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The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in
chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England
at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies,
the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods
depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the
State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of
transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the
transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an
economic power.
Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says:
“The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout
every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue,
are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however
untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.”
4
The history of the colonial administration of Holland – and Holland was the head capitalistic
nation of the 17th century –
“is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and
meanness”
5
Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men
stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the
interpreter, and the seller, were the chief
agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into
the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official
report says:
“This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than
the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in
chains, forcibly torn from their families.”
To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in
1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to “abstain” from the payment of
£21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed.
Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000.
Sweet commerce!
The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India,
the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the
transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as
well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employés of the company.
The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth.
The employés themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The
Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received contracts under
conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes
sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a
shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for
opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a
part of India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for
£40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the
contract declared that after all he realised an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid
before Parliament, the Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the
Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the
rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.
6
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The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for
export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as
Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called,
the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of
Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium
of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every
scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following
prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105,
for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades
later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who
had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were
tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as
“means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”
The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation. The “societies Monopolia” of
Luther were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the
budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The
treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back
to the mother-country and were there turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the
colonial system, in 1648 stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. It was
“in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce
between the south-east and north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, marine,
manufactures, surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the
Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put
together.” Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more
over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of
Europe put together.
Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture
properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial
predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was “the
strange God” who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and
one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value
making as the sole end and aim of humanity.
The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice
as early as the Middle Ages, took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing
period. The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-
house for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state –
whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The
only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of
modern peoples is their national debt.
7
Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine
that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the
credo of
capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the
place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.
The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the
stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns
it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable
from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away,
for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in
their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants