The Relentless Revolution: the History of Capitalism

Author: Joyce Appleby

W.W. Norton & Company, 2010

The jacket of her book describes her as "one of our most accomplished historians." She is a past president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. She taught for many years at the University of California at Los Angeles and is the 2009 winner of the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Award for distinguished writing in American History.

Appleby's history of capitalism is less minutely technical than was Marx's three volume work, Das Kapital – nothing, for example, about falling profit margins. She is focused on what has happened – history – and not pushing a political agenda. Historians, she writes, do not have to take sides. She avoids the "class analysis" that Marxists profess. And she has the advantage over Marx of more than a century and a half of observation that has passed since his death.

One could not ask for writing that is more lucid and uncomplicated about what some consider a difficult subject.

Appleby describes the scarcity of agricultural societies up to the 16th century and the European divergence and the development of capitalism as a cultural system.

"Scarcity," she writes, "exercised a pervasive influence in premodern societies." There were government regulations.

Officials were always on the lookout for farmers who held their grain off the market, hoping for a rising price, or who sold part of it to brewers without permission...Each country's laws reflected the authorities' fear of famines and the riots they provoked. Every stop in the production of the wheat, barley, oats, or rice – those precious grains that composed the staff of life – came under surveillance. (p. 57)

She wrote of felonies in England prior to the rise of capitalism: "Buying up large quantities of foodstuffs and holding them off the market, waiting for a better price and then retailing them to others." (p. 57)

Trade expanded dramatically in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the "seaborne trade that followed the great discoveries of all-water routes to the East and West Indies." Europeans dominated this trade, giving them a boost in the direction of capitalism.

Portugal and Spain led the way, and "Portugal and Spain did not fail at what was important to them... their empires lasted longer than those of other imperial powers." But Portugal and Spain remained traditionally aristocrat-dominated societies. The Dutch and English followed Portugal and Spain in seaborne trade, and their societies changed in ways that encouraged capitalism.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writes Appleby, many European villagers were still working together in common fields – community plots. There were freehold farmers and prosperous tenants. The lives of villagers were "deeply entwined with those of their neighbors," and the stability of this way of life "had built a mighty wall of hostility to change." But alongside their participation in world trade, the Dutch and English advanced their agriculture beyond that of other European societies, and their middle class advanced in influence. Prior to this, farm surpluses went to landlords (aristocrats) in the form of rent and tithes for the church, and people were little interested in change. But now, abundant food allowed for population increases. The demand for food increased the price that could be charged for crops, and this added incentive to increase food production. Wealth was accumulated for investment in farm productivity. Feeding more people with fewer workers released people for work at other occupations and left "more money in everyone's pockets" for buying a variety of goods. Tradition was pushed aside in favor of change and a new market economy. Capitalism, writes Appleby, was a cultural phenomenon and embodied a new restlessness and change. In England, she writes, the "old agrarian order" was reformed.

She writes:

What Marx and his followers got right was the coherence of a new class of owners determined to use its influence and money to secure policies that favored its interests. (p. 79)

Appleby writes of continuing tradition in China and India. There was early marriage, near the age of puberty, and extended families living together in one household – as in southern Europe. There was population growth in England but not enough to be an economic detriment. The custom of late marriages in England and the wait to establish separate households, "acted as a population check." Appleby describes and documents population growth exacerbating "declining agricultural productivity in Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Balkans." She mentions landlords in Russia and Poland not freeing themselves up for change, tying their peasants to the land through serfdom and removing incentives to improve agricultural routines. Population growth in England was not big enough to allow wages to be bid down. "English workers got paid substantially more than elsewhere in Europe – much higher than in other parts of the world," and this created more consumers for manufactured products.

By 1700, she writes, English annual output in agriculture was at least twice that of any other European country and continued so until the 1850s. (p. 83) Politically, she writes, "England became divided between those whom the changes of the century dislodged and those who stayed put."

She describes Asia as being slower in breaking their culture – their old ways of doing things. Further on the subject of capitalism first in Europe, she writes: