Louis,
All the talk of gold and silver really doesn't amount
to much. Most of this flowed into Spain, but there it
either ended up in fancy churches or flowed out to the
rest of Europe where it stimulated inflation. As Adam
Smith long ago realized, money is a veil, it is not real
wealth.
Now I do happen to think that the Europeans got a lot
of real value out of the colonization and imperialization of
the Americas, with the sugar plantations being one along
with the cotton production and a lot of other stuff, irrespective
of how the numbers play out in Ricardo's sources.
With regard to the Europe/China issue, you may remember
that Blaut and I had a rather extensive discussion and debate
about this on the old marxism-international list back in its
heyday before Godena and Adoflo led it off a Stalinist deep end.
I think you even praised the discussion, if I remember correctly.
The question is very far from simple, very far indeed.
BTW, although I think the Europeans did gain a lot from
the Americas, thus lending at least some credence to the
Blaut argument about the width of the oceans being a crucial
factor, if one wanted to argue that colonialism/imperialism was
irrelevant the place to look might be Germany which did not have
any colonies in the Americas ever and only got some in Africa
in the late nineteenth century, but developed a high-powered
industrial capitalism quite well, thank you, anyway. Of course
one might argue that it gained from the gains of the other
colonializing and imperializing Europeans, but this is not such
an easy or obvious argument to make.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Friday, September 17, 1999 7:06 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:11230] Capitalist development
>Jim Blaut, "Colonizer's Model of the World":
>
>Precious Metals
>
>We notice first the export of gold and silver from the Americas and its
>insertion within the circuits of an Eastern Hemispheric market economy in
>which gold and silver already provide the common measure of value, directly
>or indirectly, in almost all markets. The flow of precious metals began
>immediately after the European discovery of America, and by 1640 at least
>180 tons of gold and 17,000 tons of silver are known to have reached
>Europe.21 (The real figures must be at least double these amounts, since
>records were poor for some areas and periods and since contraband was
>immensely important.22) Additional quantities of gold came from colonial
>activities in Africa. In the period 1561 to 1580 about 85% of the entire
>world’s production of silver came from the Americas. The simple quantity of
>gold and silver in circulation in the Eastern Hemisphere economy as a whole
>was profoundly affected: hemispheric silver stock may have been tripled and
>gold stock increased by 20% during the course of the sixteenth century as a
>result of bullion brought from America.23 The fact that much of the
>pre-existing stock must have been frozen in uses not permitting direct or
>indirect conversion to money suggests to me that American bullion may have
>as much as doubled the gold- and silver-based money supply of the Eastern
>Hemisphere as a whole. (In Europe, the circulation of metal coins increased
>eight- or ten-fold in the course of the century.24) This process must be
>seen in perspective: it is money flowing constantly and in massive amounts
>into Europe, through Europe, and from Europe to Asia and Africa, constantly
>replenished at the entry points (Seville, Antwerp, Genoa, etc.) with more
>American supplies, and constantly permitting those who hold it to offer
>better prices for all goods—as well as labor and land—in all markets, than
>anyone else had ever been able to offer in prior times.
>
>The importance of these flows of gold and silver is routinely
>underestimated by scholars, mainly for three reasons (apart from implicit
>diffusionism, the simple tendency to undervalue causal events in
>non-Europe). First, the process is seen somehow as purely primitive
>accumulation. But the metals were mined by workers and transported by
>workers; the enterprise overall involved risk capital and all of the other
>familiar traits of the sorts of protocapitalist productive enterprises
>which were characteristic of that time (that it was partly state-controlled
>does not alter this argument, nor does the fact that some of the labor was
>unfree); and very major economic and social systems were built around the
>mines themselves in Mexico, Peru, and other parts of America.
>
>Second, the argument that precious metal flows significantly affected the
>European economy is dismissed by some scholars as "monetarism" (roughly,
>the theory that changes in money alone are very significant for changes in
>the economy overall). The error in this charge is a failure to see the
>sixteenth-century economy in its own, appropriate, geographical and social
>context, and to impute to the economy of that time the liquidity of
>exchange and the relative lack of spatial friction that characterizes the
>capitalist economy of our own time. Two facts here are basic. First of all,
>the possession of precious metal was highly localized in space. European
>merchants, as a community, obtained it and set it in motion outward, toward
>rural Europe and toward markets outside of Europe. Second of all, the
>supply of precious metal was essentially continuous, and therefore the
>advantage held by European protocapitalists in terms of prices they could
>offer for commodities, labor, and land was persistently higher than the
>prices which competitors anywhere could offer. So the protocapitalist
>community very steadily undermined the competition in all markets across
>the Eastern Hemisphere, within Europe and without, eventually gaining
>control of most international seabome trade in most of the
>mercantile—maritime centers from Sofala to Calicut to Malacca.25 The
>penetration of these markets, the acquisition of trading bases, and the
>control of a few small but important producing areas (like some islands of
>the Moluccas), was not a matter of European rationality or venturesomeness,
>but rather reflected the availability to Europeans of American gold and
>silver, trans-shipped through Lisbon, Antwerp, Acapulco (in the "Manila
>galleons"), and so on.
>
>A third sort of doubt about the importance of American gold and silver is
>associated with the critique of Earl Hamilton’s classic theory that the
>precious metal supply produced an imbalance between factors of production
>in the European economy, produced thereby a windfall of profits, and thus
>in effect destabilized the economy and moved it toward capitalism.26
>Hamilton was one of the few economic historians to perceive that American
>gold and silver was a crucial, central cause of change in Europe, although
>he was (partly) wrong about the mechanisms that brought about this change.
>The metals did not transform the economy in any direct sense. Rather, they
>enriched the protocapitalist class and thereby gave them the power to
>immensely accelerate the transformation that was already underway—not only
>in Europe—toward capitalism as a political and social system, and to
>prevent non-European capitalists from sharing in the process. American
>bullion hastened the rise of capitalism and was crucial in the process by
>which it became centrated in Europe.
>
>Plantations
>
>The impact of the slave plantation system on Europe’s economy was felt
>mainly in the seventeenth century and thereafter. But part of the general
>undervaluing of the significance of early colonialism—of the world outside
>of Europe—is a tendency not to notice that the plantation system was of
>considerable importance even in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the early
>history of the Atlantic sugar plantation economy gives a revealing picture
>of the way in which the protocapitalist colonial economy was eroding the
>feudal economy. Sugar planting was not a new enterprise; sugar (contrary to
>myth) was not a rare commodity, and sugar planting (also contrary to myth)
>was not an insignificant economic curiosity at the fringe of capitalist
>development. Commercial and feudal cane sugar production was found
>throughout the Mediterranean in the fifteenth century.27 Although little is
>known about the way planting was organized, it is known that commercial
>sugar production was important in India 2,000 years ago (apparently it was
>a Mauryan state industry), and in the Middle Ages commercial sugar planting
>under various feudal and probably protocapitalist systems of organization
>was found in East Africa, part of West Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Cyprus, the
>Levant, various parts of Mediterranean Europe, and other regions.28 If cane
>sugar was not an important commodity in northern Europe this was because of
>its price, as against that of sweeteners like honey. Europeans first moved
>the commercial plantation system out into the newly settled Atlantic
>islands from Madeira to Sao Tome and then vastly expanded production in the
>Americas. But throughout the sixteenth century the new plantations merely
>supplanted the older Mediterranean sugar-producing regions; total
>production for the Europe—Mediterranean market did not rise until later.29
>This was capitalist production displacing feudal and semifeudal plantation
>production, using the twin advantages of colonialism: empty land and cheap
>labor. No other industry was as significant as the plantation system for
>the rise of capitalism before the nineteenth century.
>
>In 1600 Brazil exported about 30,000 tons of sugar with a gross sale value
>of £2,000,000. This is about double the total annual value of all exports
>from England to all of the world in that period.30 It will be recalled that
>British exports in that period, principally of wool, are sometimes
>considered paradigmatic for the "awakening," indeed the "rise," of early-
>modem Europe. Also in 1600, per capita earnings from sugar in Brazil, for
>all except Indians, was about equal to per capita income in Britain later
>in that century.31 The rate of accumulation in the Brazilian plantation
>industry was so high at the end of the sixteenth century that it was able
>to generate enough capital to finance a doubling of its capacity every two
>years.32 Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch protocapitalist
>community (which was heavily involved in the Brazilian sugar enterprise,
>mainly in the shipping and sales dimensions) calculated that profit rates
>in the industry were 56% per year, totalling nearly £1,000,000 per year.
>The rate of profit was higher still a bit earlier, at the close of the
>sixteenth century, when production costs, including the cost of purchasing
>slaves, amounted to only one-fifth of income from sugar sales. These
>statistics should be - seen against the background of an industry that was
>not responding to some novel demand for some novel product in an already-
>rising Europe, but was merely (in essence) undercutting the precapitalist
>Mediterranean producers of Spain, Italy, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere, in
>the supply of a highly important commercial product.
>
>Sugar is of course the centerpiece of the plantation system down to the
>late eighteenth century. But other kinds of colonial production, mainly but
>not only agricultural, and fully as close to capitalism as was the Brazil
>plantation system, were of some significance even before the end of the
>sixteenth century. There was, for instance, some direct production of
>spices in the Moluccas and some European involvement with Indian merchant
>capitalists in the organization pepper production in South India. Dyes,
>tobacco, and other commercially valuable products were flowing from America
>to Europe. A very large agricultural economy existed in parts of America to
>supply food, fiber, leather, and other necessities to the mining
>settlements and other settlements. Immediately after 1492 (or before?) west
>European fishermen and whalers developed an immense industry in
>Newfoundland and elsewhere on the North American coast.
>
>To all of this must be added the profits from other sorts of colonial and
>semicolonial activities in the Eastern Hemisphere.33 The slave trade was
>highly profitable even in the sixteenth century. European merchant
>capitalists of all nations profited greatly from the Lisbon trade with Asia
>and East Africa in textiles and particularly spices (the Asian spices
>carried by the Portuguese and sold mainly through Antwerp did not replace
>the traditional Mediterranean flow but rather added to it, hence providing
>a novel and important source of accumulation). There was, in addition,
>considerable profit from the within-Asia trade resulting from the
>domination of long-distance oceanic trade in East Africa, India, and
>Southeast Asia by Portugal (with participation also by Spain and later
>Holland). Broadly speaking, however, accumulation deriving from Western
>Hemisphere colonial activities far outweighed that from Eastern Hemisphere
>activities, colonial and semicolonial, in the sixteenth century. Overall,
>both the quantitative significance, in that century, of production and
>trade in colonial and semicolonial areas and the immense profitability of
>the enterprise, that is, the rapid capital accumulation which it fostered
>directly and (in Europe) indirectly, add up to a significant vector force,
>easily able to change the process of economic transformation in Europe from
>sluggish evolution to rapid revolution.
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
>
