A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism

Jairus Banaji

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642592115
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

notes

Chapter One

1. Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York, 1955), 176–77.

2. Lopez and Raymond, Medieval Trade, 38–41.

3. Victor Brants, Esquisse des théories économiques des xiiie et xive siècles (Louvain, 1895), 134, note 1, citing a passage where money (pecunia) is said to have “quandam seminalem rationem lucrosi, quem communiter capitale vocamus.”

4. Cited Dale Kent, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434 (Oxford, 1978), 142.

5. Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, L’économie de l’Empire portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1969), 645.

6. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (London and New York, 1972), 465, which cites an “expert of the Banco di Rialto.”

7. Irfan Habib, “Merchant Communities in Precolonial India,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1990), 386–387.

8. Andreas Tietze, Mustafa ‘Ali’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1982), vol. 2, 36, 38; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010), 184–185.

9. Gigliola Pagano de Divitiis, English Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Italy, trans. Stephen Parkin (Cambridge, 1997), 12, citing Leonardo Donà.

10. Lewis Roberts, The Merchants Map of Commerce, fourth edition (London, 1700), 295.

11. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth,” in Commerce, Culture, & Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, ed. Henry C. Clark (Indianapolis, 2003), 518–563, at 538–539, T.’s description of the “use of capital advances in industrial enterprises.”

12. P. J. Marshall, “Private British Trade in the Indian Ocean before 1800,” in India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, eds. Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson, (New Delhi, 1987), 291.

13. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London: Macmillan, 1962), 383–384.

14. Charles François Du Périer Dumouriez, État...

Table of contents

• A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
• Reinstating Commercial Capitalism
• The Infrastructure of Commercial Capitalism
• The Competition of Capitals: Struggles for Commercial Dominance from the Twelfth to Eighteenth Centuries
• British Mercantile Capitalism and the Cosmopolitanism of the Nineteenth Century
• Commercial Practices: Putting-Out or the Capitalist Domestic Industries
• The Circulation of Commercial Capitals: Competition, Velocity, Verticality
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography