A History of Capitalism 1500–1980

This book is bom from the solid conviction that one cannot understand the contemporary period without analyzing the profound upheavals which the development of capitalism has brought about in societies throughout the world.

The century of enlightenment, of French esprit, of enlightened despotism, this is how the eighteenth century is usually presented—a century of expanding trade, especially world trade, and of increasing market, agricultural, and manufacturing production, accompanied by rising prices and population growth.¹ All of this was most evident in the second half of the century accompanied by vastly increased wealth and worsening poverty.²

Can the path covered in three centuries be seen clearly enough? At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the name of God and the king, armed expeditions conquered large areas in the Americas, massacring, pillaging, and bringing back fabulous treasures. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the name of nature and freedom, economists, anxious to discover the source of wealth, described the conditions of capital accumulation.

Before capitalism became dominant, economic life was shaken, more or less regularly, by changes in weather conditions, good and bad harvests, demographic changes, and wars. The whole phase of capitalist industrialization was accomplished through cyclical movements having a certain regularity: periods of prosperity and euphoria checked by a recession or broken by a crisis.

Carried away by the logic of accumulation and enlarged production, national capitalisms searched throughout the world for space in which to expand, confronting one another with increasing severity. National reactions became sharper, and with the spirit of conquest and revenge, nationalist feelings became more pronounced. The world war resolved nothing, very much to the contrary. The need for expansion on a world scale endured, although the previously existing system of international payments had been destroyed. And during the 1920s this world which had been split apart experienced the coexistence of both prosperity and crisis, and after 1929 was dragged into a new huge crisis and then another huge war.

Whatever those who see in each war, in each crisis and hint of crisis, a new aggravation of the “general crisis of capitalism” may think, what has been accomplished in the present period is in fact capitalism’s new “leap forward.” Of course, in a considerable part of the world capitalism reigns no longer; a new mode of accumulation and industrialization, another class society, and a tremendous concentration of state power have brought to these regions new means for production and resource appropriation. But World War II, the reconstruction and the period of prosperity which followed, decolonization, the internationalization of capital, and new industrialization in the third world all testify to a new thrust by capitalism on a world scale. And the crisis of the 1970s was in some ways the means by which this new expansion of capitalism and its accompanying mutations were carried out.