World Accumulation 1492–1789

299 Pages·1978·27.41 MB·English

by  Andre Gunder Frank (auth.)

World Accumulation
1492-1789
By the same author
CAPITALISM AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA
LATIN AMERICA: UNDERDEVELOPMENT OR REVOLUTION
LUMPENBOURGEOISIE: LUMPENDEVELOPMENT
SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
OF SOCIOLOGY
ON CAPITALIST UNDERDEVELOPMENT
DEPENDENCE AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT: LATIN
AMERICA'S POLITICAL ECONOMY
(with Dale Johnson and James Cockcroft)
MEXICAN AGRICULTURE 1521-1630:
TRANSFORMATION OF THE MODE OF PRODUCTION
REFLEXIONES SOBRE LA CRISIS ECONOMICA
ECONOMIC GENOCIDE IN CHILE
AMERICA LATINA: FEUDALISMO 0 CAPITALISMO?
(with Rodolofo Puiggros and Emesto Laclau)
ASPECTOS DE LA REALIDAD LA TINOAMERICANA
(with Orlando Caputo, Roberto Pizarro, and Anibal Quijano)
QUALE 1984?
(with Samir Amin and Hosea Jaffe)
DEPENDENT ACCUMULATION AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
CRISIS: THE WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM TODAY
REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS
WOrld
Accumulatt.on
1492-1789
Andre Gunder Frank
M
© Andre Gunder Frank 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published in the U.S.A. 1978
First published in the United Kingdom 1978
Reprinted 1982
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Frank, Andre Gunder
World accumulation, 1492-1789
1. Saving and investment-History
I. Title
332'.0415 HC79.S3
ISBN 978-0-333-23884-4 ISBN 978-1-349-15998-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15998-7
To the memory of
my student, friend, and compaiiero in Chile
Dagoberto Perez Vargas and his comrades
who put these theoretical concerns behind them
to fight and die to end
accumulation through expropriation
and exploitation
The inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into
what the economists call Previous, or Original Accumula
tion, but which ought to be called Original Expropriation.
-Karl Marx,
"Wages, Price and Profit" (1969:56)
Indeed, the booty brought back by Drake in the Golden
Hind may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of
British Foreign Investment. Elizabeth paid offo ut of the
proceeds the whole of her foreign debt and invested a part of
the balance (about £42,000) in the Levant Company;
largely out of the profits of the Levant Company there was
formed the East India Company, the profits of which
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the
main foundation of England's foreign connections; and so
on. . . . this is quite sufficient to illustrate our argument
. . . that the greater part of the fruits of the economic
progress and capital accumulation of the Elizabethan and
jacobean age accrued to the profiteer rather than to the
wage-earner. . . . Never in the annals of the modern
world has there existed so prolonged and so rich an oppor
tunity for the businessman, the speculator and the prof
iteer. In these golden years modern capitalism was born .
. . . Thus the rate at which the world's wealth has
accumulated has been far more variabk than habits of
thrift have been . ... It is characteristic of our historians
that,for exampk, the Cambridge Modern History should
make no mention of these economic factors as moulding the
Elizabethan Age and making possible its greatness. . . .
We were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare
at the moment when he presented himself! . . . It would
be a fascinating task to re-write Economic History, in the
light of these ideas.
-John Maynard Keynes,
A Treatise on Money (1930)
Contents
Preface II
I. The Sixteenth-Century Expansion 25
2. The Seventeenth-Century Depression 65
3. The Political Economy of Cyclical
Expansion and Rivalry, I689-I7 63 I03
4. The Transition in India to the
Transformation of Asia 135
5. Depression and Revolution, I762-I789 I67
6. The Eighteenth-Century Commercial
Revolution in Accumulation 213
7. Conclusions: On So-Called Primitive
Accumulation 238
Bibliography 273
Index 29I
Preface
I think authors ought to look back and give us some record
of how their works developed, not because their works are
important (they may turn out to be unimportant) but
because we need to know more of the process of history
writing. Historians today generally recognize, like social
scientists, that their scholarship is an activity in which
they are themselves participants. Writers of history are
not just observers. They are themselves part of the act and
need to observe themselves in action. Their view of what
"really" happened is filtered first through the spotty and
often hit-or-miss screens of available evidence, and second
through the prisms· of their own interest, selection, and
interpretatwn of the evidence they see. The result can only
be an imperfect approximation. Fortunately, no one has
to regard it as the last word. Once an author looks back at
what he thought he was trying to do, many perspectives
emerge. Foremost is that ofi gnorance, at least in my case.
A hook that to its author is a mere antechamber to a
whole unwritten library, bursting with problems await
ing exploration, may seem to his readers to have a solidity
which shunts their research elsewhere. It is useless to assure
them that the book is really full of holes.
-John King Fairbank,
Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (1969)
In this preface, I shall first try to look back and give some record of
how this work developed, before saying something about what this
book is about. In a way, I shall reminisce and dialogue in my own
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