Peasants and the market imperative: the origins of capitalism

The idea that capitalism was born in the city is conventional wisdom.1 On the face of it, this is an eminently plausible notion. If we think of capitalism as just more and better trade and commerce, nothing seems more natural than to assume that the birthplace of capitalism must have been in cities, where merchants and traders were most at home and where commercial interests flourished. This assumption also tends to be associated with a conviction that capitalism is fundamentally natural: if not an outgrowth of some basic human nature – such as what Adam Smith called the inclination ‘to truck, barter and exchange’, or perhaps an incurable greed and competitiveness – then at the very least a natural extension of the acts of exchange on which human communities have relied since time immemorial to supply the necessities they cannot produce for themselves. All that is needed to bring about capitalism, apparently, is for such processes of exchange to expand, in conditions that permit an accumulation of wealth sufficient to encourage investment. Yet, looked at more closely, capitalism, as a particular way of organizingthe production and allocation of life’s basic necessities, is a very specific social form, quite different in fundamental ways from other modes of organizing the supply of material needs; and it has a relatively short history, marked by deep and painful social transformations, which belie the easy assumption that it emerged naturally out of basic human inclinations, or out of the most rudimentary acts of exchange. Moreover, as we shall see, once its specificities are acknowledged, it may seem far less obvious that it must have been born in the city, and much more convincing to situate its origins in the countryside.