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The Origins of the Market Economy: State Power, Territorial Control, and Modes of War Fighting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2008

Erica Schoenberger
Erica Schoenberger
Affiliation:
Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

The origin and spread of money-based commodity markets is normally attributed to a natural evolution from barter and is usually seen as a solution to problems of exchange. I want to propose that markets to a considerable degree develop historically out of a different set of dynamics. These are concerned with the state-building tasks of territorial conquest and control, and are closely related to specific modes of war fighting. In this connection, markets develop not only to facilitate exchange per se but also to facilitate the mobilization of resources and their management across space and time. This need to manage resources geographically and temporally contributes not only to the spread of commodity markets but also to the development of markets in land and in labor.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 663 - 691
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

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References

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2 Ingham argues persuasively that the earliest form of money is money of account that has no physical incarnation. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, production and distribution were largely controlled by the temples and the palaces. They used the shekel as an accounting device to organize and manage the flow of goods and labor services, but there were no physical shekels. Distribution was not managed through market exchange, but on the basis of obligations owed and fulfilled. Rents and taxes were recorded in the money of account but paid in goods and labor services. See Inham, G., The Nature of Money (London: Polity Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

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23 Kallett-Marx, Money, Expense and Naval Power.

24 Ibid.; Hanson, V., “Genesis of the Infantry, 600–350 b.c.,” in, Parker, G., ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995)Google Scholar, n.p.

25 Kallett-Marx, Money, Expense and Naval Power, 18.

26 Ibid., 7–8.

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31 Duncan-Jones, Money and Government, 45. See also A.H.M. Jones, who writes, “The great mass of money was spent on wars and on the increasingly regular garrisons of the provinces … This means that nearly all the income of the treasury was spent in the provinces in the form of military pay and supplies, and very little remained in Italy” (Roman Economy, 116).

32 Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade.”

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36 Davies, O., Roman Mines in Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935)Google Scholar; Duncan-Jones, Money and Government.

37 Jones believes that Rome itself was less commercialized than one might expect, due principally to the poverty of most of its inhabitants. He also observes that the interregional redistribution of wealth from the rich provinces of North Africa and Asia to the legions in the backward regions of northern and eastern Europe tended to stimulate development and town building in the frontier areas. See Jones, Roman Economy, 36–38, 127.

38 Badian, Publicans and Sinners, 30, 53; Jones, Roman Economy, 114–16; Harris, War and Imperialism, 93.

39 Loane, J., Industry and Commerce of the City of Rome, 50 b.c.–200 a.d. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938)Google Scholar; Badian, Publicans and Sinners; Harris, War and Imperialism.

40 Duncan-Jones, Money and Government, 10, 98.

41 McCormick takes a more optimistic view of this revitalization of commerce, seeing it as both stronger and more durable than some other researchers; see Origins of the European Economy. Other sources include Lopez, R. S., The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages: 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Masschaele, J., Peasants, Merchants and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150–1350 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Spufford, P., Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verhulst, A., The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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43 McCormick also singles out the slave trade as providing a tremendous boost to the development of a commercial economy in the early Middle Ages, a point I will take up presently.

44 Even I am somewhat nonplussed by the extreme rapidity of this project. Richard is said to have remarked about the fortress, “How fair a daughter but twelve months old,” only he said it in Latin. See Baldwin, J., The Government of Philip Augustus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 90Google Scholar; Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, 113.

45 Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 296–99. See also Gillingham, J., “An Age of Expansion: C. 1020–1204,” in, Keen, M., ed., Medieval Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 59–88Google Scholar.

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49 To clarify the geography of this a bit, I am supposing that the areas experiencing the strongest impetus to marketization would be behind the front lines, so to speak, but well forward of the home base in the heartland of the empire. As in the case of Rome, the resulting market geography might be rather counterintuitive.

50 Lopez, The Commercial Revolution; Spufford, Money and Its Use, 60–69.

51 Verbruggen, Art of Warfare; Duby, Early Growth, 166–68; Contamine, War in the Middle Ages; Bachrach, “Logistics in Pre-Crusade Europe”; Ayton, A., “Arms, Armour and Horses,” in, Keen, M., ed., Medieval Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 186–208Google Scholar; Nicholson, Medieval Warfare.

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57 Gillingham, “An Age of Expansion,” 66.

58 Verbruggen, Art of Warfare; Spufford, Money and Its Use; Prestwich, Armies and Warfare, 147; Mallet, M., “Mercenaries,” in, Keen, M., ed., Medieval Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 209–29Google Scholar; Nicholson, Medieval Warfare.

59 Verbruggen, Art of Warfare, 130. See also Baldwin, J., Masters, Princes and Merchants (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 215–16Google Scholar; Mallet “Mercenaries.”

60 Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 55, 169–70; and Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, 220–21.

61 Verbruggen, Art of Warfare; Contamine, War in the Middle Ages.

62 Baldwin reckons that a mercenary knight earned roughly three times the stipend of the highest-paid civilian artisan in France. He also calculates that the daily wage scale for a knight, at 72 deniers parisis, ran five to six times that of a crossbowman on foot and twice the rate of a mounted sergeant, thus overlapping the civilian wage scale. See Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 133, 169–70. See also Prestwich, Armies and Warfare; Housely, “European Warfare,” 123–24.

63 Prestwich, Armies and Warfare, 84.

64 Ibid.; Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 272–74.

65 Ibid., 219; Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade.”

66 Lane, Venice and History, 57.

67 Ibid., 36.

68 Ibid.

69 Spufford, Money and Its Use, 98; Edbury, P., “Warfare in the Latin East,” in, Keen, M., ed., Medieval Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89–112Google Scholar.

70 Constable, G., “Medieval Charters as a Source for the History of the Crusades,” in, Madden, T., ed., The Crusades (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 130–53Google Scholar; J. Riley-Smith, “Early Crusaders to the East and the Costs of Crusading, 1095–1130,” in ibid., 156–71.

71 Ibid.; see also Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, 275–76.

72 Constable, “Medieval Charters,” 145; Riley-Smith, “Early Crusaders,” 168.

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75 Postan, Medieval Trade and Finance, 112–13, 341; Spufford, Money and Its Use, 98; Cipolla, for example, comments that “From a purely economic point of view, war was a much greater evil than the plague… .” Cipolla, C., Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 109Google Scholar.

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77 Duby, Early Growth, 47, 96, 215–17; Spufford, Money and Its Use.

78 Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets. Russo seems to me closer to the mark in his analysis of English urbanization in an earlier period. The trading towns he is concerned with are generally royal or aristocratic foundations, but he sees these as closely connected to state-building and interstate aggression, as well as facilitators of luxury consumption. See Russo, D. G., Town Origins and Development in Early England, c. 400–950 a.d. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

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80 Postan, Medieval Trade and Finance, 206; Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, 192–93.

81 Brechin, G., Imperial San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

82 Spufford, Money and Its Use, 77.

83 Rickard, T. A., Man and Metals. Volume 1 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1932)Google Scholar; Blanchard, I., Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, Volume 2 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2001)Google Scholar.

84 McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, 768.