The Rise of the Merchant, Industrialist, and the

Transcript:The Rise of the Merchant, Industrialist, and the:
The Rise of the Merchant, Industrialist, and the Capital Controller A Small Peninsula… From the fifteenth century on, European soldiers and sailors carried the flags of their rulers to the four corners of the globe, and European merchants established their storehouses from Vera Cruz to Nagasaki. Dominating the sea-lanes of the world, these merchants invaded existing networks of exchange and linked one to the other. In the service of “God and profit” they located sources of products desired in Europe and developed coercive systems for their delivery. In response, European craft shops, either singly or aggregated into manufactories, began to produce goods to provision the wide-ranging military and naval efforts and to furnish commodities to overseas suppliers in exchange for goods to be sold as commodities at home. The outcome was the creation of a commercial network of global scale. —Eric Wolf, A People Without History The Rise of Capitalism The rise of capitalism Did not just emerge out of nothing Traceable trends in global markets and the colonization process Ecological, cultural, social costs of “doing business” The global spread of “conspicuous-consumption” oriented capitalism has been both a blessing and a curse A Small Peninsula off the Landmass of Asia About four or five hundred years ago, the movement of goods and global communications became dominated by “a small peninsula off the landmass of Asia” While European powers certainly used political and military power to extend their control, it was accomplished through economic domination of trade and market expansion. Image from http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/12/amazon_ec2_in_europe.html Refresher on the World System The Modern World-System, 1974 Looked at how the capitalist systems penetrated non-capitalist systems A binary distinction between the core area and the peripheral area Argued that world economies linked by exchange relations were largely impossible before about 1500 Continued The capitalist world economy, which appeared around 1500, coincided with the expansion of commerce The states of Northwestern Europe were able to impose a regional division of labor and specialization of production - e.g. sugar in the Caribbean, bullion in the Andes, and cereals in Eastern Europe Little More… Through increasingly powerful state bureaucracies, European powers continued to consolidate the flow of surplus toward the core countries The world system theory urges us to examine the history of cultural conflicts to understand the change in any given cultural area Eric Wolf Europe and the People without History (1982) A Critique of Civilization as a