The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (69 page)

Schumpeter raised the possibility that capitalism was doomed because of its tendency to destroy the institutions that protect it.
³⁶
The corruption of auditing firms in the 2008 mortgage collapse would be an example, as would be the way economic fluctuations undermine stable families needed to inculcate the discipline and respect for law that is essential to the market working well. But Schumpeter failed to take into account the different experiences market participants draw upon when making decisions. Their opinions differed when he wrote in 1942 from those that participants hold today or will have in another half century. People do learn from their mistakes. There is no reason to think that societies won’t continue to modify and monitor their economies in pursuit of shared goals. A relentless revolution, yes, but not a mindless one.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1. THE PUZZLE OF CAPITALISM

1.
Simon Winchester, “Historical Tremors,”
New York Times,
May 15, 2008.

2.
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
(New York, 1997). See also Gregory Clark, (Princeton, 2007).

3.
David S. Landes,
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
(New York, 1997); Alfred F. Crosby, Jr.,
The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600
(New York, 2000), reviewed by Roger Hart, Margaret Jacob, and Jack A. Goldstone in the
American Historical Review,
105 (2000): 486–508; Deepak Lal,
Unintended Consequences
(Cambridge, 1998). See also David Levine,
At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000
(Berkeley, 2001).

4.
Kenneth Pomeranz,
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Marking of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton, 2000). The critical literature on this proposition is best covered in James M. Bryant, “The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity,”
Canadian Journal of Sociology,
31 (2006). See also David Landes, “East Is East and West Is West,” in Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland, eds.,
Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives
(Northampton, MA, 1998), 19–38. For a more sympathetic response to Pomeranz, see P. H. H. Vries, “Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,”
Journal of World History,
12 (2001).

5.
Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,”
Journal of World History,
13 (2002).

6.
Karl Marx,
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(New York, 1977 [originally published in 1859]).

7.
Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. by Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958 [originally published in Germany in 1904–05]), 47–62.

8.
Adam Smith,
An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(New York, 1937 [Modern Library ed.]), 306, 3, 13, and 328.

9.
Joyce Oldham Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
(Princeton, 1978), 158–70, 199–216, 242.

CHAPTER 2. TRADING IN NEW DIRECTIONS

1.
C. R. Boxer,
Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey
(Berkeley, 1969), 14; Holland Cotter, “Portugal Conquering and Also Conquered,”
New York Times
, June 28, 2007.

2.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.,
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(Westport, CT, 1972).

3.
Leonard Y. Andaya,
The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period
(Honolulu, 1993), 151; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected History of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640,”
American Historical Review
, 112 (2007): 1367–68.

4.
M. C. Ricklefs, A
History of Modern Indonesia
(Bloomington, 1981), 21.

5.
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik,
The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy,
2nd ed. (Armonk, NY, 2006), 16–18.

6.
Robert C. Ritchie,
Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates
(Cambridge, 1986).

7.
Christopher Hill,
The Century of Revolution, 1602–1715
(Edinburgh, 1961), 32; see also Joyce Oldham Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
(Princeton, 1978), 32–35.

8.
Robert Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653
(Princeton, 1993).

9.
C. R. Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire
: 1600–1800 (New York, 1970), 43–44.

10.
Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith,
The Making of the West: People and Cultures, a Concise History
, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2007), 494.

11.
Daniel Defoe,
A Plan of the English Commerce: Being a Compleat Prospect of the Trade of This Nation, as Well as the Home Trade and Foreign Trade
(London, 1728), 192, as quoted in Charles Wilson,
The Dutch Republic and the Civilization of the Seventeenth Century
(New York, 1968), 20.

12.
Wilson,
Dutch Republic
, 27.

13.
Boxer,
Dutch Seaborne Empire
, 22.

14.
Jan De Vries, “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World,”
Economic History Review
(forthcoming): 14.

15.
Boxer,
Dutch Seaborne Empire
, 94.

16.
Pomeranz and Topik,
World That Trade Created
, 80–83.

17.
Holland Cotter, “When the Islamic World Was Inspired by the West,”
New York Times
, March 28, 2008.

18.
I am indebted to David Levine for this information.

19.
Charles P. Kindleberger,
A Financial History of Western Europe
, 2nd ed. (New York, 1993), 173–76.

20.
Dennis O. Flinn and Arturo Giraldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,”
Journal of World History
, 13 (2002): 391–427.

CHAPTER 3. CRUCIAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

1.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.,
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(Westport, CT, 1972).

2.
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik,
The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy
, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY, 2006), 07.

3.
Quoted in Andrew B. Appleby, “Diet in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Charles Webster, ed.,
Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century
(Cambridge, 1979).

4.
David Landes,
The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
(Cambridge, 1969), 15–16.

5.
David Levine,
At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000
(Berkeley, 2001), 333–37.

6.
Thomas Robert Malthus,
An Essay on the Principle of Population
(London, 1798), 139.

7.
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield,
Population History of England And Wales
(London, 1981); E. A. Wrigley,
Introduction to English Historical Demography from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century
(New York, 1966), 96–159. See also Levine,
At the Dawn of Modernity,
294–99.

8.
Peter Laslett,
The World We Have
Lost (New York, 1965), 1. I have converted English currency to American dollars.

9.
Fernand Braudel and Frank Spooner, “Prices in Europe, from 1450–1750,” in Edwin E. Rich and Charles Henry Wilson, eds.,
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe
, vol. 4 (Cambridge, 1967).

10.
P. H. H. Vries, “Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,”
Journal of World History
, 12 (2001): 4–5.

11.
Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,”
Past and Present
: 68–72; Robert Brenner, “Property and Progress,” in Chris Wickham, ed.,
Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-first Century
(Oxford, 2007). Brenner, more than any other contemporary scholar, prompted a debate on the role of agriculture in modern economic change.

12.
T. H. Aston and C. E. Philpin, eds.,
The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
(Cambridge, 1985).

13.
Wrigley,
Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England
(Cambridge, 1988), 12–13.

14.
Quoted in Joyce Oldham Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
(Princeton, 1978), 59–64.

15.
Ibid., 130.

16.
D. V. Glass, “Gregory King’s Estimation of the Population of England and Wales, 1695,”
Population Studies
, 2 (1950).

17.
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield,
The Population History of England, 1541–1871
:
A Reconstruction
(London, 1981); Gregory Clark, “Too Much Revolution: Agriculture in the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1860,” in Joel Mokyr, ed.,
The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective
, 2nd ed. (Boulder, 1999), 238–39.