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Primitive Accumulation in the United States: The Interaction between Capitalist and Noncoapitalist Class Relations in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Rona S. Weiss
Rona S. Weiss
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics at lona College, New Rochelle, New York, 10801.
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Abstract

Capitalist relations do not develop “naturally,” nor are the preconditions for capitalism assured by the rise of markets alone. This paper takes seventeenth–century Massachusetts as a case in point. Class relations there were noncapitalist. A brief exploration of these class relations as well as their economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence will show how complex interaction between classes produced the conditions necessary for capitalism.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 77 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1982

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References

1 For further discussion of ancient relations see Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (New York, 1973), pp. 471–514.Google Scholar

2 For extensive bibliography and further development of this paper see Weiss, Rona, “The Development of the Market Economy in Colonial Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1981).Google Scholar

3 Akagi, Roy, The Town Proprietors of New England (Gloucester, 1963).Google Scholar

4 The author recognizes that some economic historians assume that feudalism did not exist in colonial New England. Feudalism is defined here as a particular class relation and form of surplus appropriation by way of rents. It may occur in many ways. Temporary indentured servitude was one such way; hereditary serfdom, with other traditional obligations, was another.Google Scholar

5 Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

6 Resnick, Stephen and Wolff, Richard, “The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe,” The Review of Radical Political Economy, 11 (Fall 1979), 3–22.Google Scholar

7 Farrand, Max, ed., The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts (1648; reprint ed., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1929), pp. 31–35.Google Scholar

8 Wertenbaker, T. J., The Puritan Oligarchy (New York, 1947).Google Scholar

9 For debates among Marxists on this issue, see Dobb, Maurice, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York, 1953);Google Scholar for a recent non-Marxist statement, Rothenberg, Winifred B., “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” this JOURNAL, 41 (06 1981), 283–314.Google Scholar

10 Powell, Sumner Chilton, Puritan Village (Middletown, Connecticut, 1963).Google Scholar