoples were not part of a single species. In 1910, John Lynton Myers (1916, 69) gave a presidential address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He sought to explain why polygenesis, by then a totally abandoned idea, had ever been taken seriously. He starts by noting that it was never seriously suggested before the late eighteenth century. Then something changed. That something was the emergence of a strong abolitionist movement in Great Britain:

The slave-owning eighteenth century knew quite well that Negroes and Chinamen were no more Homo ferus than they were chimpanzees, and justified enslavement as Aristotle had justified it of old, on the ground that, if anything, it was to the advantage of the slave.

But it was no accident that the generation that first doubted, on the political side, the legitimacy of white man's ownership of black man, and translated these doubts into practice and acts of Parliament, was precisely the generation which first doubted on the theoretic side, whether white men and black men were of the same blood. As long as slavery was regarded as justifiable morally, no one troubled to justify it anthropologically. But no sooner was the naturalness of slavery called into question by the Abolitionists…than the slave-owners raised the previous question: “Granted that I am my brother's keeper, and granted that this means I may not be his master, yet is this man, this black brother, in any true sense my brother at all? Is he not, on the face of him, only an exceptionally domesticable animal, and of different lineage from mine?” ⁸⁰

Polygenesis was a crude racist idea. It was used, even inside Great Britain, as an argument to deny the suffrage to Celts (Rainger, 1978, 69). But by the late nineteenth century, it lost out within the community of anthropologists to an older, alternative version of the “primitive“—one linked to the basic concept of progress.⁸¹

John Locke (1965, 383) had said in 1690: “In the beginning all the world was America.” In the mid-eighteenth century, in France and in Scotland, the concept of multiple stages of mankind's evolution was put forth as a theoretical position, notably by Jacques Turgot and Adam Smith. In their presentation, the Native Americans provided “a plausible working hypothesis about the basic characteristics of the ‘first' or ‘earliest' stage of socio-economic development” (Meek, 1976, 128).

This hypothesis fit in better with the Zeitgeist than did polygenesis. It also fit in better with the emergent distinction between “natural history” and “science“—part of the more general divorce we have noted between philosophy and science. Whereas previously the two terms “had meant pretty much the same thing: knowledge about the natural world” (Merrill, 1989, 12), they now signified separate enterprises, as science came to be divided into separate disciplines. As Merrill notes, now “[a] naturalist could still study all of nature…; a scientist only studied part of it….Natural history remained accessible to amateurs, while (science) became the province of professionals.”

It is clear that anthropology, in adopting its emphasis on ethnographic delineation, was a version of natural history centered on human groups. And, of course, it remained open to amateurs for quite a while before finally becoming, in the early twentieth century, a domain reserved for professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, anthropology still depended on the work of travelers—sometimes scientists aboard naval expeditions, sometimes explorers sent by geographic societies, sometimes members of colonial bureaucracies, sometimes missionaries, sometimes agents engaged in philanthropic tasks.

The crucial transition was in the definition of what constituted the “primitive.” What up to the mid-nineteenth century has been “considered a social or artistic condition of simplicity” (and therefore analyzable as a biological phenomenon) “was now redefined as a particular cultural state of existence” (Betts, 1982, 67). Once that shift was made, anthropology could become a discipline with a clear object of study.

Trouillot (1991, 40) captures the heart of it: “Anthropology did not create the savage. Rather, the savage was the raison d'être of anthropology.” Two famous statements made in 1871 set the stage for this. The Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso said: “For the dreams of the theologians and the phantasms of the metaphysicians, [we have substituted] a few dry facts…but they are facts” (cited in Zagatti, 1988, 24). And that same year Edward Taylor put forward his proposition in Primitive Culture (1920, 410) that “the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science.”

The outlines of the profession were now set. It would be holistic and descriptive, producing idiographic ethnographies based on fieldwork. It would be interpretative of the rationality of “primitive” peoples. It would stand for the better integration of such peoples into the modern world, for their benefit and for the benefit of the European authorities that ruled over them. And this it would remain until the anticolonial revolutions of the post-1945 era undid the basic geopolitical and hence geocultural framework within which anthropology carved its niche in the structures of knowledge.

The Argument Restated

This book is about the modern world-system in the long nineteenth century, which conventionally runs from 1789 to 1914. There are endless numbers of books that have discussed the basic characteristics of this period. There exists what we may think of as a conventional view, shared by scholars of varying ideological and/or scholarly views.

It is seen as the century of multiple revolutions—the industrial revolution, the scientific-technological revolution, the popular revolutions (and notably the French Revolution). The usual view is that the combination of all these revolutions is what created, or was labeled as, modernity. Begun in the long nineteenth century, modernity would continue into the twentieth century.

The view of this work, as expressed throughout the whole of the four volumes written up to now, is different. Take first the concept of “the industrial revolution.” For most scholars, it occurred first in England or Great Britain—the most common dates are sometime between 1760 and 1840—and then was copied or emulated in a number of other countries in continental Europe and North America. We have explained at length in volume 3 why we think that this is incorrect.

We consider that what occurred in that period in England was a cyclical upward increase in the mechanization of industrial production, one that had occurred a number of times previously and would occur again a number of times later. We consider also that it was a process of the world-economy as a whole, one that accrued to the particular advantage of Great Britain because of its defeat of France in the struggle to become the new hegemonic power of the world-system.

For a long time, the dominant view of the French Revolution was the so-called social interpretation, which argued that the Revolution represented the overthrow of feudal forces by the bourgeoisie, enabling France to become a “capitalist” country. In the last forty years, this interpretation has been challenged by one in which the French Revolution was seen as an attempt to pursue a liberal, parliamentary path, one that went awry.

Once again, we have disagreed with both views. In volume 3, we explained why the French Revolution could not be thought of as a bourgeois revolution that installed “capitalism,” since we considered that France had long since become part and parcel of the capitalist world-economy. Rather, we saw the French Revolution as in part a last attempt to defeat England in the struggle to become the hegemonic power, and in part an “antisystemic” (that is, anticapitalist) revolution in the history of the modern world-system, one that essentially failed.

We have argued that the modern world-system has two major cyclical processes. One is that of the Kondratieff cycles, more or less fifty to sixty years in length—cycles of expansion and stagnation in the world-economy as a whole. The second major cyclical process is a much slower one. It is of the rise and decline of hegemonic powers in the interstate system. We explained in volume 2 how the United Provinces (today's Netherlands) achieved the status of hegemonic power in the mid-seventeenth century. And we explained in volume 3 how Great Britain was able to become the hegemonic power following its defeat of France in the revolutionary-Napoleonic “world war” of 1792–1815.

Finally, we recounted in volume 3 the second great geographical expansion of the functioning boundaries of the capitalist world-economy. We explained the processes by which four zones that had been essentially outside the capitalist world-economy (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, and West Africa) were pulled inside and transformed—economically, politically, and socially—as a result of this inclusion.

Hence, when we arrived at telling the story of the long nineteenth century, we based it on the analyses made in the first three volumes. The modern world-system had been a capitalist world-economy since the long sixteenth century. Great Britain was the hegemonic power in the mid-nineteenth century. The effective boundaries of the modern world-system had been expanded, although they did not yet include the totality of the globe. The third and last expansion would occur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were stories we did not need to retell in this volume. (We explained in the preface why we were postponing the story of the third and final expansion of the modern world-system until volume 5.)

Instead, we chose to concentrate in this volume on what we thought was novel in the long nineteenth century. We label that newness the “triumph of centrist liberalism.” Of course, we are not the first to note the strength of liberalism as an ideology in the nineteenth century. But our approach to this issue is somewhat different from that of other scholars. This required, among other things, reviewing the difficult terminological history of the term liberalism and the confusion that its ambiguous usages has made for cogent analysis of ideological reality.

To pursue this task, we needed to argue, first of all, that there was something that had not yet been achieved in the historical development of the modern world-system: the creation of what we are calling its geoculture. By a geoculture, we mean values that are very widely shared throughout the world-system, both explicitly and latently.

We have argued that, until the long nineteenth century, there had been a disjunction between the political economy of the world-system and its discursive rhetoric. In this volume, we have argued that it was the cultural impact of the French Revolution that made it imperative to overcome this disjunction by the development of the three main ideologies of the modern world-system—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism.

We have sought to explain how it is that liberalism has always been a centrist doctrine, neither of the left nor of the right. We have argued that none of the three ideologies was in practice antistatist, although all three pretended they were. And we have tried to demonstrate the ways in which centrist liberalism “tamed” the other two ideologies, transforming them into virtual avatars of centrist liberalism. In that way, we could argue that by the end of the long nineteenth century, centrist liberalism was the prevailing doctrine of the world-system's geoculture.

We develop in detail how centrist liberalism imposed its ideology in three crucial spheres. The first was the creation of “liberal states” in the core regions of the world-system, in which Great Britain and France became the initial and leading exemplars. The second was the attempt to transform the doctrine of citizenship from being one of inclusion to being one of exclusion. We illustrated this by reference to three crucial groups that were excluded—women, the working classes (propertyless and often illiterate), and ethnic/racial “minorities.” The third was the emergence of the historical social sciences as reflections of liberal ideology and modes of enabling the dominant groups to control the dominated strata.

We have put forth this analysis with as much empirical evidence as we could amass, and with whatever theoretical arguments we could assemble. The case is offered as one that better fits the totality of the world social reality than alternate modes of explaining the long nineteenth century.