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From the green capitalist:
When seventeenth-century New England towns are compared with those of the
nineteenth century, with their commercial agriculture, wage workers, and urban
industrialism, the transition between the two may well seem to be that from a
subsistence to a capitalist society. Certainly Marxists wedded to a definition
of capitalism in terms of relations between labor and capital must have trouble
seeing it in New England towns. Most early farmers owned their own land, hired
few wage laborers, and produced mainly for their own use. Markets were hemmed
in by municiple regulations, high transportation costs, and medieval notions of
the just price. In none of these ways does it seem reasonable to describe
colonial New England as 'capitalist.'
And yet when colonial towns are compared not with their industrial successors
but with their Indian predecessors, they begin to look more like market
societies, the seeds of whose capitalist future were already present. The
earliest explorers' descriptions of the New England coast had been framed from
the start in terms of the land's commodities. Although an earlier English
meaning of the word 'commodity' had referred simply to articles which were
'commodious' and hence useful to people - a definition Indians would readily
have understood - that meaning was already becoming archaic by the seventeenth
century. In its place was the commodity as an object of commerce, one by
definition owned for the sole purpose of being traded away at a profit. Certain
items of the New England landscape - fish, furs, timber, and a few others -
were thus selected at once for early entrance into the commercial economy of
the North Atlantic. They became valued not for the immediate utility they
brought their possessors but for the price they would bring when exchanged at
market. In trying to explain ecological changes related to these commodities,
we can safely point to market demand as the key causal agent.
The trade in commodities involved only a small group of merchants, but they
exercised an influence over the New England economy beyond their numbers.
Located principally in the coastal cities they rapidly came to control shipping
and so acted as New England's main link to the Atlantic economy...But the
famers had their own involvement in the Atlantic economy, however distant it
might have been. Even if they only produced a small surplus for market, they
nevertheless used it to buy certain goods from the merchants - manufactured
textiles, tropical foodstuffs, guns, metal tools - which were essential
elements in their lives. The grain and meat which farmers sold, if not shipped
to Carribean and European markets, were used to supply port cities and the
'invisible trade' of colonial shipping...Taxes [also played a role and] had the
important effect of forcing a certain degree of colonial production beyond the
level of mere 'subsistence', and orienting that surplus toward market exchange.
But the most important sense in which it is wrong to describe colonial towns as
subsistence communities follows from their inhabitants' belief in
'improvement', the concept which was so crucial in their critique of Indian
life. Colonists were moved to transform the soil by a property system that
taught them to treat land as capital. Fixed boundaries and the liberties of
'free and common socage' assured a family that improvements belonged to them
and to their heirs. The existence of commerce, however marginal, led them to
see certain things on the land as merchantable commodities. The visible
increase in livestock and crops thus translated into an abstract money value
that was reflected in tax assessments, in the inventories of estates, and in
the growing market...Here was a definition of transferrable wealth few
precolonial Indians would probably have recognized: if labor was not yet an
alienated commodity available for increasing capital, land was.
...Because the Indians lacked the incentives of money and commerce, [Europeans]
thought, they failed to improve their land and so remained a people devoid of
welath and comfort. What the Europeand failed to notice was that the Indians
did not recognize themselves as poor. The endless accumulation of capital which
they saw as a natural consequence of the human love for wealth made little
sense to them. Marshall Sahlins has pointed out that there are in fact too ways
to be rich, one of which was rarely recognized by Europeans in the
seventeenth-century. 'Want,' Sahlins says, 'may be 'easily satisfied' either by
producing much or desiring little.' Pierre Biard, who noticed
