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This is April’s second free post— I am slightly behind due to book promotion and end-of-semester workload, but will catch up soon!

Last month I suggested there are five “phases” of capitalism, and outlined the first… one and a half. I’ll pick up right from there– if you missed it, you should read “one and a half of the five phases of capitalism” before this one. Where we left off, England was beginning to be governed by a rising mercantile class– a shift from aristocrats who were rich because they were powerful, to a bourgeoisie that was powerful because they were rich. This transformation began with changes in landownership at home, but advanced in new ways and grew dramatically with cash crop agriculture abroad.

The profits for English colonial ventures came from agrocapitalism at home. To recap: you, a local elite, kick people off of their land through various means legal and otherwise, then you rent that land as individual parcels to tenants (who are pressured by rent to maximize their market return, rather than just subsist) or sell it to medium-scale landholders who will do the same or invest in this whole process. This also meant a mass conversion of agriculture in England from food people could eat to wool they could wear. The resulting profits were one major source of investment capital for colonial ventures.

What about the other colonial powers? The Dutch were a major 17th century Atlantic power, and merchant wealth provided the funds necessary for their colonial projects, though the more urban Netherlands got this wealth from different places, and the Netherlands colonial heyday in the Atlantic world was brief. France and Spain had a longer presence, forward and backward, in the Americas, and it looked somewhat different. New France involved fewer settlers and depended more upon trade and thus diplomacy with Indigenous communities, while New Spain, particularly in Mexico, involved replacing the top of existing imperial hierarchies like that of the Aztecs and then remaking their world from the top down. It was market-dependent and bourgeois-ruled England that developed arguably the most capitalist colonial empire, which is why I’m focusing on it, though that’s also simply a matter of space and expertise.

For our purposes I don’t actually need to distinguish the major European powers from each other too much, because in one of their most profitable areas, and also one particularly central to capitalism, they converged rather closely: cash crop production by enslaved laborers. French plantations in Saint-Domingue and English plantations in Antigua were much more similar to each other than, say, French trading posts in Canada and English smallholder farms in Massachusetts. Atlantic slavery took decades to develop into the massive system it became– in the English world, that included serious state involvement through corporations— which were then special-purpose vehicles of investment allowed on a case-by-case basis by the state, not the private entities they are today— like the Royal African Company. Before that, European states had to fund the exploration of the Atlantic and the violent conquest of land, and then subsequently the continued defense of that land from Indigenous communities it had been stolen from, imperial rivals who wanted to steal it again for themselves, and commoners and enslaved people who wanted to use it differently. In other words this was not the unleashing of a free market, but the careful creation of an architecture of oppression by the state.

Agrocapitalism produced consumer goods rather than necessities– capitalism has to do this to expand. The size of a human being’s closet is unlimited, while our potential caloric intake is not. Note that I said caloric intake– while one person can only consume so much sugar or tobacco, sugar and tobacco and coffee are more like clothing than food in a market sense. They’re expensive enough and you can consume enough that the market has a lot of demand to meet– and of course, to create. 

Perhaps the most important different between agrocapitalism and later forms is not the edibility of its products (hell, Coca-Cola does quite well today) but their dependence upon land. European land was well-settled and increasingly exhausted. Agricultural expansion was possible only within limits– you can only enclose the same land once, only so much of it for wool before people starve, and with serious political backlash (in part, the English Civil War). And capitalists who did take it might find depleted soils, or just as bad, quickly deplete them themselves.

European oppression of other Europeans, while profound, was structured by political and legal limits, encoded in formal law but created and asserted through the possibility of popular rising. Enclosure produced centuries of massive and violent resistance because English peasants recognized that the enclosure of the next village over meant eventually they were next: they understood themselves as the same kind of people under the same kind of laws, and so had to contest them. Likewise English elites could not have enslaved English commoners– the result would probably have been another English Civil War. Legal, religious, and cultural frameworks structured how Europeans in “Christendom” could treat others. Often this was still with remarkable violence, and sometimes with ethnic cleansing– but not always, and again, within limits.

Equally importantly, the European peasantry already was exploited reasonably effectively. If European elites wanted new lands and greater labor exploitation they were going to have to look elsewhere. While European land and labor was already exploited to its limits, American land had been thoughtfully cultivated by Indigenous communities into a bountiful and ecologically stable landscape.

People who encounter other people do not invariably or necessarily even typically butcher them and steal their land– even if they have already constructed them as “other people,” which is itself a development that has to happen, not something natural or obvious. But European elites began to define and conceptualize Indigenous and African people as others in a particular ways that legitimized and enabled stealing their land and forcing them to work. “Rights” are something we produce together over time— the way the state could treat an English man in 1600 was the result of centuries of struggle. Europeans had painstakingly built institutions to protect themselves from each other, within and between states. These did not automatically apply to people on the other side of the world. Instead they had to negotiate with European elites without any shared history or prior victories to build on.

Indigenous polities played their cards as well as they could. But starting from having to prove your humanity meant even brilliant diplomacy could only go so far. And market dependence ensured that the most powerful Europeans would be those who most effectively dispossessed Indians. Land speculators who wanted to remove Indians and sell their lands off became richer and powerful than traders who wanted to buy furs from them. While I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of New France, the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763) was in the long run a victory for English land speculators who wanted to displace and annihilate Native populations over French traders who wanted to exchange goods with them. Among them was a young officer named George Washington.

Similarly, in Africa, European slave traders created an arms race, particularly over firearms— those African elites who engaged in the slave trade most effectively outcompeted others. Distance, meanwhile, insulated European empires from resistance. The sea was small enough for imperial commerce, but vast enough to protect those who grew rich off of it.

None of this actually explains the development of racism, slavery, the settler colonial model, ethnic cleansing– it just helps explain why they were possible. Europeans had to choose settler colonialism and genocide. These factors were simply what made that wretched choice available to them. But since it was, European elites successfully combined bourgeois avarice and aristocratic hierarchy into new legal and social structures that enabled murder, forced labor, and land theft.

The point of dividing capitalism into phases like this is of course to see things we wouldn’t see otherwise, not just narrate. Agrocapitalism tells us how, why, and when urban Italian or Dutch mercantile patterns became Atlantic capitalism in the way they did– if “capitalishm” was a Mediterranean phenomenon, why was agrocapitalism an Atlantic and especially British Atlantic phenomenon? It was not the superiority of English liberties or “Anglo-Saxon blood” or Protestantism or any of the culturalist explanations favored by the right, nor was it simply England’s colonial ventures, as overemphasis on colonialism’s role in capitalism might lead one to conclude. 

Rather, particular features of the English legal and political regime caused market dependence in agriculture to emerge here earlier, and the resulting profits could be invested in cash crop agriculture in the Atlantic world, where political geography allowed for social and political configurations that were not previously available– culminating in mass settler colonialism and slavery. Market dependence expanded from urban centers and high-margin agriculture to politics (increasingly dominated by the market-dwelling bourgeoisie, which revolted in both England and then France to establish its dominance), diplomacy, and a wider swath of economic life. Under capitalishm, cities and regions were market dependent. Now, empires and soon continents would be.

(Here I’m doing a bit of synthesizing between the accounts of what’s known as political Marxism, popularized by Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood, which emphasized domestic European agriculture, with the “world-systems” analysis of Wallerstein and his intellectual descendants, which puts greater emphasis on global and colonial patterns, and get something approximating an answer. I’m not going to resolve debates between them in an essay like this, but I can at least give you a glimpse of the strengths of both.)

I’ve grouped these geographically disparate forms of agricultural capitalism into one phase because they occurred simultaneously and influenced each other. Having enabled colonial agrocapitalism, metropolitan agrocapitalism continued to evolve in relation to it. Colonial land provided a safety valve for the metropole by giving states a place to send political prisoners, dispossessed peasants, and convicts. England, while still engaging in mass public execution to keep the commoners in line, sent more and more of them away to the colonies where their punishment could also become a source of profit. One of the cruelest features of agricultural capitalism was this conversion of metropolitan victims into colonial perpetrators. 

Agrocapitalism not only spread capitalism through empire, it also allowed for the development of new social technologies for capitalism: new banking and investment vehicles, new political ideas about what trade was and why it was acceptable, new understandings of how to optimize it. They also developed new machinery— plantations were proto-factories complete with wind-powered mills, and the fact that they did not use coal, and processed a food item rather than textiles, should not distract us from this. And as Europeans worked to justify the mass conversion of human life into stimulants— it is worth emphasizing that the key colonial cash crops of tobacco, sugar, and coffee, are all addictive stimulants— it produced some of the ideas about selfishness and market power that I talk about in my forthcoming book Control Science, out May 12.

Atlantic capitalism therefore intensified capitalist market dependence, as well as expanding it. Agrocapitalism produced the wealth for what came after, and it also shaped the form the next phase of capitalism could take. This will bring us to industrial capitalism. You know it, you love it or hate it, you’ve been waiting for it– industrial capitalism is the classic mustache-twirling smoke-choked hellscape of factory labor and capitalist profit. And it’s a complex enough topic that it needs its own whole post, which you can look out for in a few weeks.