Review: Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (2002)

The aim of this book is to place capitalism into historical context: a social system that was brought about by specific conditions and historical trends. Particularly, it is concerned with showing that capitalism was not simply an expression of natural human tendencies; to “truck, barter, and exchange”, as Adam Smith claimed and (according to the author) many even on the left tend to accept unquestioningly. Rather than being an opening up of opportunities, by removing ‘unnatural’ feudal restrictions, capitalism represented an imposition of market imperatives.

The central claim of the book is that capitalism arose in England not due to mercantile activity in the towns or market activity in general (both of which had existed for centuries) but due to the extension of market relations to a new context, namely, relations between agricultural landlords and tenant farmers. She describes this as part of a shift from “extra-economic” relations (the political, juridicial, and military means by which the aristocracy, for example, extracted its income from the lower classes) to economic means (rents and wage-labour based in property rights). In doing so she also examines the development of Enlightenment conceptions of rights and property that served to reinforce this tendency.

For me, the really interesting aspect of this book wasn’t the detail of the argument (although this was informative in itself) but the challenges to assumptions, the refusal to accept the naturalization of capitalism (“assuming the very thing that needed to be explained”). In particular it challenges even left-wing assumptions about the ways in which economic development occurs, rejecting an oversimplified system of stages through which all societies progress. The subject of this book is further examined in the author’s other works: The Pristine Culture of Capitalism examines the differences in development out of feudalism between England and France, and Democracy against Capitalism develops the project of historicizing capitalism, while Citizens to Lords and Liberty and Property trace the history of political thought in its social context.