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The New World and the Rise of European Capitalist Hegemony: Some Historiographical Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

William A. Green
William A. Green
Affiliation:
Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
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Extract

The Columbian legacy also involved catastrophic demographic collapse and brutal exploitation. Within fifty years of Spanish occupation, native populations of the Caribbean archipelago verged on extinction; after eighty years, demographic decline in Mexico and Central America may have reached ninety percent. Although epidemiological transfers devastated American Indians, other aspects of inter-hemispheric biological exchange substantially enhanced the world's capacity to support human life. Eurasian grazing stock (goats, cattle, pigs, sheep) as well as animals of burden (horses and oxen) were introduced to the Americas while native American plants — not least, the potato, maize, tomato, various beans, and squash — were transferred to the Eastern Hemisphere. Precious metals were also conveyed to the Old World with effects that continue to be debated upon European economic growth, the distribution of wealth, the organization of power, and the conduct of war. Africa's portion of the Columbian legacy was to supply 5/6ths of the human migrants from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1775 and to experience the domestic transformations dictated by the Atlantic slave trade. Taken together, the convergence of continents in the age of discovery would appear to have shaped the modern world, as Abbe Raynal implied. But did it? From Raynal's time to our own, how have historians related these developments to the advent of modernity or to the establishment of Europe's global economic paramountcy? Did the development of the Old World hinge upon the discovery of the New?

Type
Articles: The Great Debate
Information
Itinerario , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , July 1986 , pp. 53 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1986

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References

Notes

1 Debates in the size of the contact population, 1492, have been summarized in Denevan, William M. ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison 1976)Google Scholar. For recent commentary on aspects ol that debate, see Henige, David, ‘On the Contact Population of Hispaniola. History as High Mathematics’, Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978) 217–237;CrossRefGoogle ScholarZambardino, R.A., ‘Critique of David Henige’s “On the Contact Population of Hispanolia. History as High Mathematics”, Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978) 700–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Crosby, Alfred W., Jr., The Columbian Exchange. Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn. 1972).Google Scholar

3 Emphasis on the role of Cellarius is evident in Barnes, Harry Elmer, A History of Historical Writing (Norman, Okla. 1937) 16Google Scholar; Butterfield, Herbert, Man on His Past. The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge 1955) 45–46;Google ScholarBarraclough, Geoffrey, History in a Changing World (Oxford 1955) 54–58.Google ScholarHay's, DenysAnnalists and Historians. Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London 1977) 90–91,Google Scholar stresses the Humanist sense of ‘that trough of time between the ancient and the new “moderns” (…)’. This is the verdict one must reach from Simone's, FrancoThe French Renaissance. Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France, transl. by H. Gaston Hall (London 1969).Google Scholar Protestant historians ol the early Reformation allirmed two concepts of the Erasmian Humanists: that classical literature and evangelical Christianity had declined at the same time (the 5th century) and were being revived at the same time (the Age of Reformation); and that monks, schoolmen, and the papal antichrist, were responsible for 1000 years of darkness. Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, Mass. 1948) 44–52Google Scholar.

4 Despite his late-life attention to universal history, Ranke remained committed to the primacy of politics and to the proposition that the ‘history of mankind manifests itself within the history of the nations themselves’. Ranke, Leopold von, The Theory and Practice of History. Iggers, Georg G. and Moltke, Konrad von eds. (New York 1973) 163.Google ScholarRanke's, position on periodization may be teased from his History of the Popes. Their Church and State (New York 1901), vol. 1,30–31,45Google Scholar.

5 Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860)Google Scholar; Symonds, John Addington, The Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (1875–1886).Google Scholar

6 Cambridge Modern History I, The Renaissance (London 1902)2–3;Google Scholar

7 Ibidem, 494–517.

8 Essentially, Marx's, Prelace to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)Google Scholar and Engels', Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1980) and part three of Anti-Duhring (1894).Google Scholar

9 Dobb identified the feudal mode of production with serfdom, an extractive system in which the producer, who retained the means of production, was coerced into transferring his surplus to an overlord in the form of labor services or payments in kind or money. Under the capitalist mode of production, labor became a commodity, and the producer sold his labor, under contract, to a capitalist who possessed the means of production.

10 As alien intruders upon the manorial economy, towns and traders drew both lords and serfs into a money economy, accelerated the rate ol circulation, encouraged the commutation of labor services for money payments, stimulated commodity production, and created both a loan market and a market in land. In effect, what Marx had called the feudal, mode of production had been dismantled from without by the corrosive effect of commerce.

11 Dobb and his supporters—notably Rodney Hilton, Kohachiro Takahashi, and Christopher Hill—rejected ihe notion that either towns or trade were antagonistic to the feudal mode of production. The feudal elite had generally encouraged the establishment of markets and towns within their jurisdictions, exploiting them to their own advantage. It made no difference that towns, trade, and the circulation of money rendered the commutation of labor services feasible: commutation in no way altered the exploitative relations of production. In fact, there was no necessary correlation between the commutation of labor services for money payments and expanding commerce. In England, commutations occurred first in the North, not in the commercial environs of London. More importantly, in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, the growth of an international grain trade was attended by the establishment of the second serfdom.

When feudal structures declined, Dobb argued, it was not the result of market forces, but of inherent inefficiencies of the feudal mode of production. The extractive demands of the lords upon the surplus product of the peasants increased throughout the high middle ages as a result of the natural growth of the nobility and their ever-expanding desire for luxuries, personal retainers, and military resources. As peasant population increased and poorer lands were brought under cultivation, agricultural yields diminished. By the 14th century, feudalism was in crisis. Intensely burdened serf producers were no longer capable, under existing technology, of satislying the expanding demands of the lordly class, and illegal flights from the manors had become a widespread problem. When the demographic shock of the: 14th and 15th centuries altered the bargaining relationship of peasants and lords, the ability of either landholders or the Crown to regulate the movements of peasants was sharply curtailed. In England, for example, villein tenure was transformed into copyhold as an inducement to keep peasants on the manors, and copyhold quickly became indistinguishable from free tenure. Serfdom was essentially dead in the West by 1500. Nevertheless, peasants were not released from all obligations to their lords, and the feudal mode of production continued to persist, albeit in a moribund state.

Dobb's, work provoked a debate with Patul Sweezy which appeared in Science and Society in the 1950sGoogle Scholar. The original exchanges along with subsequent contributions by a host of other scholars has been collected and edited by Hilton, Rodney under the title The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London 1978).Google Scholar

12 There is little evidence for this in Dobb's work, and he admits that such conclusions concerning these early industrial producers must be gained largely Irom inference.

13 Dobb makes this point despite his acknowledgment that the great London merchants also sided with Parliament.

14 Dobb, , Studies, 192.Google Scholar

15 He faithfully noted the extent to which great merchants in the 16th century had invested in land, undertaken enclosure, and hired wage labor; moreover, he clearly indicated how they had underwritten numerous industries (copper, brass, paper, alum, soap, mining and smelting) where new production techniques required outláys well beyond the resources of craftsmen. Dobb, , Studies, 124–135.Google Scholar

16 Dobb, ,studies [42, quoting Marx, capital, vol. III.Google Scholar

17 While Sweezy agreed that the feudal mode of production was an extractive system based on the manor and serfdom, he distinguished it as a morphological category from other modes of production by the purpose for which it was undertaken. It was production for use, he argued. While the feudal system of production was not static, it was ‘conservative and change resisting’. When change did occur, it was occasioned by the action of forces external to it, not by internal contradictions. Using Pirenne, Sweezy emphasized the corrosive effect of trade and towns on a system of production for use. The greater specialization occasioned by division of labor convinced lords that purchasing goods in the market was cheaper than making them on the estates, and with a growth in the use of money as a lubricant to exchange, acquisitiveness pervaded the old order. If there was a 14th-century crisis of feudalism in which the demands of the lords exceeded the productive capacity of the serfs, it was the market that evoked the lords’, extravagance. Moreover, if serfs deserted the estates in that crisis, it was to the towns that they fled.

18 , Hillon ed., Transition, 56.Google Scholar

19 Ibidem, 63.

20 The protracted debate oh the English case involving Christopher Hill, R.H. Tawney, H.R. Trevor-Roper, Lawrence Stone and others occupied two decades. Hcxter's, J.H. ‘Storm over the Gentry’, Encounter (05 1958), reproduced in his Reappraisals in History (New York 1961) andGoogle ScholarZagorin's, Perez ‘The Social Interpretation of the English Revolution’,Journal of Economic History 19 (1959),CrossRefGoogle Scholar defused the controversy in a fashion inimical to the interpretive interests of Marxists. The historiography of the civil war era has since migrated well beyond socialeconomic and class issues, with increasing focus on regional history. Doyle, William, Origins of the French Revolution (New York 1980)Google Scholar provides an excellent summary of the state of the question in French historiography. For an evaluation of recent Marxist writings on the French experience, see Ellis, G., ‘The “Marxist Interpretation” of the French Revolution’, English Historical Review 93 (1978) 353–376CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 History Workshop 6 (1978) 3.Google Scholar

22 Anderson, , Lineages, 18–19.Google Scholar

23 It was, he thought, the peculiar structure of European feudalism (with which only that of Japan has identity)—its high-level productivity in agriculture, market-centered landlordism, and urbanization—combined with its inheritance of Roman property law that made the unique transition to capitalism possible.

24 This line of argument is advanced more substantially by Dennis Flynn in a critique of Wallerstein. Analyzing the silver question in terms of Marxian concept ol surplus value, Flynn observes that Marx considered surplus value to be created in the process of production, not circulation. The surplus that accrued to Spain Irom her control of American mines must be measured in terms of the dillerential between the value expended in producing bullion and the value obtained from that bullion when it was exchangedf for commodities or services in the European marketplace. When an exchange occurred between Spaniards and members of another community in which silver was traded for industrial manufactures, that exchange was voluntary and, one must presume, in the interest of both parties. The surplus value which accrued to the Spanish because they controlled the production of American silver was not attached to the silver itself, an object of exchange; consequently surplus value was not passed on to Spain's trading partners in the process of circulation. It was retained by the Spanish who acquired it in the original act of production. The Spanish chose to use it to sustain a century of warfare. Much of that warfare involved Italy, the Low Countries, and England, where the most industrious populations were obliged to expend their resources in unproductive, or negatively productive, ways. Using this line of argument, one might conclude that the principal contribution of American bullion to the European world economy was that it permitted a poor country, Spain, to misappropriate the continent's human and physical resources. Flynn, Dennis, ‘Early Capitalism despite New World Bullion: An Anti-Wallerstein Interpretation of Imperial Spain’ (Typescript of a paper delivered at meetings of the Social Science Historical Association, Washington, D.C. 1983)Google Scholar.

25 , Hilton ed., Transition, 159–164.Google Scholar

26 Ibidem, 164.

27 The emphasis on class is stated by Brenner, Robert, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, Past and Present 70 (1976) 30–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This article served as the basis for a symposium on the subject in subsequent issues of Past and Present.

28 See for example, Brenner, Robert, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review 104 (1977) 25–92;Google ScholarO'Brien, Patrick, ‘European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery’, The Economic History Review 2nd ser., 35 (1982) 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 The concept of core-periphery has been adapted by Braudel to undergird a commercial model for historical change which is similar in orientation to that of Pirenne. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 3 vols. (New York 1981–1984).Google Scholar

30 This language from Stavrianos, L.S. is typical. See his The World Since 1500. A Global. History (Englewood Cliffs 1966) 3.Google ScholarMcNeill, William agrees: ‘1500 A.D. symbolizes the advent of the Modern era’, and the main theme of modern world history is the ‘rise of the West to [a] position of dominance all round the globe […]’ The Rise of the West (Chicago and London 1963) 565Google Scholar; A World History (New York 1979)295Google Scholar.

31 Wolf, , Europe and the People Without History, 3.Google Scholar

32 Ibidem, 5.

33 An anthropologist, Wolf is keen to demonstrate, mainly ii would seem for the benelit of other anthropologists, that history involves process. He employes the Marxian concept of mode of production to fathom that process, but his interpretation of the concept represents a more primitive economism than that of Dobb, one that has little integration with class, class struggle, or the climax of class struggle in revolutionary action. He rejects the Frank Wallcrstein position on the development of underdevelopment and views the advent of capitalism as correlatieve with the industrial revolution.

34 McNeill, William H., The Human Condition. An Ecological and Historical View (Princeton 1980) 53.Google Scholar See also Plagues and Peoples (New York 1976)Google Scholar.

35 The European Miracle. Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge 1981).Google Scholar