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Reserve Text: From Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Chapter 1: 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, Samuel Eisenstadt has defined
it this way:
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 ------------------------------ [16] |
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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:
------------------------------- 3. And it was a
mark of political wisdom to realize this. The first such sign of wisdom
was the refusal of Venice in the thirteenth century to take over the
political burdens of the Byzantine Empire. Mario Abrate observes:
4. Frederic C.
Lane, "The Economic Meaning of War & Protection" in Venice
and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 389. 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 50-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 ____________________________________________ But, says Mattingly,
this changes by the following century: "[I]n terms of commercial
intercourse, or military logistics, or even of diplomatic communication,
European distances were perceptibly greater in th., fourteenth than
in the sixteenth century.. .." [IbId, P 60]. 7 "When one
says 'world', with reference to the 16th century. in fact, usually one
means Europe by the world.. ..On a world scale, geographically speaking,
the Renaissance economy is a regional aspect, no doubt primordial, but
nonetheless regional." Michel Mollat, "Y a-t-il une "economie
de la Renaissance?", in Actes du Colloque sur la Renaissance
(Paris: Lib. Philosophique J. Vrin, 1958), 40. 9 Marc Bloch attacked
the basic confusion head on: "Clearly from the lact that a transaction
stipulates a price in monetary equivalents or in kind, one cannot legitimately
deduce, without more precise evidence, that the payment was really made
or not in cash. ... Just as the political institutions of feudalism, characterized by a profound weakening of the State, presumed nonetheless the memory and bore the traces of a past when the State had been strong, so the economy, even when exchange had become minimal never ended its attachment to a monetary schema, whose principles were inherited from preceding civilizations." "Economie-nature ou "economie-argent: un pseudo-dilemme," Annales d'histoire sociale, I, 1939,13-14. Bloch further states: [18] 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:
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 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 On the issue of
the "money-economy." see also M. M. Postan "Thus from
the point of view of English history, and even from that of medieval
and Anglo-Saxon history. the rise of the money economy in the sense
of its first appearance has no historical meaning Money was in use when
documented history began. and its rise cannot be adduced as an explanation
of any later phenomenon" "The Rise ofa Money Economy."
Economic History Review, XIV, 2. 1944. 127. 11 B. H Slicher
van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500-1850
(New York: St. 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 ----------------------------------------------------- The most prominent
characteristic of the professional merchant in his relation to the public
is not his custom of buying, but of selling. Yet the chapman (Kaufmann)
of the Middle Ages is named from the word for buying-kaufen.
In the State records of Otto III, for Dortmund from 990 to 1000 AD the
rmptores Trotmanniae, whose municipal laws, like those of Cologne and
Mainz, are said to serve as a model for other cities, are spoken of
in the ,ame connection as mercatores or negotiatorel in other records.
If the abbot of Reichenau in the year 1075 can with a stroke of the
pen transform the peasants of AlIensbach and their descendants into
merchants (ut ipsi et eorum posteri sint mercatores), no possible
ingenuity of interpretation can explain this if we have in mind professional
tradesmen. That in point of fact merchant meant any man who sold wares
in the market, no matter whether he himself had produced them or bought
the greater part of them, is evident, for example, from an unprinted
declaration of the Council of Frankfurt in 1420 regarding the toll called
Warktrecht (in Book No.3 of the Municipal Archives, Fol 80). There we
find at the beginning that this toll is to be paid by 'every merchant
who stands on the street with his merchandise, whatsoever it be.' Then
follow, specified in detail, the individual 'merchants' or the 'merchandise'
affected by this toll. From the lengthy list the following instances
may be given: dealers in old clothes, pastry-books, food-vendors, rope-makers,
hazel-nutsellers, egg and cheese-sellers with their carts, poultry-vendors
who carry about their baskets on their backs, strangers having in their
possession more than a matter of cheese, cobblers, money changers, bakers
who use the market-stalls, strangers with breadcarts, geese, wagons
ofvitch (fodder), straw, hay, cabbages, all vendorsoflinen, flax, hemp,
yarn, who sell their wares upon the street. Here we have a confused
medley of small tradesmen of the town, artisans and peasants That buyers
as well as sellers on the market were designated as Kaufleute 13There was "long distance" trade and very local trade, but no "intermediate" trade. Carlo Cipolla gives this explanation:" A curious mixture ofuniversalism and particularism dominated the scene. It was economically convenient to get precious silk from China or precious rugs from the Near East, but it was usually not convenient to get poorer commodities from a few miles away Since mass transportation was impossible for technical reasons, freight costs remained relatively high Particularly when transportation by water route was impossible, long distance trade had to rely mainly, if not exclusively, on precious objects. For its basic daily needs any community had always to be as self~sufficient and self-sustaining as possible The interlocal division of labor had to rest mainly on precious objects or other things that by no means could be made locally or were not susceptible of easy substitution. And trade had to rest heavily on aristocratic consumption of luxury goods." Money, Prices, and Civilization in the Mediterranean World: Fifth to Seventeenth Century (New York: Gordian Press, 1967),57. 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 ____________________________________ 14See Paul Sweezy:"
[T]he rise of the towns, which was fairly general throughout western
Europe, did a great deal more than merely offer a haven of refuge to
those serfs who fled the manor; it also altered the position of those
who remained behind. ...Just as wages must rise in a low-wage area,
so concessions had to be made to serfs when they had the possibility
of moving to towns." "The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,"
Science and Society, XIV, 2, Spring 1950,145. It might be noted
that in the course of this long debate between Sweezy and Maurice Dobb,
in which they disagree about a long list of things, Dobb notes on this
point: "Incidentally, I agree entirely with the important consideration
which Sweezy stresses that it was not so much the magnitude of the flight
to the towns which was significant, but that the threat of it (accompanied
perhaps by no more than a small movement) might suffice to force the
lords into making concessions, severely weakening to feudalism."
"Reply by Maurice Dobb," Science and Society, XIV,
2, Spr. 1950, 160. 15 There is no
doubt that forms nearest to feudalism appeared in all their force, both
in Byzantium and in the Moslem world, at moments of commercial expansion
and not at those of decline. The same thing is undoubtedly true for
the Russian and Polish worlds, with the particular feature that the
men who materially organized the international trade were by and large
foreigners (Hanseatic merchants), while the indigenous landowners took
care of producing and assembling the objects of commerce 16 Cahen, ibid.
p. 96. A B. Hibbert similarly argues that: "Both fact and theory
suggest that in earlier medieval times trade was by no means a solvent
of feudal society, but that it was a natural product of that society
and that feudal rulers up to a point favored its growth. ..Feudalism
could never dispense with merchants.. ..There were two reasons why..
..They had to provision large private and public establishments, and
they wished to gain profit from trade and industry, either by becoming
traders themselves or by tapping the wealth produced by trade and industry
through levies and charges upon goods or upon those who produced and
distributed them" "The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate,"
Past & Present, No.3, Feb., 1953, 17. Hibbert further discusses the two sources of dominant strata in the towns:
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:
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 _________________________________________________________ from an older to
a new use [po.26 ]." l7 Owen Lattimore.
"The Frontier in History". in Relazioni del X Congresso de
Scienze Storiche. I: Metodologia-Problemi generali-Scienze ausiliare
della storia (Firenze, G. C. Sansoni, 1955), 124-125. |
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[22] 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:
----------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Despite the
diminution of the cultivated area and a reduction in the factors of
production-which must have indicated a great diminution in the total
production of cereals-the price of cereals did not rise in proportion
to other merchandise. They even showed a slight tendency to go down.
Which indicates that consumption regressed further than production."
"Les problemes fondamentaux de la societe pre-industrielle en Europe
occidentale," Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis Bijdragen,
No. 12. 1965,40. How great the "stagnation"
was is itself an issue. Eugen A. Kominsky doubts that the description
is valid other than for England and. to some extent. France. See "Peut-on
considerer Ie XIVe et Ie XVe siecles comme l'epoque de la decadence
de I'economie europeenne?" Studi in onore di Armando Sapori (Milano:
Istituto Edit. Cisalpino, 1957). I, 562-563. 24Ibid., p. 27. 25Ibid, p. 28. 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 ________________________________________________________ 26R. H. Hilton,
"Peasant Movements in England Before 1381", in E. M, Carus-Wilson,
ed., Essays in Economic History (New York: St. Martin's, 1966),
II, 79. Hilton points out that rent increases, in the case of poor peasants,
might cost him his reserve for the winter. For rich peasants, the result
was different: "More irritating to them must have been the hindrances
to accumulation, rather than the fear 27Eugen A. Kosminsky,
"The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England from the Xlth to the XVth
Centuries," Past & Present, No.7, April 1955, 32. He
continues: "The growth of feudal exploitation began to exhaust
peasant agriculture and at the same time to whittle down the productive
forces of feudal society. destroying the conditions for reproduction
of the labor force. ...This long drawn-out struggle ...found its clearest
expression in the rising of 1381. ., ." 28Slicher van Bath,
AAG.B. No 12, p. 190. He describes the mechanism in this way: "The
peasants felt discontented when they saw the low prices brought by agricultural
produce, and contrasted 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 be the spearpoint
of revolt."29 The sudden decline
of prosperity involved more than peasant disconnt. The depopulation
which accompanied it--caused by wars, famines, and epidemics--led to
the Wustungen, 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 Wustungen 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 ______________________________________________________ [26] "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.
40" [The]
ever more pronounced decline in the price of grain compared to rural
wages, which were maintained at such a very high level by the competition
of town crafts and the spread of textile workers into many country districts
of Europe, sealed the fate of all excessively large agricultural enterprises.
Indeed it seems as if the eclipse of the demesne and the great decline
in direct manorial cultivation occurred in the years after 1380, at
any rate in France and England" Duby, ibid.. 311.
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 WUstungen 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 ____________________________________________________ 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 author ity 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 citystates 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 __________________________________________
51 Forexample,
Ardant points out that: "To obtain credits judged necessary within
the framework of an unfavorable financial situation, a state may be
led to make pledges (gages) in the broad sense of this term which signify
a restriction of its sovereignty: a specific source of income may be
turned over to foreign creditors: a degree of supervision of financial
administration, extended then to political administration, may be exercised
by the creditors, or by the State which backs them, etc. [31] 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 taxatiop to those who would tecolonize devastated areas. Monetary
manipulation thus had many advantages. Leopold Genicot 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-a-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,57 and 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 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 ___________________________________________ "In other
words, the Empires must have suffered, more than the middle-sized states
from the regression of 1595-1621." Braudel. La Mediterranee,
II, p. 47. 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:
Unless, of course,
they extended their empires overseas. What would happen
to those empires manque was that they would develop different raisons
d'etat 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 Utterstrom. The argument in summary goes like this:
_______________________________________ To strengthen
his case, Utterstrom 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 Utterstrom 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. In addition,
Utterstrom 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."Ql 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 undernourish ment
by observing that it was precisely in protein-producing regions that
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 land mass remained the _________________________________________________
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 _______________________________________ [37]
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 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 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, the~ 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 BaIts 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 Wustungen. 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 __________________________ 83Andrew M. Watson,
"Back to Gold-and Silver," Economic History Review. 2nd ser,
XX, I, 1967, I. Marian Malowistargues
that it was the North African demand for gold (in order to sell it to
Europeans) rather than the need of the Western Sudan for the salt they
received in turn which was the primary stimulus for this expansion.
See "Quelques observations sur Ie commerce de I'or dans Ie Soudan
occidental au moyen age," Annales E.S.C, xxv, 6, nov.-dec.
1970, 1630-1636. 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 ________________________________ 85Watson, Economic
History Review, XX, p. 34. See the remarkable collaborative article
by R S. Lopez, H. A. Miskimin and Abraham Udovitch in which they argue
very convincingly that the years 1350-1500 see a steady outflow of bullion
from north-west Europe to Italy to the Levant to India: "Both luxury
consumption by the nonagricultural population [of England] and extensive
investments in the ornamentation of churches. .. exacerbated the already
acute shortage of skilled craftsmen which followed the Black Death by
causing a relative increase in the demand for their services. As a result,
the wages of skilled artisans were considerably augmented and some of
the new demand for luxury, not satisfied domestically, was diverted
to areas beyond northern Europe by economic necessity as well as in
search of the exotic; the inevitable result of this demand was an increase
in the export of money. Further, since the use of scarce labour in the
production of domestic luxury proscribes its use for the manufacture
of export articles, the potential foreign earnings of the northern economies
was reduced. ... "[W]here had
[the money] gone?. [T]he papacy was indeed a major drain of the metal
supply of northern Europe. In addition to direct transfers of money,
however, the more conventional channels of commerce tended, through
the medium of luxury consumption, to produce the same result. ...The
continental termini of [the] northsouth route [leading from the Hanse
cities] were Milan, Genoa, and Venice; ...it would seem there was an
active and probably one-sided trade connecting the northern economy
with the southern in such a way as to drain precious metals southward. "England and
France complained bitterly about the drain of precious metals by Italy,
but this was largely the counterpart of the drain from Italy into the
Levant. ...[I]n spite of gold imports from north-western Europe, a moderate
production of central European mines, and more substantial amounts coming
from Senegal, there are abundant indications that the supply of gold
was at best barely adequate and often scarce. Granted that man's gold
hunger is chronically insatiable, it is certain that trade with the
Levant in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries drained from Italy
an ever growing amount of gold. ...[T]he comparative ascendancy of luxury
trade made Italy more dependent "[There is]
an absolute contraction of the Egyptian economy by the end of the fourteenth
century and. ..an absolute quantitative decline of all its sectors.
...Egypt's economic crisis was accompanied by a breakdown of its monetary
system. Gold and silver currency became increasingly scarce, and copper
coins predominated in internal circulation and on all levels of transaction..
.. Throughout the
fifteenth century, Europe was the only area with which Egypt maintained
a favourable balance of trade. ...Egypt, at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, was virtually living off the profits of the spice trade with
Europe. ...But only a fraction of this sum remained in the country.
The spice trade was a transit trade. In addition, Egypt was also contributing
to [the] flow [of gold toward India] by its own internal consumption
of spices and other imports from the Farther East. .. Thus, at least
a good portion of the gold which began its long trek southward from
Northern Europe in~earch of iuxury products, travelling via Italy and
Egypt, found its final resting place as additions to the already incredible
gold accumulations of India." "England to Egypt, 1350-1500;
Long-term Trends and Long-distance Trade," in M A. Cook, ed., Studies
in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to
the Present Day (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 101,
102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 114,117,123,126,127-128. |
|
|
[41] 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.87 Nonetheless,
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 consump tion. 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.9o I am skeptical, however, that the exchange of ____________________________________ 87" [There
was a ]sudden rise of mineral production as of 1460. primarily in Central
Europe. 88See V. M. Godinho,
"Creation et dynamisme economique du monde atlantique (142(}--1670)," Maurice Dobb, however, argues: "The transi tion from coercive extraction of surplus labour by 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£ood (more calories and a better distribution of food values)
anq 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 apolitical 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 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
Magalhaes-Godinho has put forward as a working hypothesis that agriculture
was the major motivation of Portuguese colonization of the R. H. Hilton sides
with Dobb: "The economic progress which was inseparable from the
early rent struggle and the political stabilization of feudalism was
characterized by an increase in the total social surplus of production
over subsistence needs. This, not the so-called revival of internar.ional
trade in silks and spices, was the basis for the development of commodity
production." "The Atlantic islands,
a hypothesis pursued by Joel Serrao, 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 ______________________________ 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 1750l04--a proof of
a point to which we shall return, that European workers paid part of
the costs of European economic development.l05 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.l06 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.1O8 In addition to food, the other great basic need was wood--wood ________________________________ 104"What people
are generally less well aware of is that the situation sketched in 1750-large
rations of bread and a little meat.. .was itself the result of a deterioration
and does not apply when we go back in time to the Middle Ages."
Fernand Braudel and Frank C. Spooner, "Prices in Europe from 1450
to 1750," in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, IV: E.
E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Economy oj Expanding Europe in the
16th and 17th Centuries (London and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1967),414. for fuel, and
wood for shipbuilding (and house building). 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 ______________________________ and the Old World
tropics would not have been so quickly developed. Without the European
livestock, and especially horses and mules for transport and cultivation,
the American continent could not have been developed at the rate it
had been."Cambridge Economic History of Europe, IV, p. 276. 109Braudel speaks
of a "wood famine" with reference to various parts of Italy
"The Mediterranean navies became accustomed, little by little,
to go looking further and further for what they couldn't find in their
own forests. In the sixteenth century, Nordic wood arrived in Seville
in boats filled to the brim with planks and beams." La Mediterranee,
I, p. 13 I. H. C Darby makes
the same point for England: "The growth of England's mercantile
marine and the development of the English navy from the Tudor age onward
depended upon an adequate supply of oaks for the hulls of ships; fir
trees for masts, together with such naval stores' as pitch and tar,
were imported from Baltic lands." "The Clearing of the Woodland
in Europe," in William L. Thomas, Jr., ed., Man's Role in Changing
the Face of the Earth (Chicago, I.lIinois: Univ of Chicago Press, 1956),
200 110See Godinho,
Annales E.S.C., V, p. 33. 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 oftheiorms of thi!'C violence was surely,expansion.117
The general principle that might be invoked is that if feudal riobles
obtain less revenue from their land, they will actively 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 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 _________________________________________ 118See Malowist:
"It seems clear that in the first phase of Portuguese colonial
expansion. .., the element of the nobility plays a dominant role.. ..
As the process of development of the Portuguese colonial empire went
on, the share of Portuguese merchants in the overseas trade grew.. ..It
seems that the process of Spanish colonization of America was analogous"
AJricana Bnlletin, No.1, pp. 32-34. Similarly, Chaunu, citing Godinho
as his authority, distinguishes two kinds of Portuguese expansion: "an
expansion that was primarily overland, hence by the nobility and political
in form, represented by the taking of Ceuta and the extension of the
Reconquista into Morocco; and an essentially mercantile expansion, hence
primarily by the bourgeoisie, along the coast of Africa." L'expansion
enropeenne, p. 363. Chaunu adds, as had Malowist, that he is tempted
to extend this explanation to the Spanish conquest of America. Luis Vitale is
ready to go further in assessing the role of the bourgeoisie. He argues
"Portugal, in 1381, witnessed the first bourgeois revolution, four
centuries before that of France. The commercial bourgeoisie of Lisbon,
connected through trade with Flanders, removed the feudal lords from
power E. E. Rich assures
us that, as a motivation for expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, "overs pill 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."12o 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"a"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 Iberia~_penins~la where
the national struggles had for so long been defined in religious t~rms.
No doubt this was an era of Christian defeat by 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 motiva- ______________________________ tions 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 ______________________________________________ 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 cou)dPourish and
because it encouraged nobility to find outlets for their energies~(her
than internal or inter-European warfare. The stability of the state
was crucial ______________________________ 129Verlinden. Hispanic
American Historical Review, p. 205. See also Charles Verlinden; "La
colonie italienne de Lisbonne et Ie developpement de !"economie
metropolitaine et coloniale portugaise," Stndi in onore di Armando
Sapori (Milano: Istituto Edit. Cisalpino, 1957), I, 615-28. 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
bour geoisie (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 ____________________________________ 134"Under feudalism a state was in a certain sense the private property of a prince in the same way that the fief was the private property of a vassal. ..Princes and their vassals extended the jurisdictions of their courts, the cultivation of their fields, and the conquests of their armies as profit-seeking ventures. Later, much of the spirit and legal forms of feudalism were applied to oceanic expansion." Frederic C. Lane, "Force and Enterprise in the Creation of Oceanic Commerce," in Venice in History (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966). 401-402. |
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[52] 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 Finally, exploration
and the consequent trade currents provided job out lets 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, 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
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
________________________________________ 135See Fernand
Braudel, Civilisation materielle et capitalisme. p. 24. |
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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:
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!40 What accounts for the European surge forward? Not one thing, says Needham, but "an organic whole, a packet of change."
__________________________________ 141Joseph Needham,
"Poverties and Triumphs of Chinese Scientific Tradition,"
in Crombie, ed., Scientific Change (New York: Basic Books, 1963b),
139. Italics added. [54] 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 the first century A.D., an invention probably diffused
from China to Europe in the twelfth century A.D143 If Needham's account
of Chinese technological competence and su periority 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 virtua~ly simulta~eously,
but that after a mere 28 years the Chinese pulled back mto a contmental
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 l 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- Tse 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 deccentralization 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. _____________________________ 147"The question
may be asked, what were the practical results of these amazing expeditions,
in which hundreds of ocean-going junks and several tens of thousands
of men were used? The short answer would be, absolutely none. The Ming
Chinese were not empir~-builders. Their political pundits had no conc~ption
of the horrors of realpolitik inseparable from a colonial regime. They
had uo sense of mission, no idea of sturm und drang. Theoretically
the Son of Heaven ruled the whole world, t'ien hsia, 'all under heaven,'
and his envoys considered it enough to show themselves to the non-descript
barbarians on the fringes of the civilized world, in order to usher
in a millennium activated by the serene presence of the Son of Heaven
upon the Throne." Willetts, Papers on Early Southeast Asian
History, pp. 30-31. 49Ibid., p. 38. George Sansom, looking at this phenomenon from the Japanese end, sees a suggestive European parallel. "There is no doubt that both China and Korea suffered from the depredations of the Wako. ...The fault was partly that of the Chinese, for
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 pot 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 ex pand.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 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 Thus, Chaunu notes, European use of animal power means that "European man possessed in the 15th century a motor, more or less five _________________________ they were opposed
to foreign commerce, whereas the Japanese authorities would have been
glad to promote legitimate trade But these were also the reasons why
the Bakufu [Japanese central authorities] was reluctant to go to extremes
in sup
But even more
important than this technological advance for our problem
One last consideration
might be that, for some reason, the fifteenth century marked for China
what Van der Sprenkel calls a "countercolonization," 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, nationstates, 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 ______________________________ 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.'59 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-a.-vis
the center during the process of disintegration of an empire. Hence
the new social form that emerges is feudalism rather 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 of prebendiaries Weber calls 'prebendalism.' [p. 305]." Eric Wolf discusses the differences of a patrimonial (or "feudal") domain and a prebendal domain from the perspective of its meaning for the peasant in Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 50--52. __________________________ Joseph Levenson,
in a book devoted to the question, why not China?, comes up with an
answer not too dissimilar from that of Weber:
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:
__________________________ [60]
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 Waka and their presumed impact on Chinese expansion. In principle, the Waka 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 economi ______________________________ 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: -------------------------------------------------------------- 162Owen Lattimore
shows how just such a tribute relationship of Manchuria to Ming China
worked in the sixteenth century: "In the period of Ming decline
the 'tribute missions' received at court became a method of taking advantage
of the Chinese The 'tribute-bearers' came with retinues running into
hundreds, at the expense of the Chinese authorities, which inflated
their political importance At the same time, they brought 'non-tribute'
Roods for trade, which cut the profits of the Chinese frontier traders."
Inner Asian Frontiers of China, 2nd edition (Irvington-on-Hudson, New
York: Capitol Publishing Co. and American Geographical Society, 1940),
124. Compare this self-defeating political arrangement to the frank
colonialism Portugal and other European countries practiced on the overseas
barbarians, what Weber called "booty capitalism." Ibid, p.
135
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 playa 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 ofimportance[les grando;] sought to df;fend
themselves by creating a clientele also made up of educated men of middle-class
origin whom they pushed forward in the civil service. ... 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 worldeconomy. 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. |
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