Wood - The pristine culture of capitalism : a historical essay on old regimes and modern states

The capitalist system was born in England. Only in England did capitalism emerge, in the early modern period, as an indigenous national economy, with mutually reinforcing agricultural and industrial sectors, in the context of a well-developed and integrated domestic market. Other capitalist economies thereafter evolved in relation to that already existing one, and under the compulsions of its new systemic logic. Unprecedented pressures of economic competition generated a constant drive to improve the forces of production, in an increasingly international market and a nation-state system where advances in productivity conferred not only economic but geo-political and military advantage.

Yet though England was the worlds first capitalist system, Western culture has produced a dominant image of capitalism to which the English experience fails to conform: a true capitalism is essentially an urban phenomenon, and the true capitalist is by origin a merchant, a bourgeois. Because the capitalist economy in England originated in the countryside, dominated by a landed aristocracy, it is, at least according to some versions of this dominant model, imperfect, immature, inadequately modern and, above all, peculiar a kind of bastard capitalism, with a pre-modern state and antiquated ruling ideologies. England may have been the first and even the first industrial capitalism, but it reached its destination by a detour, almost by mistake, constitutionally weak and in unsound health. Other European capitalisms, after a late start, headed in the right direction, under the guidance of a bourgeoisie with an appropriately rational state at its disposal, and arrived in a healthier condition, more mature, more perfectly formed, more thoroughly modern.

This model implies that there is a natural course of capitalist development which has little to do with the real historical process that produced the worlds first capitalist system, and probably also that the evolution of capitalism was inevitable, though when it actually emerged it did so at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It is not hard to see how such an approach might encourage a certain amount of circular reasoning. Since, for instance, the British economy did not develop in accordance with the bourgeois model, its weaknesses and failures must be due to its deviant development.

But suppose we break out of this question-begging circle by just beginning with the simple fact that a capitalist economy nowhere and never developed in a more modern or more bourgeois society before English capitalism had imposed its own economic and geopolitical pressures on its principal rivals. Might the very features that have been ahistorically defined as the marks of modern capitalism turn out, on the contrary, to be the tokens of its absence? Might the absence of those features signal the presence of capitalism? And what would this tell us about the nature of capitalism? Might it mean, among other things, that the weaknesses of the British economy are not so much the symptoms of arrested or deviant development as the contradictions of the capitalist system itself?

There is a historical paradigm so general and firmly fixed in Western culture that it determines the framework of nearly all historical debates, often probably even more often than not without conscious acknowledgement by the participants, whatever side they are on. The deviant- or incomplete-development theory of English history, for instance, clearly assumes a particular standard of historical development against which the case of England can be measured. But even those revisionist historians who deny that social change models apply at all to English history (about whom more in later chapters), or those who reject the social interpretation of the French Revolution, tend to define what qualifies as social change in the terms of this dominant paradigm.