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The Expansion of Europe and the Spirit Of Capitalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Theodore K. Rabb
Theodore K. Rabb
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The argument presented here rests on three assumptions. The first is that, at least in commercial terms, a capitalist system was in operation in Europe by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its features included a well-developed structure of international exchange, complex trade patterns, sophisticated methods of organization and finance, a realization of the importance of ‘putting money out to work’, and a versatility of mercantile activity that was a product of the most spectacular boom, expansion of trade, and growth of the merchant community that Europe had ever seen.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 1974 , pp. 675 - 689
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 The argument that there was also a ‘first’ industrial revolution has been made by Nef, J. U., Industry and Government in France and England, 1540–1640 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univer sity Press, 1957 - first published 1940)Google Scholar, especially pp. 1 and 145–8. A different approach can be found in Wilson, Charles, England's Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), ch. IV, pp. 66–88.Google Scholar

2 A good summary of the features of sixteenth-century commerce can be found in the chapter ‘Capitalisme ou Capitalistes?’ of Pierre Jeannin's excellent survey, Les Marchands au XVIe Stècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), pp. 81–94.Google Scholar This book has been translated into English as Merchants of the 16th Century by Paul Fitting off (New York: Harper, 1972).Google Scholar

3 See, e.g., the most widely used recent general history, Parry's, J. H.The Age of Reconnaissance (Cleveland and New York: World, 1963)Google Scholar, where Oldenbarnevelt is mentioned only for his execu tion, and Le Maire and Smythe do not appear at all. The view that’European expansion was essentially a commercial venture is fully elaborated in Cipolla, Carlo M., Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (London: Collins, 1965), p. 134 and the long note on pp. 134–5.Google Scholar

4 See Jeannin, , loc. cit.Google ScholarVerlinden, Charles, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization, trans. Freccero, Yvonne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar, denies that the expansion and capitalism were related phenomena, but convincingly contradicts himself on pp. 72–3.

5 Hakluyt, Richard, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1903), I, lxvi.Google Scholar

6 The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand, trans, and ed. Keen, Benjamin (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959), p. 57.Google Scholar

7 Cited in Parr, C. M., So Noble a Captain: the Life and Times of Ferdinand Magellan (New York: Crowell, 1953), p. 245. Parr uses the word ‘armada’ where I use ‘fleet’, which seems less confusing.Google Scholar

8 La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo, trans. and ed. Kelly, Celsus (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1966 [Second Series, No. CXXVI]), I, 261–2.Google Scholar

9 Further Selections from the Tragic History of the Sea, 1559–1565, trans, and ed. Boxer, C. R. (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1968 [Second Series, No. CXXXII]), p. v. See below, n. 22.Google Scholar

10 See Rabb, Theodore K., Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 60 and 152–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See Andrews, K. R., Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585–1603 (Cambridge: University Press, 1964), passim.Google Scholar

12 See Rabb, , Enterprise and Empire, pp. 19–101.Google Scholar

13 Jeannin, , Marchands, p. 127.Google Scholar

14 See Bradford, Ernie, A Wind from the North: The Life of Henry the Navigator (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), especially pp. 67–8, where there is a fine analysis of Azurara's explanation of the impulse that led Henry to exploration.Google Scholar

15 Maynarde, Thomas, Sir Francis Drake His Voyage, 1595, ed. Cooley, W. D. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1849 [First Series, No. iv]), p. 19.Google Scholar

16 Columbus, , p. 55.Google Scholar

17 Boxer, C. R., The Dutch Seaborne Empire (New York: Knopf, 1965), especially ch. v, pp. 113–54.Google Scholar

18 See, for examples, Rabb, , Enterprise and Empire, pp. 40–1Google Scholar, and Mims, S. L., Colbert's West India Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), pp. 83, 150, 182, 269.Google Scholar

19 ‘New Britain’, reprinted in Brown, Alexander, The Genesis of the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), I, 264.Google Scholar

20 Mims, , Colbert, pp. 65–6.Google Scholar

21 Ibid. p. 63 n.

22 Tragic History, p. v. See above, n. 9. Boxer is of course referring to far more than a small group of entrepreneurs. It might be worth repeating, therefore, what was emphasized above: that the personality and outlook that animated the leaders of the expansion must be derived from all its participants, and that the result allows us to characterize the qualities which enabled the capitalist system of the time to attain its greatest success.

23 Rabb, , Enterprise and Empire, passim, especially pp. 58–66.Google Scholar

24 Condon, Thomas J., New York Beginnings: The Commercial Origins of New Netherland (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 145.Google Scholar

25 The point is well made by Grassby, R. B., ‘Social Status and Commercial Enterprise under Louis XIV’, Economic History Review, second ser., 14 (1961), pp. 19–38Google Scholar; and Elliott, J. H., ‘The Decline of Spain’, in Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660, ed. Aston, Trevor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 167–93, especially pp. 184–7.Google Scholar

26 See Marchant, Alexander, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500–1580 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942 [The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series LX, No. 1]).Google Scholar

27 Morgan, Edmund S., ‘The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607–18’, The American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 595–611, 602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Ibid. p. 596.

29 Marchant, , Brazil, ch. in, pp. 48–80.Google Scholar It is interesting in this connexion that elsewhere Professor Marchant has summed up colonial Brazilian society as follows: ‘most of the people lived an everyday life with a pre-capitalistic or even non-capitalistic mentality. The emphasis on personal and family rather than rationalized economic motivation [despite enormous capitalistic profits from sugar and tobacco] continued to be preferred as a basis for society long after the end of the colonial period.’ See his ‘Colonial Brazil’ in Portugal and Brazil: An Introduction, ed. Livermore, H. V. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 299.Google Scholar A similar picture of colonists soon abandoning hard labour can be found in Lockhart, James, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968)Google Scholar, especially chs. x and xi and pp. 227–31.

30 Parry, J. H., The Spanish Seaborne Empire (New York: Knopf, 1966), passim; Mims, Colbert, ch. xiii, pp. 281–309.Google Scholar

31 Mims, , Colbert, p. 65.Google Scholar

32 Condon, , New Netherland, p. 102.Google Scholar This complaint evidently reflected a genuine problem; as Dr Condon puts it, ‘many immigrants … spent much of their time murmuring against the com pany and doing as little as possible in the way of service’ (ibid.). One contemporary noted that colonists ‘have to be kept at work by force’ (ibid.).

33 Winthrop's Journal: “History of New England”, ed. Hosmer, J. K. (New York: Scribner's, 1908), 1, 112.Google Scholar Another Puritan, William Bradford, described in dire terms the Plymouth colony's bouts with starvation and their expeditions to find corn - presumably because they, like the Vir ginians, were not working in the fields: see Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Morison, S. E. (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 99 ff.Google Scholar

34 A good summary, centred on a comparison with other civilization, can be found in European Expansion and the Counter-Example of Asia, 1300–1600, ed. Levenson, J. R. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967).Google Scholar

35 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (New York: Scribner's, 1958Google Scholar; first German edition 1904–1905; first edition of this translation, 1930), especially chs. 11 and v. Weber's view of the qualities that were essential to capitalist success was as follows: ‘It has been neither dare-devil and unscrupulous speculators, economic adventurers such as we meet at all periods of economic history, nor simply great financiers who have carried through this change [from traditional to modern qualities, which was] … so decisive for the penetration of the economic life with the new spirit. On the contrary, they were men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles’ (p. 69).

36 Expansion, ed. Levenson, , passim, but especially p. 58.Google Scholar It could be argued that various separate forces were at work - a little bit of early capitalism, a little bit of nationalism, a litde bit of ‘medieval’ zeal, and so on. The whole purpose of the present inquiry, however, is to indicate that all these drives were inextricably entwined, that one cannot define capitalism in its early modern form without reference to an amalgam of attributes which only later may have become distinct and unconnected phenomena. Economic activity was not yet a noticeably independent compartment within society. A good discussion of how long it took before such essential modern institutions as the payment of interest and the organization of large corporations were accepted can be found in Riemersma, J. C., Religious Factors in Early Dutch Capitalism, 1550–1650 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).Google Scholar If it be claimed that nineteenth-century capitalists sometimes acred no differently than their predecessors, squandering vast sums, for example, on disastrous railroads, two responses seem in order: first, that in modern times the likelihood of windfalls is more predictable, and the relative importance of ’risk’ venture is better understood; second, that foolhardiness has been, at most, a minor aspect of modern commercial and colonizing enterprises. One need only examine the activities of some of the great banks of the nineteenth century to appreciate the change that has taken place; see, for instance, Winn, Peter, ’Uruguay and British Expansion, 1880–93’ (unpub. Ph.D. Thesis, Cambridge University, 1971)Google Scholar. Above all, it is clear that the cluster of attributes (beyond the risk-taking alone) that has been described here was not present to the same degree in nineteenth-century commerce.

37 Boxer, C. R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 1.Google Scholar Contrast the more questioning treatment of the same quotation by Elliott, J. H., The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), pp. 1 ft.Google Scholar To be fair, though, it should be pointed out that Boxer's, Race Relations in the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1825 (Oxford: University Press, 1963)Google Scholar was a major revisionist monograph, casting serious doubt on the traditional rosy view of Portugal's treatment of non-Europeans. Thus Boxer certainly belongs among those scholars cited in fn. 40, below, who have begun to undermine the heroic interpretation of the European expansion.

38 Parry, , Reconnaissance, pp. 322–6.Google Scholar

39 Ibid. p. 326.

40 See the various works by Cook, S. F. and Borah, Woodrow: The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610 (Berkeley: Ibero-Americana, 44, 1960), especially p. 48Google Scholar; The Population of the Mixteca Alta, 1520–1960 (Berkeley: Ibero-Americana, 50, 1968)Google Scholar; and Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), vol. 1.Google Scholar See, too, the studies by Curtin, Philip D.: The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), especially p. 286Google Scholar and his estimate (p. 87) that some 10 million slaves crossed the Adantic; and ‘Epidemiology and the Slave Trade’, Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 190–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Similar conclusions are reached by Anstey, Roger, Davies, K. G., and Sheridan, Richard in articles in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Engerman, Stanley and Genovese, Eugene (Princeton: University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming). The more subtle inhumanities perpetrated on North American Indians have been analysed in Wilcomb Wash burn, Red Man's Land, White Man's Law: A Study of the Past and Present Status of the American Indian (New York: Scribner's, 1971).Google Scholar Of all the recent books which, taken together, suggest that a fundamental reinterpretation of the expansion is beginning to crystallize, the most monumental is Magalhães-Godinho, Vitorino, L'Economie de I'Empire Portugais aux XVe et XVle Siècles (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1969).Google Scholar

41 Verlinden, , Modern Colonization, p. 74.Google Scholar