The American Road to Capitalism

Cacao capitalism in coastal Ecuador: Production processes and accumulation in non‐transitionary agrarian capitalism during the long 19th century

“…In works covering the First Cacao Boom (FCB) from 1760 to 1830, authors like Conniff (1977), Hamerly (1973), Leon Borja and Szaszdi (1964) and Soler Lizarazo (2014) explore the long-run historical impacts of commercial culture and market mechanisms on the development of the Guayaquil-centred cacao export economy but ultimately refrain from theorizing beyond the immediate data or the comfort of well-trodden transition debates. Research focusing on the SCB (1870-1925) remains far less hesitant to wade into theoretical waters, a tendency that must be examined in light of traditional historiography on the importance of the 'industrial revolution' for the development of capitalism (Acosta, 2006;Chiriboga, 2013;Guerrero, 1980;Maiguashca, 2012;Pineo, 1996). The problem is quite simple: If capitalist development leads to industrialization, how does one make sense of the astronomical economic performance of coastal Ecuador during the SCB?…”

“…Nevertheless, natural limits were slowly but surely rationalized in terms of trees per hectare, produce per tree per year, capitalist determinations defining (i) the calculation of differential rents in terms of regional productivity, terroir and the unique characteristics imparted to cacao seeds (Chiriboga, 2013;Norero, 1910) and (ii) the incorporation of an ever-greater area under production via the extension of the cacao frontier (including all necessary infrastructural accoutrements for shipping product from Point A to B) as a form of capitalist accumulation. Such factors remained vital for the expanded reproduction of agrarian capitalism centred in and around the city of Guayaquil and its banking institutions, particularly after 1870 (Chiriboga, 2013;Redacted;Miño Grijalva, 2008;Pineo, 1996). Yet these two dimensions, pertaining to the production of both commercial and fixed capital, that is of commodities and means of production, has hardly received the attention it deserves in the Ecuadorian literature on the subject, and much less so in the general literature on agrarian capitalism.…”

“…10 Two points: cacao seeds, when stored properly, endure longer than many other tropical products that would require speedier infrastructural facilities, and second, not until after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 would the global mobility regime change much. Pineo (1996) claims that though 'Guayaquil enjoyed several apparent economic advantages [it squandered]. For example, it was the city's great economic advantage that the cacao-growing region required no massive infrastructure investment to transport goods to port.…”

The Political Economy of Institutional Landownership: Neorentier Society and the Financialization of Land

“…In the United States, industrial capital did not face an entrenched landed class handed down from the feudal epoch, but a vast frontier populated by indigenous populations that were considered expendable. The federal government, therefore, played a particularly important role in the development of landownership in the United States (see Post 1982;Robbins 1976). During the nineteenth century the U.S. federal government ceded millions of acres of land to the railroads and mining companies in order to facilitate the expansion of capitalist markets across the continent.…”

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

“…However, in keeping with Marx's occasional discussion of capitalist slavery as a "grafted" and "anomalous" historical construct (see note 13 above), it may be useful to reverse the relation of dependency posited by the new historians of capitalism, such that rather than emphasizing the ways that Northern industrial wage labor was dependent on slave labor, we might better understand the anomalous form of capitalist slavery in the American South by recognizing that it depended on the existence of wage laborers in Britain and North, as a source of growing direct and indirect demand for slave-produced raw materials. 61 Among Marxist-influenced historians of slavery these claims have been made byMandle (1972),Post (1982), Fields…”