Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Part 1

The Shifting Rhetoric of the Aristocratic and then Bourgeois English Needs to Be Explained

I want to have little summaries of every Part and Chapter, to avoid the claim that my argument is hard to follow. I therefore also want to make every Part or Chapter title a declarative and summarizing sentence. Few of the summaries in this version are adequate. I’ll rewrite all of them at the very end of the project, when each chapter says what it says.

Something happened to the standing of a bourgeois life in England between 1600 and 1776. With whom? How to prove? Where exactly? In what respects exactly? A sheer, material, Marxist "rise of the bourgeoisie" does not seem to explain it.

Chapter 8:

Bourgeois Precursors Were Ancient
Where are we, then? The usual explanations for the modern world do not compute. Where to look? In the activities of the urban middle class, but especially in the ideas about the urban middle class.

Markets and exchange appear to have existed always, or at any rate since the invention of full language in Africa sometime around 50,000 B.C.E., give or take a dozen millennia. Long-distance trade is the most glamorous, Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, and all that. From the earliest times the obsidian for knife blades from the Valley of Mexico and from central Turkey turns up hundreds of miles away from its source. Lapis lazuli, a blue gemstone (it was for a long time the sole source of blue paint), comes only from Afghanistan, yet litters archaeological sites far away in the Mideast and South Asia. Amber from the shores of the Baltic Sea ends up in Egyptian grave goods. Such sparkling objects suggest to people that long distance trade matters the most. We still believe it—witness the recent obsession over the U.S. trade balance with China.

But local “penny capitalism,” as the anthropologist Sol Tax once called it, occurs in every society, and matters more to the lives of people.¹³¹ My big piece of cloth for ten of your bone needles. Most American competition and cooperation—trade involves both—is with other Americans, even with the ones down the street. Local markets and exchange, always, dominate the trade in exotic goods, quantitatively speaking. You spend more dollars on plumbing repair and police work and school teaching and dry cleaning earned by people in your own town than on hammers and answering machines from people in China. And therefore most of us nowadays are traders, many even in hunter-gatherer societies, and certainly always in conditions of settled agriculture. You can defame this oldest profession of being a kind of merchant as “greedy” if you wish, though it seems prejudicial to name after a prideful and idolatrous sin the ordinary exchanges in which we all participate. You are being merely prudent to specialize and trade. We all do it. So did some of the cave men, after language.

The running of markets and exchange in towns, and therefore what I am calling the bourgeois life, is of course not so ancient, because towns date from settled agriculture. But from the earliest strata at Jericho in 8000 B.C.E. the towns have traded, because—to speak of sheer human geography—no town above a couple of thousand in population can live entirely on cultivating the land without trading its services for food. With large numbers crammed into a town not everyone could live by trudging out to the local grain field each morning. The fields get too far away. In well-watered Europe in the Middle Ages the area of two football fields in grain could support a person for a year, and perhaps could likewise in irrigated Mesopotamia. The average round trip per day would then be one mile for a town of 1000, two miles for a town of 2000, and so on in proportion. It gets onerous fast, though in fact to this day many peasants worldwide do the commute.

The economic logic of course runs the same way, and more powerfully. As Adam Smith said in 1776, “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” The bigger the place, the higher the proportion of people who find it prudent to specialize in pottery or weaving or keeping accounts. Even in an unspecialized hunter-gatherer band the women specialize in hearth-linked activities, the men in venturing forth, or smoking. The crippled man among the Ilongot who specializes in being a little factory for scrapers and arrow points, or the gifted woman in being a shaman, get their food from exporting their manufactures or services. Such a nascent middle class grows larger as the town does. You may be 30% faster at throwing pots relative to your speed at plowing than other people, but the comparative advantage does you little good in a village of 100 souls, because after all there are too few people to buy your great output of pots. In a big town of 10,000, however, it will be worth your while to hang out a shingle and specialize. And in a metropolis of 100,000 you will hire apprentice potters, make each year 70,000 big pots with your own handsome design, and become truly bourgeois.

And so if the archaeologist’s spade uncovers a big town, it’s a sure thing that many non-peasants lived in it. No surprise, of course: our image of towns from ancient and not-so-ancient writings such as the Hebrew Bible or The Thousand and One Nights, or from historical accounts of life in Athens, or, truth be told, from movies by Cecil B. DeMille, are not populated by field-bound peasants.

Towns such as Ur, Kish, and Nippur dotting Mesopotamia south of modern Baghdad began around 5000 B.C.E. as agricultural villages with peasants clustered to protect their stored grain and to honor their local gods. By 3000 B.C.E. the typical substantial town would be two to four thousand, as Eresh was.¹³² In Eresh there would still be quite a few peasants, if not only them. But a great city like Uruk, with a wall 9 km round which Gilgamesh himself claimed to have had built, would have held 40,000 to 160,000 people, most of them not walking to any field.¹³³ Around 2000 B.C.E. the ur-city of Ur seems to have had a population of about 200,000.¹³⁴

And so to Changan (X’ian), China in 195 B.C.E. at 400,000 and Rome in 25 B.C.E. at 450,000, down to Beijing in 1500 C.E. at 672,000 and Istanbul in 1500 at 900,000. These are not huge by modern standards—Chicago proper is about 3 million and the metropolitan area 8.6 million, not to speak of Mexico City’s metropolitan area population approaching 20 million. But anyway the city people of any time were mainly neither peasants nor aristocratic rulers, neither priests nor bureaucrats. Almost all were traders in an extended sense—not growing anything and not taxing anything, but trading to live. They bought low and sold high, made finished goods from purchased raw materials, serviced the rest of economic activity in jobs as scribes, lawyers, surveyors, teamsters, manufacturing workers. Remove from the big-town total the proletarians and slaves, and the taxing aristocrats and tithing priests and their bureaucrats, and what’s left is a bourgeoisie, the minority in the town that made its living managing by words bitter or sweet the markets for goods and labor and land.

* * * *

Immediately, though, one runs into a gigantic scholarly controversy fueled by politics. It’s that way with all writing about the bourgeoisie since Rousseau and especially since Marx. You can’t mention the word “bourgeoisie” without raising blood pressures all around. This is a good place to deal with the controversy, immediately.

During the late 1930s Karl Polanyi, a refugee in London from the chaos of interwar Central Europe, researched what he believed was the history of markets, publishing the results in 1944 while financed by the Rockefeller Foundation at Bennington College in Vermont, as The Great Transformation. The book is still read eagerly, and has never gone out of print. Googling it in 2007 yielded fully 123,000 entries. Compare that with smaller numbers for similar and similarly long-lived books from the time: 97,200 for Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), 64,700 for Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), and 19,000 for Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944)—though we academic scribblers need to remember that Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead (1943) gets 351,000 hits, and still sells 100,000 new copies a year: not further academic scribbling, but good or bad art, highbrow or low, is what makes ideas big.

Polanyi was a lifelong socialist—his beloved wife Elena was one of the founders of the Hungarian Communist Party—and believed that markets, the bourgeoisie, and capitalism were mere vulgar novelties, mere interruptions in more civilized ways of getting our daily bread. He wrote for example that the labor market in England did not exist until the 19^th century. Until then English people, he claimed, did not work under the discipline of supply and demand. Wages, he said, were conventional, decided in a social contract of reciprocity, as it were. He said the same of land sales, and indeed he did not think that so-called “markets” in grain and the like before recent times were anything other than administrative methods for provisioning the people. The bourgeoisie was recent, the market was a parvenu, capitalism was an ethical catastrophe of recent origin.

The Polanyi economic history of England is utterly, completely, even embarrassingly mistaken. Half of southern Englishmen were laborers as early as the 13^th century, and land in large and small plots was vigorously traded by all levels of society. We have the documents, and have gotten more and more and more of them as the intellectual haze surrounding the Middle Ages has lifted.¹³⁵ Markets pervaded all of Europe from the earliest times, as they have pervaded much of the world since the caves. Kingdoms, wives, and immortal salvation in Europe could be bought and sold. Contrary to what most educated people believe, Europe and certainly England was from the earliest times thoroughly “monetized” and nothing like a “subsistence” or “barter” economy. It would be difficult otherwise to explain the English danegelt beginning in 991, assessed in silver, or coin hoards found at every chronological level from the pre-Roman era on, or the ubiquity of money measures in the earliest records, such as the Domesday Book of 1086. Such facts have been known for a long time, and recently their meaning has become still clearer. As the leading scholar of trade in the “Dark Ages” before the 11^th century wrote in 2001, “economic historians are moving increasingly to the view that the advanced regions of the Frankish economy [i.e. of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious, ruling over all of France, most of Germany, and the north of Italy 771-840] were more monetized than almost anyone dreamed three decades ago.”¹³⁶

Really, most of what you think you know about how things worked in the Middle Ages—a hazy theory that Polanyi and you and I acquired from schoolbooks and journalism and movies reflecting the earliest generations of historical scholars, especially 19^th-century German scholars—has proven to be quite wrong. Peasants were in fact, it has been discovered, profiteering and rational, as people are in the Grimms’ fairy tales, first published in 1812: think of Jack in the tale being scolded by his rational mother for trading their cow for a handful of magic beans. They used money, as in the Grimms’ tales: Jack was sent to get money, not beans. They were individualists, and married for love, as in the Grimms. They could move house and job, Grimms again. Unlike “peasants” viewed through the Romantic lens in modern times, they were not in a sense “peasants” at all. One would have thought that the Romantic historians would have listened more intently to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

In 1979 the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane summarized critically the long-exploded theory as “a progression from small, isolated communities inhabited by ‘peasants’ . . . towards the market, monetized, ‘open’ structure of the eighteenth century,” and showed that for England it was entirely mistaken.¹³⁷ Macfarlane has done ample work himself on the primary documents exposing the mistakes. But the point here is that in 1979 he was building also on 70 years of revisionism in medieval economic and social history.

One could go on and on about the gross errors in Polanyi’s economic history.¹³⁸ It’s as I say embarrassingly feeble stuff—though less embarrassing in Polanyi himself, who wrote in understandable ignorance of the frontiers of medieval scholarship since 1900 and especially since 1945, than it is nowadays in his numerous followers. In view of the accumulating evidence, a full century after the Romantic vision of peasant Europe started to fade these good Polanyists have less excuse.¹³⁹

In later work down to his death in 1964 Polanyi and his associates tried to demonstrate that the ancient world followed his anti-market model, and in particular that ancient Mesopotamia did. As socialists they wanted the market and the bourgeois life to be a mere recent stage, now thankfully to be superseded by the re-establishment of the communism that most intellectuals in the 1940s believed the remote past had seen and that the not-too-remote future would hold. The idea that a market society was the end of history was from 1944 to 1964 obnoxious to the leading members of the European clerisy. True, Polanyi conceded, local markets are ubiquitous. But such “markets” are embedded in local culture, an outgrowth of his first master category of anti-marketism, householding, the women’s realm. “Local markets are, essentially, neighborhood markets,” where women flock to gather provisions for the nest.¹⁴⁰ Local markets, Polanyi said, are not a big part of commerce. (He was again, as I said, mistaken in his history and his anthropology: penny capitalism is big.) No real capitalist market could be expected to emerge from that, he said. (He was mistaken again, though the belief persists that only big capitalists are real capitalists; thus Braudel DATE, pp. . In truth a great merchant is a trader in the village market writ large. That the one is male and the other female, we have since learned to keep in mind, does not automatically make the one economically serious and the other trivial.)

Polanyi’s second and emphatically non-market category, reciprocal exchange, involves ritualized gift giving and receiving. The relations are highly personal: “the right person at the right occasion should return the right kind of object.”¹⁴¹ The model is politeness among friends. Like Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders, a whole society in which reciprocity is prominent usually has low population and little division of labor. (Polanyi apparently did not realize that at the hands of Marcel Mauss the realm of gift-giving itself had in 1923 been brought under the species of markets.¹⁴²)

Redistribution, on the other hand, occurs sometimes even in large economies. “Redistribution obtains within a group to the extent that in the allocation of goods (including land and natural resources) they are collected in one hand and distributed by virtue of custom, law, or ad hoc central decision.”¹⁴³ The examples are kingship and socialism, but the deeper model is the family, in which the mother redistributes food.

Polanyi asserted that ancient Greece, China, and India, the empire of the Incas, the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Dahomey Kingdom of West Africa, and in particular Hammurabi’s Babylonia, were all organized on the principle of redistribution. He rejected the economistic vision of trade and markets. Polanyi wrote in 1944 that “broadly, the proposition holds that all economic systems known to us up to the end of feudalism in Western Europe were organized either on the principles of reciprocity or redistribution, or householding, or some combination of the three.”¹⁴⁴ He claimed that so-called “market” prices are nothing of the sort, but merely “equivalences” determined by, say, the code of Hammurabi, not by supply and demand. And he claimed that so-called “merchants” in such societies, in particular in the ancient Near East, were in fact governmental or temple officials, not anything like the bourgeois merchants of modern capitalism.

This tale of ancient anti-economism, as I and many other students of the matter say, also appears to be mistaken. The evidence is less embarrassingly overwhelming than it is for the importance of markets in England many centuries before 1800, since we do not have so overwhelming a tide of evidence for 1800-1200 B.C.E. as we have for 1200-1800 C. E.. Still, we have a lot of evidence even for Mesopotamia and after, much of it collected after Polanyi’s ideas were innocently formed, and sometimes indeed in response to his eloquent advocacy. And sometimes it even works in favor of a redistributive model. Michael McCormick has argued that shipments of wheat in payment of taxes (the annona, the annual distribution to the populace of Rome or, later, Constantinople, ending there in 618 C.E.) came to dominate trade in the western Mediterranean just as more commercial trade declined. “On the eve of its destruction, more and more of the eggs of [very] late Roman [i.e. eastern Empire, Constantinople] shipping had come to rest in the basket of the annona. So it was that, comparatively speaking, commercial shipping lessened to its lowest point in centuries in the second half of the seventh century.”¹⁴⁵ But this way of putting it emphasizes his greater theme: that in the time before and after the “destruction,” as late as the sixth century and as early as the late eighth century, the merchants were rushing about western Europe in search of private profit, quite without a state assignment of task.

Mostly the evidence works against redistribution outside the household or the alleged lack of real markets. We now know for example quite a lot about daily life in ancient Mesopotamia, because the people of that region wrote on cheap and permanent clay instead of stone or papyrus, the one expensive, the other transient. In 1920, unfortunately, early in the history of Assyriology, Anna Schneider wrote an influential book claiming that the economy of the town of Lagash in southern Iraq was run on the basis of redistribution by the priests of the local temple. Since Lagash was the only town then excavated, her book had an impact. The problem was that Schneider relied on evidence collected from the very temple, which as another Assyriologist, Daniel Snell, remarked recently, “quite reasonably showed the concerns of the temple leaders and staff members.”¹⁴⁶ “Traces of the temple theory persist in textbooks,” Snell notes, and influenced Polanyi. But in 1969 Ignace Gelb and in 1972 Klaas Veenhof eradicated even the traces.¹⁴⁷ They showed that Mesopotamian merchants were mostly independent of state or temple, that is, that they were traders, “bourgeois” if you will. In view of other evidence on the presence of hired workers, plainly, from the earliest times, and commonplace after 2100 B.C.E., and transactions in land from the earliest times, plainly, Polanyi’s hypothesis that ancient Sumer or the central and northern Mesopotamian states were entirely non-market societies has not paid off. So it was with every one of his searches for marketless societies. Late in his life he himself admitted so.¹⁴⁸

* * * *

And yet the failure of the Polanyi search for an earlier society entirely free of the damned economists’ and capitalists’ markets does not imply that his more fundamental point was wrong. His point was that markets are, as the modern sociologists express it, “embedded,” which is merely to say that marketeers are people, too. It was a point that Adam Smith devoted his life to making. Across cultures and for most of human history, Polanyi argued, material exchange had meaning far beyond individual want-satisfaction. That’s right. Think of your taste in furniture. He argued that trade affirmed and strengthened the social values of the larger community. Yes. Think of your gas grill for neighborhood cookouts or your plasma TV for the Superbowl party. He said that trade occurs right down to your last trade with a meaning and in a manner that a mere economist who has never read Smith will not fully understand. To be sure.

In other words, Polanyi was in this—I say as an economist who was for decades hostile to such views, and hadn’t read Smith seriously—on to something. I am still I think justified in my lofty disdain for the anti-market burden of Polanyi’s work, and especially the work of his followers like the great classicist Moses Finley or the great political scientist James C. Scott or the great economist Douglass North. None of these got the facts right. Yet Polanyi’s extra “something” humbles even the proud economist. It is for example the main point of the present book.

The economist Arjo Klamer has developed a context for markets rather similar to Polanyi’s, but free of Polanyi’s passionate and evidence-skirting distaste for the market.¹⁴⁹ The agora, the marketplace, as Klamer puts it, is prominent in all societies, but flanked of course by the private oikos, the household, and the polis, the government. Klamer points also to what he calls the Third Sphere—that is, a third public sphere additional to the agora and polis, a sphere for a cultural commons in which “people realize social values like community, a sense of identity, solidarity, neighborhood, country, security, conviviality, friendship and so on.”¹⁵⁰ Those barbeques, those Superbowl parties. You could also call it, and Klamer does, the conversation of the culture. The Third Sphere, in other words, depends as the others do on Klamer’s master concept, the “conversation”—the conversation about being an American male or a Dutch merchant or a person who values modern art or an executive developing trust in a business relationship. Thus Akira Okazaki of Japan Airlines played cards endlessly with fisherman from Prince Edward Island in Canada during the 1970s to develop a backhaul business in bluefin-tuna-on-ice for the sushi market back home.¹⁵¹ Talk, talk, talk. Realize social values. And do a little business on the side.

The anthropologist Alan Page Fiske has developed still another balanced version of embeddedness, which can be partially matched to Polanyi’s and Klamer’s categories and to the much older tradition in Europe of the seven virtues. In his Structures of Social Life Fiske speaks of "market pricing" as one of his four "elementary forms."  The other three—communal sharing [you get meat because you belong to Our Crowd], authority ranking [I am the chief, so I get more meat], equality matching [we're all in this together, so let's make the amounts of meat exactly equal for everyone]—do not involve prices, that is, exchange rates between two different things, meat for milk, arrow points for cave paintings. The society must somehow decide on the prices, “the ratios of exchange,” and Fiske accepts, contrary to Polanyi, that in any society with markets—and I say most societies have them, and Fiske and Klamer agree—the “market decides, governed by supply and demand.”¹⁵² Fiske cleverly points out that the succession of four communal-authority-equality-market correspond to stages of human maturity up to about age 8, when kids finally accept exchange as against item-by-item equality.¹⁵³ And even more cleverly he points out that the succession also correspond in the theory of scaling: categorical scales (in/out), ordinal (higher/lower), interval (same amounts), and ratio (“Archimedean ordered fields”).

Here is how the various groupings lie down together:

Fiske, Polanyi, Klamer, and the Virtues