If you missed last week's reading (well, Den commentary really...) of Sven Beckert's new tome of an anti-capitalistic attempt oddly named Capitalism: A Global History, you can browse through those posts below.

• Short summary Beckert is a credentialed-af historian at Harvard who spent his career writing about slavery and cotton trade and random New History of Capitalism stuff -- super trendy, ridiculous fad in history departments everywhere. He just published a 1300-page book that's giving me Piketty vibes. This is a thing a lot of peeps are going to look at and say, "see! SEE!" (#1401462). Someone needs to take it apart, take the bull by the horns etc, and point out that the emperor is a tad undressed.

#0 Preface: "Capitalism Book Club #0: Sven Beckert Begins His Tale"
#1 Introduction: "Capitalism Book Club #1: INTRODUCTION, and the Trouble of Defining 'Capitalism'"

Strip the account of the ideological overlay —and the Marxian “accumulation of capital for capital’s sake” goggles — and suddenly the grand historian re-appears. The individual components of Beckert’s oversized cake are pretty high quality, it turns out.

In Chapter 1 ("Islands of Capital"), we're treated to a fascinating dive into 11th-century trade routes and merchant practices on and around the Arabian peninsula. The trade routes, ultimately connecting the Mediterranean/North Africa and India and beyond is done mainly by, and going through, the Islam empire at the time.

The prose is pleasant and balanced, a glorified "Silk Road"-type history account of trade and cities, with a discomforting (and largely unnecessary) ideological veneer of Marxism popping up now and again.

I'm starting to grasp his "archepelago/islands" metaphor and the heavy emphasis on global. Whatever "Capitalism" is, and his definition isn't exactly watertight as we saw in the Introduction (#1416952), it involved trade. Trade requires a surplus (Yes, I know that's Marxian lingo but bear with me) that can be stored and transported to another place ("Island") that also has a surplus of some kind with which to barter. A society with 100% self-sufficient farmers can't engage in long-distance trade; everyone is busy toiling the land... we can only get non-farming by having agriculture generate a surplus that the rest of us can live off (...and in that one sentence you've grasped a lot of economic history already.)

“Something new emerged,” Beckert claims, around the year 1000, neatly lining up with increased crop yields and agri surplus (i.e., tradable!). We see a social change in the countryside from “more secure private property rights in the Islamic world” (p. 41) —plus, oddly "escalating peasant taxation in Europe" as if that was always available... (just work those slaves harder, bitch!)

If we think of economic society everywhere in the 1100s as ~80-90%+ of people living hand-to-mouth in subsistence farming, handing over whatever little extra to rulers (or given away with varying degrees of liberty to religious masters), there is only scant left over available for "trade" (mobilization, commodification and the rest of our Marxian glossory). Thus, archipelago.

There is nothing but farmers and shepherds between these schematic trade routes,There is nothing but farmers and shepherds between these schematic trade routes,

Note: "above this layer of mundane exchange" and “feeble divison of labor but no capitalists”

Long-distance trade (and money, and profits and "capital") can only exist in small scale along or between these trading centers, fed by the hinterland-resources "mobilized" (p. 43) for the cities around the Indian Ocean. If capitalism happens with traders commodifying (i.e., not growing/making for own use) stuff, agriculturally dominant societies of the past could only have a few of those... exchanging surplus in one region for surplus in another thus had two capitalists trade with one another, but remaining a very small portion of society, isolated and existing only in connection to their counterparts in other societies.

"AS TRADE INTENSIFIED" (p. 48)
There's something odd in the "intensification" obsession... four times I caught it (p. 57: “traded ever more intensively, “intensified agriculture” p. 59, : “those surpluses increased significantly” p. 71). I wonder what he thinks it means... what, the farmers weren't running their oxen hard enough, getting as much crop yield as they were later? Non-optimized? If, like the agricultural revolution in Europe a few centuries later, involving techniques like crop rotation + warmer climate giving off more yield, where is the "intensified" work here? (Even in a Marxian framework, it isn't like there's more labor embodied in the extra goods... labor-theory-of-value style)

This idiotic Marxist language isn't helping anyone but let's play. You're trying to say there were more stuff around, suddenly, stuff that could be stolen/extracted or voluntarily traded with foreigners across the sea.
HOW? More surplus —production better, technology improved, property rights better, climate change gave higher yields, all of which contribute to and feeds into of a) growth and b) wealth from higher, more expansive division of labor.

The benign interpretation of his Capitalism-as-an-intrinsic-force with logic of its own is just division of labor and growth... if we can get more/do more stuff, it'd make sense for societies to have some of its members take that surplus on boats across the waters and return with other stuff (hashtag Ricardo, hashtag comparative advantage). He spends a little time on the Italian city-states centuries later, plus the African kingdoms —with the Sahara being a sand "sea" with caravans going across it (p. 65)... that was real cool!—and then on the isolated Americas, to show that trading communities were everywhere

“the ubiquity of nodes of capital” … demonstrat[ing] powerfully that the archipelago of capital was rooted in forces and mechanisms independent of specific cultures, religions, and habits.”

In his mind this obvious translates into support for the idea that capitalism has a logic of its own but is of course perfectly compatible with the basic human economic constraints faced by everyone and similar optimizations found in different places. If you think “capitalism,” or trade and profit-and-loss behavior of people using their property as they see fit, is natural human economic behavior, this is also what you’d expect to see! (I'm reminded of Murray Rothbard's "Observationally equivalent" point)

Talking about paper money in China and illustrating the 13th-C yuan banknote, he concludes

eventually, that buying and selling with ‘pieces of paper’ became a defining characteristic of capitalism.

(Oddly close to Mises' idea of a dividing line between capitalism and socialism = a stock market).

ISLAMIC WRITERS wrote about the logic and legitimacy of profit and capital, “with a tenth-century source describing a 'passion for the accumulation of capital'“ (p. 42) —a translation I'd love to have fact-checked by any Arabic speakers around (no way they spoke like that a thousand years ago??); here's the source he uses.

When he discusses the European crusades, he embarks on typical Marxist/Imperialistic ideas, saying that the military conquest opened up more trading opportunities (p. 59), literally and physically opened the markets for e.g., the Genoese. Never mind the logic of that (raiding has always been more expensive than trading), it'd similarly mean that those on the other side had their trades closed by foreign military force. They also played "capitalism," so were they now less capitalistic having had their market access cut out?

We end the observations on Chapter 1 with some of the same questions outstanding from before:

• Capitalism? What do you even mean?
• what economic activity is capitalism and just "mundane" exchange and "feeble division of labor"
• how in the world Beckert can look back a thousand years and into the soul and see the motivation of people then. In contrast to the merchants and the priests, the rulers and the soldiers, the pesky merchants were "driven by another motive: accumulation” (p. 70).

OK, boomer.

The good stuff:

• painting the ship-heavy trading pictures in port cities like Aden.
• the "archipelago" of capital starting to make sense as a structural device, understanding that in these "proto-capitalist" societies (e.g., heavy agro) only very few people can live off trade, and trade with others like them from far across the seas.