The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism by Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby Read Free Book Online Page A

Sweden.
    The Limits of Trade
    The exchanges at the heart of trade have had religious, practical, romantic, and political overtones. Potlatches in the northwestern corner of the North American continent circulated possessions through gift giving. Kings secured desired goods and services through dues and taxes, and conquerors extracted tribute, but commercial exchanges, with their dependence upon money, middlemen, and bookkeeping, have exerted the most lasting influence.
    Passing goods through bargaining has been around since the first human settlements in the Mesopotamian Delta in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Yet ingrained prejudices against merchants had confined commerce to a narrow social space before the eighteenth century. Merchants were associated with making money rather than with sitting as judges, leading armies, heading diplomatic missions, writing poetry, which the nobility did, or feeding the people, as peasants did. Commercial work was important but sullied those who did it.
    Aristocrats not only looked down on those in commerce but encouraged qualities absolutely opposed to traits supportive of economic development. They cultivated leisure along with contempt for those who worked for a living. They lived off rents and other privileges and spent this money buying items to grace their persons, tables, and estates. Often they spent more than they received in rents and dues, creating an enduring, sometimes hereditary indebtedness from unpaid bills. They got away with this profligacy because few storekeepers or artisans wanted to incur the wrath of their principal customers.
    Noble and gentry families were the celebrities of the premodern world. They contributed learning, taste, style, and their glamorous presence to major public celebrations. They were the only candidates for high positions at court, or in the military, or in the church. They had first claim to any economic surplus. Merchants could not effectively protect their interests because they lacked the power to do so. Time and time again they were done in by insecure titles to property, onerous taxes, or outright appropriation of their goods. Those who had their ruler’s ear gave little thought to the consequences of these burdens. Still, since trading offered an alternative to taking by force what one wanted, it was considered a civilizing force.
    Those in the highest ranks of society in, say, sixteenth-century Europe inherited their positions, which gave to family major importance. It was not “what you did” but “who you were” that mattered. Far from being ashamed of their inherited status, men and women of gentle birth celebrated their lineage as evidence of a divinely sanctioned order. Domination was their birthright. Even in those places like the sixteenth-century Italian city-states of Venice, Florence, and Genoa or Amsterdam, where an urban oligarchy ran things, aristocratic values commanded great respect. Society recognized three groups: the clergy, the aristocracy, and commoners. People then believed in natural inequality in a world divided between the special few and the ordinary many. They found proof of hierarchy in nature when they looked at the animal world with its lions and mice. The strong sense that this was the proper order, implanted as children were growing up, was as convincing to them as our beliefs are to us.
    The reason to keep separate the ancient practice of trading from the novelty of industrial production in a history of capitalism is to fix our attention on those changes that brought into being capitalism. Trade itself is not one of them. Merchants got rich, when they did, by buying low and selling high. Sometimes they were lucky enough to get a windfall or to be able to take advantage of fortuitous shortages. The wealth from capitalism came from something else, profits from producing things. It took great capital to introduce machines into production processes, but they generated even greater profits by producing things