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#Post#: 25629--------------------------------------------------
How the West shaped Merchantilism which led into Colonialism
By: antihellenistic Date: March 24, 2024, 8:19 pm
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[quote]Mercantilism and the Birth of Political Economy
Another major drawback of the interstate thesis lies in the way
it views Europe’s competitive character as being no more than a
concentrated expression, as Tilly has it (70), of the “standard”
(ordinary) procurement of power and wealth by states across
history. It ignores the entirely new “mercantilist” discourse
Europeans cultivated during the 1600s in their reflections on
the character and dynamics of this interstate system.
Mercantilism was a discourse with no parallels elsewhere; the
first rational investigation of the relationship between
economic wealth and state power. The proponents of this
discourse included, in the main, Antonie de Montchrétien
(1576–1621), Gerard de Malynes (1586– 1641), Edward Misselden
(1608–1654), and Thomas Mun (1571–1641). What these thinkers
argued, broadly speaking, was that the market was a reality
which should be studied in a scientific manner just like any
other natural phenomena. The power of the state depended on the
wealth of society; the market was a mechanism of wealth
creation, and thus the understanding of its “laws” would reveal
the underlying economic basis of state power. These were the
first European thinkers to write of wealth and power as
independent entities in terms of their modus operandi freed from
all ethical and religious considerations. While they were not
advocating free markets, they were arguing, nevertheless, that
the world of commercial exchanges should be regarded as a system
made up of “mechanical forces” which, if properly understood,
could serve the interests of the state (Magnussen 1994: 211–15).
This was a new group of “worldly philosophers” who had come to
the realization that trade brought power and power brought
wealth (Roll 1983). They maintained that trade, in the words of
Weber, ought “to be carried on as far as possible by the
merchants of the country, in order that its earnings should
accrue to the taxable capacity […] in obvious immediate
connection with the power-seeking policy characteristic of the
[interstate] system” (1981: 348). The mercantilist “balance of
trade” doctrine explained that the total wealth of the world
could not be increased, and that, for that reason, the only way
for a state to increase its wealth was through a positive
balance of trade, a surplus in one’s balance of payments and a
deficit in one’s rivals. Mercantilists thus urged the state to
introduce a whole range of protectionist regulations, “including
prohibitions of importation and stimulation of exportation” and
the “artificial promotion of industries” (348–49) with exclusive
rights.
This doctrine was a revolution in the understanding of the
relationship between politics and economics. It was a new
discourse on the political economy of wealth to the extent that
it examined this relation on its own terms separately from
religious considerations. This discourse was preceded and
influenced by Machiavelli’s detached discussion of politics from
theological matters, and by Jean Bodin’s (1520–1596) doctrine
that there is in every state a supreme power that is subject to
no other power within the territory of the state itself, but to
which all else is subject. The revisionists (including some of
their critics, Vries, Findlay, and O’Rourke) are
political-economists who emphasize the interrelations of “power
and plenty” and yet they fail to ponder the intellectual origins
of this way of thinking.
Mercantilism laid the foundations for modern (liberal/free
market) economics. However, contrary to Hobson, the subsequent
creation in the 1800s in England of a laissez-faire state, and
also to a lesser extent in France, does not mean that such a
state was automatically more peaceful than the Asian states. On
the contrary, for some time, even as Enlightenment thinkers were
seriously thinking of the possibility of a commercial world
“operating to cordialize mankind,” in the words of Thomas Paine,
“by rendering nations, as well as institutions useful to each
other,” European governments were increasingly agreeing with a
new generation of political economists who were arguing that a
free trade economy would generate more wealth for governments to
depend on than a mercantilist economy.
The originators of these ideas, known as “the Physiocrats,” were
located in France. They included, most prominently, Francois
Quesnay (1694–1774) and A. R. J. Turgot (1727–1781). They argued
that agriculture, not trade, was the sector from which the
wealth of a nation originated. The ability to conduct war
depended on the monies raised in taxes, and these in turn
depended on the net agricultural product. France was facing a
fiscal crisis in the late 1700s and, as a solution, the
Physiocrats proposed an agrarian reform directed at replacing
the old customary relations with voluntary contracts between
landlord and tenant. That is, they called for the extension of
market relations into agriculture according to which the old
land-owning nobility would retain its right of ownership through
a capitalist form of leasehold. The Physiocrats also reasoned
that, if wealth lay in land, then proprietors should be allowed
to maximize their profits through the free play of markets. Free
trade would be mutually beneficial between all parties, swaying
each producer to specialize in the production of goods over
which they had an advantage. Higher agrarian profits would in
turn increase the tax-paying capacities of the population,
thereby solving the fiscal crisis (Rubin 1979). While Turgot
attempted to implement free trade policies when he was Minister
of Finance in 1774–76, his reforms were short-lived. England,
the most capitalistic European nation since medieval times,
would be the one to abolish protectionist tariffs and embrace
open markets in the middle of the nineteenth century. Who can
forget David Ricardo’s famous argument against the Corn Laws: If
French farmers are willing to feed us for less than it would
“cost” us to feed ourselves, let us eat French food and spend
our time doing something else?
It has been a subject of much debate as to why the English state
was the eventual winner in the great inter-state struggle for
maritime supremacy. Landes thinks that Britain’s advantage began
in the Middle Ages with the abolition of serfdom and the rise of
individual cultivators, and later in the 16th century with the
spread of mixed farming (grain and livestock and grain-fed
livestock), and the adoption of new techniques of watering,
fertilizing, and crop rotation, followed by the enclosures of
the 18th century (1998: 214). As was argued earlier, he also
states, that England was the beneficiary of a common national
identity combined with equality of civil status. For North, her
advantage lay in the greater protection of property rights.
Other explanations focus on the immediate naval contest between
Britain and France in the 18th century. They ask how it was that
France, with an economy more than double the size of Britain’s,
was the loser in the mercantilist race for global power. The
leading answer is hardly that the British were further ahead in
the direction of a “minimalist” state dedicated to low taxes and
peaceful dividends. Azar Gat sums up well what the prevailing
research says:
The Netherlands and Britain were the most heavily taxed, whereas
absolutist France, conceding the exemption of the aristocracy,
had lower tax revenues for its size, and the people of the
despotic Ottoman Empire was the most lightly taxed. An earlier
generation of historians emphasized the greater taxing power of
the new centralized absolutist state compared with feudal
fragmentation. But more recently it has been recognized that the
representative-inclusive state regimes were even stronger and
more able to generate and hardness social resources or
‘infrastructural power’ than the seemingly despotic absolutists
states. If early European states variably taxed an estimated
5–15 percent of national income, Britain’s wartime taxation
exceeded 20 percent in the eighteenth century, two to three
times the per capita taxation of France, and four time Britain’s
own taxation level before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (490).
Britain was simply a more commercially advanced society,
starting in late medieval times when its feudal lords became
involved in the growing urban markets, rather than relying on
rents extracted from servile serfs. With its greater ethnic
homogeneity and its stronger national identity – according to
Gat, “evident as early as the 14th century” (498) – the English
elites became relatively more committed to the prosperity and
power of their country. Added to this were the representative
character of the British state and the triumph of Parliament
over the kings after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which
resulted in the incorporation of mercantile elites into the
power-seeking aims and responsibilities of the state. This
commercial-national-representative culture fostered a far more
sophisticated financial system, such as stock exchanges and a
national bank able to float massive loans. The ability of the
English state to engage in deficit financing and to raise
low-interest loans contrasted significantly with the French, who
in the eighteenth century had to pay interests rates roughly
double those of the English (Gat 2006: 485–89).[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 235
-238
#Post#: 25670--------------------------------------------------
Re: How the West shaped Merchantilism which led into Colonialism
By: antihellenistic Date: March 26, 2024, 11:43 pm
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[quote]But here we encounter another exhausting debate over
which factor was primary in the rise of nation-states in Europe:
the expanding needs of a capitalist (or still feudal) economy,
or the military requirements of power-seeking states? Rather
than rehearsing this debate, I will point out that there is some
agreement that these two dynamics were important and
interconnected. In Coercion, Capital, and European States
(1990), Tilly synthesizes these two (Marxist and Weberian)
perspectives. 34 He argues that the global dynamic of European
states was a result of the fusion of both capitalism and
military might, of the military and political ambitions of the
state, and of the economic interests of the mercantile elites.
Those nation states that were able to draw extensively on the
wealth created by capitalists – by co-opting the bourgeoisie as
a partner in the state – were the most successful ones in
increasing their concentration of the means of coercion against
their foes. It was after 1500 that national states came to
emerge in England and France, as Italy and Germany remained weak
and subdivided into numerous cities, duchies, and feudal
principalities; and as Russia, Poland, and Hungary continued to
be dominated by a strong alliance between the landlord class and
the monarch. The nation-state was a whole new entity in the way
it came to be identified with a particular nationality and the
way this nationality was promoted by centrally coordinated
administrators devoted to both the pursuit of mercantile wealth
and military power (38–95).
...
Here we must turn to another group of scholars who have
emphasized the idea that Europe’s dynamism lay in the fact that
in the 16th century, in the words of Jones, it “became a single
system of states in which change in one cell affected the
others” (2003: 104). This has been one of the most fashionable
ways to account for Europe’s dynamism. Most Eurocentrics have
made some reference or other to Europe’s highly competitive
interstate system. It is an idea that goes back to Montesquieu,
Voltaire, and Adam Smith. Complementing the observations of
these classical thinkers, Mann, Hall, Jones, Chirot and others,
have argued that one of the most striking aspects of European
history, compared to Asia’s, is that Europe was never united
into an empire after the pax Romana, whereas the Near East and
China were unified early on in their histories. They have
attributed Europe’s fragmentation into competing states to the
geographical division of Europe, by mountains and sea, in
comparison to the civilizations of Asia where major rivers and
open plains made centralization less difficult. They have
detailed how the division of Europe into states of more or less
equal strength cultivated a situation that helped to diffuse
ideas and technologies as each nation felt pressured to keep up
with its competitors. By contrast a large empire in control of
the means of coercion, and unthreatened by equally matched
neighbours “had little incentive to adopt new methods” (Jones
2003: 118).
Moreover, while the political landscape of Europe since medieval
times was already fragmented by a multiplicity of feudal
landowners, each with jurisdictional and military/private
control over their lands, this type of rule was characterized by
incessant violence at the local and regional levels. Only with
the rise of nation-states, and the monopolization of the means
of violence, centralized taxation, and the magnification of
royal justice, was there enough stability for the “diffusion of
best practices in technology and commerce” and for economic
development to occur within each nation (Jones 2003: 149).
Diamond adopted this idea to explain why Europe, among Eurasian
societies, came to dominate the globe, expressing it succinctly:
Once Spain launched the European colonization of America, other
European states saw the wealth flowing into Spain, and six more
joined in colonizing America. The story was the same with
Europe’s cannon, electric lighting, printing, small firearms,
and innumerable other innovations: each was a first neglected or
opposed in some parts of Europe for idiosyncratic reasons, but
once adopted in one area, it eventually spread to the rest of
Europe. These consequences of Europe’s disunity stand in sharp
contrast to those of China’s unity. From time to time the
Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas
navigation; it abandoned development of an elaborate
water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an
industrial revolution in the fourteenth century, demolished or
virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in
clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and
technology in general after the late fifteenth century (413).
Diamond attributed this political disunity to the fact that
Europe was divided into five relatively isolated peninsulas, as
well as carved up by high mountains, whereas China’s heartland
was bound “together from east to west by two long navigable
river systems” (414).
Clearly, this emphasis on Europe’s geography and belligerence is
but a few steps away from Hobson’s and Mielants’s outlook. It is
no accident that David Christian has incorporated it into his
argument that “the state systems of Europe” produced a
“competitive and often brutal commercialism…from the fifteenth
century onwards,” which trained and “adapted” Europe to the
conquest of the Americas from which it extracted the resources
by which it built its global supremacy (Christian 2005: 391–93).
To Christian there was not much to the West other than its
global location as a “hub” region in-between the more advanced
civilizations of Asia and the Americas. The interstate idea,
however, is not a good explanation. Europe was already
exceptionally innovative and antagonistic during the medieval
and the ancient eras. Jones himself insists, despite his
emphasis on the era of nation-states, that “throughout the
medieval and early modern period” Europe saw “cumulative”
technological changes in the economy.
“Ceaseless tinkering is a defining characteristic of the
culture” from about 1000 AD onwards (2003: 62–3). He agrees
essentially with Lynn White’s well-known claim that, in the
Middle Ages, one sees for the first time the modern notion of
“the invention of invention.”35
Moreover, before 1500, as Tilly observes, European overlords
were even “more exclusively” (74) preoccupied with warfare.
According to Robert Bartlett (1993) one of the “most striking
aspects” of the period from 900 to 1350 was the “expansionism”,
“boldness” and “brutality” exhibited by German aristocratic
warriors who moved into Estonia, into Silesia, and throughout
Bohemia; and by the Franks who established new kingdoms in
Castile, Portugal, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Sicily. This was,
after all, the age of the Reconquista and the Crusades. Chris
Wickham (1994), for his part, criticizes Bartlett with the
observation that the Carolingians of the prior age were no less
aggressive and expansionary in their colonizing campaigns
against the Saxons and the Slavs, and in the creation of their
empire. But what about the earlier barbarians who brought about
the downfall of the Roman Empire? Or the Romans who created a
warrior state where conquest was the imperative and where elites
competed for adulation and status?[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page
215, 216, 217, 218, 219
#Post#: 25867--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: non-economic explanations
By: antihellenistic Date: April 10, 2024, 12:33 pm
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The Reason on Birth of Western Capitalism and Industrialism
[quote]Weber knew that “all civilized countries of the earth”
exhibited a “considerable rationalization of capitalistic
calculation.” But he also drew a distinction between
“capitalism” and “modern [European] capitalism” (1958).
Capitalism defined as the exchange of goods and calculations of
profit, including some degree of “capital accounting,” is not
the same as “modern capitalism” (Bendix 1977: 52–3). Modern
capitalism, as I pointed out above, involves the formal
rationalization of the whole sphere of economic life; that is,
the systematic rationalization of the entire process of
production, distribution, and exchange, including a “modern
economic ethos” or “a this-worldly spirit” that provides the
motivation for a methodical approach to labor and legitimates
the rigorous organization of the workforce according to the
rules of efficient management. The creation of a steam-driven
factory economy was a revolution in the rationalization of
means-end action.
But what we need to realize, as stated earlier, is that Weber’s
theory is not only about the rise of modern capitalism but most
fundamentally about the rise of modern Western rationalism. What
made Occidental rationalism different from “Chinese
rationalism,” the “rationalism of India,” and the “rationalism
of the ancient Near East” was the fact that only the West saw
the formal and theoretical rationalization of multiple areas of
social like to a degree not evident in any civilization.
This Occidental path was also characterized by the rise of
relatively independent social spheres of action. Weber observed
that, as the traditional societies of Europe grew larger and
more complex, there was a process of increasing specialization
and differentiation of political activity, art, religion, law,
science, and economic activity, according to which each of these
became autonomously regulated by their own specific norms and
worldviews. In his sociology of law, for example, he noted that
from the Middle Ages onwards, the law attained certain autonomy
from the church and from the political will of kings and
clerics. As law was increasingly controlled, taught, and
professionalized by specialist jurists, and the internal logic
of legal reasoning unfolded, law became ever more
self-reflective, and tradition, custom, and religious dogma were
progressively eliminated from the application of law in favour
of increasingly universalistic principles applied with
consistency and with due process (Habermas 1984: 243–271).
Rational law, in other words, allowed for the impartial
validation of proof through the use of generally applicable
rules
In the sphere of art, science, and ethics, Weber also detected a
parallel process of differentiation from religion. As the
aesthetic, ethical, and scientific spheres achieved a degree of
institutionalized autonomy, these activities were formalized and
taught in schools according to their own methods, axioms, and
norms (Brubaker 1984: 61–91). By thus granting to them greater
institutional autonomy and greater independence from religion,
this differentiation encouraged these orientations to become
more consciously a product of rational self-reflection, and much
less the revelation of divine scripture and religious precepts.
It encouraged them to generate their own formal principles and
norms to be applied universally.[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne page
253 and 254
#Post#: 26033--------------------------------------------------
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
By: antihellenistic Date: April 18, 2024, 10:37 pm
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[quote]I simply want to show that a combination of Weber and
Habermas affords us with a vision that does not depict the rise
of Western rationalism as a malleable instrument of technocratic
domination and class interest. It gives us a perspective that
takes seriously the evolution of rational legal codes, for
example, that protect us from arbitrary confiscation and from
unpredictable political interferences. Robert Marks’s conclusion
(2002: 151) that the rise of the West is “the story of how some
states and peoples benefited from historically contingent events
and geography to be able, at a certain point in time (a
historical conjuncture), to dominate others and to accumulate
wealth and power,” completely leaves out the specifically
Western achievement of producing self-governing institutions –
from medieval estates with corporate rights through the triumph
of representative institutions over kings to the declaration of
human rights – with the powers to criticize and challenge the
weight of the state and capital.
When one looks at the history of the modern West, from a
perspective informed by the work of Habermas and other liberal
democratic thinkers, one sees the rise of a culture in which no
singular authority has the right to impose on individuals an
overarching vision of the human good. One sees a society in
which a discussion of the ultimate values of a society, to use
the words of Castoriadis, is open for debate and becomes the
affair of citizens and not “of rabbis, of priests, of mullahs,
of courtiers, or of solitary monks” (Castoriadis 1992). One sees
a conversation that presupposes certain procedural rules, such
as the fair equality of the agents in dialogue, and the right
and opportunity of all citizens to have a fair chance to speak.
While individuals are encouraged to follow their own opinion,
“intersubjective validation or justification from others” is
required for social or political life (Benhabib 1992: 45).
Although Habermas speaks of a learning process, his focus has
been primarily on the general linguistic presuppositions of
intersubjective mutuality and reciprocal understanding. He has
made no more than passing references to such epoch making
transformations as the English Civil War, the Reformation, and
the French Revolution. The one detailed study he wrote that may
be deemed to have been historically oriented was The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (1962). This work argued that a new civic
society emerged in the 18th century in Britain’s coffee houses,
France’s salons and Germany’s Tischgesellschaften. It was here
where private individuals came together in public settings to
articulate, negotiate, and put forward ideas by way of rational
communication with one another, free from the economy and the
authority of the state. However, the focus of this work, written
when Habermas was much closer to the Marxist inclinations of the
Critical School, was on the ways in which powerful capitalistic
forces had undermined the independence of the public
sphere.18[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne page
267 - 268
#Post#: 31751--------------------------------------------------
Re: Japan
By: PotatoChip Date: December 23, 2025, 12:11 am
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History Buffs: Shogun
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhtxU8C0BxQ
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