From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Jul 23 2007 - 18:56:39 EDT
"I have observed, in surveying this history [of the nature of capitalists and their origins] from the beginning of the Middle Ages to our own times, a very interesting phenomenon to which, it seems to me, attention has not just been sufficiently called. I believe that, for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organisation we find a breach in continuity... there are as many classes of capitalists as there are epochs in economic history" (from Henri Pirenne, "The stages in the social history of capitalism", The American Historical Review, Vol. XIX, No. 3, April 1914, pp. 494-515, cited by Bairoch 1973). For example, "...however varied their origins, the capitalists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were all obliged to enter into relations with princes and a complete solidarity of interests was established between the two. On the one side the princes could not meet either their public or their private expenses without recourse to the financiers, but on the other the great merchants, bankers and shipowners looked to the princes to protect them against excessive municipal particularism, to put down urban revolts, and to secure the circulation of their money and merchandise. The more "those who had something to lose" were alarmed by social upheavals or communistic movements, the further they were driven into the arms of the royal power as their sole refuge. Even the artisans, when it came to their turn to be threatened by the journeymen, turned to it for protection, because it was the protector of order" (Henri Pirenne, Economic and social history of medieval Europe. London: RKP, 1936, p. 218). It makes me keen to read Peter Spufford's "Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe" (2003) who presents some recent research on the era. Of course, according to Prof. Tom Sekine, this kind of history is strictly impossible. Why? Because, Sekine argues, the conditions for capitalism evolved "first in seventeenth century England, and not before". Tough luck for Monsieur Pirenne, mowed down by the Marxist dialectic, as it were... Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jul 31 2007 - 00:00:06 EDT