I promised.

Yeah, I mean, it’s too much of me to ask a (deluded, Marxist) historian to provide anything in the way of evidence. The prose is nice (not quite McCloskiate... or Merovingian on cursing in French... but reasonable) and flowy; the content annoying, unintelligent, and unimpressive.

In Chapter 3 of Capitalism, we get more word salads: Intensification, capital accumulation, emergent institutions. Capitalists, like hurricanes, found their energy “in the great connecting” (p. 117), their archipelago of capital extracting wealth from Atlantic islands they capitalistically built.

While the value of goods traded across long distances remained, in quantitative terms, much less than that of things produced and consumed locally, it allowed for flexibility and large, concentrated investments, and, as a result, unprecedented accumulation. (p. 110)

Fascinating how you can turn a statement about your obsession being quantitatively unimportant therefore being important.

I have an important note here from the spring: “I’m starting to make sense of the overall argument”:

capitalism, the logic of merchants of profit-and-loss and optimization was always heavily restricted by local customs and tradition and rulers depending economically on FARMERS, not taxation from merchants, so never allowed them to roam freely. With ideology falling apart a little, and rulers in select (=European) places become economically and financially beholden to merchants, the capitalists were LET LOOSE. From their cage, to mix the metaphors… (my words, not his)

It's a clever way for him to not be eurocentric but still focus on/lay the moral error at European feet. The evil European capitalists did it... but they're not special and we don't eurocentrically discriminate.

Via select European merchants — nodes of capital — and Italian city-states, we get sailors bypassing Muslim merchants in the Sahara, somehow and metaphorically “riding the coattails of a potent new mix of concentrated capital and nascent territorial statehood on a large scale” (p. 122).

wth is a potent new mix of concentrated K? (Do we need to talk about capital again?!)

As before, sometimes capital is the economist’s K, an argument in the production process (machines, ships, intermediary goods); sometimes it’s money or the English crown’s borrowing or paper stock in Amsterdam’s emerging center of finance. Sometimes it’s “influence.” Then it’s back to being “fungible,” indicating money or gold/silver… but it was also “accumulated” in Italian city-states and deployed in West Africa, funded by East Africa ivory production, Dutch capital ravaging Barbados
= it was at work in Fuggers' and Welsers' South American mines, and “intensified production in Cape Verde and Sao Tome” (175) → they “moved their money into mines and plantations, a testament to the revolutionary potential of merchant capital.”

In this chapter, we also learn that the colonial, commodity-extracting capitalism of the 1500s and 1600s and 1700s is quite unlike the industrial capitalism that came later — which is why Beckert calls this “War Capitalism.”

War Capitalism is different because it’s rapacious and mostly zero-sum. It just forcefully takes other people's (collective?!) wealth and redistributes it.

Capitalism thus emerged in the world as war capitalism, a unique configuration that enabled something implausible: economic growth without significant technical change or productivity gains. [not productive/generative but] the vast redistribution of the world’s wealth under the auspices of the coercive expansion of European nodes of capital that generated wealth. (p. 165)

What that has to do with capitalism, properly understood, is never quite explained. Take his credentialed word for it. #1550794 #1553596

He likes to look at these literal islands (Cape Verde, Barbados, Saint Helena etc) -- making his "archipelago" metaphor of "islands" of capital come alive. They're convenient for his story because they were

a) owned and run by capital owners (“Saint Helena was a company-state,” 164)

b) unconstrained by customs or morals or church or legacy institutions

c) run on pure extractive merchant’s “logic of capitalism.” (lord proprietors of Barbados were “an assembly of capital owners”)

“…mobilization for war—that core state activity” (163)

at least something we can agree on. But remember that state activity is also capitalist activity, the state being the most important capitalist institution. #1426621

Of course, Beckert thinks, in a long line of thinkers back to Lenin’s Imperialism writings, that’s in the interest of capitalists, them having co-opted and taken over the state.

I don’t know what to tell him except “no.”

Here’s a fascinating paragraph leading us to his main contention of slavery. Europeans and the city-state merchant traders with captive slaves on Cap Verde figured out, somehow unique in human history:

a new and sinisterly consequential lessons: In zones from which escape was difficult and where no competing political authorities existed, a small number of Europeans could control large numbers of enslaved Africans. Imprisoning laborers, in fact, enabled entirely new forms of the productive uses of capital, sundered from worldly and religious authorities and from the common autonomies of rural cultivators the world over. (p. 132)

Amazing. “Slavery was profitable enough to capitalize Atlantic expansion more generally.” This was the “fateful application of the merchant’s basic logic to labor” -> “a crucial factor in the capitalist transformation of the world’s countryside.”

Actually not: it was pretty unimportant. Quantitatively small, historically plentiful, and not that productive – which even Adam Smith knew. Free the slaves and pay them a competitive wage (#1457057), and you’d get more bang for your buck.

This bloody history, “an orgy of violence” (171), was “the soil from which capitalism sprang” (173). Uh-hu, okay. I have a headache.

TRADERS' impetus made plain: “generate more capital, not to increase particular trade or production streams. Slowly but consequentially, capitalists severed their age-old attachment to specific forms of economic activity a step that symbolized capitalism’s future.” (141)

= cut connection to economic activity, just accumulate. OK, cool. MEANING?!

Obviously, as astute an observer as Adam Smith didn’t know anything about markets and capitalism:

Capitalism—to Smith’s chagrin—found its mainspring not in competition but in the novel and fabulous wealth enabled by state-backed monopolies.

Aside: I always find it hilarious when lefties, past or present, pluralize “monopoly.” You know that sort of defeats the point you’re making?

…And in global markets, monopoly rights necessarily entailed protecting a nation’s merchants from foreign competitors” (147)

...and in half a paragraph with two small observations of growth (1670-1815: British gov 17x tax extraction, but the economy only 3x’d, p. 153):

“whoever associates capitalism with low taxation has not studied history.” (153)

LOL.

Wow, one data point and we’re jumping for joy.

Also, it’s not even particularly rigorous: reverse causality, both observations caused by a third variable (financial innovation, interest rates etc). And it’s not novel either: it’s well understood by economic historians, and even by Adam Smith — whom Beckert absolutely despises — that Bank of England was “a great engine of state.” Yes, if you have better property rights and deeper financial markets and more elaborate banking system and you solve your perennial dearth of monetary media (https://stacker.news/items/793537, #780358), you can get wider division of labor. If Beckert delved into the economic history of Britain’s first financial revolution, he would have known that it punching above its weight, thanks to finance, isn’t exactly a novel argument.

“The state emerged as the crucial institution in capitalism’s history” (p. 144):

Here I write in my notebook: This is the closest I’ve been to put away this horseshit of a book // conspiratorial horseshit.

Two hundred pages in, this is still merely stated—not proven, argued, evidence advanced. We’re supposed to accept, take on a credentialed creed perhaps, that because commercial life today involves some semblance of “capitalism” and what Beckert describes during European colonial expansion he names “War capitalism” that they are in any sense connected; one caused by the other. The sins and atrocities committed in one sully and denigrate the other. What Captain John Engleduct in the 1750s, using a slave boy to light a match on a gunpowder-soaked ship to blow up 30 natives has to do with “merchant’s logic” of capitalism is entirely unclear to me. #1561710 #1534753

It’s a Marxian-infused maps-and-chaps history of empire, East India Company, raiding, and slavery. Cool. That’s not what’s noticeable and revolutionary about the modern world, or what any sensible description of "capitalism" is.

Capitalism’s condition of emergence was the world economy, a framework of possibility that stamped its every facet and forever foreclosed the possibility of understanding this new form of economic organization (173)

OK, credentialed boomer.

#5: "The Madness Returns, Den Likes Pain"

#4: “Interlude — We Need To Talk About Capital”

#3: “CHAPTER 2, We Get Capital-ISTS Without Capital-ISM”

#2: “CHAPTER 1, and the Historian Returns”

#1: “INTRODUCTION, and the Trouble of Defining ‘Capitalism’”

#0: “Sven Beckert Begins His Tale”