RH Tawney and the Origins of Capitalism1

Ormrod, David

doi:10.1093/hwj/18.1.138

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…But despite their central importance, the paradox facing marxian political economy is the paucity of studies on markets, the social agents that inhabit them and the processes through which they mediate the development of capitalism in agriculture and in the overall social formation (Crow, , p. 9). Although there are many reasons for this neglect, the most important one is the privileging of production within orthodox Marxism and an understanding of “exchange” as at best residual and at worst a drain on production, thereby creating a false binary between “production” and “circulation” (Ormrod, , p. 147).…”

Section: Agrarian Change Without Markets: Reification Of Production Amentioning

confidence: 99%

The complexity of exchange: Wheat markets, petty‐commodity producers and the emergence of commercial capital in colonial Punjab

Jan

2019

Journal of Agrarian Change

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This paper questions the orthodox Marxist view of merchant capital as “unproductive,” by highlighting the importance of traders in subsuming the countryside to the logic of capital. However, it also argues that in order to properly understand the role played by traders in agrarian change, critical Marxist scholarship on merchant capital needs to recognize the complex marketing systems in which traders and farmers operate. These markets have their own internal relations, organizational and institutional logic which in turn is tied to the specificity of the commodity. Using wheat markets in colonial Punjab as a case study, it then utilizes the framework of complex marketing systems to highlight the range of firms and farms that operated in these markets; the importance of personal relations and informal institutions of family, caste, and religion for establishing trust; and the class stratified nature of market participants. It was from within these informally organized markets that commercial capital first emerged in colonial Punjab. By creatively combining the concept of commercial capital with markets as complex systems, it hopes to provide a richer framework for the study of agrarian change in diverse contexts.

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Section: Agrarian Change Without Markets: Reification Of Production Amentioning

confidence: 99%

The complexity of exchange: Wheat markets, petty‐commodity producers and the emergence of commercial capital in colonial Punjab

Jan

2019

Journal of Agrarian Change

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“…In a fascinating paper on Tawney's LSE lectures, David Ormrod noted that British historians have been dominated by a ‘perspective which has bifurcated the historiography of early capitalism’ into a false polarity between production and exchange. He also refers to Robert Brenner reviving this ‘false antithesis’ ‘in a notably strident fashion’ (Ormrod , 146 ff.). Tawney, of course, was ‘mainly preoccupied … with the genesis of commercial capitalism’, as Thompson noted (Thompson , 356; cf.…”

Section: Reinterrogating Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tawney, of course, was ‘mainly preoccupied … with the genesis of commercial capitalism’, as Thompson noted (Thompson , 356; cf. Ormrod , 152), and much less inclined to contrapose commercial to agrarian or any other form of capitalism. That was chiefly a legacy of Maurice Dobb, but through Dobb of a whole tradition of Marxist politics and history that went back to the late 1920s and the fierce backlash against M.N.…”

Section: Reinterrogating Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Merchant Capitalism, Peasant Households and Industrial Accumulation: Integration of a Model

Banaji

2016

Journal of Agrarian Change

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My paper underscores the theoretical contribution of an early essay by Henry Bernstein, 'Notes on Capital and Peasantry', published in 1977. It uses the ideas in that essay to construct a general argument about the ways in which capitalism dominates household producers. The first section summarizes the arguments of Bernstein's essay and relates them to key passages of A.V. Chayanov's work. The second section builds a model of how commercial capitalism worked in the produce trades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third section proposes a wider taxonomy, where the differences between commercial and industrial capital and their respective forms of domination of the countryside are laid out. The key category here is vertical integration as a form/strategy of accumulation chiefly characteristic of the latter. The fourth section suggests that we need to take merchant capitalism more seriously as a historical category as well as one of theory, rejecting the idea that merchant's capital 'exclusively inhabits the circulation sphere'.

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The first women economic historians

Berg¹

1992

Economic History Rev

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RH Tawney and the Origins of Capitalism1

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The complexity of exchange: Wheat markets, petty‐commodity producers and the emergence of commercial capital in colonial Punjab

The complexity of exchange: Wheat markets, petty‐commodity producers and the emergence of commercial capital in colonial Punjab

Merchant Capitalism, Peasant Households and Industrial Accumulation: Integration of a Model

The first women economic historians

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