Capitalism and the Sea

The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World

Liam Campling,Alejandro Colás

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781784785253
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Winner of the IPEG 2022 Book Prize The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Cols analyse these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

1

Circulation

The distinction between land and sea plays a fundamental but contradictory role in the origins of capitalism. Some world historians see maritime trade and the accompanying accumulation of wealth in coastal cities as the determining factor in the emergence of this revolutionary mode of production during the ‘long’ sixteenth century (1450–1650). This is the historical era that witnessed not just the circumnavigation of the globe, but also the consolidation of a world market with financial and commercial institutions which – in their use of words like ‘flotation’, ‘liquidity’, ‘flows’ and ‘ventures’ – invoke all the movement and risk of the sea. Marx’s own famous statements on the primitive or previous accumulation of capital underline the place of overseas conquest, the Atlantic slave trade and commercial wars among Europe’s naval powers in the ‘rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’.¹

Yet in that very same Part VIII of Capital, Marx also identifies the separation of direct producers from their means of social subsistence, and the associated commodification of labour as the fundamental process that ‘clears the way for the capitalist system’.² There, Marx asserts, ‘The expropriation of the agricultural producer of the peasant from the soil is the basis of the whole process’. Commercial farmers, industrialists and their allies thus replace merchants as the chief protagonists in capitalist development by undermining the power of feudal landlords and medieval guilds, and delivering modern landed property, market societies and the accompanying ‘free exploitation of man by man’.³ Primitive accumulation appears to be less the outcome of an expanding maritime frontier than of agrarian class antagonism, and so the location of capitalism’s birthplace migrates from port to country town, from coast to hinterland.

This tension between the role of accumulation, appropriation and exploitation on the one hand and trade, exchange and conveyance on the other in Marx’s own understanding of capitalism’s genesis plays itself out in one of the most fundamental relationships within this social system: that between production and circulation. Whereas the former is conventionally identified with the realm of value creation in the exploitation of labour, the latter is seen as a domain of value realisation in the form of profit upon sale of a commodity. Moreover, the sphere of circulation is characterised by the constant shape-shifting of capital in its diverse commodity, money and productive forms. Maritime trade has historically been linked to an assortment of credit, insurance and commercial institutions that propel commodity and money capital in particular across the globe. But it would be a mistake to make this an absolute and mechanical association – clearly the different circuits of capital operate on both land and sea and, more importantly, the complete capitalist circuit demands the smoothest possible coordination between production and circulation. Capital, in this sense, is amphibious.

This chapter aims to take seriously the complex integration between these moments in the circuit of capital and explores the different ways in which capitalism has from the beginning been conditioned by the peculiar natural-geographical properties of the sea. Although we will be referring to this influence as the ‘maritime factor’ in capitalist development, we seek to avoid presenting the sea as a force external to social relations on land. In line with the rest of this book, our focus is on those terraqueous spaces where land meets sea: ports, docks, ships, company houses and trading posts. Our intention, therefore, is to consider how the fundamentally temporal dynamics of a mode of production rooted on land have interacted through the elementary geophysical properties of the oceans, and vice versa. Rather than building an artificial (and unsustainable) opposition between firm land and fluid sea, between capitalism as a social formation and the ocean as purely natural agent, the chapter seeks instead to constantly probe the changing articulation between maritime circulation, mobility and exchange, and terrestrial accumulation, authority and production. In particular, we make a historical case for underscoring the maritime factor in the emergence of capitalism: while commercial exchange, seaborne trade and maritime labour regimes might not be necessary for capitalism to exist in theory, we argue that they were integral to the historical-geographical juncture of Western Europe at the end of ‘the long sixteenth century’.

Recognising the variation in conceptions and uses of the sea in relation to the dominant form of social reproduction on land opens up the possibility of historicising the dynamic connections between maritime flows and terrestrial authority. Certainly, in the post-Columbian era ‘all the seas of the world became one’ (to paraphrase J. H. Parry) in the sense that navigators were fully conscious of the maritime interconnections between oceans.⁴ It is also the case that the Earth’s biosphere is teleconnected through complex and distinct inter-decadal relationships between water temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (E l Niño/La Niña events), Eurasian snow cover, South Asian monsoons and subtropical and polar air masses.⁵ But the world’s oceans are also sharply differentiated by salinity, acidity, depth, temperature, precipitation and cloud cover, among other local or regional bio-geographical factors, and this naturally affects human interaction with the sea. Regularly overcast skies and low circumpolar latitudes complicated nighttime sailing by the stars for Northmen, while the pronounced salinity of the Red Sea, coupled with its ‘maze of shallows’, makes the Straits of Bab el Mandeb ‘easier to enter, in terms of tidal current, than to leave’.⁶

These exceptional geophysical properties of the sea can also affect socio-economic and political relations on land and are in turn changed by the latter. For instance, several decades of far-flung Chinese expeditions across the high seas under the Muslim Admiral Zheng He famously came to an abrupt end in 1433, as the Ming dynasty turned the empire’s attention toward China’s north-west frontier, thereby effectively sealing the mainland from overseas trade and travel, both outgoing and incoming.⁷ For its part, the Red Sea’s characteristic wind and current patterns contributed toward what historians of the area have called the ‘Jidda gap’, where the Hijazi port marked an ‘invisible yet palpable late seventeenth- and eighteenth century split’ with ‘the northern sector of the Red Sea … controlled by Ottoman administrators and dominated by Cairene merchants while the southern sector opened up to Yemeni governance and Gujarati commercial preeminence’.⁸ Like other emblematic maritime straits – the Dardanelles, Gibraltar, Hormuz or Malacca – the Bab el Mandeb continues, as we’ll see in Chapter 3, to act as a strategic choke point in a regional commercial and geopolitical system fashioned by a changing combination of sociopolitical and geophysical forces. As Laleh Khalili’s richly evocative account of shipping and Arabian capitalism shows, post-war oil extraction from the region’s subsoil required its subsequent seaborne transportation. The reconfiguration was not just between hinterland and littoral, but also between land and sea in the very material sense that coastal sands dredged through complex processes of land reclamation literally found their way harbour-side in the shape of the cement used to construct roads, quays, buildings and other infrastructure.⁹ Under specific historical-geographical circumstances, then, the sea and its coastlines effectively become a productive force, simultaneously facilitating generation of wealth through maritime traffic and exploitation, but also conditioning the development of relations of production on land.

In the rest of this chapter, a picture will hopefully emerge of capitalism as a mode of production deeply entangled in a web of maritime trade, risk and enterprise that has at key junctures of its evolution – particularly during the age of commercial capitalism, the Pax Britannica of ‘free trade’ imperialism, and the more recent neoliberal era – shaped the nature and dynamics of the system. We will be looking in the first section of the chapter at the historical sociology of the maritime factor in the birth of capitalism: the interaction through time between various commercial centres of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in this process. From here, we proceed to consider the theoretical implications of this history for our understanding of distinct merchant, industrial and neoliberal forms of capitalism. This will require some discussion of contrasting definitions and interpretations of capitalism as a social system, in turn raising important questions about the periodisation of this mode of social reproduction, and its wider connections to environmental histories of the sea.

‘Expediting of the affair of negoce’: the maritime factor in capitalism

In a conventional definition, capitalism is associated with a list of social practices and institutions like market exchange, profit, competition, complex divisions of labour, wage contracts, banking, joint-stock companies and double-entry book keeping, all of which facilitate the accumulation of wealth. For the celebrated historian Fernand Braudel, ‘capitalism has been potentially visible since the dawn of history’ as many of its characteristic features just enumerated are latent in all civilisations, waiting to be released from the fetters of tradition or aristocratic privilege. ‘Far in advance’, Braudel declares, ‘there were signs announcing the coming of capitalism: the rise of the towns and of trade, the increasing density of society, the spread of the use of money, labour market, the expansion of long-distance trade or to put it another way the international market.’¹⁰ In this and similar accounts to be considered later in the chapter, capitalism is an outgrowth of the geographical concentration and socio-economic centralisation of international markets, aided and abetted by state authority: the quantitative accumulation of profit in towns reaches a tipping point, thereby triggering a qualitative capitalist transformation across the whole of any given society.

One of the chief drivers behind this concentration of wealth, aside from state formation, is the circulation of commodities, humans, ideas and technologies, principally, though not exclusively, by sea. Capital is value-in-motion, both in the abstract sense that it constantly shifts between commodity, productive and money forms, and through its more concrete embodiment in circulating goods, people and credit. The sea has been a protagonist in this transfer of actual and potential wealth either side of the early modern period, mainly because it offered a cheaper and faster means of transport, and also because it encouraged the institutional development and geographical convergence of banking, insurance, shipbuilding and related commercial infrastructure in seaports. In all this movement during the age of sail, ocean winds and surface currents gave the blue-water part of the planet a comparative advantage over continental land masses. These singular sources of marine energy (and their accompanying coastal ecology – natural harbours, tidal streams, seasonal weather, water temperature, reefs, shoals and so forth) have shaped patterns of commercial and civilisational exchange throughout history, but they acquired particular significance with the advent of capitalism as turnover time between production and consumption became central to economic activity. Even after coal and diesel replaced wind power as the engine of navigation, the ocean’s ‘free gifts’ offered unique benefits and obstacles to capitalist circulation.

By way of illustration, it is useful to briefly consider some of the main urban sites of international exchange and accumulation during the medieval and early modern periods, such as coffee houses and bourses, dockyards and arsenals, warehouses and factories, which in turn draw attention to the institutions of capital circulation and accumulation – credit and insurance firms, stock exchanges and trading companies – that housed the fledgling world market.¹¹ To facilitate the exposition, we will follow the three moments in the capitalist circuit – commodity, money and productive capital – showing how the maritime factor played a signal role in each.

Networks of commodity exchange

The London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s are two iconic institutions of British commercial and maritime capitalism, as well as representing the City of London’s continuing primacy as a centre of global finance and insurance. They both also had origins in coffee houses. The Royal Exchange was opened in 1569 as the City’s main venue ‘for the more facile expediting of the affair of negoce [commerce]’.¹² In the course of the seventeenth century, notoriously rowdy stockbrokers, merchants and jobbers were ejected from the Royal Exchange at Cornhill and took their business to the adjacent Exchange Alley, where Jonathan’s and Lloyd’s coffee houses eventually became the sites for the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s Insurers respectively. These were places for the transfer of stocks, shares and market information, but they also hosted trade in commodities and, by the start of the eighteenth century, bills of exchange and foreign currency as well. They therefore incorporated the circulation of money, commodity and productive capital in a single fixed location, interlacing their City activity with wider trading networks, stretching to the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and beyond.

From a global perspective, however, London’s ascendancy as a major economic hub was comparatively laggard. The City emerged in the course of the seventeenth century as an outgrowth, not the birthplace, of the ‘commercial revolution’ that had extended across Europe since the tenth century BCE, in large measure propelled by the intense economic activity across Africa, Asia and their connecting oceans.¹³ Janet Abu-Lughod’s absorbing study of a thirteenth-century world system featuring ‘merchants and producers in an extensive (worldwide) if narrow network of exchange’ reveals the powerful interconnections between various circuits of trade, language, religion and culture linking up the Mediterranean ports of Constantinople, Venice, Genoa and Alexandria, or Indian Ocean nodes such as Basra, Muscat, Mombasa, Aden and Calicut.¹⁴ The London coffee houses were integrated into these commercial highways first and most obviously through the trade in coffee itself – a bean (or more accurately berry) of East African origin, cultivated in southern Arabia, processed and consumed across the Ottoman world and first served commercially as a drink in Christian Europe at Pasqua Rosée’s London coffee house, founded in 1652.¹⁵ A Greek national, Rosée had arrived in the English capital from his native Smyrna as a servant to Daniel Edwards, a freeman of the Drapers Company and member of the Company of Merchants of England Trading into the Levant Seas.¹⁶ Tellingly, Europe’s first public coffee stall was opened in a back street off Exchange Alley, chasing the business opportunities afforded by the cosmopolitan concentration of merchants, traders, seafarers and brokers in the area. The journey made by Rosée and his patron Daniel Edwards from Smyrna to Venice, and then via Livorno to the City of London, thus mirrored one of several maritime routes – trading not just in coffee, but also in spices, silk, precious metals and slaves – which linked the Indian Ocean to the North and Baltic Seas through the Mediterranean and Black Sea ports of Tunis, Tripoli, Alexandria, Acre, Famagusta Lataquiyah, Constantinople, Caffa, Ragusa, Venice and Genoa. These commercial circuits, which developed from the thirteenth century onwards, are richly represented in contemporaneous travellers’ accounts, like those of Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo, as well as in more recent world histories by Andre Gunder Frank, Eric Wolf or Findlay and O’Rourke, among others.¹⁷ What is perhaps most interesting for our pur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Terraqueous Predicament
• 1. Circulation
• 2. Order
• 3. Exploitation
• 4. Appropriation
• 5. Logistics
• 6. Offshore
• Conclusion: Terraqueous Horizons
• Notes
• Index