The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor is it simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce.

In this original and provocative book Ellen Meiksins Wood reminds us that capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor is it simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the human interaction with nature.

This new edition is substantially revised and expanded, with extensive new material on imperialism, anti-Eurocentric history, capitalism and the nation-state, and the differences between capitalism and non-capitalist commerce. The author traces links between the origin of capitalism and contemporary conditions such as globalization, ecological degradation, and the current agricultural crisis.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, Theory, Sociology

213 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Ellen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis.

Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.

Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism 101 (Internal Lens)…

Preamble:
--2 of my favourite writers (Varoufakis and Graeber) have prioritized contrasting theories to analyze capitalism.
--I like to frame these theories as lenses; each lens starts with different limiting assumptions, which allows each to bring unique insights (think: microscope vs. telescope):

a) Marxism:
--My top “capitalism 101” recommendation (Varoufakis’ Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails) relies heavily on Wood’s book, which itself is an elaboration of Robert Brenner’s side in the “Brenner debate” on the origins of capitalism.
--Wood/Brenner’s focus is on the internal class struggle/social relations changes within England, in particular England’s agrarian change leading to agrarian capitalism (i.e. preceding the Industrial Revolution).
--Thus, this side is building on Marx (esp. his mature works like 1867’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1), who focused on Western Europe via critiquing English political economy. However, after the failures of Western European socialist revolutions and the rise of Leninism/Third World decolonization, there have been critiques of Marxism’s Eurocentric bias (labels get messy, but we can think of “orthodox Marxism”, “Western Marxism”, etc.).
--Here’s an interesting video debate (see: 8:05, 10:20 stating the Brenner/Wood thesis, 18:22) between Varoufakis (“we are Marxists here”) and an Indian interviewer (referencing the other lens below, specifically Braudel/Arrighi) touching on this bias, esp. 25:22 when the interviewer challenges Varoufakis on chartered companies like East India Company, which Varoufakis insists is:

[...] pre-capitalist […] extractive merchant circuit […] a combination of a joint stock company and an imperialist state […] I don’t think this is a good example of capitalism. It's a very good example of how British imperialism [...] started.

b) World-Systems/Dependency Theory:
--Graeber’s sweeping Debt: The First 5,000 Years integrates a “World-Systems” approach (i.e. Eurasian “cycles of history”) featuring Wallerstein (World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction), thus falling on the other side of the “Brenner debate”.
--This side focuses on the external (regional/global, thus more on global trade’s imperialism) changes driving capitalism. The Global South economic historians I’ve tried to prioritize have centered this lens, ex. Bagchi’s Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
--Compare Varoufakis’ response above with Graeber:

Here we come face to face with a peculiar paradox. It would seem that almost all elements of financial apparatus that we’ve come to associate with capitalism—central banks, bond markets, short-selling, brokerage houses, speculative bubbles, securization, annuities—came into being not only before the science of economics (which is perhaps not too surprising), but also before the rise of factories, and wage labor itself. [see Note below] This is a genuine challenge to familiar ways of thinking. We like to think of the factories and workshops as the “real economy,” and the rest as superstructure, constructed on top of it. But if this were really so, then how can it be that the superstructure came first? Can the dreams of the system create its body?

[Graeber’s Note: Joint-stock corporations were created in the beginning of the colonial period, with the famous East India Company and related colonial enterprises, but they largely vanished during the period of the industrial revolution and were mainly revived only at the end of the nineteenth century, and then principally, at first, in America and Germany. As Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has pointed out, the heyday of British capitalism was marked by small family firms and high finance; it was America and Germany, who spent the first half of the twentieth century battling over who would replace Great Britain as hegemon, that introduced modern bureaucratic corporate capitalism.]

Highlights:

--Wood's book critiques many theories, so there’s a lot of repetition; I’ve cut down on this (omitting: Dobb internal vs. Sweezy external, Perry Anderson’s absolutist state/bourgeois revolution, etc.) to highlight the key points:

1) Proto-Capitalism – Commerce with Fetters?:
--Wood/Brenner critique the pervasive influence of the “Commercialization Model”, which has a broad/vague definition of “capitalism” (commerce?) and frames it as inevitable progress (transhistorical determinism), ex. Adam Smith’s formulation:
i) self-interested individuals with human nature to exchange…
ii) leading to increased division of labour…
iii) leading to technological progress…
iv) culminating in a “commercial society”, i.e. capitalism.
--Thus, there was no qualitative shift into capitalism; all that was required was enough (quantitative) savings for investment (Smith’s “primitive accumulation”, i.e. original accumulation) with the removal of fetters on commerce (ex. drain by State/feudal rent). Indeed, the young Marx also echoed this tendency to varying degrees, ex. The Communist Manifesto (1848)/The German Ideology(1846).
…Capitalism is confused with commerce, esp. with the framing of opportunity/choice; once fetters are removed, people are supposed to naturally seek commerce and thus capitalism.
--Max Weber focused on the fetters (kinship/domination/religion), as does Braudel/World-Systems Theory, where Western Europe’s advantageous pre-conditions were its feudalism’s fragmented State (i.e. weak fetters). European colonialism would provide further fetters on the Global South’s capitalist development while simultaneously providing the primitive accumulation for Europe’s capitalist development.
…There’s also the notion of incremental commercial development (from Italian double-entry bookkeeping to Dutch finance to English Industrial Revolution). Towns (commercial centers) were also seen as proto-capitalist, with the bourgeoisie (derived from “town dweller”) assumed as the merchant/capitalist class. Thus, Wood critiques the notion of a progressive capitalist “bourgeois revolution”.
…There’s also demographic theories which focus on long-term cycles of population growth leading to economic development.

2) Pre-Capitalism – “Societies with Markets”:
--Instead, Wood/Brenner distinguish pre-capitalist markets/commerce as:
i) Simple exchange (C-M-C: Commodity for Commodity, with Money as the intermediary), in contrast to capitalist profits (M-C-M’: Money invested for Commodity production for more Money in return)/ruthless competition.
ii) Arbitrage/carrying trade: buy-cheap-sell-dear, where merchants relied on moving goods between fragmented markets; there was no imperative (ex. from an integrated market’s competition) to invest in transforming production itself to seek industrial profits.
--Polanyi (The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 1944) calls these pre-capitalist societies “societies with markets”, where markets/economics were embedded in non-economic relationships (i.e. kinship/communal/religious/political). Polanyi was an economic anthropologist; anthropology’s real-world observations made it is less prone to economics’ convenient models (ex. rational self-interested individual), instead observing diverse societies with overlapping community regulations/customary rights (which anthropologist Graeber describes as “human economies” in Debt: The First 5,000 Years).

3) Capitalism – English Agrarian “Market Society”:
--The key debate here is why England was the unique pioneer of capitalism and not the other European (esp. imperialist) powers, let alone Asian “societies with markets”/rest of the world.
--Wood/Brenner focus on the revolution in social relations in agrarian England, preceding the typical focus on the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. The more-mature Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867) critiqued Smith’s “so-called primitive accumulation” by emphasizing the changes in social relations, distinguishing “capital” from mere wealth/profit.
--Wood/Brenner start with England’s historical context since the 11th century, where the Norman ruling class shifted England away from feudalism’s fragmented sovereignty into centralization and demilitarization before other European aristocracies. Thus, the centralized state/landlords lacked extra-economic force (i.e. military/political/judicial) and thus their rents became increasingly dependent on economic profit from their tenants’ economic productivity (qualitative change in relations; the beginnings of capitalism’s separation of economics from politics).
…We can contrast this with France, where the ruling class used extra-economic force to extract tax/rent from peasants (developing the absolutist state), which also required preserving some community regulations/customary rights (for social consent).
a) Instead of the framing of market opportunities (where fixed rents, given its relative predictability, should remove some of insecurity’s fetters and encourage peasants to be more entrepreneurial),
b) Wood/Brenner insist on the framing of capitalism’s market compulsion/imperative (i.e. coercion), where English variable market-driven monetary rents (tenant economic leases) forced economic efficiency/productivity (in the context of profit-seeking) and eroded the community regulations/customary rights of “societies with markets”/“human economies”.
--Thus, we have the shift from “societies with markets” to “market society” (Polanyi), the reversal that saw society becoming embedded in markets. Overlapping regulations/rights become replaced with exclusive (capitalist) property rights. Enclosures (privatization of access to “common land” and, as Wood emphasizes, extinction of customary rights to survival) starting in the 16th century dispossessed commoners from the land to create profit-seeking sheep farming for landlords. Note: what about the (external) relations with global markets? See later.
…Referencing Polanyi again, this resulted in capitalism’s unique markets (labour and land) featuring “fictitious commodities” (humans and nature), both torn from community regulation/customary rights. The monarchical state, concerned with public order, initially resisted this mass dispossession until the 1688 so-called “Glorious Revolution” (consolidation by the landed classes to wipe away customary rights); this opened the door to 18th century “Parliamentary Enclosures”.
--John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) spelled out the new logic of exclusive capitalist property rights as the labour theory of property:
i) Ownership of one’s labour: this may sound reasonable, except labour (now commodified through the Enclosure’s dispossession of land/rights/community, where the dispossessed must sell their labour to survive) is dependent on being bought. So, this is the capitalist ownership of another’s labour. Owners are valued as the real “producers”, i.e. productive use of property. Thus, the “first producer” was agrarian capitalism’s landlords.
ii) Exchange-value (market price; profit-seeking) dominates over use-value (social needs). This became culturally coded as “improvement”, i.e. capitalism’s economic religion of technological progress/economic growth as ends in themselves (obscuring the driver of capitalist profit).
iii) Community regulations/customary rights (including indigenous use), etc. became “waste” (lack profit maximization) and such lands can be seized without consent of the local sovereign for “improvement” (redefining “vacancy” to justify privatization/colonization). 17th century Ireland became the experiment/model for English capitalist imperialism (enforcing economic market dependency, like modern Structural Adjustment Programs: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions).

Now if we want to look for the roots of a destructive ‘modernity’ – the ideology, say, of technocentrism and ecological degradation – we might start by looking in the project of ‘improvement’, the subordination of all human values to productivity and profit, rather than in the Enlightenment.

--Both expropriators (landlords lacking extra-economic power) and labour (dispossessed) became dependent on markets, culminating in capitalism’s laws of motion:
i) profit-maximization
ii) competition
iii) capital accumulation
…leading to investment on developing labour productivity and thus economic growth.
--Wood stresses the following sequence:
i) England’s increasing agricultural productivity due to market coercion on agricultural tenants as the driver, which…
ii) sustained the increasing proletarianization (rather than this being the driver, as standard Marxist theory suggests) from market competition dispossessing small producers, forming the dispossessed non-agrarian wage-labour filling up cities.
--Wood next emphasizes that proletarianization’s increasing numbers/limited wages/dispossession led to the historical innovation of a:
i) domestic, nationally-integrated competitive market
ii) producing cheap, mass consumer goods (rather than luxury goods):

Production for this market required making up in numbers what consumers lacked in wealth, and this created pressures to produce cheaply, pressures that reinforced the cost-sensitivity imposed by already existing imperatives of competition and the need to invest in the technical means of improving labour-productivity. This was, in other words, the first economic system in history in which the limitations of the market impelled instead of inhibiting the forces of production.

…see comments below for rest of the review…

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a recent discussion on gentrification I attended, a well-meaning liberal said he literally couldn't imagine what it would mean for housing to be a right rather than a commodity. I was able to sympathize with him to an extent. While the commodification of of basic needs clearly creates great misery and despair for humanity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictiti...), at the same this mode of production has become naturalized as common sense. Essentially I think my interlocutor was asking if humanity could possibly have a future beyond capitalism.

And this is precisely where Ellen Meiksins Wood's book is so valuable. She shows that capitalism is not identifiable with modernity tout court, much less human nature; that it was a contingent and relatively recent historical development, neither inevitable nor eternal. An investigation into origins that ultimately makes the end of capitalism seem much more plausible and hopeful. Truly a work that dilates the imagination.

[Rhyd Wildermuth · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I'm still waiting for someone to do a treatise on the alchemical language employed by Marx to explain Capital and the magic the Capitalists/Bourgeoisie employ ("everything that is solid melts into air..."), I've had to settle instead with general clarifications.

So in the meantime, TOoC was quite useful. This is the second time i've read it, though for some reason the first reading (about 6 years ago) really must have been inadequate. Or, rather say, I had at that earlier point less exposure to most of the historians and economic theorists she uses and conflicts. I'd heard of E.P. Thompson but never read him; Weber was un-opened on my bookshelf, and I hadn't even read Das Kapital yet. But none of that adequately explains why, on the second reading, i held in my hands an entirely different book.

Her premise is simple: The birth of Capitalism was a recent historical event. Within that statement, however, exists a myriad of complications, and it's a minority view.

The typical story of Capitalism goes like this: after massive european plagues, the printing press and the Reformation, so many people lived in towns instead of feudal arrangements that we all became somehow liberated to our own self-interest, investing surplus funds ("primal accumulation") into our own improvement and, with enough people doing so, the rate of "technological progress" sped up to make most of us not need to raise our own food anymore. We all became Capitalists (after a few beheadings in France) and spread the good word to the rest of the world, constantly making life better for ourselves and others, though we were a bit sloppy and maybe shouldn't have burned so much coal.

Capitalism in this scenario is a natural outgrowth, then, a step along the way (or the Final Step, if you aren't a Marxist) towards democracy and space exploration and flat-screen tv's and kidney transplants. Marxists point to the exploitation within the system and suggest another step (Communism, or central-planned economies, where our lives will finally be better), but either way, Progress will win out (or our cities will flood).

The very lazy or the very Ayn-Randian posit Capitalism as already-always existing, merely waiting to be freed by oppressive trade barriers (like Feudalism), but their further arguments still usually follow the aforementioned pattern. Evolutionary-Psychologist sorts also get into this (Stephen Pinker's a great example), coming up with all sorts of Scientific (tm) ways of explaining how well natural selection and Capitalism go hand in hand.

But Wood has none of it. For her, Capitalism began in England when rent for farms became a market, something which had never happened in recorded history. Landlords, with the death of feudalism (she argues that Capitalism did not destroy Feudalism, against most histories), had to collect "surplus" from tenants in the form of monied-rents without "extra-economic" coercion (i.e., taxes, levies, outright violence) because they had lost much of their legal/juridical power. Markets (and trade) had always existed, but economic coercion had not (Florence and the Dutch Republic were both massive urban areas with huge markets without Capitalism--even most of the "Commercialists" agree to this and call them "failed transitions").

With the pressure from landlords now to collect surplus money, the farmers on their land found themselves needing to grow even more than before (previous feudal arrangements were typically one-third of all produce, but now the amount was set, regardless of what markets provided). Farmers suddenly had to compete with each other for profit, which destabilised prices and made some people lose their farms. The landlords, in response, could charge more for the land of the "productive" farmers, could re-lease unrented land to them, thus rewarding the successful competitor taking from the loser their very access to self-reproduction (substinence, etc.). Those dispossessed farmers became reliant on the market now for everything they used to be able to make for themselves before, thus creating "consumer-goods" markets.

The key-word for her is Imperative. Farmers didn't take advantage of "opportunities," they responded to imperatives (grow/make more or lose your land). Landowners also found themselves no longer in a voluntary position--once one landowner can't farm out his land to tenants, his land is threatened by other landowners who can. Markets previously were governed not just by supply and demand, but community/social obligations and restrictions, but the pressure of so much displacement and imperative to earn/invest violently reduced these restrictions (Enclosure had happened before, but not with so much speed and legislative authority).

But therein lies another complication. Any Free-market fool will tell you that the state gets in the way of the market, though they still consistently rely upon central authorities to ensure the right conditions for their profit-taking. Without police, no one's around to arrest the thieves or squatters, because the coercion of Capitalism is pristinely Economic. Political Coercion must come from outside of it, must serve it, and must not get too much in the way. The English State's willingness to serve this role ensured capitalism's naissance (consider Foucault's point in D&P about the number of "economic-crime" laws--and their commensurate violence-of-punishment--which did not exist before Capitalism took hold).

Capitalism didn't take hold elsewhere for a little while, nor did it "spontaneously generate" anywhere else. Other states responded to the pressure eventually to the point we're at now, but it's vital for her that we continue to see the exact genesis point (in england, in the rural areas).

She makes a few other arguments, some of which almost seem extraneous and besides-the-point. Placing the birth of Capitalism in agriculture, rather than the cities, places into doubt the traditional/marxist understanding of the Bourgeoisie. She's right to point out that the bourgeoisie in France were not fighting for capitalism, but rather access to extra-economic coercion (offices, titles, etc. that would allow the professionals of the city to collect taxes).

I'm willing to accept this, but I don't like the consequences of her final conclusions. She separates the French and English Enlightenment (England had Locke--arguing that natives should be forced off their land because they refused to put it to productive use; France had Voltaire and Rousseau), and she can do this to a point, but by the French Revolution i don't think the differences continue. She makes a great argument for separating "modernity" from "capitalism," believes as I do that most food shortages are due to capitalist profit-imperative, not productive capacity, and she almost completely destroys the notion of Progress.

But something suddenly stops her. The last two chapters find her shredding through her entire argument, leaving the pieces on the floor for us to paste back together in her search for some way to keep Human/Universal Rights as Progress. She's canadian, you see. She rejects much of the "post-modern" arguments about the meta-narrative concerning Capitalism because human rights/western secularism is something too important for her to destroy. She's almost there, she's about to axe them, and then you hear her gasp as she suddenly realises she's throwing out what she thinks is the baby in the muddy water of the bath. It's not a baby, actually, there never was one. Capitalism used her tub as a toilet, and she's mistaking one of the undissolved turds for a drowning child.

But otherwise, I did rather like this book.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is an orthodox story about the development capitalism as an economic system that had been held at bay by the political order of European feudalism, but as the constraints weakened entrepreneurial bourgeois (as in urban dwelling) traders found that their business intensified, their profits increased and lo! capitalism was born……. or in another version the population development in western Europe meant growing divisions in the labour market and growth of cities, and with that growth of trade and lo! capitalism was born……. or in a version that appears to be more radical, with some grounding in Marxism, an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie gained economic power but little else until in violent revolution (England’s Civil War, France’s revolution) these traders overthrew the aristocracy and lo! capitalism was born……. None of these stories really account for where capitalism came from, they assume that it was always already present but suppressed so throwing off the chains of feudalism allowed an already existing capitalism to flourish. These stories (even the bourgeois revolution one in that form) all have one thing in common – because capitalism was already present at the interstices of feudalism just waiting to be set free it is the natural order of things; any attempts to struggle against and replace it are therefore futile because it is the natural representation of who we are.

Not everyone bought in these explanations; during the mid-20th century we had a long running debate, sparked, in part, by Maurice Dobb’s impressive 1946 book Studies in the Development of Capitalism leading to a series of essays by authors such as Paul Sweezy, Dobb, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Giuliano Procacci, Georges Lefebvre, John Merrington and Kohachiro Takahashi – Marxist and non-Marxist – collected together, finally, into The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism and generally known as ‘The Transition Debate’, which had really run its course by the mid-1950s, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s (when I studied economic history) the issues these writers put forward had been for the most part side-lined and the orthodoxy of Henri Pirenne or Carlo Cippola had come to dominate. Despite their best efforts though, many of these critical and Marxist writers seemed to accept the fundamental accuracy of the commercialisation thesis and the existence of capitalism as always already present in feudalism, or at least in feudalism’s towns.

Wood rejects these approaches in the excellent brief essay that explores the emergence of our dominant economic system and unravels the historiography of capitalism’s birth – and in doing so she allies herself closely to the author who revitalised these issues in the 1970s, Robert Brenner, with his idea that the origin of capitalism lies in the English countryside. [Brenner’s work excited me as an undergraduate all those years ago, and still does, as does Wood’s reinterpretation and extension.] As readers we do not need to have read this previous material, but it might help to have some knowledge of the major contours of the debates: Wood grapples with the key aspects of this 50 year scholarly argument.

Wood builds her case in three key stages. In the first she considers the major arguments – the commercialisation model and its various developments, where in effect capitalism becomes a system of consumption rather than one of production (my reading of commercialisation, not Wood's). She then turns to the major Marxist debates bundled up in the ‘transition’ debate before delving more directly into the case Brenner makes and various Marxist responses to it. She then moves to the principal elements of the agrarian origins of capitalism argument, working as critical friend to Brenner’s arguments as they developed, and then finally considers questions of industrial development, imperialism, the development of nation states and recent debates about modernity and postmodernity. That is to say, she packs an awful lot into a fairly short book and as a result there is an awful lot that is skipped over briefly and only limited engagement with an extensive literature – but then that extensive scholarly review and synthesis is not the point of the book.

The key things to note are that this is a book about the origins of capitalism, not its spread, not its later manifestations, but about a system that provides for the coercive economic extraction of surpluses from producers. So, she distinguishes capitalism as an economic system of surplus extraction from feudalism and other systems that result in political, military or other coercive extra-economic forms of surplus extraction. Second, it is likely that there is only be one place where capitalism developed or grew – and her argument (following Brenner) is that it is the English agrarian economy; subsequent developments of capitalism are related to and consequent on its initial form. Third, she is focussing on an economic system as structural, so although, for instance, the ‘industrial revolution’ (a term we seldom use anymore) and the scientific advances of the 17th and especially 18th centuries brought about a specific form of capitalism – factory capitalism – it is not the origin of the system or indeed the dominance of the factory, which only intensified with energy developments (including food sources) in the mid-19th century. Finally, this is an argument based in economic and political developments, and firmly rejects both technological determinism and any sense that the collapse of feudalism liberated ‘natural’ tendencies to profit making that equate to capitalism.

As with so much else in Wood’s oeuvre, this is a rich and sophisticated analysis that displays an extensive understanding of long run historical developments and displays her abilities as a political scientist meaning that she weaves together economic developments with debates in political theory and practice to build a sophisticated and accessible case. Equally, she demonstrates a clear political intent and purpose: if we want to bring an end to capitalism and build something new and different, we need to know how it came about and use that to inform both ways to bring it to an end and to build something new.

This is, in short, a vital piece of work exploring and extending historical analyses of the development and origins of capitalism that shows it to the historically specific – that is, that it came into being under specific circumstances – and considers its origin as an economic development on its own terms, not based on some ideological desire to naturalise it as the way-we’ve-always-been or to treat it as more than an economic order. It is highly recommended.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I recall correctly, I discovered 'The Origin of Capitalism' by idly browsing the Verso website during a sale. I've hardly read any non-fiction in recent months, as the pandemic and my awful job have made me too tired and anxious to appreciate it. I've become accustomed to fiction, so it felt like a concerted effort to read despite being succinct and clearly explained. I've put off writing this review for five days as my brain feels too fuzzy to write a 3,000 word essay, as the book deserves. Half that will have to suffice.

Although 'The Origin of Capitalism' isn't written in full-blown academic style, it begins very much in academic mode with three chapters of literature review and critique. Although these are interesting enough and provide context for what follows, parts II and III are inevitably more compelling as they advance the book's thesis. The most thought-provoking element of part I is discussion of what is and isn't capitalism. I've noticed and bemoaned before the tendency to assume there is no alternative to capitalism by essentially conflating all economic systems with it. It is easy to forget that money, commerce, wealth inequality, and trade existed long before capitalism. Wood takes pains to delineate the specificity of capitalism as a system, distinguished by the imperative of participation in markets, competition based on labour productivity, profit maximisation, and capital accumulation. These characteristics result in relentless pressure for economic growth and expansion of markets until all activities and resources are commoditised. I appreciated the emphasis throughout that to treat commercial economies in the early modern period as 'pre-capitalist' implicitly renders capitalism an inevitability. Woods instead points out that non-capitalist commercial economies had notable distinguishing features:

It may be possible to argue (as I would be inclined to do) that the non-capitalist character of such commercial economies was as much their strength as their weakness, and that, for instance, the Italian Renaissance, which flourished in the environment of commercial city-states in Northern Italy like Florence, would not have achieved its great heights under the pressures of capitalist imperatives. But that is another story. The point here is simply that, in the absence of those [market] imperatives, the pattern of economic development was bound to be different.

Wood contends that capitalism was born in rural England out of a confluence of social relations that had not occurred elsewhere. It then spread across Europe and beyond:

The most salutary corrective to the naturalisation of capitalism and to question-begging assumptions about its origin is the recognition that capitalism, with its very specific drives of accumulation and profit-maximisation, was born not in the city but in the countryside, in a very specific place, and very late in human history. It required not a simple extension or expansion of barter and exchange but a complete transformation in the most basic human relations and practices, a rupture in the age-old patterns of human interaction with nature.

I think the book makes a very convincing argument on this front. Capitalism had to come from somewhere and required legal, social, and cultural changes that precipitated economic transformation and technological change. Wood marks the advent of capitalism as the point at which participation in markets became necessary for subsistence. Market opportunities had existed long before, but under capitalism there is no escaping markets in order to attain the essentials of life: food and shelter.

With the advent of industrial capitalism, market dependence had truly penetrated to the depths of the social order. But its precondition was an already well-established and deeply rooted market dependence, reaching back to the early days of English agrarian capitalism, when the production of food became subject to the imperatives of competition. This was a unique social form in which the main economic actors, both appropriators and producers, were market-dependent in historically unprecedented ways.

The market dependence of English farmers was based not simply on the need to exchange in order to obtain good they could not produce but also on the particular relation between 'economic' tenants and landlords devoid of extra-economic powers. Even the productive capacity to be self-sufficient did not make producers in England less market-dependent.

Chapter 7 investigates how the theological and philosophical roots of capitalism tangle with imperialism, in the idea that land must be 'improved' and used as productively as possible. Empires existed long before capitalism; capitalism provided a new rationale and economic structure for them. I found the example of Ireland fascinating:

There had long been attempts to subdue Ireland by direct or indirect military means, and in the sixteenth century, there were various unsuccessful efforts to establish private military settlements as a defence against Irish rebellion. This was, in effect, a feudal model of imperial domination, with a kind of feudal lordship being used to dominate a dependent population by extra-economic means. The Tudor monarchy sought to extend its rule over Ireland force in a more systematic way, dominated by the state, but it also tried something new, which was to have far-reaching implications for the development of British imperialism.

In the late sixteenth century, England's Irish strategy underwent something like an instant transition from feudalism to capitalism. The Tudor state decided to embark upon on a more aggressive process of colonisation. But this time, the effort to exert extra-economic control by a more effective military conquest was supplemented by an attempt to impose a kind of economic hegemony, using military force to implant a new economic system, as well as a new political and legal order.

A strategy that could be observed throughout the British Empire in subsequent centuries. This conveys a key point: capitalism has always been backed by violence one way or another. Most likely English farmers did not want to become market-dependent and economically insecure tenants. They were not given the choice, as the legal system removed traditional land rights, enclosed common land, and punitively enforced ownership. Capitalism is also an invasive pest. It must constantly expand its reach, or else collapse:

Capitalism had emerged in one country. After that, it could never emerge again in the same way. Every extension of its laws of motion changed the conditions of development thereafter, and every local context shaped the processes of change. But having once began in a single nation state, and having been followed by other nationally organised processes of economic development, capitalism has spread not by erasing the national boundaries but by reproducing its national organisation, creating an increasing number of national economies and nation states. The inevitably uneven development of separate, if interrelated, national entities, especially when subject to imperatives of competition, has virtually guaranteed the persistence of national forms.

While it is depressing to confront England's culpability for introducing capitalism into the world, I also found this a very intellectually satisfying book. It breaks down some of the overwhelming absolutism of 21st century capitalism by describing where it came from. It's a bit like seeing pictures of a totalitarian dictator when they were a small and ugly baby. Wood emphasises that seeing the beginning of capitalism also helps us think about its end, despite it being an extremely persistent system that survives cyclical crises. She makes a strong argument for market imperatives undermining attempts to make capitalism gentler:

Once market imperatives set the terms of social reproduction, all economic actors - both appropriators and producers, even if they remain in possession, or indeed outright ownership, of the means of production - are subject to the demands of competition, increasing productivity, capital accumulation, and the intense exploitation of labour.

For that matter, even the absence of a division between appropriators and producers, is no guarantee of immunity. Once the market is established as an economic 'discipline' or 'regulator', once economic actors become become market-dependent for the conditions of their own reproduction, even workers who own the means of production, individually or collectively, will be obliged to respond to the market's imperatives - to compete and accumulate, to let 'uncompetitive' enterprises and their workers go to the wall, and to exploit themselves. The history of agrarian capitalism, and everything that followed from it, should make it clear that whatever market imperatives regulate the economy and govern social reproduction, there will be no escape from exploitation.

Wood essentially argues that capitalism has ruined the pre-existing concept of markets, by forcing participation and adding the requirements of endless growth, competition, and profit maximisation. This reminded me why I find concepts like corporate social responsibility, sustainable development, and ethical consumption hollow. They cannot hope to adequately temper the overwhelming imperatives of maximising profits and shareholder returns, which demand reduced production costs, minimum regulatory compliance, and growth, growth, growth. The more I read about capitalism, the more I realise that a bit of government intervention is never going to control its destructiveness. Even without regulatory capture, capitalist markets have to expand in defiance of environmental and social disaster. It's a feature, indeed the defining feature, rather than a bug that can be fixed.

Certain writers are hopeful that capitalism can be crowded out of markets, such as Erik Olin Wright in How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century. At the moment I am pessimistic, probably because of the pandemic's effects on my state of mind, more akin to Wolfgang Streeck in How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. Nonetheless, I enjoyed 'The Origin of Capitalism'. I think it would read well with Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, which traces the origin of fossil fuel-powered industrialisation, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which analyses the current expansion of markets into the realm of behavioural data. I was left contemplating the irreversibility, inevitability, and expiration of economic systems.

[Public Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

You will enjoy this book if you already have a familiarity with the orthodox view on how western society transitioned from feudalism to capitalism. You will enjoy this book more if you are already familiar with academic criticism of the orthodox view on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. You will enjoy this book yet more (is it even possible??) if you begin with an opinion about various critiques of the orthodox view on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

I, however, had little familiarity with any of these things and felt hopelessly lost for most of the book. This is a scholarly work masquerading as an accessible volume on the origins of capitalism. Unless one to three of the preconditions above apply to you I would steer clear of Ellen Wood's The Origin of Capitalism.

[Goatboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not very deeply read in economic theory or history, but I honestly cannot imagine a more clearly written explanation of a very focused topic. Exactly as the title says, Meiksins Wood cuts through the fog of assumptions regarding the origins of capitalism and shows how its birth was tied to a very specific time and place, a very specific set of circumstances in English agrarian society, and very specific laws and policies that enabled it to flourish.Very illuminating and certainly changed my thinking on several issues past and present. A mini mind bomb that will forever adjust my thinking.

[Rob M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise here is that both marxist and non-marxist histories of capitalism tend to view it as emerging naturally out of feudalism once the barriers to commercial activity are removed, usually by a process of 'bourgeois revolution' (if you're a marxist) or by some kind of inevitable tendency rooted in our propensity for 'truck and barter' (if you're a liberal).

The problem, according to Wood, is that the marxist version of history views capitalism as equally inevitable as the liberal version. The only difference, for the marxists, is that capitalism will one day itself be superseded, because socialism lives in the interstices of capitalism just as capitalism lived in the interstices of feudalism.

What if, asks Wood, capitalism is not a universal imperative embedded with the human tendency to undertake commercial activity? What if capitalism didn't emerge from commerce at all? After all, merchants and trade have existed for almost as long as civilisation itself. The almost transhistorical fact of commerce is a key plank in the argument that capitalism has always existed in all human life, in utero, even before its emergence as a world system - and therefore that it always will.

Capitalism, according to Wood, actually emerged in one specific place in one specific moment in history - the English countryside in the 15th and 16th centuries, during the period now known as 'Enclosure'. Capitalism is not defined by accessing opportunities in the market, something traders have done from year dot, but being compelled by the market to access the necessities of life. This compulsion towards the market then creates an imperative to make constant improvements to production, in order to stay ahead of the market.

Once it had emerged, these capitalist 'laws of motion' led it to outcompete, conquer, and force capitalism upon all other societies, through trade, war, and imperialism. None of the highly developed commercial empires (all along the Silk Road), wealthy trading nations (the Netherlands, Italian or German city states), rapacious imperialists (Spain), or emerging bureaucratic states (absolutist France) could rightly be called capitalist, and indeed demonstrate the plethora of non-capitalist models of development to emerge out of late feudalism. All became capitalist, sooner or later, because of the outward pressure of a system of property relations which developed specifically in England.

It's hard to know whether Wood successfully dismantles either the marxist view of Bourgeois Revolution (which it's not clear she really intends to do) or the liberal view of the inevitability of capitalism (which she clearly does intend). However, what she achieves here is a wake-up call on all the assumptions that underpin classical theories of history, and a reminder to cross check grand ideas against the actual specificities of history.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wood recent death and my own interests in longer view of capitalism strangely overlapped and I revisited this gem of historiography. Wood and Brenner have been key in getting me to re-think some over-generalizations about capitalist teleology assumed in both liberal and Marxist circles. Many Marxists after Marx have made the same assumptions as liberals about the natural development of capitalism out of feudalism as if it were an innate process of development to economics. Wood not only contested this view, but her synthesis of Brenner with E.P. Thompson explains many otherwise hard to explain traits of capitalism: Why was capitalism so much more tied to England and England’s settler colonies than to Spain or to the various early modern European merchant states like the Italian city states or the Dutch Republic, why did France require a bourgeois revolution whereas England had a religious revolution, why do Locke’s myths about property origins seem so crucial to capitalist thinkers?

This book is divided into three sections. The first is an excellent overview of the various models for the origins of capitalism including most of the figures around the various liberal models, the world-systems quasi-Marxist answers, and the key figures on the transition debate (Paul Sweezy, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, and Kohachiro Takahashi) as well as the Brenner Debates on Agrarian capitalism. While knowledge of these debates that happened between late 1950s and late 1990s does help, Wood presents them clearly and without assuming much prior knowledge. Through these debates, one can see that part of the issue is that the definition of capitalist pre-conditions isn’t settled. Is capitalism the existence of a market or the social compulsion for the market to dominate? If it is the former, then capitalism does seem natural as markets between societies for certain goods have existed in almost all societies. If it is the latter, then such systems as early modern French absolutism or the merchant systems that liberals often call mercantilism are not actually capitalism.

The second section book more clearly lays out this option while Wood acknowledges her intellectual dependence on E.P. Thompson and Robert Brenner more clearly. This section discusses how specific political arrangements after the Tudor period led to English aristocracy being dependent on value from land-holdings on the market instead of pure taxation from extra-economic forces to increase their wealth. This agrarian model creates the pre-conditions for the industrial model but did not exist elsewhere in Europe nor really even outside of England until colonialism pushed it out in search of my growth. Woods focuses on the fact that most of Europe, even colonial states like Spain, put its surplus into the military or into the use value of aristocrats, whereas the legal structures of England required re-investment and improvement to be profitable. This was power was more centralized in the hands of land-owners in the English civil war (revolution), and even after the monarchy was restored, this power was not lost. Woods also goes into why the Dutch and Italian merchant states did not give up extra-economics means of enrichment and thus didn’t develop the same culture or reinvestment. Then Woods convincing shows John Locke laying out a argument and a myth that naturalized these English developments after the English Civil War.

Admittedly, one can become slightly frustrated with Wood here. Here argument is sound, but she does not show specific instances. While she does do this in other books, one gets the feeling that this is only to lay out the logic and the minimal of empirical evidence for her position on the debates but not necessarily go deeply into the empirical historical case. Some people may be frustrated by this tendency, but she does go into these details in other works.

In the third section, Wood talks about the relationship to Enlightenment and Modernity. Wood uses Weber’s arguments about the collapsing of various kinds rationality into instrumental rationality, but unlike someone like Horkheimer or Adorno, does not assume this was the only direct of Enlightenment thinking. If French absolutism were more sustainable, a different model may have been developed. In this sense, Wood seems to argue against critics like Adorno or Frederic Jameson that only one modernity was possible. This also opens her to be combined with theorists who don’t necessarily agree with her on the origins of capitalism when talking about capitalist development outside of Europe. For example, Jairus Banaji’s critique of overly simplistic schemas being read unto the development of capitalism in Asia can work with Wood even though the two thinkers disagree on the origins of capitalism. This third section, however, does seem to be less historiographical and more into taxonomic debates in popular left philosophy and thus seems slightly out if place in the book.

While I regard this book as excellent, it does leave a few areas unexplored. What exactly was primitive accumulation needed for it? Were the enclosures a form of primitive accumulation or something else? How crucial was the Protestant reformation for the differences in aristocratic privilege to have developed in England but not France? The timing seems to indicate that it was crucial but the direct relationship is never discussed even though it seems the breaking of church property tithe systems were just as vital as enclosures to making property the key vision of liberty in England and English speaking colonies? Another question, how crucial was US chattel slavery and what was it relationship to agrarian capitalism? Wood does mention that there is a relationship but doesn’t go very deeply into it. She explains, for example, that US slavery and primitive accumulation accelerated capitalism because of its reliance on the English model whereas the Spanish model did not even though it accumulated and enslaved as much. However, she doesn’t go into specifics here in how the developments were related.

These caveats aside, however, this book is particularly helpful at getting a grip on global capitalism origins and why it seems so related to Anglo-culture in specific and to Western Europe in general without completely Eurocentric exceptionalism being involved. It is clear and readable and presents a complicated but convinced argument.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

By now it’s something of a cliché to say of a fish that when asked, it simply wouldn’t know what water is. Submerged in the aqueous, the only horizon of its world, to even consider that there might be an alternative would be … unintelligible, let alone thinkable. For Ellen Meiksins Wood, it’s capitalism that is our water: soaked to the bone in market imperatives, our imagination has been so stunted that not just capitalism, but even what came before - and what might came after - largely remain inconceivable in terms other than those of capitalism itself. It’s with an eye then, to a possible future, one definitively broken with the capitalism of the present, that Wood looks to the past: to the origin of capitalism, and its birth amongst the very specific, very idiosyncratic conditions of a sixteenth-century England.

In order to appreciate though, the import of Wood’s historical retelling - one whose iconoclasm aims to shatter our received understandings of the French and English revolutions, the history of imperialism, the birth of the nation-state, and the specificity of the Enlightenment and modernity more generally - it’s worth recalling what came before. From Braudel to Weber, Paul Sweezy to Perry Anderson, the birth of capitalism figures largely as the story of an unshackling: of removing, piece by piece, the impediments to its bloom. Construed as a tendency instilled at the beginning of history - and thus in some sense outside of it - history itself becomes an incubator for capitalism’s preordained birth, the shell to its eternally present kernel.

Aiming then, to pull capitalism back into throes of history, Wood sets out to distinguish, with a surgeon’s precision, just what makes capitalism what it is, and more especially, what it isn’t. At the heart of the distinction lies nothing less than the status of production - and the production of food in particular - whose evolving circumstances mark the break between capitalism and all that came before. For only in capitalism does production - rather than say, distribution, arbitrage, or the expansion of markets - become the site of competitive intensification, subject to the imperatives of profit-maximisation and the drive to ‘efficiency’.

Where pre-capitalist appropriation took place among - for example - the contest for markets, the monopolisation of trade routes, and the sheer control of distribution (all of what might be called ‘extra-economic’ factors, secured by means of force, tradition, and obligation), only in capitalism does appropriation take place by means of ‘market forces’ alone. Only here does ‘the economy’ reign supreme. And only in England, with its unique mix of historical circumstance (long story short: centralised state, concentrated land-holdings, large population of tenant farmers) were the conditions ripe for production - and with it capitalism - to take centre stage in the organisation of society.

Needless to say, I’ve left out entire swathes of argument here (why those conditions, and why England only? - read the book), but given just how much Wood managed to pack into this slim 200ish pages, it’s a wonder if I managed to get anything of it across at all. I mean, the actual history of the English origin of capitalism takes up a single chapter here; the rest (the eight others) are given over to spelling out the historical and theoretical consequences of taking the story told here seriously. My list of subjects above (recap: on imperialism, the nation-state, the Revolutions across the channel, and the Enlightenment) fill out the rest of the book, each discussion more revelatory than the next. It’s early days yet, but this book may well have changed just how I think about… well, everything.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book. It provides the reader with a perfect historiographical overview of various theories of capitalism. It does a wonderful job of discounting many traditional explanations for the origin of capitalism. EP Thompson is one of the few historians who doesn’t get too damaged by her review of the literature. I think the book might have made me a Marxist. Not sure yet. It’s such a short book it’s hard to believe she covers so many thinkers (Anderson, Harvey, Landes, Braudel, Smith, Weber, etc.) and so many relevant topics, including colonialism, Dutch economics, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, mercantilism, feudalism, enclosure, French physiocrats, the Industrial Revolution, agrarian capitalism, etc.). In a way, the book’s thesis, that capitalism arose due to a qualitative rather than quantitative change in the market (and the social relations mediated by that market) prefigures the Dawn of Everything hubbub. I mean, her argument is that capitalism is a choice, and an historically contingent episode in history, rather than expression of basic human nature. But this book is far more focused, and consequently far more persuasive.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An effective essay on how capitalism developed in very particular historical circumstances in the English agrarian economy, and is erroneously associated with cities, the enlightenment, modernity, rationalization, and other cliches, including the notion that it arose out of pre-capitalist trade through increasing commercialization. That particular argument--that latent capitalism was always waiting to be liberated from feudalism--is revealed to beg the question. Rather, it is a matter of enclosure leading to market imperatives controlling market participants, and decidedly not a matter enterprising individuals taking advantage of market 'opportunity,' the keynote of coarse capitalist propaganda.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this work, Meiksins Wood makes the original argument that capitalism was not nascent in ancient or feudal societies. Rather, as she argues fairly persuasively, it was a particular development in agrarian England due to conditions specific in the economic and political situation there.

She details the development of agrarian capitalism in England, which emerged out of a unique agrarian sector preoccupied—tenant and landlord alike—with enhancing and improving the land. Out of these circumstances, there developed a set of economic relations and with them a mode economic appropriation. In the English case, the free peasant did not own the means of production, the farms they worked on, or the goods that were produced there for the market; instead, they relied on selling their labor for wages to procure their necessities on the market. This was the basis of economic appropriation unique to agrarian capitalism. Meiksins Wood contrasted that with ancient, Dutch, Italian, and in particular the French absolutist state. The case of the French absolutist state, serving as a particularly salient counterexample to capitalism as she argues, relied on extra-economic appropriation. In that French case, utilizing the mechanisms of the absolutist state, the ruling aristocracy and emerging bourgeoisie squeezed the peasantry through the extra-economic powers of the state offices, as well as the remnants of the aristocratic and municipals jurisdictions. There the mode of economic appropriation unique to capitalism never developed, and did not do so until English and American capitalism invaded France much later.

While Meiksins Wood develops an original and compelling case, her argument suffers from a couple of deficits. First, like her contemporary Perry Anderson notes about his own work, rather than a writing of actual history as such, they are based on the readings of works of modern historians. Second, and this is a common leitmotif across her writings, Meiksins Wood style is particularly dry; unlike the most beloved historians, you never get the sense of the touch and feel of the people, economies, or societies she is describing. We could say, with justification, that it misses the warp and woof of life. This may be because she has the tendency to speak "above" the empirical circumstances of specific events. While these shortcomings are annoyances, and certainly detract from the overall quality of the work and the enjoyment from reading it, they should by no means serve to denigrate the originality of the work and the contribution Meiksins Wood managed to make to the study of economic and political history.

[Nick Colley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't think this was for me.

This book seems to mostly compare existing theories of capitalism.

Unfortunately for me, I don't have a deep understanding of the these theories and the author assumes I do.

This means their comparisons feel really rushed and confusing.

I'd say this might be great for academics but it is not as described "a clear and accessible introduction".

I also found the author uses a lot of filler words and does not use plain English which makes the book feel like you're listening to someone trying to sound clever. This is very frustrating when you're just trying understand what point they're trying to make.

An example of this:

"In modern France, for example, as we have seen, where ..."

No I haven't seen, and get to the point!

These two things combined, shallow explanations and slow getting to the point meant I could not finish this book.

[Neal Adolph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me try to put into words a few thoughts - but let me begin by admitting that I shall fail at fully collecting the impact this book has had on my thinking over the past couple of weeks. But, first, a story.

I remember more than 10 years ago, when I was in grad school, taking a Masters in History with a focus on the history of labour and the unemployed, that I got into a classic facebook debate with one of my high school friends' older brothers. I had written something that railed against the very existence or structure of capitalism, something that is ultimately quite innocuous for somebody in my field of study to do. He didn't much like it.

I remember his core argument being something along the lines that there has never been a society where capitalism was not a driving concept or ideal informing human behaviour. It was natural, it was human, and it was somehow embedded into the very genetic code of our social relations.

I, of course, retorted. Capitalism is a historical reality. It has a beginning, that can be traced, and while that beginning reflects some continuity, it is actually the change that matters. What I continually tried to impress was that the defining feature of capitalism was a dramatic shift in the relations that existed between people; capitalism is about the relationship people have to the means of production and, in turn, the power they have to determine how the means of production are used. He disagreed. Having now read this book I can see where his idea comes from - for him, Capitalism is about the transfer of monies and the act of exchange. This is, indeed, something that has been done for a long time.

He was wrong back then. He's still wrong now. I wish that, back then, I had already read this book because it would have given me a bit more of the knowledge needed to explain the huge shifts in human relationships that were engendered by the development of capitalism. (Not that I think he would have listened or cared whatsoever, given the nature of my degree and knowledge compared to his - but that's a whole other story.)

What would this book have added to that conversation? And what will it add to future conversations?

The first is that capitalism is a system that started in rural communities rather than it growing urban communities, and that it was the dispossession of peasants (workers) from land that lead to the growth of urban communities and the creation of the proletariat. But the insight is deeper than this of course. It was the huge shift of peasants from being able to rely on custom and traditional rights to property and, through that property, to produce the needs of self-reproduction, that was the huge shift. Instead of customary rights to land and production, wage labour and rents were brought into place. It was up to the worker to garner enough through their wages to survive, not through their production.

That's a seismic change in relations.

The second is that capitalism was dependent on the notion of "improving" the productive value of land (or other means of production, as they emerged through industrialization). This is a major shift in thinking that is forced onto workers because of the shift in their relationship to production and onto capitalists because of the new economic motive for profit as a means of growing wealth - rather than coercive extra-economic means (like the use of the church, military, or legal methods). In England in the sixteenth century an entire new genre of literature developed outlining to people how to improve the production of their land; this didn't exist beforehand because the relationship between peasant and landlord was not reliant on the production of goods but on the extraction of wealth through coercion. Improving land value through increasing production so that it could support the acquisition of more wealth which could then be reinvested into other means of extracting wealth in what would become an ever-expanding continuous cycle that supported the "growth" of capitalism.

Third, capitalism expanded rapidly because the inherent motives built into the economic belief required it to move from where it started to where it continues to go through that very same notion of reinvestment in the pursuit of wealth. It is because of this system that capitalism developed in England, grew across the south, and then across the country, then ultimately across the empire. It also, in the process, placed new competitive pressures on other markets that forced dramatic restructuring of market regions into national markets, and feudalistic structures into various nation states. The changes didn't happen because capitalism just-makes-sense but because capitalism is dependent on expansion in order to succeed; finding new markets, finding new labour, finding new lands and resources, and finding ways to dispossess local populations from all of these in the pursuit of profit.

All of this happens in southern England, which is quite specific and unique - and Wood does an exceptional job of indicating how and why capitalism developed in this corner of a developing nation rather than in others despite the supposition that it was going to develop everywhere, naturally, once it was set free. In doing so, she makes it clear that capitalism is a set of ideas that couldn't have grown elsewhere because the conditions didn't exist politically or economically or socially; but she also devotes a great intellectual energy to outlining that even in a place like Southern England, where capitalism began in the fields tilled and cared for by generations of subsistence farmers, the conception of life prior to capitalism was not pre-capitalist but actively non-capitalist.

It's a profound book with a profound and meaningful narrative, and it reminded me of a think I once heard from an another exceptional early modern historian, Natalie Zemon Davis. Something along the lines of "we study history not because we want to justify the world we live in, but because it allows us to understand that the world doesn't have to look like ours."

Which leads me to the last bit. Capitalism began because it dispossessed people from their land and, in doing so, removed them from controlling the means by which they were able to survive. In its stead they were expected to work for wages, which were subjected to the market, so that they could purchase the right to a home and the essential human needs for survival - mainly, food. It brought about economic coercion of the sort that turned the very means of subsistence into the core driving value of a new economic order.

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to dismantle capitalism, then, is to focus again on the core means of our survival and return them to a right rather than a privilege.

Housing for all! Good quality, nutritious food for all! With great honour and respect given to the many advocates who have worked for centuries along these lines, perhaps this is where the collective struggle against capitalism must always devote its focus and discipline. Until it is achieved, and then guarded in perpetuity.

[Faaiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book starts off with critiquing the supposedly (I say supposedly only because I know very little on the origins of capitalism) contemporary and widely prevalent notion that capitalism as it developed was an inevitable and natural consequence of progressively complex tendencies and increased development of trade and commerce. Instead, Wood argues that capitalism was brought about by and under very specific historical circumstances in England, in particular, the imposition of market imperatives whereby the direct producers and owners of the means of production, the tenants, were systematically dispossessed of their lands due to the imposition of economic rents linked to their productivity. The tenants who found better and more productive ways of producing were brought in by landlords whereas those who were not able were forcibly removed and rendered wage laborers. No longer owning the means of their own reproduction, the wage laborers' social relations were increasingly dictated by their capability to sell their own labor to survive.

The book is obviously targeted for an academic audience but the layperson interested in the subject matter can find it illuminating and interesting too. However, the poignancy of Wood's arguments would be more strongly felt by the reader familiar with, or maybe even immersed in, the contemporary and predominant discourse on the origin of capitalism as a phenomena that was an inevitable result of the progression and development of humanity, trade and commerce in particular. In my opinion, reading this book alone does not give the reader enough information about what the contemporary theories on the origin of capitalism argue. And as someone who is likely to not pick up another book on this subject matter for the foreseeable future, I am also ignorant of any responses by the proponents of the commercialization argument to this work. Hence, if you read this book as a standalone, your knowledge of the subject matter is highly likely to be uncomfortably incomplete (which is not entirely the fault of Wood).

[janeee :D · Rating 3 out of 5]

quite well written !

[Elliot Brent]

I finally had to put this one down for the last time for a while. I HATE starting things and not finishing them. Anyhow, the author wrote this book in a way where I just really wasn't receiving much from it.

I just uploaded a blog on it and posted it on my bookstagram, and my other social media platforms.

Now, I can continue reading other books. Plus, I will begin on writing towards what I did all of the reading on finances for.

My bookstagram is penmanshipeb

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

In which Wood is at great pains to remind us that capitalism is not a natural force or state but a historically-specific set of market imperatives. Amen.

She is less convincing when arguing that the root of this society lies not in cities or industrialism but in the rent practices of the English countryside, largely because a lot of these sections seem to default to “read about this in my other, lengthier books.” This under-200-page volume is caught in some weird middle ground between pamphlet/article and book, and functions mostly as a quick overview to Wood’s thought in general, I think - which is fine, but not the way the book is presented.

On the other hand, I am now definitely interested in reading her more substantive books, so...

[KimNica · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I picked up this book I was expecting something along the lines of Polanyi. I really wanted to like it.
And while I buy the argument that capitalism is not an innate part of human nature but the result of very specific historical circumstances, Wood's description of the change in English property relations that is supposed to have set it all in motion is too vague to be fully convincing. Add to that the preachy voice, repetitive style and lack of references (sparse end notes instead of detailed footnotes) and I cannot really recommend this book.

[Cait · Rating 4 out of 5]

learnington…

sorry to my goodreads friends for this insufferably long review but I’m writing down what I learned so I remember:

Wood argues that capitalism emerged from the combination of a highly specific set of circumstances in post-feudal England:

1. A uniquely centralized monarchy relative to all other European powers, which meant that local aristocrats/landlords (relics of feudalism) were relatively weak in terms of their political, military, etc. (“extra-economic”) powers
2. Unusually large landholdings among local aristocrats/landlords

Wood’s thesis is that capitalism is, in effect, a fluke—more specifically, a unique set of social property relations which emerged from the landed class’s efforts to preserve their wealth and status (and the peasant farmer class’s need to feed themselves) amid these conditions. The argument is basically:

1. Because they lacked “extra-economic” political power, landlords had to extract wealth by economic means alone. This meant leasing out their large landholdings to tenant farmers and generating profits, rather than, e.g., levying taxes, compelling payment by military force, etc.
2. A “market for leases” emerged in which landlords, instead of charging the customary fixed rents, began charging the highest rent that the market could bear—and the more productive the land, the higher the rent they could charge. Less productive land would mean getting out-competed / bought out by surrounding, consolidating, more profitable landlords. Here we see the capitalist drive to “relentlessly improve the productive forces.”
3. Peasant farmers across Europe, including England, historically outright owned their own land or else enjoyed communal use rights that distributed land access in part according to village values. But this “market for leases,” for the first time, compelled tenant farmers to compete amongst themselves to be the most productive, such that they could afford high rents and retain access to the land. Peasants were isolated from the means of food production (land) unless they could compete and pay.
4. Increasing competition and exclusion drove out people who had historically farmed the land, creating a large, propertyless class of wage laborers who could only feed themselves by buying the means of subsistence on the market rather than producing it themselves. Thus emerges the capitalist market for cheap commodities. A class this large of totally dispossessed people was only feasible at all because of the surplus generated by ever-increasing (and ever-dispossessing) capitalist productivity.

Wood’s goal is to tell a historically specific story about capitalism as a challenge to ideas of capitalist development as the inevitable outcome of human nature. She pinpoints capitalism’s origin at the point that the market became an imperative rather than an opportunity. But if capitalism has a highly localized and historically specific beginning, and is actually an outlier in terms of social property relations relative to most of human history, then perhaps we can imagine its end as well.

Scariest part of the book was imagining these classes of people just trying to live as they had always lived and accidentally inventing capitalism… oh wow

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across the work of Benedict Anderson when watching a lecture on Southeast Asia, and eventually also learned of the work of his brother Perry Anderson. I think I first came across the Brenner debate when Jacobin started doing podcast episodes on E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and they mentioned the spat between E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. I am admittedly too ignorant and poorly read to really know what the Brenner debate is about. I think Perry Anderson’s view of things more prominently coloured my views on capitalism, because of his focus on colonialism and the Third World, but Ellen Wood tries to emphasize that this is besides the point when trying to understand the origin of capitalism. If Eurocentrism is about the superiority of Europeans, she obviously rejects that, but if it is about the contingent emergence of the capitalist mode of production in Britain, she accepts that. Again, I don’t even understand or have spent any great effort trying to understand what the debate is about. Maybe I should. What I do know is that I did find this book enlightening.

I think the most useful thing I came away with from this book was an understanding of capitalism’s relationship with markets. As Wood says, markets have existed for a very long time. What is particularly unique to capitalism (again, this assertion might be part of the debate?) is the coercive way that capitalism forces people into markets for their own survival. People are more and more unable to survive outside of markets, and the related processes of enclosure and dispossession are the principle means by which this is accomplished. Without land that people control themselves, they must purchase items for their own survival from markets, and consequently need to sell their labour in markets to acquire the income to purchase such items. Markets are no longer supplements to one's livelihood but a mandatory part of one's survival. This framing of capitalism is actually extremely important for understanding how capitalism functioned in the colonization of Turtle Island and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous peoples on this land.

The second interesting thing that made an impression on me from this book was (from my view) a somewhat revisionist departure from the determinism of orthodox Marxism. It is the assertion that capitalism was not an inevitable stage within historical progress. The emergence of capitalism was contingent on a number of factors, and more specifically it was something that emerged in Britain, and this British mode of production (and its related notions of perpetual improvement and focus on efficiency within the dynamics of capitalist competition) became defining for the capitalist mode of production everywhere. She spends a lot of time throughout the book explaining why she thinks capitalism is not something intrinsic to human society, is not something that inevitably emerges on the path to socialism, and is not even something that it is required to achieve socialism (maybe this is my own extrapolation from reading this book), and also how many scholars conflate different forms of feudalism and empire with capitalism, especially with examples from antiquity and the middle ages. I don’t think I have any sort of investment in the sort of Calvinist determinism that did come to define orthodox Marxism. Scholars of the so-called Frankfurt school, the Situationists, Indian communists like Ambedkar all rejected that aspect of radical politics. Maybe it is an interesting mental exercise or some secularized spiritual form of teleological faith that makes radical politics more exciting and interesting, but if I’m very honest, I don’t think anything is inevitable. The future is always open as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, Ellen Wood is one of the most interesting Marxist historians from the settler-colonial nation-state now known as Canada, and was married to the NDP’s Ed Broadbent at the end of her life. She taught at York for many decades, as a lot of Canada’s most prominent left-wing theorists have, and I’m pretty excited that I will be starting school there in September, in a building no-less named after one of the most famous communists from this colonial outpost: Norman Bethune. Anyway, irrelevant digression. This was a worthwhile read, and I’m sure I’ll have to come back to it again for future reference.

[Harris]

Wood reviews various origin stories of capitalism, noting that they seemingly all take capitalism as the natural end after feudalism (still excited to read Perry Anderson's origin stories tho). Wood, instead, sees capitalism as a distinct product of specific circumstances (the creation of the market imperative, land enclosure, and agriculture). There’s definitely value in finding the origin outside of linear trajectory/human nature, especially if we are to find realistic paths out of it. The argument is compelling, but it could have been more fleshed out for me, as I still doesn't know Marx. I was also heavily distracted by animal crossing so who knows how much I missed.

[Ella Pia · Rating 3 out of 5]

there’s some interesting stuff in here about the rise of capitalism in England and the specific nature of English feudalism that started to produce capitalist social relations. But I feel like by attempting to argue that the development of capitalism was not natural or inevitable, and rejecting any notion that technological progress, the development of the forces of production, the French Revolution, or profit-seeking was part of the rise of capitalism, she herself basically implies it was inevitable! Bc she takes out the actions of human beings and all the complex dynamics that occurred within feudalism that undoubtedly contributed to the rise of capitalism even it not in some linear way. She essentially said it was just market imperatives that forced capitalism into being! Does that not imply it’s inevitable and not some more dynamic and complex process? Also the argument that the bourgeois revolutions had nothing to do with the rise of capitalism is wild to me. Pretty frustrating book in a lot of ways even if I did learn some things…

[Adolfo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Da los principios elementales para el entender el capitalismo y sus consecuencias. Nos da elementos del pasado para entender el presente. Personalmente me gusto mucho el libro y su punto de vista.

[Ivar Vangen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Denne er ganske enkelt et must for alle med et minimum av interesse for historie eller økonomi.

[Ziad Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sought out this book after realizing that, if asked, I did not feel I could adequately explain to someone what the difference is between capitalism and commerce - if trade has existed for thousands of years, but capitalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, then what are its particular and distinctive conditions, where did they come from, and how do they manifest in our lives now?

Woods’ work is valuable in answering these questions in that it first seeks to dismantle our assumptions about capitalism (that it is just the natural result of an expansion of trade and that it will arise anywhere where economic activity is released from political constraints) before explaining the specific historical contingencies that produced it; namely, the decision by English agrarian landlords to eliminate common use rights to land and adopt a market-based system for rents that subjected producers to market imperatives and therefore engendered competition, wage labor, and an increasing emphasis on enhancing productivity. Woods also importantly contrasts English capitalism with the non-capitalist economies of other European states (primarily France) to illustrate just how distinctive and contingent the English system was.

While I buy Woods’ explanation, it is not clear to me why this system only arose in England and why it was not independently adopted elsewhere. Woods repeatedly invokes the idea that pre-capitalist commercial societies relied on arbitrage and exploiting market opportunities or leveraging extra-economic powers to extract surplus wealth, but that it was primarily capitalist England that sought to enhance productivity to generate more surplus value. But why could these commercial societies not pursue productivity enhancement also? What was stopping them from investing their commercial profits into the production of the goods they were trading? And if it’s really the case that they rarely did so, how can we maintain a productive society in which people are not forced to be subsistence farmers without some amount of capitalist development?

Maybe it’s a good thing that Woods has created so many questions for me, but I do wish there was a bit more historical analysis to supplement the book. Overall though, a great intro and valuable framework-shifter.

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meiksins Wood does a marvelous job here with a complicated subject: how, and why, did capitalism originate in England when it did—and not in any of the other European states with comparable wealth and technology? (Also, don’t forget powerful and technologically-advanced states outside Europe like China.)

The early part of the book is discussing the existing historical debate around the issue, finding that many of them assume that capitalist mindset and principles were always latent and merely awaiting some critical mass. These other accounts are like reading an explanation of a wildfire that just talks about how flammable the forest was, with no story of lightning or spark to get it started.

So to make her argument, she has to get very specific about what she means by capitalism, drilling into the specific set of social relations that led to capitalism. And those social relations were unique to England at the time, enabling first agrarian and then industrial capitalism that began to press forth onto the other states of Europe and the world.

Luckily, she tends to circle around a subject multiple times and re-express her points as needed, because she is clarifying a lot of these cloudier terms in specific ways for her argument. Still a pretty heavy lift for reading in the evenings, and almost impossible to read while the kid was playing with her toys. Rad book though!

[Fernando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Escribo como esto como lector común y corriente, porque soy mayormente lego en historiografía marxista y porque no voy a sumar nada a lo mucho que se ha escrito sobre este libro desde 1999. Es un ensayo provocador y muy estimulante, que ataca de frente la idea común y extendida, sospechosa desde todo punto de vista, de que el capitalismo se desarrolló como consecuencia natural o inevitable de la "naturaleza humana" (ja, ja), el comercio común a todas las culturas, ni como extensión o superación inevitable del feudalismo y el Estado absolutista. Más bien es el resultado de una configuración específica de fenómenos y factores históricos, geográficos, políticos, etc., y también tecnológicos, claro, y también de formas de explotación del trabajo. Eso es lo que la autora busca en el núcleo del libro. La primera parte se dedica a desmontar los supuestos de los que parten otras historias del capitalismo: poco a poco, muestra cómo muchas asumen la preexistencia del capitalismo, su estado latente "antes" de su eclosión en Inglaterra, su condición "natural", etcétera, aun cuando pretenden explicar su surgimiento. Es decir, se tiende a las explicaciones que no explican nada. Luego, la autora explora las condiciones específicas de Inglaterra que condujeron al desarrollo del capitalismo. El último tercio, a mi parecer bastante flojo, pasa por encima de los debates sobre modernidad y capitalismo, capitalismo y ciudad; me parece muy estimulante, eso sí, su insistencia en el carácter esencialmente agrario de ese primer capitalismo, nuevamente como insistencia en su especificidad histórica. Lo bueno de todo esto es que el libro es de lectura rica y clara, sin recovecos teóricos ni la obtusa necedad de complicarse sin necesidad.

[Ruben Lind · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vattentätt resonemang och välgrundad kritik av liberala och även huvuddelen av marxistiska historieskrivningar om kapitalismens uppkomst som leder fram till tesen att kapitalismen uppkom inte som ett resultat av att diverse hinder undanröjdes vilket möjliggjorde en transhistorisk eller inneboende mänsklig tendens - att handla, maximera och byta - att få fritt spelrum, utan att det var specifika, exempellösa förändringar i ägarförhållandena på den engelska landsbygden som var kapitalismens ursprung. Dessa innebar ett kvalitativt skifte i produktionen som gjorde marknadsprinciper (som vinstmaximering, ackumulation, produktivitetsökningar, bytes- över bruksvärde, expansion och exploatering) till ett tvång och inte bara en möjlighet, och det var denna övergång som var avgörande för samhällets kapitalistiska utveckling. Därmed argumentarar hon emot föreställningen att den senare var blott konsekvensen av en kvantitativ ökning av kapital i bemärkelsen rikedom (till följd av t.ex. imperialism, handel, plundringar, icke-ekonomiska former av exploatering och vinstuttag osv). Hon redogör också för skillnaden mellan borgare och kapitalist, modernitet/rationalitet/upplysning och kapitalism och förhållandet mellan kapitalismen och nationalstaten och imperialismen. + massa annat! Kanske den mest allmänbildande boken jag läst den borde va kurslitteratur.