The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi

Author:Giovanni Arrighi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 13: 978-1-84467-304-9
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Dialectic of Capitalism and Territorialism (Continued)

The long gestation lag that separates the restructuring and reorganization of the English state in the late sixteenth century and its subsequent rise to dominance in the European world-economy was due primarily to the fact that a critical ingredient was still missing from the synthesis of capitalism and territorialism engineered by Gresham and Elizabeth: commercial world supremacy. Throughout the seventeenth century this remained the prerogative of Dutch capitalism. And as long as it did, no amount of industrial expansion and monetary stability could help England to become the master rather than the servant of systemic processes of capital accumulation. Just as Venice’s industrial expansion in this same period was associated with the subordination of the old Venetian city-state to the declining Genoese regime of accumulation, so England’s industrial expansion was associated with the subordination of the new-born English nation-state to the rising Dutch regime.

The fundamental subordination of the English state to the rising Dutch regime is best illustrated by the outcome of the Anglo-Dutch trade dispute which erupted in the early 1610s when the English government banned the export of undyed cloth. The aim of this ban was to compel English producers to complete manufacture at home in order to increase the value-added of English textile production and set English trade free from the constraints imposed on its expansion by Dutch commercial intermediation. As Jonathan Israel (1989: 117) explains, “Dutch superiority in dyeing and ‘dressing’ was … not only a means of syphoning off a large part of the profits of England’s own output (for most of the benefits accrued to those who handled the finishing process and distribution) but also a means of undermining English trade with the Baltic generally.”

In Barry Supple’s (1959: 34) words, the English prohibition was a “gigantic gamble” – a gamble, moreover, that failed abysmally (Wallerstein 1980: 43). For shortly afterwards Holland retaliated by banning all imports into the United Provinces of foreign dyed and dressed cloth. The effect on England was devastating:

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