Almanack, Guarulhos, n. 17, p. 465-475, Dez.

2017

Revisiting the Transition to Capitalism Debate

Resenha de: ANIEVAS, Alexander and NISANCIOGLU, Kerem. How the

West Came to Rule: the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press,
2015. 375 pp.

465

Robin Blackburn*
University of Essex
Colchester – United Kingdom

This ambitious book covers over six hundred years of global his-
tory and offers a specifically ‘geo-political’ correction to a Marxist un-
derstanding of the emergence of capitalism. The book has extensive

Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School in New York and the University of Essex, UK. He
*

is the author of the The American Crucible (2011). E-mail: roblack@essex.ac.uk.

 Robin Blackburn Almanack, Guarulhos, n. 17, p.465-475, Dez. 2017
Revisting the Transition to Capitalism Debate http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2236-463320171713

chapters on the Mongolian Empires, the clash between Hapsburgs and

Ottomans, the impact of the Black Death , the turn to slave plantations
of the Americas and the profits of British rule in India. While develo-
ping a critique of traditional Marxist accounts, they uphold both Marx’s
concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ and what they call the ‘classical’
narratives of successive ‘bourgeois revolutions’ , each helping to con-
firm a capitalist dynamic and the ‘Rise of the West’. According to the
‘consequentialist’ doctrine they espouse the nature of revolutions is set
by their results rather than their agents. The authors structure much
of their narrative around a critique of ‘Eurocentrism’, which they see
as conferring an unjustified salience and superiority on western insti-
tutions and a failure to register the weight of geo-political advantages
and handicaps. The authors supply a new narrative that reworks the
‘transition debate’, Trotsky’s theory of ‘uneven and combined develo-
466
pment’ and a concept of the ‘international’ derived from Internatio-
nal Relations, all of this from an avowedly ‘anti-capitalist’ standpoint.
The book develops a historical materialist approach but does not
suppose that human history is an orderly march of successive modes
of production, each born out of the contradictions of their predeces-
sors. While their critique is welcome so is their refusal to throw out
the baby with the bath water. The elaboration of theoretical models
of social relations, and the identification of characteristic tensions wi-
thin them, is an essential part of making sense of history. The book
takes seriously the task of identifying the succession of structures and
struggles that enabled capitalism to embody and promote increasingly
generalized and pervasive commodification.
The authors argue that early capitalism was a more complex and
global affair than is often allowed. Heteroclite labour regimes, and
types of rule, gave rise to uneven and combined development in which
the new and the old were closely interwoven. The authors often quote
Marx’s powerful passage from Capital, volume 1 chapter 31 sketching
the successive moments of ‘primitive accumulation’, linked to gold
and silver from the Americas, the Atlantic slave trade, slave plantations,
trade wars, colonialism and so forth. New forms of plunder and super-
-exploitation punctuate later decades and centuries, with Western rule

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casting a long shadow. ‘Primitive accumulation’ was not just a passing

phase but was stubbornly recurrent. It supplied would-be capitalists
with the capital and labour force they otherwise lacked. The racializa-
tion of the enslaved and/or colonized generated an intermediary layer
of ‘free workers’ that, if given slightly easier conditions, would become
useful allies of the slaveholders, serving in their patrols and militias. Ca-
pitalist development, in this account, is invariably linked to racializa-
tion and super-exploitation, and is devoid of a progressive dimension.
The book’s subtitle presumably supplies a key element of the
answer to the question posed by the main title. The West’s rise to glo-
bal ascendancy is a team race which is won by Britain around 1763. (p.
272) The British win because their maritime-manufacturing complex
is now turbo-charged by capitalism. While we may anticipate this con-
clusion much of the book’s interest lies in the account it gives of how
467
this point itself was reached.
The authors explain how Europe’s mercantile and proto-capitalist
elites exploited the toilers of the ‘East’ but they grant that it can also
sometimes be thought of as the global ‘North’ exploiting the global
‘South’. While the East and South were mercilessly plundered they
contributed to the rise of the West in other ways too.
Anievas and Nisanancioglu – henceforth AA and KN – urge that
in preceding epochs the Mongolian empires created relatively peaceful
conditions along the Silk Road and in adjacent areas which were con-
sequently favorable to the revival of Western commerce in the Baltic
and Mediterranean. The nomad’s military prowess inspired emulation.
They observe: ‘The Mongol Empire also facilitated the diffusion of
such key military technologies as navigational techniques and gunpow-
der from East Asia to Europe all of which were crucial to Europe’s
subsequent rise to global pre-eminence…The Mongols would acquire
such techniques in one society and then deploy them in another…’ (p.
73). We can agree that these exchanges were highly significant without
seeing those involved as capitalists.
The authors urge that the hugely destructive Mongol invasions
of China led its rulers to abandon their projects of expansion and to

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stand down the voyages of Admiral Zheng He’s mighty fleet. As Jo-
seph Needham used to insist, China made an outstanding contribution
to the science and material culture of the West. AA and KN remain
focused mainly on the geopolitical and do not concern themselves with
Needham’s “Grand Titration”.
It is fascinating to consider what would have happened if Chi-
nese sailors and merchants had made contact with the Americas befo-
re the Europeans. Admiral Zheng He repeatedly sailed to the Indian
Ocean but neglected the Pacific. If he had turned left rather than ri-
ght, and sailed to the Americas, China might have been able to pre-
-empt Columbus and Cortes, especially when it is borne in mind that
a silver famine was asphyxiating the Chinese economy at this time. A
Chinese mercantile colony in Central America would have thrived on
the exchange of silk fabrics and porcelain for silver. The Aztec and
468
Inca rulers would, perhaps, have been able to strengthen their defenses
with Chinese help (and gunpowder) and repulse Spanish attempts to
conquer the ‘American’ mainland. (China did not go in for overseas
territorial expansion).
AA and FN confer great importance on the bonanzas of Ameri-
can silver and gold arguing that the differential use made of precious
metal plays a key role in explaining the great divergence between West
and East. ( p. 248-9) But they and the authorities they quote do not
explain how the silver and gold were extracted and refined, processes
that fit their mixed labour model because it involved tribute labour
and wage labour but fell short of a capitalist dynamic because the in-
digeneous miners had to spend most of their earnings on buying food
and clothing from the royal shops that were kept supplied with these
essentials of life in the mountains from the tribute goods which the
Spanish overlords secured from the native villages. This closed circle
of production and consumption led to output of thousands of tons
of silver, with the royal authorities taking the lion’s share but did not
promote capitalist accumulation.
In their own accounting for the divergence between East and West
they cite the ‘indispensable’ work of Jack Goody (p. 304, footnote 22)

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but do not take sufficient account of his stress on differences concer-

ning family form and the regulation of kinship. Goody maintained
that clans and kin accumulated so much power in the East that they
weakened the state’s power to tax and regulate. In Goody’s view this
challenge to the power of kinship was a Western European phenome-
non and was driven by the material interests of the Catholic Church.
(The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, 1988). This inte-
resting line of thought has not received the attention it deserves from
historical materialist accounts, including How the West Came to Rule.
Whether it is right or wrong, it points to a level of analysis of social
reproduction that should figure in any materialist account.
AA and KN eschew speculative ‘counter-factuals’, but they do
claim a positive role for Asian empires despite the latter’s often-tight
mercantilist policies. They have little time for the argument of some
469
global historians that the land-based empires of Asia briefly encoura-
ged trade only to strangle its autonomous momentum by over-regula-
ting and over-taxing it. Ellen Wood has argued in The Empire of Capital
(2004) that the geographical fragmentation of Europe allowed for the
rise of sea-borne empires whose merchants became more difficult to
control. But for AA and KN the empires were already highly diverse
and made their own qualitative input to the rise of Western capitalism
through a multitude of dispersed influences and contributions.
Thus the rise of the Ottomans issued a powerful check to Europe-
an expansion and tied them down in the Balkans, the Adriatic, the Le-
vant and North Africa. According to AA and KN this blockage to the
East allowed the western Europeans to seize their chance in the Ame-
ricas and to initiate a new type of global trade: ‘By blocking the most
dominant European powers from their customary conduits to Asian
markets, the Ottoman’s directly compelled then to pursue alternative
routes.’ (p. 115). However this free-floating compulsion was only com-
pelling because of the breakthrough of a new and more intense – now
capitalist – consumerism.
The authors do give importance to Dutch and English trading pat-
terns and to what they call ‘company capitalism’, the state chartering

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of companies to trade with the East and West Indies. They see these
companies as dominating the English and Dutch maritime economy
of the 17th and 18th century (p. 116). They urge that the Dutch were
constrained by the fact that they were reliant on Ottoman sources for
cotton and other vital raw materials for their textile manufacturing. (p.
117) The English eventually prevail because they are less exposed to
continental warfare than the Dutch.
The geographic advantages conferred by England’s relative ‘isola-
tion’ from the continent enabled it to outflank its rivals. (p. 116). They
conclude: ‘English development in the sixteenth century can best be
understood as a particular outcome of “combined development” […]
Ottoman geopolitical pressure must therefore be seen as a necessary
but not sufficient condition for the emergence of agrarian capitalism
in England.’ (p. 119) The causality embraced by the authors in these
470
passages is a weak one whether addressing the impetus to trade, En-
gland’s ‘isolation’ or the authors’ exaggerated view of ‘company capi-
talism’. Indeed the turn to the Americas should be seen as a having two
distinct waves, firstly the silver surge of the mid and late 16th century
while allowed Europe to buy Eastern spices and silks and, secondly,
the rise of the sugar and tobacco plantations of the Americas, which
really belongs to 17th century and after. It was not until the early 17th
century that Dutch and English merchant adventurers turned to set-
ting up plantations to meet the popular demand for sugar and tobacco,
discovering that this offered far larger returns than either the Eastern
trades or preying on Spanish fleets. At first these plantations were
worked by free, European youths but demand was so buoyant that the
merchants brought African captives who had greater immunity to tro-
pical diseases and brought valuable agricultural skills. The Dutch West
and East India companies played a role in this because they blazed a
trail for English and French planters. Once the Dutch had lost Angola,
Brazil and New Amsterdam, their operations became a side-show.
How the West Came to Rule pushes the debate about the transition
to capitalism into new areas and that is itself salutary. The geo-poli-
tical perspective yields new insights. But the argument from geo-poli-
tical necessity to economic novelty moves too rapidly and insists that

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the emergence of capitalism in England has no primacy in the switch

from luxury trades to building slave plantations (this gruesome prima-
cy should be a source of national shame not pride).
As already mentioned, the Eastern trade was largely confined to
small quantities of expensive luxuries in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Dutch and English 17th century interlopers and marauders, with
their contempt for Spanish mercantilism, pioneered the large scale
Atlantic trade in items of popular consumption. Before long the Euro-
pean companies were left far behind and the free-lance slave traders,
privateers and smugglers became the champions of laissez faire and
free trade, and became thoroughly respectable.
Sugar and tobacco, the new popular pleasures, came to Europe
not from Asia but from Brazil, Barbados and Virginia. The surge of
plantation development was initiated by ‘New Merchants’ not by the 471
official trading companies. The chartered trading companies played
a very modest role because they embodied the backward practices
of feudal business, with its royal charters. By contrast the New Mer-
chants favoured a much looser variety of mercantilism that allowed
for competition and innovation. Whereas the companies were looted
by their own management, the ‘New Merchants’ kept a close eye on
their investments. The initiatives of the new merchants stemmed from
a surge of commodification and domestic demand, itself the product
the spread of capitalist social relations in the English countryside as
well as towns. Tenant farmers, improving landlords, lawyers, stewards,
and the swelling ranks of wage labourers, had the cash or credit to buy
these popular treats and indulgences. Without the forced labour of
the plantations, and Hobsbawm’s ‘forced draught’ of consumer cash,
these trades would not have kindled the 18th and 19th century blaze of
the hybrid Atlantic economies. AA and KN do register the plantation
revolution but insist that it would be wrong to see English capitalism
and wage labour as a ‘prime mover’.
How the West Came to Rule has a good chapter on the slave planta-
tions and their massive contribution to capitalist accumulation in the
long 18th century. But AA and KN do not concede that the planta-

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tions were summoned into being by the cash demand generated by

the world’s first revolutionary capitalism. They underplay the role of
the New Merchants (and their captains and seamen) with their double
role as entrepreneurs and political leaders. This was the epoch of the
English Civil War and ‘Glorious Revolution’. The classic work on the
New Merchants stresses their link to England’s transition to capitalism
is Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution (1993). One might have
thought that Brenner’s work would be grist to the mill so far as AA and
KN are concerned. However the reader of How the West Came to Rule
is repeatedly warned not to be misled by Brenner’s account of capita-
list origins and development (see especially pp. 22-32, 118-9, 279-81
amongst many others).
AA and FN contest the novelty and centrality that Brenner ac-
cords to the spread of capitalism and commodification in 16th and 17th
472
century rural England. They see instead a long chain of ‘value added’
contributions from colonial or semi-colonial Asia, Africa and the Ame-
ricas, all helping to bring global capitalism into existence. They con-
cede to Brenner ‘the great merit of de-naturalising the emergence of
capitalism’ (p. 81) but dispute the idea that this remarkable new twist
in human history was the unintended result of a three-way struggle
between English landlords, tenant farmers and landless labourers as he
argued in his now-classic articles in Past and Present and New Left Review
in the 1970s and 1980s. Brenner did not himself always connect his
decisive research into the New Merchants with the so-called ‘Brenner
thesis’. Nevertheless he identified the crucial break-through, showing
that agrarian capitalism developed from landlords who demanded mo-
ney rents, tenant farmers needed cash to pay rent, and landless rural
workers, who had to sell their labour power if their families were to be
housed and fed. Farmers who needed or wanted to pay for extra hands
had an incentive to seek labour-saving innovations. The wages and
fees paid by employers would also helped to swell the domestic market,
encouraging commodification. Since agriculture accounted for at least
70% of GDP its transformation had great consequences.
Jan de Vries argues that early modern Europe was gripped by an
‘industrious revolution’ reflecting a more intense labor regime and a

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proto-capitalist consumerism. A taste for tobacco, sugar, coffee and

cotton apparel encouraged many into new habits premised upon
the increasing importance of the wages, rents, profits, fees and sala-
ries of an Anglo-Dutch ‘market revolution’ in the years 1550-1650.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1614) gives us a glimpse of the feasting and
rebellions that early modern capitalism, with its visions of plenty, could
inspire and of the varieties of enslavement it entailed. By the mid-19th
century daily life had been re-shaped by sweetened beverages, jam,
confectionary, washable clothes, colourful prints and the chewing or
smoking of tobacco.
AA and KN decry what they term the ‘ontological singularity’ of
Brenner’s economic logic, urging that it leads to a reductionism that
has no space for race or patriarchy. They argue that ‘patriarchy and
racism’ are ’not external to capitalism as a mode of production but
473
constitutive of its very ontology.’ (p. 278). It is difficult to see how any
account could be more reductionist than one which simply (con)fuses
capitalism with racism and patriarchy. Nevertheless there are interes-
ting questions which arise here. Could capitalism survive if deprived
of the fruits of gender and racial exploitation? There are certainly
feminists and anti-racists who believe that much can be achieved short
of the total suppression of capitalism – and there are some who belie-
ve that better versions of capitalism could assist in promoting feminist
and anti-racist goals. The spectrum here was illuminated by Nancy
Fraser’s Fortunes of Feminism (2014).
Back in the day the more radical British and US abolitionists cam-
paigned courageously for racial justice and equality in the name of a
‘free labour’ or forty acres and a mule, demands compatible with capi-
talism. Socialists might be happy to form alliances for progressive goals
to be achieved ‘by any means necessary and appropriate’. If we grant
the theoretical possibility that patriarchy and racism could be suppressed
but capitalism remains, this outcome might still prove to be undesirab-
le, impractical and unstable. The intimacy of the connections between
capitalism, racism and patriarchy suggest that they could share a com-
mon fate, though other outcomes are quite possible.

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AA and KN endorse the classic claim that the rise of capitalism

was given needed extra-momentum by a series of ‘bourgeois revolu-
tions’. Their account of the main revolutions is not detailed but adds
the dialectical sweep of their story. AA and KN quote Anatolii Ado to
the effect that ‘the popular revolutions of the petty producers ought
to be seen as an essential element of the capitalist dynamic’. (p. 212).
Slave resistance sometimes took the form of demanding wages while
itinerant peddlers happily bought ‘stolen goods’ from the slaves.
While I find AA and KN’s sketch of the bourgeois revolutions
makes for a more complex account, there is still a way to go. The Ame-
rican War of Independence led to the destruction of the European
colonial empires in the Americas. This was a mighty blow for capita-
lism in the Atlantic societies and helped to trigger the French Revolu-
tion and hence the Haitian revolution. The further impact on Spanish
474
America and Brazil are not discussed. All these events echoed themes
of bourgeois revolution and the ‘rights of man’ as re-worked by free
people of colour, slave rebels, liberty boys, dockers, sailors and the ‘pi-
caresque proletariat’. The black Jacobins denounced the ‘aristocracy
of the skin’. AA and KN could, perhaps, have drawn on their notion
of a mixed social formation to consider in more depth the worlds of
indios, caboclos, petty producers, runaways, store keepers, itinerant ped-
dlers and the ‘sans culottes of the Americas’. The bourgeois character of
these revolutions in the end excluded as many as it aroused.
How the West Came to Rule offers so much that it would not be fair
to dwell on its omissions. The American Revolution tests the limits of
the model advanced by AA and KN. The North American farmers
and merchants have a solid claim to have defied and destroyed mer-
cantilism and colonial subjection. But the planters were not exactly
bourgeois and the indigenous peoples and the enslaved Africans found
no solace and much suffering and bitterness in the extraordinary rise
of the White Man’s Republic. In this as in other cases the initial impact
of bourgeois revolution was to stimulate the plantation trades rather
than weaken slavery or racialization.

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How the West Came to Rule (HWCR) rightly stresses the massive
‘Atlantic’ contribution to the development of capitalism in the 17th,
18th and 19th centuries. Whether it is Britain, France, Spain, or even
Portugal and the Netherlands, the volume of trade that was bounded
by the Atlantic was very much greater – down to about 1820 – than
Europe’s trade with the East. Of course after that date British rule
in India, and the sub-continent’s commerce, became far more impor-
tant for the metropolis, and the same could be said for Indonesia and
Dutch rule. Whereas the spice trade to Asia required two or three
galleons a year in the 16th century the plantation trade was to require
thousands of ships by the mid 19th century. AA and KN maintain that
Britain’s early industrialisation was based on Indian inputs (p. 246). In
fact England’s 18th century cotton manufacturers looked to the Cari-
bbean and Anatolia for most of their raw material. It was not until the
475
19th century that India became Britain’s main source of cotton and the
captive Indian market a major outlet. AA and KN could have dwelt
at greater length on the hugely destructive impact of British rule in
India – famines, fiscal exactions, de-industrialization and so forth – but
they do explain the Raj’s success in building a locally-financed and
recruited Army of India and alliance with the subcontinent’s ‘martial
races’. British India troops held down the widening boundaries of the
Raj and were deployed to many parts of the empire. They formed
part of the British forces that invaded China in 1839-42, 1859-62 and
1900. (p. 263) This was the true apogee of empire. But the rapacious
ultra-imperial unity of the Western powers and Japan did not last for
long, leading, as it did, to a new epoch of war and revolution.
How the West Came to Rule addresses a large and complex question
in interesting new ways and is to be commended for that. It draws on
wide reading and demonstrates the continuing relevance of the de-
bates on the transition to capitalism and gives them a geographically
and conceptually wider scope. While their account may be open to ob-
jection at various levels their choice of topic and the breadth of their
approach is timely and welcome.

Recebido: 26/07/2017 - Aprovado: 10/08/2017

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