The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century

2. THE NEW EUROPEAN DIVISION OF LABOR: C. 1450–1640

2 THE NEW EUROPEAN DIVISION OF LABOR C. 145CH64O Figure 3: "The Negroes having exhausted the metallic veins had to be given work making sugar." This engraving of a sugar mill in Hispaniola was made in 1595 as part of a series begun by Theodore de Bry, a Flemish engraver, known as Collectiones Peregrinationum, celebrating the "discoveries" of West and East India. Reproduced by permission of the Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. It was in the sixteenth century that there came to be a European worldeconomy based upon the capitalist mode of production. The most curious aspect of this early period is that capitalists did not flaunt their colors before the world. The reigning ideology was not that of free enterprise, or even individualismor science or naturalism or nationalism. These would all take until the eighteenth or nineteenth century to mature as world views. To the extent that an ideology seemed to prevail, it was that of statism, the raison d'etat. Why should capitalism, a phenomenon that knew no frontiers, have been sustained by the development of strong states? This is a question which has no single answer. But it is not a paradox; quite the contrary. The distinctive feature of a capitalist world-economy is that economic decisions are oriented primarily to the arena of the worldeconomy , while political decisions are oriented primarily to the smaller structures that have legal control, the states (nation-states, city-states, empires) within the world-economy. This double orientation, this "distinction" if you will, of the economic and political is the source of the confusion and mystification concerning the appropriate identification for groups to make, the reasonable and reasoned manifestations of group interest. Since, however, economic and political decisions cannot be meaningfully dissociated or discussed separately, this poses acute analytical problems. We shall handle them by attempting to treat them consecutively, alluding to the linkages, and pleading with the reader to suspend judgment until he can see the whole of the evidence in synthesis.No doubt we shall, wittinglyand otherwise,violate our own rule of consecutiveness many times, but this at least is our organizing principle of presentation. If it seems that we deal with the larger system as an expression of capitalism and the smaller systems as expressions of statism (or, to use the current fashionable terminology, of national development), we never deny the unity of the concrete historical development . The states do not develop and cannot be understood except within the context of the development of the world-system. The same is true of both social classes and ethnic (national, religious) groupings. They too came into social existence within the framework of states and of the world-system, simultaneously and sometimes in contradictory fashions. They are a function of the social organization of the time. The modern class system began to take its shape in the sixteenth century. When, however, was the sixteenth century? Not so easy a question, if we remember that historical centuries are not necessarily chronological ones. Here I shall do no more than accept thejudgment of Fernand Braudel, both because of the solidityof scholarship on which it is based, and because it seems to fit in so well with the data as I read them. Braudel says: I am skeptical . . . of a sixteenth century about which one doesn't specify if it is one or several, about which ones gives to understand that it is a unity. I see 67 68 The Modern World-System "our" cenlury as divided in two, as did Lucien Febvre and my remarkableteacher Henri Hauser, a first century beginning about 1450 and ending about 1550, a second one starting up at that point and lasting until 1620 or 1640.* The starting points and ending points vary according to the national perspective from which one views the century. However, for the European world-economy as a whole, we consider 1450-1640 the meaningful time unit, during which was created a capitalist world-economy, one to be sure that was, in Braudel's phrase, "vast but weak."2 And where was this European world-economy? That too is difficult to answer. For the historicalcontinents are not necessarily geographical ones. The European world-economyincluded by the end of the sixteenth century not only northwest Europe and the Christian Mediterranean (including Iberia) but also Central Europe and the Baltic region. It also included certain regions...