Download or read book Merchants and the Origins of Capitalism written by Sophus A. Reinert and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N.S.B. Gras, the father of Business History in the United States, argued that the era of mercantile capitalism was defined by the figure of the "sedentary merchant," who managed his business from home, using correspondence and intermediaries, in contrast to the earlier "traveling merchant," who accompanied his own goods to trade fairs. Taking this concept as its point of departure, this essay focuses on the predominantly Italian merchants who controlled the long-distance East-West trade of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Until the opening of the Atlantic trade, the Mediterranean was Europe's most important commercial zone and its trade enriched European civilization and its merchants developed the most important premodern mercantile innovations, from maritime insurance contracts and partnership agreements to the bill of exchange and double-entry bookkeeping. Emerging from literate and numerate cultures, these merchants left behind an abundance of records that allows us to understand how their companies, especially the largest of them, were organized and managed. These techniques can also be put in the context of premodern attitudes toward commerce and the era's commercial-political relations. The Commercial Revolution anticipated the Industrial Revolution by over half a millennium and laid the groundwork for today's world of global business.
Download or read book A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism written by Jairus Banaji and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated. Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.
Download or read book The Origin of Capitalism written by Ellen Meiksins Wood and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor is it simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. In this original and provocative book Ellen Meiksins Wood reminds us that capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor is it simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the human interaction with nature. This new edition is substantially revised and expanded, with extensive new material on imperialism, anti-Eurocentric history, capitalism and the nation-state, and the differences between capitalism and non-capitalist commerce. The author traces links between the origin of capitalism and contemporary conditions such as 'globalization', ecological degradation, and the current agricultural crisis.
Download or read book Creating A World Economy written by Alan K. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an exploration in world history that examines complex and intriguing questions concerning the origins of the first truly global economy, centered in Europe, which served in turn as a solid basis for the later emergence of the modern world system. Professor Smith first examines the remarkable progress achieved by many cultures around the world, achievements that for some time far exceeded anything then found in Europe. The study then probes beyond "traditionalism" as a sufficient explanation of the inability of these societies to maintain the economic momentum that had begun so auspiciously and carefully examines the experience of European societies by way of comparison, finding that remarkably similar processes tended to unfold at first: regions of Europe that made the earliest gains in material progress were, like other parts of the world, unable to sustain these advances. Still, in some parts of Europe–particularly the Netherlands and England–a new alignment of social forces was yielding the social system that would eventually evolve into capitalism. This breakthrough allowed for continued dynamic material progress, particularly for the English. Able to establish an unprecedented commercial dominance in vast reaches of the world, the British found themselves at the hub of a new world economy much more complex than any earlier intercultural commercial system. The book delineates the systemic roles assumed by the various regions of the world and by European merchant capital and explains the tensions within this system that ensured its continued dynamism and eventual transformation into the current world economic system. Creating a World Economy combines an epic sweep with a mastery of historical detail and is sure to stimulate discussion among sociologists and historians interested in questions of a global nature.
Download or read book Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe 1300 1600 written by Martha C. Howell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules.
Download or read book Capitalism written by James Fulcher and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Very Short Introduction James Fulcher considers what capitalism is, the forms it can take around the world, and its history of crises and long-term development. In this new edition he discusses the fundamental impact of the global financial crises of 2007-8 and what it has meant for capitalism worldwide.
Download or read book Capitalism and Politics in Russia written by Thomas C. Owen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph - based largely on memoirs, diaries, archival documents and other primary sources - represents a comprehensive social history of the Moscow merchants in the period between 1855 and 1905. The author first examines the essential aspects of traditional merchant culture in the early nineteenth century. He then discusses the emergence of 'capitalist' manufacturers and traders, a group who implemented modern business techniques in the 1840s without however, adopting the political liberalism of the western bourgeoisie. Committed to economic modernisation as a means of redressing Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War, these merchants cooperated with sympathetic intellectuals in railroad management, banking, journalism and the struggle to gain tariff protection. The study concludes with an analysis of the 'bourgeois' class consciousness that resulted from the Moscow commercial-industrial leaders' conflicts with both the tsarist government and the militant labour movement during the Revolution of 1905. Owen contributes to discussions about the distinctive features of Russian social and economic development in the final years of the Russian Empire.
Download or read book Slavery s Capitalism written by Sven Beckert and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence. Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.
Download or read book Networks in the Early History of Capitalism written by Stefania Montemezzo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a detailed examination of Venetian commerce in the Middle Ages, this book explores the business practices and structures that enabled merchants to compete in a challenging international market. Contributing to the literature on the early history of capitalism, this book demonstrates how Venetian merchants combined innovation with traditional methods to maintain their edge in a competitive world, providing valuable lessons on resilience and strategic planning in commerce. Small- and mid-sized commercial companies operating across borders and geographies in the early Renaissance period faced numerous challenges, including identifying profitable sectors and businesses, developing effective business strategies, dealing with peers and subordinates, managing the flow of information, and assessing risks and potential rewards. The chapters explore a range of topics in this context, including the roles of family-based firms, the strategic deployment of agents, and the impact of state policies on private enterprise. Readers are introduced to the ways Venetian merchants managed capital, adapted to market demands, and overcame obstacles like wars and resource shortages. This book will be of significant interest to historians and social scientists researching economic history, the history of trade, the history of capitalism, medieval and Renaissance history, and historical network analysis.
Download or read book Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism written by Xavier Lafrance and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume builds and expands on the groundbreaking work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origins of capitalism. Whereas Brenner and Wood focused mostly on the emergence of capitalism in the English countryside (agrarian capitalism), this book utilizes their approach to offer original, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically informed accounts of transitions to capitalism – both agrarian and industrial – in a wide range of countries in order to provide within a single volume a diverse collection of relatively brief yet detailed case studies of the historical transition to capitalism distributed across three continents. Offering a new and highly original analysis of the global spread of capitalism, this book will be a unique contribution to the longstanding debate on the transition to capitalism.
Download or read book Tea War written by Andrew B. Liu and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Capitalism Volume 1 The Rise of Capitalism From Ancient Origins to 1848 written by Larry Neal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. Starting with its distant origins in ancient Babylon, successive chapters trace progression up to the 'Promised Land' of capitalism in America. Adopting a wide geographical coverage and comparative perspective, the international team of authors discuss the contributions of Greek, Roman, and Asian civilizations to the development of capitalism, as well as the Chinese, Indian and Arab empires. They determine what features of modern capitalism were present at each time and place, and why the various precursors of capitalism did not survive. Looking at the eventual success of medieval Europe and the examples of city-states in northern Italy and the Low Countries, the authors address how British mercantilism led to European imitations and American successes, and ultimately, how capitalism became global.
Download or read book Capitalism written by Jürgen Kocka and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Does Capitalism Mean? The Emergence of a Controversial Concept -- Three Classics : Marx, Weber, and Schumpeter -- Other Voices and a Working Definition -- Merchant Capitalism. China and Arabia -- Europe : Dynamic Latecomer -- Interim Findings around 1500 -- Expansion. Business and Violence : Colonialism and World Trade -- Joint-Stock Company and Finance Capitalism -- Plantation Economy and Slavery -- Agrarian Capitalism, Mining, and Proto-Industrialization -- Capitalism, Culture, and Enlightenment : Adam Smith in Context -- The Capitalist Era. The Contours of Industrialization and Globalization since 1800 -- From Ownership to Managerial Capitalism -- Financialization -- Work in Capitalism -- Market and State -- Analysis and Critique.
Download or read book Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism written by David McNally and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction: This book challenges the conventional wisdom about classical political economy and the rise of capitalism. It is written in the conviction that modern interpretations of political economy have suffered terribly from acceptance of the prevailing liberal view of the origins and development of capitalist society. By the liberal account, capitalism emerged out of the centuries-old competitive activities of merchants and manufacturers in rational pursuit of their individual economic self-interest. Over time, this account claims, the persistent activity of these classes developed new forms of wealth and productive resources and new intellectual and cultural habits, which eroded the existing structure of society. The rise of capitalism is thus explained in terms of the rise to prominence of the most productive, rational, and progressive social groups—merchants and manufacturers. Not surprisingly, classical political economy came to be seen as an intellectual reflection of the ascendance of merchants and manufacturers and as a theoretical justification of their interests and activities. This book argues that capitalism was the product of an immense transformation in the social relationships of landed society and that this fact is crucial to understanding the development of classical political economy. Without a radical transformation of the agrarian economy, the activities of merchants and manufacturers would have remained strictly confined. By no inexorable logic of their own were mercantile and industrial activities capable of fundamentally transforming the essential relations of precapitalist society. Rather, the changes in agrarian economy, which drove rural producers from their land, forced them onto the labour market as wage labourers for their means of subsistence, and refashioned farming as an economic activity based upon the production of agricultural commodities for profit on the market, established the essential relations of modern capitalism. In what follows, these processes are described in terms of the emergence of agrarian capitalism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Download or read book Family Firms and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe written by Thomas Max Safley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating study follows the fortunes of the Höchstetter family, merchant-manufacturers and financiers of Augsburg, Germany, in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, and sheds light on the economic and social history of failure and resilience in early modern Europe. Carefully tracing the chronology of the family’s rise, fall and transformation, it moves from the micro- to the macro-level, making comparisons with other mercantile families of the time to draw conclusions and suggest insights into such issues as social mobility, capitalist organization, business techniques, market practices and economic institutions. The result is a microhistory that offers macro-conclusions about the lived experience of early capitalism and capitalistic practices. This book will be valuable reading for advanced students and researchers of economic, financial and business history, legal history and early modern European history.
Download or read book Modern Capitalism written by Henri Sée and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Capitalism and Slavery written by Eric Williams and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.
