E J Hobsbawm

Guilford Press
The Seventeenth Century in the Development of Capitalism

Author(s): E. J. Hobsbawm
Source: Science & Society, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring, 1960), pp. 97-112
Published by: Guilford Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40400697
Accessed: 13-02-2018 17:39 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Guilford Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science
& Society
This content downloaded from 103.95.81.100 on Tue, 13 Feb 2018 17:39:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
E. J. HOBSBAWM
IS now commonly admitted that there was, for several dec-

ades in the seventeenth century, a period of major economic
and social recession, crisis and secular readjustment, which
contrasts strikingly with the periods of economic expansion which
preceded and followed it. Its effects were not confined to any
single country, but, with a few marginal exceptions, can be traced
throughout the entire range of the economic area dominated by
and from, western Europe, from the Americas to the China Seas;
nor were they confined to the economic field. The simultaneous
occurrence of revolutions or attempted revolutions in the middle
of the seventeenth century, in England, France, the Spanish Em-
pire and the Ukraine have been plausibly connected with it.1
In the present paper I want to consider the place of the seven-
teenth century crisis in the history of capitalist development, and
especially in the genesis of the industrial revolution. This im-
plies that the seventeenth century crisis was produced by the in-
ternal contradictions of the economy in which it occurred, and not
by wholly extraneous factors. I have not space here to discuss
i For the most convenient conspectus of the evidence for the "seventeenth century
crisis," cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the
Seventeenth Century," (Past & Present, 4 and 5, i954"5)- For the possible relations
between the crisis and the revolutions, "Seventeenth Century Revolutions" (Past
& Present, 13, 1958) and H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The General Crisis of the Seven-
teenth Century" (Past & Present, 16, 1959).
97
98 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
this question at length, but it is possible briefly, and I th
clusively, to set aside the two principal "extraneous" expl
for the crisis which have been suggested. First, it cannot
down to secular climatic changes. The suggestion has b
cifically investigated and rejected.2 Second, it cannot be a
to the effects of the Thirty Years' War, though nobod
wish to underestimate these. It is indeed tempting to m
Thirty Years' War responsible for the crisis, if only becau
ginning coincides with the great collapse in the Baltic tra
"slump of the 1620's") which initiates the crisis, and its e
the acute period of European revolutions.3 However, a
one major component of the crisis, the collapse of the
imperial economy in America, clearly begins some tim
the Thirty Years' War and independently of it, and b) sy
of the crisis are plainly visible in areas unaffected by the
is therefore legitimate to regard the wars as a complicati
tor in the crisis rather than as a cause; except perhaps in
litical aspect.
Two other possible objections to the following analy
also be briefly dealt with before we go further. It has been
that the present analysis pays too little attention to mone
tors, credit, movements of the price-level and other matter
as experience has plainly shown, affect business decisions
out arguing the case at length, I think it is reasonable, an
with the general drift of economic theory on these matter
gard such factors as secondary rather than primary in the lon
analysis of economic development, while in no sense denyi
2 E. Le Roy Ladurie, "Histoire et Climat," (Annales, Janvier-Mars 1959) 31

ment, la crise du xviie siècle, parfois présentée comme l'incidence hu
historique du 'petit âge glacaire,' atteint en fait ses paroxysmes dans des
de rémission climatique/'
3 If , as is legitimate, we include the wars of the 1650's in the era of c
European war which stretches from about 1620 to 1660, the coincidence
even more striking.
4 Cf. F. Mauro, "Sur la crise du xviie siècle" (Annales, 1, 1959) 181-5; a
E. J. Hobsbawm, locxit. The reviewer, perhaps not unjustly, ascribes my
of monetary etc. explanations to a "préjugé marxiste/'
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY CAPITALISM 99
considerable importance in the short run. In any case, the general

analysis here attempted can quite easily allow for a much greater
autonomous effect of monetary factors (e.g., the supply of American
bullion, or the availability of suitable means of payment) than
is here specifically considered. It may also be argued that autono-
mous movements of population are not allowed for in the study
of a period when a fall, or at any rate a very considerable slowing
down in population growth occurred, and clearly had important
economic consequences. Here again it seems both more profit-
able, and more in line with the current trend of researches, to
consider population not as an autonomous variable but as one
dependent on the general movements of the economy in which it
occurs. If the seventeenth century is one of widespread epidemics,
it may well be argued that their capacity to kill people, if not
their actual occurrence, depended on the economic and social fac-
tors whichi determined people's accessibility to infection and
capacity to resist it. Poor men almost invariably die more fre-
quently in epidemics than rich ones.
It is thus legitimate to regard the seventeenth century crisis
as one generated by previous economic development. The prob-
lem facing us is how it fits into the economic evolution which, at
the end of the eighteenth century, produced the industrial, agri-
cultural and demographic revolutions which have ever since domi-
nated the history of the world, or, in the current jargon phrase,
the "take-off into self-sustained growth." There had been economic
growth in previous ages. Indeed a tendency towards producing
its conditions is fairly constant in the history of Europe from at
least the tenth century onwards. But it will be accepted that
everywhere and at all times before the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury sooner or later this tendency came up against certain barriers
and obstacles. The "feudal crisis" of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries and the seventeenth century crisis are examples of what
happened then: recession, relapse, breakdown, and within this
setting, shifts and readjustments which eventually allowed the ten-
dencies of growth to resume. The importance of the seventeenth
century crisis is this. After it the barriers seem to have been
permanently lifted. The march towards industrial revo
no longer interrupted by secular breakdowns, though
signs of certain difficulties of this kind in the eighteenth
The world economy, as it were, taxis along the runway of
drome, to become airborne in the 1780's. Since then, b
speaking, it has been flying. Its internal difficulties and
dictions have been of a different kind.
I am not here concerned specifically with the reason why the

economy took off into self-sustained growth. Theorists, starting
with the classical economists and Marx, and in recent years once
again, have analyzed under what conditions such growth becomes
possible or inevitable, and every government planning economic
development of its country acts on some such analysis, though only
the socialist ones act effectively. The problem I am concerned
with is how this happened under the peculiar historical condi-
tions of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, i.e., a)
under conditions when nobody planned or knew enough to plan
industrialization, and b) when the main dynamic force in the
economy was private enterprise urged along by the motive to make
and accumulate maximum profits. For the first (and therefore
most difficult) industrial revolution, the initial breakthrough in
world history, was achieved by and through capitalism, and could
almost certainly, in seventeenth and eighteenth century conditions,
not have been achieved in other ways, though today such other
ways are available, and indeed preferable.5 On the other hand
we know that the actual process of the rise of industrial capitalism
5 Failure to observe that private enterprise industrialization must, by the nature of

private enterprise, solve the technical problems of industrializing very differently
from, say, socialist industrialization, makes W. W. Rostow's "The Stages of Economic
Growth" largely useless. (Cf. Economic History Review, August 1959). Rostow's
failure derives from a refusal - odd in a champion of private enterprise - to face
the fact that entrepreneurs are in business for profit, or if they are not, will go
bankrupt. It is understandable that businessmen like to pretend that their motives
are more than just to make money, or that anti-Marxists should wish to deprive
Marx of credit for everything, including his incidental demonstration of the his-
toric achievements of capitalist enterprise in its early phases. But it makes for neithei
good history nor good economics.
was a slow and tortuous process. It stretched over at least eight

centuries- say from A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1800, and was interrupted by
at least two major secular breakdowns, the fourteenth to fifteenth
and the seventeenth century crises. That is to say, it included a
number of demonstrably false starts.
This was natural, for private enterprise was and is blind.
We know as a matter of fact that it did eventually produce indus-
trial revolution, but that was not the object of entrepreneurs.
Such men, acquisitive and anxious to accumulate the greatest profit,
are not very rare- at any rate in Europe from the time of the
crusades onward- nor is their behavior very recondite. It will
advance economic development and industrial revolution if, and
only if, greater profits are to be made by doing so than in other
ways. If they are not, it will not. This simple and observable
fact has created great difficulties for analysts, even though they
(as usual with the shining exception of Marx) have not often
been aware of their nature. Some have been tempted to assume
that there are special kinds of entrepreneurs with a built-in ten-
dency to innovate, as distinct from ordinary businessmen. (This
seems to have been the position of Schumpeter). Others have
assumed that industrialization comes about when entrepreneurs
are combined with a "capitalist spirit' ' which produces the ten-
dency to accumulate and innovate. (Calvinism has, since Max Web-
er, been most frequently cast for this role). Yet others prefer to
make industrialization depend on the conjunction of entrepreneurs
and some extraneously caused or unexplained "modern scientific
attitude," as does Rostow. None of these explanations is either
necessary or convincing. The Schumpeterian position is uncon-
vincing because the argument is circular (the ''right" kind of entre-
preneur is always found and defined ex post facto). Moreover, it
is quite clear that, say, the British industrial revolution was not
made by specially innovating businessmen, but by businessmen who
were no more and no less far-seeing, technologically progressive
or original than any others. The Weberian position is uncon-
vincing, because- within certain historical and institutional limits
-ideology adapts itself to business as much as business follows
ideology.6 The reason why the (Catholic) financiers, m

and manufacturers of fourteenth century Italy and Flanders
produce industrial revolution was not that they were not
The Rostowian position, finally, is unconvincing, because
tual pioneer industrial revolution of the late eighteenth
depended hardly at all on any science and technology not
available by 1500. Technically speaking, it consisted ab
the application of a few simple empirical ideas well w
compass of intelligent working artisans.7 This is no doub
what exaggerated statement, but it may stand. Modern s
not become essential to industrial development until th
decades of the nineteenth century.
The difficulty which faces the analyst derives primari
the fact that (as may still be observed in "underdevelope
tries) in pre-capitalist economies the highest profits are
ever found in business activities which advance economic
ment directly. What is needed for the preparation of i
revolution is constant technological innovation and co
tion on mass production, that is, on producing a const
creasing range of goods turned out in constantly greater
ties at constantly cheaper prices, such as will create and
its own rhythm of economic expansion. What is need
vestment concentrating on those branches of production w
advance mass manufacture.8 Thus, in the colonial ent
6 This is not to deny that some ideologies have shown themselves to be mor
to capitalist enterprise than others - e.g. Calvinism than Catholicism -
where the general social framework and ideology are highly hostile t
enterprise, certain minority ideologies may be essential for the recruit
body of entrepreneurs. It is no accident that a disproportionately high
Indian capitalists are Parsees or Jains. But in Western Europe - and n
Italy and Germany - there was always a fair supply of potential entrepren
the eleventh to twelfth century onwards.
7 The one major exception to this generalization is the steam engine; but
was a working proposition, though not yet a very efficient one, in Fran
land by 1700 or so; i.e., several generations before the industrial revolut
8 Cf. Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, (Berlin 1956 edn) 365, 369: "Der Weltmar
selbst die Basis dieser (d. kapitalistischen) Produktionsweise. . . . Sobald
of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, what was needed was not

the spice trade, but sugar-plantations; for the pepper-merchant
made and makes his money by cornering the scarce supply of a
very expensive product and making a monopoly profit on each
transaction, but the sugar-planter makes his money by producing
increasing quantities of sugar at diminishing prices and thus by
making a greater global profit out of a rapidly increasing market.
What is needed, and for analogous reasons, is a cotton rather than
a silk industry. In modern terms, what is needed is the technique
of the makers of nylon stockings rather than that of Christian
Dior. But this is a historians', or a planners' judgment. We
cannot say that as a business enterprise Christian Dior is less de-
sirable than the manufacture of standardized cheap textiles. (M.
Boussac, who conducts both, expects to make good profits out of
both). But under pre-capitalist conditions the Christian Dior
type of enterprise would almost certainly have been more profit-
able, and therefore the natural tendency of private enterprise
would have been to create it, rather than the nylon-type.
For in such societies the great bulk of the population, the
peasantry, are virtually outside the range of the market, partly be-
cause they have and use very little money, partly because they
live in a largely self-sufficient local or regional economy. The
sections of the population which get their incomes in cash and
habitually buy commodities with them-broadly speaking the
townsmen- are small. The best markets are limited luxury mar-
kets. The biggest accumulations of wealth are in the hands of
nobles or clergymen whose idea of how to spend or invest them-
the latter mainly in different forms of building and decoration
-happens not to be that best suited to economic progress. The fact
faktur einigermassen erstarkt, und noch mehr die grosse Industrie, schafft sie sich
ihrerseits den Markt, erobert ihn durch ihre Waren. . . . Eine stets ausgedehntere
Massenproduktion ueberschwemmt den vorhandenen Markt und arbeitet daher
stets an Ausdehnung dieses Markts, an Durchbrechung seiner Schränken."
that so large a proportion of the population is normally

to the land, makes the development of widespread or
manufacture very difficult and sometimes imposes techn
on it. In brief, we have a situation in which the intel
trepreneur will, if he has the choice, put his money first
finance or overseas trade, in which the biggest profits
made, second, into the production of relatively expen
for a relatively restricted market, and only lastly into
duction. There will thus be a marked tendency for all
capitalist enterprise to adjust themselves to life within w
called the pores of pre-capitalist society. Capital will
not create a capitalist mode of production and certainly n
dustrial revolution, though undoubtedly contributing to
grate pre-capitalist modes of production.9
We are therefore faced with the paradox that capitalism
develop in an economy which is already substantially
for in any which is not, the capitalist forces will tend to ada
selves to the prevailing economy and society, and will the
be sufficiently revolutionary. But how then are the nece
ditions brought about?
In other words, the real problem of the seventeenth ce
its outcome rather than its origin. I have elsewhere atte
analyze its causes10 and, while this analysis will no doub
tested in detail by other students, it is safe to say that i
character will not. Any such analysis will have to dem
in one way or another how the barriers which the prev
capitalist economy imposed on economic development, p
the economic expansion of the sixteenth century from re
point of "take-off into self-sustained growth," and most like
also show how the very process of economic expansion u
9 Marx, who noted this effect clearly and discusses it fully, supposed it
to mercantile and financial capital. I am inclined to believe that it a
generally to all, including industrial capital, in pre-capitalist econom
until the capitalist or potentially capitalist sector of the economy h
certain critical size.
10 E. J. Hobsbawm, op. cit.
conditions produced the contradictions which generated the subse-

quent crisis.11
Thus we may point to the contradictions in East- West trade. The
economic expansion of an urbanized sector in western Europe was
partly achieved by turning large areas of eastern Europe into a food-
and raw material-producing colony of the west.12 But this was
achieved by turning eastern Europe into a serf economy, dominated
by landlords whose policy- free trade, de-industrialization, the in-
creasing exploitation of the peasantry, and the sacrifices of the ur-
ban classes- eventually cut down the potential, and actual market
for western goods in the east.
But the Baltic trade was the chief trade of northern Europe.
The collapse of the Baltic market in the 1620's initiated the main
period of general crisis. Furthermore the expansion of an extensive
serf-estate economy in the Polish East produced the social tensions
which led to the Ukrainian-Cossack revolution.
Again, we may trace the contradictions and deficiencies in the
sixteenth century colonial system. Thus Spanish and Portuguese
expansion, being based on robbery and monopoly, failed to stimu-
late European exports outwards which were at all equivalent to the
flow of bullion and goods inwards, thus probably increasing Euro-
pean inflation and certainly making the European balance of trade
with the outside world even more negative than it had always been.
Moreover, once the initial grazing-off process had been completed,
even the flow of wealth to Europe ceased or was offset by high costs.
By the early seventeenth century the Spanish Empire, having vir-
tually killed off all the Americans, relapsed into an extensive agrarian
11 In this sense M. Mauro's criticisms of the view that %'la structure 'féodal' de la société
a gêné le development capitaliste, l'a maintenu à l'intérieur de certaines limites,"
seem to me to be misconceived. (Annales, loe. cit.) It is clear that a "feudal" econ-
omy or society (or whatever else we choose to call it) is compatible with a certain
amount of capitalist development, and may even, in certain ways, facilitate it. But
the problem is not why Jacob Fugger was so like a nineteenth century tycoon in
his business operations, but why, after all, sixteenth century Germany was econ-
omically so unlike mid-nineteenth century England.
12 Cf. the writings of Polisih historians on this point, especially of Prof. M# Malowist,
e.g., in Econ. Hist. Rev. December 1959, Past & Present, 13, April 1958.
feudalism.13 Or else, more generally, we may trace the

rapid economic expansion (including population growth)
economic framework which did not at the same time pro
responding increase in agricultural productivity. It is fai
that the rise in agricultural output from all sources did
pace with the increase in demand, or in industrial output
the price-scissors between agrarian and industrial prices
sixteenth century. A Malthusian situation thus tended to
the demographic horrors of the seventeenth century, with
nomic consequences, were being prepared. We can ob
approach as, for instance, an area like Holstein turns fro
exporting to a food-importing area towards the end of th
century, and this at the very time when importing areas ha
their food from increasingly distant or numerous export
watch its effect in an English village in the first third of t
teenth century, as a permanent stratum of village poor
steadily more crowded settlement, until population rise
amid epidemics and sickness to population stagnation.14
lyst could trace other, and perhaps equally significant self-c
tions in the economic expansion of the sixteenth century
However, if the origins of the seventeenth century c
likely to yield to investigation, its results are much mor
to analyze. For why, after all, did this breakdown prod
turned out to be satisfactory conditions for subsequent g
not yet another vicious circle? Here, I suggest, we must
not only the gradually increasing disintegration of the p
societies in Europe, but also three fundamental characte
13 Cf. Woodrow Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression (Berkeley, 1

depopulation, H. and P. Chaunu, Seville et l'Atlantique VII (1957) fo
in trade after 1610, F. Chevalier, La formation des grandes domaines
(1952) for the relapse into agrarianism.
14 Cf. W. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant (1957). Also: Phelps Brown an
Economica, XXIV (1957), 289. The really appalling demographic ravages
tury are best indicated by an example from a peaceful area. Between 1
the population of the Essonnes valley (south of Paris) appears to ha
absolute terms by 25 per cent. Cf. M. Fontenay, "Paysans et Marchan
in Paris et Ile de France IX, 1957-8.
our development: 1) that crises tended to weaken the "feudal" kinds

of enterprise more than the "progressive"; 2) that the European
economy and its colonies formed a single entity, and 3) "bourgeois
revolution."
The first phenomenon is simple enough. Not all entrepreneurs

can go into the most profitable businesses which (as we have seen)
were likely to be the least revolutionary. Those who cannot take
first choice must take second or third. And if a crisis knocks out
the first choice, the second or third- which are likely to be less af-
fected by it- may find themselves emerging into first place, thus
revealing their economic potentialities. Thus, the decline of the
expensive "old draperies" in England- a victim of the collapse of the
Baltic market- may well reveal the advantages of the cheaper "new
draperies," which were capable not only of conquering new markets,
but also of maintaining and expanding their hold in the old ones.
Again, in the sixteenth century anyone out for American profits
made straight for Eldorado. Only when gold and silver proved
elusive, or were already monopolized by someone else, did venturers
content themselves with such activities as sugar-planting, as in north-
east Brazil. But these initially modest enterprises turned out to be
excellent investments. Moreover, they turned out to be immensely
stimulating to the economy in general, since they depended on a self-
generated and constant expansion of markets all-round: more sugar
sold at lower prices, more sales in Europe, more European goods
sold in the colonies, more slaves needed for the plantations, more
goods with which to buy slaves, and so on. Small wonder that the
new colonial system which emerged in the middle of the seven-
teenth century became one of the chief elements and it may be
argued the decisive element, in the preparation of industrial revo-
lution. But- and this is the important point- the new colonial sys-
tem only emerged fully in those countries which had no access to
the old, and after the collapse of the old, i.e., from the middle of
the seventeenth century. The Dutch, who managed to capture
the Portuguese system in the Indian Ocean, retained their eco-
nomically unprogressive methods of colonial exploitation until well
into the eighteenth century. Had the English been as successful
as the Dutch, there is little doubt that they would have do

less to develop their methods of colonial exploitation, whi
out to be rather more useful for our subsequent industri
The second phenomenon is more complex.15 Briefly, the
opment of modern capitalism cannot be understood in te
single national economy or of the national economic histo
separately, but only in terms of an international economy
of course, what Marx meant when emphasizing the "world
Broadly speaking, the capture of this entire world market
of it-by a single national economy or industry could pro
prospects of rapid and virtually unlimited expansion w
modest and confined capitalist manufacture of the period
yet achieve itself, and thus make it possible for this mode
ist sector to break through its pre-capitalist limits. In oth
there was probably at this period not room in the European e
(including its colonies) for the initial industrialization of m
one country. Or, to put it another way round: a widesprea
taneous economic expansion everywhere in the advanced
Europe would probably have slowed down the preparation
dustrial revolution.16
Now the seventeenth century crisis certainly made such a con-
centration of world resources easier, if only because it eliminated
from the economic race some areas which had been formerly dy-
namic and advanced- e.g., Italy and a large part of Central Europe-
leaving, in effect, only the Dutch, the English and possibly the
French in the race . (And of these, as we shall see, the feudal-abso-
lutist French were unable to compete effectively, the Dutch unwill-
15 It has lately been discussed more fully by K. Berrill in ' paper due to appear in the
Economic History Review.
16 The problem is moie fully discussed in E. J. Hobsbawn op. cit., but the argument
may be summarized in Berrill's words: "The crux of the argument ... is that the
most vital circumstance of an industrial revolution was the market condition in
the trading area and this was only slowly ripening before 1780. Only slowly did
purchasing power expand with population, income per head, transport costs and
restraints on trade. But the market was expanding and the vital question was when
would a producer of some mass consumption goods capture enough of it to allow
fast and continuous expansion of their production."
ing to use their extraordinary monopoly position for the purpose

of advancing industrial revolution). But the crisis did more. Where-
ever we look, we observe it concentrating economic forces: wealth
and economic power in large landlords, best able to accumulate and
to secure (in plantations and serf-estates) the maximum agricul-
tural export-surplus from colonial countries; markets in large capital
cities; and so on.17 For instance, in the course of that century, while
the population of England increased much less than in the sixteenth
or eighteenth centuries, London doubled its size, and therefore
greatly increased its proportion of the total British population and
home market. In this tendency to concentrate, the seventeenth cen-
tury crisis seems to differ markedly from the fourteenth century
crisis, which led, on the contrary, to economic dispersion- e.g., the
break-up of large demesne farming in the west, and of the great
industrial concentrations in Italy and Flanders. Hence, taking the
European economy as a whole- and this must include both the east-
european and overseas colonies- the seventeenth century crisis did
not so much lead to a temporary general regression, as to a very
rapid economic shift. As the English "old draperies" declined, the
"new draperies" rose; the sixteenth century pattern of Baltic trade
was replaced, after a few decades, by a geographically and commer-
cially somewhat different new pattern; the old Spanish pattern of
colonialism by a far more effective Franco-British-Dutch pattern.
It is true that some of these solutions were only temporary. By
the mid-eighteenth century the serf-economy of the new east-Eu-
ropean magnates and the plantation economy of West Indian and
American planters were patently near the limits of their economic
potentialities. Nevertheless, they helped to enable the large, and
as we have seen increasingly concentrated "capitalist sector" of the
European economy, to maintain its growth, and to move straight
from the crisis period into an era of extremely rapid and dynamic
expansion, notably in England between 1660 and 1700.
But this was no accident. For if the crisis produced conditions
of economic concentration which could be used to advance indus-
17 See E. J. Hobsbawm, op. cit., for a full discussion of chis complex process, :•
trial development, it did not necessarily guarantee such d

ment. This is shown by the Dutch, who were the chief ini
ficiaries of this concentration. As we know, they never be
pioneers of the industrial economy; indeed, paradoxically
less flourishing Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) and Liè
to become, after England, the first industrialized econom
was because, alone of all the old fashioned "medieval" business
centers, the Dutch- a sort of Venice or Augsburg swollen to semi-
national scale-were able to carry on business in the old and unpro-
gressive manner, and in doing so tended increasingly to sacrifice
the interests of Dutch manufacture to those of Dutch trade and
finance. If the only capitalist economies available in the seventeenth
century had been of the Dutch type, it is to be doubted whether
the subsequent development of industrialism would have been as
rapid or as great. A different kind of "modern" capitalist economy
was needed, if the economic potentialities of the seventeenth cen-
tury were to be utilized. But in fact, in the course of the century,
one such economy emerged: the English.
Whether it did so as the result of a "bourgeois revolution"
is a matter for debate. I am not entering this debate about nomen-
clature here. But it can hardly be denied that sometime in the
course of the seventeenth century- say between 1620 and 1670-
England was transformed from a secondary, though interesting and
dynamic economy into an economy which looked like being able
to initiate and conduct the economic revolution of the world, which
indeed it did. The transformation was so rapid, that by the 1690's
England seemed actually on the verge of industrial revolution. At
all events scholars have been puzzled why the industrial revolution
did not grow out of the development of the 1690's, but was delayed
until the 1780's. Moreover, this transformation in the world position
of the British economy was not due merely to spontaneous economic
developments within it, but plainly also to a major revolution in
policy, which henceforth subordinated all other ends to an ag-
gressive mercantilism, to the accumulation of capital and profit.
Moreover, whoever actually constituted the ruling class of post-
revolutionary England, it is clear that this policy differed in at
least one crucial respect from the Dutch: in cases of conflict the
interests of the manufacturing sector normally prevailed over that
of the trading and financial sector. In spite of Davenant's appeal
to imitate the free-trading Dutch "consuming at home what is
cheap or comes cheaply and carrying abroad what is rich and will
yield most money,"18 the bitter struggle between the home indus*
trialists and the East India Company was unambiguously won by
the manufacturing interests in 1700; a victory as important as that
of North over South, high-tariff over low-tariff interests was to be
for the industrialization of the United States.
Lastly, it may be safely claimed that the full and unfettered
adoption of such a policy was impossible before the Revolution.
This was so not because it was not advocated on technical grounds,
or even anticipated, or because the wealth it produced would not
have been recognized as useful by the ancien régime of James and
Charles, but because that ancien régime was incapable of applying
it effectively; as indeed were all the ancien régimes of the seven-
teenth century, whether they tried to or not, except bourgeois ones
like the Dutch.19 The striking thing about the reformed absolutist
monarchies with which Trevor-Roper makes such play is not that
they produced devoted, intelligent, and often remarkably able and
perspicacious economic strategists, but that these strategists did not
prevail. The impressive thing about late-seventeenth century France
is not Colbertism, but its relative failure; not the reform of the
monarchy, but its failure, in spite of much greater resources, to
compete economically- and therefore, in the end, militarily- with
its maritime rivals, and its consequent defeat by those rivals.20
For the purposes of this discussion it is not important to settle
the name of this new policy, or to discuss in detail how, in terms
18 Works (ed. 1771) I, 102-3.

19 H. R. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., attempts to show that the seventeenth century revo-
lutions were unnecessary for the adoption of the desirable economic policies. But
much of his article is devoted to demonstrating the incapacity of the pre-revolu-
tionary ancien régimes to adopt them.
20 Cf. R. Mousnier, "Evolution des Finances Publiques en France et Angleterre (Revue
Historique, 1951).
of politics and ideology it came about, beyond establishin

is in any case obvious, that it came about during the p
crisis, and pretty obviously in some sort of connection w
English Revolutions. What is important is, that such an e
and such a "bourgeois" state policy emerged nowhere else
in England, and that its emergence made a crucial diff
the subsequent economic development of the world, b
ensured that the resources concentrated by the crisis were
ingly to be absorbed by and subordinated to, a single eco
adequate size, which was likely to make progressive use of
It has not been my purpose to argue that, but for the
teenth century crisis, industrial capitalism would not hav
oped. If we take a general view of the period from, say 1
to 1800 A.D., it is reasonable to suppose that the forces ma
the disintegration of the feudal economy and the gro
capitalist economy were powerful enough to secure a break
sooner or later, somewhere; and it is equally reasonable
pose, with Marx, that industrialization was the logical
of such a break-through. It has rather been my purpose
that this replacement of feudalism by capitalism was not,
not be, a simple linear evolution-that, even in purely e
terms it had to be discontinuous and catastrophic- and to
some of the mechanisms of this historic change, and to dr
tion to the seventeenth century crisis as a crucial (as it tu
the crucial) episode in the decline of the feudal and th
of the capitalist economy. The question why the industri
lution was delayed until the late eighteenth century c
discussed here.
Birkbeck College, London
2i Admittedly in and through a sort of hostile symbiosis with the Dutch; but from
the point of view of subsequnt development the important thing is, that the
English soon became the dominant power in this partnership, and Dutch resources
were thus mobilized for economic growth largely by and through England.

E J Hobsbawm

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

E J Hobsbawm

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

E J Hobsbawm

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Guilford Press

The Seventeenth Century in the Development of Capitalism

IS now commonly admitted that there was, for several dec-

2 E. Le Roy Ladurie, "Histoire et Climat," (Annales, Janvier-Mars 1959) 31

considerable importance in the short run. In any case, the general

I am not here concerned specifically with the reason why the

5 Failure to observe that private enterprise industrialization must, by the nature of

was a slow and tortuous process. It stretched over at least eight

ideology.6 The reason why the (Catholic) financiers, m

of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, what was needed was not

that so large a proportion of the population is normally

10 E. J. Hobsbawm, op. cit.

conditions produced the contradictions which generated the subse-

feudalism.13 Or else, more generally, we may trace the

13 Cf. Woodrow Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression (Berkeley, 1

our development: 1) that crises tended to weaken the "feudal" kinds

The first phenomenon is simple enough. Not all entrepreneurs

as the Dutch, there is little doubt that they would have do

ing to use their extraordinary monopoly position for the purpose

trial development, it did not necessarily guarantee such d

18 Works (ed. 1771) I, 102-3.

of politics and ideology it came about, beyond establishin

Birkbeck College, London

You might also like