Appleby - The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

L IKE A GOOD detective story, the history of capitalism begins with a puzzle. For millennia trade had flourished within traditional societies, strictly confined in its economic and moral reach. Yet in the sixteenth century, commerce moved in bold new directions. More effective ways to raise food slowly started to release workers and money for other economic pursuits, such as processing the sugar, tobacco, cotton, tea, and silks that came to Europe from the East and West Indies and beyond. These improvements raised the standard of living for Western Europeans, but it took something more dramatic to break through the restraints of habit and authority of the old economic order. That world-reshaping force came when a group of natural philosophers gained an understanding of physical laws. With this knowledge, inventors with a more practical bent found stunning ways to generate energy from natural forces. Production took a quantum leap forward. Capitalisma system based on individual investments in the production of marketable goodsslowly replaced the traditional ways of meeting the material needs of a society. From early industrialization to the present global economy, a sequence of revolutions relentlessly changed the habits and habitats of human beings. The puzzle is why it took so long for these developments to materialize.

Most of the marvelous machines that transformed human effort began with simple applications of steam and electricity. How many people had watched steam lift the top off a pan of boiling water before someone figured out how to make steam run an engine? Couldnt someone earlier have begun experimenting with lightning? The dramatic success of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century innovations compels us to wonder why human societies remained fixed for millennia in a primitive agrarian order. How can it be that brilliant minds penetrated some of the secrets of the cosmos but couldnt imagine how to combat hunger? The answer that the times were economically backward is of course semantic and doesnt really help us pierce the conundrum of great civilized accomplishments in the face of limited economic productivity.

Starting with these questions, I am going to explore the benchmarks in capitalisms ascent, looking at how this system transformed politics while churning up practices, thoughts, values, and ideals that had long prevailed within the cocoon of custom. This is not a general study of capitalism in the world, but rather a narrative that follows the shaping of the economic system that we live with today. Nor does it cover how various countries became capitalistic, but rather concentrates on those specific developments in particular places that gave form to capitalism. My focus is on economic practices, of course, but it cant be stressed too much that capitalism is as much a cultural as an economic system. A new way of establishing political order emerged. People reversed how they looked at the past and the future. They reconceived human nature. At a very personal level, men and women began making plans for themselves that would once have appeared ludicrous in their ambitious reach. Tucked into this account will be an examination of how different societies have responded to the constant challenges ushered into their lives during the past four centuries.

If we were to visit ancient Florence, Aleppo, and Canton, we would be astonished by the rich array of foods and goods for sale in their vast bazaars, souks, and markets. We would marvel at the beauty of their churches, temples, and mosques, as well as the merchants elegant city houses and the country homes of the nobility. We would discover a population of talented artisans, knowledgeable statesmen, shrewd traders, skilled mariners, and energetic people everywhere. Yet they all were in thrall to an economic system so limited in size and scope that it could barely feed them. They accepted as normal that they would regularly suffer from drastic shortages of all kinds of goods because it had always been so.