What Caused Capitalism?
Assessing the Roles of the West and the Rest
By Jeremy Adelman
Once upon a time, smart people thought the world was flat. As globalization took off, economists pointed to spreading market forces that allowed consumers to buy similar things for the same prices around the world. Others invoked the expansion of liberalism and democracy after the Cold War. For a while, it seemed as if the West’s political and economic ways really had won out.
But the euphoric days of flat talk now seem like a bygone era, replaced by gloom and anxiety. The economic shock of 2008, the United States’ political paralysis, Europe’s financial quagmires, the dashed dreams of the Arab Spring, and the specter of competition from illiberal capitalist countries such as China have doused enthusiasm about the West’s destiny. Once seen as a model for “the rest,” the West is now in question. Even the erstwhile booster Francis Fukuyama has seen the dark, warning in his recent two-volume history of political order that the future may not lie with the places that brought the world liberalism and democracy in the past. Recent bestsellers, such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, capture the pessimistic Zeitgeist. So does a map produced in 2012 by the McKinsey Global Institute, which plots the movement of the world’s economic center of gravity out of China in the year 1, barely reaching Greenland by 1950 (the closest it ever got to New York), and now veering back to where it began.
It was only a matter of time before this Sturm und Drang affected the genteel world of historians. Since the future seems up for grabs, so is the past. Chances are, if a historian’s narrative of the European miracle and the rise of capitalism is upbeat, the prognosis for the West will be good, whereas if the tale is not so triumphal, the forecast will be more ominous. A recent spate of books about the history of global capitalism gives readers the spectrum.
The Cambridge History of Capitalism, a two-volume anthology edited by two distinguished economic historians, Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson, presents readers with a window into the deep origins of capitalism. Joel Mokyr’s
The Enlightened Economy explains how capitalism broke free in a remote corner of western Europe. And in
Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert, a leading global historian, offers a darker story of capitalism, born of worldwide empire and violence.
WESTWARD HO!
The conventional narrative of the making of the world economy is internalist—that is, that it sprang up organically from within the West. The story goes like this: after the Neolithic Revolution, the global shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture that occurred around 10,000 BC, the various corners of the globe settled into roughly similar standards of living. From China to Mexico, the average person was more or less equal in height (five feet to five feet six inches) and life expectancy (30 to 35 years). Societies differed in their engineering feats, forms of rule, and belief systems. But on the economic front, they boasted common achievements: advanced metallurgy, big walls, and huge pyramids.
Some say that groups of Europeans began to be rewarded for the improved productivity that stemmed from their individualistic habits. Others argue that Europeans stumbled on the right balance of good governance and benevolent self-interest.
If there were tragedies, they entailed plagues and blights more than man-made catastrophes. This is not to say that the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 was polite; of the city’s one million people, more than 200,000 were killed, and the Tigris is said to have run red with blood. But horrific episodes such as this did not determine social well-being, measured as income per person over the long run. That figure remained remarkably constant until about 1500. In this sense, the world was flat. About this portrait, there is consensus.
Where there is debate is over what came next. Some say that groups of Europeans, especially northern Protestants, began to be rewarded for the improved productivity that stemmed from their individualistic habits. Others argue that Europeans stumbled on the right balance of good governance and benevolent self-interest. Either way, late-medieval Europeans found the formula for success, banked on it, and turned it into what, by the nineteenth century, would be known as capitalism.
Internalists argue that capitalism was born European, or more specifically British, and then became global. A system of interconnected parts and peoples, it radiated out from a few original hot spots and over time replaced the “isms” it encountered elsewhere. “Replace” is actually a bland way of putting it. Champions of capitalism would say “liberate.” Marxists would call it a “conquest.” But the story line is the same: Europe exported its invention to the rest of the world and in so doing created globalization.
CAPITALISM RISING
The internalist story remains the most familiar way of explaining the breakout from the long post-Neolithic
durée. The Cambridge History of Capitalism goes so far as to argue that elements of capitalism have existed since prehistoric times and were scattered all over the planet; the traits of the individual optimizer were sown into our DNA. Clay tablets recording legal transactions with numbers offer proof of some Mesopotamian capitalist plying his wares. Relics of trading centers in Central Asia trace the primitive optimizer to the steppes. True, for millennia, capitalists were uncoordinated, fragile, and vulnerable. But the origins of capitalism go as far back as archeologists have found remnants of organized market activity. As Neal explains in his introduction, “The current world economy has been a long time in the making.”
In this rendering, the survival of capitalists is a bit like that of early Christians: often in doubt. Just as Christians had to make Christendom, imperiled and scattered capitalists had to defeat predatory rulers and rent-seeking institutions in order to make capitalism. In
The Cambridge History of Capitalism, it was the Italian city-states that first departed from the old order. Although they were vulnerable to rivals and tended to favor oligopolies, these polities laid the groundwork of institutions and norms that in the fifteenth century would pass to mercantile states of the Atlantic—Spain and Portugal—and then the Netherlands, France, and England. Freed from a Mediterranean Sea crowded with Ottoman fleets and North African corsairs, the Atlantic upstarts unleashed themselves on the world’s oceans. In the internalist account, what was important was getting a virtuous cycle going: creating institutions, such as the legal defense of private property, that rewarded entrepreneurial behavior and letting this profit seeking reinforce those institutions through people abiding by laws and paying taxes. The virtuous cycle lifted capitalists from trading with one another to coordinating with one another, thus creating a system of rules and norms to sustain the returns of profit-seeking pursuits. These moneymen put the “ism” in “capitalism.”
Then came a second leap forward with the Industrial Revolution and the spread of the printed word, which, Neal writes, dissolved the “obstacles to imitation.” European societies began to emulate one another. From pockets of accumulation and ingenuity emerged coordinated and, eventually, integrated processes. Coal, timber, draperies, and flatware filled European trade routes.
The globalization of European capitalism has been an uneven and bitter process. Only a few in the periphery, such as Japan, got the mimicry right.
Afterward, according to this story, capitalism went global, as European actors and institutions fanned out to join forces with the huddled capitalists in Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. But here’s the rub: beyond Europe, capitalism had weaker domestic roots, and so it yielded more conflict and tension in the periphery than in the heartland. Local societies resisted change and resented being viewed as backward, condemned as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The globalization of European capitalism has been an uneven and bitter process. Only a few in the periphery, such as Japan, got the mimicry right; these exceptions help confirm the norm that capitalism is best built from the inside out.
FROM SCIENCE TO WEALTH
There are other ways of explaining how capitalism started in Europe and diffused. Mokyr, for instance, has championed the view that capitalism owes its existence to the cognitive, cultural, and intellectual breakthrough that came about as the scientific revolution swept Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More than any other scholar, he has connected the shifting attitudes to and uses of technology to economic change, crediting the rise of capitalism to an alliance of engineers and investors, tinkerers and moneymen. When those people finally joined forces in the middle of the eighteenth century, the obstacles to growth came crumbling down. In
The Enlightened Economy, Mokyr goes further:
"A successful economy . . . needs not only rules that determine how the economic game is played, it needs rules to change the rules if necessary in a way that is as costless as possible. In other words, it needs meta-institutions that change the institutions, and whose changes will be accepted even by those who stand to lose from these changes. Institutions did not change just because it was efficient for them to do so. They changed because key peoples’ ideas and beliefs that supported them changed.
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This is a lot of entangled change and rules, and it’s not easy to sort out the causality. The key to Mokyr’s internalist argument is the emergence of what he calls “useful knowledge,” which translated science into production. The process was far from simple.
The Enlightened Economy charts the often imperceptible steps that rewarded intellectual innovators and aligned them with impresarios, to create circles of “fabricants” and “savants.” “Interaction” is a key word in Mokyr’s vocabulary; it’s what conjugates curiosity and greed, ambition and altruism. The big breakout came with the Enlightenment, which gave birth to rational thought, the modern concept of good government, and scientific insights into what produced more wealth. After that, there was no looking back.
Internalist histories vary a lot. There are materialists, who see people responding to incentives and opportunities to pool their money. There are institutionalists, who insist on the primacy of property rights and constitutional constraints on greedy rulers. And there are idealists, who spotlight Europe’s intellectual breakthroughs. Some combine elements. But internalist narratives also share a lot. Internalists argue that Europe’s breakout was autopoietic—that is, that the causes can be found within the system itself, one capable of maintaining and reproducing success without depending on outside forces. In general, the internalist story is also a cheery one. It focuses on what went right, fits with a rise-of-the-West narrative, and tends to be confident of capitalism’s durability. If the rest poses a threat, this is mainly because the rest seethes over lagging behind the West.
There are a couple of problems with this kind of history. The first is that what passes for capitalist behavior is so broad that it’s no wonder one can find proof of Homo economicus from time immemorial. Charting the rise of capitalism can be like tracking the hedge fund manager from the hominids who marched out of Africa. Some internalist narratives rely so much on the capitalist as the maker of the system that they define the hero of the story in such a way that he is either unrecognizable to historians who see more in human behavior than material self-interest or so generic that he is hard to separate from the crowd.
The lesson of internalist theories has been “Replicate!” Catch up by copying. But the problem has always been that the nature of catching up makes copying impossible.
The other problem involves the scale of analysis. “Britain,” “Europe,” and “the West” are notoriously imprecise and anachronistic terms. Why some city-states and not others? Why not Spain but France? Empires seem to drop out of Mokyr’s story. When they do creep in, they play the role of agents nonprovocateurs, promoting greed of the wrong sort: Spain throttled capitalism because it acquired Aztec gold and then got conquistadors hooked on precious metals and not profits, and the United Kingdom acquired an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness—and that empire was merely an extension of the more important domestic market.
As for explaining the fate of the followers, the lesson of internalist theories has been “Replicate!” Catch up by copying. Borrow the script. Free markets; protect private property. But the problem has always been that the nature of catching up makes copying impossible. As the Russian-born economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron noted, “In several very important respects the development of a backward country may, by the very virtue of its backwardness, tend to differ fundamentally from that of an advanced country.” Finally, as a new crop of global historians has been showing, it is not so easy to isolate the United Kingdom, Europe, or the West from the rest. When it comes to privileged internalist variables, such as scientific knowledge or the Enlightenment, a growing chorus of scholars is finding that West-rest interactions set the stage for the workings of impresarios, engineers, and philosophers. So what role did the rest play in the rise of the West?
