How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West - Softcover

Parisot, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337872 ISBN 13: 9780745337876

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2019

Synopsis

No nation in the history of the world has been more closely identified with capitalism than the United States. Capitalism, politicians and business leaders confidently assert, is and always has been at the heart of the American dream.

Not so fast, says James Parisot. In How America Became Capitalist, he tells the little-known story of how our economic system came to be, and of the alternatives that were sidelined along the way. Capitalist elements were apparent from the first colonies of white settlers, but they were far from dominant, and they weren’t the driving factor in the advancement of colonies deeper into the continent. Even slavery, which was at the heart of both American capitalism and imperialism throughout much of the nation’s growth, was less a monolithic force than a series of complicated encounters that took different forms. Individual difference slowed the homogenization of capitalism as well, as transgender people, gays and lesbians, and people in interracial relationships all brought complexity to the market’s idea of the typical household.

At a moment when the long-term viability of capitalism is coming increasingly into question, How America Became Capitalist reminds us that the path to its dominance was never so smooth, nor so complete, as its champions would have us believe.
 

About this title

About the Author

James Parisot is an affiliate faculty member in Sociology at Drexel University. He has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals, is co-editor of the book American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers: Cooperation or Conflict? (Routledge, 2017), and is the author of How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West (Pluto, 2019).
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How America Became Capitalist

Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West

By James Parisot

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2019 James Parisot
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3787-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
Introduction: The Embrace of Empire, 1, 
1. The Origins of Colonial Society, 20, 
2. The Expansion of Empire, 49, 
3. Kentucky and Ohio, 82, 
4. Slavery and Capitalism, 112, 
5. The Progress of Empire, 130, 
6. The Consolidation of American Capitalism, 161, 
Conclusion: Capital and the Conquest of Space, 189, 
Notes, 197, 
Index, 249, 

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of Colonial Society

The colonial exploit that became the United States emerged as a product of the European, and most significantly British, empire-building process. And while the community patterns of the colonial power were transplanted to the colonies, these were not necessarily reproduced identically. English aristocrats — or want-to-be aristocrats — indentured servants, African slaves, and other classes of settlers who migrated out of choice or force, found themselves in alien conditions with a foreign ecology to grapple with and living upon land already settled by native populations. In their new surroundings the white-settler societies of New England and Virginia did not simply emulate the habits they brought but adapted to their conditions to build something unique.

In this context, this chapter has two goals. First, it examines the ways that the Virginia and New England colonies emerged out of the international history of capitalism. In a broad sense, European global colonial expansion developed in an era in which Europe itself was going through a slow and uneven transition to capitalism, and patterns of colonialism reflected this. Each colony echoed a different aspect of European migration, and distinct intentions, which led to a less capitalist social structure in the north and social formation that was initially more capitalist in the south. Secondly, the chapter presents an overview of how gender relations were made in the colonial era and provides a framework for understanding some of the ways in which gender was recreated with the rise of American capitalism. In particular, I emphasize the concept of a patriarchal household mode of social reproduction, but also aim to move past binary conceptions of gender roles in the transition(s) to capitalism.

While in today's world many people assume capitalism is the "natural" outcome of human nature, in fact, as generations of social scientists have discussed, this is not the case. Rather, on a world-historical scale, it is relatively new as the dominant form of social life. Historically, in northern European cities such as Ghent and Bruges capitalism began to sprout as early as the twelfth century. Textile production in Flanders was stimulated through relations with the international market as wool was sourced from England and finished goods made their way south to the Mediterranean through the Champagne fairs. And, as capitalism was international from its origins, fluctuations in the Flemish textile industry stood directly in relation to economic movements elsewhere. From Flemish traders traveling to England in the thirteenth century to establish an interdependence between English wool production and the textile industry back home, to the first Genoese sea voyage to Flanders in 1277 bypassing the Champagne fairs, economic movements in the textile industry were linked to fluctuations in the international market. Wage labor and class struggle were also present in both rural and urban Flanders. Many of the textiles produced were created by the labor power of workers who went on large-scale strikes several times, the greatest being in 1280.

Connected from England to Italy, to the Baltic through the Hanseatic League, Bruges became the entrepôt of northern Europe and developed a sophisticated financial system to accompany its commercial growth. Within the region, capital also flowed towards maximizing profitable investments and managing risk. In fourteenth-century Ghent, for instance, capital shifted towards the countryside to search for lower labor costs. Capital also invested in infrastructure, specifically in the form of water management and flood prevention technologies. These projects generally used temporary laborers paid relatively low wages and were organized by contractors who expected to profit from taxes that water boards collected. Water boards also sold annuities to investors, who hoped to profit from the infrastructure projects. And while some labor was organized into guilds, this did not necessarily preclude capitalist development. While guilds regulated prices, supply and demand, and regulated class conflict and compromise within production processes and between producers and merchants, many apprentices and journeymen never themselves became masters as the apprentice system partially functioned to create a working class of labor for masters to use. Overall, as Bas van Bavel notes, in the Netherlands, by the eleventh and twelfth centuries market relations were well established and by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, land was commodified and marketized and capital-wage labor relations took off, as, by the sixteenth century, in the Netherlands as a whole, perhaps one-third to half of all labor was wage labor, with higher rates in some parts of the countryside.

Further south the development of capitalism in the Italian city-states was shaped by international relations and appropriations, especially from Islamic societies. The Crusades spurred the growth of Italian wealth as capital sought profits through violence. Venice supplied ships and in return for transporting soldiers and weapons Venetians would demand partial control over captured cities, which they could then profit from through taxation and control of licenses for productive enterprises. And Venetian capital, perhaps in part emulating the Arab qirad, was regularly pooled into commendas, partnerships in which investors could merge their capital to manage risk. Many other aspects of what would become early capitalism in the Italian city-states seemingly derived in part from Arab ideas and institutions. Commercial terms such as sakk which became translated into check, an instrument of monetary exchange, among many other concepts, came from Arabic words. The adoption of Arabic numerals made calculations much easier than using Roman numerals and, along with algebra, made the Italian "invention" of double-entry book keeping possible. And leading mathematical thinkers such as Leonardo Fibonacci, who grew up in Algeria, developed commercial mathematics after learning from Arabs. Europeans also modeled their coins after Islamic currencies.

Additionally, through the latter part of the thirteenth century, Florence developed a capitalist economy in which wool produced in England, Spain, and Portugal was shipped through the Low Countries and France into Florence to be worked by the Florentine proletariat to sell to traders in the Levant for Asian goods. By the 1330s a significant proportion of Florence's population lived on wages from the textile industry. Overall, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many aspects of capitalism unevenly developed throughout Europe. Capitalists pooled their capital in associations to manage risk, complex credit and financial tools were developed, workers sold their labor power to capital for wages, and merchant capitalists made great profits, and sometimes losses, from international trade.

Slave labor also played a key role in the rise of capitalism. Initially, Portuguese expansion set up the pattern for the European conquest and colonization that followed. This included creating the model of plantation slavery that spread across the Atlantic to the West Indies and North American colonies. Settling on Madeira in 1419, the Azores in 1427, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1450, and later Sao Tome and Fernando Po in the 1470s and 1480s, Portuguese merchants soon found, first, profits from intercepting the already existing African slave trade and, secondly, that slave labor could be put to profitable use. They found slaves could be a useful source of labor to work on and strengthen their trading posts. Thus, Sao Tome and Fernando Po were settled and quickly became centers of the slave trade based on the use of slaves to build fortifications, churches, and so on. And Lisbon responded to the rise of the slave trade by introducing licenses and taxes on slave traders with the goal not of capitalist development, but financing the monarchy as taxing merchant capital became a major source of wealth for the Crown, by 1560 perhaps half of its revenue.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, all the components for the rise of a plantation sugar industry on islands off the coast of West Africa were in place. The Portuguese brought sugar cane and processing equipment from Sicily (as islands such as Cyprus, historically, had plantation sugar production in the fourteenth century) and Spain to Madeira in 1446. Beginning as a way to finance exploration, colonization and plantation building brought together territorial empire building, capital, and market relations stretching from Italy to Africa, and beyond. By 1500 Madeira had become a large center of sugar production, with about 2,000 slaves working in a total population of 15,000–18,000. Slavery then spread across the Atlantic to the Americas. As the native populations were wiped out by the millions and indigenous labor proved difficult to sustain and control, the Spanish and Portuguese soon resorted to African slave labor, and by the middle of the fifteenth century, dozens of sugar plantations were set up in the Americas, some of which had more than a hundred slaves. By 1570, it is estimated that there were perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 African slaves in Portuguese Brazil, and perhaps ten to fifteen as many native slaves. But by 1600, there were perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 Africans in the colonies, and between 1600 and 1650, it is estimated at least 200,000 Africans were brought across the ocean.

In this emerging world order, by the time capitalism developed in England, its international formation had been in motion in fits and starts for several centuries. England's contribution to the origins of capitalism, then, was not, as some have argued, that capitalism was essentially invented there. Rather, England took this uneven history several steps forward as the enclosures dispossessed the agrarian population, a wage labor class with nothing to sell but labor power formed, and capitalism gradually took hold, setting the stage for the British to build a global empire.

From England to Virginia

Out of this historical process the colonies of North America were founded. From one angle, it might appear the colonies were capitalist from their inception. They arose interconnected with the developing Atlantic world market, held together by ships sailing for profit. Yet social historians have argued that the social relations that formed within the first two centuries of colonization may have not been capitalist. So we seem to have two different possibilities: either (what became) the United States was capitalist from the start, and never went through a transition in the first place, or else at some point the country became capitalist.

In the case of Virginia, capitalist interests tended to prevail from the start. The first British merchants, gentlemen, and adventurers began to explore the coast of North America in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. And the first substantial attempt at colonization was the lost colony of Roanoke. The reasons for the creation of the colony were manifold, from interimperial rivalry with Spain to privateering. While dreams of the profits of empire may have guided the Roanoke adventurers, resulting in failure after three expeditions, following in the path of the Spanish and Portuguese, some English investors continued to see North American colonization as a path towards profits. They dreamed of locating precious metals, or finding a Northwest Passage, or producing wine and silk for the English market. Thomas Hariot, for example, wrote a guide in 1588 describing commodities which could be produced in Virginia to stir up excitement for colonization among English investors. And adventurers and investors such as Richard Hakluyt believed that a colony could produce basic commodities such as oil, wine, and sugar, moving England away from dependence on foreign sources. It would additionally create an outlet for the English poor, dispossessed by the rise of capitalism. The colony would likewise provide an impetus to expand English naval power, particularly as natural resources such as timber could be used to develop a shipbuilding industry. But this capitalist fantasy eventually clashed with reality as early settlers instead found a country populated by native peoples who resisted their expansion, in which precious metals were scarce and silk and wine difficult to produce, no evidence of a Northwest Passage, and a climate in which tobacco, partially to the consternation of the ruling political elite of the Virginia Company of London, became the staple of local farming.

From the start, Virginia was built on a combination of capital and colonization. But the dream of an independent American Empire was yet to be conceived for almost two centuries. Rather, settlers were part of the emerging British Empire. The colony was born at a time in which England was going through its own transition to capitalism, and the political economy of colonial Virginia reflected this, as it was not the British Crown that initially governed the colony, but the Virginia Company. For investors in the Virginia Company, the colony was a potential source of primary resource extraction and hopes existed that gold and silver might be found. It was also a way to break England's dependence on foreign imports by producing basic agricultural commodities for the English market. And it was believed that a route to China could be found through America. In any case, for investors in the Virginia Company colonization was seen as a potential route towards profit.

The first settlers reached Virginia in late April of 1607 and explored the area until, in mid-May, they choose the site to build Jamestown. From the start, tensions arose with the natives. First, the Native Americans found a group of two or three dozen explorers in Cape Henry, and chased them back to their ships. And after spending a week constructing a fort, the colonists, under Captain Christopher Newport, headed up river to explore and begin diplomatic relations with the natives. They learned that local native groups were linked together through the leader Powhatan, and on returning to Jamestown three days later, found Powhatan's warriors had attacked the fort. Of course, relations with the natives were not always so violent, and the settlers quickly became dependent on their food. This was in large part due to the poor planning of the English. Rather than sending over potentially self-reproducing families, or laborers and farmers who could work the land, a disproportionate number of settlers were gentlemen. In the first three shiploads, for example, 293 men and two women came, and 110 of these were gentlemen. Only fifty-one were laborers (in some cases servants of the gentlemen) and twenty-seven craftsmen. The fundamental problem was that "gentlemen, by definition, had no manual skill, nor could they be expected to work at ordinary labor." Instead, their role was supposed to be "force of knowledge" and "exercise of council"; in other words, organizational planning and governance. But a colony cannot be built on brains alone, and the inability of Virginia to become self-sustaining in its early years meant that, by the cruel winter of 1609–10, it has been said that colonists were possibly going so far as to resort to cannibalism.

The social forces that drove the colonization of Virginia were also very much a masculine infused form of capitalism. Men risked their lives, and often died, traveling across the ocean seeking profit and prestige. Given that the majority of settlers were men, the Company also sent over shiploads of women, "Tobacco Brides," to marry them. For example, the Company's notes of 1619 record they sent over ninety "young maids to make wiues for so many of the former Tenants." And in 1621 the Company sent over fifty women as "they require one hundredth and fiftie of the best leafe tobacco for each of them; and if any of them dye there must be a proportionable addition vppon the rest." A social logic of patriarchal expansion was also quickly established in the colony. The 1619 Proceedings of the Virginia Assembly contain, for example, a petition to assign land to the male children of planters. Thus, shortly after the colony began, settlers began to clamor for more land to pass to their sons.

While capital may have guided colonialism, the Company also suggested adopting aspects of a tributary form of empire over the indigenous peoples. In 1609, for instance, the Virginia Council instructed Sir Thomas Gates that, if distrust arose with Powhatan, "but if you finde it not best to make him yor prisoner yet you make him yor tributary." But overall, the goal of the Company, funded by shareholders, was to find a way to generate profit. In their letter to Gates, for example, they suggested four ways of doing this; mining, trade, tribute from the land, and "the fourth is labour of yor own men in makinge wines pitche Tarre sope ashes, Steele Iron Pipestaues in sowinge of hempe and flaxe in gatheringe silke of the grasse, and pvidinge the worme and in fishinge for Pearle Codd sturgeon and such like." In other words, the desire of the Company was not to become dependent upon tobacco production, but to create a diversified economy through the construction of profitable social relations. To accomplish this, they sent over men to start ironworks, saltworks, build sawmills, breed silk worms, and so on, although their attempts proved of limited success as tobacco quickly became king. Initially, agricultural production was run collectively. But in 1609 small amounts of land were distributed to individuals, and in 1614 the first group of Company men finished their contracts and were allotted 3 acres per individual, or 12 per family. Independent farmers were expected to feed themselves in addition to providing two and a half barrels of corn a year and working for the Company one month per year. This started the tradition of private individual agricultural social property relations that would continue to grow.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745337872
• ISBN 13: 9780745337876
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288