Capitalism first emerged in England. Unable to re-establish serfdom and
possessing vast lands following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Englisharistocracy turned to the development of its large estates. It rented
its lands at a high price to the richest peasants. In order to pay their
land leases, the latter had to turn to the (national) market and
specialize in order to remain competitive. ---- This complete dependence
on the market of the two dominant agrarian classes, the old and the new,
pushed them to dispossess the peasantry, whose feudal exploitation had
become less profitable than the capitalist exploitation of land and
agricultural workers. The process of dispossession took several
centuries; England was nonetheless capitalist well before the Industrial
Revolution (1760-1840). It was this generalized competition between
economic actors, first agricultural, then industrial, which led to
strong economic, fiscal, and financial growth of the English state. With
a superior military budget, England gradually became the world's leading
military power.
This rise in power of England put its rivals in crisis, starting with
France of the Ancien Régime, whose frequent wars with England led to
bankruptcy and the French Revolution of 1789[1]. From the end of the
Ancien Régime, the administrative elite inspired by the English model
attempted reforms of deregulation and legal unification of markets.
However, it was not until the Revolution that these reform projects came
to fruition. But if the French Revolution is indeed a "bourgeois
revolution" in that it brings the bourgeoisie of the Ancien Régime to
power, this bourgeoisie, mainly administrative and rentier, continues to
enrich itself mainly as under the Ancien Régime, by exploiting the
peasantry through taxes and land rents.
This is due to two reasons: on the one hand, the bourgeoisie of the
Ancien Régime never aspired to anything other than modernizing the
Ancien Régime in a non-capitalist way, to share the tax burden with the
aristocracy and to enrich itself at the expense of the peasants as
statesmen and landowners. On the other hand, the French peasantry
managed to increase its landed assets by buying up the lands of the
aristocracy and the clergy dispossessed by the Revolution, and the
French artisans to renew in another form, notably via the Prudhommes,
the regulations of the Ancien Régime, which ensured them significant
control over the means of production, the labor process and the sale
price of products.
It was only with the Second Empire of Napoleon III, anxious to make
France a great power again capable of competing with England, that the
State would undertake a series of decisive reforms: creation of a
competitive national market via the railway and free trade treaties with
the rest of Europe on the one hand, and, to allow French companies to
remain competitive, taking power over the production process by
industrialists via the destruction of existing regulations by the Court
of Cassation on the other hand.
French industrial capitalism was born, even if it would take until the
1960s for French agriculture, still partially independent of the market
due to the persistence of a partially self-sufficient peasantry, to get
in tune with a series of structural reforms leading to the growing
indebtedness of farms and their complete dependence on the market.
Armand Paris
Read also the article Contre-histoire: The historical emergence of
capitalism
Validate
[1]On the French case, see: Selim Nadi, "On the construction of
capitalism in France. Interview with Xavier Lafrance", Contretemps,
February 3, 2020 and Armel Campagne, "The transition from feudalism to
capitalism in France", Les armes de la critique, January 8, 2024.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Focus-Aux-origines-du-capitalisme-en-Angleterre-et-en-France
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