8 - Countering the Eurocentric Rejection of the First Global Economy (II)

Summary

Chapter 8 advances further my claim concerning the existence of the first global economy (FGE) by revealing its ‘historical capitalist’ nature. This responds to the fundamentalist-Marxist position which asserts that a global economy could not have existed before the nineteenth century because capitalist social relations of production were not universal and that the world rested largely on an agrarian foundation and only weak trans-continental trading linkages. I draw on a range of eclectic Marxists and Braudel in outlining the contours of ‘historical capitalism’, which comprises a hybrid set of social relations—part-modern capitalist/part-agrarian—together with rational institutions and global trade. I then advance a detailed analysis of how the principal global trading commodities were produced within the global historical capitalist mode of production. Here the analysis of Caribbean slave production provides the litmus test for my claim that historical rather than purely modern capitalism existed before about 1850, simultaneously revealing that the dividing line between the two modes of production can be wafer thin. I then reveal the rational commercial and financial institutions of historical capitalism, in the absence of which global trade could not have existed before concluding with a brief summary of global trade during the FGE.