Read Online The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism by Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby - Free Book Online
Authors: Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby
Tags: General, History, Economics, Business & Economics, Historiography, Capitalism - History, Economic History, Capitalism, Free Enterprise
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technological changes that characterize capitalism as a system. The Dutch grew fat and happy and complacent without following the English path toward progressive improvements. Indeed, its backward neighbor Belgium, which stayed within the Hapsburg Empire until the nineteenth century, industrialized first. Riches were not enough in these early decades of capitalist development to pry open the doors of a closed society in Spain and Portugal; Dutch prosperity did not translate into continued innovation.
From the 1620s through the 1680s, the English government was in turmoil. A king was executed, a Parliament dismissed, another king restored, and a hereditary succession rejected, ending with the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although these were primarily political conflicts, economic issues helped define the opposing sides. The king was the largest landholder in England, so his income could vary with good and bad times like that of other landed families. But the king, thanks to his unique prerogatives, had other sources of income, like payments from grants of monopolies, patents, and company charters. The most lucrative “gifts” he could sell were licenses for the exclusive public control of a product, a trade, or even a government service, like the inspection of tobacco or collection of customs.
King James I found in the granting of monopolies a particularly facile way of increasing his income. As one scholar reported, in the early seventeenth century a typical Englishman lived “in a house built with monopoly bricks…heated by monopoly coal. His clothes are held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins…. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, monopoly lobsters.” 7 The holders of monopolies had the exclusive right to sell these items and charged as much as people would pay for them.
Such a lavish sale of privilege would have been a burden at any time, but with the growth of internal and external markets, monopolies distorted the whole pattern of trade. Even the nobility became attracted to commercial ventures, especially if they involved colonies that would enhance the prestige of England. 8 The more the English rulers attempted to extract money in unconventional taxes, grants, and patents, the more economic issues got pulled into parliamentary debates. Defenders of royal prerogatives exuded the confidence of carriers of an old commercial tradition, appealing more to sensibilities than to economic reasoning. Men close to power continued to evoke the old ideal of subordinating economic activities to social solidarity, but fresh disputants were finding their voices and a new vocabulary for talking about harvests, rents, trade, and taxes as part of a new economic order.
In England the king came to represent adherence to tradition and the use of arbitrary power. Monopolies and closed corporations shared in the opprobrium of all things royal. In the wrangling over monopolies and other economic ills, a large swath of the English elite with seats in Parliament—improving landlords, members of trading companies, clothiers—discovered their common interests. Economic grievances transmogrified into political issues. With gross simplification it could be said that even if the forces behind economic development didn’t cause the English Civil War, the conflict assured that they would eventually triumph.
Civil unrest in the seventeenth century, because it lasted so long, weakened the political authority requisite for policing economic restrictions. It’s one thing to have a law—even a venerable law—on the books and another to be able to enforce it in the face of powerful incentives for evasion. With the leaders of England’s political and religious institutions distracted by the long civil unrest, entrepreneurs strengthened internal transportation systems, marketed colonial products, and turned London into a great emporium. After this thirty-year period
From the 1620s through the 1680s, the English government was in turmoil. A king was executed, a Parliament dismissed, another king restored, and a hereditary succession rejected, ending with the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although these were primarily political conflicts, economic issues helped define the opposing sides. The king was the largest landholder in England, so his income could vary with good and bad times like that of other landed families. But the king, thanks to his unique prerogatives, had other sources of income, like payments from grants of monopolies, patents, and company charters. The most lucrative “gifts” he could sell were licenses for the exclusive public control of a product, a trade, or even a government service, like the inspection of tobacco or collection of customs.
King James I found in the granting of monopolies a particularly facile way of increasing his income. As one scholar reported, in the early seventeenth century a typical Englishman lived “in a house built with monopoly bricks…heated by monopoly coal. His clothes are held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins…. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, monopoly lobsters.” 7 The holders of monopolies had the exclusive right to sell these items and charged as much as people would pay for them.
Such a lavish sale of privilege would have been a burden at any time, but with the growth of internal and external markets, monopolies distorted the whole pattern of trade. Even the nobility became attracted to commercial ventures, especially if they involved colonies that would enhance the prestige of England. 8 The more the English rulers attempted to extract money in unconventional taxes, grants, and patents, the more economic issues got pulled into parliamentary debates. Defenders of royal prerogatives exuded the confidence of carriers of an old commercial tradition, appealing more to sensibilities than to economic reasoning. Men close to power continued to evoke the old ideal of subordinating economic activities to social solidarity, but fresh disputants were finding their voices and a new vocabulary for talking about harvests, rents, trade, and taxes as part of a new economic order.
In England the king came to represent adherence to tradition and the use of arbitrary power. Monopolies and closed corporations shared in the opprobrium of all things royal. In the wrangling over monopolies and other economic ills, a large swath of the English elite with seats in Parliament—improving landlords, members of trading companies, clothiers—discovered their common interests. Economic grievances transmogrified into political issues. With gross simplification it could be said that even if the forces behind economic development didn’t cause the English Civil War, the conflict assured that they would eventually triumph.
Civil unrest in the seventeenth century, because it lasted so long, weakened the political authority requisite for policing economic restrictions. It’s one thing to have a law—even a venerable law—on the books and another to be able to enforce it in the face of powerful incentives for evasion. With the leaders of England’s political and religious institutions distracted by the long civil unrest, entrepreneurs strengthened internal transportation systems, marketed colonial products, and turned London into a great emporium. After this thirty-year period
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