Conclusions: Money, Technology, and Magic

Abstract

To summarize the core of my argument in this book, let us begin by reflecting on the notion of capitalism. It is generally applied to a particular economic system inaugurated in Europe no earlier than the sixteenth century (Wallerstein 1974–1989), but some theorists have dismissed such a historical discontinuity and instead attempted to trace processes of global capital accumulation several millennia back in time (Frank and Gills 1993).¹ In this latter view, the real modern discontinuity was the shift to fossil fuels in late eighteenth-century Britain (cf. Pomeranz 2000). From this perspective, we can understand the deliberations of classical political economists such as Ricardo and Marx as reflections not on a completely new mode of production, but on the new kind of society generated by steam power. Capital accumulation had been pervasive in stratified societies for millennia preceding the Industrial Revolution, but steam-driven technologies were the particular form of capital analyzed by Marx. Preindustrial forms of capital included farmland, livestock, roads, canals, armies, ships, and architecture. They, too, were material infrastructures that could be accumulated through the appropriation of labor-power and natural resources, and whose expansion in turn contributed to further such appropriation. This is the cross-cultural essence of capitalist power: a recursive relation between some kind of material infrastructure, on the one hand, and the capacity to make claims on other people’s labor and resources, on the other.