Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism

by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese

Daily Shipping-1983 Oxford University Paperback-Pages are crisp and unmarked with very little corner wear-Cover exhibits shelf wear-Owner stamp (X4)

Genres: History, Economics

400 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 1983

About the author

Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese (May 28, 1941 – January 2, 2007) was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the Antebellum South. A Marxist early on in her career, she later converted to Roman Catholicism and became a primary voice of the conservative women's movement. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2003.

Reviews

[Drew Norwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Every society gets the commerce it deserves."

This is a very technical book and was largely over my head. I only skimmed most of the detailed chapters but the overall argument and the historical discussion of the relationship between a society's labor, capital, and its system of production was impactful. The Genoveses' main theses in. the book are stated as follows:

(1) "Changes in the social relations of production, rather than in the sphere of circulation and exchange, determined the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, roughly, by the sixteenth century."

(2) "The history of capitalism as a world-conquering mode of production cannot be separated from the creation of a world market, but the emergence of that market must be understood as a new quality, not as a mere quantitative extension of older long-distance markets in luxuries and other goods specific to the seigneurial ruling class and even the early national state."

(3) "Merchant capital did play a revolutionary role in the rise of capitalism, but only within limits that must be clearly delineated."

(4) "The conservative-indeed, the increasingly reactionary--role of merchant capital appears in especially visible form in the African slave trade and the slave-plantation system of the Americas."

[Leonardo]

...aunque la ideología del capital sea antitética a la esclavitud, en la práctica el capital no solo subsumió y reforzó sistemas esclavista de producción existentes en todo el mundo sino que también creó nuevos sistemas de esclavitud en una escala sin precedentes, particularmente en las Américas.

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