Michael Andrew Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition to Industrial Capitalism in England.
Michael Andrew Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition to Industrial Capitalism in England (Leiden: Brill 2013)I don't know how many times this book fell out my hands and tumbled from the couch to the floor. Physically holding up this text by Michael Andrew Zmolek which weighs in at perhaps six kilos and nearly 900 pages is no easy task for those who still enjoy reading hard copy. Indeed wading through this enormous tome from time to time I found myself wondering why on earth someone would write such a gigantic work let alone why Brill's Historical Materialism Series decided to publish. It certainly isn't going to be a money maker. Moreover its essential thesis is relatively easily stated. But after several weeks of persevering, I have to say the effort of reading through this tome has been worthwhile. An attempt to apply the Brenner thesis to the development of capitalist industry the work is in fact an impressively erudite and up-to-date Marxist review of English economic and political history from the 14th to the 19th century.
A PhD thesis prepared under the supervision of George Comninel at York University who is an unbending proponent of political Marxism, it dutifully reiterates many of the principle themes of this school: the exclusively English origins of capitalism, the importance of late medieval changes in social property relations to the initiation of agrarian capitalism, the significance of relative exploitation spurred by competition in improving productivity, and the overall downgrading of the role of the rural and urban bourgeoisie as against the landlord class as agent of economic and political change. It is the 14th century class struggles and not, as Marx had it, Tudor enclosures which were decisive to capitalist development. The 16th century enclosures are an after-effect of the changes in the relations of production brought about by the class struggles of the 14th century as is the 17th century English Revolution. The materialist dialectics of Marx--"bullshit" (according the analytical Marxists with whom Brenner associated) --are replaced by the syllogistic and deductive logic of capitalist social relations in markets presumed rational. It then follows in determinist fashion that the enclosure and improvement of agriculture based on capitalist agriculture increased the size of the wage-labour force and cut the cost of food to sustain such labour. Increases in the supply of food at affordable prices in turn spurred population growth generally and especially the growth of the proletariat. While these changes increased market dependence and widened the internal market, they eventually forced the introduction of machinery as a creative response to rising food prices in the late 18th century. The introduction of machinery, in turn, brought on the Industrial Revolution and accelerated the trend from the formal to the real subsumption of labour enforcing discipline on the producers while spurring gains in productivity. As the author rightly stresses, manufacturers turned to machinery in an effort to effect savings faced with competitive pressures based on rising costs especially for food. The Brennerite insistence on the importance of competition in driving innovation is certainly vindicated. But to what degree Brenner himself might have rather anachronistically applied this competitive model of the genesis of the Industrial Revolution to the nascent capitalist agriculture of the 16th century is another question.
The above is the barest outline of the author's argument. But it is unfolded across an immense narrative which includes an introduction and fourteen chapters and ends in a conclusion which summarizes the whole story from 14th to the 19th century. The first chapter is devoted to the pre-history of industry and successive chapters then deal with the inception of the agrarian capitalism, the consequences of the agrarian revolution, the role of capital and technology in the making of industrial capitalism, the social origins of the factory and factories and machinery. But in sharp distinction to political Marxism, there is an enormous weight put on the role of the state in clearing the way for the development of both agrarian and industrial capitalism. The exact significance of this stress on politics in inflecting the Brennerite model is not indicated but its net effect is to soften the economic determinist logic of that approach. In deference to Brenner, the author pays lip service to the latter's view which minimizes the revolutionary importance of the English Revolution but, in fact, he offers an analysis which confirms the decisive importance of the political and legal transformation wrought by the revolution in opening the way to the consolidation of the capitalist system. Hundreds of further pages in the latter part of the work are also devoted to politics including chapters on custom and law, late 18th century politics, the state's role in the Industrial Revolution, the popular revolts of the first part of the 19th century including the Chartist movement and the political reform of 1832, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Ten Hours Bill. In all these matters the author's analysis is based on an impressive and up-to-date bibliography.
While I find myself in agreement with much of Zmolek's line of argument there are several points with which I disagree. True he gives more weight to the petty producers than does Brenner. But in my view he does not give sufficient importance to late medieval peasant differentiation as stressed by Rodney Hilton and Terence Byres. In this respect there is too much emphasis on market compulsion and not enough on market opportunity. Wallerstein's and Marx's stress on the importance of the appearance of the world market in the 16th century is curtly dismissed in accord with Brennerite hostility to the significance of trade and any dialectical view of change. The development of capitalist relations in agriculture was undoubtedly decisive as Brenner has insisted. But we recall that it was in areas close to town markets and manufacturing that the impulse to enclose and improve land was most salient. In the case of England the production and export of wool cloth overseas from the reign of Henry VM onward proved a boon to merchants and capitalist enclosers alike. But Zmolek ignores this, stressing the development of the internal market instead. The role of colonialism, slavery and the development of overseas markets in accumulation overall are not given sufficient due. Relative exploitation and increases in productivity became more important with time but their significance is exaggerated relative to primitive accumulation and absolute exploitation in the 16th and 17th centuries. In passing, the author acknowledges that despite the prevalence of capitalism as late as the end of the 17th century that the observance of customary rights and tenures had yet to be eliminated in manufacturing and agriculture but the implications of this for the Brenner approach are not explored. Meanwhile the extensive development of early modern manufacturing on the Continent as signalled by J.U. Nef and the proto-industrial historical literature is dismissed as non-capitalist because presumably not sufficiently driven by market competition. Not to mention that in the fully feudal Ile-de-France in the 17th and 18th centuries economic rents in a capitalist sense prevailed. Presumably capitalist relations cannot exist within a feudal shell as that would be dialectical nonsense. In my view Zmolek's successfully applies the Brennerite approach to the development of capitalist industry. On the other hand, too often that approach becomes a Procrustean bed into which the author is forced to fit his account.
HENRY HELLER
University of Manitoba
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| Author: | Heller, Henry |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Labour/Le Travail |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2014 |
| Words: | 1235 |
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