Capitalism and Modernity E-Book

Jack Goody

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 319

Beschreibung

This important new book investigates how the West attained its current position of economic and social advantage. In an incisive historical analysis, Jack Goody examines when and why Europe (and Anglo-America) started to outstrip all other continents in socio-economic growth. Drawing on non-Western examples of economic and technical progress, Goody challenges assumptions about long-term European supremacy of a 'cultural' kind, as was a feature of many theories current in social science. He argues that the divergence came with the Industrial Revolution and that the earlier bourgeois revolution of the sixteenth century was but one among many Eurasia-wide expressions of developing mercantile and manufacturing activity. This original book casts new light on the history of capitalism, industrialization and modernity, and will be essential reading for all those interested in the great debate about the economic rise of the West.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: the Notion of Capitalism and the Rewriting of World History

1 Culture and the Economy in Early Europe

2 The Sixteenth Century

3 The Other Side of the Coin

4 Malthus and the East

Kin groups

Kinship

Individualism

Malthus and the East

5 The Challenge of China

6 The Growth and Interchange of Merchant Cultures

References and Bibliography

Index

To the memory of Peter Laslett and to the Cambridge Group

Copyright © Jack Goody 2004

The right of Jack Goody to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2004 by Polity Press Ltd.

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goody, Jack.

Capitalism and modernity : the great debate / Jack Goody.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7456-3190-8 (hb : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-3191-6 (pb : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-3800-3 (Single-user ebook) – ISBN 978-0-7456-3799-0 (Multi-user ebook)

1. Social history. 2. Capitalism – History. 3. Industrialization. 4. Civilization, Modern. I. Title.

HN13.G66 2004

306–dc22 2003016235

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Acknowledgements

If I were to list all those who have helped to focus my attention on the problems discussed in this book, the manuscript would be very much longer than it is, and it would include a number of the names whose work has been the subject of my comments. For it is an essay by a generalist, intended for the general reader, and I am therefore especially indebted to friends, acquaintances and, above all, people’s books. I would like particularly to thank those associated with the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure, in particular the late Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley, as well as my former colleague Alan Macfarlane. The help I have received on China from Joe McDermott and Francesca Bray is obvious, as is that on Venice from Deborah Howard and on Bologna from Carlo Poni; Christine Oppong (née Slater) took me to the early Slater mill near Providence, Rhode Island. Keith Hart gave me valuable comments on chapter 6. I am very grateful to Juliet Mitchell for her help with this and all my recent publications.

I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for Polity Press whose comments were most helpful. The chapter on Malthus (chapter 4) is based upon a paper contributed to the conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population in Florence in 1999 which was devoted to assessing developments in population studies covering the last millennium; it is being published by them in the conference proceedings. The section on Landes was based upon an article in the Neha-Jaarboek (Amsterdam, 2001: 61–74). Those on André Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz were based on pieces in the Times Higher Education Supplement (23 October 1998, p. 28, and 3 November 2000).

Bologna, Easter 2003

Introduction: the Notion of Capitalism and the Rewriting of World History

Every nation … , whether Greek or barbarian, has the same conceit that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life.

Vico, The New Science, 1744, Axiom 125

Throughout the world historians and social scientists are involved in the debate about modernization, industrialization and capitalism. All recognize that Europe (including Anglo-America) has outstripped all other continents in economic growth since the nineteenth century; now some others are catching up. But there consensus rests. The timing of this initial occurrence and the reasons for the delay in other areas are the subject of great debate. Before turning to the timing and nature of European advantage, let us consider what is understood by the large-scale processes of capitalism, modernization and industrialization by which it is often characterized.

The contemporary world has been seen as marked by the advent of these overlapping but not identical features, the claims for which I want to try to examine (and to disentangle) from a broad comparative point of view. My approach includes some acquaintance with other Eurasian cultures and their history but also derives from a very different type of experience as a field anthropologist in Africa.

Let me begin with capitalism, a concept that has been used in many ways. Pirenne defines capitalism in very general terms as ‘the tendency to the steady accumulation of wealth’ and sees this as a characteristic of European merchants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,1 that is, as a feature of the revival of the economy. That notion fits with de Roover’s account of the development of banking. Somewhat more specific are the definitions in terms of the ‘market society’ by some economists, of ‘continuous growth’ (Rostov’s take-off) by others, or even as ‘democratic society’ or as the ‘free enterprise system’ by politicians. But these concepts are vague and unsatisfactory. Markets are found even in the simple agricultural societies of Africa,2 where capitalist activity has been discerned by the comparative economist Polly Hill and by the economic anthropologist Keith Hart. As for free enterprise, at least in the context of labour, the labour discipline required by early industrialization is a far cry from the relative freedom of other productive systems.3 Freedom is not a quality invented by the modern West, whatever readers of Adam Smith may conclude, nor yet is the ‘rule of the people’ (democracy), though the particular type of numerical election system used for consulting them is.

Heilbroner writes of ‘capitalism’ that ‘the wage–labour relationship appears not as means for the subordination of labour but for its emancipation, for the crucial advance of wage-labour over enslaved or enserfed labour lies in the right of the working person to deny the capitalist access to labour-power.’ I have elsewhere told the story of showing an African ‘chief’ or ‘headman’ round Pye’s factory in Cambridge (now Philips), where women were lined up assembling radio sets. On the wall hung a clock where the workers punched in the times of their coming and their going. My companion turned round to me in surprise and asked in his native language, ‘Are these slaves?’ He was used to a much more individualized form of work organization, where he himself decided when to go to and when to leave his farm. So it is not capitalism that institutes freedom but the absence of oppression, whether political or economic. That situation can well exist under other regimes.