The Origins of Capitalism and the "Rise of the West"

by Eric H. Mielants

Eric Mielants argues that, contrary to established thinking, the 'rise of the West' should not be examined through the lens of the Industrial Revolution or of the colonization of the New World but viewed through long-term developments that began in the Middle Ages.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Sociology

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mielants' account in a nutshell: in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, all major Eurasian regions were experiencing considerable economic growth and commercial expansion; however, only in Europe - due to the weakness of pastoral raiders and rural nobility - were bourgeois-ruled and relatively autonomous city-states able to develop, who in turn were able to use political means to achieve captive markets; thus, as these regions continued to grow and integrate with one another, European political entities were able to set their local economies up as the core regions and peripheralize others. Mielants thus rejects the notion (accepted by most on the two halves of the "Brenner debate") that capitalism has its origins in the 16th century, much less the 19th, pushing its origins back to the high middle ages, and crediting its triumph more to politics than production or exchange.

Mielants' arguments are sufficient to make this hypothesis plausible, but hardly enough to make it conclusive; in particular, his reasoning for why the European city-state system developed seems especially unclear, especially given the (acknowledged) existence of politically independent cities in North Africa and India. However, as this is a short book, it's appropriate that it ends up being merely suggestive rather than probative.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

What dynamics contributed to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in Europe? Mielants pushes back capitalism's inception to as early as the beginning of the High Middle Ages. In his view, capitalism did not spring up at once as a mature and fully integrated system but progressively assembled itself over the period of a few centuries in a series of positive feedback loops. Crucial to Mielants' positive argument for why capitalism in its embryonic form first emerged in Europe between 12th century and 14th century is the role played by the medieval city states--the "institutional vehicles of exploitation" (159)--fueled by bourgeosie merchant capital, free to pursue its own long economic, political and military objectives. Mielants attributes the political niche that the urban mercentile elite were able to carve out for themselves in medieval city states like Venice in the Eastern Mediterrean and Genoa in the Black Sea and the latter's subsequent economic subjugation of the countryside as setting in motion the chain of events that lead to the meteoric rise of the capitalism in the West. To this extent, he is an internalist. But his internalism starts and ends there. The spread of capitalism as a world-system was not an inevitable auto development of the European inter-state system. As Mielants reminds us, the polities in East and South Asia had to contend with the constant threat of nomadic incursion whereas Western Europe did not experience a similar pressure that could jeopardize the emergence of the capitalist mode of production from the decaying ruins of feudalism. Capital accumulation was universal, yet the merchant classes in China, South Asia and North Africa were unable to transform their wealth into independent 'class' institutions that could safeguard and bolster their power with respect to the gentry or the royal court. Those sympathetic to the Brennar-Wood thesis that capitalism properly speaking "took off" in one country by virtue of the class dynamics peculiar to the English countryside in the 14th century may find Mielant's account a tough pill to swallow, since the latter prioritizes the merchant capital and the medieval cities' endocolonialization of the hinterlands though the core-periphery division of labor over the agrarian class struggle between peasants and lords nascent capitalist rentier class. Mielants himself adopts a modified world-systems analysis, but he does not completely jettison the Brennerian thesis, if we can, exercising appropriate level of charity, understand Mielants as substituting the struggle between merchant-bourgeosie and the nobility for the struggle between peasants and nobility.

[Mark Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm dying to know how we got here... Economically speaking I mean. Is capitalism a natural system or was it the contrivance of a political and economic elite? Mielants' book takes the perspective of an economic historian and paints a picture of how we arrived at the state we call capitalism, and how the West came to dominate. He also explores how different global power might have been had the Mongol empire not eviscerated China.