The Nineteenth Century, Apogee of Historical Capitalism
Capitalism is not a system based on a transhistorical rationality that would allow it to be reproduced indefinitely and thereby become the manifestation of the ‘end of history’.
As opposed to this ideological view inspired by the ‘economics’ of imaginary capitalism, I read the historical trajectory of capitalism as consisting of a long preparation (eight centuries from the year 1000 in China to 1800 in Europe), a short apogee (the nineteenth century) and a decline begun in the twentieth century.Are the two concepts ‘European world economy’ and ‘historical capitalism’ interchangeable? My definition of historical capitalism includes its global tendency. It advances by including external regions, beginning in 1492 and ending only at the close of the nineteenth century. The analyses of each of the four teammates (Wallerstein, Arrighi, Frank, originally, and later me) converge on this essential point and break with the dominant conventional view that, to say the very least, underestimates the globalized dimension of capitalism,—which it is content to juxtapose to the analysis of the diverse formations that make up the world system.
My approach to the formation of capitalism begins with the specificity of this mode of production in contrast with the preceding dominant mode, which I have described as tributary. The latter does not require the formation of a political authority covering a vast area. That remains the exception, exemplified by China in contrast with the successive failures to establish empires in the Middle Eastern/ Mediterranean/European region.
Wallerstein chooses to identify the birth of the European world economy as occurring either in 1492 or a century and a half earlier in Europe. I am proposing a more ambitious approach here, based on the thesis that the same contradictions traversed all of the tributary societies, in Asia as well as in Europe.
From this perspective, I see the beginning of capitalist modernity occurring much earlier in the Sung era in China, spreading to the Abbassid Caliphate and then the Italian cities. Nevertheless, Wallerstein and I jointly critique Frank’s later thesis (formulated in Re-Orient), which eliminates capitalist specificity.Wallerstein draws a picture of the nineteenth century as the (short) apogee of capitalism: the social order is stabilized and the working classes have ceased being dangerous, and Europe’s domination over ‘the rest of the world’ is established and appears indestructible. These phenomena are really two sides of the same coin. However, this apogee will be brief.
In Europe, the apogee of capitalism leads to the formation of new ‘nations’ inspired, to varying degrees, by the models of France, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium. This type of ‘national renaissance’, which takes the place of a bourgeois revolution, shapes the unifications of Germany and Italy, begun in 1848 and completed in 1870. The formation of eastern and southeastern European nations, also proclaimed in 1848, completes the picture. These complex processes, which combine the aspirations of the educated middle classes, instead of the established bourgeoisies, and the peasantry, were the subject of animated debates, notably within Austro-Marxism and nascent Bolshevism at the end of the nineteenth century. These movements, the so-called ‘springtime of nations’ (of peoples?), are obviously distinct from those of peoples who are victims of internal colonialism, a specific phenomenon unique to England (the Irish question) and the United States (the Afro-American question). Similar movements of the awakening of peoples who are victims of internal colonialism develop in the Indian regions of Latin America, (the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 is the prime example of this awakening) and in South Africa.
The very success of the expansion of this apogee, however, is going to lead rapidly to the first great systemic crisis of capitalism.
The challenge presented by this large and long crisis, which begins in 1873 and will find only a—provisional—solution after the Second World War, will bring about a three-part response from capital: the move to monopoly capitalism, financialization, and globalization. This qualitative transformation of historical capitalism marks the end of the system’s apogee and begins the long decline through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.Will this long decline, from the first lengthy crisis (1873-1945/1955) to the second (begun in 1971 and still deepening)—the ‘autumn of capitalism’—coincide with the ‘springtime of peoples’? This challenge is central to the social struggles and international conflicts (the revolt of the peripheries) taking place for the last 100 years.
It is clear that the nineteenth century still inspires a barely concealed nostalgia among all defenders of the so-called ‘liberal’ (centrist liberal) capitalist order.
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